Some Like It Hot-Buttered (30 page)

Dunbar, with an IV in his left hand, didn’t look all that bad for a guy in the hospital. The left side of his neck was bandaged, and there was a bandage on the right side of his head, where he must have hit the concrete garage floor. His eyes were a little unfocused, but he was awake, and holding a little whiteboard and a marker in his hands. I assumed that meant he was having trouble speaking.

The cops looked up when I came in.

“Mr. Dunbar has been telling us quite a story, as well as he can,” Dutton said. “But I forgot: you have it all figured out, don’t you?”

“I think I do,” I said. “Can I test my theory against what Joe told you?”

I looked at Dunbar, whose eyes were at half-staff. He nodded, sort of.

“We’re not here to play games,” O’Donnell said.

“No, but I’ll bet Dunbar can’t talk all that well, and doing too much writing is going to tire him. He can nod to confirm what I say if I’m right.”

“Go ahead,” O’Donnell grumped. “Let’s see how smart you are.”

I walked to Dunbar’s bedside and made eye contact. He perked up a little, at least opening his eyes all the way.

“You understand what we’re doing, Joe?” I asked. Dunbar nodded. “You call me off if I’m wrong.” Another nod.

I looked over at Dutton and tried not to smirk. “Amy Ansella was having an affair, wasn’t she, Joe?” Dunbar nodded. “With you, wasn’t it?”

Dunbar shook his head, no.

I stopped myself before asking, “Are you sure?” I could be relatively certain Dunbar knew whether he was sleeping with Amy Ansella. I tried not to look directly at O’Donnell and Dutton. “Then, who?”

Dunbar’s mouth tightened, and for a moment, I thought he was going to cry. He looked at the whiteboard in his hand, but then gestured me over and whispered, “Marcy.”

“
Marcy Resnick?
Amy was having an affair with the woman from her husband’s office?”

Dunbar nodded.

I was reeling. “But you said you didn’t know Marcy,” I told him.
See? You’re wrong!
Dunbar made a face that said,
I was
lying,
genius.
Then he went back to looking sad.

“Maybe you don’t know the whole story, do you, Freed?” O’Donnell said.

I regained my composure. I had to prove myself, and I
did
know what I knew. I was pretty sure my theory would still hold up. I began again, more slowly, piecing in this new information as I went along.

“All right. Amy and Marcy met through company functions—or maybe after Marcy and Vincent became friends at work—and at some point, they began an affair. Amy and Marcy were together at Comedy Tonight the night Vincent was killed. Right, Joe?”

Dunbar nodded. He seemed a little more awake now.

“Vincent had known about the affair for months, or at least, he’d known his wife was cheating on him. His sister says he told her, and the change in his mood would be explained that way,” I continued.

I looked at Dunbar. A tear was forming in his right eye. “The thought of it was dragging him down. He confided in you. He would do that. You had to carry this around for a while, didn’t you?” Again, a nod from Joe Dunbar. “And right after your wife had gone through a bout with cancer. It must have been awful. Seeing your best friend destroyed by something like that. He’d loved Amy so much. And you couldn’t do anything. You felt bad that you couldn’t help.”

Dunbar hung his head. I was on the money so far. “And then something happened that you’re blaming yourself for, but it’s not your fault, Joe.”

He looked up, wondering if I knew what had actually happened.

“You told him who Amy was cheating on him with, right?”

Dunbar nodded.

“How did you know?” I asked him, genuinely curious.

Dunbar took a moment and scrawled on the board, “Saw them together.”

“So, you didn’t know they were lovers; you just mentioned to Ansella that you’d seen his wife with his friend from work,” Dutton said, piecing the puzzle together, filling in holes I hadn’t. Dunbar nodded again and bit his upper lip.

It took him a long time to write on his whiteboard: “Vince mentioned to Amy in passing that I’d seen her and Marcy together. She went off, confessed everything. Like she’d been waiting to tell him.” Dunbar showed us the board, then put his head down. It shook a bit.

“That set off the chain of events,” I told Dutton and O’Donnell. “With the knowledge that his wife was having an affair with Marcy Resnick, Vincent confronted Amy, and they had the argument the neighbors heard the night he died.”

Dunbar started scribbling again, and held up the board. “More,” he had written.

This time, I nodded. “You guys already had a plan for Vince to get even with Amy, didn’t you? You were going to make sure Amy saw Vincent cheating on her, too.”

Dunbar wrote, “Before we knew it was Marcy.”

“The timing was just a coincidence?” I asked, and Dunbar nodded. “So Amy was supposed to come to Comedy Tonight with Vincent that night?” But Dunbar shook his head, no.

He wrote, “In the car.”

I got it, then. “Amy saw him getting picked up for the movies, and she saw who was picking him up, right, Joe?”

Dunbar nodded, and a tear crested over his cheek.

“So?” O’Donnell asked. “Who was it? Who was Ansella’s mistress?”

Dunbar smiled a little and pointed to himself.

“In drag. The ugliest woman Leo had ever seen,” I reminded Dutton. “And Leo is a veteran of the merchant marine. ”

“It was you?” Dutton said to Joe, who nodded agreement. “Why?”

“Vincent wouldn’t ever cheat on his wife, no matter what,” I answered. “But he wanted Amy to
think
he could, so he and Joe cooked up what was, for them, a logical scheme. Joe’s wife, Christie, who used to be a beautician before her cancer, probably helped. She made Joe up as a woman, gave him one of her chemotherapy wigs, and probably had a good laugh when he went out the door.”

Dunbar nodded and dropped his head again. He blamed himself.

“Do you know if that’s when Vincent stole your last bottle of clonidine?” I asked Dunbar.

His eyes widened, and now he bit both lips. He shrugged; he didn’t know.

“But you did discover it missing later?” I asked.

Dunbar nodded. He wrote: “My fault.”

I shook my head. “No,” I said. “Amy called you ‘murderer, ’ but you aren’t really a murderer, Joe.”

Dunbar’s eyes began to tear, and he nodded his head:
Yes, I am.

“No, you’re not. You inadvertently provided the means, but Vincent Ansella killed himself.”

Dutton’s head turned sharply, and he watched Dunbar for a reaction. Dunbar’s eyes were still tearing, but they widened a bit. And he shook his head up and down,
yes.

“Wait a second. Ansella poisoned his
own
popcorn?” O’Donnell said. “Why in god’s name would he do that?”

“Because the world wasn’t funny for him anymore,” I said. “It was that important to him.”

Dunbar’s jaw dropped open. I was right.

“Vincent found out Amy was being unfaithful to him, even before he knew with whom.” I turned to Dunbar. “He loved Amy, and tried to ignore it, but it went on for months, and it wore him down. But the real blow was when the movies, the classic comedies, the thing that always provided relief for him no matter what his problems were, stopped helping.”

“What were you, his psychiatrist?” O’Donnell wanted to know. “How do you know what he was thinking?”

“Because I have his video collection, and I understand the way his mind worked,” I answered. “He and I had similar tastes, and we catalogued the same way.”

“Catalogued?” Dutton asked. “You’re basing this on how Ansella listed his videos?”

“No, not exactly. But he had the most complete, comprehensive classic comedy collection I’ve ever seen.”

“Nice alliteration,” Dutton said.

“Thanks. I was working on that the whole way here. Anyway, Ansella had more comedy videos than anyone I’ve ever known, or known about. And I have some connections in the area, remember.”

“So what’s that got to do with suicide?” asked O’Donnell.

“I’ve been organizing the collection since Amy sold it to me,” I explained. “And it’s magnificent. But there’s no copy of
Young Frankenstein
.”

They waited. For quite a long moment.

“That’
s it
?” They both seemed to ask at once.

“That’s enough,” I said. “See,
Young Frankenstein
was Vincent Ansella’s favorite movie. It was the one thing that was always guaranteed to pull him out of the doldrums, and there is no way—
no way
—that he’d ever consent to live without owning it. Unless he didn’t think it was funny anymore. Unless he knew he wasn’t going to be living much longer.”

I looked at Dunbar. He scribbled on the whiteboard, and held it out for me to see: “That’s why you’re theater.” I overlooked his spelling and handed him back the board. He wiped it off with a paper towel.

“Yes, I understand now,” I told him. “See, Amy’s affair was draining Vincent of his humor. People who worked with him, even his own sister, said that during the last months of his life, he wasn’t the same man. He was humor-less, he no longer found anything funny, and he seemed not to care about anything.”

There wasn’t a sound in the room now, as they were all paying attention to what I said. “When he didn’t have comedy to lean on anymore, Vincent didn’t have any internal support system left. He had you, and his sister, but I’m sorry, Joe. He needed something else.” Dunbar was crying openly now.

“He started selling off his video collection, just a little bit. Especially the titles that had once meant the most to him. I checked. It was like they caused him the most pain now. As it stands, his collection has no
A Night at the Opera
, no
Sleeper
, no
Hail the Conquering Hero
. Some of the Laurel and Hardy shorts are gone. There’s no Lucille Ball.”

“Oh, come on,” said O’Donnell. “You’re going to base a suicide on holes in the guy’s video collection? Suppose he never owned those movies. Suppose he just didn’t like them.”

“There were spaces for them on his inventory list, which he kept dutifully literally until the day he died. And he’d deleted them. You can see it; he listed them alphabetically and by year of release,” I told him. Then I looked at Dunbar. “Did he own them, Joe?” Dunbar nodded. “Did he sell them off, at the end?” Yes, again. “I checked on eBay, and there are still a few items listed under the name VincAns. Things that didn’t sell in time, I guess.”

“I hate to say it, but you might be right,” O’Donnell said. “He had one outlet, and that didn’t work for him. He had access to the pills, and the fact is, Vincent Ansella was the only one who had a reason to want Vincent Ansella dead. Makes sense, Freed.”

“Please, no autographs,” I said.

Dunbar closed his eyes and lay back on his pillows, and we left the room quietly.

Chief Dutton approached the cop guarding the door. He tilted his head toward the room and said, “He’s on suicide watch. Get in there and make sure nothing happens.” The cop was inside before Dutton’s voice stopped echoing, and he hadn’t been speaking very loudly. O’Donnell and Dutton moved to a corner to confer.

I walked over to Christie Dunbar. “I’m sorry,” I told her quietly. “You told me you were out the night Vincent died, and I thought you were covering for yourself. You were covering for Joe.”

She nodded. “But I didn’t know it would come to this.”

“You were very brave,” I told her. “Saving your husband’s life when Amy tried to shoot him.”

Christie curled her lip. “Brave?” she said. “I’ve wanted to hit her for years, and then I pick up a vase from that stupid yard sale and clock her with it. After all this time, I’m sorry.”

“Sorry you hit Amy?” I asked.

“Sorry I didn’t hit her with Joe’s bowling ball, instead,” Christie answered.

I nodded, took her hand, and let it go. Dutton, O’Donnell, and I headed out of the hospital. None of us said a word until we hit the parking lot. And it was O’Donnell who finally broke the silence.

“I can’t believe you got all this from a few movies missing from the guy’s collection,” O’Donnell said.

“Well, I saw the wig at Dunbar’s house, and he’d said that he was on clonidine six months ago. I just didn’t put it all together until then. It really didn’t matter who Amy was sleeping with; it just drove Vincent crazy he wasn’t enough for her.”

We stood there for a few minutes. I don’t think any of us knew what to do next, and we talked about politics and sports (because we were men, and that’s what men do) for fifteen minutes, before I said I had to get back to the theatre. I didn’t really, but it sounded like a decent excuse.

“I forgot to tell you about the interview with your projectionist last night,” O’Donnell said. “He admits to being an accessory to the piracy thing, but the kid is so oblivious, I don’t think he even understood how serious it was.”

“You plan on charging him?” Dutton asked.

O’Donnell shook his head. “His dad got him a lawyer, and the lawyer got him a deal. Immunity for his testimony. He did stuff wrong, but he’s no criminal. He’s just a young bozo.”

“He’s a young filmmaker,” I corrected him. “They have tunnel vision; they don’t see anything but the prize, and the prize is a finished movie.”

“Yeah,” O’Donnell said. “For a stake in his epic tale of adventure, this movie he thinks he’s making, he let them use your theatre for a storage space. But it got screwed up when Vincent Ansella decided to sprinkle a little something extra on his popcorn, and all of a sudden there were cops everywhere and no time to get rid of all the discs without anybody seeing. As soon as the chief here got the autopsy report that night, he had cops watching your theatre, Freed. The video pirates couldn’t get in to get their stock, and they were worried the projectionist would talk. So all of a sudden, the money got a lot better.”