The Mayor of Lexington Avenue Read Online Free

next week talking about the young woman and describing her, Rudy started to wonder. He only knew for sure when the Bass Creek Gazette finally obtained a picture of Lucy and published it on the front page a week after her body was discovered. Rudy was shocked. He went to the Gazette building, which was a block away from the hotel on Oak Street, and bought every paper for the last week. Then he carefully read everything about the murder of Lucy Ochoa.
    According to the coroner, the murder had happened on Thursday, January 16th, or early in the morning of the 17th. Rudy retraced the days in his mind. That was the same night I was there! The time of death freaked him out even more. The coroner had estimated the time of death to have been somewhere between 10 p.m. and 2 a.m. Rudy knew he had locked up the convenience store at eleven and gone directly to Lucy’s trailer, but he wasn’t sure what time he’d left. He read further: Her throat had been cut, probably with a knife. There were no signs of a break-in or a robbery.
    After he’d read everything, Rudy sat and thought about it for a long time. He’d been at the murder scene during the time the murder was supposed to have happened. But Lucy was fine the last time he saw her. She didn’t seem to have any problems pushing him out the door. Should he go to the police with what he knew? That idea scared him. They were nice enough when they came in the store but he’d seen them beating up a guy on the street one night, a guy he knew to be a harmless old drunk, and they did it to other innocent people, too—he’d seen it on TV.
    At that moment, it hit Rudy like a bullet to the brain that he might actually be a suspect and that the police might try to make him confess, just like they did to people on TV. I’m not confessing to nothing, he told himself. What should I do? Should I tell Mom? He’d have to tell her about why he was at Lucy’s house—and about the drinking. That just wasn’t going to work. In the end, he decided to do nothing. Nobody knows I was in her house, he concluded, and promptly tried not to think about it again.
    By the end of the week, the police had analyzed all the blood samples: from Lucy’s body, the bed, the carpet and the pieces of glass. The neighborhood had been canvassed but most of the neighbors hadn’t seen or heard anything unusual that night. Pilar Rodriguez remembered someone with dark hair throwing up on her lawn somewhere around midnight, but she hadn’t gotten a good look at his face. Maybe it was that kid from the convenience store—Rudy was his name—but she really couldn’t be sure. Farther down the block, a young man named Ray Castro said that he’d seen someone, a tall, dark-haired man, go in Lucy’s trailer sometime after eleven and then come stumbling down the street from that direction less than an hour later and puke in the Rodriguezes’ front yard. His friend José Guerrero had seen the same thing. There had been a third person with them that night, a guy named Geronimo, but neither knew his last name and he couldn’t be located. And neither of them mentioned his relationship with Lucy or that he’d headed that way after they’d all seen the dark-haired guy.
    The only bombshell—and it really wasn’t a bombshell yet because the only person Harry Tuthill told was Wesley Brume—was the coroner’s aside to Brume that Lucy had had sexual intercourse that evening. He had managed to extract a semen sample and had checked for signs of rape. There were none.
    On Friday morning, January 24th, Wes Brume was summoned to the office of Clay Evans IV, the Cobb County state attorney, to discuss the evidence in the Lucy Ochoa murder. The state attorney’s office was just down the block from the police department, so it was a short trip for Brume. The woman’s murder had already been headlines across the state and Clay wanted it solved and the perpetrator brought to trial while interest was still at least lukewarm. Too