“Don’t be. You’re very good at things that aren’t cooking.”
It wasn’t like Sharon to be this forward, but I certainly wasn’t complaining. I think we’d both felt disappointed— and ashamed of our petty disappointment—when the call about Harry Lillis’s death had interrupted us the previous week. We were picking up where we’d left off, and it was making the atmosphere in the room a little strange.
It didn’t help that I was flirting madly with another man’s wife in that man’s house. The fact that the man in question had done the same with my wife in my house provided little solace. I can’t say whether revenge is a dish best served cold, because Sharon was serving a hot dinner. In a number of ways.
Eventually, we settled into our normal pattern, although the underlying tension was still there. We started to discuss Lillis, the implications that Townes or his son had killed him, and Sophie’s odd behavior of late.
Neither of us said a word about Killin’ Time. I was, frankly, afraid to break the mood—women respond so unpredictably when you accuse them of robbery. I can’t vouch for Sharon’s motivations.
“The problem is, I really don’t want Les Townes to be the killer,” I said. “I grew up watching the guy in movies and wishing I could be more like him. I can’t just tear down that part of my character and start fresh now.”
Sharon’s eyes were sympathetic. “I’m afraid you may have to get used to the idea,” she said. “It seems everything Harry said about Les was true.”
“I know.” I sighed. “I’ll admit, all the evidence is circumstantial, but Lillis was killed in almost exactly the same way that Vivian Reynolds died in 1958. I’m not sure how reliable my Internet evidence on that one is, but the parallels are eerie.”
“How much more can you find out about Vivian without going to L.A.?” Sharon asked.
“I’m not sure I could find out much more even if I did go,” I told her. “All of the studio insiders are dead now, and so are most of the cops. There’s nobody to ask.”
“Did you check on the insurance?”
“Yes.” I hadn’t told her this before. “I called the insurance company saying I was researching a book on famous insurance claims in Southern California.”
“You didn’t. And they bought this?”
“Hook, line, sinker, pier, and coastline,” I said. “They were thrilled to be included in such a long-overdue project. ”
Sharon giggled. I could have eaten her alive.
“Anyway, the diligent girl working in the records department spent about an hour digging into the archives and called me back. The house had fire insurance, of course, but it was for the right amount—nothing inflated, just what the house was worth—and Townes didn’t appear to be in any serious financial straits. Vivian’s life insurance named Wilson the beneficiary, but in trust to Townes.”
“Does the plot thicken?” Sharon asked. We had finished eating, so I helped her carry the plates into the kitchen and put them into the dishwasher.
“I don’t know. It’s natural she’d leave her money to her son. The policy had been changed when he was born, but Townes had signed it, too, and changed his own to mirror Vivian’s.”
“So the money went to Wilson, who was where when the fire started?” Sharon was all attention now.
“He was at his grandmother’s. Les Townes’s mother.”
“So what does this all mean?” Sharon closed the dishwasher, and I was standing right behind her. I didn’t move back to give her room.
“It all looks awfully normal, from an insurance point of view,” I said. “Now, we’d better get going, or we’re going to be late for that play.”
Sharon grinned mischievously. “Well, here’s the thing about the play . . .” she said.
“Yeah?” I moved a little closer. It was that kind of a grin.
“I never actually bought the tickets,” she said.
I put my hands on her hips and pulled her just slightly toward me. Sharon moved close enough to kiss. “You didn’t?” I asked.
“No. I didn’t want to see it. It sounded dumb.”
“Then why did you invite me to the play?” I said. “Is this how the whole dating thing is going to go?”
“I knew you don’t like coming here, so I had to pretend we were going out,” she said. “It’s practical.”
“No, practical would have been if we’d gone to my house. That’s practical.”
“I don’t like going to your house,” she said. “I wanted this to happen here.”
“You wanted what to happen here?” I asked. It was going to come from her, not me, if I had any say in the matter.
“This,” Sharon said, and gave me another coronary-threatening kiss. This time, I didn’t try to come up for air very soon.
When we finally did start to breathe again, I said, “Here’s good.”
Then we didn’t talk again for quite some time.
32
TUESDAY
I woke up in a strange bed in a strange room in a strange house, something I hadn’t done for a very long time. That odd feeling of disorientation is overwhelming for a brief period, but it usually dissipates quickly.
Not this time.
It didn’t help that Sharon wasn’t there when I woke up. I could hear the water running in the shower, so I knew she was still in the house. But her absence from the bed made for extra weirdness, and that was something I didn’t really need.
A lot of men wake up after spending a night in bed with a woman and wonder what they might have been thinking the night before. I knew exactly what I’d been thinking, and didn’t mind having thought it. But I was asking myself a lot of questions in the bright morning light.
What did that mean? Were we back together again on a permanent basis? Was last night a result of our history? Did Sharon sleep with me simply because I was the most comfortable choice? What happens now?
There was one other question that hung over the room, and having cooled down considerably from the night before, I could ask it now: Did Sharon steal Anthony’s movie? Suppose she had—for altruistic reasons, surely— then what would I do? What should I do?
Men also make a lot of ill-considered choices after a night like I’d just spent. And I was no exception: I decided that being alone in Sharon’s bedroom (which these days thankfully bore no traces of Gregory, not even a tie clip— he’d occupied the guest bedroom since returning to the house in this weird arrangement they’d worked out), I had a rare opportunity to eliminate the possibility that my ex-wife had committed robbery, so it was my right—no, my duty—to prove her innocent.
You can talk yourself into all sorts of things after you’ve had a night you’ve been dreaming about for a long, long time.
I got out of bed, after doing a quick visual scan of the room for hiding places that could hold large cases of film reels. Discounting the closet as too obvious, I started by dropping to the floor and looking under the bed. But there was nothing to be seen except shoes and a baseball bat. Sharon considers a baseball bat the first line of defense against nighttime burglars. She believes in strict gun control, but insists the Second Amendment guarantees each citizen the right to wield a Louisville Slugger.
Maybe the closet wasn’t too obvious after all. I crossed the room and opened the door, and took a few moments to drink it all in.
I’ve never lived in a home that had a walk-in closet. The best I’ve ever been able to do is an arm-in closet, which allows an arm to be extended all the way in if a shirt is far in the back. But this was almost a whole room.
It had a full-length mirror, and shelves on three sides, as well as a closet pole on each wall, holding Sharon’s suits, skirts, and blouses. It was all so tidy, she could find anything she needed with a quick glance. My closets in the town house, on the other hand, were more receptacles for piles of clothing, out of which I would pull what was needed at any given moment. I’m clean, but I’m not neat.
The thing about such a well-organized closet, with every
thing immediately visible, was that it drove home the point: there were no cans of film here. But there were plenty of shoes. Women seem to need a truly horrifying number of shoes, despite the vast majority of them having only two feet. Males don’t understand this, but we put up with it because, well, they’re women. As long as they’re nice to us, we figure they can indulge that shoe jones anytime they want.
Hang on, though: the floor of the closet was built up on a riser, meaning there was storage space beneath the shelves on one side. Storage space with a door that was closed, hiding the items being stored.
Just enough space for film canisters.
This bore investigation. I walked to the spot where the raised section began, and got down on the floor to reach for the handle. I stole a quick glance toward the closet door, saw no one there, and opened the storage space.
It was in shadow, and difficult to see inside, so I lowered myself closer to the floor, face almost inside the storage area. If I’d had a flashlight, I’d be able to see in, but maybe . . .
I reached inside and felt around. Something grazed the back of my hand, so I grabbed for it and pulled it out.
It was a fuzzy blue slipper, the left one, with a two-inch heel on it. I vividly remembered a very interesting evening that had begun a few years ago with that slipper and its brother on Sharon’s feet. Yes, I remembered that fondly. But it wasn’t a can of film. I put the slipper back where I’d found it and closed the door.
About four feet farther into the closet was another section with a door. I crawled toward it, scraping my knees on the carpet, and resumed my position, face inches from the floor, and felt for the door handle.
“Okay, I give up. What the heck are you doing?”
I’m crazy about hearing Sharon’s voice, but it wasn’t what I was hoping for at that moment. I spun, as well as a man can spin on his bare knees, and faced her. She had her hair in the traditional female towel-turban, but that was all she was wearing.
“You’re naked,” she said.
“So are you.”
“I was coming in here to get my clothes. What’s your excuse?” She walked into the closet and I stood up, somewhat painfully. My knees weren’t made for friction, no matter how plush the carpet.
"Ah, I was . . . See . . .” S. J. Perelman would have been proud of the razor-sharp wit, no?
“Elliot,” my nude ex-wife said, “I don’t understand why you’re naked in my closet. And the weird part is, it’s more the ‘in my closet’ part than the ‘naked’ part that’s confusing.”
There was no point in concocting a story. “I was looking for Anthony’s film,” I said.
“And you thought the most logical place to find it would have been in my underwear drawer?”
“Well, I didn’t know it was your underwear drawer, did I?” There’s a sentence you don’t get to say often.
“Wait a minute—you were looking for Anthony’s movie in my closet? You think I stole it?” The expression on her face was exactly the one she’d had at our divorce settlement—disappointed, sad, and angry all at once.
“I don’t think you stole it, but other people might,” I answered, feeling only slightly hypocritical. “I was trying to prove that you hadn’t.”
Sharon walked past me to what I now knew was her underwear drawer, and started pulling out various garments. This morning wasn’t shaping up the way I’d hoped. “That’s so gallant of you, Elliot, accusing me of the crime and then trying to exonerate me all by yourself. Would it be prying to ask why in the name of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart I would steal Anthony’s film?”
“Um . . . because you wanted him to stay in school,” I mumbled. I was starting to wish my underwear were in here as well.
Sharon was almost completely dressed now. “I think maybe you’d better go,” she said. “Put some clothes on.” And she walked out of the closet.
Nope, not the way I’d hoped for at all.
33
IF waking up alone in a strange house was weird, trust me, it had nothing on getting dressed alone in a strange house and beating it out the door as quickly as is humanly possible. Sharon was nowhere to be seen, and I wanted to be gone before she reappeared. I had too many thoughts running through my head—all bad—at the same time, and the loudest one was screaming, “Speed!” So I found my clothes, put them on, and tried as meticulously as possible to eliminate all traces that I’d ever been there at all. I even started the dishwasher before I left.
The twenty minutes it took me to get to Comedy Tonight was enough to allow some of the other competing voices in my mind to sort themselves out and speak freely.
“You’re an idiot,” one said. “You were finally back with the one woman you’ve ever really loved, and you threw it away over a suspicion you never seriously believed, anyway. ”
“You didn’t see that smile on her face in the projection booth,” I defended myself.
“Of course I did,” it countered. “I’m a voice in your head.” Touché.
“What about Anthony’s movie?” another one piped up. “If Sharon didn’t take it, who did?”
“Carla?” the first voice ventured. “She’s the one who really doesn’t want to see Anthony leave New Jersey for Hollywood. ”
I was much too tired for a bout of schizophrenia this morning. “Can we leave that to Dutton, finally?” I tried. “We’ve done everything we can do.” The voices didn’t answer back, but I got the impression they were giving me a disapproving look.
A third chimed in, “You’re nowhere on the Vivian Reynolds and Harry Lillis murders, you know,” but I ignored it. I hate negative head-voices.
It went on like that the whole way. The debate going on between my ears could have filled an hour of time on a cable news talk show, if I could have increased the volume to dangerous levels. You can’t purposely change the volume in your head. Seriously, try it. Can’t be done.
By the time I reached the theatre, I was thoroughly discouraged about pretty much everything from international relations to the price of dog food, and I don’t even have a dog. When I get going on being discouraged, I’m a pro.
I dragged myself into Comedy Tonight a good eight hours before I needed to be there, dropped myself into my office chair, ignored the lingering sting in my butt, and wondered what the hell I should do with the rest of my short stay on this planet. I had certainly destroyed any chance I had of spending my life with Sharon, even if she did get over this latest outrage. I figured she would eventually, but then I’d just come up with another and another down the line until finally she saw the colossal error in her ways and broke off all contact with me entirely.
The three oversized children with whom I spent my working hours would eventually grow up and leave the nest, to be replaced by others (Rutgers University and Midland Heights High School will have an endless supply of cheap labor for the foreseeable future) who would also ingratiate themselves to me and then take off to start their actual lives, while leaving mine in a perpetual neutral gear.
The shining achievement of my professional life had been writing a novel that was pretty good but took enough out of me emotionally to be my only effort in that area. And it had been turned into a truly lousy film that had made everyone forget there was a book to begin with. Now I played dusty old movies to an indifferent audience—a small one, at that—and took a solid financial loss every night I stayed open.
The sad fact was, I’d never been happier than the night I’d introduced Harry Lillis and Les Townes in front of a packed house at Comedy Tonight. But that memory was now, let’s be fair, just a little tainted, as it seemed to have triggered a set of events that ended with Townes murdering Lillis and then disappearing into the night. Talk about your downers.
I had begun to make friends with one of my honest-to-goodness heroes in this life, and had ended up helping to hasten his death. That wasn’t going to be a real strong line on my interpersonal resume.
I couldn’t even find Anthony’s movie, and hadn’t told him w
here it was when I actually knew. Nice guy I was.
What had begun as a minor case of self-pity was growing into a full-blown inner tantrum. Sadness was being overrun by anger. Was I going to just let the circumstances of my life roll over me? Was I that defeated, at the relatively tender age of thirty-seven?
Yeah, pretty much.
But I didn’t have to take it lying down. I could fight back at the karma that had brought me to this rotten Tuesday morning. I could choose one of the things that was tormenting me and attack it frontally, just to prove I could do it. It was just a question of summoning the determination, persevering when the inevitable hardships arose, and not even considering the possibility of failure.
I decided, after three cups of heavily caffeinated coffee from the Dunkin’ Donuts down the street (in New Jersey, there’s a Dunkin’ Donuts down every street), to avenge my friend Harry Lillis. Not the comedian; not the legend. My friend. Because somebody had done something unspeakably bad to a man I cared about, and it was time to get the word out that you didn’t do that on Elliot Freed’s watch.
I’d solve Harry Lillis’s murder, prove Les Townes had killed him and Vivian Reynolds, and see justice done. And if that’s not a bold plan for a Tuesday morning, I’ve never heard one.
The way to prove my suspicions was to illustrate the parallels between the murder of Harry Lillis and the death of Vivian Reynolds in 1958. It was way too large a coincidence that they had died under almost identical circumstances, and that Townes could not account for his whereabouts either time (to be fair, no one knew if Townes could account for his whereabouts the night Lillis died, because no one knew where Townes was now). So I started calling the few remaining names that Sergeant Newman had given me of ex-studio employees who might still be alive.
It took a great deal of the morning. Who am I kidding— it took the whole morning, and part of the early afternoon, and I spoke to a number of people. Some of the numbers were either disconnected or had been passed to new Verizon customers who had no idea what the hell I was talking about. Other numbers led to people who were still alive, but hadn’t had any direct contact with either Lillis or Townes on the day of the fire, or didn’t remember. I heard the sentence “It was fifty years ago” at least fifty times. But, eventually, I reached Estelle Mason, who had worked in the commissary at the studio while most of the Lillis/Townes films were being made. She lived in, of all places, Edison, New Jersey, not fifteen minutes from the uncomfortable chair in which I was sitting. But I didn’t ask to see her face-to-face; I wanted my answers immediately. Mrs. Mason was kind enough to indulge me.
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