Some Like It Hot-Buttered

by Cohen, Jeffrey

  Marcy looked around at the lobby and nodded her head. “I like it,” she said. “It’s not like a multiplex at the mall.”

  “No,” I agreed. “It’s more like Pompeii after the eruption.” She covered her mouth to laugh. “It has charm.” So did John Wayne Gacy, I thought, but I let it go.

  Marcy looked more closely at me. “You didn’t invite me here to discuss the decor, did you?”

  “No.” I felt awkward, but even Fred Astaire would have felt awkward in this situation, white tie or no.

  “You’re still looking into the thing with Vince, aren’t you?” Marcy’s gaze was probing, but it didn’t burn through me like it could have. She wasn’t accusing me; she was just trying to get it clear in her own mind.

  “It’s stuck in my head,” I said, possibly to myself. “I can’t stop thinking about it. And I’m concerned that the police think my projectionist is involved, when that doesn’t make any sense.”

  Marcy watched me for a while, thinking. Then she said, “How can I help?”

  “You can forgive me if my questions aren’t tactful.”

  Her face clouded over. I was going to ask about the rumors again, and she knew it. “I didn’t have an affair with Vince Ansella, Elliot,” Marcy said. “I already told you that.”

  “So why do people think you did?”

  She stood up. A theatrical move, but I understood it; I’m better on my feet as well. “People think what they want to think,” Marcy said. “I had lunch with the guy a few times, and they turned it into this hot romance. By the standards of the office gossips, you and I are having a wild affair right now. But so far, I’ve managed to fight the impulse to jump your bones.”

  It was just as well. Marcy was a very attractive woman, though in exactly the opposite way that Amy was: she could very well have been the girl next door, if the girl next door had grown up compact, slim, and down-to-earth. But at the moment, my life was overstocked with women, and I wasn’t prepared to add another. Not that Marcy was exactly making an offer.

  “I understand how rumors get started,” I told her. “But Amy Ansella believes it’s true, and she doesn’t really have contact with the gossips at the office, does she?”

  Marcy’s mouth puckered a bit at the mention of Vincent Ansella’s widow. “I don’t know what her problem is,” she said. “She knows I didn’t have an affair with her husband, but she’s resentful of me.”

  “If you only worked with Vincent, and had lunch with him on occasion, how would his wife even know enough about you to be resentful?”

  She sat back down. “From . . . being around, you know. Office Christmas parties, Fourth of July picnics, that sort of thing. The company’s really into pretending we’re a big happy family.”

  Marcy didn’t seem too keen on finishing her sub, and I thought it would be rude to scarf it up while she was sitting there, so I cleared the table and threw out the remains of our dinner. I gave her the tour of the theatre, showed her the projection booth and screened a three-minute trailer for Help!, the classic film of the evening, which she found, and I’m quoting now, “groovy.”

  “You’re off by a few years,” I told her. “Actually, it’s ’fab.’ ”

  “Gear.”

  I smiled and nodded, but I’d killed our chance at easy conversation by talking about her rumored liaison with Ansella. “I’m sorry if I’ve upset you,” I told her as I walked her to the theatre entrance. “Are you sure you won’t stay for the movie?”

  “I’d like to, but I have to walk the dog,” she said. “He’s probably sitting home with his legs crossed as we speak.”

  “Another time, maybe.”

  “Yeah.”

  I unlocked the front door and reached over to open it for Marcy, then stopped. “Can I ask one last impertinent question? ” I said.

  She nodded, a little hesitantly.

  "Why do you think Amy called Joe Dunbar a murderer at the funeral?”

  “I really don’t know.”

  “Speculate. I could use your perspective.”

  Marcy thought about that, searched my eyes, and nodded. “I don’t think she loved Vincent as much as she should have, as much as he wanted her to,” she said. “Once he was dead, I think she felt guilty, so she had to shift the blame to somebody.”

  “You think Amy killed her husband?”

  Marcy shook her head. “No. I don’t think she cared about him enough to kill him. You can chalk that up to the word of a suspected adulterer, but that’s what I think.”

  “You’re not a suspected adulterer,” I told her.

  “I’m not?”

  “Of course not. You’re a suspected adulteress.” Marcy chuckled, but there wasn’t much mirth in it. “I have one last uncomfortable question.” She nodded, accepting. “Where were you the night Vincent died?”

  “I had a date,” she said. “The police asked me that, too.”

  “Have they confirmed it with the guy?” I asked.

  “No.”

  My eyebrows dropped. “Why not?” I asked.

  “I haven’t told them who I was out with.” She clearly wasn’t going to tell me, either.

  I repeated the offer to stay and watch the movie, but Marcy seemed to want out of Comedy Tonight as soon as possible, which made me feel bad. I unlocked the door for her, thought about what a nice person she seemed to be, and wondered why what she’d said had unsettled me so badly. And then I wondered if Sharon had ever loved me as much as I wanted her to. I wondered if anybody ever loves someone as much as that person would like.

  And I was willing to bet Marcy didn’t have a dog.

  29

  The showing that night went by uneventfully, which was a blessing, considering how hard my mind was racing. Having immersed myself in the investigation of Vincent Ansella’s murder, I used my most trusted mental tool— obsession—to attack the problem, and so far, I was coming up empty.

  Beyond a few gut feelings, a rumor or two, the observations of relatively unreliable observers, and a succession of women of varying degrees of attractiveness, I had pretty much nothing to go on. Ansella was just as dead as he’d been three weeks earlier, and there had been no arrests.

  Meanwhile, back at the theatre, the projection booth was still unmanned, the basement had been cleared of its illegal booty weeks ago by a team of armed men and women from an agency of either the county, state, or federal government (I never could get a straight answer on that one), and worst of all, the novelty of seeing a film at the Scene of the Crime had worn off, so my crowds, as I was still euphemistically calling them, had dwindled to their pre-murder numbers. New furniture in the town house would have to wait.

  None of that would have bothered me, but the more I thought about it, the more it seemed that whoever had killed Ansella seemed to have it in for me, too, these days. Besides the unsettling image of a bleeding popcorn box affixed to my countertop with a deadly weapon was the even more unsettling image of my left leg, now an adorable shade of purple under its bandage, and the equally upsetting thought of what would have been if my reflexes had been just a hair slower or the concrete divider just a little less strategically placed.

  Not to mention, I wasn’t having sex with anybody, and while I’d gotten used to that since the divorce (actually, a while before the divorce), my first chance since then was gone, and that was a real downer.

  Other men have a best friend or a spouse off of whom they can bounce feelings and ideas like this, be told they’re acting ridiculous, and get on with their lives. I, on the other hand, was vacuuming the lobby of an ancient movie theatre while a sixteen-year-old girl trying her best to look like Wednesday Addams listened to Alien Sex Fiend on her iPod and tried very, very hard to pretend I wasn’t there.

  I decided to reach out. “So Sophie,” I said, immediately sounding ridiculous. “What’s new?” It was a way to kill the time until we could both go home. And I assumed anything with the word “kill” in it would appeal to Sophie.

  She stared, as
I was surely speaking some obscure dialect known only to bush people in a single remote African village. “New?” Sophie asked. “What is this obsession with newness? Don’t the ancients have anything to teach us? Have you ever read The Tibetan Book of the Dead?”

  “Still don’t want to tell me what you’re hiding from your folks?” Stare. “You’re not doing drugs, are you?” Big stare. I walked away.

  It’s a full life I lead.

  Turning over in my mind all the information I had on Ansella’s murder—and believe me, it didn’t take long—I kept coming to one conclusion: the only person who had any reason to want Vincent Ansella dead was his wife. If he was indeed having an affair with Marcy Resnick, or anybody else, Amy Ansella could certainly have become enraged. It happens. It doesn’t as a rule happen much to men who looked like Ansella, but love is a funny thing. I’m told. Even if Vincent wasn’t having an affair, Amy certainly believed he was, and therefore the whole “enragement” scenario could still apply. Maybe the front she showed—that she barely cared about her husband—was just that: a front.

  But if Amy didn’t really believe Vince was prowling around outside the marriage bed, did she have a reason to want him dead? Considering that he’d worked for an insurance company for many years, his own policy was substantial, but hardly winning-lottery-ticket substantial. There were easier ways to end the marriage than by spicing Ansella’s popcorn with blood pressure nukes.

  Okay, I thought, putting away the vacuum and locking the storage closet, so riddle me this, Batman: if Amy Ansella didn’t kill her husband, who else had any motivation to see him dead? As far as I could tell, the answer to that was: nobody.

  So I settled on Amy Ansella as my chief suspect, lacking trifles like proof. But that still didn’t answer a lot of questions. For example, who was the blond woman who gave Vincent a good-bye kiss in the middle of the movie? Christie Dunbar? She had only offered the lame “I was out” defense, which I believe was dismissed in the case of I.M. Lying vs. O. Please. Whomever the mysterious blonde was, did she give him the poison as a parting gift? Was there another person somewhere out there who hated Vincent Ansella enough to end his life? Not to mention, ruin his appreciation of a classic comedy?

  Sophie nodded a couple of times in my direction, both an indication she was through for the night and an appreciation of the beat being drummed into her head. I walked her to the door, unlocked it, let her out, watched as she got into her father’s car and drove away, then locked the door and went back to the lobby. It drove Sophie just a little crazy that her father had to pick her up after work, but in New Jersey, sixteen-year-olds can only have a limited learner’s permit, and can’t drive without a licensed driver in the car, and not at all after midnight. The look on her face was priceless. The look on her dad’s face, one of absolute adoration for his baby girl, was heartbreaking. One finds entertainment in strange places.

  Everything was just the way it had been before the doors had opened this evening. Mostly clean, mostly painted, mostly restored. I lived in a world that was defined by the word “mostly.”

  I was mostly over my marriage, mostly healthy (the only flaw being the stitches in my leg, which were beginning to itch), mostly independent, mostly doing what I wanted to do, and mostly content with my life. But I was finding that the gap between “mostly” and “sufficiently” was widening.

  Was this it for the rest of my life? Pushing the rock that was Comedy Tonight uphill every evening just to see it roll back down every night? Reveling in my self-reliance, only to find that it meant I had nobody else I could rely upon? Banging my head against the wall trying to solve riddles no one had asked me to solve?

  Okay, so that last one probably wasn’t going to last the rest of my life. Not unless the driver of the Lexus was waiting for me on the way home again tonight. A thought I’d had every night since he tried to run me down.

  I finished shutting the theatre down and walked outside, steering the bike without getting on. Suddenly, the prospect of my daily commute back to New Brunswick wasn’t quite as pleasant a thought as it had been before.

  As I walked down Edison Avenue, trying to convince myself to mount up and start pedaling, I noticed a car slowing in front of the theatre, and turned instinctively to ready myself. But this time the car was a Honda Accord, and behind the wheel was Chief Barry Dutton.

  “You want a ride?” he asked. “I’m going your way.” I nodded, thanked him, and took the bike’s front wheel off so the rest would fit into the trunk.

  “What are you doing driving into New Brunswick at this time of night?” I asked him when I got in. “Don’t you live in Midland Heights?”

  Dutton nodded. “Sure. We have a residency requirement.”

  “So what’s this about?”

  He hesitated. “Officer Levant told me about your . . . mishap the other night, and I want to see if that mysterious Lexus of yours is back again.”

  “You came out to give me a ride home? At midnight?”

  “My wife’s at a convention in San Diego,” he said. “I didn’t have anything to do.”

  We drove south into Highland Park, and Dutton pulled over just short of River Road, and turned off his headlights. It was warm enough to leave the windows open, so he did.

  “I asked the Highland Park police chief to watch for a Lexus around this time each night since you reported the . . . attack,” Dutton said. “They’ve pulled over two so far, but neither of them had an L on the license plate, and one of them was dark blue.”

  “So what are we doing here?”

  “We’re on a stakeout,” the chief said. “I brought you a cup of decaf and a bagel.” And sure enough, he produced both items from a Dunkin’ Donuts bag he had on the floor behind him.

  “A decaf?”

  “I didn’t want to keep you up all night.”

  “Very considerate,” I said.

  “To protect and to serve. Here.” He handed me the bagel and put the coffee in a cup holder in the console.

  We sat for a while as I ate the bagel and Dutton sipped on a coffee (he hadn’t brought any food for himself). Finally, he turned to me. “Are you sleeping with Leslie Levant? ” he asked.

  I came very close to a coffee spit-take that Jerry Lewis would have envied. “Did you really just ask me that?” He nodded. I shook my head. “No,” I answered honestly. And the odds were, I never would be. Thanks for reminding me, Chief.

  “Good,” Dutton nodded. “I don’t think she’s good for you right now.”

  “Since when are you Dr. Phil?” I asked.

  “I’m just making conversation.” He stopped doing that, and we watched the road silently for a while longer. “You know, she can bench-press two hundred pounds,” Dutton said out of the blue.

  “That’s great; I’ll put it on the back of her bubblegum card. What are we talking about, Chief?”

  “I’m just watching the street.” And he stopped talking again.

  The Lexus seemed determined not to show up tonight. “Where did you first notice the Lexus that night?” Dutton asked.

  “In Edison, about a half mile up.” I finished the decaf, which would have been fine without the sugar.

  “So what are we doing here?”

  I shrugged. “You’re the cop.”

  Dutton started the car and said something quietly to himself. I didn’t ask.

  Silently he drove me the rest of the way to my front door, which hadn’t gotten any less green since I saw it last. I got out and took my bike out of the trunk. Walking to the driver’s side, I saw Dutton lower the window, and I stood by his door.

  “Thanks for driving me. I was a little nervous about riding home tonight.”

  He nodded. “I was, too.”

  “Aw, Chief. You go on like that, and people will talk.”

  He gave me a patented look to indicate that he was a practicing heterosexual, and began to raise his window. I held up my hand. “One thing,” I said.

  “Yeah?”

  “W
hat was this all really about? Maybe you were concerned, but you’re not going to come and drive me home every night. What am I missing?”

  Dutton considered me for a long moment. “That’s what I’d like to know,” he said, raised his window, and drove away. He didn’t even wave.

  It had been a less than satisfactory evening. But on the plus side, nobody had made an attempt on my life, which made it an improvement over other nights I’d had recently. It wasn’t much, but it was something. Sort of.

  You should never assess an evening before you’re asleep in bed, however. When I got inside, against all logic, the phone was ringing. And the caller ID indicated an out-of-area call with no number listed.

  Usually, I let those calls go, assuming they’re from people trying to sell me insurance or heavy breathers who can’t read a phone book properly. But it was after midnight, and the insurance salesmen are mostly off work by then. If it was a heavy breather, I could have the satisfaction of telling the idiot I had his phone number and would be giving it to the proper authorities, even if it wasn’t true. So I picked it up and said, “Yeah?”

  “Mr. Freed?”

  Anthony.

  30

  My head was reeling, and it being the wee hours of the morning didn’t help. I gripped the cordless phone so hard I truly expected to find finger indentations when I hung it back up later. I wondered if I could use *69 when I got off.

  “Anthony!” I sounded just a little less frantic than Oliver Hardy when a piano was plummeting down 150 stairs directly at him. But perhaps this wasn’t the moment for a classic comedy reference.

  “Yeah, hi?” His voice betrayed a little confusion, like he was expecting someone other than me to pick up the phone. Someone who could speak rationally.

  I tried very hard to control my tone. “Where . . . are you?” I asked.

  “I’m on set,” he said with great pride. “We’re shooting the bakery scene, and I have to get off in a minute before the light shifts.”

  Okay, so he was shooting the bakery scene. Sure. The bakery scene. What bakery scene? The kid’s on the lam from every law enforcement agency in the country and he’s filming a cookie transaction?