Some Like It Hot-Buttered

Table of Contents

Praise for
Some Like It Hot-Buttered

“
Some Like It Hot-Buttered
bursts with mystery, action, romance, and laughs. Jeffrey Cohen is the Dave Barry of the New Jersey Turnpike, and his boffo Double Feature Mystery series is a sure-thing smash hit.”

—Julia Spencer-Fleming, Edgar
^®
Award nominee
and author of
All Mortal Flesh

“Knock, knock. Who’s there? Cohen. Cohen who? Cohen buy yourself this most entertaining book.”

—Larry Gelbart, writer of
M*A*S*H
,
Tootsie
,
Oh, God!
,
A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum
,
Barbarians at the Gate
, etc.

“Movies, murder, characters who are real people, laughs, danger, and damn good writing.
Some Like It Hot-Buttered
truly has something for everyone: a comedy tonight—and so much more!”

—Linda Ellerbee, television producer, journalist, and
bestselling author of
Take Big Bites
and
And So It Goes

“Cohen’s debut Double Feature Mystery is a double winner. He doesn’t just make you laugh; he makes you care about his characters. I give it two buttery thumbs way up!”

—Chris Grabenstein, Anthony Award-winning
author of
Tilt-a-Whirl

“Many authors create good characters, but to create side-splittingly funny ones and make them believable is a tour de force. Jeffrey Cohen accomplishes that in his delightful
Some Like It Hot-Buttered
, which comes roaring in like a blast of fresh air.”

—
Denise Dietz, author of
the Ellie Bernstein/Lt. Peter Miller Mysteries

“You’d better hold on to your butt with both hands, because you’re going to laugh it off.”

—J. A. Konrath, author of the
Jacqueline “Jack” Daniels Mysteries

“A mystery with humor, warmth, and dead-on characterizations of family life—Jeff Cohen is barking up the right tree.”

—Rochelle Krich, Mary Higgins Clark
Award-winning author of
Grave Endings

"Briskly-paced ... Soars with a tightly focused plot with realistic characters.”
—South Florida Sun-Sentinel

"Hilariously twisty and twisted plot full of entertaining characters . . . Much like Evanovich, Cohen fills his novel with off-the-wall characters just zany enough to seem real.”
—Crescent Blues

“Cohen succeeds in injecting humor and humanity into this clever puzzler . . . Should appeal to a broad cross section of the mystery market.”
—Publishers Weekly

“Humorous asides arise from screenwriting deadlines, cockeyed in-laws, and self-castigating remarks. Highly recommended.”
—Library Journal

“Quirky, adorable, and downright funny.”
—Booklist

THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP
Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
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Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

SOME LIKE IT HOT-BUTTERED

A Berkley Prime Crime Book / published by arrangement with the author

PRINTING HISTORY
Berkley Prime Crime mass-market edition / October 2007

Copyright © 2007 by Jeffrey Cohen.

All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without
permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the
author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.
For information, address: The Berkley Publishing Group,
a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.,
375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.

eISBN : 978-1-436-23292-0

BERKLEY® PRIME CRIME
Berkley Prime Crime Books are published by The Berkley Publishing Group,
a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.,
375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.
The name BERKLEY PRIME CRIME and the BERKLEY PRIME CRIME design
are trademarks belonging to Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I am a very lucky man. I get to do what I love to do for a living, and I have a great support system, which as always is headed up by my unparalleled wife and constantly amazing children. There are no better.

This time out, however, I had help from many different people, and they each deserve much more than thanks (but that’s all I can afford). For help getting Elliot’s story seen, thanks to Julia Spencer-Fleming, Ross Hugo-Vidal, PJ Nunn, and Bruce Bortz.

Extremely special thanks are due to a very special person: Linda Ellerbee, whom I had never met nor spoken to before
As Dog Is My Witness
. She has become, I think, a friend. Anyone who recommends your book to the
Today
show is a friend, but Linda is also as gracious and open as they come.

For help in finding the right poison for poor Vincent Ansella, my thanks to Kay Lancaster, P.J. Coldren, and especially Luci Hansson Zahray (otherwise known as “the Poison Lady”), who gave me the information I ended up using, which I’ve probably messed up herein.
She
knows what she’s talking about, even if I don’t.

And for enormous amounts of information on how a projection booth works, what it costs, and all that sort of thing, I am indebted to Denise Brouillette of the Paramount Theatre in Austin, Texas; Robert Bruce Thompson, Bert Sandifer, Carl Brookins, and John Stewart (not of
The Daily Show
), also of the Paramount in Austin. I wasn’t even in the A/V club in high school, so they have literally taught me everything I know, as selflessly as is humanly possible.

I’d be a total swine (an awful thing for a Jewish boy) if I didn’t acknowledge my incredible agent, Christina Hogrebe of the Jane Rotrosen Agency (and all I met there), without whom this book wouldn’t exist, and the terrific editor of the Double Feature Mysteries, Shannon Jamieson Vazquez, without whom this book wouldn’t have been nearly as good.

—Stephen Sondheim,
A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum

1

—attributed to every dying English actor since Richard Burbage (1567-1619)

TUESDAY
Young Frankenstein
(1974)
and
Count Bubba, Down-Home Vampire
(last Friday)

The guy in row S, seat 18, was dead, all right. There was no mistaking it. For one thing, he hadn’t laughed once during the Blind Man scene in
Young Frankenstein
, which was indication enough that all brain function had ceased. For another, there was the whole staring-straight-ahead-and-not-breathing scenario, and the lack of a pulse, which was good enough to convince me.

“Were you the one who found him?” I asked Anthony (not Tony, mind you), the ticket taker/usher/projectionist. Anthony, a Cinema Studies major at Rutgers University, was nineteen years old, and a film geek from head to toe (sorry, Anthony, but it’s true). He was wearing black jeans, a T-shirt with a picture of Martin Scorsese on it, and a puzzled expression that meant he was wondering how to work this event into his next screenplay. Anthony shook his head.

“Sophie found him,” he said, indicating our snack stand attendant/ticket seller/clean-up girl, who was standing to one side, biting both her lips and ignoring her cell phone, which was playing a Killers song by way of ringing. Sophie was, in her own high school junior way, freaked out. I considered gesturing her over, then realized she wanted to stay as far away from our non-respiring patron as possible, so I walked to her side instead.

“It’s okay, Sophie,” I told her. “Just tell me what happened. ”

She avoided looking toward the man, who appeared to be in his early forties, maybe five years older than me, and was dressed for a late April evening out in Midland Heights, New Jersey: pink polo shirt, with the proper reptile depicted on the left breast, tan khakis, no socks, and penny loafers that looked to have last been shined during the Clinton Administration. His box of popcorn was still on his lap, although there was very little left in it. The popcorn had spilled onto the floor at some point, but the carton remained in his hands.

“I was picking up the wrappers and whatever,” she said, her usual teenage indifference betrayed by her wavering voice. “I saw him sitting there as the people filed out, and I didn’t think anything about it. You know, some people just sit there and wait for everybody else to leave. But then they all, like, left, and he didn’t move. And when I went over to see . . .” Sophie fluttered her left hand in a gesture of futility, and then it went to her mouth. She didn’t want us to see her cry; it would ruin her image. Sophie was the Midland Heights version of Goth, which is to say, she wore all black and straightened her hair. But her clothes were clean and pressed, her makeup leaned toward pinks (which didn’t have much effect on her pale complexion), and her shoes were open-toe sandals. She was about as Goth as Kelly Clarkson, but she was in there swinging.