nationally televised funeral— intruded on her, and she called our conversation quits.
I spent a couple of hours after that on the Internet, which has completely replaced the library as the freelance writer’s main site for research. One of the few luxuries I allow myself is a high-speed cable Internet connection, and it pays for itself in time spent waiting for pages to pop onto the screen. I’d sooner give up my thesaurus—I could always download one, after all.
Through various web sites, I gained the following information:
Louis Gibson was an attorney who founded People for American Values in 1992—
Louis Gibson once told an interviewer he was “appalled at the degradation of American values by the excesses and mistakes of the 1960’s”—
Louis Gibson and his wife, Stephanie Jacobs Gibson, had been “happily married” for 23 years, and had two children, Louis Gibson, Jr., now 22 and a senior at Georgetown University, and Jason Gibson, now 17 and a junior at the Pringley School in Annapolis, MD—
Louis Gibson regularly appeared on such television programs as Meet the Press, Sunday Morning, Larry King Live; and The O’Reilly Factor. On his last TV appearance, on Left of Center, he had gotten into a shouting match with the host, Estéban Suarez.
I belong to an Internet bulletin board for writers called Writers United for Stage and Screen (WUSS), which was started by four disgruntled screenwriters about 10 years ago. Since the only kind of screenwriter is the disgruntled kind, WUSS is now populated by 250 professional and semi-professional screenwriters (like me), who leave messages for each other.
One of the great advantages of WUSS is the vast depth of knowledge that members can tap. If you need to know about the migrating patterns of Canadian geese, the caliber of the most widely circulated gun in America, the lyricist of “Do Wah Ditty Ditty,” or the perfect way to cook lamb chops, there’s always somebody to ask.
I logged on that morning and read my messages for the day— there were two. One was from Margaret Fishman, a screenwriter and novelist who wanted to know if New Jersey really had more Mafia members per square mile than any other state. The other was from Gene Manelli, a comedy writer with some fringe credits, which put him a few rungs up the ladder from me. Gene was continuing a thread of conversation that between the two of us had degenerated into a war of puns. Don’t ask me to detail it— you’d wake up screaming for weeks.
I left a message addressed to “ALL.” It read: “Anyone with info about the recently deceased conservative lobbyist Louis Gibson, please get in touch privately. There’s no money in it (for YOU), but it will be greatly appreciated.”
Once that was done, I logged off the Net and made yet another follow-up phone call on the Star-Ledger story. This time, I actually got the person I needed, spent 25 minutes asking questions I didn’t entirely understand, and wrote down answers I didn’t understand at all. Hey, it’s a living.
That left one more interview for the article, and I was awaiting a callback on that one. I decided to concentrate on the “Case of the Stinky Bomb.”
Every year, the Parent Teacher Organization (PTO, not PTA, so they don’t have to pay dues) of Midland Heights publishes what it calls “Find-A-Friend,” the list of every child in the school district (who sends in a form at the beginning of the school year), with address, phone number, and parents’ names. This year, it was rumored, email addresses (for the kids!) would be added, but since it was only October, the Find-A-Friend for this year hadn’t come out yet. The book is a resource so central to a family’s life it can often supplant the local phone book, and missing this year’s edition would be a major handicap.
Luckily, there was last year’s. I picked it up off the shelf on my desk (the Find-A-Friend is rarely far from my grasp) and started leafing through the pages, hoping to be hit on the head with the names of kids who might perpetrate such a dastardly crime.
I don’t like to sound callous about it, but the fact is, if you live in a small community long enough, and your children go to the public schools, you pretty much know which kids are more likely to flout authority, and which ones are going to play by the rules or die. So, while I’ll admit that this was a fishing expedition of the worst