As Dog Is My Witness (8 page)

M
ahoney called me from the
road the next morning at eight-thirty, as we had arranged. He told
me the location of his first repair job of the day, a West Windsor
address, which was actually somewhat convenient for me, since I
wanted to drop in on Mary and Justin Fowler on the way back, and
North Brunswick is about halfway. I told him I’d arrive about
twenty minutes after he did, and find an out of sight place to
park. If I was any good at this following gig, he wouldn’t see me,
but we’d keep in touch via cell phone.

I had a little time, so I pondered the Justin Fowler
story. I had called the attorney for Karen Huston, the wife of the
man whom Justin was accused of murdering. But this very pompous man
named Rezenbach hadn’t called back until after six, when I refuse
to answer the phone unless the West Coast is calling. He left a
message saying Mrs. Huston was “far too distraught” (no, I’m not
kidding, the man said “distraught!”) to submit to an interview.
Maybe later in the week.

That left Justin himself. First, I had to figure out
how they’d managed to come up with the $200,000 that had sprung
Justin, and from there, maybe I could find either a legitimate
alibi for Justin at the time of the shooting, or a way to get the
charge against him lowered to involuntary manslaughter. I
understood so little about the incident that the questions were
coming from seventeen different directions, and none of them added
up.

Being confused took about twenty minutes, so I hopped
into the Saturn (I felt the minivan, which I detest anyway, was too
easy to spot on the highway) and headed toward the spot Mahoney had
described.

It was on the side of Route One, in the northbound
lane, toward an area of trees. Luckily, there was a Burger King in
perfect position to view a new SUV with rental car plates and
Mahoney’s van in front of it. I parked in a good vantage spot,
noting that even at this time of the morning, other cars were in
the Burger King lot, which was good, and called Mahoney on the cell
phone.

“The eagle has landed,” I said when he picked up.
“Over.”

“You don’t have to say ‘over,’” he said. “We’re on
cell phones.”

“Okay, but you’re taking the fun out of it. I’m
here.”

“I know,” he sighed. “I saw you pull up. If you had
flames shooting out of the tailpipe and a bullhorn screaming at
four thousand decibels, it might have been a little less
obvious.”

“No need to thank me,” I told him. “You’re my best
friend. So, what are you fixing over there? A bum transmission? A
cranky electrical system?”

All I could see was the raised hood, but I heard a
little engine noise through the phone. “Drained battery,” he said.
“The idiot who rented this thing decided to pull over to the side
of the road and read his newspaper, turned off the car, but left
the heater on.”

“That’s all it takes?”

“Yeah. They build an SUV the size of Sandusky, Ohio,
and they put in a battery big enough to run your kid’s transistor
radio. And the punchline is, without the engine running
. . . 

“. . .  the heater did nothing.”

“Exactly.”

I’ll spare you the next fifteen minutes of
scintillating banter. I kept
my
engine on while watching,
and at one point, with prior notification to Mahoney, walked into
the Burger King, got myself a hot chocolate, and came out with a
newspaper, pretending to read while downing my morning
beverage.

Mahoney called back a minute later. “The battery’s
running,” he said. “My next job is in Florham Park.”

“What’s the matter—they couldn’t find something
farther away?”

“Yeah, I guess all the cars in Cape May are running
okay today. I’m out of here.”

“I’m keeping my eyes open, Chief,” I said.

“I’m calling in now. Let’s nail this guy before he
kills again,” Mahoney countered. I’m pretty sure he was
kidding.

The plan was for me to stay and observe until the
local rep came to drive the SUV back to his dealership. If nobody
came to destroy Mahoney’s handiwork (he said it happened about once
a day), I’d move on to Mary Fowler’s house, do some actual work,
and then, time permitting, catch up with Mahoney before the kids
were due home from school.

So I did what I do best: I sat, watched, and thought.
Howard and family would appear at my house that night, so this
could be my last chance to think for a week.

It didn’t make sense that Justin Fowler would kill
Michael Huston for the fun of it. Asperger kids, no matter how much
they retreat from the world of human interaction, aren’t by nature
antisocial. Many of them
want
to have friends and a social
life, but don’t know how. It’s an education and training issue, not
a question of impossible stubbornness. Justin, new gun in hand,
wouldn’t kill Michael Huston just to try it out.

A blue Lexus slowed down near Mahoney’s last patient,
but kept going. The guy driving was talking into a cell phone, and
weaved a little in his lane. He wasn’t obeying the “hands-free” law
recently enacted in the Garden State. I considered making a
citizen’s arrest, but I would have had to use my cell phone to do
so, and that seemed wrong, somehow.

Meanwhile, Huston’s widow was “too distraught” to
talk to me, which wasn’t a huge surprise. But there’s distraught
and there’s
distraught
, if you know what I mean. It wouldn’t
be an awful thing to look into their marriage a bit and see how
distraught she’d likely be facing life without her husband.

A top-of-the-line Honda stopped by Mahoney’s car, and
I sat up. But the passenger door opened, and a guy in a mechanic’s
jumpsuit got out, waved to the driver, and closed the door. He got
into the car, started it up, and the Honda drove away. The
mechanic, clearly from the nearby rental outlet, drove the SUV off
the shoulder and onto the highway. Waste of time.

I put my car into reverse and backed out of my
parking space, probably causing jubilation inside the Burger King.
For a lousy cup of hot chocolate (and I mean that in every sense of
the word), I had occupied a parking space for close to an hour.

On the way up Route One, I checked in with Mahoney. I
used the “hands-free” device that’s supposed to help, and while I
did have to look down quite a bit to see the number I was dialing,
at least the head-phone paid off by making me almost inaudible.

“How’re things in Florham Park?”

“I’m still about fifteen minutes out. I take it
nobody assaulted my patient.” He sounded disappointed, as if
everything should just happen in the first ten minutes so he could
breathe easier.

“Sorry. Your charge, recharged, is back at the shop,
where someone can charge it.”

“Has anyone ever told you you were amusing?” he
asked.

“As a matter of fact . . . 

“They were lying.”

We agreed that, after the Fowler interview, it would
be stupid for me to try to make it to Florham Park, a good
forty-five minutes away. So I’d check in with Mahoney
afterward.

The drive to North Brunswick took maybe twenty
minutes, so it was about ten-thirty when I rang Mary Fowler’s
doorbell. She didn’t expect me this time, but she was just as fast
getting to the door.

“Mr. Tucker!”

“I asked you to call me Aaron, Mary. May I come in?
I’d like to meet Justin, and I hear he’s home.”

Mary hesitated. “I don’t know
. . . 

“Mary, it’s cold out here, and I’m not great at
cold.”

She smiled with one side of her mouth, and stepped
aside. I walked in, and Mary closed the door, cutting off the
frigid air. Why did her older, not-in-perfect-shape house retain
the heat, while mine always felt like a windstorm was taking place
in the living room? I guess there’s something to that insulation
stuff, after all.

“I’m sorry, Aaron, but Justin isn’t expecting you,
and, well, you know . . . 

“I know, Mary. Preparation is everything with
Asperger’s. But I’ll do my best, okay? Maybe you could tell him I’m
here and get him used to the idea while I talk to Kevin for a
minute.”

She looked surprised. “Kevin? Kevin’s not here.”

“I assumed he was the one who bailed Justin out.”

Mary shook her head. “I don’t know who bailed Justin
out. Justin said he’d never seen the man before.”

That was a surprise. “A bondsman?”

Mary nodded. “It seems that way. But I don’t know who
put up the collateral. Justin won’t tell me—he’s too afraid. And
Kevin hasn’t been back home since you saw him. He might have gone
back to Indiana. I don’t know what’s going on, Aaron.”

At that point, what was going on took a back seat to
the noise from inside Justin Fowler’s bedroom. Tearing paper,
knocking on walls that could legitimately be described as
“banging,” and howls from someone—I assumed Justin—all came at
once. The sudden explosion of sound was startling, but Mary was
already heading for the door before I recovered. She reached it,
but found it locked.

“Justin?”

“GO AWAY!” The voice was that of a very angry
adolescent— loud, annoyed, and full of tension. More banging on the
wall came with each syllable: “GO (Bang!) A- (Bang!) WAY!
(Bang!)”

“I’m sorry, Aaron,” she said. “If he doesn’t want to
talk to
me
, I don’t think he’ll want to talk to you.”

I nodded, but asked softly, pointing to the door, “Do
you mind if I try?”

She seemed surprised, but nodded. I walked to the
door and knocked softly. “Justin,” I said, “can I talk to you?”

The noises stopped, and a quiet, puzzled voice came
through the door. “Who are you?”

“I’m Aaron Tucker. I’m a reporter. Lori Shery sent
me.”

A long soundless moment followed. Then the lock in
the bedroom door clicked, and the door opened slowly. Mary’s eyes
opened wide, and Justin Fowler stuck his head through the opening
in the doorway.

It was a blond head, with a large forelock of hair
that he’d surely brush back with some regularity. The eyes, when
they made contact with mine—which wasn’t often—were blue and
piercing, and the mouth was thin and serious. Even smiling, Justin
Fowler would be smiling seriously—like Gregory Peck with a bleach
job and Asperger’s.

“You’re pretty short,” he said, looking me over.

“So I’ve been told. Can I come in?”

He looked behind himself, into the room. “It’s pretty
messy,” he said.

“So’s my whole house,” I said. “I don’t mind.”

Justin thought about it, and still didn’t look me in
the eye. “Okay,” he said, and let his mother and me into the
room.

He wasn’t kidding about the mess. The gun posters had
been ripped to shreds, and those that managed to hang onto the
walls were only shards of their former selves. Justin was mad, all
right, and probably at guns. For a young man with AS, having the
central focus in his life turn on him like this must have been
devastating.

Justin seemed nervous, watching Mary as she assessed
the room. “Sorry, Mom,” he said, then looked away.

“It’s okay, honey. I understand.” Mary turned away
from her son so he wouldn’t see her eyes moisten.

I decided to step in. “Justin, can you tell me why
you’re here?”

His brows met in the middle and his lips
pursed—Justin, it seems, had never heard such a stupid question
before. “I live here,” he said, voice full of condescension.

“I mean, can you tell me how you got out of
jail?”

Justin’s eyes clouded over and his voice got softer.
“I got bailed out,” he said.

“Who bailed you out?”

I didn’t even get the words out of my mouth—I was
still in the middle of “out”—when Justin began speaking. “Did you
know that the Booth deringer is currently on display at the Ford’s
Theatre National Historic Site in Washington, D.C.?”

“Justin,” I said, hoping to use some of the tactics
that worked with Ethan, “look at my eyes.”

But he didn’t. He kept walking around the room in a
circle and talking, louder by the second. “It is a .44-caliber
single-shot, muzzle-loading, percussion cap-fired Deringer pistol
manufactured by the Henry Deringer Company of Philadelphia,
Pennsylvania. It has a black walnut stock with checkering, a barrel
with an octagonal upper portion, a round lower portion, and
scrollwork on the sideplates.”

“Justin,” I said, trying again. His voice was rising
in pitch, too, becoming more agitated. I wasn’t doing well.

“It has an S-shaped trigger guard and the words
‘Deringer Philadela’ stamped on the lock plate and the top of the
breech plug.”

This wasn’t helping. I looked to Mary, but she shook
her head. “He’s avoiding you,” she said. “He doesn’t want to answer
your questions.”

“No kidding.”

“Most people spell ‘Deringer’ wrong. They use two
‘r’s when they shouldn’t.” Justin was not really in the same room
as us anymore, so Mary and I walked out.

Justin, carefully this time, locked the door behind
us. She walked me toward the door.

“I’m sorry I upset him,” I told her.

“Don’t be,” Mary answered. “At least you got him to
stop tearing up his walls.” She chuckled humorlessly.

“If he gets into a more receptive state of mind,
would you call me?” I gave her a business card with my 1,600
contact possibilities on it—business land phone, cell phone, email,
fax, business address, guy next door who can come call me
. . 

“Certainly,” she said, but I knew she considered the
possibility to be remote.

“Maybe I can bring him something next time,” I said.
“What does he like? “Mary opened the door for me and, as I pulled
on my gloves, the cold wind caused us both to stiffen.

“Guns,” she said.