Some Like It Hot-Buttered

by Cohen, Jeffrey

  I gave Dad the rundown on my dealings with the women “in” my life. He listened, as he always does, with complete concentration. And when I was finished, he digested it all as he drove.

  “This is what you’re sending me home to tell your mother? I left the house this morning, and you had a new girlfriend she wanted to meet and an ex-wife she still loves. Now, I have to go tell her to expect you for dinner every Thursday night again.”

  “That’s not going to happen.”

  “Sure it’s not,” he said.

  “It can’t. I have a theatre to run. Make it lunch.”

  We pulled up to Amy Ansella’s Colonial and I helped Dad down from the driver’s seat, which he resented. At the doorstep, he stood back, allowing me to ring the bell. After all, I was the one Amy had met before.

  She was very charming with Dad, smiling her best flirtatious smile at him and calling him Arthur at his request. She had boxed up much of her late husband’s DVD and VHS collection—at least twelve hundred titles, and that was a conservative estimate—but still had about fifty or so movies that she was loading into a carton from the shelves in her living room. Amy also handed me an inventory of everything I was buying, so that I could match it against the discs and tapes when I unpacked them, to make sure everything was there.

  “Vincent kept the list,” she said. “I just took the movies and put them into boxes. I didn’t even look. But he was very careful about keeping the list up-to-date, so I’m sure it’s still accurate. I crossed off the ones I gave his sister.” I told her that at this price, the collection was beyond my expectations, and even a few inaccuracies on the list wouldn’t have been a problem, but she assured me there were none. “Vincent kept it current until the day he died,” Amy said.

  I did my best to keep Dad from lifting heavy cartons (I had, in fact, tried to borrow the truck without him, but he’d seen through that), and was as successful with that as I had been generally for the past few weeks. When all was said and done, I believe I may have carried one more carton than he did out to the truck. I don’t know about him, but I was exhausted.

  Amy came out of the house with—I swear—a pitcher of lemonade, which she offered first to my father, who accepted gratefully, and then to me. I’m not a huge lemonade fan, but you have to be nice to a recent widow, so I drank four quick cups and waited for the cramp I knew would hit my midsection at any second.

  “I still can’t believe you’re letting me have all this at such a low price,” I told Amy. “Are you sure you want to do this?” Dad gave me a look that had its roots in the tradition of our people: You’re trying to pay more?

  “I’m sure,” Amy said. “I told you, I just want them where I don’t have to see them every day.” Then she smiled naughtily and added, “Besides, you’re a pretty nice guy when you’re not asking me about my sex life.”

  The look Dad gave me then had no roots in the tradition of our people.

  We sat on the bumper of Dad’s truck while Amy refilled the plastic cups again. Cramp, be damned. “I didn’t mean to ask you any impolite questions,” I told her, although I snuck a peek at my father to reassure him. “It’s just that . . . what happened still gnaws at me. I’m just trying to make sense of it.”

  The pitcher was empty, and Amy sat on the grass, staring ahead with little affect in her tone or expression on her face. “There is no sense to it,” she said. “I have to come to terms with that idea, that I’m never really going to understand it.”

  “I don’t think you should do that,” Dad told her. “If you give up, if you just tell yourself that it was ‘one of those things,’ you’ll end up regretting it later. You’re young now, and you don’t really know about regrets. Trust me.” I stared at him a moment. It was the least optimistic thing I’d ever heard my father say; usually he was so upbeat you’d swear he was Shirley Temple with a really bad sore throat.

  “Dad,” I said. He gave me a look that shut me up.

  But Amy was giving him a sad smile. “You’re probably right, Arthur,” she said. “But I don’t think I have the strength to do it. The police say . . .”

  “The police are wrong,” I told her. “Anthony didn’t have anything to do with what happened to your husband.”

  “Then why did he run away?” My father. Helping.

  “I won’t know that until I get to talk to him again,” I said.

  Amy’s body tensed, which wasn’t entirely an unattractive thing. “Again? You’ve heard from him?” she asked.

  Oops.

  “No, not really,” I said. “I heard a rumor that he was out of state, working on a project. But I have nothing to back that up. What I meant was, when I get to talk to him and ask him why he left, I’ll know better.”

  Amy couldn’t have been a terribly astute woman, because she leaned back and said, “Oh.”

  This wasn’t getting me anywhere. “I can’t stop asking questions, Amy. I don’t want to embarrass you, but please tell me: where were you the night your husband died?”

  “Here. At home. If you must know, Vincent stormed out. I thought he might go to your theatre; he’d been talking about Young Frankenstein being shown in the area. I didn’t know where, and I didn’t care; he’d made me watch it a thousand times.”

  “You really weren’t at the theatre?” I asked.

  Amy shook her head. “I prefer something a little more sophisticated. Like Indiscreet.”

  “So maybe you can tell me who I should be talking to,” I tried. “Who would have a reason to want to hurt your husband? ”

  She thought about it. “I think it was his pal, Joe Dunbar, but nobody seems to agree with me.”

  “Dunbar had no motive,” I said.

  Amy looked sharply at me. “I don’t know why. But I know men. And he’s a man who could do something like that.”

  “Nobody saw him at the theatre. But . . .”

  Amy saw it on my face; I’d said more than I had intended. “But what, Mr. Freed? You can’t hurt me anymore; feel free to tell the truth.”

  “One witness saw your husband at the movies that night with a blond-haired woman. Not with Joe Dunbar.”

  “Have you seen Joe’s wife?” she asked.

  I didn’t know how to react to that, so I said, “There was no one else? Nobody else who might have wanted to kill your husband?”

  Amy laughed without humor, a hollow sound like a mallet hitting Curly in the head during a Three Stooges short. “He wasn’t that memorable.”

  It slipped out: “So why did you marry him?”

  Amy looked me straight in the eyes. “He made me laugh,” she said.

  33

  It was getting late after Dad and I unpacked the boxes and carried them into the town house. He didn’t say anything about the enormous gash in my countertop, although his eyes were filled with questions. My father is, if nothing else, a tactful man. I mumbled something about wanting to unpack (which I had no intention of doing now), and he said something about leaving my mother alone too long. Dad drove off, looking worried. Don’t ever let them tell you Jewish guilt is the sole province of mothers.

  I took a long look around the living room. There were at least twenty cartons of films in various formats, and the sad part was, they didn’t clutter the room. Aside from the drooping futon-like sofa, there wasn’t a stick of furniture to be seen other than a floor lamp that should have been banished two presidents ago. I would have to buy a decent home entertainment system to properly show the DVDs I’d just bought. And, since I was in a self-pitying sort of mood, I reminded myself that, in all likelihood, I’d be watching them alone.

  With dark clouds gathering, this wasn’t the best time to be leaving for the theatre, but I had no choice—the doors had to open in an hour and a half. I got on the bike for the first time since the Lexus attack (I’d been taking cabs home and mooching rides around) and started toward Midland Heights.

  Eight minutes into the ride, just when I was past the scene of the attack, it started to rain.
r />   The fold-up poncho I keep in a pouch attached to the seat was all folded up (as advertised), but the rain wasn’t hard, and going up the hill into Highland Park, I preferred not to destroy the momentum I’d developed. So I kept pedaling. And naturally, the sky opened up and buckets of rain began to fall. At least, they felt like buckets.

  By the time I could have stopped the bike, gotten the poncho, and put it on, the whole exercise would have been pointless. It was beginning to feel like someone didn’t want me to save the environment all by myself.

  I arrived at Comedy Tonight wetter than if I’d just taken a shower, and considerably colder. Luckily, I keep some extra clothes in the office, so I went inside to change, and didn’t bother to close the door, since I was the only person in the theatre.

  At least, that’s what I thought. I was lamenting my lack of foresight in not keeping dry towels in my desk when a sound came from the doorway. Leslie Levant was standing there, an amused expression on her face. Given the way my day was going, I assumed she’d come to tell me that not only did she never want to see me again, but also that she wanted to erase the memory of ever having seen me before.

  “Have I come at a bad time?” she managed to say without guffawing.

  I believe I said something on the order of “argf,” and compounded my embarrassment by trying to cover myself with the sweatpants I’d picked up off the floor.

  “Don’t worry, Elliot,” Leslie said. “I’m a professional.”

  “A professional voyeur?”

  “Nonsense. You can’t get paid for being a voyeur.”

  I pulled on the sweats and sat down, reaching for a T-shirt from the bottom drawer of my desk. I never said Comedy Tonight was a classy operation. “Is there a reason you showed up, or do you want to arrest me for indecent exposure?”

  “Depends on your definition of ‘indecent.’ ”

  I looked up. “Are we flirting again? Can you maybe carry a certain color handkerchief in your shirt pocket, so I’ll know what our status is on any given day?”

  Leslie leaned on the edge of the desk, a little too close for my comfort. I reached over to make sure my pants were properly zipped, then remembered I was in sweats. I left the hand there.

  “I’m sorry about that,” she told me. “I realize I was abrupt the other night, and I shouldn’t have been. You scared me. I thought you were getting too involved too fast.”

  “I probably was. But you weren’t getting involved at all, and I wanted to clarify the relationship,” I said, sounding way too much like a TV psychologist for my own taste. “I wasn’t interested in setting a wedding date; I just wanted to know where I stood, and you showed me.”

  She frowned. “I was abrupt.”

  “You could say that. At least you waited until I stopped bleeding from the leg to ambush me.”

  “You’re not going to make this easy, are you?” Leslie couldn’t seem to decide if she was irritated or hurt.

  “I don’t even know what ‘this’ is, so how could I make it easy?” I’d had a long day, and wasn’t much in the mood to be charitable to a woman who’d put me in this state of mind to begin with.

  “We’ve been going too fast,” she said. “We met, we flirted, we dated, we kissed, and you were starting to look at me like I was your next Sharon. I was starting to look at you and Sharon and getting jealous. It was way too much, way too soon. I think we should start again, slowly.” She stuck out her hand. “I’m Leslie Levant. Nice to meet you.”

  “Man, you blow hot and cold.”

  “I’m unpredictable,” Leslie said.

  “You’re nuts, is what you are.”

  She withdrew her hand. “It’s part of my charm.” Leslie saw the look on my face, and stopped grinning. “Still. I think I’ve been unfair, and I want to try again. How about it?”

  I closed my eyes and thought about that. “I don’t know,” I said.

  That probably wasn’t the response she was expecting, and I didn’t blame her; it wouldn’t have been the response I’d have expected if you’d asked me ten minutes earlier. “You don’t know?” Leslie asked.

  I opened my eyes again, and tried to look at her without anger, which I believe I managed. “I really don’t,” I answered. “If we can’t define what we have, and what we hope to have, I don’t know if I want to keep things the way they were. Not that it wasn’t fine, but it’s too iffy for me. I want to have something to do with your life, and for you to have something to do with mine. Or at least, I want to know that we’re finding out whether that’s possible. You seem to want something else, but I don’t know what it is.”

  “I’m gun-shy, Elliot. I had a bad marriage, and I’m not in the least ready to even consider doing something like that again. I like you, but you’re in a hurry. You want everything to happen in the next two weeks, and I can tell you now, that won’t be the case with me.” She stood up and made important eye contact. “I can’t make any promises,” Leslie said.

  “Can you promise you’ll at least think about it?”

  “I don’t know.” Great. Now we both didn’t know. This conversation was becoming more vague as it went along.

  “Then I guess we need to keep our lives separate for a while,” I said.

  She looked at me for a very long time, and it seemed that Leslie was thinking of ways to counter my argument. “Do you really want to be alone tonight?” she asked.

  “No, I don’t. But I’m greedy, and I want more than just not being alone.”

  Leslie shook her head slowly and let out her breath. “You’re not like other guys I meet, Elliot Freed,” she said after a while.

  “Maybe you should consider that.”

  “Maybe.” She turned and walked through the door, then headed left, toward the lobby and the street. I got a good view of her on the way out, and I confess, it did shake my resolve. But I couldn’t think of a way to call her back without sounding like an idiot.

  Sophie would be showing up in fifteen minutes, and I had to get ready for her unspoken scorn. I still had to put on socks and shoes. There were things that needed doing. I hadn’t threaded the projector or started the popcorn machine. Luckily, I had cleaned up pretty well the night before.

  After all, a good thirty or forty people were coming. Everything had to be just right, didn’t it?

  I spent a few minutes setting up the popcorn and changed a couple of the two-sheets in the lobby to reflect the next week’s movies, and then went and turned on the lights in the auditorium.

  It really did reflect hours and hours of hard work, and I was proud of it. But it still wasn’t within driving distance of the vision I had for the theatre, something that went back to my childhood and before that, when going to a movie was something more than watching a DVD on a really, really big screen.

  In those days, there was a palpable excitement in seeing a film in a real movie palace, one of the over-the-top rococo structures that signaled a group experience. The idea was that it should be too much, it should be almost garish in its architectural excess. This was, in fact, the temple of moviegoing, and that made it a special experience, something that everyone could afford, but that gave us a glimpse of the better life.

  At Comedy Tonight, it was more likely you’d get a glimpse of the better life as it was in 1948, but without cosmetic surgery. When you looked at Ginger Rogers, for example, in Swing Time (1936), it was hard to imagine a woman more beautiful. But in the last years of her life, while it was possible to understand that she had once been a great beauty, the present-day reality was only a reminder, and something of a tease. My theatre was like Ginger Rogers in 1995.

  Luckily, the lights were never turned on high, so you couldn’t see the cracks in the plaster and the missing pieces of the painting on the ceiling. (Michelangelo had nothing on the guy who climbed up into the cupola of Comedy Tonight.) The missing seats here and there didn’t help, and the fact that not all the seats that were there actually matched wasn’t a huge asset, either.

  I stood
another few seconds checking on the state of my mostly restored theatre and then remembered that I needed to take my huge asset upstairs to the projection booth.

  Getting Help! to thread up had been a little tricky the night before—we don’t always get what you’d call mint-condition prints, and this one’s sprocket holes were a little cranky. I should have left myself extra time, and I hadn’t expected to torpedo a budding relationship, so now I was in a hurry.

  As it turned out, though, I needn’t have rushed—the film was perfectly threaded and ready to go, and the projection booth was powered up and lit, as it always was whenever Anthony was in the theatre.

  But this was different. I knew Anthony couldn’t be in the theatre tonight.

  Could he?

  34

  “Don’t you see,” I said to Chief Barry Dutton, who was sitting behind his desk the next day, looking like an African-American Transformer toy in “building” mode, “this means someone is trying to make it look like Anthony’s here, when we know he’s not.”

  “Let me see if I have this right,” Dutton said, his voice rumbling somewhere beneath the tones of a lion who just came back to the den to find Uncle Scar hanging out with his lioness. “You received a phone call from a fugitive from justice, didn’t bother to let the authorities know about it, and then when you think it might help that fugitive’s case, you bring the information here to me. Is that about it?”

  “No need to thank me. It’s all part of the service.”

  “Mr. Freed, we don’t know each other very well. But you can assume from this moment on that if I need to be irritated by a civilian who thinks he’s witty, there are other places I can go.” Dutton, I could see, could be very intimidating if he tried hard enough, and he was certainly giving it a shot. He didn’t stand up, though, which might have helped. The man was roughly the size of Pike’s Peak.

  “I’m sorry, Chief. It’s a reflex with me. From this point on, assume that you have successfully cowed me into submission. ”