Sixteen

After a shower at home (I wouldn’t shower at the Y for fear of getting athlete’s everything), I dressed for lunch with Stephanie, and headed to R.W. Muntbugger’s, a New Brunswick restaurant so adorable you pretty much want to adopt it and take it home with you.

New Brunswick, NJ is the home of Rutgers, the state university. In the 1970s, when I was an undergraduate there, New Brunswick was a depressed little city with a glorious past (Benjamin Franklin and John Adams used to get drunk there) and a lot of porno theatres. But since then, the city has undergone something of a renaissance, mostly due to the continued presence of its number one benefactor, the Johnson & Johnson company.

These days, downtown New Brunswick still has a number of stores that sell cheap merchandise to the people who actually live in the city. But it also boasts any number of trendy restaurants, three separate live theatre venues, a wine store, and an Ethiopian boutique. Not a porno theatre (or, for that matter, a movie theatre) anywhere to be found. This, in New Jersey, is called “progress.”

Muntbugger’s is a prime example of what is right and wrong with New Brunswick. In an attempt to please people blatant enough to embarrass a cocker spaniel, the restaurant tries to be all things to all patrons. It boasts a homey atmosphere in a building that could accommodate a small warehouse, has “antiques” hanging from its walls and ceiling, calls its hamburgers “Muntburgers,” which borders on the disgusting, and charges $4 for an imported beer like Molson, which is imported all the way from Canada. In a truck.

Naturally, such an establishment packs ‘em in, as Rutgers professors and J&J execs alike have decided they “discovered” the place, so normally, one has to wait a good 20 to 45 minutes to get a table at lunchtime. This was apparently not the case for Mrs. Louis Gibson. I actually found Steph at a table the minute I walked in.

She was resplendent in black, but her widow’s weeds were in this case a black Gap T-shirt and a pair of black jeans. No sense being uncomfortable just because somebody else was dead.

I sat down as she smiled at me, and apologized for being late, despite the fact that I was on time. Finding her waiting for me made it feel like I was late.

“Don’t worry,” she said. “I just sat down when you walked in.” The fact that she already had a drink, and had consumed about half of it, gave away the lie, but I let it go.

I ordered a Diet Coke and we both ordered salads. I was pretending to be dieting, and she was just showing off. After the waiter left, I pulled my interview cassette recorder from my jacket and put it down on the table.

Steph looked a little surprised. “We’re taping?” she asked.

“I’m on assignment. You wouldn’t want me to misquote you.”

“Wouldn’t I? Anything you make up would probably sound better than the truth.”

I gave her my famous half-grin, guaranteed to be ingratiating. “I’m forty-three,” I told her. “You can’t expect my memory to be what it once was. Who are you, again?”

She smiled. “An old friend.”

“You don’t really mind the tape recorder, do you?”

She thought about it, but shook her head. “It’s okay,” she said.

I hit the record button. “You didn’t seem terribly upset when Louis was killed. Do you worry that makes you seem like a suspect?”

Stephanie’s eyes widened. “Whoa!” she said. “You don’t waste any time, do you?”

“Who’s got time to waste?” I said. I looked at her for a few moments, letting her know I was waiting for her to answer the question. She exhaled grandly.

“Okay,” she said. “I said you could have unlimited access. Well, you know Louis was not a model husband.”

“He had affairs.”

“He was rarely not having an affair,” she said, her voice empty of emotion. She didn’t seem upset, just reporting an unhappy fact. “Once he became well known in Washington, he could pretty much have his pick of the cute blondes, and there was a long succession of them.”

“Anyone who thinks you’re not enough is an idiot,” I blurted. Sometimes, even I don’t understand why I say some things.

She smiled. “You’re not seeing me clearly. You look at me through a haze of twenty-five years.”

“Not at all. I see you the way you are now. It was Legs who was trying to get back to being eighteen again.”

“You’re sweet,” she said. “But Louis needed younger women. He didn’t care who they were, or even if he liked them. He did-n’t care if he was embarrassing me by being seen with them. He didn’t care if his children knew about it, either. After a while, I stopped caring, too.”

“A lot of people would say that was reason enough to have him killed,” I suggested. Strangely, she smiled.

“You have to care to be that angry,” she said quietly. “You can’t have a crime of passion if you don’t have the passion.”

“So how did you react?” I asked.

Stephanie hesitated. In fact, she came to a complete halt, and if the lighting at Muntbugger’s hadn’t been fashionably dim, I’d have sworn she was blushing. The waiter bailed her out by bringing our lunch, and she waited until he left, then tried, unsuccessfully, to express her thoughts again. She started her answer more than once, and never uttered a complete word. I decided to bail her out.

“You had affairs of your own,” I said, and she looked down at her food, and nodded. “Why couldn’t you tell me that?”

“I didn’t want you to think badly of me.” I had to strain to hear her.

“I never thought my opinion meant so much to you,” I said.

“Well, it does.” She spoke quickly, to get past this sticky point. “Anyway, I decided to match Louis embarrassment for embarrassment, but I couldn’t do it. I had a couple of quick. . . episodes, and then I gave up. He didn’t care, and I learned not to care, too. Finally, our marriage found its level of dysfunction, and we made it work for us.”

“Functional dysfunction.”

“Yeah,” she chuckled. “Besides, if I was going to have Louis killed for having an affair, why wait for this particular one? He’d had more than I could count.”

“Who do you think did have a reason to kill Legs?”

“That’s what I’ve been agonizing over. Politically, there were lots of people who didn’t like Louis. God knows, even I didn’t agree with him politically much of the time. But to kill him? In Washington, if you don’t like somebody, you make their life miserable. Killing him would just end the fun.”

“How about personally? One of his ex-girlfriends?”

“Most of them were politically motivated—they wanted to move up, and sleeping with a connected guy helped them up the ladder. I can’t imagine any of them being in love with him, certainly not enough to kill the next in line.” “Nonetheless,” I said, “who was the one just before Ms. Cheri Braxton?” She winced at the name.

“Cheri?”

“I just report the facts—I don’t make ’em up.”

“Let’s see. The most recent one I knew about was named. . . oh, come on. . . Robyn. With a ‘y.’ Robyn Ezterhaus.” She spelled the last name, too.

“Did the affair with Robyn last an unusually long time? Was it especially intense?”

“They all tend to run together, but I don’t think so. And after all, Aaron. . .”

“What?”

Stephanie frowned. “It doesn’t make sense. If she wanted Louis so badly, she had to get rid of the competition. His being married was the problem. Why didn’t she come after me?”

I stared down and speared a piece of grilled chicken, which was the only thing making the salad even marginally interesting. “Why, indeed?” I said.