Some Like It Hot-Buttered

by Cohen, Jeffrey

  “The bakery scene?”

  “Yeah, and we have to clean up from the last take. There’s fake blood all over the cheesecake.”

  “Anthony,” I said, biting my lip so hard I had to wonder if they make Band-Aids for lips, “tell me where you are. Maybe I can help you.”

  “I don’t see how,” he said. “The script is locked. Believe me, it’s not that I don’t respect your opinion . . .”

  One of us was insane, and I wasn’t entirely convinced it wasn’t me. “Listen to me carefully, Anthony. The police are after you. The FBI is after you. For all I know, the United Federation of Planets is after you. You have to tell me where you are, and let me help you get out of this mess.”

  There was a pause. Then I realized Anthony had put his hand over the mouthpiece of his cell phone. “Sorry about that,” he said when he came back, “the DP was asking me about a gel on the key light. What were you saying?”

  “I was saying that you are wanted by the police in connection with video piracy and possibly murder, and you have to tell me right now where you are so I can help you.”

  At least this time he’d been listening. “You’re kidding. Why do they think I had anything to do with the DVDs? And who got murdered?”

  If the kid was faking, he was doing a really mediocre job of it. His delivery was fine, but the lines were awfully scripted—you ask about the murder first. “So you admit you know about the movies.”

  “Sure. I agreed to store them in the basement of the theatre. ” No biggie. A federal crime. What’s your question?

  “Agreed with whom?” Even under duress, I was being grammatical. I want that noted when the truth is finally told.

  “I’m . . . not supposed to say. They told me not to call, not to call my folks, either. You know, so nobody gets in trouble. But I didn’t do anything. I just unlocked the door a couple of times.” Anthony sounded concerned, much as he would be if someone had told him that he needed to get a haircut or had to write another paper to pass a class. Not like he could go to jail for the rest of his life.

  “They also think you had something to do with Vincent Ansella’s murder.”

  You could hear his eyebrows rise. “Who’s Vincent Ansella?”

  “The guy in row S, seat 18.”

  “They think I killed him? That’s crazy! He had a heart attack.” I was starting to believe him.

  “Anthony, why were you calling?” I had paced around the kitchen to the spot where the countertop had a permanent wound in it. If someone knew I was talking to Anthony . . .

  “I felt bad about missing work.” Anthony wasn’t pulling a Richard Kimble; he was pulling an Alicia Silverstone: he was Clueless.

  “Anthony, tell me where you are.”

  The tumult around him seemed to increase in volume again. “I’ve got to go, Mr. Freed. We’re losing our light. I’ll call you again in a few days.”

  “Wait! Who did you open the door for? Who told you not to call your parents?”

  He hung up.

  31

  Carla Singelese lived in Bohn Hall at Montclair State University, but even from her eighth-floor dorm room, you couldn’t see the Yogi Berra Museum and Learning Center or the Abbott and Costello Center, so there was little point in looking out the window.

  Neither of us was interested in the view, anyway. Carla, even with only one exam left in the semester, looked worried, sitting on her bed with a residence advisor (named Arnold) present, although Arnold seemed mostly interested in eyeing Carla when he wasn’t perusing the copy of Maxim he’d brought with him. He was probably comparing Carla to Jessica Alba. Carla would come up wanting, but it wasn’t really a fair comparison. She didn’t have lighting, makeup, and a personal trainer.

  Having seen her high school yearbook picture, I could say the ensuing two years had been good to Carla. She was what we would have called a “cute chick” back before “hot” became the only acceptable adjective to describe an attractive female. She was small and of average weight, neither overweight nor model-thin. She had large brown eyes, which were now widened at the news that Anthony Pagliarulo was found, having been lost.

  “He called you last night?” she said. “How can he be missing if he called you?”

  “He called me, but he didn’t say where he was,” I said. “Do you have any idea where Anthony might go?”

  She made quite a show of thinking about it. Carla obviously wanted me to see how close she and Anthony were, how intimately she knew his thought process. “Probably, he’d go home to his folks,” she said. “If he really thought he was in trouble, he’d go to his dad first. One time, he got in this fender bender, and even before he got out of the car, he was on the phone to his dad.”

  I rubbed my eyes, because I thought I’d already related the conversation with Anthony in excruciating detail. And since I had in fact called Michael Pagliarulo last night to tell him his son was safe, whereabouts unknown, I knew Anthony hadn’t called his parents. “He didn’t think he was in trouble.” I tried not to sigh. “He said he was on set, shooting the bakery scene.”

  “The bakery scene.” Carla chewed that over a couple of times. She ignored Arnold, who was taking turns staring at her T-shirt (which read “Stop Clubbing Seals”) and the page of his magazine, where Ms. Alba was wearing a shirt on which it would have been impossible to fit that slogan, even in ten-point type. “I’m trying to remember what happens in the bakery scene.”

  “Anthony said there was blood,” I attempted.

  “There’s blood in every scene.” Carla dismissed me. “Somebody gets shot about once a page.” She sat and put her fingers to her temples. “The bakery scene.”

  After I’d hung up the phone with Anthony, and determined that I couldn’t trace the number from which he’d called (caller ID was blocked, so *69 didn’t work), I had choices to make. I probably should have asked O’Donnell or Dutton to check into the phone records, but that would require that I actually tell one of them Anthony had called, which wasn’t really my first choice. Or I could have ignored the call altogether, and concentrated strictly on Ansella’s murder, which was what I had been intending to do until the phone rang.

  But as much as it irritated me that Ansella had died at Comedy Tonight, as much as I considered it a personal insult, the person I needed to help right now was Anthony. Even if he didn’t really understand that he needed help. I knew it, and that was enough.

  My mood hadn’t been helped much by the fact that I’d needed a ride to Montclair (actually Little Falls, but why quibble?) to talk to Carla. I could have mooched a car from Moe, but for reasons even I didn’t understand, I’d called Sharon.

  We’d been unusually quiet for much of the ride, neither of us wanting to mention the kiss from the last time we’d seen each other. We spoke only about the directions I’d gotten from MapQuest and whether or not we wanted to eat after the interview. It was a warm May morning, but it had felt pretty chilly in Sharon’s car.

  “The bakery scene is where Antonio, the hero, confronts the baker, who is really a cruel monster who runs a whorehouse and gambling in the back room of the bakery,” Carla said, eyes closed to better recall the details. “You think Antonio is going to get killed by the baker, but then he shoots the baker in the head six times.”

  I knew it wasn’t going to get me closer to finding Anthony, but I couldn’t help blurting out, “Six times?”

  “Yeah. Anthony said it was accurate, because there would only be six bullets in a revolver from that period.” Shooting a pastry chef six times in his head didn’t seem to be a problem so long as the weaponry was accurately portrayed.

  I decided to switch gears. “How close are you and Anthony? ” I asked. It was a little direct, but I didn’t really have the time to ease into the subject. Sharon was waiting in the car in the parking lot.

  At the question, Arnold looked up, interested.

  Carla didn’t blush, but I could tell she wanted to. She closed her eyes halfway and made a sound that would
have approached a giggle if she’d let it. “I don’t know . . .” she said.

  “Well, are you good friends? Are you dating?”

  Arnold seemed to be assessing his chances with Jessica Alba, giving himself a reality check, and realizing that Carla was much closer to his level, although he probably overestimated his level and underestimated Carla’s. She tilted her head back and forth for a moment, deciding.

  “We’re sort of . . . In high school, we had a thing for a while.”

  “You went out.”

  “More like we stayed in, if you want to know the truth.” She turned to Arnold. “You don’t have to be here, you know.”

  “Regulations,” he said, clearly not wanting to miss this part of the story.

  I considered the possibility that Arnold might drool his way through the rest of the conversation, and turned toward him. “It’s okay if I’m her uncle, isn’t it?”

  “You said you were a newspaper reporter,” Arnold said. I think this time, I was with the Daily Tribune.

  “I am, but I’m also Carla’s uncle,” I told him. “Her dad wanted me to check on the security procedures here, and you have been an enormous help. I’ll be happy to pass the word on to him that Carla is very safe here. Keep up the good work.”

  Arnold narrowed his eyes. “That true?” he asked Carla.

  “Every word,” she said.

  Arnold curled a lip, deciding whether to protest, then sighed, got up, and took his magazine with him toward the door. “I’ve got an exam, anyway,” he said, and left the room.

  Once the door closed, Carla looked back at me. “If you’re asking whether Anthony and I slept together . . .”

  “I’m really not,” I said. “I’m just trying to gauge how close you are now. Whether he’d confide in you, and whether you’d cover up for him. I want you to know that I’m on Anthony’s side, I’m trying to help him, and I won’t tell the police anything unless I think it will do him good.”

  “Well, I wanted to sleep with him,” she said, seemingly having dozed through my speech, which is not unusual for me when I speak to women. “I love Anthony, and I think he loves me, but he was always obsessed with this film of his. His vision is so pure that he wouldn’t give in to the temptations of the flesh.” Great. I come for information, and I find myself in the middle of a book with a picture of Fabio on the cover.

  “Carla, please listen.”

  “No, it’s okay, really. I don’t mind people knowing. Anthony broke it off with me a little after we started college.”

  Anthony broke it off with her? I would have been more surprised, but it sounded like there was nothing to break off.

  “I understood. He needed to be thinking about his art. I love him enough to accept that,” Carla continued.

  Okay, that was the wedge. “Good. So help me help him. Tell me where he would be.”

  “He really didn’t call his folks?” That seemed to amaze her. I shook my head. “And he’s finally shooting his movie, huh? Well, I guess he’s in Hollywood. I mean, that’s where you shoot a movie, isn’t it?”

  “Not if you aren’t employed by a studio,” I told her. “Anthony got hold of some money . . . somehow . . . and he’s using it to produce his movie independently. Now, where would he want to go if he was shooting on location? Where does the story take place?”

  Carla raised her eyebrows. “In the Old West,” she said. “In 1840. How do you think he went there?”

  A good question. I got up to leave, and then had a sudden inspiration. “Do you have a copy of the script?” I asked her.

  “Sure,” Carla said, and climbed down to the floor to search under her bed. From my vantage point, it was hard to believe Anthony had always kept his mind on his film. Then I remembered: he was Anthony. I made a mental note to respect the fact that she was roughly half my age.

  She found what she was looking for—a CD-ROM— and held it out. “You think this will help?” she asked.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “But I do know Anthony is lucky to have such a good friend.” I headed for the door.

  Carla spoke very softly, and I could just barely hear her. “Lover,” she said.

  32

  “I think this is the last ride I’m going to give you,” Sharon said.

  I almost spit out a mouthful of french fries, and that would have been an unpardonable faux pas in Sharon’s car. It was a testament to the huge hurry she was in that she’d agreed to allow food in the car to begin with.

  “What are you talking about?” I asked, as soon as I’d managed to swallow.

  She went on as if I hadn’t spoken. “And I think maybe we’d better stop having lunch together for a while, too.”

  “Jesus, Sharon, it was just one kiss. If you want, I’ll pretend I didn’t enjoy it, and we can go on like before.”

  She never took her eyes off the road, because she’s Sharon, but I could tell this conversation was difficult for her. “It’s not about . . . that,” she said. “It’s . . . I just don’t think it’s a good idea, that’s all.”

  “You want to explain that?”

  She wouldn’t look at me, not even for a second, and I was beginning to think maybe it wasn’t because the highway required every iota of her attention. In a wildly unconvincing voice, she said, “You know, you’re not saving the environment by making people drive you all over or borrowing cars from Moe. It takes just as much gas for me to drive you as it would if you drove yourself. You’re just saving yourself the responsibility and the car payment, and you’re forcing us to spend time together.”

  “Yeah. That’s why you don’t want to see me anymore. It’s an ecological issue.”

  “I’m just saying it’s not healthy for the two of us to act like we’re still a couple, Elliot. We’re not. That part of our lives is over, and we both need to move ahead.”

  There’s a face I make when something doesn’t strike me as honest, which sort of looks like Jackie Gleason with a bad case of gas. I made it now, but Sharon was so intent on the road, it had no effect. “Okay, what’s really going on?” I asked. “That didn’t even sound like you talking.”

  She drew a deep breath, then let it out. Apparently, the act of respiration itself was supposed to be impressive. Finally, she spoke.

  “Gregory thinks we spend too much time together for a divorced couple.”

  “Funny, I thought you and Gregory spent too much time together when we were a married couple, and that didn’t seem to matter.” Gregory? Now I had to worry about what Gregory thought?

  “Don’t be petty, Elliot.”

  There are certain things that push my buttons. Okay, there are a lot of things that push my buttons. But nearing the top of the list was someone I don’t like telling me what I can and can’t do. It’s why I haven’t voted in fifteen years.

  “Petty! I love this. You and I try to have a civil divorce, unlike every other divorced couple in the country, and the guy who broke up our marriage to begin with decides we’re being too nice to each other? What’s he afraid of, that I’ll steal my wife back from him?”

  Sharon didn’t talk for a while, and I stopped eating. I confess, I even wiped a little of the grease off my fingers and onto her car seat. Okay, so maybe I am petty.

  “It’s just . . . you need to grow up, Elliot.” Now, that did sound like her.

  “I’ve never much seen the benefit to that, Shar.”

  She nodded. “But I’m not going to help you avoid it anymore.”

  “Fine. You want to let me off here, or can we make it all the way back home before we part ways and you can start living your life the way Gregory wants you to?”

  Her mouth undulated a little as she tried hard not to frown disapprovingly, but it was a doomed effort. “It was going to happen sooner or later, wasn’t it?”

  “What?”

  “That we’d start acting like all the other divorced couples. ”

  This time, I was silent for a while. That one hurt. I looked out the window and tried
to think of something else. The Garden State Parkway is a lot more attractive than the New Jersey Turnpike, and since they installed E-ZPass, it’s not that much slower. If you have the choice, go with the Parkway. More trees.

  “All right,” I said after an appropriate pause. “You have to do what’s right for your marriage.” I didn’t even mean anything by that.

  Sharon put a finger to her left eye, but I couldn’t tell if it was because it was tearing up, or because her mascara was clumping, which I understand from commercials can be a major hazard for women. “I’ll call you when . . . things calm down a little, okay?” she said.

  “You do what you have to do.” Okay, that time I meant something by it. I never said I was the most magnanimous man on the planet. Or even the most magnanimous in the center lane of the Garden State Parkway. “Just step on it, will you? I have to get back so I can cheat a widow out of her inheritance.”

  Dad met me at the town house. Even though he’s usually glad to see Sharon—he likes to think there’s a chance we’ll reconcile, despite her subsequent remarriage—this time he was a little more subdued, and as soon as she drove away and I hopped into the passenger seat in the truck, he gave me a look. He must have noticed the way Sharon and I were eyeing each other.

  “What’s going on with Leslie?” he asked.

  “Can we talk about that later? I’m dealing with one disaster at a time right now.” I’d left my bag of fast food, with french fries oozing oil, on the seat of Sharon’s car. That would add at least a week to the time she’d refrain from calling, but I knew the rules. I couldn’t call her until I heard from her. It was usually best to call her at the office or on the cell phone, anyway. When I called her at home, and a man—that is, Gregory—answered, I wouldn’t hang up, but I’d generally wish I had.

  “Disaster? What disaster?” Nobody can ignore a request to ignore something better than a Jewish parent. They can’t help it; it’s in the DNA. If I ever have kids, I’ll be exactly the same way, and you can highlight those words right here and show them to me in twenty years if you like.