Seventeen

“Okay, so Stephanie Jacobs is smashing her boobs into you, and you’re telling her to cut it out?” Mark Friedman was shaking his head, incredulous. “What’s wrong with you, Tucker?”

“I’m terminally married,” I said.

We were sitting around a large table, the five of us. Muntbugger’s had been warned ahead of time, but took no reservations. So I’d had to wait for about fifteen minutes while the troops gathered (I’d gotten there first, feeling some responsibility for the occasion). Now, all of us having ordered and already downing a beer, I was getting the others up to speed on the state of the Legs Gibson investigation. Apparently, my conduct during a crucial episode was somewhat disappointing to my friends, or at least Friedman.

“I’m married, too, but I’m not that married,” Friedman said.

“You were at Aaron’s wedding,” Mahoney said. “Don’t you remember Abby?”

“I was pretty drunk,” Friedman noted.

I took a picture of Abigail out of my wallet and showed it to him. Friedman’s voice dropped to a rasp. “Okay,” he said, “I see your point. Can I keep this?”

“No.” I snatched it out of his hand and put it back into my wallet. I’d have to clean it off later.

“It’s not that I don’t want to see pictures of your wife,” Greg Wharton said, “but I don’t think that’s why you asked us to come here, is it, Tucker?”

“No, thanks, Wharton. I have one question to ask each of you, and I’d appreciate it if you’d each think very carefully about it before you answer. There may be follow-up.”

I took the tape recorder out and put it in the center of the table. And the four of them burst into such a storm of laughter that people at tables in all directions around us looked over, shook their heads, and despaired at the state of middle-aged men in America.

“What the hell is that thing for?” Mahoney gasped through guffaws. “We going to sing later?”

I was prepared for the outburst. “I’m working,” I said. “If I’m going to quote you idiots, I need to get it right, and I don’t plan on taking notes all through dinner.”

“Is Snapdragon paying for dinner?” McGregor wanted to know. “I didn’t order the filet mignon sandwich, but if they’re buying, I could always change.”

“Maybe they are,” I said. “If what you guys tell me is any help at all, I’ll put it on my expense sheet.” There was much hand-rubbing, smiling, and eye-widening at that remark. Friedman ordered himself an Anchor Steam. McGregor didn’t change to the steak sandwich, but he did add steak fries to his order. They make them waffle style at Muntbugger’s.

It was McGregor who finally sat back and put his hands behind his head in a gesture of relaxation and preparedness. “What are your questions?” he asked. Thank god for McGregor. Otherwise, we’d have sat there all night trying to make each other laugh, and succeeding most of the time. High school friends are easy.

“I’m going to start with Wharton,” I said. “He gets two questions, one for being a politician, and another for being a doctor.”

“Osteopath,” he corrected.

“What is an osteopath, anyway, Greg?” McGregor asked. “Sounds like somebody who attacks you with the bones of his last victim.”

“That’s very amusing,” Wharton said sourly. “We’re the most misunderstood branch of the medical profession. Why, if internists had to know half of what. . .”

“Save the electioneering for the politician question,” Friedman said.

I saw my opening and dove in. “Let’s say somebody in Washington wanted Legs Gibson dead,” I started. “What kind of idiot would they have to be to do something about it?”

“A big idiot,” Wharton said immediately. “You don’t kill the people you disagree with. You make their lives miserable and then make sure you smear them so much they can’t get re-elected and have to go work for a living. Killing them is just way too quick. There’s not enough suffering. Besides, there’s the whole ‘getting caught’ thing that can put a crimp in your campaign.”

The waiter brought our dinner, so I turned off the recorder until everyone was well hunkered down. When I turned it back on, numerous groan-worthy puns later, I was asking Friedman about carpets.

“Let’s say we’re in a room with a light beige carpet,” I started.

He cut me off. “What kind of carpet?” He asked.

“Light beige,” I repeated.

“Deep pile, shag, shallow pile, wall-to-wall, area rug, old, new, Scotchguard, no Scotchguard, what?” Friedman’s tone indicated that he was talking to a complete moron, and was exasperated for having had to explain himself further. “Polyester blend, wool, what kind of material?”

“I’d say deep pile, wall-to-wall,” I started. “It’s a rental apartment, so my guess would be that every unit has the same rug.”

“Carpet,” he corrected. “A rug is something that doesn’t go wall-to-wall.”

“Or something that Wharton could use on that bald spot,” McGregor noted, to some hoots.

“Better than that comb-over Legs was doing, from what I could see on the news,” Mahoney chimed in.

“Let’s not stray too far from the topic at hand,” I urged.

“Topic at head,” McGregor interjected. I ignored him, and pressed on.

“The carpet, Friedman, the carpet.”

“What about it?”

“Okay, so it’s beige, right? And whatever pile I said it was, and a rental apartment carpet, so it’s probably not the most expensive one left in the warehouse.”

“Okay,” Friedman said. “So?”

“So let’s say, for the sake of argument, that there’s one area on the ru. . . carpet that’s a little bit darker than the rest of it. What does that tell me?”

Friedman looked at me with disdain. “You don’t have to be a carpet expert to figure that out,” he said. “Something’s been spilled on the rug.”

“Carpet,” Wharton corrected.

“I’m willing to bet that area was a little stiffer than the rest, no matter how many times it had been vacuumed, right?” Friedman asked.

“That’s right,” I said, prompting him to pontificate on the art of rugging a little more. Reporting isn’t about talking. It’s about getting others to talk. It’s something the TV people have never figured out.

“And it stood up a little bit more, didn’t it?” he said, essentially repeating himself, but I let him go on, to see if he’d reach the conclusion I wanted. I nodded. “So then, something was spilled on it, but there was no stain, right? I mean, no discoloration.”

“No, that’s right. It was a little darker, but not a different color than the rest.”

Friedman smiled a smug smile. The wise old expert on Aladdin’s mode of transport would now dispense his hard-earned expertise, if we were men with sufficient sense to stop chewing long enough to hear it.

“So what happened was, something was spilled on the carpet,” Friedman began.

“And we don’t have to be Einstein to figure out what that was,” Wharton said. I gave him the patented stare I give my kids to shut them up, but on Wharton, in this case, it had the opposite effect than the one my children employ: Wharton actually shut up.

“And whatever it was, it was mopped up just about immediately,” Friedman went on, ignoring both Wharton and the byplay that had gone on between Wharton and me. “Because you’re right, Tucker, if it’s in a rental, it was probably a cheap carpet, so if it had been left to stain for even a couple of minutes, it probably would have left a noticeable discoloration.”

“What do you use to mop up liquid on a rug?” I asked, not being well schooled in the art of cleaning. And if you don’t believe me, come to my house sometime.

“Best thing right away is club soda,” he said. “So it doesn’t leave a stain, but the fabric is left with a change in texture, and that’s why you can notice it, if you look, and feel it, if you touch it or walk on it.”

“Whart,” I said, “if someone is stabbed in the heart, I assume that would cause a pretty massive blood loss. Would I be wrong?”

“Well, there’d be a lot of immediate spurting,” he said. “You have to figure that a wound to the heart, if the heart were contracted, or beating, at the time, would last for a few beats of the heart, expansions and contractions, at the very least. So blood would be spraying all over for at least a few seconds.” “The police report indicated that there was a good deal of blood on the bed,” I said. “Would that be consistent with the kind of wound you’re talking about?”

Wharton thought for a moment, chewing carefully on his cheddar burger. Finally, he regarded me and pointed a finger. “Can I have one of your fries?” he said.

I handed him one, probably without even thinking. “What about the blood, Whart?”

“You told us to consider our answers carefully, didn’t you?” he asked through a mouthful of potato. “I’m considering.”

“Not to mention raising your intake of carbohydrates by about six zillion percent,” Friedman added.

“From what you’ve told me, the wound was a single wound, delivered through the rib cage and into the heart,” Wharton said finally. “That’s a strong person pushing that knife, or a really, really angry one pumped up by adrenaline.”

“So there’d be a bunch of blood?” I asked, trying to get him back to the question.

“Not as much as in the first few seconds of a head wound,” Wharton said. “But for maybe ten or fifteen seconds, the blood would be flying, and not in any predictable pattern. It wouldn’t be pretty in the room, I’ll tell you that.”

“If he’s stabbed while he’s lying on the bed, would it fly far enough that there’d be a stain almost at the foot of the bed, and to the side, like where you’d put your shoes, if you were neat?”

Wharton thought about that for a while, too, until I realized he wanted another French fry. Given that, he said, “No, I’d say probably not. The heart would pump out blood, but not in arcs. It would fly up, miss the bed, and then hit just the one spot at the foot of the bed. There would have to be a lot of other dark spots on the rug to indicate that was what happened.”

“So if there is just the one spot, and a relatively large one, at the base of the bed, what does that tell us?” I asked.

“One of two things,” Wharton said, washing down his pilfered potato with some of McGregor’s beer. “Either he was killed near the foot of the bed and fell down. . .” he tailed off.

“Or what?”

“Or that wasn’t blood that got washed up at the foot of the bed. Could be other bodily fluids.”

Emitted was a loud group grimace that you can actually hear on the cassette tape, and Mahoney made a comment about not discussing such things in front of open food. I turned to McGregor.

“Okay, Alan, let’s talk money.” McGregor brightened considerably, about to show us his level of expertise. Everyone was glad not to be discussing bodily fluids.

“What money?”

“About thirteen million dollars that’s missing from the Legs Gibson ‘You’d-Better-Have-My-Values’ Foundation. If I want to see where that money came from, and even more fun, where it went, what do I have to do?”

McGregor grabbed his beer back from Wharton, who looked annoyed, and took a long drag on the bottle. Then he put it back down on the table, out of Wharton’s reach.

“Ask,” he said.

“Ask? Ask whom?” I was showing off my grammatical expertise here. I was an English major in college, you know.

“Ask the Foundation. Believe it or not, Gibson’s American Values thing is a not-for-profit organization. That means the books are a matter of public record, and anybody can ask for an accounting whenever they feel like it. You gotta love America.” McGregor grinned at that.

“So if I just call up and say hi, I’m a member of the public, and I’d like to see your books for the past three years, they have to give them to me?” Wheels were spinning in my head that I had-n’t used since freshman economics, a class I almost never attended.

“That’s right. Of course, if there was illegal activity, I’d be surprised to see it labeled that way. Somebody had to find a way to skim off the money without being obvious about it.” McGregor’s eyes got dreamy, like he was trying to come up with the right way to do such a thing. If this went on too long, he’d be trying to get Max Bialystock to invest in a musical about Hitler by the time dessert came.

“If you saw the books, would you be able to figure it out?”

He came back to earth. “I don’t know,” McGregor said. “It depends on how clever the person doing the skimming was.”

“Let’s say the person was Legs Gibson.”

“Twelve seconds,” McGregor said without boasting. “Less, if Legs was distracted.”

Mahoney had been sitting, semi-quietly, at the other end of the table all night, but all the activity had gotten to him. “Why am I here, again?” he asked. “Was it just to make sure that Friedman doesn’t break the bank ordering exotic beers he couldn’t recognize without the labels?”

“I resent that,” Friedman said, draining an amber with a Hungarian label. “I don’t deny it, but I resent it.”

“You are here,” I told Mahoney, “for a number of reasons. First of all, you organized the evening, so it’s only fair you should have to suffer through it like the rest of us. Also, you are my closest and largest friend, and therefore are necessary in case a fist-fight breaks out over the last French fry. And last, but certainly not least, you are here because I have a question about the operations of Newark International Airport, which as I recall is your base of operations, professionally speaking.”

He took on a smile which could only be described as beatific. “So it is,” Mahoney said.

“How often does a shuttle run from Newark to Washington, D.C., and vice versa?” I asked.

“About every fifteen or twenty minutes, if you factor in all the airlines running them,” he said. “It’s a short flight, only a little over an hour, and lots of business guys go back and forth all the time, so that’s where the airlines make their money.”

“How about on Saturdays?” I asked.

“It’s not all that different,” Mahoney answered. “Some business guys are coming home from the Friday meetings that run late. Some tourists go down for a weekend. Some other business guys go down there to get ready for the Big Meeting that’s coming up Monday morning. The weekend schedule isn’t very different from the weekly one.”

“How long does it take to rent a car at the airport?” I said. There were groans all around the table, and Mahoney’s eyes narrowed.

“Not that long,” he said with too much emphasis, defending his chosen profession with authentic zeal. “If you have one of those club cards, where you can do everything over the Internet or on the phone, you can literally take a shuttle to the gate, pick up the car they told you to take from the lot, and leave. With the shuttle or the monorail at the airport, maybe twenty minutes, tops. More if you’re waiting for baggage.”

“You spend a lot of time on the roads in our beloved state,” I said. “How long from Newark Airport to Scotch Plains on a Saturday late afternoon/early evening?”

“Maybe half an hour,” Mahoney estimated.

“So if I were in D.C. at five, I could conceivably be in Scotch Plains by seven-thirty without breaking a sweat?”

“It’d be close,” Mahoney said, “but if you planned ahead, it’s possible. There’s one problem with your theory, Inspector,” he added.

“What’s that?”

“Well, if you’re assuming that Stephanie killed Crazy Legs, then got right on an airplane at Reagan, flew to Newark, hopped in a rental car and drove to the reunion, you’re forgetting that she had her own car when she pulled into the lot in Scotch Plains.”

“You noticed that?” I asked incredulously.

“Sure,” Mahoney said. “It’s second nature now. I see a car, I check the plates, and I look for a sticker or a number that would indicate it’s from a rental company. Got to keep up with the competition. And Stephanie’s car was definitely private.”

I thought for a while about that. “That leaves a few possibilities,” I said. “But one thing’s for sure.”

“What’s that?” asked Mahoney, always dependable to deliver a straight line when you need one.

“Well, you gentlemen—and I use the term loosely—have answered your questions very well, so Snapdragon is definitely picking up the tab for dinner,” I said, reaching for my American Express card.

There was a good deal of cheering while I calculated the tip, and how to convince the people at surrounding tables that I’d never met these men before in my life.

I got home after Leah was in bed, but Ethan was still up, wreaking havoc with my computer by playing Internet games on the Nickelodeon site. Abby, with a Sphinx-like look on her face, told me he had been on the Internet pretty much all evening.

We sat in the kitchen, she having a cup of decaf and me having a couple of tablespoons of Maalox. And the idiot grin that kept trying to conceal itself on my wife’s face finally got the better of me.

“Okay,” I said, “tell me about the dog.”

“It’s so cute!” she gushed. “We found it on the site for this shelter in Hackettstown. . .”

“Hackettstown!” I groaned. “That’s an hour and a half drive easy.”

“You only have to do it once,” Abby said. “He’s so adorable, Aaron. Part beagle, part basset hound.”

“A bagel. Very appropriate.”

“You have to see. As soon as Ethan’s done playing, I’ll show you the picture.”

“Don’t show me anything,” I said. “I don’t want to be infected with cute dog disease like the rest of you.”

“You are a very difficult man,” my wife said. “Believe me, once you see the picture, you’ll fall in love.”

“I might fall in love tonight, but in February, when the wind is blowing and it’s twelve degrees outside and Mr. Adorable wants to be walked, I’m not going to be so in love.”

Ethan called in from the den. “I’ll do it, Dad,” he said. “You don’t have to walk the dog.”

Abby and I looked at each other, but our looks were saying two different things: hers was all about “see?” while mine was very clearly stating, “famous last words.”