A Farewell to Legs

by JEFFREY COHEN

  “How you doing, Aaron?” he said. “Would you look at that kid? Black shoes. Running on my gym floor wearing black shoes. And do they stop him? No. You know what that’s going to do to my floor?”

  “Maybe the kid can’t afford a separate pair of shoes for gym, Reese,” I said.

  He snorted. “In this town? Kid could probably afford a separate pair of shoes for each class in the day.” I didn’t have the heart to tell him my son’s shoes had needed replacing for a month and a half.

  “Hey, Reese, what do you know about this stink bomb thing? Did they ever figure out who did it?” I had to protect my source, and clearly, if “they” had found out, she’d know about it.

  He turned, looking me up and down for a second. “That was the damnedest thing,” Reese said. “I couldn’t figure it out.”

  “Were you here each time?”

  “Of course I was here,” he said, as if the idea of the school being open without him was patently absurd. “I was near the locker room when it happened, even. Heard some running as I turned the corner. The girls inside were already screaming. Felt like I let them down, you know.”

  “You can’t be everywhere.”

  “No, but I should have been there. Kids put their trust in you, Mrs. Mignano puts her trust in you, you should be able to protect. . .” It was clearly a personal affront to Reese that some 10-year-old had decided to patronize the Kwik N’ EZ and have some fun.

  “Anything you can tell me that might point me in a direction?”

  “Why, Aaron?” he asked. “You writing about it?”

  “Maybe,” I said. (Sure. I’m writing about it. You’re reading about it, aren’t you?)

  “The first one was the gym,” Reese said. “That wasn’t that bad, because it was just one bomb, and it’s such a big room, with doors that open to the outside, it didn’t make that much of a stink.”

  “But the parents did,” I suggested.

  He widened his eyes. “Oh, you better believe it!” Reese said. “Anne got calls all that morning—the phone was ringing before the fumes cleared. It’s amazing how fast they work.”

  “The second one was the boys’ room?” I asked, trying to keep him on topic.

  “Yeah, that was probably the worst one,” he shook his head. “Small space, tiny window. There were three boys in there at the time.”

  “Did you see it?”

  “No,” he lamented, shaking his head. The man looked as if someone had suggested he’d betrayed his country and cheated on his wife. “I was downstairs cleaning up where some little third grader had gotten sick.”

  “You can’t be everywhere at once,” I repeated. “Tell me about the locker room.”

  “Well, I’ll tell you,” he said. “I didn’t see anybody in the area before, and naturally afterward, all I heard was screaming and footsteps. But I can tell you one thing.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Whoever did it had on the right sneakers. Wasn’t a scuff mark on that floor. No, sir.”

  Somehow, that observation didn’t seem like it was going to be a tremendous amount of help to me.

  Chapter

  Eleven

  Because my faith in my agent was roughly equivalent to my faith in my cable company to lower its rates, I spent much of the morning going through the Hollywood Creative Directory. The HCD, as we just-barely-outsiders call it, is an exhaustively detailed list of production companies in Hollywood (or thereabouts), their personnel, their credits, and little details like their addresses, phone numbers, faxes, and email addresses. And if that sounds like it ought to cost you a pretty penny, rest assured that it does. Three times a year.

  What you do is, you go through the HCD in alphabetical order, looking for companies which you believe might be interested in the letter-perfect screenplay you’ve just completed. You compile a list of those which have done something similar in the past, or are run by an actor/actress/producer/director whom you think might be just right for the material in some way. Once you’ve narrowed your list down to the merely implausible, rather than the ridiculous, you can begin the “pitching” process, long distance style.

  I should point out that absolutely none of this is done until you have filled out the appropriate forms, printed out a copy of the opus, written a check for $35, and made sure you send all that to the Registrar of Copyrights at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. Since I had just come back from said nation’s capital, I had dropped the package off on Independence Avenue personally. The truly dedicated screenwriter should also do all that stuff and send a copy to the Writers Guild of America, which registers screenplays in roughly the same way the Copyright Office does. This facilitates all sorts of nasty lawsuits should one be lucky enough to be plagiarized later on.

  It took about two hours to compile the pitch list for “Minivan,” since there are a lot of production companies in Hollywood, and I am an ambitious bastard. Once I had it properly compiled, I wrote another in a distressingly long series of brilliant cover letters, which emphasized the story, and not what a swell writer I am, and urged the producers on the list to hurry the heck up and request a copy of the script this very second, before the guy in the next cubicle became a mogul by leaping on the material first. The first rule of Hollywood is: Paranoia is your friend.

  After spending a good deal of time learning how to use Microsoft Word for the Mac to personalize form letters, I was ready to start printing out cover letters. But strangely, all this time, my mind had not been on the script—I’d been thinking about the stink bomb, the rock through the window, and the hair from a dead man that was found in Cherie Braxton’s bedroom.

  My leased Epson printer spit out letter after letter, and I began the process of faxing the ones that could be faxed. Faxing is quick (although not as quick as email) and relatively cheap (five cents a minute, rather than 37 cents a letter), and makes me feel better, because I don’t have to wait five days for a letter to get to California from New Jersey before I can expect the bidding war to begin on my phone. Hey, we must cling tightly to our dreams.

  It struck me that I hadn’t made any progress on anything. While I mindlessly faxed letter after letter, I wasn’t any closer to finding out who the stink bomber was. Preston Burke may or may not have chucked a stone through my unexpectedly expensive front window, but if he hadn’t, who had, and why? And how in the name of Sydney Greenstreet did the hair of a man who had died in the Texas electric chair seven years earlier find its way into a Washington, D.C. secretary’s (oops, administrative assistant’s) bedroom while a violent crime was being committed?

  At least on the Madlyn Beckwirth story, I had been able to excuse myself because I wasn’t, and still am not, a private investigator. I could overlook the fact that I didn’t know what I was doing because I wasn’t expected to know what I was doing. I had spent so much time telling people I wasn’t a detective that I very nearly missed many of the most obvious clues in the story.

  This time, though, I wasn’t being asked to do anything a good reporter shouldn’t be able to do. Yes, I was reporting in areas that were out of my normal expertise, but the technique of reporting remains the same no matter what the subject matter. I should have been able to get farther along than this.

  Was Mahoney right, that I was letting 25-year-old lust for Stephanie cloud my judgment? Honestly probing my feelings, I had to say that wasn’t the case. For one thing, I had much greater lust for Abby these days, and besides, the rest of Legs’ family was so creepy that the murderer could have been any of them and not disturb my fantasy lust at all. So I discounted the Mahoney Theory.

  Maybe there was just too much to think about—the knife, the stink bomb, the window—could be I was just spreading myself too thin and not doing justice to any of the things I should have been investigating.

  I had to better organize my day. Then I’d see if I couldn’t tackle one thing in the morning, like the stink bomb, then devote the time before the kids got home to the front window investigati
on.

  The last producer fax was crawling its way through the machine when the phone rang, and Mahoney, sounding like he was calling from Calcutta, was on the other line.

  “You have a cell phone?” I asked incredulously.

  “Of course I have a cell phone!” he roared through the sea of static. “I spend my day in a rickety van on the road all over New Jersey, picking up other cars that have broken down on the side of the highway in god knows what isolated area. If I didn’t have a cell phone, I’d be a complete idiot!” This from a man who complains because he can’t find current 8-track cassettes to play in his van.

  “So what have you accomplished?” I asked.

  “It’s nice talking to you, too,” he said. “How was Washington?”

  “A lot like Detroit, but for all the politics,” I told him. “The usual amount of unpleasantness and backstabbing.”

  “Or, in this case, frontstabbing.”

  “Good point.”

  “I’ve gotten The Guys together, and we’re meeting at a restaurant near you Wednesday night. That’s tomorrow. That okay with Abby?” Mahoney didn’t much care about keeping things convenient for me, but he would lay down his life to save Abigail thirty-five cents on a melon at Stop & Shop. I’ve known him for 27 years, and she’s known him since she met me. Loyalty is a funny thing.

  “I’ll check with her, but I think it’s okay. Where are we meeting?”

  “That place J.P. Mugglebuggle’s, or whatever.”

  “R. W. Muntbugger’s?” It figures. I go out to eat twice in the same month, and it turns out to be the same restaurant.

  “Yeah, is that okay, or do you want to go to the Ethiopian place?” Mahoney is an advocate of international dining.

  “I don’t understand the concept of Ethiopian cuisine,” I said. “Isn’t that where they’re always having famines?”

  “You, sir, are a vulgarian,” he said with an upper-crust accent that a true Harvard graduate couldn’t tell from the real thing.

  “I have been called worse things,” I said. “Just out of curiosity, how would you find out who threw a rock through your window?”

  At just about that moment, I could practically see Mahoney stretching his massive, powerful body behind the wheel of that van and knitting his brow.

  “I’d look for the stupidest person I could find.”

  “Why?”

  “Think about it,” he said with a snarl. “Would you throw a rock through my window?”

  That didn’t help much, either.

  Chapter

  Twelve

  I spent my lunch hour on the Internet, looking up the shining life record of Branford T. Purell. A lovely man, Mr. Purell had roamed the highways of West Texas, particularly the area of Midland/Odessa, where he had once worked on an oil rig, or as they call it in the Lone Star State, an “all reeig.” Once the area’s oil business, um, dried up, Purell took the whole unemployment thing personally, and vented his frustration on virtually any woman who happened to be walking along the road alone. He shot five of them, three fatally, for no discernible reason. The two he didn’t kill eventually recovered. Not having the same concerns as Preston Burke’s girlfriend, they fingered him pretty quickly, and his trial had roughly the same outcome as Burke’s. The difference was, Purell’s conviction stuck. Something to do with the fact that he was actually guilty.

  Purell had been the kind of guy who would blame everyone else for his problems. To the day he died, he claimed the women were “asking for it by walking out there alone.” As we all know, the international symbol for a woman who hopes to die by shotgun blast is one who walks alongside the highway. It makes perfect sense when you have the right point of view.

  Virtually nobody except the most vehement death penalty opponents tried to stay Purell’s execution. His own sister, contacted by his attorney, refused to put in a clemency request to the governor. Of course, this was Texas, and they’d just as soon execute somebody there as go out for a hamburger, so it’s possible Purell’s sister was just looking to spice up an otherwise dull Tuesday evening. Hey, some siblings are closer than others.

  Lucille and her son Avery were the only “kin” Purell left behind, and from the look of it, they were not a close family. Lucille attended the execution, but brought a date, and after it was over, signed autographs outside the prison for a good long while seeking out television reporters and granting interviews. She made her 15 minutes of fame last more than twice that long.

  It wasn’t a difficult thing to get Lucille Purell Watkins’s phone number from directory assistance. These days, you just dial 411 and James Earl Jones will tell you anybody’s phone number, so long as you’re a Verizon customer. Except his own. Maybe Verizon wants us to believe that 411 is James Earl Jones’ phone number.

  Lucille wasn’t home, but miracle of miracles, she did have an answering machine, one that played “The Yellow Rose of Texas” while she instructed me to “go ahead and leave a message.” So I went ahead and left one.

  I had nothing left to do except run down the parents of the usual suspects I’d taken out of the “Find-A-Friend” directory, and that was just a millimeter above nothing. But I had only a day and a half left, and I’d stupidly promised Anne I’d have something for her before the Board of Education meeting Thursday night. Sometimes, being gallant is overrated.

  Trying my best to gather enthusiasm, I checked the clock. Two hours before the kids got home—plenty of time to see at least two parents. Why call ahead?

  I got the list from my reporter’s notebook, put on my denim jacket, and headed out the door.

  Standing on the sidewalk in front of my house, gazing into the lovely garbage-bag-and-cardboard patch I’d made from the remains of my front window, was Preston Burke.

  Chapter

  Thirteen

  We stared at each other for a long moment. “What are you doing here?” Preston Burke asked me.

  “Isn’t that supposed to be my line, Preston?” I asked.

  He looked positively stunned, standing in the sunshine outside my house. He squinted up at me, trying to make sense of it all. “Isn’t this Abigail Stein’s house?”

  So that was it. He’d looked up Abby’s address somewhere, maybe in the state’s lawyer’s directory, and come down here to do whatever mischief he’d planned for this visit. He hadn’t expected anyone, least of all me, to be here while he left her his flaming bag of dog poop, or toilet papered her tree.

  The one thing I had to do now was convince the man he’d made a mistake. I wanted to be sure he never came looking for Abby again.

  “This is my house,” I said, honestly enough.

  “Then, why did the reverse phone book list this as Abigail Stein’s house?” Burke wasn’t challenging me. He was asking a sincere question.

  “I couldn’t begin to tell you,” I said, which was also true. At least, I couldn’t begin to tell him if I wanted to protect my wife.

  He sat down on the front steps, and I thought he was going to cry. “How am I going to find Abigail Stein?” Burke said, seemingly in despair.

  “Why are you looking for Ms. Stein?” I asked, as innocently as I could muster. “I heard the charges against you had been dropped. I assume your business with her is done.”

  Burke did a double take Soupy Sales would have envied. “Oh, it is,” he said. “I’m not here in a professional capacity.”

  “You’re here on an amateur basis?”

  “No, you don’t understand.” The understatement of the week. “I’m looking for Abigail Stein on personal business.” He sucked in his breath, screwing up his courage. “I’m in love with her.”

  I’m ashamed of myself, but I do recall letting out a laugh. “You’re. . . in love with Abigail Stein?”

  “Is that so amusing?”

  I walked down and sat next to him. “I’m sorry, Preston. You have to understand. Abigail Stein is my wife.”

  To truly empathize with the look in Burke’s eyes, you have to know what it
is to be in love with Abby. To have aspired to someone so close to perfection, and then have the rug pulled out from under you. . . it’s a feeling I hope never to actually have myself.

  “Your wife?”

  “Yes,” I told him. “We’ve been married for fourteen years. We have a twelve-year-old son and an eight-year-old daughter.” I actually reached into my jacket for my wallet, and showed him pictures of my children. This, to a man I was pretty sure five minutes ago was a dangerous maniac.

  “Oh, my. . .” Preston Burke was coming apart at the seams, and I felt awful for him. “All that time when she was working on my case, the only thing that got me through was thinking, ‘once this is over, I’ll go and I’ll ask her out.’ And now. . .”

  It occurred to me that he should have seen Abby’s wedding ring during all those visits, but some people are less observant than, let’s say, eighty percent of the population. “I understand how you feel,” I told him. “I’m sorry. I got to her fifteen years before you did.”

  “I thought you said fourteen.” Ah. Now it was becoming even clearer. Preston Burke was, in all probability, an adult Asperger’s Syndrome patient, and he didn’t even know it. It happens all the time, and after you’ve lived with it for a while, you can spot them a block and a half away.

  “We dated for a year before we got married, Preston.”

  “How come she’s not Abigail Tucker?” Burke was trying to trip me up, prove that Abby wasn’t really my wife.

  “Not all women change their names when they get married.”

  He absorbed that. It was all coming down on Burke at once, but he was used to readjusting his expectations. He stood up. “What happened to your window?” he asked.

  I didn’t have the heart to tell him. Until very recently, I thought he had happened to my window. “Somebody threw a rock through it,” I told him.

  “Why?”

  “I have no idea,” I answered honestly.