Guy Langman, Crime Scene Procrastinator Read online

  “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.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  “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.”

  “You did what?” she says, almost laughing.

  “It’s not funny!” I say. I feel like a toddler.

  “Okay, you’re right.” She smooths her hair, smooths the creases in her dress. If she thinks she can smooth everything away, she’s wrong. I scowl. “Settle down,” she says. “Have a seat.”

  “I don’t want to have a seat!” I say. I realize I’m yelling.

  “Guy,” she says. “Oh, honey. I understand.”

  Bullshit. “How can you understand? How can anyone understand unless they learn that their whole life is a lie? What else don’t I know?”

  “That’s it,” she says. “I promise. And really, it’s not like what you think.”

  “What I think is that Dad had a kid and never told me about it. I have a brother I never knew!”

  “Well then, I guess it is what you think,” she says. Is she trying to be funny? “I wanted to tell you a long time ago,” she says. “But your father … he made me promise. It was a serious sore point for him. You know he loves you—he hated that he had a child he lost touch with. But his mother didn’t want anything to do with your father. Your father tried to have a relationship with him, but it just didn’t happen. And the boy—well, the man—he has had some … problems over the years. I don’t think anyone in the family had seen him for decades before the funeral.”

  “What? He was at the funeral?”

  “Yes, that strange man in the beard.”

  “Why didn’t anyone tell me?”

  “Your father never wanted you to know. And honestly, I don’t want anything to do with him. He’s not well.”

  “What do you mean, ‘not well’? What do you mean, he has problems?”

  “Drug problems,” she says. “That’s part of the reason why your father never wanted you to know about him, really. I mean, that sounds awful, but really it’s just that he didn’t want you to try to get close to him. He’s crazy, his mother is crazy—they’re all crazy, to be honest. I was surprised he’s not in a room with padded walls, to tell you the truth … Now, I know it’s a lot to take in, but please try not to worry about it. And please don’t contact him.”

  “Try not to worry about it? Who were those other guys at the funeral? More secret relatives?”

  “I honestly don’t know,” she says. “Your father lived a lot of lives before me. And I don’t think it’s a good idea for you to go back to that Forensics Squad. I don’t like you digging up ancient history, obsessing on death. It’s not healthy.”

  I say nothing. What I think is this: Dumb move, Mom. If you wanted to make sure that I did stay in Forensics, that’s all you’d have to say.

  I spend the rest of the evening doing my best to ignore Mom and the world. I go up to my room and just pace and think and then eventually fall asleep. So then, of course, when it’s time to actually go to bed for the night, I’m wide-awake. All these weird thoughts are running through my mind. How can I really write a book of my dad’s advice if I don’t know anything about his life? What good would it accomplish? Am I trying to bring him back from the dead with this project? Just saying that word—“dead”—or thinking it, rather, is still hard for me. As that dreaded word enters my mind, I feel my eyes go dark, like I can’t process the word while thinking of it. How could I have avoided it for the past sixteen and three-quarters years? Just as life is all around, so too is death.

  “Okay,” I tell myself. “Quit being so glum, GL. You’re gonna end up wearing bondage pants and looking like a raccoon if you keep up on this morbid path.” Working on this book will allow me to spend time in the company of the man, or pretend to, anyway. And once it is completed, I could leaf through the pages, drown myself in his words, and live the lie that he is still alive.

  But what do I know about the man? What do I really know? I know his father’s name was Guy. That I definitely know. It is a conversation we had many times whenever I would complain. Why would I complain? Because it’s the twenty-first century and my name is Guy! “It’s a good name, Guy,” Dad would say. “A warrior name. The name of my father. The name of Guy Fawkes. The name of Guy de Maupassant. The name of Sir Guy of Gisborne.” (I have no idea who these people are.)

  I also know his mom’s name was Lana. “Lana Langman.” Every time her name came up, Dad would do the “say it ten times fast” challenge. Lana Langman. Lana Langman. Lana Langman. Lana Langman. Lana Langman. Lana Langman. Lana Langman. Lana Langman. Lana Langman. Lana Langman. Sounds like total gibberish. Still cracks me up. Good stuff. But I don’t know enough!

  I get up and grab a notebook. I flip to a blank page and stare at it, its white rectangular form looking to me like a tombstone of pure marble. It is up to me to write an epitaph. Maybe this book isn’t just going to be a list of funny/wise things Dad said. Maybe it’s going to be more. Maybe it’s going to tell all of it. All of him. Maybe all of me. I begin to write. My sweaty fingers struggle to grip the pen as I write those all-powerful words: CHAPTER ONE.

  “Rules for Living”: The Francis Langman Story

  CHAPTER ONE

  “It is what it is.” —FRANCIS LANGMAN

  Francis Langman of Berry Ridge, New Jersey, was born in Newark in 1929. His parents were Guy and Lana Langman. Say “Lana Langman” ten times fast. Guy’s nickname was “Wolf,” but no one knows why. They lived in Newark and worked in a clothing shop.

  Francis, aka “Fran the Man” [okay, no one called him that but himself], entered this world at the beginning of the Great Depression but lived a happy young life of stickball and chasing girls. He hung out with the other Jews on Prince Street and once got kicked out of synagogue for yelling “Jesus Christ, could someone turn on a fan?” Well, it was hot in there.

  From these modest beginnings he would build a life of unusual richness, traveling the globe and banging a l
ot of hot ladies. He knocked up some lady and had a son! Jerk. He became a scuba diver, invented the Langman valve using his knowledge of bagel making, and supposedly had a brief career as a bullfighter. Although here possibly the author is thinking of Ernest Hemingway. Pretty sure he smoked weed back then. That is, Francis. Possibly Hemingway too. Probably. How else would he justify that beard?

  On one scuba trip, Francis discovered sunken treasure. Who does that? Francis Langman, that’s who. He sold most of the very valuable Spanish coins, but saved three in an old cigar box. He invested most of the earnings. Some schemes made him money and some lost him money. (“Never do business in a country where the national currency is goat,” he once said. Useful advice.) One smart move: he started buying property with some extra cash in North Jersey and NYC in the 1970s and it would make him a rich man.

  Later, he became a father a second time. This son, Guy, would also like to travel the globe and bang lots of hot ladies, or at least bang a lot of hot ladies. For the most part, he spends his time playing video games and arguing with nerds about murder.

  It’s clear that there are some holes in this book. And there is only one way to fill in the gaps. First I have to find my long-lost brother the possible psychopath. I have some serious research to do.

  CHAPTER NINE

  I ponder that mystery for a while, then another mystery presents itself. It begins like this: At the next session of Forensics Squad, Mr. Z writes on the board THE FORENSIC ART OF HANDWRITING. Woo-hoo. Who among us doesn’t love handwriting? I mean handwriting?! It’s like writing! With your hands! I’ll stop now. The Big Z begins with a few prepared remarks. “You can try, but you can’t really change your handwriting,” he says. “Once you learn how to form letters, it’s hardwired into your brain in a complicated process. Even people who lose both arms and end up writing with their mouths eventually develop a handwriting—or should I say mouth-writing—style that is very similar to the way they wrote when they had their hands …”

  This is sort of interesting, and I look around the room to see everyone’s reactions. TK casts his eyes about suspiciously and then puts his pen in his mouth and starts writing something. He shrugs and seems pleased with the results of his experiment. Maureen has a very serious look on her face. Raquel is not paying much attention at all. As usual, she is flipping through her purse, as if it’s a magical container that somehow holds all the crap in the world in its minute interior. Maybe it does.