Some Like It Hot-Buttered (19 page)

But I digress.

The car was driving behind me, but since it
was
a car, and I was self-propelled, I felt it wouldn’t be behind me for long. For some reason, though, the driver, whose face I couldn’t make out in my repeated backward glances, seemed to be in no hurry to pass me. In fact, he (and I was only guessing that it was a man) appeared to be determined to let a bicycle beat him to the bridge.

I waved him around me as we approached, trying to get him off my back, and the car seemed to respond, closing the distance between us and moving to my left. I kept pedaling, but when the car came even with me and we were shoulder to shoulder, the driver didn’t accelerate, and the Lexus didn’t pass me.

Instead, it veered to the right, and came very close to hitting me. I reacted quickly, pulling the handlebars hard to the right, and luckily there were no cars parked on that side of Raritan Avenue. Riding home at one in the morning has its advantages—fewer shoppers are parked on the road as you go.

I yelled, “Hey!” at the top of my lungs, and pedaled harder, the most useless thing I could do at the time. A man on a bike isn’t going to outrun a luxury car (he won’t outrun a 1939 Hudson, for that matter), but when the ol’ adrenaline starts pumping, it’s hard to keep a level head. The impulse is to get the hell out of there.

The car swerved in after me again, just as I was starting down the hill that leads to the Albany Street Bridge. Highland Park, as the name might indicate, is built on the high ground, and the slope at that section of road is pretty steep.

There was no sidewalk to protect me there, and no parking meters to hide behind (the only time in my life I’ve felt bad about the absence of parking meters). I was exposed. There was absolutely no one else on the road to offer help.

And the Lexus was bearing down on me.

Luckily, Middlesex County, in its enduring concern for the safety of people on foot and in motor vehicles (but not on bicycles), had provided shelter—and some pretty serious shelter, at that: there’s a concrete barrier between the roadbed for the bridge and the pedestrian crossing next to it. All I had to do was thread the needle and maneuver the bike into the cutout on the road that led to the walkway. Once I was behind the concrete, nothing short of a bazooka attack would be able to penetrate.

Right now, I was trying to determine how to make it up onto the sidewalk at high speed while headed straight down a steep hill. Braking would mean that the car could reach me more easily, and anyway, braking too hard could throw me over the handlebars and into the road, where I’d be a goner for sure. Trying to sneak onto a curb that could just as easily throw me off the bike seemed too large a risk to take. If I could keep the bike going down, actually pick up speed, and then get behind the barrier, I could at least take a moment to evaluate my chances.

But I had to make it to the cutout first. The Lexus, and whoever the psychopath was driving it, seemed intent on beating me into a bloody pulp before I reached the safe haven. The driver made his most severe swerve yet, a violent and unexpected turn that could have knocked me off the bike and into the middle of the road, where he might easily have run me over and created an “accident.”

That is, he could have done so, if I hadn’t been trying to anticipate his movements. I knew he didn’t want me getting to the bridge, so he’d want to make his move soon. And at the first hint of a move in my direction, I hit the brakes and moved to the right as far as I could. I knew I couldn’t stop, but I could throw off the driver’s sense of my speed, and that might be enough. I hoped.

As it turned out, it was
almost
enough. He wasn’t able to broadside me, but the back fender of the Lexus just nicked my left ankle as I swerved right. The concrete barrier was only about twenty feet away, so I ignored the pain and didn’t look to see if there was blood. I kept moving to the right, as if I were planning to turn onto River Road and go toward Piscataway.

The Lexus, whose driver was apparently disappointed he hadn’t succeeded in killing me, also veered to the right, braking just when I picked up my speed again. I was riding downhill and I shifted hard to keep pedaling and gathering speed. It was fortunate that I knew the road so well, having ridden it almost every night for the better part of a year.

I pulled up on the curb and made it behind the concrete barrier just as the Lexus lunged right, banging its passenger-side rear fender on the edge of the barrier and then, apparently rocked by the impact (and with a nice-sized dent in that fender), drove off.

I stopped and ducked behind the concrete, just in case the driver had a weapon he wanted to wield. Apparently he didn’t, and after a few seconds, the Lexus was nowhere to be seen. I hadn’t gotten a good look at its rear license plate, other than to see that it started with the letter L.

Now that I had the luxury of time, I noticed the pain in my left ankle. I looked down, and saw the scrape wasn’t as bad as it could have been, but there was blood, and I might need a few stitches. But I’d go home and ice it first, because a) I didn’t feel like riding the bike to Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital, and b) I had no idea what would happen to the bike if I rode to the emergency room. A cab might be the way to go, if I decided I needed the treatment.

I got back on the bike and rode slowly across the bridge and to my front door. Sitting on the steps in front of my house was Leslie Levant, in jeans and a T-shirt. She stood as I rode up, and didn’t notice anything odd until I got off the bike and started to limp to the sidewalk.

“What happened to you?” she said, grabbing for my shoulder and taking the bike’s handlebars from my hands.

“I don’t suppose you’d believe I cut myself shaving,” I said.

“That’s where
I
would cut myself shaving,” she said.

“Well, it’s a long story,” I told her, and let her help me up the stairs. I pulled out my keys and opened the so-green-you-wouldn’t-believe-it door.

“I have all night,” she said.

“I was coming to apologize,” Leslie said.

We were lounging in my living “area,” having just returned from the scenic emergency room at Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital, where I’d received six stitches on my left ankle, a tetanus shot, an elaborate bandage I intended to replace with a large Band-Aid the next morning, and a prescription for antibiotics in case the Lexus’ rear fender was carrying an infection. My ankle stung a little, but other than that, I was fine. Leslie had cleaned up the blood from the entrance hall floor (there wasn’t much), but I’d have to clean the bike more thoroughly tomorrow. Or later that day, if you wanted to be technical about it.

“Apologize? For what?” I asked. I didn’t remember her doing anything worth apologizing for, unless it was the look she gave me when she saw my expression at the mention of a tetanus shot. I don’t like needles. So sue me.

“The way I acted when your ex-wife was at the theatre today,” she said. Leslie was used to being up this late (or early: see previous mention of desire to be technical), as she’d been on the overnight shift for a while now. But even though I worked late most nights, I was starting to fade. A growing boy like me is generally in bed by one a.m., and it was currently closing in on four. “I turned tail and ran as soon as there was competition.”

“Yeah, but it’s such a nice tail,” I said. She scowled, so I quickly added, “Besides, Sharon isn’t competition. She’s married to someone else. That’s all over with now.”

“Sure it is.”

I gave her my best innocent expression. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It means, I saw the way you look at her, and I don’t think anything’s over yet.” Leslie lay back on the sofa, which for a less fit woman would have meant she could never get up again. I was sitting on a folding chair that belonged in a park, blocking someone’s view of Fourth of July fireworks. “I think you have unresolved issues about her, and you need to get through them before you can move on.”

This conversation was heading in a direction I hadn’t seen coming when she offered to apologize, and I can’t say I was crazy about it. “This is sounding very much like a kiss-off speech,” I told her. “You could at least save that for a time when I’m not coming home from the hospital.”

Leslie stood up, which I considered a superhuman effort all by itself. She started to pace, and didn’t make eye contact. No, this wasn’t going to be one of our more enjoyable encounters.

“I don’t have a problem with the way things are now,” she said, talking more to herself than to me, from the way her voice sounded. “But I think we need to slow it down a bit.”

“Slow it down? We’ve gone out twice and kissed a couple of times in almost three weeks. How much slower can we go?”

“You’re dangerous,” Leslie said softly. “You’re on the rebound and you want to re-create the life you had with your wife. I’m not your wife.”

“At the moment, you’re not even my friend,” I said. “You’re a woman I’m getting to know, and I think you’re overreacting. I’m not proposing anytime soon. For one thing, it would kill my alimony.”

She didn’t laugh. She didn’t react at all. She just shook her head, said, “I’m going home, Elliot. I don’t think we should see each other for a while,” and left.

All in all, this was not one of my better nights.

I slept until one in the afternoon, and in the shower, took stock of my life. There’s little else to do in the shower, since I really don’t like to sing without a band, and there’s no room for a band in my bathroom. Not even a combo.

I was a divorced man in his late thirties, living alone in a rental I didn’t really call home, operating a business that didn’t have a chance to survive, pining after a woman who had chosen to leave me for a guy who spends most of his day with unconscious people, and brooding over another woman I’d met less than a month before, and who had just dumped me, before I even knew what I was being dumped from. I didn’t own my own home, my own car, or a stick of grown-up furniture, and my closest confidant was my father. It was a good thing a band wouldn’t fit in the room, because all I’d be able to play would be the blues. And that goes so badly with soap and water.

Clearly, the only thing left to do was investigate a murder.

FRIDAY
Help!
(1965)
and
Too Many Kids
(today)

It took me a few days of phone calling and cajoling to set up more interviews with everyone I wanted to question. The people I’d talked to before at least understood why I was calling, even if they weren’t all that thrilled about seeing me again. Others, confronted with a call from the owner of the local comedy theatre, were somewhat confused by a request to discuss the death of Vincent Ansella, and since I couldn’t explain it to myself any better than I could to them, sometimes persistence was more convincing than logic.

Joe Dunbar’s wife Christie, for example, was reluctant to grant an interview. I first contacted her via e-mail through her small business website. She took a while to get back to me, and didn’t want to meet when I suggested it. But when I laid it on pretty thick about how Vincent Ansella had spent his last few moments enjoying himself at my theatre (even if his choice of refreshment was unfortunate), she relented, but said she wasn’t going to tell her husband about the interview, so I should meet her at her office.

This turned out to be in an industrial park in Iselin, and Moe wasn’t happy about loaning me a 2003 VW Beetle (brakes) to get there, but there I was. It was the least-descript building I’d ever seen, and I was once a government employee for a couple of months. The sign on the office door read "MediTek.”

In her normal (non-funereal) clothing, Christie was brassy indeed. Her curly blond hair, almost platinum, orbited her head without really seeming to touch it. Her makeup was more reminiscent of Emmett Kelly than Sophia Loren, and her laugh reminded me of the horn on a 1977 AMC Pacer. I liked her immediately.

“Why didn’t you want Joe to know we were talking?” I asked her. “I’ve spoken with him already.”

“Ahh,” (this might be the place to mention that “ahh” preceded everything Christie said, and I will omit it from now on) “he’s been so upset since Vince . . . ya know, that I didn’t want to tell him. Why bring it up again?” She adjusted one of her many bracelets.

“Do you know of anyone who would want to hurt Mr. Ansella?” I asked. No use beating around the bush with Christie; she was a straight-ahead kind of girl.

“I can’t think of a soul. Vince Ansella was the sweetest, funniest, most joyful man I’ve ever known. Who’d want to bump off a guy like that?” She started to play with a plaque on her desk that read “World’s Best Boss.”

Obviously, I didn’t know who’d want to “bump off ” Ansella, so I didn’t offer an answer. Instead, I shifted gears. “How did you meet your husband?” I’d put in another call to Meg Vidal to get tips on questioning people, and she said I should get them to talk about themselves. After a ten-minute lecture on letting the police do their job.

“Would you believe it? Vince’s sister Lisa set us up. I think she was worried Vince would never get married if he kept hanging around with Joe. Maybe she thought they were queer, you know?” She laughed, which sounded like
PAH!
“They weren’t. I’ve known some queer guys, and they’re the nicest people on the planet, but Vince and Joe? Straight as a couple of arrows, believe you me. Anyway, she knew I wasn’t Vince’s type, so she figured she’d see if Joe was game. And he was.”

I figured we’d established a rapport, so I moved into waters I thought might be a little choppier. “How do you get along with Amy Ansella?” I asked.

Christie’s mouth, in a perpetual smile, drooped a little, but she was trying not to be obvious. “We weren’t best buddies, but we got along,” she said.

“I don’t think you did,” I said quietly.

She grinned a little, wickedly. “You’re a smart fella, Elliot. But Amy . . . well, Amy is all about Amy, isn’t she? And when someone’s like that, and she takes on a guy like Vince, who just wanted you to be happy, she finds herself the perfect husband. He’ll do whatever you want him to do.”