“I’m in the book. Now, can I go back inside? I’ll bet I missed the speakeasy scene.” Leo was halfway through the door.
I looked at Dutton. “Swordfish,” I said.
“Very funny. Do you remember anyone else who might have been here that night? Someone who could have seen something Mr. Munson overlooked?”
I made a “yeah, well” face. “Leo’s really our only regular, ” I told him. “I don’t recall anyone else of note being here that night. But Sophie sold all the tickets on her own. We don’t usually draw like we did tonight.”
Dutton nodded. "I’ll have to tell Sergeant O’Donnell about Mr. Munson, you know.”
“Yeah, that should really move the case along.”
Dutton raised an eyebrow. “Don’t underestimate O’Donnell. He’s not the most personable guy on the planet, but he knows what he’s doing. I’ve worked with him before. Meanwhile, have you heard from your projectionist?”
I had left Anthony—and the rather eerie indications that he’d been in the theatre tonight—out of my summary to Dutton, since I couldn’t
really
report accurately that he’d been here. It might have been elves; you never know. Besides, if Anthony
had
been there, what had he done other than his job?
I shook my head. “No word. I spoke to one of his roommates and a professor today, and nobody’s heard from him since Wednesday.” That was accurate and truthful. Not complete, but accurate and truthful.
The auditorium door opened, and Leslie Levant walked out and joined us. Dutton, also used to seeing her in uniform, was having a hard time with the substantial amount of cleavage being displayed, and made very healthy efforts to maintain eye contact. Hoping for a somewhat different relationship with the officer than her chief had, I let my eyes roam where they may.
“I saw you get up and walk out, Chief. Is there anything I can help with? A clue on the poisoning?”
Dutton shook his head. “No, thank you, Officer. Nothing to be done right now. I appreciate the offer, though.”
He turned to me. “Don’t hesitate to call me if you hear from that young man, Mr. Freed. It’s important to me and to the department. Is that clear?” His tone was much sterner than before, and caught me off guard.
“Sure,” I finally said. “I get a call, you get a call.”
“Be sure I do,” said Dutton. He hesitated, as if deciding whether to slap me or not, and then walked into the auditorium, nodding at Leslie and her cleavage.
“He’s a real laugh riot,” I said when the door had closed.
“He’s a good cop.” Still with the frozen demeanor.
I knew that tactic from my marriage. “Okay, what’d I do?”
She’d been waiting. “You don’t comp me at the door, Elliot. I didn’t go to dinner with you to get free movie tickets.”
“I never thought you did. But as the owner of the theatre, I’m entitled to let friends in free if I want to. And I’m not going to take your money, Leslie. I don’t take my ex-wife’s money at the door.”
“No, you take it in alimony checks.”
“It’s the principle. After you and I get divorced, I’ll be happy to take your money.”
She couldn’t help it; she grinned. We might have had our first kiss then, but she spotted Sophie looking at her from the snack bar. Leslie straightened up, cop that she was, and nodded.
“All right, then,” she said. She turned and walked back into the auditorium.
“Well,” I said to myself, giving Sophie the evil eye, “that was certainly . . . satisfactory.”
I went upstairs to check on the change of reels, but it had already been accomplished, and the next one was set up. That could have happened within seconds, or within twelve minutes of my previous checking, so it was a decent bet that if it was Anthony, he wasn’t commuting in from Pennsylvania to keep the place running.
The light in the projection booth was adequate to make out what was going on, but not to see under the table or in corners, and I couldn’t turn on the lights without people in the audience noticing. I had time to kill, since Harpo was playing “Everyone Says I Love You” on his harp, and although the man was possibly the most brilliant mime of his or any age, he was never able to turn me into an aficionado of the harp. Four minutes to search.
“Anthony,”
I hissed, ducking under the table.
“Anthony! It’s Elliot.”
I caught myself.
“Mr. Freed. If you’re in here, come on out. I promise, I won’t turn you in!”
“That’s great,” came Dutton’s voice from the doorway. “If your promise to him is as sincere as your promise to me, I’ve got nothing to worry about.”
15
A good deal of time was spent with me explaining exactly why I suspected Anthony was around; Dutton threatening to shut down the theatre to search again; me protesting that my business, suddenly booming, would be ruined (and besides, to deprive an audience of Harpo’s ride in a garbage cart pulled by horses—the silent Mr. Marx in only his underwear and a scarf that made him look like Julius Caesar—would be beyond cruel); Dutton countering that a suspected criminal was secreted in the building; me countering his counter by saying that all the searching so far hadn’t turned up much of anything; and Leslie bringing us to reason by saying that if we’d simply leave the booth and wait for the next reel change, we’d have a chance of spotting the criminal in the act. (When did Leslie come in? I just don’t know anymore.)
Dutton took up the position with the best view of the projection booth door, just outside the women’s restroom, which could certainly cause an amusing stir in town. Once she covered her cleavage with Dutton’s jacket (which fit her like a small tent), Leslie was stationed at the top of the stairs, where she could see not only the door to the booth but also whether anyone was coming up the stairs.
Since I was the owner of the place, and in Dutton’s mind the least trustworthy, I was relegated to the first row of the somewhat shaky balcony, in the corner farthest from the staircase, to better ensure my demise should the structure decide to collapse. I could see the door of the booth, but barely, and got caught up in the movie just as Harpo and Chico were busy putting the “tie-onna-the-bed, throw-the-rope-outta-the-window. ”
Wait a minute! That meant that the next reel change— which would come just when Harpo would be “getting tough” with two nasty football players—was only seconds away. I stood up and headed for Dutton’s position.
Dutton wasn’t there. Neither was Leslie. I couldn’t imagine what had taken them away other than . . . Anthony!
But when I rushed to the booth door and flung it open, I found Police Chief Barry Dutton trying desperately to figure out how to switch from one reel to the next, and Officer Leslie Levant next to him, standing over his shoulder and pointing toward the take-up reel on the first projector.
“I think it’s that one,” she said.
“You don’t mind if I do it, do you?” I asked. “I paid close to a hundred grand for this projection booth, and I’d prefer not to get anything broken.”
They looked up, a little embarrassed, and stepped aside. I hit the pedal on the floor when I saw the small white circle appear in the right-hand corner of the screen, and the reels changed smoothly, as they should.
Leslie’s arm brushed a pile of papers on one side of the table, and she bent to pick them up. I turned to Dutton.
“Do I tell you how to stop a car for speeding?” I asked.
“I was on the A/V crew in high school,” he muttered.
“I was on the baseball team,” I said. “Doesn’t make me Derek Jeter.”
“This is not the major leagues,” Dutton said, but without much swagger in it.
“If you two are done comparing the size of your bats,” Leslie said, “I think I’ve got something here you should see, Chief.”
Dutton ignored the less-than-totally-respectful remark that had been made, and took a step toward Leslie, which was all he needed in the cramped projection booth.
She was holding a small plastic pill bottle, which I couldn’t see well from the screen’s illumination, but which appeared to immediately intrigue Dutton. He pulled down the sleeve on his shirt and grasped the bottle with his fingers inside the sleeve to avoid leaving fingerprints on it. I walked to his side.
It was a prescription vial, and I could see it had some pills in it.
“What is it?” I asked, but Dutton didn’t answer.
“Who has access to this room?” he asked me over his shoulder.
“On normal nights, just me and Anthony,” I said. “Tonight we have enough people to start a basketball game. Why?”
“It’s a prescription,” Dutton answered, still not looking at me. “Thirty pills. Clonidine.”
It took me a moment. “The medication that killed Vincent Ansella,” I said, and Dutton nodded. “Who is it made out to?”
“Michael Pagliarulo,” Leslie said, her voice hushed, and not because she was afraid she’d spoil the football scene for the audience.
I took a deep breath. I remembered the name from an employment application. “Anthony’s father,” I said.
16
“It doesn’t mean anything,” I told Leslie in my kitchen that night. She’d given me a ride home on the pretense that I’d “had a rough night,” but really she wanted to talk about the new evidence without Dutton around. “All it means is that Anthony’s dad has high blood pressure, and the medication he’s been prescribed is the same as the stuff that was used to poison Vincent Ansella.”
“Sounds like something to me,” she said, still in the jaw-dropping outfit she’d worn to the movie but minus Dutton’s jacket. “I’ll grant you the evidence is all circumstantial, but . . .”
“I’ve got to look at the circumstances,” I said.
“Exactly.” She noted my glance. “Not
those
circumstances. ” Leslie blushed, quite fetchingly.
I got the container of Edy’s ice cream out of the freezer and took two spoons from a drawer, then sat next to Leslie. “I’ll bet you there were fifty people there tonight with high blood pressure,” I told her. “I don’t know what percentage of those were prescribed clonidine.” I handed her a spoon and opened the container. I’d offered a coffee mug to hold the ice cream, but Leslie said this was a more “communal” experience. I think she was just impatient; she plunged in with the spoon and got the bevy of chocolate chips lurking near the top.
“Maybe,” Leslie said, her tongue doing all sorts of interesting things to the ice cream. “But it all looks bad for Anthony, and you need to maintain a distance.”
I almost stopped spooning ice cream for a moment. Almost. “A distance? Why do I need to maintain a distance from Anthony? For one thing, how can I know if I’m maintaining a distance when I don’t know where he is?”
“I’m talking like a cop now,” she said.
“You’re not dressed like one,” I marveled.
“Nonetheless. The water’s getting deep for your projectionist, and you can’t tell me you weren’t aware he was in the building tonight.”
All the clichés are true. I looked away, thus confirming my guilt. “Sure I can,” I said.
“Well, not convincingly.”
We seemed to have stopped eating the ice cream, so I stood to give myself something to do, and took it back to the freezer. “Okay, so I had an idea he was there. But I never saw him tonight.”
Leslie stood, too, carrying the spoons. She opened the dishwasher to put them in, saw it was empty, and washed the two spoons by hand. “You need to stay away from this, Elliot. It’s going to get bad.”
“It’s a couple of pirated DVDs of a bad movie. I don’t understand why everybody’s so bent out of shape about it.”
She dried her hands on a towel. “Because now there seems to be a dead man connected to it, and
that
is a very good reason for everyone to be bent out of shape.”
“Anthony has no motive to kill Ansella. He didn’t even know the guy.”
Leslie raised an eyebrow. “As far as you know.”
“You don’t know the kid.” I waved a dismissive hand. “It just doesn’t fit his character. Anthony’s the type who would spend six months figuring out exactly how to shoot a murder scene for a movie, but it would never occur to him to do it for real.”
“Maybe he’s into snuff films,” she suggested.
“Anthony? Snuff films would be too real for him. I don’t think he’s ever seen a documentary he liked. He thought
Fahrenheit 9/11
was a lousy movie because it was too realistic, and he wanted to know who that guy was who kept talking so funny.”
“Michael Moore?”
“No.”
Leslie sat down on the living room futon. “You have no furniture.”
“What’s that you’re sitting on?”
“My butt.”
“And a lovely one it is. Besides that.”
“A piece of foam rubber,” she said, rubbing her lush behind. “And not a very thick one.”
“Well, based on the box office figures from tonight, if we can pull in half that for the weekend, you can come with me and help pick out some furniture on Monday.”
“Well, let’s see how the theatre does this weekend, then. And think about what I said, all right? About maintaining a distance?”
I walked over but didn’t sit down next to her, for fear I’d never be able to get up. She was right about the foam rubber. “Maintaining a distance,” I echoed. “From Anthony, or from you?”
She stood in a fluid motion, which I considered an impressive athletic feat on its own merits. “From Anthony,” Leslie said.
And then she kissed me.
17
Sharon hadn’t even sat all the way down in her seat at C’est Moi! when she gave me a strange look, paused, and said, “You’re seeing somebody.”
“It’s nice to see you, too, honey,” I countered. “My lord, but you have a talent for small talk.”
Sharon ordered and turned back to me. “So, are you going to tell me about her?” she asked.
“What makes you think . . .”
“Before I was your ex-wife, I was your wife,” she said. “Before that, I was your girlfriend. And in order to become your girlfriend, I started out as the girl you wanted to ask on a date. I know what you look like when you’re infatuated. My god, it practically radiates from you.”