A Farewell to Legs: An Aaron Tucker Mystery - By Jeffrey Cohen Page 0,63

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.

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