Some Like It Hot-Buttered

by Cohen, Jeffrey

  “Yeah, I think she was making a scene. Amy has a real sense of the dramatic.” Dunbar took a bite, and his eyes indicated that his opinion of reduced-fat muffins was roughly the same as mine. “Calling me a murderer was sure dramatic. ”

  “I don’t know about the dramatic,” I said. “I run a comedy theatre.”

  “I know. Vince was sorry he hadn’t found your place sooner. You should do more advertising,” Dunbar told me. He didn’t mention where I’d get the money for that, and I didn’t ask.

  I had to be careful with the place I was about to go. “How about another woman? Someone in the theatre thought they saw Mr. Ansella with a blond woman. Any idea?”

  Even if I hadn’t been watching Dunbar closely—and I was—it would have been obvious that he was unnerved by the question. He coughed into his napkin and took a swig of coffee. “No idea. Vince never mentioned a blonde,” he said. But my eyes were telling me another story: he knew something . Problem was, I had no idea how to call him on it in a constructive way. So I pressed on as if I believed him.

  “Do you have any idea why someone would want to kill Mr. Ansella?”

  I’m sure Dunbar wasn’t trying to do an impression of someone who’s guilty and trying to cover it up, but he looked away and coughed again to avoid answering. I just waited him out, and eventually, while turned away from the table, Dunbar exhaled and bit his lip.

  “I can’t think of one reason anybody would want to hurt that man,” he said. “He was the sweetest human being I’ve ever known. Vince Ansella should never have died.”

  Maybe he wasn’t badly hiding his guilt. Maybe he was badly hiding the fact that he was crying. Dunbar snorted, blew his nose into a Dunkin’ Donuts napkin, and kept looking away.

  “All he wanted was for everybody to be happy,” he continued. “Who would want to hurt a man like that?”

  I didn’t know, so I didn’t say anything.

  “Did Vincent and Amy get along well? Was there trouble in their marriage?”

  That seemed to focus Dunbar, and he pretended to have an eyelash in his eye and brush it away. He turned to me with red eyes. “The cops asked me about that,” he said. “I’ll tell you what I told them. Vince and Amy weren’t the love story of the century, but they got along fine, as far as I know. Vince would have told me if there were problems, at least, until the last few months.”

  “His behavior changed?” Marcy had told me the same thing.

  Dunbar nodded. “He started, I don’t know, closing up. He didn’t invite me over to watch comedies. He didn’t come out bowling, like we did once a month or so. He didn’t seem to want to be alone with me, because . . .”

  “Because?”

  “It’s stupid. I got the feeling he was afraid he’d tell me something he shouldn’t. Isn’t that dumb?”

  “I don’t think so. What do you suppose he didn’t want you to know?”

  Dunbar discarded half his muffin in a trash bin directly behind him. “These suck,” he said. “Reduced-fat muffins. I should have gotten a double chocolate donut.”

  “What do you think—”

  “I don’t know, Mr. Freed, but there was something bothering the man. He was a completely changed person, and not for the better.”

  I took a shot. “Amy thinks he was having an affair.”

  “Amy should know better,” Dunbar said.

  “He was seen at the theatre with another woman,” I offered. “Amy wasn’t there, but someone else might have seen him and told her.”

  “What do you mean, Amy wasn’t there?” Dunbar asked.

  A large firecracker went off inside my head. “You mean Amy was there?” Then, I thought another moment. “Were you there?” I can’t remember everyone in the theatre every night. I leave that to Leo.

  “No,” Dunbar said. “I wasn’t there. Do you think I’d just leave my best friend dead in a movie seat?”

  “What about Amy? Was she at the theatre that night?”

  “I would have no way of knowing.” But Dunbar’s eyes were saying something other than what came out of his mouth.

  21

  FRIDAY

  The Thin Man (1934)

  and Phat Ho (today)

  The theatre had been packed again Saturday night, and while every seat wasn’t filled on Sunday, a good number of them were. I had made all the reel changes myself both nights, and there had been no further evidence that Anthony was anywhere near the place. I imagine Dutton and O’Donnell were both watching the theatre pretty closely, just in case.

  The crowds were still larger than usual, but starting to diminish, and I knew that sooner rather than later, Comedy Tonight would be back to the depressing audience levels it averaged before becoming the Crime Scene du Jour.

  Leslie had been on the night shift the whole week, so I didn’t see her again until Friday. During the week, I’d invented a few more newspapers and talked to some of Ansella’s coworkers. And that was where it had gotten a little weird: two of them confirmed that Vincent had been acting “angry” for about two weeks before he’d been killed. But they each contradicted Marcy’s story that she and Vincent hadn’t been close.

  “They were the best of friends until right before he died,” one said. “Something happened—I don’t know what—but after that, he was a different man.” The woman went on to suggest, in terms that were not terribly subtle, that she knew why Vincent and Marcy had stopped getting along, but she was far too principled a person to say. I made a mental note not to tell her anything even slightly personal, and moved on.

  I’d also spoken to two more of Anthony’s professors, who hadn’t heard from him and were waiting for term papers, and another of his roommates, a kid named Lyle who was so stoned he called me “dude” seventeen times during a six-minute conversation. Dolores wasn’t home, he assured me, but they were “just friends,” anyway. I got the feeling Dolores had a lot of friends. Amy Ansella’s friends didn’t have any news, either. But her neighbor, a Mrs. Nelson, confirmed that Amy and Vincent were shouting at each other the night he died. “It was mostly Amy,” Mrs. Nelson said. “I’m not sure Vince could get a word in edgewise.”

  I didn’t tell Leslie any of this when she showed up at the town house without warning just around noon on Friday, even though she knew I hadn’t cleared enough money to buy furniture—at least, not yet. She appeared at the door, with her own bicycle strapped to the back of her car.

  “Let’s go for a ride along the canal,” she said. I didn’t bother to tell her that I consider a bicycle to be transportation, not recreation. You wanted to know where this relationship (if that’s the word for it) is going, I told myself. Here’s your chance.

  The Delaware and Raritan Canal towpath is a bicycling route of about twenty-eight miles that runs from Frenchtown to Ewing, a ride of roughly two and a half tree-lined, scenic hours (thus trashing, one hopes, the vision most people have of New Jersey as a toxic waste dump run by the Mob). The problem is, you have to leave your car (assuming you have one) at one end, and ride back up the same path in the other direction, making it a ride of approximately fifty-six miles, which is more than I’m willing to do unless being chased by a very determined bear on roller skates.

  We solved this problem by calling my dad, who agreed to meet us in Lambertville and drive us back to Leslie’s car in Frenchtown. Luckily, he still had an old truck which could accommodate two bicycles and a pair of weary riders, one of whom he was no doubt anxious to meet. I’d get back to the theatre in time for the night’s showing, tired but without the saddle sores those who don’t ride regularly might have. Leslie might have a slightly more tender behind when we got back, but my philosophy was that this ride hadn’t been my idea.

  Leslie rode in front for a while, which allowed me the luxury of watching the aforementioned behind for an extended period. When the path widened after a while, I pulled out and rode next to her. It was a weekday, so there were few other riders, and not many pedestrians on the path.

  But I was r
egretting the decision to get close enough that she could talk to me once I’d told Leslie about my conversations with Amy Ansella and Joe Dunbar. “You went to her house?” she pretty much screamed as we rode over a wooden bridge somewhere to the left of the Delaware River. “How could you do that? Why can’t you just leave this to us?”

  “Everybody’s so bent out of shape about some copied DVDs that I don’t see anything being done about the murder, ” I told her, a bit unfairly, since I had no idea what was being done about the murder. “Besides, with all the circumstantial evidence, Anthony’s being hung out to dry, and I’m the only one who seems to care.”

  “I’ve heard this before,” she said, pedaling harder and making me catch up.

  “Well . . . his father came to see me, and he cried.”

  There was a small decline, and we coasted for a few welcome seconds. Leslie didn’t speak for the moment; she felt the breeze in her face, then looked at me. She smiled.

  “You’re a real softy, you know that?”

  “Not where it counts,” I said.

  She pretended to ignore that. “All right, what did they tell you?”

  I recounted most of what I’d learned—which wasn’t much—over lunch, which we had in a coffee shop in Lambertville, a town so adorable you want to wrap it in a little pink blanket and feed it pastina. Alas, there was no outside seating, but we could look out the window at the fine day, and at our well-chained bicycles attached to the cast-iron fence of a church across from the restaurant. I had my front wheel with me in the coffee shop. Leslie, being a law enforcement official, chose to live on the edge, and just ran the chain through her front wheel spokes.

  “So, do you believe Amy about the affair her husband was having with Marcy Resnick?” Leslie asked. She was eating a small salad and refused even to touch the croutons, which I thought was just a little showy. I had a steak sandwich because there was no way I was riding twenty-eight miles unless I got a reward for it. I even ordered french fries.

  “I don’t know,” I answered. “Everybody seems to agree that Ansella was not himself for a few months before he died. You could attribute that to guilt, I suppose. Some people at their office clearly thought something was going on between Vincent and Marcy. Amy admits they fought before he left for the movies. I would suspect her, but it just doesn’t add up.”

  “What doesn’t add up?” She had put so little dressing on the salad, I was practically embarrassed to look at it.

  “The murder couldn’t have been that spontaneous. Someone had to know where Ansella was going that night, get hold of the medication, grind it up and put it in the vial in advance, get to the theatre and sit next to him, sprinkle it on his popcorn and leave undetected. That’s not something that just happens; it’s something that is planned and executed.”

  Leslie stopped spearing romaine to ask, “So? The crime was premeditated. No kidding. It’s not an impulsive act. We knew that.”

  “So, it’s not the act of someone who just found out her husband had been cheating on her. It’s not an act that comes from a shock. It was something done after long, careful thought. And from the description Leo gave me, the woman sitting next to Ansella that night sure wasn’t his wife.”

  "Marcy?”

  I shook my head. “Not unless she put on a blond wig and about thirty pounds before she left the house, and hit herself in the face repeatedly with a bag of loose change. Leo said she was the ugliest woman he’d ever seen, and he was a good few rows behind them, in the dark.”

  “So how reliable is his description, then?”

  “Leo’s a nut, but he’s a smart nut. If he says that’s what she looked like, you can bank on it.”

  “Joe Dunbar’s wife looks roughly like that.” Leslie was all cop now. I don’t know why, but I found it exciting.

  “Yeah, but Leo said this woman was ugly. Christie Dunbar isn’t ugly.”

  “Not everyone has the same standards of beauty that you do, Elliot,” Leslie said.

  I thought about what Dunbar had said. “But there might have been someone else there . . .”

  Leslie looked up sharply. “Who?”

  I didn’t have time to answer because my father was walking toward us, but not even pretending to look at me. His gaze was fixed directly on Leslie, like many men’s often were, but to his credit he was looking directly into her eyes. He’s a class act, my father.

  “So this is Leslie!” Classy, but not restrained. He took her hand between his own two, and held it. “It’s so nice to meet you,” he said.

  “It’s nice to meet you,” she answered. “Come sit.” There was no question which side of the booth Dad would choose; he sat next to Leslie, who had to scoot over. I could have warned her about his brimming affection for anyone whom his son deems worthy, but it’s not the kind of thing you can adequately describe.

  “So, Elliot says you’re a cop,” Dad began. Nice opening, Dad.

  “A police officer, yes,” she corrected gently.

  “Sorry.” He caught the distinction immediately.

  “You know, I’m here, too, Dad,” I interjected.

  “You I’ve seen before,” he noted without shifting his gaze. “So Leslie, why is a pretty girl like you out there carrying a gun?”

  I love my father deeply, but the man can drive you nuts without half trying. “Dad,” I started.

  “It’s all right,” Leslie cut me off. “It’s what I want to do, Arthur,” she continued (he had instructed her to address him that way). “I’ve always wanted to be one of the good guys. Whether or not I’m pretty doesn’t really enter into it.”

  Dad thought that over, and nodded. “Makes sense. So. Are you two done? I’m ready to drive.”

  “You just drove here from Manalapan, Dad. Don’t you want something to eat?”

  He made a face. “Your mother made me lunch before I left.” My mother is a lovely woman, but family legend has it she learned to cook from the Marquis de Sade.

  “You sure you don’t want anything, then?”

  He considered. “Maybe a little something.”

  We sat while he hunkered down with a brisket sandwich, cole slaw, and a side of creamed corn before ordering rice pudding for dessert. Maybe my mother couldn’t cook, but she certainly understood cholesterol, and would never have allowed such a repast if she’d been present. Which is why I didn’t say anything to Dad about it; I knew he didn’t get to enjoy himself this way too often.

  He insisted on paying for everyone’s meal, over our protests, and then ushered us to his truck where we lifted the bikes into the bed, over his protests (he wanted to do the lifting) and got in to drive back to Frenchtown. Naturally, Leslie got the window seat, and I was stuck in the middle, feeling the drive shaft heat up beneath my . . . beneath me. Being one’s son only goes so far in my family.

  In between my father’s fawning over Leslie and her enjoying it immensely, we discussed where Anthony might be. Dad was still convinced there “must be a girlfriend somewhere,” despite his having met Anthony on a few previous occasions. Of course, he was convinced that I had been the most popular kid in my senior class in high school, and we were living under the same roof at the time. So his assessment of teenage males might be a tad suspect.

  Leslie speculated that Anthony was “hiding out” with friends, and assumed, as the rest of the police did, that he had pirated the DVDs and might be somehow connected to Ansella’s murder. I told her that didn’t jibe with the pre-threaded reels at the theatre, and she pursed her lips and stopped talking for a while.

  I wasn’t prepared to agree with any of those assumptions, and I burrowed down deeper in my seat, trying to get into Anthony’s head. If I were nineteen and people thought I’d committed a crime, where would I go?

  He was only a year and a half out of high school, I thought. Anthony wasn’t the type who would have made legions of friends in college, and probably not that many beforehand, either. If there were one old high school buddy he could trust . . . Where had A
nthony gone to high school, again?

  “You think he’d go back to his hometown?” Dad asked. There are times he can read my mind. Personally, it frightens me. “Wouldn’t his parents see him around? Wouldn’t he try to contact them somehow?”

  “You’re still operating on the assumption that he’s guilty; that’s where you’re going wrong,” I told him. “Anthony knows people suspect him, but he knows he didn’t do it. He’s enough of a movie maniac to think there’s only one thing left for him to do.”

  “Oh, my god,” Leslie said, “We’ll never find him. He’s pulling a Richard Kimble.”

  “What’s a Richard Kimble?” Dad asked.

  "It’s from The Fugitive,” she said. “He’s searching for the real killer.”

  22

  We stopped at Frenchtown to pick up Leslie’s car, and parted ways with Dad, who expressed no regrets about having spent almost an entire day in the car without actually going anywhere. He twinkled at Leslie before leaving, and she kissed him on the cheek, which probably made his month.

  She drove me back to the town house (I don’t really think of it as “home” yet; I’ve only been there a year), where we liberated my bike from the contraption she had strapped to her car. We went inside for a quick soda and I took a shower (after she insisted we had to do so separately, the spoil sport). Leslie showered and got ready for her shift while I biked to the theatre, on the assumption that I hadn’t spent enough time on a bicycle yet today.

  The elves had threaded up the projector. I guessed the elves loved me again.

  Since I wasn’t busy rewinding and threading the film, I had time to think, and after I had finished checking the projection booth, I went down to the office, took out Anthony’s employment application, and looked up his educational background.

  He’d gone to Cranford High School. A place to start.

  I read through the rest of the application, hoping some piece of information would jump out at me, but aside from his birth date (he was a Sagittarius), parents (two), grade point average (not bad), and reason he wanted to work at a crumbling movie theatre (“I love movies. I want to make movies. I have a script that I could shoot today if I had the money”), there was little to go on. In fact, nothing.