Four

“Crazy Legs?” Abby was on the floor in my office/our family room, doing stretching exercises. After the brouhaha at the reunion, Mahoney and I had left early, so I actually made it home before my wife had gone to bed, and filled her in on the melodrama.

“It’s a long story,” I said. “I’m not really sure who gave him the nickname. I think it was Friedman, but he denies it.”

“You guys never actually use each other’s first names, do you?” She lay down on the floor and began doing pelvic thrusts toward the ceiling. Wearing a pair of running shorts and a light blue T-shirt, she was making it difficult for me to concentrate on the evening’s bizarre events.

“It would be considered disrespectful,” I said. “Anyway, I think we ended up calling him ‘Crazy Legs’ because he was the least ‘Crazy Legs’ person we’d ever met, and besides, it pissed him off.”

“Always a. . . plus in your. . . social circles,” said my wife, thrusting harder now.

“You have no idea what you’re doing to me right now,” I told her.

“What makes. . . you think. . . I don’t?”

“You know, I did get home earlier than expected,” I pointed out. No sense wasting a perfectly good opportunity.

She got up and immediately bent at the waist, touching the floor in front of her with her palms, stretching her hamstrings. “A friend’s husband, a guy you actually know, is murdered, and you’re spending all your energy trying to proposition your own wife. That’s sad and flattering at the same time.”

“I can’t help it. Your legs can take my mind off of anything, except your. . .”

We both started, and looked up, when the doorbell rang. It was after eleven, and our doorbell never rings after eleven. It hardly ever rings before eleven. And at this hour, you could almost certainly rule out the Jehovah’s Witnesses. Abby stood up, and pointed to the door, as if I didn’t know what that bell going off in our living room might have meant.

I went to the door, cursing the fact that we have neither a peephole nor a door chain. For all I knew, Hannibal Lecter was standing on my doorstep, but a strange fear of insulting my guest would keep me from checking on his intention to eat my liver with some fava beans and a nice Chianti. Being civil has its costs.

On the way, I tried to see through the divide between the drapes on our front window, but the BMW parked in front of our house was unfamiliar. I wondered what Hannibal was driving these days.

Turned out, it didn’t matter. I opened the door, and Stephanie Jacobs Gibson was standing there, still in the gasp-inducing clothes she had worn at the reunion. Her face, however, was a little wan, and seemed freshly damp on both cheeks.

“Steph,” I said, more loudly than was necessary. Across the room, Abby was already sizing up the competition. As if anyone could compete with Abby.

“I’m sorry it’s so late,” Stephanie said. “I wanted to call, but I didn’t know if that would wake the kids, or if you’d be awake, and then I needed to go somewhere, so I got out your business card. . .”

“Come on in,” said Abby. I stepped aside to let that happen, then closed the door behind Stephanie. Abby walked to her, took her hand, and introduced herself. My wife has roughly seventeen times the social skills that I have.

I got Stephanie a beer, at her request, and we sat in the living room, Steph and Abby on the sofa, and me on the floor facing them, backed up to the entertainment center, an imposing piece of furniture Abby and I have dubbed “The Monolith.”

“I’m so sorry to hear what happened,” Abigail started. “You must be. . .”

“Shocked,” Stephanie cut her off. “I’m shocked. But I’m not heartbroken. I’m not even sure I’m sorry.”

Abby and I took a minute to pretend we weren’t looking at each other, but Stephanie noticed.

“Don’t get me wrong, I never wished him dead,” she said. “But things hadn’t been good between Louis and me for a long time. He had affairs. A lot of them.”

I coughed, because it gave me time to think. Stephanie offered me a sip of her beer, but I shook my head. If I drink anything after nine o’clock, it’ll be followed by a Maalox chaser before bed. “I never knew you were married to Cra. . . to Louis.”

Stephanie grinned. “It’s okay, Aaron,” she said. “I know you called him Crazy Legs. Even though I never knew why.”

Abby stood up and walked to me, put a hand on top of my head, the way you would with a little boy who’d just done something precocious. “Aaron never knew why, either,” she told Steph. “He explained it to me, and I still don’t know why.” They shared an “oh, those men” look.

“How’d you end up married to Legs, anyway?” I asked, trying to shift the conversation away from me as the stereotypical man.

Stephanie stopped grinning and stared into the neck of her beer bottle for a moment. “Well, we dated a couple of times senior year after I broke up with Michael. I didn’t think much of it, but Louis. . . well, Louis was persistent. Anyway, after graduation, I went to Montclair State, back before it was a university, and Louis went to NYU. So he’d come over, or I’d go into the city, and after a while, it got to be a regular thing.”

I decided to ignore Abby’s look and ask a question. Hey, I’m a reporter. We do that. “I think what I meant was, what did you see in the guy? I mean, we always thought he was kind of. . .” I quickly remembered that Legs was dead, and that stopped me.

“. . . an asshole? Well, that’s because you were guys.”

“We still are. Kind of.”

“Louis was always nicer to a girl he wanted to impress than he was to anybody else,” Stephanie said. “You didn’t get to see what he was really like until he had gotten what he wanted out of you.”

Abby sat down next to me. “I assume you mean he wanted sex,” she said. Stephanie nodded. I gave Abigail an “I-thought-you-said-to-shut-up-and-let-her-talk” look, and she gave me a look with language you can’t print in a family newspaper.

“But it was more than that,” Steph went on. “He decided he wanted me to marry him, even after I slept with him. He thought I’d look good on his arm, so he kept up the charming act. God, this is an awful way to talk about the recently murdered, isn’t it?” She stood up. “Where do I throw out the beer bottle?” she asked, sniffling a bit.

“Don’t worry about it,” Abby said. “Do you want another one?” Stephanie shook her head. “I drank at the reunion, and I still have to drive back to the hotel tonight.”

“You could stay here,” Abby answered. “We have a sofa bed.”

“No. I’ve already taken up enough of your evening. I should go,” said Stephanie. “I have to drive back in the morning. Fact is, I would be driving back now, but both my sons are out of town, so I don’t have to be there for them until tomorrow.”

“Back to D.C.?” I asked, and she nodded. “Was Legs in the government?”

“He is. . . was, the head of a big political foundation, People For American Values,” said Stephanie. “He actually became pretty important. Not as important as he thought he was, but important.”

People for American Values. Somewhere in the back of my knee-jerk liberal mind I remembered something, but couldn’t classify it. I probably grimaced, and stored that bit of confusion away until I could ask Abby, who knows everything.

Stephanie picked up her jacket from the banister hook and put it on. “Isn’t there anything we can do to help you?” I asked, but she shook her head.

“You’ve already done it,” she said. “You were here when I needed you.”

“We live here,” I said.

She laughed, and kissed me on the lips, gently. It wasn’t a sexual thing, but it got Abigail’s attention. Nobody who isn’t me would have noticed, but she did narrow her eyes a millimeter or two.

“What bothers me more than anything else,” Stephanie said, “is why. I know Louis wasn’t the most lovable man on the planet, and he had political enemies, but everybody in D.C. has enemies. Why kill him?”

“The police will find out,” I said. “Legs was important enough that they can’t just forget about it.”

I opened the front door for her, and as she was about to walk out, she stopped. “Aaron,” she said.

I waited, but she didn’t say anything else. “What?”

“Aaron, you. . . you found out who killed that woman here, right? You could find out about Louis.”

I almost closed the door on her foot. “Oh, no. Steph, no. The Madlyn Beckwirth story, that was. . .” I looked to Abby for help, but after the kiss, my wife was not in a charitable mood. “That was a fluke, a mistake. I’m just a magazine writer. Honestly.”

But Stephanie hadn’t changed much since high school. She knew how to get what she wanted, and her wheels were already spinning fast. “One of the journalists Louis and I got to know is a features editor at Snapdragon. And besides the music stuff, you know they cover politics.”

Stephanie stepped back inside, and I closed the door, so the neighbors wouldn’t be distracted by my terrified screams so late at night. I felt the trap being sprung around me.

“I know, Steph, but really. I don’t know anything about politics. I write mostly about home entertainment equipment.”

Steph was having none of it. “You know about murder investigations, and you knew Louis. You could write it, Aaron. Don’t turn me down now. I can get Lydia from Snapdragon to call you tomorrow morning. Please.”

In times of crisis, my wife is always my strength. I looked at her for help, and as usual, she came through with flying colors.

“How much does Snapdragon pay per word?” she asked.