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 some 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.”
“I can’t help it. Your legs can take my mind off of anything, except your. . .”
We both started, and looked up, when the doorbell rang. It was after eleven, and our doorbell never rings after eleven. It hardly ever rings before eleven. And at this hour, you could almost certainly rule out the Jehovah’s Witnesses. Abby stood up, and pointed to the door, as if I didn’t know what that bell going off in our living room might have meant.
I went to the door, cursing the fact that we have neither a peephole nor a door chain. For all I knew, Hannibal Lecter was standing on my doorstep, but a strange fear of insulting my guest would keep me from checking on his intention to eat my liver with some fava beans and a nice Chianti. Being civil has its costs.
On the way, I tried to see through the divide between the drapes on our front window, but the BMW parked in front of our house was unfamiliar. I wondered what Hannibal was driving these days.
Turned out, it didn’t matter. I opened the door, and Stephanie Jacobs Gibson was standing there, still in the gasp-inducing clothes she had worn at the reunion. Her face, however, was a little wan, and seemed freshly damp on both cheeks.
“Steph,” I said, more loudly than was necessary. Across the room, Abby was already sizing up the competition. As if anyone could compete with Abby.
“I’m sorry it’s so late,” Stephanie said. “I wanted to call, but I didn’t know if that would wake the kids, or if you’d be awake, and then I needed to go somewhere, so I got out your business card. . .”
“Come on in,” said Abby. I stepped aside to let that happen, then closed the door behind Stephanie. Abby walked to her, took her hand, and introduced herself. My wife has roughly seventeen times the social skills that I have.
I got Stephanie a beer, at her request, and we sat in the living room, Steph and Abby on the sofa, and me on the floor facing them, backed up to the entertainment center, an imposing piece of furniture Abby and I have dubbed “The Monolith.”
“I’m so sorry to hear what happened,” Abigail started. “You must be. .