A Farewell to Legs (16 page)

“Fine. So how does that lead to me cleaning up dog
poop?”

My wife, who grew up outside Chicago, took on what
she considers to be a New Jersey accent, as if such a thing
existed. “Dat’s da
beauty
of dis deal,” she said. “It
doesn’t
lead to you cleaning up dog poop. It leads to our
daughter bonding with an animal and taking on the responsibility of
its care.” I removed the bikini from Abby’s suitcase, stuffed it
back into her closet, and replaced it with a much more concealing
suit—one that would cause most men to weep silently, rather than
drool openly, once she put it on. “Hey,” she said, but smiled and
let me make the replacement.

“So in your heart of hearts, you believe that your
daughter will actually feed, groom, and, most importantly, walk a
dog, probably a good few times a day, because she will feel
responsible? Have you actually been living with this child for any
period of time?”

“Ethan will help,” she said with a straight
face.

“This is not the time for comedy,” I told her.
“Ethan? It’ll take Ethan three weeks to notice we even
have
a dog!”

“Then you’re saying it’s okay with you if we get a
dog?” said my wife.

I sat down on the bed and took her hands, beckoning
her to sit next to me so we could talk seriously. Our eyes met, and
I tenderly said, “no.”

“No?”

“No. Look, Abby, you know as well as I do that this
dog is going to end up being mostly my responsibility. The kids
will be thrilled to pieces with it for about three days, and then,
once February comes and the wind is blowing and there’s six inches
of snow on the ground, it won’t be so much fun to walk Fido
anymore. And you’re at the office all day, so you won’t be able to
do it. I’m here, I’m going to feel bad for the poor mutt, and I’m
going to end up doing most of the care. So, as the person whose
life it will affect most noticeably, I’m saying, no.”

Abby stared into my eyes, and saw that I was
serious. She took a deep breath.

“
Fido?
You want to name our dog
Fido?
”

“You’re beautiful when you’re annoying,” I told
her.

Abigail stood up and went back to packing. “We’ll
take a look on the Internet when we get back,” she said.

“Abby. . .”

“I said a
look
. We won’t do anything until
you say it’s okay.” She reached into the closet again. “Which
nightgown should I bring?” she asked.

“How badly do you want me to agree to this dog
idea?”

“Pretty badly.”

I pointed. “
That
one.”

She put it in the suitcase.

D
riving long distances with
children is an experience to be undertaken only by those foolish
enough to become parents to begin with. The travel time by
automobile from Midland Heights, New Jersey to Washington, D.C. is
usually about three-and-a-half to four hours if you go straight
through. The actual driving time with a wife and two children is
about six hours, and if you listen to what goes on in the back
seat, it feels like eight days.

“Stop that.”

“Shut up.”

“
Ethan!
”

“Get out of my face, you imbecile!” Ethan gets all
his best insults from cartoons, which are his major source of
cultural information. He thinks people actually say, “curse this
traffic!”

We stopped about every half hour so Leah wouldn’t
get car sick, and made sure to pull into every rest stop because,
guaranteed, someone would have to go to the bathroom a half mile
after we left. Only a parent can actually force someone to go to
the bathroom when they don’t want to. We ate bad rest stop food
(there is no
good
rest stop food). We listened to an
unabridged recording of one of the Harry Potter books, and I did my
best to keep the kids engaged along the way.

“Look, Ethan, a sign for the Decoy Museum!”

“So?”

“So, where do you think they keep the
real
museum?”

Long pause. “What do you mean?”

Like that.

Finally, much more battered but no less irritated
with each other, we pulled the minivan (which was rumored to hold
more luggage than a sedan, an out-and-out lie) up to the parking
garage of a hotel that specifically asked me not to mention its
name, given the fact that it doesn’t want to offer the “Dead
Conservative” rate to every family that pulls up with four stuffed
animals, a bag full of foods an Asperger’s kid will eat, and one
suitcase carrying a certain, specifically requested nightgown.

My bag, an overnighter, held three changes of
underwear and socks, a few shirts, an extra pair of jeans, my
“toiletries,” and a copy of my latest script. Maybe being confined
in a room with Abby for three nights, I’d be able to force her to
read it.

Getting Abby to read one of my scripts is like
getting Leah to go to the dentist. She’ll do it, but only under
extreme duress.

She tells me it’s hard to read something when the
author is in the room. I’ve offered to leave the room while she’s
reading, but she says she can feel my eyes on her the whole time.
This is silly of her, since my eyes are on her all the time, but
Abby will generally read the latest book she’s gotten out of the
library, even if she doesn’t like it, before my script. Hell,
she’ll read the side of a cereal box before she’ll read my
script.

In the old days (before I wised up), I used to wait
until she’d read it to send anything out to my agent. Now, I send
it to my agent and then suffer the torture of days and days until
Abby will crack the cover.

So I had high hopes as we checked into the swanky
digs we’d finagled for the weekend that I could do some meaningful
interviews, see some sights with my children, and get my wife to
pass judgment on my latest work, all in one weekend.

And I believe I may have mentioned the specifically
selected nightgown that had made the trip with us.

Before the kids had time to discover Cartoon Network
on the in-room cable, Abby spirited them out to see the Lincoln
Memorial. I would have liked to have gone, since big Abe in his
huge chair is one of my favorite sights, but I had already lined up
a good number of interviews for the few days we had. So I was off
to see the infamous Cherie Braxton, at the scene of the crime.

I took the Metro, rather than the minivan, because
Washington’s streets make as much sense to me as New Coke. And
after asking only three complete strangers for directions, I found
the nondescript, five-story apartment building, and Ms. Braxton
buzzed me in.

I couldn’t help but think about how many times Legs
had climbed these stairs, and whether or not he’d managed to do it
without being winded, like I did. Of course, it was just the second
floor, but I still took a certain pride in seeing all that work at
the Y pay off.

Cherie had the apartment door open already, and she
was standing in the doorway, watching for me at the elevator. She
was startled when I appeared in the stairwell.

“Mr. Tucker?” she asked in a small voice. I admitted
to being me, and she gestured me into the apartment. “I wasn’t
expecting you on the stairs,” she added.

“I’m trying to work off fifteen pounds,” I said.
Okay, twenty. But no more than that.

“You don’t need it,” she said automatically.
Flattering men who were older than her came to Cherie Braxton as a
reflex.

“I hope you don’t lie that much when we start the
interview,” I said, but she didn’t smile. I walked inside and was
immediately overcome by beige, the clear color of choice among the
upwardly mobile in our nation’s capital. Beige carpeting gave way
to beige walls with beige furniture breaking up the monotony.
Amazingly, the ceiling was white. They must have run out of beige
paint. There were cartons everywhere—it was obvious Braxton was
moving out. She removed some boxes from an old sofa, and we sat
down.

She had, I noticed, decided to dress a little more
conservatively for the
Snapdragon
reporter than she had for
the cops. Her figure, which was in the top six percent, was still
evident, but every button on her silk blouse was buttoned, and her
denim skirt fell well below the knee. I clearly didn’t represent an
upward move in status, so I wasn’t being seduced. Just as well.

“You moving because of what happened?” I asked.

“In a way. After the press got hold of me, people
began picketing outside the building and everything. Besides, once
the pictures ran in the papers and on the news, I started getting
better offers.”

“Better offers?” For what, her services as murder
witness?

“You know, I got asked out by men higher up in the
government. And I got a few offers to pose in magazines, but I
turned those down.” It’s nice to have standards. “They were only
offering fifteen thousand, and that’s not enough to take off my
clothes and get my picture taken.” No matter how low those
standards might be.

“How did you meet Louis Gibson?” I decided was a
good place to start.

“Louie came to my office at Housing and Urban
Development to try and get my boss to endorse a rider for putting
the Lord’s Prayer back in schools on a bill that HUD wanted passed
in the House,” she said, sounding quite knowledgeable. “My boss
made him wait a few minutes, and that got Louie pissed. Since we
had a common enemy, we got along well right away.”

“You started seeing each other.”

“We started seeing
all
of each other, if you
know what I mean,” she said. “I mean, we were never dating. We just
came here to screw.”

“You knew he was married.”

“Of course.” Cherie made a face like she couldn’t
believe how stupid one reporter could be. “He never shut up about
his wife, how she nagged him, what a pain in the ass she was, blah,
blah, blah. But he’d never leave her. It’d look bad in the media,
this big family values guy throwing over the wife and two kids for
a young blonde. And I was glad. The last thing I needed was to be
saddled with Louie for the rest of my life.”

I feigned surprise. “So you weren’t in love with
Louis Gibson.”

Her laugh was more like an eruption. “Pah!” the
sound went. “In love? With Louie? Jesus Christ on a crutch, no! I
didn’t even like the son of a bitch!”

“And yet. . .”

“He knew people. And I wanted to know those people.
Simple as that. Now, he wouldn’t take me to dinner at his friends’
houses, but he’d make sure the folks there knew my name. A lot of
girls these days don’t believe in sleeping your way to the top, Mr.
Tucker, but I’ll tell you, I don’t see anything wrong in it. If men
are stupid enough to do stuff for you because you’ll fuck ’em, I
say, fuck ’em.”

Washington is an interesting town. Sometimes, it’s
as if entire decades of social change never occur there.

“Can I see where it. . . happened?” I
asked.

She led me into the bedroom, which was also full of
cartons. The bed was made, since Braxton still lived here, but the
only furniture beside the bed were two nightstands with a lamp on
each. It was a very beige room, with a beige rug. Near the foot of
the bed on the right side, there was a small patch of carpet that
was slightly darker, as if it had been rubbed the wrong way. That
was the only thing that wasn’t quite as beige as the rest of the
room. The closet doors were mirrored, and you can bet Cherie
Braxton spent a good deal of time looking at her reflection, to
make sure she was still a valuable commodity.

“What did you see or hear that afternoon?”

“Nothing,” Cherie said. “I was in the shower when it
happened. Louie had made some crack about my ass, and I decided to
let him wait a good long time for me to come back. Then I was going
to dump him, you know, just to see him look surprised. But I was
the one in for a surprise, I’ll tell you.”

“The knife was just sticking out of him when you
came in?”

“Yeah, and he had this look on his face, like he
couldn’t believe it. Not like he was scared, or upset, or even mad,
but that he was just so surprised. I guess whoever did it surprised
him worse than I was going to.”

“I guess so,” I said.

E
stéban Suarez, the TV
journalist who hosted the program
Left of Center
, was a
breath of fresh air, at least compared to Cherie Braxton. Sure, he
was just as ambitious and cynical, but he hadn’t slept with Legs
Gibson, at least as far as I knew.

“I love it when they go on about the ‘Liberal
Media,’” Suarez was saying. “You get guys like Bill O’Reilly on TV,
just to the right of Attila the Hun, and they complain about this
liberal bias in the media,
on the air
, as if they weren’t in
the media themselves.”

All of which was fascinating, but it didn’t answer
my question about his getting into a fight with Legs on the show
six days before Legs ended up as a Conservative-on-a-Stick.
Instead, he was explaining, without being asked, why his own
televised soapbox was named “Left of Center.”

“I’m a liberal,” he said, having worked up a head of
steam. “I think I’m the last one left who’s willing to admit it.
Everybody else is so busy trying to be ‘centrist’ or ‘objective’
that they can’t get out of their own way fast enough. Leaves the
market wide open for a guy like me, who’s got the balls to say it
right to your face. ‘I’m a liberal.’”

I was starting to wish I wasn’t. “That’s nice,” I
told him, “but the question was about the show with Louis Gibson.”
I gave myself a mental pat on the back for getting a word in
edgewise.

“Yeah.” He walked around the set of his show, which
was as simple as these things get. Two chairs, which were
considerably more worn than you might think, a piece of shag rug
that went out of style with Nehru jackets and lava lamps, a lot of
lights and boom microphones hanging from what appear to be bathtub
pipes. Still, like all the other times I’ve been on a television or
film set, I felt perfectly at home. Now if I could just convince
someone else I belonged there.