As Dog Is My Witness (6 page)

“I don’t have Asperger’s. They’re not incapable of
lying, but most of them are really bad at it.”

“You probably
did
tell your mother everything
you were doing when you were twenty-two.” Barry is a nice man, but
he can be a real pain when he puts his mind to it.

“Anyway,” I sighed, “I’m guessing you don’t know
Chief Baker well enough to call her and put in a good word for
me.”

“Which word would that be? ‘Irritant?’ ‘Problem?’
‘Obstruction?’”

“You’re a nice man,” I told him, “but you can be a
real pain when you put your mind to it.”

“That’s exactly what I could tell her about you,”
Dutton said, his chuckle rumbling again. “If you want me to.”

I hung up on him. It gives me a certain feeling of
power to do that to my local chief of police, no matter how much
he’ll make me pay for it later.

The cell phone rang a minute or two later. I checked
the incoming number, but didn’t recognize it, so I opened my
phone.

“Hello?”

The voice was female, but authoritative. “Aaron
Tucker?” “Depends. Who’s calling?”

“This is Chief Leslie Baker of the North Brunswick
Police Department.”

Barry Dutton worked fast. “In that case, yes,” I
said. “This is Aaron Tucker. I guess Chief Dutton called you.”

“Yes,” said Baker. “And he said to tell you he should
have left you in the chair with the duct tape. Does that mean
anything to you?”

“No,” I answered. “Chief Dutton hallucinates
sometimes.”

“Is there something I can do for you, Mr.
Tucker?”

“I’m writing about the murder of Michael Huston. Can
you spare a few minutes?”

She exhaled, not meaning for me to hear it. While
North Brunswick is a much larger town (with therefore a much larger
police department) than Midland Heights, Baker was probably not
used to dealing with murder investigations, or the publicity they
usually generated. But she knew it was part of her job.

“I suppose so, but it’ll have to be quick. Where are
you?”

I gave her my location, and she directed me to the
North Brunswick Municipal Complex on Hermann Road. Because I’m a
trained investigative reporter, this immediately made me wonder
whether the road had been named after Bernard Herrmann, who wrote
so many memorable film scores for Alfred Hitchcock films. There was
no way to know, so I put that out of my mind. But the music from
Vertigo
kept running through my head.

It took but a few minutes to get there, and after
twice getting lost in the building, I found myself in Chief Leslie
Baker’s office, which was not only larger than Barry Dutton’s, but
also had carpeting. I made a mental note to inform Barry of these
salient facts at my earliest convenience.

Chief Baker herself was a tall woman, about five-foot
nine or ten, and in full uniform, she appeared to be roughly the
size of the Empire State Building. She was on the phone when I
walked in, but hung up and stood ramrod straight, shook my hand
with a grip that could have turned my hand into a maraca had she
given it full force, and pointed me toward a chair. She was nothing
if not physically impressive.

“Lieutenant Rodriguez is working on the Huston case,”
she told me almost immediately. “But since Chief Dutton requested I
speak to you, I’ll tell you whatever I can.”

I took the reporter’s notebook out of my back
pocket—they are designed specifically to fit on your butt or in an
inside jacket pocket, but I’m not classy enough to wear a sports
jacket—and opened it to a blank page. Baker did not blink.

“What led to the questioning, and eventually the
arrest, of Justin Fowler?” I asked.

Baker opened the file on her desk. Behind her, I
noticed, was a picture of her shaking hands with one of the former
presidents I hadn’t voted for. I tried not to hold it against her,
and then saw a picture of her shaking hands with a former president
I
had
voted for. Apparently, she was a bipartisan
hand-shaker.

“According to Lt. Rodriguez’s report, once we
discovered the kind of firearm that had killed Mr. Huston, Mr.
Fowler was initially questioned as an expert on antique weaponry.
But after the officers entered Mr. Fowler’s residence—with his
permission—and discovered the weapon in his bedroom, the arrest was
made.”

“You’re aware that Mr. Fowler has Asperger’s
Syndrome?”

“Yes,” Baker noted a space on the report, then closed
it to keep it from my gaze. Reporters are notorious for being able
to read documents upside-down. She didn’t know, of course, that
trying to do so usually makes me woozy. “I’m not terribly familiar
with the condition, but Lieutenant Rodriguez did note it, and
explained very briefly what it means.”

Baker, I could tell, was trying to be fair, but she
didn’t want some wiseguy reporter busting into her office and
screwing up her case, no matter how many police chiefs called her.
But the swiftness of the arrest and the constant references to the
file were making me suspicious. I didn’t think anything sneaky was
going on, but I had a hunch she wasn’t telling me something.

“Among other things,” I said, “it could mean that
Justin might confess to a crime he didn’t commit, if the
interrogators made it clear that his confession would please them,
or make them his friends. He might not have a very firm grasp on
the consequences of copping to a crime he didn’t do.”

“Are you his lawyer, Mr. Tucker?”

“I haven’t even met his lawyer, Chief. But I do know
something about Asperger’s. My son . . . 

“Chief Dutton told me about you,” Baker said. “I
understand you have a personal stake in this. But the fact is,
Justin Fowler had the gun in his possession and he confessed to the
crime.”

“What’s his motive? Why did he kill Michael
Huston?”

“He said he had just gotten the gun, wanted to see if
it would work, and chose Mr. Huston completely at random.”

I couldn’t help but curl my lip. “Oh, come on,
Chief,” I said. “There are a hundred ways Justin could have tested
out this weapon. He didn’t need to go out on a 10-degree winter
night and shoot the first person he saw walking his dog. Asperger
individuals might have poor impulse control, but they have to be
provoked. There has to be an impulse to control. Your detectives
put words in his mouth.”

“Then explain how the murder weapon ended up in his
bedroom,” Baker said. “A gun with no serial number, a gun for which
there’s no record of purchase, and a gun for which there’s no
license. Clearly an illegal weapon, and one that would appeal only
to a collector, since it’s not nearly as powerful or efficient as
anything manufactured today. Who else would choose to shoot someone
with a single-ball deringer that has to be used at close range, Mr.
Tucker?”

“It worked for John Wilkes Booth.”

Baker stood. “I don’t have anything else I can tell
you. If you have further questions, you can direct them to
Lieutenant Rodriguez.”

“Can I see Justin Fowler? Can you get me in for an
interview?”

Baker’s lower lip twitched. “No need,” she said. “I
just got off the phone with the county jail. Justin Fowler made
bail ten minutes ago.”

C
hief Baker could offer no
explanation for Justin’s seemingly impossible bail-out, and I had
no time to go back to Mary Fowler’s house—I was needed at home.

Other men might have considered the investigation of
a murder to be more urgent than being in a chair behind a desk when
a nine-year-old girl and her twelve-year-old brother got home from
school. I’m proud, however, that I’m the one who’s been there
pretty much every day since they started school. Besides, it gives
me an excuse for never having cleared what, in a civilized culture,
would be considered minimum wage.

When I got home, Jeff Mahoney’s battered old van, the
one he calls the “Trouble Mobile,” was parked in front of my
battered old house. He was sitting in the driver’s seat with a cup
of Dunkin’ Donuts coffee and the engine running, so the van’s
heater wouldn’t turn off. His green uniform and green hat—with the
logo of the rental car company whose vehicles Mahoney fixes on the
road—were greasy, which is not unusual. The green hat was pulled
over his eyes, and he was slouched back in the seat, which
was
unusual.

I got out of the car, walked to the van, and knocked
on the window, producing a muffled sound because,
uncharacteristically, I was wearing gloves. Mahoney didn’t open his
eyes, but he did take a sip of coffee. Then he sat up and looked,
turned off the van, and got out. He wore no coat.

“Mr. Tucker,” he said by way of greeting.

“Mr. Mahoney,” I countered, showing off my
originality.

“I need you to follow someone,” he said.

I looked up at Mahoney, who stands a good ten inches
taller than me.

“Who?”

“Me.”

“Well,” I said, “suppose I follow you into the house.
You don’t have a coat on.”

He looked surprised, but walked up the steps and
waited for me to unlock the door. I thanked the powers of good for
the invention of the radiator (I told you this was an old house)
and took off five or six layers of clothing to look more like
myself and less like the Michelin Man.

Mahoney took a long sip from his jumbo coffee cup
while I put water on the stove to make my favorite cold-weather
companion, fat-free hot chocolate (French Vanilla). I know, it’s
hard to have confidence in a grown man who drinks something called
“Swiss Miss,” but trust me, I’m macho as all get-out.

“Okay, I give up. How come I have to follow you, and
where am I following you to?” Warren came in, intimidated by the
large guest, but curious. Mahoney, without thinking, put down a
hand for the dog to sniff, and within seconds was, as usual,
Warren’s best friend. He scratched behind Warren’s ridiculously
long ears.”

Somebody’s sabotaging my work,” he said with a
straight face.

Warren and I stared at him. “Your work?” I finally
said. “You fix rental cars that break down on the highway. How can
somebody sabotage your work?”

We walked into my office, which is right near the
kitchen, an unfortunate coincidence that has helped make me the man
I am today—the one who carries around an extra ten or fifteen
pounds. I sat in the big swivel chair in front of my desk, and
Mahoney paced next to what I laughingly refer to as the “client’s
chair,” an old dining room chair we don’t have room for anywhere
else in the house.

“For the past three weeks, after I’m finished with a
repair, someone has been tampering with the cars so that the repair
is undone. They’re making it look like I didn’t do the work, and
they’re screwing up my batting average.” Mahoney believes that the
number of cars he repairs, and how well the job is done, appears in
a box score in the newspaper every morning. He is determined to be
the best at what he does, and thinks the rest of the world is
hanging breathlessly on each repair he performs. It’s how he got to
be the way he is, which is worth being.

“Wait a minute,” I said. “I don’t understand the
process. You get a call from your company that a renter’s car has
broken down. Is the customer there when you arrive?”

“No,” Mahoney shook his head. “Usually, somebody at
the company drives out with a replacement car, picks the renter up,
then flags the original rental car so I can see it. Most often,
there’s a rental agency near where the car has broken down, or at
least nearer than I am, so the replacement car has arrived, and the
customer has left, before I get there.”

The teapot began to whistle, so I got up and we moved
back into the kitchen. I took the hot chocolate box out of the
cabinet after I turned off the water, and started to create a
40-calorie drink that would take my mind off how drafty and cold
the house gets no matter what you do. I noticed that Mahoney didn’t
make a withering crack about the hot chocolate, which was not an
encouraging sign.

“So how does the car get back after you repair it?
You drive up in the van and fix the car. You can’t drive both the
van
and
the car back.”

“That’s right,” Mahoney said as I stirred my drink.
Exhausted after the long trip from my office, I sat at the kitchen
table instead of going back inside. Besides, once I spilled the hot
chocolate, I could mop it up much easier in the kitchen. You have
to plan ahead. “I call the office when I’m done, and they send out
a car with two guys in it. One of them drives the car back. If the
car needs a part I don’t have, I call a tow truck, and they tow it
away.”

I thought about that as Warren walked to Mahoney for
another pat, and got it. “Do you stay with the car until the driver
arrives, or is there a time when it’s repaired, but you’re already
gone?”

Mahoney stroked Warren’s head and the dog, in his
quest to make people do all they can for him, lay down, forcing
Mahoney to bend over and rub the dog’s belly. “That’s how it
works,” he said. “There’s a short time when the car is there by
itself. I can’t wait around for the driver every time—I have more
cars that need fixing.”