A Farewell to Legs Read online

  Maybe I hadn’t come just to see Friedman, Wharton and. . . what’s-their-names, after all.

  Chapter

  Three

  It took me a few moments to regain the power of speech, and a few more to look Stephanie in the eye, something her plunging neckline wasn’t helping me achieve.

  “I don’t solve mysteries,” I said when English once again became my primary language. “I’m a soldier on the bottom rung of the literary battleground.” It sounded good at the time. I have no idea what it meant, since battlegrounds don’t generally have rungs, but there was no time to think of that.

  “That’s not what I heard,” she said, still not taking her eyes off me. I thought Mahoney might begin doing the tarantella behind my back just to get her attention. “I heard you found out who killed some woman in your town a while back.”

  Well, therein lies a tale. And one I have told elsewhere, so I’ll spare you the details. I decided, in this case, to be modest.

  “Oh, I was just working on a story and got lucky,” I said.

  “You were lucky I was backing you up,” grumbled Mahoney, “or you might not be here today.”

  His booming voice finally penetrated Stephanie’s radar screen, and she turned to him. “I’m sorry,” she said. “You don’t have a name tag, and I’m embarrassed, but I can’t remember. . .”

  “Come on inside,” I said, gesturing toward the door. “Let’s see who we can remember without name tags.”

  I didn’t hold out my arm, but she took it anyway, and as we walked inside, Mahoney gave me the same look arsenic would give you if it had eyes.

  Inside was a table with “Hello My Name Is” name tags, next to which was tastefully arranged an array of pictures from the football highlights of Bloomfield High School’s team for my graduation year (meaning three pictures, one for each of our victories against nine losses). Mahoney and I walked past the table, having decided ahead of time to forego the stupid tags and let people guess who we were. Stephanie stopped and carefully found hers, then tried to find an artful place to attach it to her dress. It took a while, but she managed.

  I was across the room by the time she had assembled herself, but I did take some amusement in the looks our male classmates gave Stephanie as she made her way around the dining room. The nametag gave them a legitimate excuse to look where they wanted to look, which I believe was exactly the effect Stephanie had desired. But before I could make my way back to her, I felt a hand grab my upper arm, and turned.

  Mark Friedman, looking every bit his age at 43, was smiling, tall, trim, and healthy-looking. I fought the urge the choke him.

  “Hey, Tucker!” he yelled. “I saw you come in with the Goddess. How’d you manage that?”

  “It’s nice to see you, too, Mark,” I attempted. “Are the other guys here?”

  “I saw Wharton earlier,” he said. “He’s trying to get everybody to vote for him for something. But what about the Goddess? You banging her?”

  “I’m married to a goddess,” I told him, “and it’s not Stephanie Jacobs. Before the parking lot five minutes ago, I hadn’t seen her in twenty years.”

  “Could have fooled me, the way she was hanging onto your arm,” he said, doing his best to leer but coming up with a lopsided grin instead. Friedman could never really transcend his original image, that of a cute little boy. But he was constantly trying.

  After showing off pictures of our respective children (they throw you out of the Father’s Union if you’re caught not carrying), Friedman and I caught up on professional accomplishments. His took longer than mine. He owned three carpet stores. I made a mental note to change professions.

  We headed for the bar, where I got a Diet Coke (they never listen when you tell them to forget the lemon) and Friedman opted for a Chivas Regal with water on the side. I knew what I had paid for the Diet Coke, so, if Friedman could afford a Chivas at the cash bar, I figured there must be money in selling carpet in Central New Jersey.

  The problem was, we weren’t making eye contact very much. And when we did, it was that kind of tentative, accidental eye contact that’s really just a way of finding out if the other guy is looking at you, or if he’s just checking out some woman he went on a date with 27 years ago.

  “Where’d you say you saw Wharton?” I asked.

  He looked relieved, pointed, and we walked across the room more or less together, waving at people we thought we recognized and avoiding the glances of people we were certain we recognized.

  Halfway there, Stephanie grabbed my arm again. I thought Friedman was going to have a hemorrhage right then, and he found himself caught in one of those awkward situations where you don’t know if you should continue on the path you’ve begun or stop to ogle a woman’s cleavage. He was clearly leaning toward the latter, but I pushed him in Wharton’s direction and stayed to talk to Stephanie.

  “You didn’t show me pictures of your children,” she said. “You have some, don’t you?”

  “Two,” I admitted, reaching for the evidence. “Ethan is twelve, and Leah’s eight.”

  She made the usual noises you make when you see someone else’s children. “So what do you do when you’re not solving murders?” she asked.

  “I freelance.” Stephanie gave me the same confused look everybody gives me when I say that, and yet I persist. “Writing. Magazines and newspapers.” I actually pulled a business card out of my wallet and gave it to her.

  “No kidding. My husband knows a lot of editors. Maybe he can help you get. . .”

  Mahoney loomed up behind her. “Do you remember me yet?” he asked Stephanie. Clearly, the man was trying way too hard.

  “I do. You drove me home once in the rain, didn’t you?” Damn, she was good. Mahoney’s grin got so wide I was afraid it would meet at the back of his head and his brain would fall out. While they were reliving this fascinating episode in their lives, I followed Friedman from the bar (where he’d replenished his Chivas) toward our resident politician.

  Greg Wharton, New Jersey state assemblyman (and osteopath), brushed the forelock out of his eyes as we approached. Wharton was a little heavier than I remembered him, but then, I was a little heavier than I remembered me, too. His suit was nicely enough tailored that it was hard to tell exactly how much heavier he was than his early-30’s self, the last version of Wharton I had seen.

  He smiled when he saw Friedman and me approaching, but as with all politicians or would-be politicians, it was hard to know if he meant it. I guess it doesn’t really matter. Wharton shook my hand heartily, as if he were campaigning outside a Stop & Shop and had just asked for my support.

  Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Stephanie Jacobs talking to Mahoney, but she was looking past his left shoulder toward Michael Andersen, Bloomfield’s one-time quarterback, with whom she had performed all sorts of delectable acts in the back seat of a 1968 Ford Fairlane, at least according to rumor.

  “So, what are you running for this time?” Friedman asked Wharton. “Board of Chosen Freeloaders?”

  “That’s Freeholders,” said Wharton, his sense of humor sharp as ever. “And no, this time it’s State Senate. There are too many issues. . .”

  “Spare me the campaign rhetoric,” I suggested. “I can always look it up on your web site, Whart. Besides, I don’t even live in your district.”

  “You could move.”

  Friedman rolled his eyes. “Nothing ever changes,” he said. “You still expect us to get you elected.” Wharton’s eyes narrowed. That one stung. It’s a long story, involving a stuffed ballot box in a student council election. And even though the statute of limitations has in all probability run out, it’s probably better left untold.

  Before a fistfight could break out, I gestured to Mahoney. Stephanie was walking away. Mahoney bit his lower lip, but walked over to us anyway.

  “Well, look who it is,” said Wharton. “Jerry Mahogany.”

  “Knucklehead Smiff,” Mahoney answered, completing the ritual. The reference to th
e Paul Winchell Show was a long-standing bit between the two of them. They didn’t shake hands, but nodded at each other.

  I recognized about twenty percent of the people in the room, and discounting for spouses, that still gave me a woefully low batting average. No one approached us—and I almost gave a long-lost-friend greeting to a man who turned out to be the bartender.

  Still, the four of us—Mahoney, Friedman, Wharton and Tucker (that’s me)—managed to create a mini-reunion in our corner of the room. Old jokes, half-forgotten, were dragged out and given one more road test. Stories that were three-quarters forgotten (at least by me) were retold and embellished. Facts were disputed, opinions dismissed, and current lives and families, not to mention the past quarter century, completely ignored. And when Alan McGregor was spotted walking through the door, our mini-group was complete.

  Mahoney, who had jump-started his sense of humor and assumed his customary court jester role, bellowed from across the room: “McGregor!” Heads turned. No one cared. McGregor reddened a bit, but walked over to us, smiling.

  McGregor is about the same height as Mahoney, but not as muscular. He looks more like Clark Kent, and less like Superman.

  In our group, no one member was more important than the rest, but it wouldn’t have been “Us” without McGregor. He provided the humanity in a gang of four who would have gone for the throat for the sake of a joke had he not been present. He also held his own, providing puns that would send lesser men running from the room.

  He had barely caught up with the rest of the group (wife, three kids, some sort of financial job I didn’t understand) when I spotted a short, trim woman with casually coiffed brown hair standing by herself in a corner, nursing a ginger ale. I must have gasped audibly, because Mahoney turned in her direction, and broke into the nastiest grin I’d seen on his face in six months.

  “Gail Rayburn,” he said, and the whole group turned first to her, then to me. I felt like my face was giving off heat beams. And they were enjoying my discomfort immensely.

  Gail Rayburn, who had been considered something of a hot number during our tenure at Bloomfield High, had inexplicably decided one week during our senior year to make me her pet project. She found me at a party at Bobby Fox’s house, seduced me in some subtle way the beer wouldn’t allow me to remember (like saying “come here”), and then given me my first—and to date, last—hickey, a 24-karat beauty that I’d worn proudly for close to a week. She had, of course, then moved on to someone else, leaving me to look foolish, which was not unusual for me in high school, and continues to be not unusual for me to this day.

  “You ought to go over and say hello,” said Wharton.

  “Too bad you’re not wearing a turtleneck,” Friedman added. “Your wife might find out.”

  “Don’t go over,” McGregor chimed in. “You don’t want to stick your neck out.”

  I looked at Mahoney. “Why’d we come to this thing, again?” I asked.

  “I’m having a good time,” he said. It occurred to me that he’d started having a good time when I started being the object of ridicule, but hey, what are best friends for?

  I assessed them carefully. “I can do better than this group,” I said, and walked to where Gail was standing.

  On my way, I noticed Stephanie standing among five or six ex-jocks desperately trying to suck in their guts. If you squinted, it was like a football huddle in Playboy. Except that Stephanie was dressed. Mostly.

  Gail Rayburn, on the other hand, was completely dressed, and, at 43, gave the appearance of someone who was less a hot number (although still attractive) and more a moderately successful entrepreneur. She still had a figure she could show off, but had chosen not to do so, and was wearing her nametag on the lapel of a suit jacket. The tag read, “Gail Armstrong (Rayburn).”

  “Gail,” I said, and she smiled, somewhat gratefully. I hoped I also noticed a flicker of recognition in her eye.

  “Aaron Tucker,” she said after a moment. “It’s good to see you.”

  She reached over and hugged me. Yes, the figure was still there. But it was a friendly hug, and I appreciated it as that.

  “I’m glad you remember me,” I told her.

  “Of course I do,” Gail said. “You were the nicest guy in the class.”

  “In high school,” I told her, “that generally means you’re the one who gets the least. . .”

  “Hickeys?” she asked, and we both laughed. I glanced over at the guys I’d left, and they were all looking at us, with adolescent grins on their faces. Gail raised her ginger ale to them in a toast. McGregor reddened and looked away.

  “It’s twenty-five years later, and I still haven’t lived that down,” I said.

  “Do you want to?” she asked.

  “Not really.” Out of the corner of my ear, I heard a cell phone ring. Stephanie, at the center of the huddle, reached into her purse (she couldn’t possibly have had pockets in that outfit) and pulled out a phone.

  “You looked so cute with that thing on your neck,” Gail continued. “You should have been fighting girls off after that.”

  “Was that why you did it?” I asked. “I’ve often wondered. You just picked me out of the crowd. Were you trying to see if you could change my reputation?”

  She laughed. “I just did it because I felt like it,” she said. “I was cementing my reputation. Your reputation didn’t need any help. You were always the one with the most integrity, the one who never compromised his principles.”

  It was my turn to laugh. “It’s easy not to betray your ideals,” I said, “if nobody ever asks you to.”

  “Don’t sell yourself short. You believed in things, and you stuck to them. You never did anything you thought was wrong. You had integrity.”

  “Where’s my tape recorder when I need it?”

  It was then that Stephanie made a sound that can’t actually be described accurately. A cross between a cough and a groan, it was something primal, and every head in the room turned toward her, wondering if a wild animal had been let loose in the room.

  She was standing, holding the cell phone, but not next to her ear. She was staring at it in her hand, as if the phone itself, and not someone on the other end, had just told her something she couldn’t comprehend. Stephanie dropped the phone, then picked it up. One of the jocks tried to say something to her, but she waved him off and started toward the door.

  The way to the door was right past where Gail and I were standing. Stephanie started to barrel past us, but I grabbed her arm. “Steph. . .” I said.

  She didn’t look at me. I’m not sure she was actually talking to me.

  “My husband,” she said. “My husband is. . . somebody killed him.”

  Gail gasped. A couple nearby turned their heads away, asking each other if either knew what she meant. I maneuvered myself into Stephanie’s line of sight.

  “Somebody killed your husband? As in. . .”

  “Murder,” she said. “That’s what the police said.”

  “Are they sure it was him? Maybe. . .”

  She laughed, not a merry laugh. “It was him, all right,” she said, avoiding my gaze again. “Everybody in Washington knows Louis Gibson.” And she just kept walking, right out the door.

  I looked at Gail. “Should I go after her?”

  “Why? Are you guys really good friends?”

  I thought about that. “No,” I said. “Before tonight, I hadn’t seen her in years.”

  Mahoney beckoned me from across the room. He was pointing into the bar, which was adjacent to the banquet hall. There was a television over the bar, which normally this time of year might be showing a baseball playoff game. This time, a news report seemed to be on, and Mahoney was pointing to it.

  “Is that her husband? Is that. . .?”

  I looked at the face on the screen, which was identified as that of Louis Gibson. I was too far away to hear what was being said, but the inevitable crawl underneath the face indicated that this Gibson guy was the head of so
me political lobbying group in D.C. Mahoney walked to my side.

  “Look at him,” he said. “He lost his hair, put on some pounds, but he’s the same asshole.”

  Louis Gibson. It took me a while, because we had never used that name.

  We always called him “Crazy Legs.”

  Chapter

  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.”