As Dog Is My Witness (25 page)

“The kid’s crazy, and he should plead crazy,” he said
as soon as he dug Justin’s folder out of his files and reminded
himself who Justin Fowler was to begin with. “I could knock him
down to a charge where he wouldn’t even realize he’d done jail
time. Kid with a disease like that, the prosecutor doesn’t want to
put him in front of a jury.”

“But what if Justin didn’t do it?” I asked after
downing a mouthful of Maalox.

A pause. “What do you mean, he didn’t do it?” Tyson
said. “The kid
said
he did it. He
confessed
, for
criminy’s sake. Of
course
he did it.”

I watched as Ethan and Dylan, sitting side-by-side on
the sofa, fought over the remote control to the television. Howard,
seated not five feet away in the armchair, read the
New
Yorker
, and seemed not to notice. “Where’d he get the gun?” I
asked. “There’s no record of him buying and registering a gun, and
a weapon like that you don’t just pick up at a Wal-Mart.”

“There’s gun shows all over the place,” Tyson said.
“The kid is obsessed with guns. He could go to a gun show.”

“There are no gun shows in New Jersey—they’re
illegal,” I countered. “Justin doesn’t even have a driver’s
license. How’d he get to a gun show in another state?”

“You never heard of the bus?”

This was New Jersey, and I knew people who didn’t go
to the bathroom unless they could drive there. But I let that
comment go. I hit the “mute” button on the phone, yelled, “PUT DOWN
THE REMOTE!” and hit the “mute” button again. “Why’d he do it?” I
asked Tyson. “Why did Justin kill Michael Huston, a man he’d never
met before in his life, and had no argument with?”

“I just told you, the kid’s crazy,” he droned. “Had a
new gun, and needed to test it out.”

“But you know how serious Justin is about guns,” I
said. “He’d know what kind of damage he could do, and he’d also
have a method of testing out the gun without firing it at a living
human being. Why not fire it at a firing range? Shoot into a barrel
filled with Styrofoam? If he’s going to shoot something, why not a
squirrel or a rat? Why kill Michael Huston?”

“Crazy’s crazy,” Tyson said. “I could have a team of
psychiatrists on the stand testify, but it won’t go to trial. The
prosecutor doesn’t want to go after a crazy kid.”

“He’s
NOT CRAZY
!” I screamed into the phone as
Howard looked instinctively at Ethan, and Dylan stifled a chuckle.
“Justin Fowler has Asperger’s Syndrome—if anything, he’s autistic.
It’s
not
a mental illness, just like what you have isn’t a
mental illness!”

“What I have? What do
I
have?” Tyson
asked.

“
Stupidity
!” I said, hanging up loudly.

Two pairs of eyes were staring at me from the living
room. Ethan, of course, hadn’t noticed, and was busy taking the
remote control and changing the channel to
Dexter’s
Laboratory.

I said something on the order of “heh, heh, heh,” and
picked up the phone again. The best defense is complete denial that
anything happened.

Working on something that had been itching at me for
a few days, I checked with James Earl Jones (he supplies the 411
welcome voice for Verizon) and got the number of the administration
offices of the University of Indiana. Worming my way through the
layers of bureaucracy, I managed to find the Registrar’s office
after being kept on hold only twice. After being transferred to my
second registrar, I asked about the records of one Kevin Fowler, a
junior whose major I did not know. There were the inevitable clicks
of a computer keyboard in the background as my current best buddy
checked on his computer.

“You’re sure about the spelling?” he asked after a
moment.

“Yeah, I’m sure,” I said, and spelled it again.

“And he’s a junior?”

Seeing as how this was the grand total of my
information on the subject, I worried that the next question would
make me seem foolish. “Yes,” I answered. “I’m sure he’s a
junior.”

There was a long pause this time, and more clacking,
then silence. Finally, the registrar du jour returned to the
phone.

“There’s no one by that name enrolled here in any
class,” he said. “Never has been.”

A
fter checking with Indiana
State University, University of Southern Indiana, Indiana
University of Pennsylvania (huh?), and Purdue
University-Indianapolis, I determined that Kevin Fowler, despite
his obvious academic gifts, was not enrolled in a college whose
name included the state of Indiana. This was not, I should note, a
major shock to me, but it did necessitate some further
investigation. I called Rodriguez, but he wasn’t in.

Desperate to get the heck out of my house and
distance myself from my houseguests, I walked to Police
Headquarters and asked Marsha if Barry Dutton was in. Being chief
of police requires one to be in Police Headquarters more often than
most citizens, so I found Chief Dutton behind his desk, which I
pointed out to him was not as grand as the one behind which Chief
Leslie Baker of the North Brunswick Police Department was currently
sitting.

“I know,” Barry nodded. “But this is so much more
homey.”

“I need some police-type thinking,” I said.

“Any type of thinking will be an improvement.”

“Geez, wake up on the wrong side of the paddywagon
this morning, Barry?”

The chief nodded his head slightly and frowned a
little. “Westbrook dumped his girlfriend, and he’s making my
existence a living hell,” he said.

I sat still, shocked to my tiny core. “Westbrook
dumped his girlfriend? You sure you didn’t get that backwards?”

With great glumness, my friend shook his head. “No,
he ended the relationship himself. Felt he could do better.”

“Maybe we should chip in and buy the man a mirror.
What brought this on?”

Barry leaned back in his chair and locked his fingers
behind his head. “She got a new job.”

“You’re speaking in riddles today, oh Police
Oracle.”

“I wish I were. The woman wanted to be a hairdresser,
and a job opened up in a salon on Edison Avenue.”

“So?” This was more perplexing than the Huston
murder, and had considerably more potential for me to make fun of
Westbrook, so I was paying a good deal of attention.

“So, Cyndi wasn’t working at the All-You-Can-Eat
anymore, and Westbrook figured he didn’t need a restyling, but he
was
missing out on the free eats. So he dumped her.” Barry
was having trouble hiding the grin now.

“You’re lying to me. Here’s a guy with the
personality of gravel and the looks of a Macy’s parade float, and
he’s dumping an actual live woman . . .  She
is
alive, right?”

“Far as I know. I don’t think they’re hiring dead
haircutters on Edison Avenue.”

“He’s dumping an actual live woman because he no
longer saves $7.95 when he goes to the Trough-eteria. Am I getting
this right?”

“You’re a born detective, Aaron Tucker,” said Barry.
“You’ve analyzed the situation flawlessly.”

I sat for a few moments and shook my head, staring at
the diploma over Barry’s head. I never knew he went to Stanford. Oh
yeah, colleges.

“Speaking of being a detective,” I began.

“Don’t let what I said go to your head,” Dutton
interrupted. “I was being arch.”

“You could be
an
arch, if you could touch your
fingers to the ground while you stood up. Nonetheless, I have a
police question for you.”

“If I can’t answer, should I call a cop, or just make
something up.”

“Make something up. There’s never a cop around when
you need one.”

He grumbled a little, which would unnerve most
mortals, but had no effect on me. If Barry ever hurt me, his wife,
I’m pretty sure, would yell at him, and he hates that. And my wife
wouldn’t be too thrilled, either.

“What exactly do you need to know, Citizen
Tucker?”

“A guy says he’s a student at the University of
Indiana. Phone records show he called his mother, who lives in
North Brunswick, twice from Indiana the week Michael Huston was
shot. But there’s one little thing—the University of Indiana has
never heard of the guy. And I think he was in the area of New
Jersey that week. Now, how is that possible?”

Barry, now the professional, sat back and thought.
“He have a cell phone?”

“Yes, but it’s based here in Jersey. No record of a
cell phone in Indiana.”

“An address in Indiana?”

“I haven’t been able to find one, but admittedly, I
haven’t had time to look very hard.”

Barry sat up. “Ah-hah!” he said. “I have it.”

I cut him off. “He has a phone number set up in
Indiana, possibly based in a friend’s house or a local business,” I
said. “It doesn’t exist physically, but it bounces whatever calls
he gets there to his number here in Jersey. He can also bounce his
outgoing calls through that number to make it look like he’s
calling from Indiana.”

Barry, looking deflated, stared at me. “How did you
guess all that?” he asked.

“I tried doing it myself for a couple of years,” I
told him. “Make it look like I was in the L.A. area in case
producers wanted to meet. They don’t like to do business with
people outside the Hollywood area.”

“Did it help?”

“Am I a successful screenwriter today?”

He stared at a spot above my head, clearly thinking
about the murder case again. “Somebody’s going to an awful lot of
trouble to make it look like he’s in Indiana,” Barry said. “Why
would he do something like that?”

“I’m just guessing,” I said, “but I think it’s
because he’s been here the whole time.”

“Who is this guy?” Barry asked.

“Kevin Fowler, the younger brother of the guy they’ve
charged with the crime. I met him once, and got a bad vibe.”

“You’re basing this on a bad vibe?” Barry tried not
to guffaw. If you’ve never seen a very large African-American man
struggle not to guffaw, don’t feel deprived—it really doesn’t live
up to the hype.

“No, I’m basing it on my understanding of Asperger’s
Syndrome. Justin Fowler says he found the gun—
after
the
murder—in a hiding place he and his brother used when they were
kids. He’s lying about a few things, not the least of which is his
confession that he killed Michael Huston. And the only person
besides his mother for whom Justin would lie about these things has
to be his brother, Kevin. It fits.”

Barry frowned. “Let me play devil’s advocate. Justin
really did kill Huston, confessed to it, then got scared of
spending the rest of his life in jail. So he started lying to
protect his ass, and in the process, implicated his brother. It
fits that way, too.”

“Explain the fake University of Indiana registration
and the phone that rings through from Muncie.”

He pursed his lips, about to reply, then thought
better. “Okay, I can’t,” he said. “But you don’t have enough yet.
Why would Kevin Fowler want to kill Michael Huston?”

I probably pursed my lips, too. It was a lip-pursing
contest, and I knew not how to judge it. “I have no idea,” I
admitted. “But I can find out.”

On the way out of the building, I passed by
Westbrook, who was back in his double-knit checkerboard suit,
making him look like he was about to squirt water out of his
carnation or put on big, floppy red shoes and climb out of a small
car with thirty or forty of his closest friends. He grimaced at me
as I went by, and I couldn’t resist.

“Hey, Gerry,” I said as I passed. “You’re looking a
little shaggy. Think you could get yourself a free makeover
anywhere in town?”

Luckily, Westbrook can’t run.

D
inner that night was the
usual cornucopia of hilarity, with Howard and Andrea glaring openly
at me, Dylan questioning everything Ethan did or said, Leah finally
giving up and acting sullen like everyone else, Abby cooking until
the last possible second and seemingly never sitting down, and
Ethan . . .  well, Ethan didn’t much notice, as soon
as pasta was placed in front of him.