Guy Langman, Crime Scene Procrastinator (17 page)

It’s starting to hit me. I’m dead. So sad, really. So many things I wanted to do. Grow a beard. Go to Africa. Punch a moose. (What? One gave me a weird look one time.) Take a pottery class. Skinny-dip in the South of France. Or the North of France, for that matter. The Middle of France—who gives a shit? Hell, I’d even skinny-dip right in the South of Jersey, when you get right down to it. The important thing is being nude on the beach. The important thing is not dying.

Before I get too bummed in that direction, I need to figure
something out. Something is still bothering me from before. Maybe two things. Maybe three things. Maybe a million things. Or I just change the topic.

“Things with Raquel, um, progressing well?” I ask.

“Well, they’re progressing,” he says, waggling his eyebrows. I sort of don’t want to know more. Abort, abort! Change topics again!

“So, um, Maureen was talking about how she was writing stuff,” I say. “Some online thing. You know anything about that? Facebook or something?” I ask.

“She probably has a JerseyGoths account. That’s what all the local Goth chicks have.”

“How would you know that?”

“I know lots of things,” he says.

“Have I told you today that I hate you?” I ask.

“I can bring up her account in like two seconds, probably.” He whips out his phone and clicks some buttons to go online. “That looks like her,” he says. I crowd next to him to see the phone. The name is Neeruam, which seems to be Maureen backwards. Clever.

“Damn!” I say. “How did you do that?”

“You can search by school. She’s the only one at Berry Ridge High on here. That chick from North Berry Ridge Forensics is on here too. You can send her a message, since you love her or whatever.”

“I do not love her.”

“What do you want with Maureen’s page? Want to read her entry from today? I think it’s about her mom.”

I read some of her writing about her mom and I think I have a new understanding of Neeruam. Maureen. Whatever. How weird it must be to grow up with a MILF-y supermodel for a mom. You
probably always feel like you can’t keep up. So you try to be perfect in school. You try to find your own thing—maybe you dress in a way guaranteed to piss your mom off. People are so predictable; they just never see it about themselves.

Shit. Who am I to talk? Maybe this is my life. Maybe a kid of a man who did everything would try to be someone known for doing nothing. Maybe I’m who I am because I realize I can never be my father. Maybe this is why we all are who we are.

“Are you okay?” Anoop asks. “Why is it taking you so long to read?”

“Just thinking,” I say.

“Thinking about how effed up this is?” he asks. “About how we’re going to catch this killer?”

“Something like that,” I say.

“There’s more,” he says. “Here is yesterday’s. It looks like poetry.”

“Wait,” I say. “So you’re telling me that Maureen writes in a secret journal with black ink on black pages so no one can read it, but then posts it online for the world to read?”

“It would seem that way,” Anoop says. “Girls are pretty freaking weird.”

“Sure are,” I say. “So yeah, open that entry.”

“Neeruam wrote a poem about forensics,” he says. “Ha-ha.”

“Really?”

“Really.”

“She really wrote a poem about forensics? Probably about the handsome Mr. Tnaz.”

“What?” he says.

“It’s Zant backwards,” I explain.

“Got that,” he says. “But did you just call Zant handsome?”

“Shut up,” I say. “Show me the poem, Poona.” Saying names backwards is fun.

“It’s about fractography.”

“Who would write a poem about fractography?”

“I think we both know the answer to that.”

“Can I just read it?” I say. He hands me the phone.

“Not bad,” I say. “Not that I know anything about poetry outside of ‘There once was a man from Nantucket.’ ”

“Greatest poem ever written,” Anoop says.

Then I see another poem. It appears to be called “The Guy of My Dreams.” This one I read aloud.

“Man,” Anoop says. “Holy sheet. How did I not see it before? Neeruam likes you.”

“Stop calling her that. And she does not.”

“The
Guy
of my dreams.”

“It just means guy, any guy, not Guy-Guy.”

“If you choose to delude yourself, Guy-Guy …”

“It’s not a delusion.”

“That poem is very clearly about you.”

“Are you saying I’m a teddy bear in a suit of armor?”

“I would probably say an asshole in a T-shirt, but close enough.”

“Thanks.”

“So, Guy-Guy,” Anoop says. “Listen. I know what you’re thinking. The prints on the wallet matching the prints in your attic. The fact that Toby looked like you. It’s a little creepy.”

“It’s a lot creepy!” I say.

“Are you thinking what I’m thinking?” he asks.

“Usually when you ask that, the answer is no, because you’re thinking about math and I’m thinking about boobs, but in this case we quite possibly are in agreement.”

“Hey, I think about boobs too,” he says. “It’s like sixty–forty, boobs to math.”

“I got about ninety–ten, boobs to video games.”

“
Boobs to Video Games: The Guy Langman Story
,” he says. “That should be your autobiography.”

“Okay, well, it’s going to be a short one. I think someone is trying to kill me.”

“And are you thinking you know who it is?”

“Is that what
you’re
thinking?” I ask.

“Let’s just say the name of the guy who wants to kill you, one, two, three: One, two, three …”

“Jacques Langman.”

“Jacques Langman.”

“He’s obviously around,” I say. “Seeing as how he came to the funeral.”

“And pretty much nobody else knew about the coins.”

“And the criminal record, and it’s all just …”

“Okay, okay,” Anoop says. “But let’s not jump to crazy conclusions.”

“I’m just not sure what other kind of conclusions we could make.”

“Listen. It’s late. I gotta run. Good night, man. Tomorrow we look for more clues.”

“Clues about the impending murder of Guy Langman or clues about Neeruam and the mystery of why girls are so hard to figure out?”

“Both.”

“Deal.”

“Deal.”

I head up to my room. I get out my notebook. I think maybe I should try writing my own poetry. Words of Dad’s, old proverbs, thoughts and fears breaking across the page like waves. I’m not
much of a poet, though. Not really. I did write a kick-ass haiku about a robot once. My favorite poem really is the one about that guy from Nantucket. It’s got everything, if you think about it. Whitman is okay, but he really can’t hold a candle. But tonight I don’t feel like writing—not poetry, not my book on Dad, not anything. I just stare at a blank page and ask it the same question over and over again until the word doesn’t even seem to mean anything, until it is just funny squiggles of black on white: Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why?

I’d love to sleep in, but crime waits for no man. Or something. Anyway, Anoop calls me early the next morning. He’s already been working on answering at least one-half of the mysteries on our plate. He’s been doing some reading. “They aren’t releasing much about the cause of death on Toby. They have determined that the fall is what killed him, though. He wasn’t bludgeoned before the fall.”

“Unlike the theory of your creepy girlfriend.”

“Raquel is not creepy!”

“She is sort of good at figuring out the mind of a murderer, though.”

“It’s part of the skills of being a good detective. Zant said that all the time.”

“Maybe Zant killed Toby. Zant sure knew a lot about the mind of the killer.”

“Why would Zant kill Toby?”

“Probably just jealous over how handsome he was. I don’t know if you noticed, but Toby was a really, really good-looking fellow.”

“You’re clearly just saying that because he looked like you,” Anoop says. “Which brings us back to our previous theory.”

“Whatever, whatever. Sure, sure. So what do we do next?”

“The way I see it is, we do one of two things,” Anoop says.
“We either go back to the scene of the crime and look for clues, or we try to find Jacques Langman ourselves.”

“Those sound like terrible ideas,” I say. Because they do. “Isn’t there a third thing?”

“Well, there is, but I already did that this morning.”

“Nice.”

“So you choose, my friend. What do you think will bear the most fruits, as it were?”

“By ‘third thing’ I mean call the police, not whatever weird third thing you had in mind,” I say.

“The police aren’t going to care, Guy,” he says, and I know he’s right. “We have to do this ourselves.”

“Then let’s get to the golf course,” I say. It’s the least frightening of the two options. “At least we aren’t going to get killed there.”

“Unless you can die from dirty balls.”

“Which, if you can, you already would have. Are we allowed to just go walk around the golf course?” I ask.

“I think so,” he says. “It’s not like you have to pay to get in.”

Turns out you totally have to pay to get in.

We drive all the way over there only to get turned away by a snooty turd in a cardigan sweater. He’s like some sort of golf-course guard-Nazi in a little booth.

“You boys can’t just show up here looking like bums and defile this course,” he says. “It’s a public course, yeah, but there’s a dress code and a fee.”

I mutter, “You dick, you have dirty balls,” and shuffle off. Anoop has no intention of being dissuaded so easily.

“All we have to do is dress like golfers?” he asks the guy in the booth. The guy nods.

“I think my pink sweaters and lime-green slacks are at the cleaner’s,” I say.

“I’m sure your dad had some stuff that would pass as golfwear,” Anoop says to me. “He probably had some clubs too.”

“Dad hated golfing,” I say.

“Okay, you can go without clubs. You can be my caddy.”

“I ain’t your caddy, bitch,” I say. “You’re my caddy. Who’s your caddy?”

“I’m the Bengal Tiger Woods.”

“Good one.”

We drive back to my house on the slightly absurd mission of finding clothes that will allow us to pass the rigorous standards of the golf-course police. Anoop is right, though. Fran probably had lots of clothes we could use for the purpose. We get to the Manor, park the car, and head into my dad’s old office. There are enough rooms in Langman Manor that it isn’t exactly like one of those creepy houses where a shrine to a dead person lingers long after they are gone. It is just a room filled with crap we haven’t bothered to get rid of. Okay, possibly for shrine-like reasons. Mom likes to go in there and look around at Dad’s old stuff. Once I saw her wearing one of his old shirts—a polyester Hawaiian number decorated in scores of ukuleles and topless Polynesian ladies—and talking to herself in the mirror, as if she were him. She looked so happy that I didn’t want to interrupt. Funny thing is, she hated that shirt while he was alive.

It doesn’t seem like Polynesian tits would be the right motif to go golfing in, much less to appease Mr. Golf-Nazi, who is working the check-in booth, but Anoop insists.

“Dude,” he says. “That is the funniest shirt I’ve ever seen in my life.” He takes a few pictures with his phone. I model. Work it.
Stuff like that. Anoop picks out a pretty funny ’80s-looking pink shirt and a pair of pink pants. Fran was pretty large for much of his life, his waistline of an epic girth, so we have to cinch up the pants with ginormous belts. It is a pretty weird look.

“Don’t we need golf shoes?” I ask.

“I’m pretty sure you’re thinking of bowling.”

“I’m not thinking of bowling.”

“You’re thinking of sticking your fingers into some balls, that much I know,” he says.

“That doesn’t even make sense, Anoop,” I say.

“Come on,” he says. “Let’s roll.”

“Now
you’re
thinking of bowling,” I say.

“I’m thinking we need to get moving.”

“Shouldn’t we bring some clubs?”

“Small detail,” he says.

“Dad did have golf clubs somewhere,” I say. “He got them as a gift. Never used them.” We look through his office closets, unearthing boxes of papers and pictures of him as a young man, vivid and alive. I get sucked in, staring at the pictures, thinking about his life. The hair on that man! The hats! The ascots!

I find pictures of me too. Baby pictures. Kid pictures. Pictures of me hyper—playing baseball, grinning at the camera under an oversized blue batting helmet even though I don’t remember ever actually being happy playing baseball. Or maybe I was. I am happy in all the pictures, hanging on my father’s arm, both of us grinning like chimps. I’m smiling in every one of them. It’s hard not to think about what this means and how different it is from my life now. I see a bag of golf clubs and pick it up.

Then I find a lined yellow piece of paper. It’s folded in half. I
open it up. Dad’s handwriting. A simple note. To whom? To himself? I read it and my eyes immediately fill with tears.