card I don’t yet have? I have no leverage.”
“Larry Gelbart doesn’t work on spec, you know.”
“Larry Gelbart is god.”
“True.”
The phone rang. “I’ve got it!” Leah screamed as she ran from the living room into my office.
“Check and see who it is,” I reminded her. Before we added Caller ID to the office phone, she would answer no matter what, and then hand me the phone to fend off the inevitable mortgage refinancer or siding salesman interrupting our dinner.
“I will!” She looked at the hard-to-read display. “It’s somebody named Cherry.”
“Cherry?” Abby and I looked at each other. “You mean Shery?”
“Oh. Yeah.” Leah is a fine reader, but she panics a bit when the answering machine is about to pick up.
I stood and walked to the phone, looking at Abby. “Lori’s calling again? It must be important.” Abby nodded, but looked at my plate with some dismay. Great artists don’t like to have their work interrupted, no matter how reasonable the pretext.
“Lori?” I said.
“How’d you know? . . . Oh, you have that box, don’t you?” Lori Shery, the president and co-founder of ASPEN (ASPerger Syndrome Education Network), doesn’t call often, but her voice is always welcome on the other end of the phone. Even now, through what sounded like stress, it had a friendly, warm tone to it that is the perfect sound for a parent whose child has just been diagnosed with AS, and who doesn’t know where to turn. I know.
Lori started ASPEN out of her living room at virtually the same moment Ethan was diagnosed, when he was in kindergarten. Abby had stumbled across Lori’s web address while doing some Internet research on this new condition we’d just heard of, which our son will have all his life. And Lori was, indeed, a godsend.
She had calmed our fears, which all AS parents have in the beginning. No, she said, our son wouldn’t necessarily have to live out his adulthood in a group home and work at Burger King because he has Asperger’s. Yes, it’s going to be difficult, but not so difficult you can’t handle it. Lori herself is an Asperger parent, and she is nothing if not experienced, knowledgeable, and confident.
Before I knew it, I was actually taking part in ASPEN, despite my absolute refusal to attend any kind of meeting involving any group since being initiated into the boys service club—the Ciceronians—at Bloomfield High School in the 1970s. I’m still not much of a joiner, but participating in ASPEN gave me the background I needed to understand what Ethan would require from his school and from us, his parents. Then, I started feeling experienced enough to reassure new parents myself, and that is another kind of blessing.
I also write a quirky column for Lori’s newsletter, which she constantly has to remind me about. Non-paying work is sometimes more difficult for a freelance writer to remember, I’m ashamed to say. But it’s true, and I assumed she was calling because I was in danger of missing the latest deadline, which I was pretty sure fell sometime this month.
Now, however, the tension in her voice was telling me this call wasn’t about 750 words on the lighter side of Asperger’s Syndrome.
“What’s wrong, Lori?”
“You’ve known me a long time, haven’t you?” she asked. “Well, I have a big favor to ask.”
“You know you can have whatever you want.”
“I need you to investigate a murder,” said Lori.
I’d been asked to do that just twice before, and in both cases, resisted as hard as I could until there was no alternative. For one thing, I think my track record would convince anyone I’m ill-suited to that kind of work, and for another, I’m a coward, and murders tend to be perpetrated by violent people. Other people don’t do windows. I don’t do murders.
But this was Lori Shery doing the asking. Lori, besides being an old friend and one whom I owe about 168 favors, is also a force of nature. If something stands between her and what she needs, she simply ignores it until it goes away—or she bulldozes over it and teaches it a lesson. Lori is not to be denied—ever.
“Sure,” I said.
Chapter Three
“Really?” Lori said. “I thought you’d have to be convinced.” “Normally, I would,” I told her. “But I can’t turn you down. I just hope you remember who your friends are when inevitably you’re elected the first female Jewish President of the United States.”
“Stop it,” Lori laughed. I wasn’t kidding.
“Why are you asking about a murder?” Well,