As Dog Is My Witness (5 page)

I walked into the living room, which was dominated by
the kind of grandfather clock obviously handed down from generation
to generation. Unfortunately, the room surrounding it wasn’t quite
as grand or regal, so the clock looked like a king visiting the
commoners for the annual tournaments. “Don’t worry, Mrs. Fowler,” I
said. “You have nothing to be sorry about.”

“It’s Mary, Mr. Tucker. And may I get you something
to drink?”

“No, I’m fine. And call me Aaron. Is Justin
here?”

Mary looked embarrassed, and stared past me for a
moment, not wanting to make eye contact. “No,” she said. “They’re
holding him on $200,000 bail, and I don’t have that kind of
money.”

Abby had thought the Middlesex County prosecutor
might want bigtime bail. While Justin had been charged with
aggravated manslaughter and not pre-meditated murder, the bail was
still set high, with no option for putting up just ten percent in
cash. Mary would have to mortgage her house to a bail bondsman if
she wanted to get her son out of county jail.

She thought I should see Justin’s room. Like many
young Asperger adults, Justin was not ready to live on his own,
even though he had graduated with an associate’s degree from
Middlesex County College and had a full-time job. The pressure of
living in a world populated with other people, and having to
maintain a household of some kind on his own, would have been too
much for him to handle.

His room, which was smaller than Ethan’s, couldn’t
have changed much since high school. But instead of the posters of
bands or basketball players you might have expected, the walls were
covered with pictures of guns. Rifles, automatics, pistols,
revolvers. Guns, preferably by themselves, but sometimes in the
hands of their owners, were clearly Justin’s heroes.

“When did he develop his interest in guns?” I
asked.

“It doesn’t help his case, does it?” she said. “I
think it started in high school. He had gotten hold of some gun
magazine or another, and that was it. It’s all he talks about. But
I never let him own one.”

“He doesn’t own the gun they found?” In Justin’s
room, the police had discovered an antique gun, described as a
single-shot de-ringer replica of the handgun John Wilkes Booth used
on Abraham Lincoln. Apparently, he hadn’t tried to hide it—it was
sitting right there on his desk. Ballistic tests confirmed it as
the weapon used to kill Michael Huston.

“No, it wasn’t registered to him. I frankly was
shocked when they told me they’d found it there, and I thought the
police had planted the gun in Justin’s room. But Justin said it was
his.”

The murder had been four days earlier, so the room
was no longer considered a crime scene, although a few tiny
remnants of yellow police tape dotted the doorjamb. Crime scene
investigators had been through and taken anything they considered
of interest, so I didn’t expect to find any evidence that Justin
was or wasn’t involved in the killing. I sat on the edge of his
single bed and looked at his mother.

“What led the police to Justin in the first place?” I
asked.

“I guess it was the gun,” Mary said. “Once they found
out what kind of gun it was, they started looking for area
enthusiasts. It didn’t seem to take long. They were here with a
search warrant two days ago.”

“Mary, I’m going to have to ask some questions that
aren’t easy to answer. I want you to know, I have a son with
Asperger’s, and I understand, okay? If I’m going to find out what
happened, you have to tell me everything.”

Mary Fowler looked me straight in the eye, and even
if her gaze was a little teary, it was unwavering. “Whatever you
need to know, Aaron.”

“Has Justin ever been . . . 
aggressive with people? Kids in school when he was little, maybe
with girls when he was in high school or college, just because he
didn’t understand?”

“You mean, is he violent?” Mary didn’t need the
jargon, and was telling me so.

“Yes.”

“He . . .  got into a few fights when
he was a boy, but you know these kids, Aaron. He always lost. His
impulse control isn’t great, but he did learn that getting beaten
up didn’t get him much.”

I didn’t like the way this was going. “Do you think
that might have fueled his interest in guns?” I asked.

Mary hadn’t considered that idea before. Her eyes
widened a bit, and she leaned lightly against the dresser.

But before she had a chance to answer, a loud sound
from the driveway interrupted us. It was the unmistakable cacophony
of a very large motorcycle. That noise ended, thankfully, and
another, less piston-driven one, began in the kitchen, just to our
left on the other side of the hallway. Someone was walking in
through the side door.

Actually, “walking” is understating it. “Barreling”
would be more descriptive. Young, in his late teens or early 20s,
the large person entered the house as if he were Superman and this
was one of those paper maché walls they were always setting up for
him to burst through, when there was a perfectly good door maybe
four feet to the side. Long hair flopped over his forehead and a
sense of absolute purpose burned in his eyes. “Ma!” he yelled. Then
he saw us standing in Justin’s room, and advanced on us like Patton
on . . .  wherever Patton advanced on. I was an
English major, not a history major.

“Where have they got him, Ma? When’s he getting out?”
The young man looked me up and down, which doesn’t take long, and
didn’t like what he saw. “Who’s this guy?”

“Kevin, this is Aaron Tucker. He’s investigating the
case and trying to help Justin. Aaron, this is my younger son,
Kevin.”

I reached out a hand, but Kevin was still suspicious,
and I ended up looking like I had just finished a round of curling,
hand extended with nothing to show for it.

“Investigating? Are you a private eye or
something?”

“No, I’m a freelance writer, and I’m working for
Snapdragon
Magazine, but . . . 

“A reporter? No press, Ma! We don’t have time for
these . . . 

Mary put her hands on her son’s well-developed upper
arms, the apparent result of considerable iron-pumping. “It’s not
like that, Kev. Aaron has a son with Asperger’s, and he’s trying to
prove that Justin didn’t do it.”

Kevin wasn’t enthused about the word “Asperger’s,”
which showed on his face. He also wasn’t crazy about the press.

“Is that right?” He appeared to think he was the
captain of the football team and I was a bespectacled, 50-pound
waterboy. “How you gonna go about doing that,
Aaron
?”

I looked around for the hall monitor, but none was in
sight. “I don’t know yet,” I said. “I’m going to ask questions and
see where the answers lead me.”

Kevin moved closer. I was beginning to worry that, in
my mid-40s, I was going to get my first wedgie. He towered over me,
but I’m used to that, and aside from a little tension in the back
of my neck, it didn’t bother me much.

“Like what kind of questions?” Desperately, I fought
the impulse to answer in an exaggerated voice, “like what
kinda
questions.” Luckily, I’m an adult, and have learned
self-restraint. It didn’t hurt that Mary stepped between us.

“Kevin! That’s no way to treat someone who’s trying
to help!”

“You don’t know these people, Ma. He’s just
interested in getting himself a big by-line so he can use us to get
rich and famous.”

I smiled my wisest, most self-deprecating
“experienced-old-freelancer” smile. “The famous part isn’t really
all that important,” I said. “But I would like to know where you’ve
been, Kevin. Obviously, this is the first time you’ve been home
since Justin was arrested.”

Kevin remembered his initial mission, which was to
rescue his brother and be a hero. He did everything but flex his
muscles and eat spinach right out of a can with no fork. “I was
away at school,” he said. “University of Indiana.”

I considered asking if he was on the varsity
intimidation team, but decided not to give in to my juvenile
impulses. Of course, I didn’t make any moves or sounds to indicate
how impressed I was by his admission into a college, either.
Maturity only goes so far when you’re smaller than most
fifteen-year-olds.

“So you came home as soon as you were called?”

“Sure,” Kevin said, defensively. He must have been on
the defensive squad of the intimidation team. “It takes a while to
bike from there.”

“Then, you’ve been in transit
. . . 

Kevin wasn’t looking at me anymore. He was concerned
with his mother. “This isn’t getting us anywhere, Ma,” he said.
“Where’s Justin?”

“He’s in the county jail. They set bail at $200,000,
and I don’t know. . . 

“What? Two hundred grand? That’s ridiculous! He can’t
stay in that jail by himself!”

I understood the concern. A relative naïf like Justin
in a jail full of repeat offenders wasn’t a pleasant thought. But
neither is going so far into debt that you might never get out,
assuming it’s even possible to raise that much money.

“Well,” Mary said in a tiny voice, “I already have a
mortgage on the house, and I can’t borrow much more. I don’t know
what to do.”

This was the moment Kevin had been waiting for. He
zipped up his black leather jacket and turned toward the door, in
his best Cosmic Avenger style.

“Don’t you worry, Ma. I’m getting him out. Now.” And
he turned and strode (there is no other word for it) out of the
house. The cacophony began in the driveway again.

On a chair beside Justin’s desk, Mary sat down
wearily, not even moving the pants that Justin or the cops had left
there. She had promised herself she’d be strong in front of the
guest, but it was too much to ask. Mary Fowler began to cry.

O
n the way back home, I
called Barry Dutton in his office. The Midland Heights chief of
police was between meetings—one with our mayor and council, and
another with a group of area rabbis who wanted him to report any
Orthodox Jews caught speeding on Saturday, when they were barred
from getting behind the wheel of any car, speeding or not.

Strikingly, he still chose to take my call. “Aaron,
I’m not going to send a patrol car to follow Leah home from school
every day. I’m not. The child can walk the three blocks on her
own.”

“If it was your daughter . . .  I
began.

Barry rumbled, which I took for a chuckle. “My
daughter,” he said, “is a six-foot-one black woman and can kick the
ass of anyone who gives her trouble.”

“Could you send
her
to follow Leah home from
school?”

“What do you want, Aaron?”

I had to be delicate about this, because Barry is a
sensitive guy. The two other times I investigated a murder, he felt
my participation was—shall we say?—inappropriate. In fact, he
thought I should “stick to writing about which DVD player is cooler
than the others.” Because the proper presentation here would be
extremely important, I decided it’d be better to ease into the
subject.

“I’m investigating this murder . . . 
I began. I actually heard him drop the phone.

“I’m sorry, Aaron,” Barry said after picking up the
handset. “I thought you said something about investigating a
murder. And I’m sure you
couldn’t
have said that, because I
remember telling you the last time that if you chose to do that
again, the next murder you investigated would be your own.”

“This is different.”

“The last time, you said it was ‘different.’ And I
ended up sending two officers to cut you out of a chair you’d been
duct-taped to in a hotel in New Brunswick. So don’t tell me it’s
different.”

“I wasn’t in any danger, was I? Besides, this is an
Asperger’s thing. Lori Shery wants me to do it.” Lori once spoke to
the state association of police chiefs about AS people getting
involved with the criminal justice system, and she had so wowed
Barry, he was offering to instruct a course for his officers by the
end of the same week.

He knew when he was trapped. “Lori?” he asked
tentatively.

“Yeah. And you don’t want me to tell her you called
me off, do you?”

He groaned, which sounded like Darth Vader having an
asthma attack. “What do you need, Aaron?”

“How well do you know the chief of police in North
Brunswick?”

“Not very. Her name is Les Baker.”

“
Her
name?”

“They’re very progressive in North Brunswick.”

“Cool.”

Barry’s voice showed concern. “Is this about that guy
shot with the old gun?”

“Yeah. The kid they picked up for it has AS. He’s
into guns, but his mom swears he doesn’t own any.”

“The fact that they found the gun in his room might
indicate otherwise. Did you tell your mother everything you were
doing when you were twenty-two?”