might be a good idea to sit in the chair.
“See, Legs here”—and I could tell every time I used that name it annoyed him, so I resolved to use it as often as possible— “skimmed thirteen million off all the sincere conservative maniacs who sent him money, and he needed to be able to cover it up so he could go on living with all the money, even after the cops or the IRS found out about it, right Legs?” He was trying to figure out how to tape Mahoney to the chair while still holding the gun, and was having a hard time doing it. “You want me to hold the gun for you while you do that, Leggsy?”
He pointed the gun at me. “Stop calling me that!” he said. “Just trying to help.” Legs went back to pulling on the edge of the tape with his teeth, while moving the gun back and forth from me to Mahoney. I don’t know why, but the image of Legs holding a gun on me just wasn’t all that frightening. Maybe because it was Legs. He’d always been annoying. He’d always been a self-congratulating pest who never conceded that anybody but he could be right, but he was never what you’d call scary. “I can understand your need to cover up the theft, Legs, but your own brother! Isn’t that just a little cold?”
“You didn’t know him,” Louis Gibson said. “He was the most self-satisfied, egotistical, ill-tempered, pompous. . .”
“In your gene pool? Who would have thought it?” Mahoney chimed in.
“He wasn’t the kind of brother you think twice about,” Legs continued, his face a little redder.
“So you stab your brother in your girlfriend’s apartment after sex, and you dump his body on the bed, put on his clothes, pull the extremely unconvincing toupee off his head and put it on your own, and assume his identity so you can be dead and still have more than thirteen million dollars. Now, that’s family values,” I said.
“I guess you can take it with you,” Mahoney added. He looked at me. “But wouldn’t the cops do fingerprints, that sort of thing, and find out it wasn’t Legs?”
“No,” I said. “The medical examiner wouldn’t have a reason to take prints if Cherie Braxton—who didn’t know him very long, and couldn’t tell the difference—and later, Stephanie, both identified the body as Louis Gibson. Lester looked enough like you to pull it off, right Legs? And once you took his shoes, the ones without the three-inch lifts in them, you were walking around at your real height, instead of the one everybody was used to. So you looked more like him.”
“DNA?” Mahoney asked. Legs was looking at whomever was speaking, as if he were a spectator, enjoying the show. After all, we were talking about how clever he was—what’s not to like?
“All they got was a hair from the piece of cabbage Legs has on his head,” I said. Legs involuntarily touched himself on the head to make sure it was still there. “That actually worked to his advantage, since the cops got a DNA match on a guy who was executed in the state of Texas seven years ago, and that totally confused them. It always pays to get a real human hair wig, does-n’t it, Legs?”
“I said, stop calling me that!” he bellowed.
“Did you know that you were wearing a murderer’s hair, Legs?” I asked. “That’s kind of, I don’t know, symmetrical, isn’t it?”
“So, where did the money go?” Mahoney asked. “The cops didn’t find it in any of his accounts.”
“They won’t find it in my accounts,” said Legs, pleased to pat himself on the back for his own ingenuity. “My mother is laundering it for me.”
“Forty-four years old and still doing his laundry at Mom’s,” Mahoney said, clucking his tongue and shaking his head. “Pathetic.”
“Clearly, Stephanie knows about all this, or she wouldn’t have led us to this room for you to shoot us, right Leggsy?” If I could get him angry enough to make a large movement before he taped us to the chair, Mahoney or I (better Mahoney) could rush him.
Legs laughed. “Yeah, Stephanie knows,” he said.
“How’d you get her to go along with it?” I asked.
The voice from the doorway was one laced with nostalgia and sex. “Go along with it?” Stephanie asked. “Do you really think he was smart enough to think this all up himself?”
She stood in the doorway in a matching trenchcoat, although hers was more of