Some Like It Hot-Buttered (15 page)

A rather large man in his late fifties, with a head full of curly dark hair, was standing in the doorway of my converted closet office, and he was enough to fill it up. Carrying an actual hat, he stood nervously spinning it in his hands and barely making eye contact. But his eyes, when I could see them, looked haunted.

“We’re not open yet,” I told him when my mouth was relatively chicken-free again.

The man nodded. “I know. I came to talk to you. My name is Michael Pagliarulo.”

Inside my head, there was a sigh. I hoped there was no outside sign of it. “You’re Anthony’s father.”

Mr. Pagliarulo nodded again. “That’s right. May I come in?”

“There’s not so much ‘in.’ Maybe I should come out.” I stood, wiping savory sauce off my lower lip, and walked into the lobby to talk to the man, who on closer examination did bear some resemblance to his son around the eyes and mouth. I wondered if Anthony was destined to avoid hair loss as well as his father, and hoped for his sake he was.

“Is there something I can do to help you, Mr. Pagliarulo?”

He shrugged, possibly because he didn’t trust his own voice not to waver, then he said, “I don’t know what to think. Ant’ny doesn’t disappear like this. I’ve been called twice during the week by the
police
, Mr. Freed. Do you have children?”

“No, sir.” But I’d be glad to go out and have some right now if it would make him feel better.

“Calls from the police are the last thing you want when you have children,” Pagliarulo said.

“They’re not exactly a high point of the day even if you don’t,” I volunteered, then wished I hadn’t.

He prudently chose not to respond. “His mother is beside herself, on tranquilizers the past two days. I don’t know what to tell her. Ant’ny would call us if he were . . .”

“There’s no point in thinking that, Mr. Pagliarulo. There are plenty of reasons that Anthony might feel the need to stay away right now.” For example, he’s either involved in a serious crime, or the victim of one (a possibility I hadn’t considered until this very moment). There are reasons I never considered a career in diplomacy.

“They called me about my medication last night,” he went on. “To find out if Anthony had taken any pills from me. Why would a nineteen-year-old kid need blood pressure pills, Mr. Freed?”

“The police don’t think he has high blood pressure,” I told Mr. Pagliarulo. “There was a . . . situation here with someone who took the wrong pills, and they’re trying to find out where the pills came from.”

“The man who died here the other night?” Pagliarulo’s eyes were wide with fear for his son, but now outrage was starting to creep in, too. “They think Ant’ny poisoned a man he never met before with my blood pressure pills? That’s crazy!”

“I don’t believe it either, Mr. Pagliarulo,” I said, and I meant it. “But the man died from an overdose of the same medication you take, and they found a prescription bottle of clonidine where Anthony had hidden it.”

He waved a hand, dismissing the idea. “Hidden,” Mr. Pagliarulo said. “I asked him to fill a prescription for me. He passes by the CVS on his way sometimes, and I was going to see him the next day. He said he’d do it. He used to do that for me all the time . . .” I think that was the moment Mr. Pagliarulo realized what he was saying. “You think the police are going to say he stole pills from me and used them on that man?”

“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves, sir,” I said. “I don’t see any reason they’d think Anthony would do something like that. They just don’t have any other suspects right now.”

“I wish they did,” he said.

“Maybe I can do something about that,” I told him. I wasn’t going to be intimidated by a cop, no matter how good a kisser she was. And she was good.

“Would you?” asked Michael Pagliarulo, and I was lost.

20

Joe Dunbar finally called back, but he didn’t want to talk to me at his home, so we met at a Dunkin’ Donuts in Midland Heights over coffee and reduced-fat muffins late Sunday morning.

I actually had an iced coffee, as it was a warm day, and they put coconut flavoring in it, which always makes me feel like I’m on a tropical island. Unfortunately, the view of Edison Avenue, with its used-car lots and antique stores side by side, doused that feeling just a little.

“I don’t know why she’d say ’murderer,’ ” Dunbar said. “Amy just seemed to turn on me suddenly, but I got the feeling it was planned.”

“Planned?” Reduced-fat muffins are really bad, no matter who makes them. The whole
point
of muffins is the fat.

“Yeah, I think she was making a scene. Amy has a real sense of the dramatic.” Dunbar took a bite, and his eyes indicated that his opinion of reduced-fat muffins was roughly the same as mine. “Calling me a murderer was sure dramatic. ”

“I don’t know about the dramatic,” I said. “I run a comedy theatre.”

“I know. Vince was sorry he hadn’t found your place sooner. You should do more advertising,” Dunbar told me. He didn’t mention where I’d get the money for that, and I didn’t ask.

I had to be careful with the place I was about to go. “How about another woman? Someone in the theatre thought they saw Mr. Ansella with a blond woman. Any idea?”

Even if I hadn’t been watching Dunbar closely—and I was—it would have been obvious that he was unnerved by the question. He coughed into his napkin and took a swig of coffee. “No idea. Vince never mentioned a blonde,” he said. But my eyes were telling me another story:
he knew something
. Problem was, I had no idea how to call him on it in a constructive way. So I pressed on as if I believed him.

“Do you have any idea why someone would want to kill Mr. Ansella?”

I’m sure Dunbar wasn’t
trying
to do an impression of someone who’s guilty and trying to cover it up, but he looked away and coughed again to avoid answering. I just waited him out, and eventually, while turned away from the table, Dunbar exhaled and bit his lip.

“I can’t think of one reason anybody would want to hurt that man,” he said. “He was the sweetest human being I’ve ever known. Vince Ansella should never have died.”

Maybe he wasn’t badly hiding his guilt. Maybe he was badly hiding the fact that he was crying. Dunbar snorted, blew his nose into a Dunkin’ Donuts napkin, and kept looking away.

“All he wanted was for everybody to be happy,” he continued. “Who would want to hurt a man like that?”

I didn’t know, so I didn’t say anything.

“Did Vincent and Amy get along well? Was there trouble in their marriage?”

That seemed to focus Dunbar, and he pretended to have an eyelash in his eye and brush it away. He turned to me with red eyes. “The cops asked me about that,” he said. “I’ll tell you what I told them. Vince and Amy weren’t the love story of the century, but they got along fine, as far as I know. Vince would have told me if there were problems, at least, until the last few months.”

“His behavior changed?” Marcy had told me the same thing.

Dunbar nodded. “He started, I don’t know, closing up. He didn’t invite me over to watch comedies. He didn’t come out bowling, like we did once a month or so. He didn’t seem to want to be alone with me, because . . .”

“Because?”

“It’s stupid. I got the feeling he was afraid he’d tell me something he shouldn’t. Isn’t that dumb?”

“I don’t think so. What do you suppose he didn’t want you to know?”

Dunbar discarded half his muffin in a trash bin directly behind him. “These suck,” he said. “Reduced-fat muffins. I should have gotten a double chocolate donut.”

“What do you think—”

“I don’t know, Mr. Freed, but there was something bothering the man. He was a completely changed person, and not for the better.”

I took a shot. “Amy thinks he was having an affair.”

“Amy should know better,” Dunbar said.

“He was seen at the theatre with another woman,” I offered. “Amy wasn’t there, but someone else might have seen him and told her.”

“What do you mean, Amy wasn’t there?” Dunbar asked.

A large firecracker went off inside my head. “You mean Amy
was
there?” Then, I thought another moment. “Were
you
there?” I can’t remember everyone in the theatre every night. I leave that to Leo.

“No,” Dunbar said. “I wasn’t there. Do you think I’d just leave my best friend dead in a movie seat?”

“What about Amy? Was she at the theatre that night?”

“I would have no way of knowing.” But Dunbar’s eyes were saying something other than what came out of his mouth.

21

FRIDAY
The Thin Man
(1934)
and
Phat Ho
(today)

The theatre had been packed again Saturday night, and while every seat wasn’t filled on Sunday, a good number of them were. I had made all the reel changes myself both nights, and there had been no further evidence that Anthony was anywhere near the place. I imagine Dutton and O’Donnell were both watching the theatre pretty closely, just in case.

The crowds were still larger than usual, but starting to diminish, and I knew that sooner rather than later, Comedy Tonight would be back to the depressing audience levels it averaged before becoming the Crime Scene du Jour.

Leslie had been on the night shift the whole week, so I didn’t see her again until Friday. During the week, I’d invented a few more newspapers and talked to some of Ansella’s coworkers. And that was where it had gotten a little weird: two of them confirmed that Vincent had been acting “angry” for about two weeks before he’d been killed. But they each contradicted Marcy’s story that she and Vincent hadn’t been close.

“They were the best of friends until right before he died,” one said. “Something happened—I don’t know what—but after that, he was a different man.” The woman went on to suggest, in terms that were not terribly subtle, that she knew
why
Vincent and Marcy had stopped getting along, but she was far too principled a person to say. I made a mental note not to tell her anything even slightly personal, and moved on.

I’d also spoken to two more of Anthony’s professors, who hadn’t heard from him and were waiting for term papers, and another of his roommates, a kid named Lyle who was so stoned he called me “dude” seventeen times during a six-minute conversation. Dolores wasn’t home, he assured me, but they were “just friends,” anyway. I got the feeling Dolores had a lot of friends. Amy Ansella’s friends didn’t have any news, either. But her neighbor, a Mrs. Nelson, confirmed that Amy and Vincent were shouting at each other the night he died. “It was mostly Amy,” Mrs. Nelson said. “I’m not sure Vince could get a word in edgewise.”

I didn’t tell Leslie any of this when she showed up at the town house without warning just around noon on Friday, even though she knew I hadn’t cleared enough money to buy furniture—at least, not yet. She appeared at the door, with her own bicycle strapped to the back of her car.

“Let’s go for a ride along the canal,” she said. I didn’t bother to tell her that I consider a bicycle to be transportation, not recreation.
You wanted to know where this relationship (if that’s the word for it) is going,
I told myself.
Here’s your chance
.

The Delaware and Raritan Canal towpath is a bicycling route of about twenty-eight miles that runs from Frenchtown to Ewing, a ride of roughly two and a half tree-lined, scenic hours (thus trashing, one hopes, the vision most people have of New Jersey as a toxic waste dump run by the Mob). The problem is, you have to leave your car (assuming you have one) at one end, and ride back up the same path in the other direction, making it a ride of approximately fifty-six miles, which is more than I’m willing to do unless being chased by a very determined bear on roller skates.

We solved this problem by calling my dad, who agreed to meet us in Lambertville and drive us back to Leslie’s car in Frenchtown. Luckily, he still had an old truck which could accommodate two bicycles and a pair of weary riders, one of whom he was no doubt anxious to meet. I’d get back to the theatre in time for the night’s showing, tired but without the saddle sores those who don’t ride regularly might have. Leslie might have a slightly more tender behind when we got back, but my philosophy was that this ride hadn’t been
my
idea.

Leslie rode in front for a while, which allowed me the luxury of watching the aforementioned behind for an extended period. When the path widened after a while, I pulled out and rode next to her. It was a weekday, so there were few other riders, and not many pedestrians on the path.

But I was regretting the decision to get close enough that she could talk to me once I’d told Leslie about my conversations with Amy Ansella and Joe Dunbar. “You went to her
house
?” she pretty much screamed as we rode over a wooden bridge somewhere to the left of the Delaware River. “How could you do that? Why can’t you just leave this to us?”

“Everybody’s so bent out of shape about some copied DVDs that I don’t see anything being done about the murder, ” I told her, a bit unfairly, since I had no idea what was being done about the murder. “Besides, with all the circumstantial evidence, Anthony’s being hung out to dry, and I’m the only one who seems to care.”

“I’ve heard this before,” she said, pedaling harder and making me catch up.

“Well . . . his father came to see me, and he cried.”

There was a small decline, and we coasted for a few welcome seconds. Leslie didn’t speak for the moment; she felt the breeze in her face, then looked at me. She smiled.

“You’re a real softy, you know that?”

“Not where it counts,” I said.

She pretended to ignore that. “All right, what did they tell you?”

I recounted most of what I’d learned—which wasn’t much—over lunch, which we had in a coffee shop in Lambertville, a town so adorable you want to wrap it in a little pink blanket and feed it pastina. Alas, there was no outside seating, but we could look out the window at the fine day, and at our well-chained bicycles attached to the cast-iron fence of a church across from the restaurant. I had my front wheel with me in the coffee shop. Leslie, being a law enforcement official, chose to live on the edge, and just ran the chain through her front wheel spokes.