It Happened One Knife

by JEFFREY COHEN

  I called Barry Dutton at his office, then Sergeant Newman in Los Angeles, then Detective Honig in Englewood, then Meg in Camden, peppering them all with questions about Wilson, and Harry’s will, and the Bel Air fire in 1958. Everyone gave me roughly the same answers: Why should the police share any information at all with a movie theatre owner? Actually, Newman was less discouraging, giving me names of ex-studio employees who might still be alive, and a B-list of cops who hadn’t been on the force at the time but might know something, though he did still ask the question.

  Strikingly, I had no answer to give, even the fourth time. You’d think out of sheer repetition I’d have come up with something.

  When I’d asked Dutton what might have been removed from Harry Lillis’s room at the Booth Actors’ Home, he’d sounded downright hostile when he said, “You may not realize this, Elliot, but the Englewood Police Department doesn’t rush right to the phone and call me whenever they get a clue in a case.” If he kept up that attitude, I’d start to think he didn’t want me looking into Harry Lillis’s murder.

  The Internet provided little more of use; I’d pretty much tapped out any sources of information about Vivian Reynolds’s death. Despite encouragement from a vegetarian restaurant waitress, I was running into a brick wall.

  Fortunately for me, I had plenty of other frustrating things to consider. I decided not to think about Sharon’s curious expression when Anthony’s film turned up missing again. But I’d try and find the copy of Killin’ Time, so that Anthony would stop scowling at me. It had gotten so bad, I made Jonathan taste my food for me when Anthony was in the theatre. It wasn’t doing me much good, since Jonathan seemed unfamiliar with the “tasting” concept, and would generally eat whatever I’d intended for myself and leave me with nothing.

  Sharon aside, the only other person I could think to contact was Anthony’s roommate Danton. He was in when I called, and although he offered to come to the theatre, I didn’t want to risk Anthony seeing him at Comedy Tonight. I said I’d meet him at the apartment, which I’d visited once before.

  I left the office and went to the snack bar to tell Sophie I’d be gone for an hour or so. Her hooded eyelids said more than her voice when she responded, “Fine,” so I asked her if my absence would be a problem.

  “Wasn’t a problem all morning.” She sighed. “Why would it be now?”

  “What, exactly, happened to give you this attitude, young lady?” I asked.

  “Elliot,” Sophie said, “you’ve never talked to me like my father does before.”

  That took me aback, and I might have blushed a bit. “Well, I . . .”

  “I’ve always liked that about you,” she added.

  I made it to Guilden Street in New Brunswick in about twenty minutes on my bike. Danton opened the door of the second-floor apartment and let me in. The place looked exactly like it had when I’d seen it a few months before: slovenly, cramped, unsanitary, and littered with pizza boxes. About standard for an apartment with four undergraduates infesting it.

  We sat in the “living room,” a space occupied by a couch with holes in its cushions and permanent Cheez Doodles stains on its arms; milk crates holding up books, CDs, DVDs, and more DVDs; a Salvation Army armchair that smelled of beer; a large cardboard Amazon box being used as an ottoman; and a sixty-inch flat-screen LCD HDTV television with surround sound. You have to have priorities.

  “I’m not sure I can help you much, Mr. Freed,” Danton said when I explained my mission (but left out the part about him being my current prime suspect by default, since I didn’t want to consider my ex-wife/current, um, girlfriend? ). “I saw all the same stuff you saw that night. I don’t know what happened to Anthony’s movie.”

  “Well, you know what the cops say: maybe you saw something and didn’t realize you saw it.” I couldn’t explain that sentiment, but I wanted to get the police into the discussion. Maybe I could sweat a confession out of the kid.

  “I don’t know what that means,” he said.

  Danton was a lanky guy in a white T-shirt and shorts that had last been washed when gasoline was 89 cents a gallon (pardon me: 88.9 cents per gallon—do they think they’re fooling anybody with that one?). He had the easy smile of a young man who has always gotten every girl he wanted to fall in love with him. I ignored all that and asked exactly where he’d been after the screening.

  “Well, they were doing all the toasts and stuff,” he answered, making a show of thinking. “I was on the steps to the balcony at that point, because I remember looking down at Anthony and Carla.”

  “What about after the group broke up?” I prodded.

  “I hung out with Phil and Dolores in the lobby for a while, and then I took off,” he said.

  Dolores was another of their roommates. It was a very relaxed apartment. “Who’s Phil?” I asked. “Dolores’s boyfriend?”

  Danton grinned a little and shook his head. “Nah. Phil’s our new roommate. Lyle graduated last year. Phil and Dolores are just friends.” His grin betrayed his definition of “friends.”

  “Did you leave with them?” I asked. Dolores’s love life was none of my business.

  “Nah. They took off before I did. I was trying to talk to this one babe, but she didn’t want to know me.”

  “One of the other film students?” I asked.

  “Nah. Older lady, but easy on the eyes. Didn’t matter, though. She wasn’t interested.” He sounded a little surprised, because all women should have been interested, in Danton’s opinion.

  “Older?” Danton nodded, so I went on. “Long, dark blond hair, big eyes, dressed in a skirt with a slit up the side?”

  Danton grinned wider. “That’s her. You try for her, too?”

  “She’s my ex-wife,” I said.

  Danton’s expression took on a more respectful attitude. “Cool,” he said.

  “So you were talking to her for a while.” I tried to get him back on track before I felt the need to hit him over the head with a wet sack of manure.

  “Yeah. But she shot me down, so I left. Nobody else there who was that interesting.”

  “You leave with anybody?”

  Suddenly it struck Danton that I was trying to establish an alibi—or not—for him. “You think I took Anthony’s movie?” he asked.

  “I don’t think anything,” I said. “I’m trying to eliminate things so I can focus on what’s left.”

  “Well, you can eliminate me,” he said. “I had no reason to steal it.”

  “You weren’t even a little jealous that Anthony got his film made? Maybe you had a script that was better, but you couldn’t get the financing, especially not the way he got it?”

  Danton looked like he was going to make a fart noise: both his lips turned out and flattened in an expression of dismissal. “I’m a history major, Mr. Freed. I don’t have any scripts at all.”

  “You don’t.” There went an hour’s worth of kangaroo court in my head.

  “Nope. I’m tickled for Anthony. Let him go make his movies. Maybe he’ll get rich and I can hit him up for a loan. No reason I wouldn’t want him to have his movie. What kind of a guy do you think I am?”

  I stood up. “Sorry if I offended you,” I told him. “I wasn’t trying to make you a suspect.” I believe my nose grew just a bit after I said that. “I’m just trying to . . .”

  “Eliminate things,” Danton said.

  “Exactly. Consider yourself eliminated. At least, from my list.”

  I walked to the door. Danton didn’t say anything else until I turned and faced him again. “Just one question,” I said.

  He didn’t look happy. “Yeah?”

  “Is Danton your first name or your last name?” I asked.

  The kid grinned one last time in a Cheshire cat fashion. "Yes,” he said.

  30

  MY conversation with Danton had made me uneasy for a number of reasons. For one, I never like being in the room with someone who is sure he’s cooler than I am, especially when I’m sure of
it, too. For another, I believed him, which meant I couldn’t blame him for Anthony’s missing movie, and I wanted to. The fact that he had even considered hitting on my ex-wife, a woman easily fifteen years older than he was, made my stomach uncomfortable. And there was something about Danton’s manner that had me feeling suspicious of him on a subliminal level: even if he hadn’t taken Killin’ Time, I felt he’d done something else equally reprehensible, although I couldn’t imagine what that might be.

  But more than anything else, it worried me because suddenly, Sharon was my best—and to be fair, only— remaining suspect in the Case of the Missing Movie.

  Even if her motives were altruistic (and I could certainly imagine her trying to save Anthony from himself), I didn’t want to think that my ex-wife had committed burglary for a good cause. Mostly, I didn’t want to be there when she was accused. I’ve seen Sharon when she’s not pleased, and it isn’t something I wanted to experience again if I don’t have to.

  All of which made the prospect of our upcoming date (set for the following Monday night, a mere two days away) somewhat daunting.

  Clearly, my only recourse was to find evidence supporting the theory that Carla, Anthony’s girlfriend, had taken the film. I resolved to begin doing so shortly.

  I got back to the theatre after my interview with Danton just in the middle of the second feature, a comedy about a ghost who finds a career as a sports announcer that wasn’t as funny as the average Tampa Bay Rays game. Jonathan was nowhere to be seen on my arrival, which I took to mean he was inside the auditorium. Sophie sat behind the snack bar, her back to me, on her stool. I couldn’t tell if she was reading, sleeping or—for all I knew—sticking pins in an Elliot-Freed-as-all-men voodoo doll, but her head was down when I walked over.

  “Everything going okay?” I asked in the most benign, yes-I’m-male-but-I’m-not-the-enemy tone I could muster.

  Her head jerked up, alarmed. Geez, maybe she had been napping! “Sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean to startle you.”

  Sophie turned around and looked at me as her hand went, palm up, to her cheek. Was that a tear I saw being wiped away? “You didn’t startle me,” she said, but the quiver in her voice betrayed her words. “I was . . . doing inventory.”

  “No, you weren’t. Now tell me what’s bothering you.”

  “Nothing!” She ran, literally, to the ladies’ room, where she knew I wouldn’t follow. I guessed I’d be selling candy for a while until she came out.

  Jonathan emerged from the auditorium just as I was sitting down on Sophie’s stool, and realizing that there was still some residual ache in my butt from the buckshot. I made a mental note to buy a softer seat for the snack bar, and wondered how Sophie, with her almost total lack of padding in that area, had withstood it all this time.

  “Did someone yell?” Jonathan asked. “I thought I heard something out here.”

  “Sophie was being dramatic,” I told him. “She’ll be back soon.”

  Jonathan looked around, making sure I wasn’t actually holding Sophie hostage somewhere, and then looked at me. He seemed to be staring at the area just under my chin, not making eye contact. When someone does that, it has a tendency to make me self-conscious, as does most everything else.

  “What are you staring at?” I asked. Jonathan didn’t answer. I took a deep breath, and figured, what the hell. “You talk to Sophie a lot,” I said to him.

  Before I had a chance to finish the thought, Jonathan widened his eyes and looked me in the face. “No, I don’t,” he said.

  “I’m just wondering if you’d have any idea why she’s upset,” I said. “Maybe she told you something.”

  “Not me,” he answered. “I didn’t do anything.”

  “Nobody thinks you did. I’m just wondering if she said something to you that she wouldn’t say to me.”

  Jonathan seemed to find that concept confusing. “What wouldn’t she say to you?” he asked.

  This line of questioning wasn’t getting me anywhere, so I decided to ask what I should have days ago. “Jonathan,” I said, “have you been in touch with Les Townes?”

  You’d think I’d just asked him for the definitive word on Einstein’s theory of relativity and its relation to the work of Steven Spielberg. Jonathan’s eyes seemed to recede into his head, and his mouth puckered, like I’d mentioned lemons out of context. “Les Townes?” he asked. “Of Lillis and Townes?”

  No, Les Townes of Black Sabbath. “Yes,” I said. “Of Lillis and Townes.”

  “You mean have I ever spoken to him?” Jonathan made a face like he was trying to hear me from very far away: eyes squinted, head leaned forward.

  “I know you spoke to him when he was here that night,” I said, thinking I sounded like a kindergarten teacher with an unusually naive student. “I’m asking if you’ve spoken to him or heard from him privately since then.”

  “Why?”

  That struck me as odd. “Why am I asking? Because Mr. Townes is missing and the police are wondering if anybody’s heard from him.”

  Jonathan shook his head. “Why would I have been in touch with him? Did he say something to you about me?” Jonathan appeared to be asking if Townes wanted to be his friend.

  “No, I was just wondering if you’d talked to him. Or his son.”

  “He has a son?” Jonathan asked.

  This conversation really wasn’t going anywhere. “Yes, Jon. He has a son.”

  “Jonathan.”

  “No. Wilson.” No point to it anymore.

  “My name isn’t Wilson.” Jonathan must have thought I was a complete idiot.

  It was time to stop beating around the bush. “Jonathan, the night I came downstairs and found you in my office. Were you . . . ?”

  The door to the ladies’ room opened and out came Sophie. Her face was not wet and her eye makeup, what little there was, had not streaked. She marched to the snack bar and glared at me.

  “What are you doing behind there?” she asked.

  “Somebody had to be here,” was the best I could do.

  “I’ll bet nobody came out for a snack,” Sophie said. “You just don’t trust a woman to handle the situation.”

  “What situation?”

  "May I get back to my workstation, please?” Sophie asked. Workstation?

  I got out of the way and turned to face Jonathan. I didn’t care if Sophie heard the question now.

  But Jonathan was gone.

  Sophie went back behind the snack bar, and as she sat down, I thought she winced a little. Well, good. Maybe I wouldn’t get her that new stool, after all.

  31

  No one will ever win the battle of the sexes. There’s too much fraternizing with the enemy.

  —HENRY KISSINGER

  MONDAY

  IT is never easy for me to knock on the door at Sharon’s house. Since she and Gregory moved in together (about twenty minutes after she moved out of my house), I’ve felt like I did on the set of Split Personality: that someone had taken something that was mine and turned it into something I could barely recognize, while I stood by and watched.

  Of course I know (before Sophie can get on my case about the previous sentence) that Sharon never belonged to me, and that she is still the same woman she was when we were married. But there’s something unnerving about seeing a person with whom you were that intimate move on to someone else. I have enough of an ego for it to hurt, deeply. So entering their home had always been awkward.

  Tonight, though, took the prize for weirdest yet, because I was knocking on Sharon’s door for our third date since starting this experiment. We were going out to a play being performed at the George Street Playhouse in New Brunswick (Sharon’s idea), but instead of her picking me up at the town house, from which we could have walked to the theatre, Sharon had suggested first having dinner at her house. Gregory was in Las Vegas, at a convention of people who put other people to sleep for money. I hoped there’d be a hypnotist working the hotel lounge, just for the irony.

>   But somehow, the two thousand miles between us didn’t seem quite far enough.

  Sharon opened the door and, as usual, immediately riveted my attention. She doesn’t favor low-cut tops, but the one she was wearing was tighter than usual, and she had on those jeans again.

  She knows exactly what effect they have on me.

  “Come on in,” she said, gesturing. The house, as befitting a two-physician income, was large and well furnished. Sharon doesn’t show off, but she has really good taste. As evidence, I offer the fact that she divorced me. As more evidence, I offer the fact that she was divorcing Gregory. She doesn’t always get it right the first time, but, eventually, she manages.

  I offered the red rose I’d been holding behind my back, and she took it, smiling. I didn’t tell her I’d bought it at the Shop Rite, but the UPC code on the wrapping may have betrayed my lack of class. She pretended not to notice. “It’s beautiful,” Sharon said. “Thank you.”

  And she leaned over and gave me a kiss that would kill a normal man.

  “Wow,” I said when we came up for air. “If I’d known the flower would get that kind of reception, I’d have bought the whole dozen.”

  My ex-wife smiled the smile she thinks is mysterious, but is really just adorable. “The night is young,” she said.

  “That doesn’t make any sense, but I’m really turned on,” I told her.

  “Good. I made dinner,” she said. “Are you hungry?”

  “That’s one of the things I am, yes.”

  I followed her into the dining room, where Sharon had set the table and put out covered dishes. We sat, feeling way too formal, and she served out chicken Kiev and rice pilaf, as well as asparagus and a white wine that I’m sure has a name, but don’t ask me to repeat it. She is a wonderful cook, but I could barely eat a bite for the first few minutes. The atmosphere was just a little too intense.

  Finally, hunger took over, as well as my fear that I seemed less than enthralled with the evening Sharon had planned. “This really beats the dinner I made for you,” I told her. “I’m embarrassed.”