It Happened One Knife

by JEFFREY COHEN

  “There aren’t that many who can back it up,” Dutton noted. Touché.

  “Were there any visitors at the Home that night? Maybe someone else . . .”

  “Maybe, maybe, maybe.” Dutton shook his head. “I didn’t get the complete report; I don’t think it’s even written yet. Elliot. Lillis is dead. You’ll have to accept it eventually. ”

  “Why can’t I talk to the Englewood cops?” I asked him. “They’re not telling you everything.”

  His eyes widened, and he looked amused. “So they’re going to tell you?”

  “I want to talk to them.” When in doubt, act like a four-year-old.

  “Be my guest,” Dutton said, hands laced behind his head, relaxing. “How do you think you’ll talk your way in? You’re not going to pretend you work for a fake newspaper again, are you?”

  I hung my head, but looked at him. “You knew about that?”

  “I’m the chief of police. I see all, and know all.”

  “I thought that was a guy in the justice department. Look, Chief, I’m going up there to talk to the Englewood detectives working on the case. Now, I’ll keep your name out of it . . .”

  “Big of you,” Dutton said.

  “. . . but I am going up there. And I don’t care what kind of deception I have to use, or what lies I have to tell. Harry Lillis was an important figure in my life, and I’m not going to just let him die without anyone looking into it deeply enough. These guys probably think that it was only an accidental fire, just like the cops in L.A. fifty years ago thought Vivian Reynolds died in an accidental fire. It’s the easy solution, and you’ll have to forgive me, but cops generally like easy solutions. They’re not going to dig unless someone makes them, so I am going up there.”

  Dutton hadn’t liked the comment about cops and easy solutions, and he raised a finger to scold me, but he didn’t get a chance. The phone rang, and, still staring at him, I picked it up.

  “Comedy Tonight.”

  “Is this Elliot Freed?”

  I admitted it was.

  “This is Detective Lieutenant Benjamin Honig of the Englewood Police Department. Mr. Freed, we are looking into the death of Harry Lillis, and I’m afraid I’ll have to ask you to come in for an interview.”

  I stared at the phone for a moment. “I’m not sure I can make it,” I said. Hell, all of a sudden the cops were looking for me? Did I need a lawyer?

  “It’s very important,” Honig said. “But I can tell you that you’re not in any trouble, Mr. Freed. We’re hoping you can help us. Some aspects of the incident are not entirely consistent. ”

  “Can you send a car?” I asked.

  AFTER gloating for a few minutes to Dutton, I summoned the staff to the projection booth so we could begin our little scripted pageant. I found Anthony at the base of the stairs to the balcony, apparently in the midst of an argument with his father, who looked smaller than usual as his son berated him. It was one of those moments when I didn’t mind not having children.

  “It’s my life, not yours,” Anthony was saying to Michael Pagliarulo. “If this is because you pay my tuition . . .”

  “It’s not about money. You know it’s not about money,” his father told him. “If it was about money, I’d want you to quit school, so I wouldn’t have to pay for it.”

  “Meeting upstairs,” I said, hoping the next few minutes would defuse the tension between the two of them.

  Anthony looked confused to see Dutton in the projection booth, as did Sophie and Jonathan when they arrived, but Anthony’s look was a warier one. Could he have known why the chief was there? Could this really have all been a scam of some sort on Anthony’s part?

  Sophie, all teenage impatience, lowered one eyebrow and looked through her bangs, which were hanging in her eyes. Anything involving men had to be bad, and she was stuck in a room with five of them. Well, four and a half men: Jonathan was wearing a SpongeBob T-shirt and the same leather flip-flops he seemed to wear in all weather. Sophie barely looked at him.

  Dutton took charge, being the largest, most weapon-carrying person in the crowded room. “I’m glad you were all available on such short notice,” he said.

  “We all work here,” Sophie told him. She was an equal-opportunity obvious-noter. “Except Anthony’s dad.” Michael Pagliarulo nodded in her direction, seemingly afraid to get on Sophie’s bad side, and I didn’t blame him.

  “Yes,” Dutton had to agree. He did his best to regain what little dignity could be had in a room built for one person that was currently holding six. “As you know, the night of the screening of . . .” He actually referred to a reporter’s notebook he pulled from his back pocket.

  “Killin’ Time,” Anthony said, his voice so dry I swear dust flew from his mouth.

  “Yes,” Dutton said again. After being abused by my staff for months, there was a certain guilty pleasure, I admit, in watching them do it to someone else. “On that night, the only copy of Killin’ Time vanished from this booth right after the show.”

  Sophie gave him a look that would probably have vaporized a weaker man. “Do you think one of us stole Anthony’s movie?” she hissed.

  “That’s just the point,” Dutton answered. He picked up the screwdriver from the control table and knelt down to begin opening the panel on the floor, which we had loosened earlier (Dutton wanted to better heighten the drama of the moment). It took just a few seconds to get the screws loose. “I don’t think anybody stole Anthony’s movie.”

  The booth door opened, and Sharon stuck her head in. “Elliot?” she called. “You in here?”

  “Yeah, come on in,” I offered. “We’re reenacting the stateroom scene from A Night at the Opera.”

  Sharon squeezed her way into the booth and took in the scene. I’d told her Dutton was coming to the theatre, but hadn’t told her why.

  “What are you talking about?” Michael Pagliarulo asked Dutton. “If nobody stole the movie, where is it? Wouldn’t it still be here?”

  “Exactly.” Dutton was savoring his moment. “Wouldn’t it?” He pulled up the plywood panel and set it aside.

  I watched their faces. Nobody looked especially guilty, although Sophie did stifle a yawn.

  “Are you saying the reels are in there?” Anthony asked, spoiling Dutton’s surprise.

  The chief was gracious about it; he didn’t shoot Anthony for spilling the beans. “Yes, that’s what I mean,” he said. And he reached inside the storage compartment.

  Then Dutton’s expression changed from one of slight disappointment but great anticipation to one of utter confusion and more than slight disappointment. He reached inside the compartment again. Deeper. Until his arm was pretty much out of sight.

  Anthony got down on the floor next to him. “What’s wrong, Chief?” he asked. “Can’t you lift them?”

  Dutton stared directly at me when he said, “No. The problem is the reels aren’t here anymore.”

  Anthony and Sophie turned their heads to stare at me, too. I could feel their eyes burning into my cheeks, and it wasn’t a pleasant, warming feeling. Anthony’s father looked at the chief, wondering why such a man would play this mean trick on his son.

  “Wow,” Jonathan said, squinting into the storage compartment. “There’s all kinds of wrenches down there.”

  But I was staring at Sharon, who looked strangely amused.

  26

  SATURDAY

  DETECTIVE Lieutenant Benjamin Honig was a tall, broadly built man with curly hair going prematurely white. He had a prominent nose and stared down it at me, but I wasn’t intimidated. I was sitting in front of his municipal desk, in a metal chair with a leather cushion on it, drinking coffee that wasn’t all that bad, but I had to make believe it was, because it had been brewed in a police station.

  I took a sip and made a face. “Ugh.” I can play along.

  Honig nodded. “I know,” he said. “It’s really amazing. You can go out and buy the best coffeemaker on the market, and if you install it in a police s
tation, the coffee comes out tasting like mud.” He slurped down much of his freshly poured cup, and sat behind his desk. “Now then,” he said, lumping two words with opposite definitions against each other. “Harry Lillis.”

  It’s possible that at the drop of Lillis’s name, I was supposed to go to my knees and confess, because Honig just looked at me for a long moment. I didn’t confess, because I was relatively sure I hadn’t killed Lillis, so Honig eventually moved on.

  “Harry Lillis,” he repeated, but didn’t wait as long for my tear-soaked breakdown this time. “The body was discovered in an unrecognizable state in a gazebo seventy-five yards from the rear entrance of the Lillian Booth Actors’ Home. Firefighters on the scene reported it was there when they arrived, lying on the wooden floor of the gazebo, which was engulfed in flames.” He was reading from a report he held on a clipboard. Underneath the report, also attached to the clipboard, was today’s New York Times crossword puzzle, folded neatly to fit on the board.

  “Thank you,” I said. “Can I leave now?”

  “We haven’t even gotten to you yet,” Honig said, apparently having missed my masterfully ironic tone. He went back to the report. “Body was badly burned, no fingerprints left, no hair, no clothing, except for a few pieces of burned cloth that appear to match the shirt Lillis was seen wearing earlier that evening.”

  “Dental records?” I asked. What the hell; I was drinking the man’s coffee, and actually got up to refill the cup.

  “Lillis had a full set of dentures, which were found next to the body. Took us a while to find them in all the ash, but they were there.”

  I stopped in mid-refill. “Next to the body? Not in his mouth?”

  “Apparently they fell out as the body burned. They were a few inches away, on the floor, a little melted.” Honig wasn’t wearing glasses to read, unlike Dutton, who favors half-glasses. Maybe he was wearing bifocal contact lenses.

  “We sure they were his?” I asked.

  Honig gave me a look that read, “What’s this we stuff, kemosabe?” He said, “Dentures are made with the patient’s name on a small piece of paper that is molded directly into the plastic. They were Lillis’s teeth, all right.”

  That took the wind out of my sails.

  “I’m sorry for your loss.” Homicide detectives must say that in their sleep.

  “He was a legend. And he was getting to be a friend.” I bent my head, and my right thumb and forefinger went to the bridge of my nose. Harry was dead. I looked up at Honig. “Lieutenant, why am I here?”

  He glanced back down at the report. “Four nights before Lillis died, he called you from the Booth Actors’ Home. Is that correct?”

  I nodded.

  “He told you that his ex-partner had threatened to kill him.”

  I blinked. “How did you know . . . ?”

  “Chief Dutton in Midland Heights told me about that. We also have reports from the NYPD of two complaints you made, and then withdrew, against the ex-partner, Mr. Townes, and his son. Said they shot at you and sent you a cartoon character clock in a box.”

  “Well, when you say it like that, it doesn’t sound scary,” I said.

  “Did Lillis tell you Townes wanted to kill him?”

  I thought about exactly what Harry had said. It seemed like months ago, but it had only been a little more than a week. “He said that Townes had implied he could kill Harry if Harry made any more comments about Townes possibly killing his wife.”

  Honig’s jaw dropped a couple of feet. “Townes killed Vivian Reynolds?” Oh lord, another classic comedy freak. Somehow, they all find me, eventually.

  “That’s what Harry said. I don’t know if it’s true.”

  “How?”

  I grimaced. “Harry said he strangled her and then . . .”

  “And then what?” Honig’s eyebrows had merged.

  “And then set their house on fire to cover his tracks.”

  Honig sat back in his chair and blinked a few times, digesting the information. “Lillis set the fire in Bel Air?” He was a fan. “Did he use kerosene?” he asked.

  That made me blink. “To set the fire?” Honig nodded. “How the hell would I know? Why? Was there kerosene found in the gazebo?”

  “We’re not sure yet,” Honig answered. “Could be kerosene, could be chemical fertilizer from the garden shed. That stuff is pretty flammable.”

  “Was it in the gazebo?”

  “It was on the body,” Honig said. “A lot.”

  Wait a second; I’m slow on the uptake. “So we’re talking about a murder here, for sure?” I asked.

  “Unless Lillis decided to immolate himself, I’d say yes,” Honig answered. “And for that matter, even if he didn’t.”

  “What does that mean?”

  Honig’s lips flattened out; he looked like he’d tasted something awful. “It means—and I don’t want this repeated anywhere—that the head was set at a strange angle, and might have had a broken neck. As if . . .”

  “As if someone strangled him, and then set the body on fire to cover his tracks.” I sat back and forgot the coffee.

  “So I need to know from you, Mr. Freed, exactly how much you know about the Vivian Reynolds case, and how it relates to Les Townes.”

  I spent the better part of an hour detailing for Honig the research I’d done on Vivian Reynolds’s death, and how none of it could be substantiated. I told him about my visit to Les Townes’s home, about his son Wilson, about the attack with the shotgun and the ticking package delivered to Comedy Tonight. I told him about Wilson’s visit to threaten me and about his breaking my snow globe. I talked for so long, I think I might have told him about the time my mother made me go trick-or-treating dressed as a stalk of celery. I went through a good deal of police station coffee. Honig made a new pot. I took two bathroom breaks.

  He took notes. He wasn’t a great listener; he didn’t let me forget I was being questioned in a crime investigation. But he was a good listener. He didn’t miss anything, he asked for clarification when he needed it, and he asked questions that made sense. By the time I was finished, I felt like my brain had been emptied. Tomorrow, I’d relearn that “walking upright” thing I’d mastered a while back.

  Finally, Honig stood up, indicating the interview was over. He reached a hand across his desk and I took it. “Thank you for coming in,” he said.

  “I didn’t have much of a choice, Lieutenant,” I answered. “You sent a car.” I got up to leave, and did my best Peter-Falk-as-Columbo impression: “There’s just one thing, if I may ask.”

  “I have no reason to tell you anything about an ongoing investigation,” Honig said.

  I ignored that. “If you knew that Townes had threatened Harry’s life, and you knew that Harry had been murdered, and didn’t just die in an accidental fire, why didn’t you immediately go to Queens for Les and his son?”

  Honig’s eyes narrowed. “What makes you think we didn’t?”

  “And?”

  “And, they were gone. The house was empty of everything but furniture. They’d taken their clothes and left. There was nothing there, and nobody has seen them for over a week.”

  27

  I asked Honig if Officer Broeker, the uniform who had driven me up from Midland Heights, could take me to the Booth Actors’ Home before the return trip. He grumbled about it, but agreed after a minute or so. I figured that I’d already made the trip to Englewood, and was less than two miles from the Actors’ Home. It would be foolish to go home and then borrow a car to drive back up.

  My chauffeur in blue came in with me, and followed silently wherever I went. When I inquired at the front desk about seeing Lillis’s room, the woman behind the counter looked worried, and called for Walter Lee, who arrived in less than a minute.

  Luckily, Walt recognized me, and visibly relaxed. “We’ve been a little jumpy recently,” he said. When I asked again if I could see Lillis’s room, he glanced briefly at Officer Broeker.

  “He’s not here to inv
estigate,” I said. “He’s my ride for the day.” Broeker’s expression went from stony to . . . stonier.

  Walt walked me back to the room where Lillis had lived. There were traces of police crime scene tape on the doorjamb, but most of it had been removed. He unlocked the door and let it swing open, but seemed reluctant to walk inside. Maybe Walt was squeamish. For that matter, maybe I was squeamish, because I hesitated for a second, and then went in. Walt said the room would have been cleared out by now to make room for a new resident—he was fond of mentioning the lengthy waiting list—but the police had insisted on not touching anything in there until the medical examiner’s report on Lillis’s autopsy was released, and that hadn’t happened yet.

  The room was untouched—no, make that unchanged. The cops had been through it, had opened drawers and moved furniture, but had been respectful, not tossing the place like they would if it had been a suspect’s residence. It was still neat, but there had clearly been some activity recently.

  The bed was made, waiting for Lillis to come back.

  I looked for the wheelchair, but it wasn’t here. “Did they find his wheelchair?” I asked Walt.

  “His wheelchair?” he responded.

  I must have added three permanent wrinkles to my forehead. “Harry had injured his hip in a fall,” I said. “Didn’t you know that? He could barely stand up the last time I saw him, and was complaining that the physical therapy on his hip wasn’t helping.”

  “Physical therapy?” Walt seemed incapable of starting a response without repeating something I’d just said. “Mr. Lillis wasn’t receiving physical therapy.”

  “Why not?”

  “He didn’t need it,” Walter Lee answered, for once using his own words. “All the tests our doctors ran indicated he hadn’t injured himself. We assumed he’d done a pratfall to entertain the people watching, because he didn’t even land hard. Mr. Lillis insisted it was worse and requested a wheelchair, which we gave him gladly, but he never really needed it.”

  My head started to hurt. It was as if all the strange information I’d been getting all day was collecting in my sinuses. “I don’t understand,” I told Walt. “I saw Harry just a few days before he died, and he needed me to wheel him outside. Everyone here saw me doing that.”