Some Like It Hot-Buttered (26 page)

The response didn’t come too quickly, like he had rehearsed it, and it didn’t come too slowly, like he had to make it up on the spot. “I went out to dinner with Christie,” he said. “And before you ask—because the cops already have—no, I don’t have a receipt from the restaurant. We went out for a pizza, and I paid cash.”

Christie had said she was
out
, but she hadn’t said where, and that seemed odd, with an answer as innocuous as this at her disposal. If it were true.

“Would the guy at the restaurant . . .”

“Remember me?” Dunbar asked. “No. Would the guy at your pizza place know you by name, Elliot?”

Actually, he probably would, but that was a sad comment on my life, not Dunbar’s. So I changed topics.

“Amy told me she and Vincent had an argument the night he died. She said he admitted to her that he was having an affair, and they fought bitterly. But it didn’t seem shocking to her; it was almost like she expected it.”

“Did she say who he was having an affair with?” he asked.

“She said it was with Marcy Resnick,” I told him.

“Who’s Marcy Resnick?”

“A woman he worked with.” Strange that Dunbar didn’t know the name.

“Strange that I don’t know the name,” he said. See? “Vince and I saw each other at least once a week. Up until the last few months, he told me everything. You’d think he’d at least mention her, if it was someone . . .”

“Maybe that’s why he was so secretive the past few months,” I suggested.

Dunbar shook his head. “It doesn’t figure. Vince just wasn’t that kind of guy. Besides, he was married to Amy. You’d think that would be enough.”

I looked at him. “Who knows what goes on in someone else’s marriage,” I said.

“Yeah.”

I took a look around the room, and the rooms I could see from where I sat. “You sure you’re not moving out?” I asked Dunbar. “What’s going to be left after you sell all this stuff?”

He laughed. “I’ll be happy if we sell a tenth of it, to tell you the truth,” he said. “I just want to clear out some storage space.”

I couldn’t think of anything more to ask, other than “how come Amy called you a murderer” again, but that was getting old, so Dunbar walked me to the door. The living room, filled with the first-class castoffs, was hard to navigate, but I’m pretty nimble on my feet, so I managed to get out of the house without causing myself a life-threatening injury.

Before I walked to the car, I turned back to face Dunbar, who was watching me from the open doorway. “Do you think Amy said that to deflect suspicion from herself?” I asked. Okay, so Marcy and Christie had given me the idea. I wanted to see if Dunbar would parrot his wife’s opinion.

Dunbar’s eyes opened as wide as if he’d been hit in the solar plexus. It took him a long moment to recover, and he exhaled. “I’ve known Amy a long time, and I think she was just lashing out at anything and anybody. She always sort of resented the fact that Vince and I had known each other for so long, and she was . . . jealous of me in a weird way. She was just mad at Vincent, and she thought she could get to him through me.”

“Except he’s dead,” I said quietly.

“Yeah,” Dunbar said. “Except he’s dead.”

37

It took me close to an hour to pedal home, but it wasn’t a hard ride, and by the time I got out of the shower and dressed, my legs were back to normal.

Still, after an hour on the bike, sitting was a priority, especially on a nice soft cushion. Your butt gets conditioned to a bicycle seat, but never completely. I’ll bet Lance Arm-strong walks like Yosemite Sam.

I went into the living room to begin the mammoth task of uncrating and storing Vincent Ansella’s gargantuan video collection. Trying to wrap my mind around the entire job would have given me a headache and led to a feeling of such intimidation that I’d never even begin, so I concentrated on the first box, which was what I’d decided to call the one closest to where I was sitting.

As I unpacked, I checked off each video from the list Amy had provided. Ansella had the most eclectic, yet comprehensive collection of classic comedy I’d ever seen, making my own—which numbered in the hundreds—seem puny and superficial, like someone who claims to be a major rock and roll fanatic because he has all of the original albums the Beatles released in America.

Nonetheless, it took me about a half hour to check out the first carton of videos, mostly because I was checking each disc and tape individually, and I’d get distracted by the special features list on a DVD or the cover copy on a VHS box, and forget that I had approximately nineteen million more of these things to go through. I also had to contend with the small but significant percentage of doubles, since unsurprisingly, Ansella and I had similar taste. At this rate, I’d be completely finished sometime during the Chelsea Clinton Administration.

One major problem was that I had no bookshelves. I mean, none. And I really needed something to hold all these videos—if the water heater in the town house decided to blow up tonight and the living room flooded, I’d suffer the greatest blow to comedy since a major television network green-lighted
Hello, Larry
. (Look it up.)

So the first step would be getting some shelves from someplace that would deliver, since I couldn’t actually drive somewhere and pick up large pieces of furniture. I could ask Dad to borrow the truck again, but I did have to become an adult at some point, and besides, have I mentioned that there are these places that actually bring the stuff to your house?

I walked, gingerly, into the bedroom, where I have the computer set up on one such assemble-it-yourself desk in one corner. I powered up the Mac and checked my e-mail. Apparently some ex-girlfriends had been talking out of school, since the usual ads for various enhancements to my anatomy still comprised the bulk of my messages.

I deleted all of those, read one or two from actual humans I knew, particularly one from a fellow Marx
freres
fan in New Hope, Pennsylvania, and then turned my attention to the task of finding shelving that could accommodate well over one thousand movies in various formats.

But before I got to that, something caught my eye. And I could have kicked myself.

On the corner of my desk was Anthony Pagliarulo’s screenplay,
Killin’ Time
, on the CD-ROM his “lover,” Carla, had given me. I had placed it on my desk with every intention of reading it, but my attention had been distracted by, well, everything that had happened since that moment. I got the impression that if the disc could have grown arms, it would have been waving frantically at me, trying to remind me it was there.

I put it in the disc drive and waited for it to show up on the screen. I don’t really know why, but I was sure that reading the script would give me a clue to Anthony’s whereabouts. Understanding the kid the way I did, as a devoted and possibly fanatical film freak, I’d be able to get into his head and follow the train of thought toward whichever station Anthony might have bought a (one-way?) ticket to visit.

Killin’ Time
was, as anyone who’d ever met Anthony might expect, a very referential script, which included plenty of artsy camera angles; no character development of any kind, ever; a barely recognizable story; and dialogue that (remember, this takes place in the 1840s) featured lines like “the African-Americans in town ain’t gonna like this.”

As advertised, it also included depictions of gore so lovingly described it was like a new father pulling baby pictures out of his wallet: oh, look here, how he shows the eye-gouging from the
inside
of the skull, and here, look at this one, where the intestines are actually
visible
after the slashing. It would probably make untold millions at the box office and be lionized by critics everywhere.

I have to say, though, that it wasn’t until the second time through the script that I began to realize what Anthony was getting at. Not with the violence, which was strictly there to show how many different ways he could depict violence. But there was something in the description of the surroundings that conjured up images in my mind so familiar as to be almost iconic. I could practically see the settings, because from his loving detail, Anthony had told me which movies he’d stolen them from.

The Searchers
.
Fort Apache
.
My Darling Clementine
. Even, yes, parts of
Easy Rider.

I could have smacked myself in the head for not figuring it out sooner. Any movie nut/film student shooting a Western, if he had any budget at all, wouldn’t have been able to resist the allure, not to mention think he was the first to create an
homage
, just by using the location. A quick call to the Utah Film Commission confirmed that permits had been issued, and a film called
Killin’ Time
was completing principal photography as we spoke.

Anthony was in Monument Valley, Utah.

38

Now, the question became what to do with my newfound information. Of course, I had promised to tell Chief Dutton whatever I had discovered, without hesitation, but the whole question of what
he’d
be required to do after that slowed me down. I hadn’t had the need to test Dutton’s word, yet, and I wasn’t sure whether he’d agree to find out more, or simply have Anthony picked up by the Utah State Police.

To avoid deciding what to do about Dutton, I considered my other options, which were, in a word, limited. I could try calling the number Dutton had gotten for Anthony’s cell phone, but I had tried to read it upside down from a distance of about seven feet two days ago. It wasn’t the most reliable information I’d ever gathered.

I even toyed with the idea of flying to Utah—what the hell, I’d always wanted to see Monument Valley—but then thought of Sophie running the theatre all by herself, and immediately banished that thought. By the time I got back, she’d be showing
The Seventh Seal
, followed by
The
Exorcist
, as a tribute to the great comedian Max von Sydow. Even Leo wouldn’t sit through
that
double feature.

I couldn’t just close up, either. That’s the problem with owning a movie theatre—there are no days off. We’re open on Christmas, we’re open on Thanksgiving, and we’re open on Yom Kippur. We’re open on my birthday, when I’m sick, and when a distant relative dies. If Mr. Ford had been running a movie theatre, he probably would have been showing a matinee the day after Lincoln was shot. Well, not if O’Donnell was running the investigation, but otherwise.

If I couldn’t call Anthony and I couldn’t go see him, I could try to get a message through to him via Carla or Tajo Rosenblad. But they had both seemed genuinely amazed at the idea that he was missing, and equally surprised he was not in touch with his folks. It was possible, though not likely, that he’d gotten in touch since then, but my urgency on the phone had probably spooked Anthony into going farther underground. Once again, my superior investigative technique had shown through. I had a real future in this pursuit.

Staring at the computer screen in frustration, it occurred to me that a film student let loose for the first time would know when he was in over his head—at some point he’d
have
to be in over his head—and he’d call the closest thing he had to a mentor for help.

I put in a call to Professor Bender at Rutgers, and he immediately asked me to come to his office, as “just the tone of your voice is causing me vociferous anxiety.” You have to love college professors: they can’t just say something creeps them out.

It wasn’t a long ride to Bender’s office, and I chained the bike outside this time, carrying only the front wheel with me up the stairs. Bender, ponytail all a-twitter, was sitting behind his desk, with a poster over his head for
Repulsion
, an early Roman Polanski thriller. You had to figure it wouldn’t be a
Back to the Future
poster. Film professors.

“What news is there of Anthony?” he asked as soon as I sat down, and I was tempted to answer, “Belike, ’tis but a rumor,” but I was way too common a man to make Shakespeare references before four in the afternoon.

“I think I might know where he is, but I wanted to see if you’d heard from him at all,” I said. “I thought perhaps I could confirm it.” I’m also usually way too common to say “perhaps,” but some of the snootiness in that room was bound to rub off.

“Indeed.” Bender stroked his beard as if it were a pet. “I’m sorry, but I haven’t heard from Anthony at all, or I’d have called the police. But I’m intrigued, Mr. Freed.” That made him look and sound even more like a Bond villain. “Where do you believe Anthony might be?”

I told him I’d spoken to two of Anthony’s friends, and they had each confirmed he was trying to film a low-budget (by Hollywood standards) Western. I asked Bender if he’d read the script, and he said Anthony wouldn’t let him see it before it was “perfect,” so I gave him a brief summary of what Anthony might have un-ironically called “the plot.” I included a few key sequences, and described the settings almost verbatim from Anthony’s script.

“And this information leads you to believe . . . what?” he asked, still stroking. A white cat for his lap would have cemented the Ernst Stavro Blofeld image. And, of course, he would have to shave his head.

“Think about it, Professor. Anthony is a film . . . student.” (“Geek” seemed a little harsh.) “He’s very familiar with past films and the way they were shot. He knows a good deal of film history, as I’m sure you’ve taught him most of it yourself. ” (In reality, Bender had probably distracted Anthony with pretense and opinion masquerading as fact, but sometimes you have to blow a little smoke.)

Bender nodded. “Of course. We want our students to have a solid background in the classics. We have separate tracks of study in cinema history, cinema appreciation, cinema criticism . . .”

I interrupted the recruitment pitch. “So given all that, and given that Anthony is dedicated to the idea of cinema tradition” (now he had
me
saying “cinema”), “if he were to try to deconstruct the classic Western, where would you expect a film student to go?”