Some Like It Hot-Buttered (24 page)

Sophie would be showing up in fifteen minutes, and I had to get ready for her unspoken scorn. I still had to put on socks and shoes. There were things that needed doing. I hadn’t threaded the projector or started the popcorn machine. Luckily, I had cleaned up pretty well the night before.

After all, a good thirty or forty people were coming. Everything had to be just right, didn’t it?

I spent a few minutes setting up the popcorn and changed a couple of the two-sheets in the lobby to reflect the next week’s movies, and then went and turned on the lights in the auditorium.

It really did reflect hours and hours of hard work, and I was proud of it. But it still wasn’t within driving distance of the vision I had for the theatre, something that went back to my childhood and before that, when going to a movie was something more than watching a DVD on a really, really big screen.

In those days, there was a palpable excitement in seeing a film in a real movie palace, one of the over-the-top rococo structures that signaled a group experience. The idea was that it
should
be too much, it
should
be almost garish in its architectural excess. This was, in fact, the temple of moviegoing, and that made it a special experience, something that everyone could afford, but that gave us a glimpse of the better life.

At Comedy Tonight, it was more likely you’d get a glimpse of the better life as it was in 1948, but without cosmetic surgery. When you looked at Ginger Rogers, for example, in
Swing Time
(1936), it was hard to imagine a woman more beautiful. But in the last years of her life, while it was possible to understand that she had once been a great beauty, the present-day reality was only a reminder, and something of a tease. My theatre was like Ginger Rogers in 1995.

Luckily, the lights were never turned on high, so you couldn’t see the cracks in the plaster and the missing pieces of the painting on the ceiling. (Michelangelo had nothing on the guy who climbed up into the cupola of Comedy Tonight.) The missing seats here and there didn’t help, and the fact that not all the seats that
were
there actually matched wasn’t a huge asset, either.

I stood another few seconds checking on the state of my
mostly
restored theatre and then remembered that I needed to take my huge asset upstairs to the projection booth.

Getting
Help!
to thread up had been a little tricky the night before—we don’t always get what you’d call mint-condition prints, and this one’s sprocket holes were a little cranky. I should have left myself extra time, and I hadn’t expected to torpedo a budding relationship, so now I was in a hurry.

As it turned out, though, I needn’t have rushed—the film was perfectly threaded and ready to go, and the projection booth was powered up and lit, as it always was whenever Anthony was in the theatre.

But this was different. I knew Anthony
couldn’t
be in the theatre tonight.

Could he?

34

“Don’t you see,” I said to Chief Barry Dutton, who was sitting behind his desk the next day, looking like an African-American Transformer toy in “building” mode, “this means someone is trying to make it look like Anthony’s here, when we know he’s not.”

“Let me see if I have this right,” Dutton said, his voice rumbling somewhere beneath the tones of a lion who just came back to the den to find Uncle Scar hanging out with his lioness. “You received a phone call from a fugitive from justice,
didn’t bother to let the authorities know about it
, and then when you think it might help that fugitive’s case, you bring the information here to me. Is that about it?”

“No need to thank me. It’s all part of the service.”

“Mr. Freed, we don’t know each other very well. But you can assume from this moment on that if I need to be irritated by a civilian who thinks he’s witty, there are other places I can go.” Dutton, I could see, could be very intimidating if he tried hard enough, and he was certainly giving it a shot. He didn’t stand up, though, which might have helped. The man was roughly the size of Pike’s Peak.

“I’m sorry, Chief. It’s a reflex with me. From this point on, assume that you have successfully cowed me into submission. ”

He rumbled some more, which I took to be a sigh of resignation. “All right. So explain to me how the intruder or intruders who set up your projection booth for you provide any evidence whatsoever that your projectionist didn’t have something to do with the pirated videos. And try to stick to something resembling facts, because theories that begin with ‘you just don’t know the kid like I do’ really don’t hold up all that well in court.”

“It’s simple,” I said. I stood up, to pace around. It doesn’t help, but it looks good. “The person—or people— trying to make it look like Anthony had a hand in the piracy and the murder don’t know that I spoke to him. They don’t know I’m aware he’s away someplace shooting this movie of his. They think I’m still as much in the dark about his whereabouts as everyone else.”

“Which you are.” Dutton was listening closely, all cop now, his hands clasped in front of him, thinking.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, all you got was a phone call that, for all you know, came from across the street. Anthony could easily be here in town, operating out of someone’s basement, or with some friends over on campus in New Brunswick. There’s absolutely no reason to take him at his word.”

“You don’t know the kid like I do,” I said with little enthusiasm.

“Uh-huh.”

“He was shooting a movie. I heard the tumult and the crew behind him.” It wasn’t much, but it was something.

“You heard other people talking. It could have been a bowling alley or a Laundromat for all you know.” Okay, maybe it wasn’t something, after all.

“You could probably get my phone records and see where the call came from, couldn’t you?”

Dutton was about to answer when the door opened, and a uniformed officer I hadn’t seen before walked in and handed Dutton a sheet of paper.

“Yeah,” Dutton said. He took the paper from the uniform, nodded, and watched the officer leave. I wondered why I was there for any of this.

Dutton spent a good deal of time scanning the paper.

“My phone records,” I reminded him.

“Yeah, I’ll have to get you to sign a waver for them before you leave,” Dutton said. He scanned the papers. “They’re not terribly interesting, really.”

It took me a moment to realize what he was saying. “Those are my phone records?” I asked, pointing to the paper in his hand. Dutton nodded. “You just went ahead and got them without getting permission from me?”

Dutton looked at me over his half-glasses. “You obstructed an ongoing murder investigation for three full days after getting this phone call and you’re going to lecture
me
on procedure?” he asked. Okay, so he had a point. I peered over his desk at the paper, and tried to make out the number highlighted on the sheet in front of him. I can read upside down, but not fluently.

“So, what do the phone calls show?” I asked. “If I’m not prying, what with it being my phone and all.”

“Well, the call is here, Saturday morning right before one a.m.,” he began. “But it doesn’t really prove anything. It’s from a cell phone registered in Los Angeles, but on the Verizon network. Call could have come from a lot of places.”

“Is one of them across the street, or from someone’s basement in New Brunswick?”

Dutton’s eyes narrowed. “Let’s assume for a moment that your projectionist isn’t the one setting up the screenings at night. Who else could it be?”

“I haven’t a clue,” I told him honestly. “There aren’t that many people who really understand the workings of that kind of machine.”

“Okay.” Dutton nodded in agreement. “Let’s start with the basics. Access. Who could possibly have been in the projection booth on the nights when the Phantom Threader appeared?”

“What do you prefer? ‘The Projectionist Who Wasn’t There’?”

I tried to remember that I had to show some respect for the office, if not the man. It’s like the president. “Don’t go into film marketing as your second career, Chief,” I said.

He ignored me almost as well as if Sharon had been giving him lessons. “How about the popcorn girl?”

“Sophie?” I laughed out loud. “Sophie doesn’t even know how to work the popcorn machine. I have to set it up for her every night.”

“She could be putting that on. Anthony could have showed her, since I’m assuming you haven’t.”

I shook my head. “You’re giving her too much credit. Sophie can’t even get Goth together on a convincing basis.”

“Well, no one else is there every night except for . . . Who’s that guy who’s there every night? The one who told us about Ansella’s supposed girlfriend?”

“Leo?” Dutton, who had been looking through his notes for the name, pointed at me: yes. I rewarded him with an expression of supreme skepticism. “Leo is a crusty little old guy who used to work in the merchant marine. He messed up his right hand with a fishhook, and doesn’t really have the use of all his fingers. Believe me, you’d need all your fingers to work that monster in my booth.”

Dutton pursed his lips, but nodded in agreement. “But it doesn’t happen
every
night, does it?”

“No.”

“So what can you remember about the nights when your gremlins were on the job? Was there anyone special who was there every time?”

I gave that some thought. And the more I thought about it, the more my stomach felt like I’d eaten a freezing plate of slush for breakfast. Nah; it
couldn’t
have been. But Dutton saw it on my face.

“Who?”

I sat back down. “It can’t be. No. Now that I think of it, it’s somebody who wasn’t even there one of the times . . . no.”

His voice was considerably more basso this time, and his eyes darker. He drew the word out:
“Who?”

“Leslie Levant.”

And the scary part was, Dutton looked like that was the answer he’d expected.

35

“It’s not possible,” I said. “Leslie wasn’t there the night the powdered sugar was dumped on the popcorn. You can check your log books. She was on patrol that night. And the projector was threaded up when I got there.”

Chief Dutton’s house was a comfortable split-level on a quiet street in Midland Heights. He’d decided that our conversation was going to take a turn that might not be best expressed in police headquarters, no matter how closed his office door was. So we came back here, and were currently sitting in his eat-in kitchen. Dutton had taken out smoked turkey and rolls from his refrigerator, and was looking as domestic as he could, considering he resembled Gentle Ben more closely than Martha Stewart.

“She couldn’t have been there ahead of you that day?” He spread mustard on one half of his roll and started assembling a sandwich. I rummaged through the refrigerator (with permission from the chief, of course) for low-fat mayonnaise, which is roughly the same as low-fat fat, an oxymoron.

“Nobody can be there ahead of me on any day,” I answered him. “I have the keys to the front door, and nobody else does.”

“Not even Anthony? He let these piracy people in, didn’t he? And would you get me a diet black cherry, while you’re there?”

I got a can of soda as requested, which helped me find the mayo, since that was hiding in the far reaches of the second shelf behind the beverages. It was a very well-organized refrigerator. “No, not even Anthony has the front door key. He could get the keys to the basement, which he apparently used to let the pirates in, but not the front door. I have the only one. Nobody has the keys to Comedy Tonight except me. Nobody gets to the theatre ahead of me.”

Dutton chuckled, Fred Flintstone in a mellow mood. “He let the pirates in. It sounds like Captain Jack Sparrow was running around in your theatre.”

“Are you sure you’re a cop? Is there a diploma or something I can see?”

He gave me a droll look, and said, “I’d be happy to give you a really good look at my gun, if you insist.”

I ignored that, and narrowed my eyes. “You didn’t look surprised when I mentioned Leslie’s name,” I said after a while. “You suspected her before I mentioned it, didn’t you?”

Dutton’s face betrayed him: he thought about denying it, then decided against it. He nodded. “I’m always concerned about things I can’t explain, especially when they involve my officers,” he began. “Officer Levant bought a new car recently. She moved into a new apartment, a larger one. Threw a party for her fellow officers when she moved in, and showed off the new furniture and appliances. Took a trip to Rome two months ago. That all costs money. Any one of them alone wouldn’t be suspicious. All of them, in a relatively short period of time with no pay increase, makes you wonder.”

I started filling a sandwich roll with sliced turkey. I looked across the table at him. Dutton never seemed to be seriously worried about anything—he maintained an aura of calm no matter what, and seemed to have a very strong inner barometer. He said what he had to say, but didn’t tell you everything, ever.

“But there was no connection to this case specifically. Couldn’t she have been taking kickbacks from businesses, protection, the usual graft?”

Dutton’s eyes flashed anger. “Not in my town,” he said. “That doesn’t happen. In my department, there is no ‘usual graft.’ When I see someone spending more than they should, with no obvious increase in their income, I get suspicious immediately, and I act as soon as I can.”

“Sorry,” I said, and I meant it. “But couldn’t the extra money be attributed to her divorce?”

“She’s been divorced three years,” Dutton said, and it occurred to me how little I knew about Leslie. “Where’s the money been for three years?” I couldn’t answer. “Besides, ” he seemed to think of something. “There was something else.”

I waited. Dutton put his hands to his temples. “This can’t go beyond this room, you understand?” he asked. I nodded my head. It seemed that speaking would be somehow inappropriate.