Some Like It Hot-Buttered

by Cohen, Jeffrey

  36

  I spent most of Tuesday mulling over what had happened, and it came to this: not much. I had theories, and some of the facts supported them, but others didn’t. And I had the chief of the Midland Heights Police Department sort of on my side, but sort of not.

  Not to mention, I hadn’t heard from my ex-wife in a few days, and the woman I’d begun a relationship with had moved from police officer to suspect, and besides, wasn’t talking to me. By my choice.

  By Wednesday morning, having gotten through the slowest night of the week at the theatre, I was ready to push on. And Joe Dunbar, Vincent Ansella’s closest friend, was taking the day off from work to attend to what he called “family business.” He wasn’t anxious to have me in his home, but he couldn’t come up with a plausible excuse not to, so I rode the bike up to his neighborhood, which wasn’t far from Amy’s, on the other side of Piscataway.

  “I’m actually cleaning up stuff for our yard sale on Saturday, ” he admitted when he let me in. “That’s why the place looks like this.”

  “You must have a really understanding boss,” I told him.

  “I do,” he said. “I work for my wife.”

  “Christie?”

  “No,” he said. “My other wife.” Then Dunbar stopped. “You know Christie?”

  I’d forgotten he didn’t know I’d spoken to his wife. “Amy Ansella mentioned her.”

  Dunbar scowled. “I bet,” he said.

  I walked into the room, which was filled with cartons of vinyl LPs, VHS tapes, a couple of wigs, old clothing, and what my mother calls tchotchkes, knickknacks that serve little purpose beyond looking remarkably odd on people’s shelves. There were New York Mets yearbooks, drinking mugs, and bobblehead dolls, as well as some exercise equipment (small free weights and the like) and cook-books. And this was just in the living room.

  “Why don’t Amy and Christie get along?” I asked.

  Dunbar didn’t react outwardly; he just kept walking. “Their husbands were friends,” he said. “Didn’t mean they had to be.”

  “What exactly does your wife do?” I asked as we navigated through the room toward the kitchen. I already sort of knew from visiting her office, but I wasn’t supposed to tell Dunbar I’d talked to Christie, so I was playing dumb.

  “She runs a company that trains medical records personnel for hospitals, pharmaceutical companies, and support services,” Dunbar said, clearly not for the first time in his life. “Christie provides the training, and then helps find jobs for these people. I mostly do the human resources work and run the office, and I handle all the interaction with employers that Christie doesn’t do herself.”

  I’m embarrassed to say that the first thought that came to mind was: a guy whose wife deals with a lot of pharmaceutical companies might be able to get hold of some prescription medications.

  Dunbar must have seen it on my face, because he said, “Don’t even think it. Pharma companies are very closely regulated, and you can’t just get a prescription for something because you want it.”

  “So Christie doesn’t have high blood pressure?”

  He moved some boxes out of the way as we walked from the kitchen to the “family room,” where there were yet more cartons. Dunbar made room on two chairs for us to sit. “No, she doesn’t,” he said. “But before you ask, yes, I do. And no, my doctor took me off clonidine six months ago. I don’t have any.”

  “I’m sorry, Joe. But you know there are still a lot of unanswered questions.”

  He waved a hand to brush away the insult. “I understand, ” Dunbar said. “You’re a movie theatre owner. You have to ask tough questions.” He smiled.

  I was playing cop a little too hard, and I smiled back. “I know. It’s silly. But I can’t leave it alone. If Vincent had been killed at the Loews in New Brunswick, you wouldn’t be seeing me now.”

  “The Loews wouldn’t be showing Young Frankenstein, would it, now?”

  Dunbar’s cell phone, which he wore clipped to his belt, rang. It was a simple ring, which I appreciated. Dunbar apparently didn’t feel the need to express his individuality through the way his cell phone interrupted the rest of his life, and I found that refreshing. His conversation, which was clearly about business (he kept using words like “invoice” and “sessions”) lasted only a minute or so, and then he turned his attention back to me, apologizing.

  “No problem,” I said. “It’s a hazard of modern life. So, is the business doing well?”

  Dunbar nodded enthusiastically. “It’s still new, you know. We’ve only been doing this about a year. Christie used to be a beautician, you know, but she . . .” He got a little teary. “Christie is a cancer survivor, and when she came out of the chemo and the radiation with a pretty clean bill of health—for now; you know, they’re never sure until a few years have gone by—then she decided she wanted to help the industry. Help people get better, you know. She wasn’t a doctor or a chemist or anything, so she figured she could get them the best help they could have. And she asked me to give up my job to help her.”

  “What were you doing before?”

  “I was a sales rep for a replacement windows manufacturer until she got sick. My territory was the whole East Coast. I’d have to be away too much, and I couldn’t do that when she was sick. So I quit.”

  I never know what to say when someone tells me a story like that. “Well, I’m glad she came through it all right,” I told him.

  Dunbar nodded, and looked at me a while, waiting for something. I was wondering what to say next. “I guess you’re going to ask me again about Amy calling me ‘murderer, ’ ” he said.

  That seemed like a good place to start, seeing as how he’d brought it up. “It was on my mind,” I told him.

  “I’ve been thinking about it a lot. I really don’t understand what she was getting at. I think she was just so emotionally out there at the funeral, you know, she’d say or do anything. She was in shock.” Dunbar leaned back on his cushioned seat and stared at the ceiling. “The poor kid. It came so out of the blue.”

  “Joe, I’ve got to ask: where were you the night Vincent died?”

  The response didn’t come too quickly, like he had rehearsed it, and it didn’t come too slowly, like he had to make it up on the spot. “I went out to dinner with Christie,” he said. “And before you ask—because the cops already have—no, I don’t have a receipt from the restaurant. We went out for a pizza, and I paid cash.”

  Christie had said she was out, but she hadn’t said where, and that seemed odd, with an answer as innocuous as this at her disposal. If it were true.

  “Would the guy at the restaurant . . .”

  “Remember me?” Dunbar asked. “No. Would the guy at your pizza place know you by name, Elliot?”

  Actually, he probably would, but that was a sad comment on my life, not Dunbar’s. So I changed topics.

  “Amy told me she and Vincent had an argument the night he died. She said he admitted to her that he was having an affair, and they fought bitterly. But it didn’t seem shocking to her; it was almost like she expected it.”

  “Did she say who he was having an affair with?” he asked.

  “She said it was with Marcy Resnick,” I told him.

  “Who’s Marcy Resnick?”

  “A woman he worked with.” Strange that Dunbar didn’t know the name.

  “Strange that I don’t know the name,” he said. See? “Vince and I saw each other at least once a week. Up until the last few months, he told me everything. You’d think he’d at least mention her, if it was someone . . .”

  “Maybe that’s why he was so secretive the past few months,” I suggested.

  Dunbar shook his head. “It doesn’t figure. Vince just wasn’t that kind of guy. Besides, he was married to Amy. You’d think that would be enough.”

  I looked at him. “Who knows what goes on in someone else’s marriage,” I said.

  “Yeah.”

  I took a look around the room, and the rooms I co
uld see from where I sat. “You sure you’re not moving out?” I asked Dunbar. “What’s going to be left after you sell all this stuff?”

  He laughed. “I’ll be happy if we sell a tenth of it, to tell you the truth,” he said. “I just want to clear out some storage space.”

  I couldn’t think of anything more to ask, other than “how come Amy called you a murderer” again, but that was getting old, so Dunbar walked me to the door. The living room, filled with the first-class castoffs, was hard to navigate, but I’m pretty nimble on my feet, so I managed to get out of the house without causing myself a life-threatening injury.

  Before I walked to the car, I turned back to face Dunbar, who was watching me from the open doorway. “Do you think Amy said that to deflect suspicion from herself?” I asked. Okay, so Marcy and Christie had given me the idea. I wanted to see if Dunbar would parrot his wife’s opinion.

  Dunbar’s eyes opened as wide as if he’d been hit in the solar plexus. It took him a long moment to recover, and he exhaled. “I’ve known Amy a long time, and I think she was just lashing out at anything and anybody. She always sort of resented the fact that Vince and I had known each other for so long, and she was . . . jealous of me in a weird way. She was just mad at Vincent, and she thought she could get to him through me.”

  “Except he’s dead,” I said quietly.

  “Yeah,” Dunbar said. “Except he’s dead.”

  37

  It took me close to an hour to pedal home, but it wasn’t a hard ride, and by the time I got out of the shower and dressed, my legs were back to normal.

  Still, after an hour on the bike, sitting was a priority, especially on a nice soft cushion. Your butt gets conditioned to a bicycle seat, but never completely. I’ll bet Lance Arm-strong walks like Yosemite Sam.

  I went into the living room to begin the mammoth task of uncrating and storing Vincent Ansella’s gargantuan video collection. Trying to wrap my mind around the entire job would have given me a headache and led to a feeling of such intimidation that I’d never even begin, so I concentrated on the first box, which was what I’d decided to call the one closest to where I was sitting.

  As I unpacked, I checked off each video from the list Amy had provided. Ansella had the most eclectic, yet comprehensive collection of classic comedy I’d ever seen, making my own—which numbered in the hundreds—seem puny and superficial, like someone who claims to be a major rock and roll fanatic because he has all of the original albums the Beatles released in America.

  Nonetheless, it took me about a half hour to check out the first carton of videos, mostly because I was checking each disc and tape individually, and I’d get distracted by the special features list on a DVD or the cover copy on a VHS box, and forget that I had approximately nineteen million more of these things to go through. I also had to contend with the small but significant percentage of doubles, since unsurprisingly, Ansella and I had similar taste. At this rate, I’d be completely finished sometime during the Chelsea Clinton Administration.

  One major problem was that I had no bookshelves. I mean, none. And I really needed something to hold all these videos—if the water heater in the town house decided to blow up tonight and the living room flooded, I’d suffer the greatest blow to comedy since a major television network green-lighted Hello, Larry. (Look it up.)

  So the first step would be getting some shelves from someplace that would deliver, since I couldn’t actually drive somewhere and pick up large pieces of furniture. I could ask Dad to borrow the truck again, but I did have to become an adult at some point, and besides, have I mentioned that there are these places that actually bring the stuff to your house?

  I walked, gingerly, into the bedroom, where I have the computer set up on one such assemble-it-yourself desk in one corner. I powered up the Mac and checked my e-mail. Apparently some ex-girlfriends had been talking out of school, since the usual ads for various enhancements to my anatomy still comprised the bulk of my messages.

  I deleted all of those, read one or two from actual humans I knew, particularly one from a fellow Marx freres fan in New Hope, Pennsylvania, and then turned my attention to the task of finding shelving that could accommodate well over one thousand movies in various formats.

  But before I got to that, something caught my eye. And I could have kicked myself.

  On the corner of my desk was Anthony Pagliarulo’s screenplay, Killin’ Time, on the CD-ROM his “lover,” Carla, had given me. I had placed it on my desk with every intention of reading it, but my attention had been distracted by, well, everything that had happened since that moment. I got the impression that if the disc could have grown arms, it would have been waving frantically at me, trying to remind me it was there.

  I put it in the disc drive and waited for it to show up on the screen. I don’t really know why, but I was sure that reading the script would give me a clue to Anthony’s whereabouts. Understanding the kid the way I did, as a devoted and possibly fanatical film freak, I’d be able to get into his head and follow the train of thought toward whichever station Anthony might have bought a (one-way?) ticket to visit.

  Killin’ Time was, as anyone who’d ever met Anthony might expect, a very referential script, which included plenty of artsy camera angles; no character development of any kind, ever; a barely recognizable story; and dialogue that (remember, this takes place in the 1840s) featured lines like “the African-Americans in town ain’t gonna like this.”

  As advertised, it also included depictions of gore so lovingly described it was like a new father pulling baby pictures out of his wallet: oh, look here, how he shows the eye-gouging from the inside of the skull, and here, look at this one, where the intestines are actually visible after the slashing. It would probably make untold millions at the box office and be lionized by critics everywhere.

  I have to say, though, that it wasn’t until the second time through the script that I began to realize what Anthony was getting at. Not with the violence, which was strictly there to show how many different ways he could depict violence. But there was something in the description of the surroundings that conjured up images in my mind so familiar as to be almost iconic. I could practically see the settings, because from his loving detail, Anthony had told me which movies he’d stolen them from.

  The Searchers. Fort Apache. My Darling Clementine. Even, yes, parts of Easy Rider.

  I could have smacked myself in the head for not figuring it out sooner. Any movie nut/film student shooting a Western, if he had any budget at all, wouldn’t have been able to resist the allure, not to mention think he was the first to create an homage, just by using the location. A quick call to the Utah Film Commission confirmed that permits had been issued, and a film called Killin’ Time was completing principal photography as we spoke.

  Anthony was in Monument Valley, Utah.

  38

  Now, the question became what to do with my newfound information. Of course, I had promised to tell Chief Dutton whatever I had discovered, without hesitation, but the whole question of what he’d be required to do after that slowed me down. I hadn’t had the need to test Dutton’s word, yet, and I wasn’t sure whether he’d agree to find out more, or simply have Anthony picked up by the Utah State Police.

  To avoid deciding what to do about Dutton, I considered my other options, which were, in a word, limited. I could try calling the number Dutton had gotten for Anthony’s cell phone, but I had tried to read it upside down from a distance of about seven feet two days ago. It wasn’t the most reliable information I’d ever gathered.

  I even toyed with the idea of flying to Utah—what the hell, I’d always wanted to see Monument Valley—but then thought of Sophie running the theatre all by herself, and immediately banished that thought. By the time I got back, she’d be showing The Seventh Seal, followed by The Exorcist, as a tribute to the great comedian Max von Sydow. Even Leo wouldn’t sit through that double feature.

  I couldn’t just close up, either. That’s the problem w
ith owning a movie theatre—there are no days off. We’re open on Christmas, we’re open on Thanksgiving, and we’re open on Yom Kippur. We’re open on my birthday, when I’m sick, and when a distant relative dies. If Mr. Ford had been running a movie theatre, he probably would have been showing a matinee the day after Lincoln was shot. Well, not if O’Donnell was running the investigation, but otherwise.

  If I couldn’t call Anthony and I couldn’t go see him, I could try to get a message through to him via Carla or Tajo Rosenblad. But they had both seemed genuinely amazed at the idea that he was missing, and equally surprised he was not in touch with his folks. It was possible, though not likely, that he’d gotten in touch since then, but my urgency on the phone had probably spooked Anthony into going farther underground. Once again, my superior investigative technique had shown through. I had a real future in this pursuit.

  Staring at the computer screen in frustration, it occurred to me that a film student let loose for the first time would know when he was in over his head—at some point he’d have to be in over his head—and he’d call the closest thing he had to a mentor for help.

  I put in a call to Professor Bender at Rutgers, and he immediately asked me to come to his office, as “just the tone of your voice is causing me vociferous anxiety.” You have to love college professors: they can’t just say something creeps them out.

  It wasn’t a long ride to Bender’s office, and I chained the bike outside this time, carrying only the front wheel with me up the stairs. Bender, ponytail all a-twitter, was sitting behind his desk, with a poster over his head for Repulsion , an early Roman Polanski thriller. You had to figure it wouldn’t be a Back to the Future poster. Film professors.

  “What news is there of Anthony?” he asked as soon as I sat down, and I was tempted to answer, “Belike, ’tis but a rumor,” but I was way too common a man to make Shakespeare references before four in the afternoon.

  “I think I might know where he is, but I wanted to see if you’d heard from him at all,” I said. “I thought perhaps I could confirm it.” I’m also usually way too common to say “perhaps,” but some of the snootiness in that room was bound to rub off.