Guy Langman, Crime Scene Procrastinator

by Josh Berk

  “What kind of music you got on there?” I say, super-friendly.

  “What?” she says loudly, looking annoyed. I make the gesture that she should take off her earbuds.

  “I said, whatcha listenin’ to?” I flash the classic Langman smile. She still looks annoyed. It must be her. The Langman smile never fails.

  “A bunch of bands you’ve probably never heard of,” she says, all pissy.

  “Just making conversation here,” I say, holding my palms up in a gesture of mock surrender.

  “Fine, it’s the Sisters of Mercy,” she says. “I’m sure you love them.”

  “Can’t say I’m a particular fan of the SOM—but hey, I’m open to all music,” I say.

  “No one calls them the SOM,” she says. I smile again. Then she stops and seems to look at me for the first time. Then she speaks, not to me, just near me. And about me. “Seriously, what does Guy Langman listen to?” she says. She is getting a little more involved in the conversation. I notice that she keeps one earbud in. Like she is only half-committed to the idea of talking to me. I mind, but I don’t mind. That’s how I live most of my life.

  “All music is the same to me,” I say. “I listen to whatever my mom is playing on the piano. Or whatever is on the radio. Or I listen to my dad’s old records. I’m on a big Herb Alpert & the Tijuana Brass kick lately.”

  “Listening to old records had you briefly up here,” she says, holding her hand high over her head. “Herb Alpert & the Tijuana Brass …” She ever-so-slowly moves her hand down past her desk and leans over until it touches the dusty floor.

  TK chimes in. “His theory is interesting, though,” he says. “All music can be reduced to fundamental core similarities.”

  “Yeah,” I say. “That’s exactly what I was doing, expounding a theory about fundamental core whatever-the-hell-you-said.”

  He sniffs at me, still not looking up. TK’s defining gesture. The sniff.

  “Guy has no thoughts on anything,” Maureen says to TK. Then she turns to me. “You can make fun of me for trying too hard, but you are just too lazy to look into what kind of music you like. You don’t even take the steps to go beyond the records that already happen to be in your house? What are you saving all your energy for? You never do anything.”

  “All I was saying is that music is music—what’s the difference?”

  “And all I’m saying is that it’s super-easy to sit there and make fun of everything like you’re above the world, but you can’t just refuse to take part in anything forever,” she says. Seriously, why am I talking to her? Who is she—Anoop?

  I try to change the subject. “I do know exactly what kind of movies I like,” I say. She raises her eyebrows.

  “Action,” I say. “I can say with certainty that I like action movies.”

  “Figures,” she says. Then she rolls her eyes, actually rolling one and then the other to make the point excessively clear. I had expected as much.

  “Yeah, yeah,” I say. “Action movies aren’t something cool that someone smart is supposed to like, but I don’t like them for the explosions and the violence. I like them for the dialogue.”

  “You watch action movies for the dialogue? That’s like saying you read porno mags for the articles.”

  “My dad actually did read those articles. Or at least he claimed to …”

  “Everybody claims to. Nobody does.”

  “Well, I do like the dialogue in action movies. Those dudes always know exactly what to say. I’m a big fan of the action-hero quip,” I say.

  “The action-hero quip?”

  I look around the room for an example. “Like, I could take this chair and smash it over a bad guy’s head and then be, like, ‘Take a seat.’ ” I say it in a good action-hero growl. “Or I could stab somebody with this pencil and be, like, ‘I think I’ve made my point.’ ”

  To my surprise, Maureen laughs. “Those are really good!” she says. “What movies are those from?”

  “I just made those up!” I say.

  “No way!”

  “I swear!”

  “Pretty good,” she says, nodding and smiling. “Do another one.”

  “How about if I smacked a villain with my book bag and said, ‘Looks like you have some extra baggage.’ ”

  “Not bad!” she says.

  “You try one,” I say.

  “No, I couldn’t,” she says. “I suck at things like that. You’re good. You should, like, write movies for a living!”

  “Nah,” I say. “Too much work. I saw an interview with a screenwriter and he was talking about how it takes like ten years to get your movie made, and then all these stupid film people just mess with it anyway, and—”

  “You piss me off, Guy,” Maureen says in a startling action-hero growl of her own. “I want to punch you so hard in the face.”

  “What the hell?” I say. “What brought that on? What did I do?”

  “You have a gift and you won’t pursue it because it’s too much work? What the hell? Didn’t you ever hear the expression ‘Anything good requires effort’?”

  “I heard it a little differently,” I say. “My dad’s version was, ‘If you want your balls to shine, you got to use lots of wax’ … I’m not sure that’s the same thing, though, really. Maybe it was just a personal hygiene tip—”

  Maureen shakes her head. It looks like maybe she is fighting a smile.

  “Well, I am working on a book about my dad,” I say. Why do I tell her this? What do I care what she thinks? Let the schmucks say what they say, but in the end you’re the one who has to look at your punim in the mirror every morning. Another phrase of Dad’s, which I once accidentally misquoted back to him as “You’re the one who has to look at your tuchus in the mirror every morning,” which is one odd morning ritual. Punim means “face.” Tuchus means your rear end. You’d have to be flexible. More to the point: Why do I care what Maureen thinks? Am I trying to impress Maureen Fields?

  “That’s cool,” she says. “Do you want that to be your job? You want to write books?”

  “I don’t know. That seems hard too. Why do we keep talking about my career goals? Who put you up to this? Anoop? My mother?”

  “I think it’s disturbing that it could equally be either,” she says quietly. “Anoop is like a second mother to you. It’s unhealthy.”

  “So who was it?” I ask Maureen.

  “Neither! I’m just wondering. You seem so smart. What does the future hold for you? You need to figure it out ASAP.”

  Maureen says “ASAP” in a funny way. She doesn’t spell it out. It’s an acronym for “as soon as possible” so people usually say “A-S-A-P.” She just said “a sap,” like it was a thing. Anyway, I don’t feel like giving her a real answer. So I give her a fake one. A sap.

  “I heard about being a ‘kept boy.’ Maybe I could be a ‘kept boy,’ ” I say.

  “What the hell is that?” Maureen asks.

  “Like you have some sugar momma and you lie around on the beach and just do it with her once in a while. I look good in a wet suit.”

  “You mean like a gigolo?”

  “You don’t get paid for the sex, she just keeps you around …”

  “For the sex!”

  “Yeah, I guess.”

  “That is the worst career goal I have ever heard,” she says. I shrug. I don’t tell her my other career goal, which is to be the guy who shovels the hippo crap at the zoo. I realize this is a weird goal, but I figure most every career is more or less shoveling hippo crap, so you might as well just go ahead and literally do it, you know? I’m deep.

  Mr. Zant shows up finally, freshly waxed. Forensics Squad goes well, if uneventfully. More to the point, here’s what happens next: Being Anoop-less means I don’t have a ride home. I announce this to the group, and Maureen offers one with much excitement. OK, more like she just shrugs and mutters, “I guess we could, like, give you a ride or whatever.” I know!

  “Don’t mind if I do,” I say. “Do no
t mind if I do.” We wait for Mrs. Fields and I try to picture her. When she shows up, Maureen’s mom looks approximately exactly like the exact opposite of what I would have guessed. The chipper and tanned blond MILF behind the wheel of a midnight-black BMW is literally the very last person on earth I would have guessed would be the mother of Maureen Fields. Well, I suppose she could have been one of those tribeswomen from Social Studies class with the floppy pizza-dough boobs and whatever the female equivalent of the dong bracelet would be. I would have been slightly more surprised to see a topless tribeswoman introducing herself to me as Mrs. Fields, but honestly, only just slightly.

  “Hello, Mrs. Fields,” I manage to squeak out, trying to get into the car while holding my backpack over the embarrassing tent of my pants. Maureen rolls her eyes, then sullenly introduces me. “Ma, this is Guy. He needs a ride, okay?” She then shoves past me into the backseat. It seems rude to leave Mrs. Fields alone in the front, so I hop in next to her.

  There is something so shocking and unavoidably sexy about Mrs. Fields that it is as though a naked model from a centerfold has come to life and offered to give me a ride home. I think about my dad’s old Playboys. I imagine she is going to start telling me about her turn-ons and favorite ways to be kissed.

  “Guy!” Maureen smacks me on the back of the head. “Wake the hell up!”

  “Maureen,” her mom says, her voice purring as smoothly as the car’s well-tuned engine. “Watch that mouth of yours. I’m sure he just didn’t hear the question.”

  “Yeah, I—I’m sorry, ma’am,” I manage, using all the powers in my pubescent arsenal to keep my voice from cracking into a thousand pieces. Trying to sound cool. Trying to sound manly. “What was the question?”

  “Where do you live, Guy?” Maureen spits at me. She is not nearly as kind as she was a few minutes ago. “What the hell do you think the question was? We don’t know where you live.” Then she mutters to herself, sort of talking to her balled-up fists. “Why the hell did we say we’d give him a ride? Why? Why? Why?”

  “Oh, right,” I say, ignoring the latter question. I notice Mrs. Fields’s right hand poised over the touch-screen GPS in the car’s dashboard. She wears several rings on her slender fingers, and her nails look freshly painted. Like her shoes, they are the color of blood.

  I give her my address, then add, “It’s the one at the end of the circle with the goofy sign that says ‘Langman Manor.’ ”

  “You are Guy Langman?” she says. I think I should probably not answer. I look at Maureen. She is somewhat less than helpful, giving me that big-eyed, head-shaking face that clearly means “I dunno, what the hell?”

  Mrs. Fields continues, “Maureen talks about a Guy at home all the time, of course.” I again look back at Maureen. She is shaking her head as if in vigorous disagreement with this statement. As if in vigorous disagreement with the whole world, maybe. The black hood of her sweatshirt is pulled down so far over her eyes that it looks like the hoodie is trying to swallow her head. She looks like she is trying to shrink herself down to the size of a penny so that she can get lost like spare change between the cracks of the leather seats.

  “I just never put it together,” Mrs. Fields says. “Silly of me, really. I mean, how many Guys are there?” This is clearly a rhetorical question, yet for some reason I always answer rhetorical questions. It’s, like, do I even know what “rhetorical” means? Don’t answer that.

  “Well, there was Sir Guy of Gisborne,” I say. Smooth.

  “I knew your family a long time ago,” she says. “A lot of people thought it was, um, odd when your mom fell for Fran. Especially because he already had a son our age. Struck people as weird. Why would Tammy Reynolds fall for this old man? But not me. I always got it.”

  “Ew, Mom, stop crushing on Guy’s dad,” Maureen says.

  “There was something about him, though,” Mrs. Fields says. She takes her right hand off the wheel and clutches it to her chest. She grabs a bony protrusion of her collarbone. She holds her heart. Damn, Dad was a heartthrob. But wait.

  “You knew my mom back then?” I say. “And, um, Dad’s son?” What the hell?

  “Sure,” she says. “We both lived in Bayonne, then both ended up in Berry Ridge. Small world. Small state, anyway. I was so sorry to hear about your father’s passing. He was the kind of man who was far too alive ever to die.”

  I can’t let go of what she said earlier. This is amazing. Mrs. Fields knows about my half brother. The hum of the engine speaks to us like a soft whisper from another world. According to the GPS, we’ll be at Langman Manor in about four minutes and I am just beginning to wrap my head around all this new information. And I’m hungry for more.

  The digital clock on the GPS counts out its final minute. One minute to go. The LANGMAN MANOR sign is clearly in sight.

  “Dad’s son, his name is Steve, right?” I say, just making up a name, hoping she’ll correct me.

  “What? No,” she says. “Your father named him Jacques. I’ll never forget that. I’m surprised you didn’t know that. Weird Jacques.” She laughs. “Like Jacques Cousteau, the underwater diver person. That was a friend of your father’s.”

  “Oh, right,” I say, acting like I knew it all along. Amazing, how she fell into my trap. I do have good detective skills. Muahahaha. “Hey, so can we talk more about this sometime?” I say. It comes out wrong, like I am hitting on her. I’m not! But of course it looks that way. And okay, maybe I am. “I mean, I’m trying to write a book about my dad.” It sounds stupid. I press on. Noble. Brave. Sir Guy of Goddamn Gisborne. “I’d love to hear some stories about what my parents were like back then.”

  She smiles, this heartstoppingly beautiful woman. Then she grabs her collarbone again. I can tell from her eyes that the shadows of a thousand nights are flashing across her brain.

  “The past is the past, and only a fool will not let it be,” she says as I get out of the car. Kinda poetic. I might have to write that down. Then I think she feels bad for calling me a fool. She smiles softly. “Just write this: ‘Francis Langman was a hell of a man.’ ”

  Then the beautiful car with the beautiful driver (and, oh yeah, also Maureen Fields) zooms away from the curb, leaving me in a small pile of grass clippings. I can’t see into the tinted windows, but I am pretty sure Maureen is rolling her eyes in there, shaking her head in utter disapproval. Trying to disappear into the seat. Funny thing is, the thought makes me smile. Freaking Maureen Fields.

  “Rules for Living”: The Francis Langman Story

  CHAPTER TWO

  Francis Langman was a hell of a man.

  CHAPTER THREE

  And a liar.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  I walk into the house and see Mom apparently in a wrestling match with a vacuum cleaner. It is not going well. I’d say she was well on her way to defeat in the first round. Does wrestling have rounds? I’m not exactly what you’d call “into sports.”

  “Since when do you vacuum?” I ask. We always had a maid service. Mom looks up. Does she notice some bitterness in my voice? If so, she doesn’t show it. “I was texting you. I needed a ride.”

  “I guess I didn’t hear the phone. Did you know that vacuums are loud?”

  “Um, yeah,” I say.

  “You know, we might have to curtail our spending around here. A lot of your father’s money was in real estate or the stock market. Prices are going down, and …”

  “Well, can you give me a ride to school tomorrow?” I ask, cutting her off.

  “Didn’t you hear what I said?” she asks.

  “Yeah, sure, you’re going to fire the maid. Can I have a ride tomorrow?”

  “No,” she says.

  “No?”

  “You heard me.”

  “I need a ride,” I say.

  She puts down the vacuum and looks at me seriously for the first time since I walked in.

  “Is Anoop not going in again?” she says, narrowing her eyes at me.

  “Diarrhea …,” I lie.
Diarrhea is always a good lie, my friends. No one asks for details.

  “Sorry to hear that,” she says. “Probably all the curry. But I can’t give you a ride. I have plans.”

  “What kind of plans?”

  “I’m going into the city to see about selling one of Dad’s New York properties,” she says. “I have to leave ridiculously early.”

  “Can’t you reschedule?”

  “Can’t you take the bus?”

  “What?”

  “Big yellow thing, maybe you’ve seen it around town. Its wheels go round and round. Round and round. Round and round.”

  “I am not taking the—”

  “Let me finish,” Mom says, holding up a hand. “All through the town.” She does some jazz hands.

  “Bus,” I say.

  “Why?” she asks, a little disappointed that I don’t acknowledge the jazz hands. Normally I’m a pretty big fan of the jazz hands. I enjoy the old razzle-dazzle.

  “The bus is like the last resort for the destitute and criminally insane.”

  “I rode the bus every day when I was in school.”

  “Well, it’s not the 1940s anymore.”

  “I graduated in the 1980s,” she says.

  “Whatever. I’m not taking the bus. It’s all freshmen and psychopaths, as if there’s any difference. Am I right?” I can tell this fight is lost, so I am just getting obnoxious. I try to give Mom a high five. “Can a brother get an amen?!” I say.

  “Guy, you’re taking the bus,” she says.

  “Fine,” I say, narrowing my eyes. I guess there is no way out of the bus. “But I get something in return.” Life is a negotiation. Dad taught me that too.

  “You’re really going to sell one of Dad’s properties?” I ask.