Free A Farewell to Legs by JEFFREY COHEN

is the disgruntled kind, WUSS is now
populated by 250 professional and semi-professional screenwriters
(like me), who leave messages for each other.
    One of the great advantages of WUSS is the vast
depth of knowledge that members can tap. If you need to know about
the migrating patterns of Canadian geese, the caliber of the most
widely circulated gun in America, the lyricist of “Do Wah Ditty
Ditty,” or the perfect way to cook lamb chops, there’s always
somebody to ask.
    I logged on that morning and read my messages for
the day— there were two. One was from Margaret Fishman, a
screenwriter and novelist who wanted to know if New Jersey really
had more Mafia members per square mile than any other state. The
other was from Gene Manelli, a comedy writer with some fringe
credits, which put him a few rungs up the ladder from me. Gene was
continuing a thread of conversation that between the two of us had
degenerated into a war of puns. Don’t ask me to detail it— you’d
wake up screaming for weeks.
    I left a message addressed to “ALL.” It read:
“Anyone with info about the recently deceased conservative lobbyist
Louis Gibson, please get in touch privately. There’s no money in it
(for YOU), but it will be greatly appreciated.”
    Once that was done, I logged off the Net and made
yet another follow-up phone call on the Star-Ledger story.
This time, I actually got the person I needed, spent 25 minutes
asking questions I didn’t entirely understand, and wrote down
answers I didn’t understand at all. Hey, it’s a living.
    That left one more interview for the article, and I
was awaiting a callback on that one. I decided to concentrate on
the “Case of the Stinky Bomb.”
    Every year, the Parent Teacher Organization (PTO,
not PTA, so they don’t have to pay dues) of Midland Heights
publishes what it calls “Find-A-Friend,” the list of every child in
the school district (who sends in a form at the beginning of the
school year), with address, phone number, and parents’ names. This
year, it was rumored, email addresses (for the kids!) would be
added, but since it was only October, the Find-A-Friend for this
year hadn’t come out yet. The book is a resource so central to a
family’s life it can often supplant the local phone book, and
missing this year’s edition would be a major handicap.
    Luckily, there was last year’s. I picked it up off
the shelf on my desk (the Find-A-Friend is rarely far from my
grasp) and started leafing through the pages, hoping to be hit on
the head with the names of kids who might perpetrate such a
dastardly crime.
    I don’t like to sound callous about it, but the fact
is, if you live in a small community long enough, and your children
go to the public schools, you pretty much know which kids are more
likely to flout authority, and which ones are going to play by the
rules or die. So, while I’ll admit that this was a fishing
expedition of the worst kind, it was not a witch hunt.
    Besides, I had nothing to go on.
    And after a good long look at pretty much every name
in the Midland Heights school system, I had compiled a list of
eight extreme long shots. In other words, I still had a grand total
of nothing to go on. But I had killed an hour, and in freelance
writing school, they teach that an hour killed is never a bad
thing. Especially if you’ve avoided paying work.
    I started in on the third act of the mystery
screenplay. Screenwriting, for those of you sensible enough never
to have tried it, is traditionally done in three acts. And the acts
are defined in no better terms than those of Julius Epstein, who,
with his brother Philip and Howard Koch, wrote a little picture
called Casablanca that you might have seen, so he should
know.
    “In the first act,” Epstein said, “your main
character gets caught up a tree. In the second act, people come out
and throw rocks at him. And in the third act, he gets down out of
the tree.”
    So my bogus Aaron Tucker stand-in, Andy Trainor