A Farewell to Legs (21 page)

“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.

B
ecause 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
investigation.

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.

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.

W
e 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.”