Guy Langman, Crime Scene Procrastinator (21 page)

“I’m sorry,” I say. Sorry for everything.

“I don’t know. Maybe it was all for the best. I ended up doing okay for myself. Did he ever talk about me?”

“No,” I say, in barely a whisper. “I’m sorry.”

“Please don’t be. All is forgiven. The only reason to carry baggage,” he says, “is if you’re a fool.”

“Or you work at the airport,” I say, finishing the line. Dad had said it many times. Jacques smiles.

“Well,” he says, checking the time on his watch. “I know
you have a bus to catch. It was nice to meet you, Guy Langman,” he says. “And Anoop of the double-tall soy latte and perfect SATs. Let’s hang out again sometime. You know where to find me.”

“We sure do,” I say. “We sure do.”

Anoop and I spend most of the bus ride home doing two things: (1) saying “WTF was that?” over and over again, and (2) sleeping. But mostly saying “WTF was that?” Jacques turns out to be a nice guy? It so wasn’t right that Dad cut him out of his life. I mean, I know there are always two sides to every story. Unless, I guess, one of the sides is a dead man. But how could Dad possibly explain his actions? Was there a good reason for Dad acting the way he did? I can’t think of any. It was just unfair. And not very much like the Fran Langman I knew. Maybe Dad mellowed with age. Maybe he cared less. It is a lot to think about. It makes me so angry that Dad acted so terribly. And it makes me so angry that he kept secrets from me. But mostly all this new information makes me sad because the one person I want to talk about it with will never be able to answer my questions.

And what does this mean for our investigation? We’re no closer to figuring out who broke into my house or how Toby Weingarten died. WTF indeed.

After the bus deposits us safely back in the land of Berry Ridge and Anoop takes me home, I feel like I still need to talk about it. In a day of firsts, why not another? I call Maureen. I start by composing a text, then deleting it a hundred times. Sometimes you can’t find a way to squeeze what you are feeling into a text
message. Sometimes there is the need for the mouth-words. The phone rings two times.

“Guy!” Maureen says. “I’m so glad you called! I have some … well, I’m not sure if it’s good news or bad news. It’s just news.”

“Most of the time life doesn’t break down into a good-news, bad-news situation anyway. I’m okay with that,” I say. “Most news is just weird. I have some weird news myself.”

“Is it about Toby?”

“No,” I say. “Well, maybe. I don’t know. You go.” I cough. “Go on,” I say.

“I’m pretty sure it
was
suicide,” she says.

“What? How do you know?”

“He sort of … he sort of left a note.”

“No one mentioned a note! They looked everywhere!”

“Not a physical note. Online. He left it on JerseyGoths.”

“Um, that doesn’t make any sense. Aren’t the Gothics all girls?”

Maureen laughs. “I’m sorry. It’s not funny. Just—‘the Gothics’? You sound like my grandmother.”

“Shut up,” I say. But I don’t say it mean. “Toby seemed like just a regular guy, not a practitioner of the Gothic lifestyle.” I say it super-dorky on purpose. Just teasing. Flirting? Shut up.

“Lots of ‘regular guys’ have dark sides, Guy. And, no, it’s not just girls. Dudes post on there sometimes. There’s no real rule against it … Some of them are creeps. Some of them are okay. Toby was okay. I actually knew him. I mean, I talked to him, once or twice on there. I just never knew it was him, if you know what I mean. I knew his screen name, but it wasn’t until I did some digging tonight that I figured out it was him!”

“Did he seem sad?”

“Um, yeah. I mean, everyone on there does. That’s what we all have in common.”

“Why are you so sad, Maureen Fields?” I ask. I don’t know why. It just comes out.

“I don’t even know that I am anymore,” she says with a giggle. “But don’t tell the Gothics.”

“Your secret shame of being happy sometimes is safe with me,” I say. “But what was up with Toby? Soft signs of suicide?”

“What?” she says.

“That’s something I read. Sometimes there is nothing obvious, nothing
overt
, but sometimes when they dig into the person’s life, there are hints. Clues. Soft signs of suicide.”

“I should write that down,” she says. “You’re a poet, Guy Langman.”

“I’m also confused,” I say.

“Aren’t we all?”

“I think so,” I say. “If being sort of sad and pissed off and confused are soft signs of suicide, it’s a wonder any of us are alive.”

“Yeah,” she says. Then she’s quiet for a moment. I just hear her breathing and the scrape of her pen. Black ink on black paper, no doubt.

“But I’m, like, specifically confused about something,” I say. “This note is legit?”

“I’m pretty sure,” she says. “A few girls on there knew him really well. His last post was real upsetting stuff. And then nothing since the day Toby died. Not a peep. He hasn’t been this quiet on there in years. I guess when he saw that electrical tower he
wandered off from the group, climbed it, and jumped. He’d probably climbed that tree thinking the same, but couldn’t go through with it. A little while later … he did.”

“Man,” I say, feeling so sad for Toby. “It really is sad. Did he know he was going to do it? If you want to die, how do you still go about your day? Get up. Eat breakfast. Get dressed. Go on the Forensics Squad trip. And then …”

“Is that what you’re confused about, Guy?” she says.

“Well, um, yeah, that. But also—how did the same fingerprints get on Toby’s wallet and my wall? It wasn’t my half brother. Anoop and I shot that theory down today.”

“You did?” she asks. So I tell her all about it. She seems a little bummed that I went to the city without her. I tell her I’ll take her sometime. Shut up.

“Okay, I’ve been thinking about that too,” she says.

“Any theories?”

“Just that we need to expand the suspect list.”

“Well, who the hell else would have been up there? No one else knew about those coins.”

“No one?”

“Well, Anoop knew,” I say. There is another pause. This time I don’t even hear the pen on paper. This time I just hear the breathing. “No way,” I say. “No freaking way.”

“Think about it,” she says. “His prints
would
be on the wallet. He was the one who found it.”

“I was the one who found it!”

“Well, whatever. He obviously touched it. He took it back to his house.”

“He was wearing rubber gloves.”

“Are you sure?”

“Pretty sure …”

“Well anyway, he took the thing home. He could have placed a print on there at any time.”

“He put it in an evidence Baggie. You saw that.”

“Yeah, we all saw that. But no one saw what he did with it when he had it at home.” My heart was beating really fast. Would Anoop really do that? Why?

“It doesn’t make any sense,” I say.

“It makes perfect sense,” she says. “You were fighting with Anoop anyway. He knew about those coins. How much did you say they were worth?”

“A lot.”

“Enough for a new car? You know how people make fun of Anoop’s car all the time. And he’s got his rich new girl to impress …”

“People make fun of the AC Machine? I mean, I know I do, but I didn’t know other people did.”

“Okay, by ‘people’ I meant you.”

“Fair enough. But have you seen that thing? What is he, an algebra teacher? Okay, okay. But he would, what, break in to steal the coins and sell them for a new car? Then help me lift the prints on the attic wall, knowing they would be his own?”

“Well, he had to do it. TK was there with you. Plus, you know what Mr. Zant would say. Prints don’t mean anything unless you have something to compare them to. It wouldn’t mean anything to have his prints.”

“So he’d plant his own prints on the wallet just to make me think that the break-in wasn’t him?”

“Yeah. He knew he could throw you off the trail. If he put the print on the wallet, you’d see that and match it to the window print and you’d really think it was Jacques!”

“Anoop is smart,” I say. “But that’s, like, evil genius smart. I think you lost me halfway through.”

“Thank you,” she says.

“That wasn’t a compliment.”

“It kinda was. You kinda said I was an evil genius.”

“I said
Anoop
was an evil genius.”

“But I figured it out, so that sort of makes me an evil genius too.”

“Fine, everyone around here is an evil genius. What do we do now?”

“That’s the million-dollar question,” she says. “Too bad you’re not an evil genius too.”

“I guess we could wait and see if Anoop shows up at school with a shiny new Lexus or something.”

“By then it would be too late. The coins would be sold and it would be impossible to get them back, even though they are stolen property.”

“I can’t believe Anoop would do this to me,” I say. “I literally cannot believe it. It makes no sense. He’s been so into the investigation, besides everything else. Why would he drag me into the city? Just to throw me off his trail?”

“Maybe.”

“But he had to know that Jacques’s fingerprints would prove it
wasn’t
him.”

“Who knows? Maybe Anoop is crazy. What do we really know about him?”

“I’ve known him my whole life. I know he used to watch
Dora
the Explorer
until he was way too old for it. I know he cried on his ninth birthday because his neighbor Mark Conrad went to Don Rossini’s party instead. I know his ‘if I had to make out with a man’ choice is Derek Jeter. I know everything about him.”

“Except for if he stole your treasure.”

“No,” I begin to say. “There is no way—”

“You know,” she says. “There is a way we could find out.”

“There is?”

“Yeah,” she says. “I was reading a book about forensics projects—”

“You have got to be kidding me.”

“Get over it, Guy. Yes, I’m a huge nerd. Since we’re going to be friends, it will be just a lot easier if you accept that.”

“We’re going to be friends? When? Was there a memo or an email that went out or something? I don’t remember agreeing to—”

“Shut up, Guy. We’re totally friends. And the book had a project for building a lie detector.”

“What?”

“Yeah, it’s actually not all that hard to build. I talked to TK about it. He said he has all the parts you’d need.”

“What is TK’s deal, anyway?”

“I don’t know. Talk about evil genius. He’s nice, though.”

“Okay, so TK builds this lie detector. I can’t imagine how we get Anoop to take it.”

“Well, obviously we don’t just come out and say ‘Hey, Anoop, we want to see if you stole thirty thousand dollars’ worth of treasure from Guy’s house, so come over and let us strap you to this lie detector TK made with some crap from his garage.’ ”

“Okay, what then?”

“You leave that up to me, Guy Langman,” she says. “I shall use my feminine wiles.”

“Feminine wiles? When did you get those?”

“Shut up, Guy Langman. I’ll talk to you later.” She hangs up sort of quickly. Dad always called this the Irish good-bye. I’m not sure why. But instead of just lingering all awkward at the end of a conversation or something, I guess the Irish just run out of there. Is Maureen Fields Irish? And, okay, I have some bigger questions simmering here. Is there any possible way that Anoop stole the coins? And if poor Toby really jumped to his death and it
wasn’t
Anoop who stole the coins, then who was it? And hey, Maureen Fields is fun to talk to
and
she apparently has feminine wiles. That being the case, I guess anything’s possible.

Sure enough, the next meeting of the unofficial Forensics Squad, held at Langman Manor, features TK and his homemade lie detector. We’re assembled in the great room again. Raquel and TK. Me and Maureen. And sure enough, Anoop is here, looking clueless. Maureen’s feminine wiles surely did the trick.

“Thanks for coming, everyone,” Maureen says. Wily. “As I told you all, there is some very important news about the case.” Mutter, mutter, mutter. “Toby Weingarten did not kill himself. Toby Weingarten was murdered.” Gasp, gasp, gasp. I’m just confused. Didn’t she just call me and tell me it
was
suicide? Feminine wiles sure are wily.

“I don’t get it,” Anoop says. “How can you know that?”

“Let’s just say I have some inside information,” she says. “I think it was someone on his team from North Berry Ridge who did it.”

“Stupid North Berry Ridge jerks,” I say reflexively.

“Yeah,” TK says. “Exactly. And I know how we’re going to catch them. I’m going to get Zant to set up a rematch so we can see who is the rightful owner of Sherlock’s Glass. The challenge will be to create a working lie detector, which, as luck would have it, I’ve already done.” TK takes out his lie detector. It’s a wooden box about the size of a shoe box, dotted with lights and full of wires sticking out in all directions. He shrugs. “It just takes a few
transistors, a capacitor, some LEDs, about five regular resistors, and a variable resistor.”

“Oh yeah?” I say. I’ve figured out that this whole thing is a ruse. There is no rematch. Maureen just said that Toby was murdered to set this up. This is just an excuse to make Anoop wear the lie detector. Oh yeah, I get it. Total masculine wiles.

“It will have to be adjusted for each person who uses it,” TK says. “And if we want to catch the North Berry Ridge jerk who killed Toby, we need to make sure it works correctly. That’s where you guys come in. I’m hoping you can help me out.”

TK is about to ask Anoop to be the first volunteer when Raquel volunteers. “I like this!” she says. Um, okay. Her wiles are all out of whack. “Do me first,” she says. Everyone snickers a little. TK and Maureen share a look. This wasn’t part of the plan. But Maureen smiles and plays along.

“Go ahead,” she says. “Yeah, totally. Go for it.” TK applies the sensors to her hand and tweaks some settings. Maureen asks some questions. “Okay, would you ever go out with Guy?”

“Um, no,” she says.

“True statement,” TK says.

Why did she have to ask that?

“Um, does anyone else want to try this?” TK asks. “Anoop?”