Guy Langman, Crime Scene Procrastinator (6 page)

What’s everybody all balled up about?
I could imagine him asking.
That their dead relatives would give a rat’s ass about traffic noise? I think they’ve probably got bigger problems. Like being dead, for instance
. Ha-ha. That’s a totally made-up Francis Langman quote, but definitely the type of thing he would have said. It would have been fun to say it to him. To have the wise/smart-assy words come out of my mouth and go to his ears. To see if they would have made him laugh. So I go ahead and say them. Out loud.

I never thought I’d be one of those people who talks to a dead person at a cemetery, but there, in the parklike setting under the magnolia trees, flanked by the traffic noise, raindrops dripping off my nose—there I find myself talking to my father. The place where he’s buried is marked only by a stone. Not even his name. He requested it that way, which was odd. There is no wacky inscription like he used to joke about. He used to say he wanted his tombstone to read
FRANCIS LANGMAN: MAN, THAT DUDE COULD DANCE!
or
FRANCIS LANGMAN: THE JEWISH COCKHORSE
. (I don’t even know—nor do I want to know—what that means.) Nothing at all marks his eternal resting place, but it’s easy to find his plot. I feel like I know his neighbors—Edith Wasikowski and Peter Jay Harvington. Plus, Fran is right under the Burger King sign crassly shouting about chicken clubs and burgers.

I find myself standing there in the dribbles of rain. “Hi, Dad,” I say. Then I tell him my joke about the dead people giving a rat’s
ass about the traffic noise. And I tell him that he’d probably think I was “nuttier than a squirrel turd” for talking to him, but I feel like doing it anyway.

And I start to tell him everything. About school and Mr. Zant. About Raquel and Forensics Squad. About the strange people at his funeral. About the mysterious pictures in the attic. And about what I think deep down sometimes. What I never tell anyone. About how sometimes I am not really sure if life is worth living. And I know what they say: Talking to yourself is one thing, but when you start answering back is when you really should start to worry. But I do it anyway. I start saying his parts back to myself. I know. Nuttier than a squirrel turd.

“What’s the point of all this, Dad?” I ask him. I gesture around the cemetery, pointing at the trees, the sky, the grass, the bench a few feet away.

“I think the point of that bench is that it’s a place to put your ass when you get tired,” he says.

“You know what I mean,” I say. “Of all of it. Life.”

“Life ain’t a pencil, Guy. It ain’t gotta have a point.”

“But then what are we living for?” I ask.

“You got someplace else you need to be? What the hell else are we going to do?” he asks. “Stick our dicks in bowling balls?”

“You got a point there,” I say.

“Listen, son,” he continues. “Life ain’t easy, but it don’t got to be hard neither. Do these things: First of all, take care of your mother. She needs you. Secondly, be good to your friends. They are one of the few things in life that are truly worth something. And follow your heart. It knows what’s right. Certainly more than your balls.”

I’m waiting for Mr. Zant to hurry up and finish. Ironically, his lesson is something about how we need patience to be good at forensics. But I don’t want to listen to the lesson; I want to get to work on my own project this week. And I need Mr. Zant’s help.

“Every single drop of blood, every hair, every tiny bit of evidence, must be numbered and labeled,” he says. “You will need to reference these later. A simple mix-up in your paperwork could set a killer free. Every piece of evidence must follow a closely watched chain of custody. If someone who is not supposed to have access ends up so much as touching or in some cases even breathing on the evidence, it will likely be thrown out of court. And okay, that just about wraps it up. We are out of time.”

Everyone starts to gather their things and make their way out into the hallway. “You probably loved that talk about needing patience, Guy, huh?” Anoop says.

“Shut up,” I say.

“You’re the least patient person I know.”

“Well, now I need
you
to be patient. Just wait up. I need to talk to Mr. Zant.”

“What about?” Mr. Zant says, overhearing me.

“Yeah, what about?” Anoop says.

“Dude,” I say to Anoop. “Some things are private.”

“Ooh, private!” Mr. Zant says, clapping his hands.

“Yeah, Anoop. Wait in the hall.” Anoop gives me a very quizzical look, sighs and huffs, but like a good friend goes to wait in the hall.

Mr. Zant turns to me and freaks me out. “Solving a crime isn’t all paperwork,” he says. “Sometimes it’s hunches. I can tell already—you have the right hunches. You could be good at crime-solving if you learn to do the work.”

Compliments make me feel awkward, so I let the latter part of his comment slide, even though it does feel sort of good. I have good hunches? Thanks, Zant. I have a hunch you’re weirding me out.

“Yeah, um, thanks,” I say. “So listen. I wonder if you could help me process some evidence.” Now it’s his turn to give me a quizzical look. I carry on. “If I have some old pictures and I want to figure out who is in them, what’s the best thing to do?”

“Do you have an exemplar?” he says, stroking his beard.

“Do you like saying words I don’t know?”

“We talked about exemplars last week.”

“I wasn’t paying attention … that … week?”

“Exemplars are something to compare them to.”

“No, I don’t have anything to compare them to. They’re just some old pictures. My dad was with some guy and I want to know who he was. Is. If he still is.”

“Alive?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, there’s not much we can really do, but if you want to bring them in, it might be an interesting exercise.”

“I hate exercise,” I say.

“I knew you’d say that,” he says.

“But I do have the pictures with me,” I say. I take out the old picture of my father and the mysterious other man on the boat. “I have a feeling I know this guy,” I say, pointing to the non-Dad guy. “But I can’t figure out why. If you had a picture of someone and you wanted to know who they are, what do you do?”

Mr. Zant looks at the photograph a long time. He handles it gently, careful to only touch the edges. “It’s very hard,” he says. “Maybe if this were a police investigation, they’d run the picture through some facial recognition software. But that only works if you have something to compare it to.”

“Isn’t there some software you can run that would show what the person would look like thirty years later?” I ask.

“Sure there is,” Mr. Zant says. “But I don’t think we need to.”

“What do you mean?” I say.

“Guy,” he says. “In thirty years the person on the left will look like the person on the right.”

“What?” I ask again, even though I think I already know where he’s going with this.

“Look at the eyes. Look at the nose. Look at the shape of the eyes and the lips. They’re almost identical. The younger man is clearly the older man’s son.” I feel my face turn red. I feel my temperature drop fifty degrees. I start to shake.

“Guy!” Mr. Zant says. “Are you all right?” I’m not, of course, but I try to compose myself. I take a deep breath and steady myself on the desk. Dad had another son? Why didn’t I see it? And why didn’t
Mom
see it? She saw this picture the other day, when I was holding it. Was it really the first time she saw it? Did she really never see the picture before? Deep breaths, deep breaths.

“Thank you, Mr. Zant,” I say. “I’m fine. Can you help me with one more thing?”

“Sure, Guy.”

“Can we fingerprint this picture?”

“Well,” he says. “I suppose we could. But remember, fingerprinting isn’t a magic bullet. It won’t tell you much. It won’t tell you anything at all if you don’t have something to compare it to.”

“I know that,” I say. “And I do have something to compare it to. There are my prints, of course. But I bet you’ll find a few more. The only one I care about is the one with the smudge in the middle.”

“A smudge?”

“Yeah,” I say. “Almost like the picture was handled by someone who has no fingerprints at all.”

Mr. Zant gives me a serious look, narrowing his eyes and pursing his lips. Then he smiles and skips off toward the cabinet in the corner of the room. He swings open the metal door and pulls out a small box. It’s his fingerprinting kit. He opens it carefully and extracts a few items. He offers me a pair of rubber gloves. “I’m good,” I say.

“Come on,” he says. “You can help. It will be fun.”

I’m skeptical, but I shrug and do it. The gloves feel weird, all tight and sweaty. I keep wiggling my fingers.

“You get used to it,” Mr. Zant says.

“Spend a lot of time wearing rubber gloves, do you?” I ask. “Sounds like you have an interesting home life.” He laughs, but doesn’t answer my question.

“Okay, now we need to lightly dust the picture,” he says. He shakes, then opens, a tiny blue bottle marked
FINGERPRINTING
POWDER
. The lid has a small brush attached to it, sort of like a bottle of rubber cement. He hands it to me.

“No, no, you do it,” I say. “I don’t want to mess it up.”

“Messing things up is the only way anyone ever learns anything,” he says. “Why do you think surgeons practice on cadavers?” I can’t really argue with that logic. It seems like it might fit in the book, even if Dad didn’t say it. I take the brush from his hand. I drop it on the desk, leaving a large blot of a black mark on the desk.

“Sorry!” I say.

Mr. Zant shrugs. “These desks were built to withstand nuclear war, so I think a little bit of dust is okay.” I start to dab the brush toward the top right corner of the back of the picture. “Tell me why you chose that spot to start with,” he says.

“I’m sorry, is that wrong?” I ask.

“Not at all,” he says. “That’s how most people would handle a picture, so that’s the spot where you’re most likely to find a print. It’s the perfect place to dust for prints.”

“That’s what I was thinking,” I say.

“Good work,” he says. “Now, not too much dust. You really just need the tiniest amount. The next step is to carefully lift the print with the tape.”

I take the fingerprinting tape and carefully set it onto the picture. I feel like a surgeon. It’s pretty fun. But when I lift the tape up, all I see is a blurry mess.

“Ah,” I say. “I told you I’d screw it up.”

“No, you were perfect,” he says. “That’s just what we call overlap. It just means there are a bunch of prints on top of one another.”

“Hey,” I say. “If the person we’re looking for is left-handed, they’d probably handle the opposite corner, right?”

“Right!” he says. “Is he left-handed?”

“
She
,” I say. “She is left-handed.”

I repeat the process, this time lifting a print from the top left-hand corner of the back of the picture. Like magic, a print appears before my eyes. The ridges and whorls—they are all visible. So too is the blank space in the middle.

“I can’t believe it,” Mr. Zant says. “It
is
almost like this person doesn’t have a fingerprint on that finger … I’ve never seen anything like it, but it’s just like you predicted. You
do
have the hunches, Guy! Now tell me what it means.”

Before I can explain to Mr. Zant that I know exactly who the mysterious left-handed, no fingerprint woman is, Anoop sticks his head back in the door. “I really have to go, you guys,” he says. “Train Chattopadhyay is leaving the station, Guy. Get aboard or you’re on your own.”

“Thanks a million, Mr. Zant,” I say, tucking the picture back into the envelope. “I guess I gotta run. I’ll give you the scoop tomorrow.”

“Now would you tell me what
that
was all about?” Anoop asks as we walk toward his car. But I don’t want to. There’s only one person I want to talk to about this. Luckily, I know right where she lives.

“Where are the other six, GL?” Mom says after hearing me slam the door and taking one look at my flaring nostrils. I know what she means. I don’t hide anger well. I’m not even past the foyer yet, just standing there inside the big front door, looking up at her. She’s smiling, trying to be funny. She knows I am feeling grumpy, thus the question. It’s something Dad would say when someone was in a bad mood. His joke was that you were Grumpy of the Seven Dwarfs, so the other six must be around somewhere. I would usually quickly make up where I thought all the others were. I knew he meant it rhetorically, but I couldn’t resist the exercise no matter how bad a mood I was in. I would start counting on my fingers and say something like, “Sleepy is in bed, of course; Sneezy is at the allergist; Doc is on the golf course; Bashful is hiding under the rug again; Dopey—well, even he doesn’t know where he is; and … crap.” I’d always forget at least one. And yes, I realize that the fact that I usually forgot Happy probably meant something.

But no matter what, just doing that little thing would usually make me laugh. Especially if I came up with something really strange—like “Bashful is breaking out of his routine by auditioning to be a stripper”—that cracked Dad up. Just seeing him laugh would immediately snap me out of it and I couldn’t remember why I was Grumpy in the first place. He’d try to play it straight,
his serious deep-set eyes burning before a twinkle and the greatest laugh you’ve ever heard. Damn, I miss him.

But my grumpiness isn’t going away so easily this time. “Grumpy” doesn’t even begin to describe it. I’m pissed. There’s no other way to put it. So I just blurt it out. The words come out like an auctioneer rattling off prices for a used clock or like a single word, the world’s longest hyphenated one. “Mom-I-know-Dad-had-another-son-and-I-know-you-knew-and-I-can’t-believe-you-never-told-me-and-I-saw-the-picture-and-I-know-you-saw-that-picture-before-the-other-day-so-don’t-lie-just-tell-me-how-you-knew-and-also-tell-me-why-you-never-told-me.”

She stands there, staring at me for a minute, blinking. She purses her lipsticked lips, then exhales slowly. She doesn’t say anything, though. So I take the picture out from my backpack. “This younger guy is clearly Dad’s son,” I say. “And I fingerprinted the picture—I know you’ve touched it.”