Some Like It Hot-Buttered (10 page)

I took a seat in the last row inside the funeral home, which was by my estimate about two-thirds full. When you’re in the theatre business, you estimate crowd sizes reflexively. This made me envious, as I’d never actually seen my own movie theatre two-thirds full. But maybe I was being petty. Besides, the funeral home didn’t have as many seats as Comedy Tonight.

There were a good few testimonials, and a few not-so-good ones, and I was getting to know quite a bit about actuarial tables, which didn’t make me feel better. Yes, I was only thirty-seven years old, but I was male, and my family had a history of heart problems, and . . .

My mental connection to the guy in the polished mahogany casket with brass handles was fading—I loved my business, but it wasn’t all there was in my life. I had . . . um . . . well, there was my ex-wife, although she was married to someone else now; and my parents; and hey, I’d had a date last night with a woman I barely knew, and even though she was wearing a gun, I thought it went well . . .

Okay, so my business
was
pretty much all there was in my life. My novel, now four years old, and the film that was made “from” it, rarely entered my thoughts, and paved no path to any kind of future. At least Comedy Tonight wasn’t all about how long the average person would live under the proper circumstances.

Anyway, the speeches had a decided bent toward Ansella’s professional life. The quick wit and easy manner Marcy had described weren’t really mentioned. Nobody who spoke seemed to know Vincent very well. Although Marcy did not stand to speak, she did dab at her eyes a bit during the service, which was more than I could say about Ansella’s wife or his mother. Ansella’s sister, Lisa Rabinowitz, was dealing with two small children who were wandering up and down aisles (one of them, an adorable little girl, seemed especially intent on not paying attention to her mother), so she didn’t seem to have time to be sad.

The current speaker, a woman who had worked with Ansella at the office, finished her remarks by saying that he was “accurate in his estimates, until the one that mattered most,” choked, and left the podium. There was the embarrassed silence that ensues at such events, when each person in the gathered assemblage wonders a) if he or she should be the next to speak, and b) if no one is going to speak next, is it time to eat?

After a few seconds, a compact, barrel-chested man with a head almost completely free of the need for shampoo stood from his second-row seat on the aisle and composed himself for a walk to the podium. He stood and looked at us all when he got there, closed his eyes for a moment, opened them again, and exhaled.

“I’m Joe Dunbar,” he said. “Vince Ansella was my best friend.” That seemed to take a good deal out of him, as if he were addressing his first meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous and had made the startling revelation that he belonged in their ranks. “I met Vince in the third grade, when we were eight years old. The first thing he ever said to me made me laugh.

“We were waiting outside the school before the first day of class, and a girl I knew told me that Vince was in our class that year. I walked up to him and asked, ‘Are you Vincent Ansella?’ and he said, ‘Yeah, but it’s not my fault.’ I don’t know why, but I was eight, and that cracked me up, and we ended up sitting next to each other in class.

“I knew Vince for thirty-five years, and he kept making me laugh. He loved comedy, and he made me go with him to every movie that came out that might be funny. He kept me up late nights during high school, not drinking and messing around like other kids, but watching the Marx Brothers on late-night TV, because he had just discovered them. When we went to college, and we were in different states, he used to call me whenever a Peter Sellers movie was going to be on TV, to make sure I was watching.

“He could never get enough of something that made him laugh. As you know, his favorite movie was
Young Frankenstein
, and he spent his last few minutes on earth watching that. I’m sure it made him laugh over and over again. He made me see it about eighteen times . . . no, nineteen, now that I think about it, and I think he liked it more when I laughed, because it meant we shared a sense of humor.

“After we both got married, we only lived ten minutes away from each other, so all four of us used to go out to the movies together. Vince never wanted to see anything serious, and we all went along with him. He kept us all laughing. My heart goes out to his wife, Amy, and to his mom and his sister, Lisa, but I bet they have lots of funny stories about Vince to remember even now.

“Vince spent his time doing his job dealing with insurance and actuarial tables, but in his heart, he was all about comedy. The job took his time, and he did it right, but it wasn’t what his life was about. His life was about what makes people laugh, about comedy, and seeing as much of it as he could. So I’m glad he was able to do that, because his life was so short, it makes me feel better to know he spent it well.”

Dunbar had held himself together that long, but it was as much as he could stand. He closed his eyes tightly, trying to will the tears back into their ducts, but it was no use. He stumbled back to his seat next to a blond woman who under other circumstances would have been described as “brassy.” Since everyone now understood that the
real
eulogy had been delivered, we waited for the pallbearers (who naturally included Dunbar and a man I took to be Lisa Rabinowitz’s husband, since he had been trying to corral the children with as limited a success rate as she) to gather.

When Ansella had been taken from the room, and his family had followed him out, the rest of us rose and walked from the building.

It was a lovely day, not a cloud in the sky, and I stood in the sunshine for a long moment, trying to absorb all I’d heard and seen that morning. A voice behind me said, “It really makes you think, doesn’t it?”

Marcy Resnick was one step above me, so when I turned, I was looking up at her, and squinting into the sun. “Marcy,” I said. “Yeah, it makes you think.”

“Here I thought Vincent was all about the job, and it turns out he was into comedy movies more than anything else. You don’t know anything about another person.” She stepped down so I was able to look at her without craning my neck.

“I’m not sure I know all that much about me,” I said. “Another person would be too much to expect.”

The coffin was rolled into the back of the hearse by the pallbearers, and the driver closed the door on it and walked back to wait by the driver’s side. It was a nice day, and there was no reason for him to sit in a stuffy car with a dead man.

“Are you going to the cemetery?” Marcy asked.

“No. I’m still a little surprised I came here. Besides, I don’t have a car, and I have to get back to not run my theatre. How about you?”

She shook her head. “I’m heading back to the office. It’s still a working day. But I should say something to his wife.” Marcy started down the steps toward Amy, and I followed.

“Well, I’m glad I got to . . .”

A loud scream of “No!” cut me off, and we both looked toward the limo, where Amy Ansella, her face contorted with . . . well, that sure looked like rage, was shoving Joe Dunbar away from her. Dunbar, for his part, looked positively stunned, and hadn’t even put up his hands to defend himself. The blond woman standing next to him, presumably his wife, seemed horrified. Dunbar was bent over slightly, had probably been leaning over to embrace his dead friend’s wife, but she had pushed him away, and his arms were still spread, either in shock or from the blow she’d dealt him. Amy might be stronger than she looked.

“Get
away
! Get away from me, you bastard!” she screamed, as everyone in the funeral party stood as still as statues. “Don’t you
ever
talk to me again!”

I don’t know why, but I walked down the steps toward them, even as the rest of those gathered stood still as statues. I haven’t a clue what I was trying to accomplish. It was too fast, and too strange. I guess I was thinking that if a fistfight broke out, I could try to break it up.

Dunbar sputtered something I couldn’t hear, but Amy was having none of it. “Go away!” she bellowed again, and Dunbar started to back off. The blond woman with him couldn’t decide whether to look astonished or angry. “Get away from us, and stay away!” Amy yelled.

I looked toward Marcy, who had stayed where I’d been standing, but she was just as astounded as the rest of us. My glance at her may have been the only movement among the twenty-or-so people outside the funeral home, aside from my continuing to inch my way down toward the pavement. I was still operating on autopilot. But even traffic on the street seemed to have stopped in a surreal tableau that suggested time itself had paused for this moment.

“Maybe I won’t go see her just now,” Marcy muttered.

The limo driver finally snapped back into real time and realized he had the power to end this astonishing scene. He walked around the car and opened the rear door for Amy, who was still staring at the retreating Dunbar.

I was close enough now to hear the Widow Ansella, in a slightly less hysterical tone, fire a parting salvo in Dunbar’s direction:

11

"She said ‘murderer’?” Sergeant O’Donnell looked surprised. I’d anticipated this would be old news, as I’d assumed he would’ve had a man at the funeral, but apparently I’d either overestimated the county investigator or his department’s budget.

“Quite clearly,” I told O’Donnell. “To be fair, Dunbar looked awfully shocked when she said it.”

We were in my office at Comedy Tonight, a former broom closet I had cleaned out, given my belief that brooms can stay in the regular closet with all the other cleaning implements and just get over themselves. There was a small assemble-it-yourself desk (which I had assembled myself, after only three calls to the manufacturer and one to my father), a phone, a watercooler, and a single chair, which O’Donnell was now sitting in, having commandeered the office as his temporary headquarters. Standing next to him, I felt rather like someone had taken over my territory, a feeling I remember having quite often during the divorce proceedings.

“Well, he might have simply been surprised she said it out loud, or surprised she knew it was him.” O’Donnell chewed on a pencil, which I realized with some revulsion was one of mine. Companies send me free pencils and pens all the time with the business name on them, secure in their odd belief that I will give them as gifts to my “clients.”

“Yeah, or she might have been putting on a nice public display of accusation to shift the suspicion from herself,” I suggested.

“Uh-huh,” he said, with great noncommittal flair.

“You did suspect her, didn’t you?” I might as well accuse somebody of something; it seemed all the rage around here these days.

“I’m sorry, am I required to keep you up-to-date on our investigation, Freed?” O’Donnell leaned back in my chair and eyed me with something that couldn’t be described with any word other than “suspicion.”

“I thought I’d come by and share information with you, O’Donnell, but if that’s your attitude, I’ll keep it to myself next time.”

"It’s
Sergeant
O’Donnell, and what makes you think there’ll be a ‘next time’ you’ll have anything useful to tell me?” he asked. I ignored him, because coming up with a clever retort would have required more effort than I had energy for at the moment.

“Did you get a report back on that vial my father found here, or are you not allowed to tell me whether I’m under suspicion as a major drug dealer?” At least that had a little zing to it.

“Oh, we got the report, okay.” O’Donnell smirked. “I’m sorry to say, we don’t think you’re dealing coke in anything but overpriced cups that are mostly filled with ice.”

“I’ve got to make money
somewhere
,” I told him. “The studios take all the receipts on the movie. Anyway, what is it I
am
dealing? I’ve been out of the business for so long, I can’t remember which felony I was committing on a regular basis.”

O’Donnell picked up a paper from my desk and held it out far from his face so he could read it. I felt like telling him that real men like Chief Barry Dutton aren’t too insecure to use reading glasses.

“It’s a substance called clonidine,” he said, reading from the paper. “It’s an alpha 2-adrenergic blocker” (it took him a couple of tries to say “adrenergic”) “used to treat high blood pressure, and sometimes attention deficit disorder. Crushed up into a powder and given in a large enough dose to someone who doesn’t need it, clonidine makes a healthy person’s blood pressure drop until his heart stops.”

“So it was this clonidine that killed Vincent Ansella,” I said.

O’Donnell nodded. “Sprinkled on his popcorn. He probably never even noticed it. And anyone with high blood pressure might have a prescription for it.”

“Do any of the suspects have high blood pressure?” I asked.

“Strangely, Sherlock, I haven’t had time to check on everyone yet, because I haven’t ruled out
anyone
as a suspect except Ansella himself. Besides, anyone who wanted to kill him could have
known
someone with high blood pressure, and stolen enough to do the job.”

“I don’t suppose you’ve checked whether Ansella himself had a prescription?”

“Well, then you suppose wrong.” O’Donnell didn’t have enough room in the small office to pat himself on the back, but I’m sure he made a mental note to do so once he got back out into the real world. “Ansella didn’t have high blood pressure. In fact, aside from being dead, he was in excellent health.”

“Not to mention, he probably wouldn’t take his prescription medication sprinkled over a large buttered,” I noted, mostly to myself.

“Probably not.”

“Any prints on the vial?”

He grinned. “Besides your father’s? No. But I’m letting him go because he’s only got one reason to be in the theatre.”