Some Like It Hot-Buttered (31 page)

“Because now it was hush money. Do you think Anthony understood that?” I asked.

O’Donnell shook his head in wonder. “The kid fell asleep in the theatre, woke up when we were in the basement, didn’t know where we were, assumed we were gone, and left through one of the fire doors. It wasn’t until later, when he got a call from the real pirate, that he left town, and that was just because he was told that he had his money, and he had to start assembling a crew and shooting
now
. But it was contingent on his not telling
anybody
, not even his folks. He had to disappear for the duration. They just wanted him out of the way so he couldn’t tell what he knew.”

“Who? Who wanted him out of the way? Was it . . . ?”

Barry Dutton shook his head; no, it wasn’t Leslie Levant after all.

“You won’t believe it,” he said. “But I guarantee you’re going to like it.”

“Wait, I’ll bet I know,” I said.

O’Donnell rolled his eyes. “Here we go again.”

44

Professor Aloysius “Ted” Bender did not look especially good in handcuffs. If the truth be told, he summoned up an image of someone else entirely. Bender would have disputed it, but the posture, with his hands behind him, slightly hunched over, and walking forward, was unmistakable. So was the widow’s peak.

If it hadn’t been for the gray ponytail, I decided, he’d be the spitting image of Richard Nixon, an analogy I’m sure Bender would find appalling. I’m not sure how Nixon would have felt about it, either.

As he was led out of Murray Hall, Bender couldn’t stop talking, but he really wasn’t saying much. Which wasn’t unusual.

Mind you, I had not been invited to watch the arrest. In fact, Dutton and O’Donnell had been very clear about my staying away. But since I had correctly guessed the video pirate’s identity, I figured there was no reason to miss this. They had decided against telling me his name, but the evidence was clear.

Cause and effect: Anthony called me and gave me information about what he was doing and where he was. I went to Bender, on the hunch that he might know more about Anthony’s situation than he was letting on. Bender was, after all, pretty much Anthony’s mentor, his source of all information about “cinema,” and therefore, the person Anthony would have consulted on his film. I’m sure
Killin’ Time
was a project in class, and that Bender knew the script intimately.

I gave Bender enough information to get him concerned. Anthony might talk if I found him on location. And almost immediately, the plug was pulled on Anthony’s film. A stupid move, because that resulted in Anthony’s coming back to New Jersey, demanding to know what I had done to sabotage him. It had taken me a while to realize the only connection could be Bender.

College professors do all right at Rutgers, but they’re hardly making a fortune. Bender had all the duplication equipment he needed, and a student with access to a movie theatre, a small one where one employee would be trusted with the keys to the projection booth and the basement. Bender could get in, “borrow” the film overnight, duplicate it to his heart’s content, and have it back the next day. Eventually, he’d had a copy of the projection booth key made. And Anthony let him store the boxes in the basement, possibly without even knowing what they contained. I wouldn’t be surprised if Bender had told Anthony he just wanted to screen
Count Bubba, Down-Home Vampire
for his own amusement, or for a class on film comedy. Anthony was so focused on his own goals that he didn’t really bother to notice anything that went on around him.

With a few selected nights of borrowed film, Bender had made enough (even bad movies are sellable at the right price, especially when they’re still being shown in theatres) that he could afford to pay for Anthony’s low-budget production and keep him safely out of the way. While I was in Bender’s office, moronically spilling the beans that I’d deduced where Anthony had gone, and what he was doing, Bender was mentally cutting Anthony loose; assuming Anthony would never betray him, Bender advised me to turn Anthony in, which was remarkably stupid and egotistical on Bender’s part. But he’d cut off Anthony’s flow of cash, and for that, the kid would probably never forgive me.

Of course, Anthony didn’t realize that he’d been Bender’s patsy, that Bender had placed the duplication equipment at Anthony’s apartment in order to deflect suspicion from himself, and that he’d probably told the cops Anthony had been “acting strange and secretive lately.”

I watched as two uniformed officers from the New Brunswick Police Department led Bender out of the building, and toward the street, where their patrol car was waiting. O’Donnell stood off to one side, but Dutton wasn’t there. This was no longer a Midland Heights matter. I’m sure a few of the guys standing around campus in “inconspicuous” black suits were Feds of one kind or another. They must have found evidence that at least some of Bender’s pirated videos had been sold out of state. Oops.

I moved up toward O’Donnell while they were marching Bender out. “You should get his class rosters,” I said by way of a greeting. “You might find accomplices.”

“Gee, thanks,” O’Donnell answered. “We never would have thought of that. By the way, you should carry Raisinettes in your snack bar.”

“We do.”

Bender, still talking a mile a minute, made his guest appearance then, and I caught a quick snatch of what he was saying. The guy wasn’t even waiting until he got to the station to spill his guts.

“It was me, all me, all me,” he recited, almost like a mantra. “I did it for the money. Me. Education gets no funding in this country. I had to do it. It was me. I swear.”

The thing was, nobody was asking him whether he’d done it.

“Methinks he doth protest too much,” I said to O’Donnell.

“You’ll get nowhere quoting the Bible to me,” he said. “I’m an atheist.”

“You don’t look it,” I told him.

45

“I’m surprised you asked to see me,” I told Amy Ansella.

Amy didn’t appear to have suffered any ill effects of her close encounter with Christie Dunbar’s vase, but I couldn’t see the back of her head, where the impact must have taken place. She looked at me through the bulletproof glass and spoke into the telephone. “I don’t have anything to hide,” she said.
Not anymore,
I thought, but I didn’t say it.

Amy, from her cell in county lockup, had gotten a request through to O’Donnell: she wanted to talk to me. He hadn’t been crazy about the idea, but granted the request.

“Why am I here?” I asked her.

Amy seemed surprised. “To set the record straight,” she said. “They think this was all my fault, and they won’t listen to me. But you seem to have their ear. You can tell them.”

I had no idea who “they” were, but I did have this nagging curiosity, so I plunged in. “Why did you shoot Joe Dunbar?” I asked her. “You were in the clear; you hadn’t committed any crime. Why screw it up by committing attempted murder?”

“It was self-defense,” Amy asserted.

“Self-defense,” I repeated, by reflex.

Amy nodded vigorously. “He had destroyed my life,” she said. “He told Vincent about my . . . arrangement with”—and she hesitated—“that
whore
, and ruined everything. I had it all set up perfectly: my husband provided for me, gave me a home and all the things I needed, and I had . . .
her
. . . for the rest. But Joe Dunbar decides to be the morality police and tell Vincent what was going on.”

I curled a lip. It didn’t hurt. “Vincent knew for months before Joe told him,” I said. “The only thing Joe told him was that he’d seen you with Marcy.” (
I
didn’t mind saying her name.) “Joe didn’t even understand the significance of it. You overreacted.”

Amy all but launched herself at the glass.
“I did not!”
she screamed into the phone, prompting a look from the guard behind her. Amy composed herself and swallowed. “It was a perfectly legitimate response. Dunbar threatened my lifestyle, so he had to be removed. Any court in the country will see it my way.”

I wouldn’t bet on it,
I thought,
but we’ll find out soon enough.

“I’m just curious,” I told her. “If the relationship with Marcy was so important to you, why did you two stop seeing each other after your husband died? You hadn’t killed him. Why not just continue the affair in the open, now?”

“I didn’t know Vincent had committed suicide,” Amy said. “It wasn’t until Dunbar approached me at the funeral, and told me Vincent had taken the medication
from him
, that I realized. And yet, here I am behind bars, and he walks free. How does that make sense?

It occurred to me that Dunbar was in a hospital room with a concussion and a bullet wound that had avoided killing him by maybe an inch, but I kept that to myself, too. I was a model of restraint today.

“You haven’t answered my question,” I reminded Amy. “Why did you and Marcy break up?”

“Would you believe it?” she said. “She actually thought I’d killed my husband. For
her
! So I told her never to contact me again. That woman seduced me, then accused me of murder. This is all her fault.”

“Make up your mind,” I told her. Someone else would have to model restraint for the rest of the day.

Outside the Middlesex County Courthouse in New Brunswick, next to the facility where Amy was being held pending her arraignment, I spotted Marcy Resnick on a bench.

“I’m sorry,” I told her. “They only allow one visit a day. I didn’t know you were here.”

Marcy didn’t look me in the eye. “It doesn’t matter,” she said. “She won’t agree to see me, anyway. I’ve asked.”

“Someday, you’ll have to explain to me what you see in her.”

This time, Marcy did look at me. “Just what you saw when you first met her. She told me how you looked at her, and I could see it at the funeral.”

I tilted my head. “She’s very beautiful,” I said, “but only on the outside.”

“You don’t know her the way I know her,” Marcy said.

“Were you at the theatre the night Vincent died?” I asked her.

Marcy nodded. “After he told her he knew about us, she got mad, and they had this fight. Amy called me after Vincent left, apparently with some woman behind the wheel of the car. I don’t believe Vince was cheating on her, but Amy insisted she’d seen this woman.”

I didn’t see any reason to tell her who the “woman” had been.

“I tried to talk her into coming over, see if I could calm her down,” Marcy continued, unprompted. “But she was
mad
at him, can you imagine? She thought Vincent was having an affair, and she saw no irony in her rage at him for that. She insisted we go to the theatre where he was headed, just to rub it in for him.”

“Did she confront him there?”

Marcy shook her head. “She never got close. We sat in the back row. I don’t even think Vincent knew we were there. And he
was
with some woman, but I think they were just friends, from the way they were acting. They didn’t touch, and she left before the end of the movie. Now that I think of it, she did give him a peck on the cheek then, but that didn’t really count. I’d kiss Vince on the cheek when I saw him, too.”

“And you two certainly weren’t having an affair,” I said.

“Of course not,” she said. “I’ve never tried to hide who I am. I just don’t broadcast my orientation. With Amy, I think she was always in denial. She knew, but she wouldn’t admit it, and she married Vincent because he loved her and he made her laugh. She didn’t love him; she didn’t
want
him, but she could spend her life with him. Then I came along, recognized something in her that she didn’t acknowledge, and one afternoon a little less than a year ago, I made a tiny gesture, and Amy was, I don’t know,
released.
She couldn’t get enough. And I thought she loved me. She didn’t.”

“I’m sorry for you,” I told her.

“I’ll be all right.” Marcy tried to smile bravely, and did a semi-convincing job. “So tell me: how does she look?” She wiped away a tear and sniffed.

“Orange isn’t her color,” I said.

46

Suddenly, I had no one left to interview. I had nothing left to investigate.

I was just a comedy theatre owner again.

This would take some getting used to. For the past few weeks, Comedy Tonight had been something of an afterthought, running more or less on its own, and I hadn’t thought a lot about doing the next level of renovation, or promoting to a wider geographical area in an attempt to draw an audience from a broader base. It was back to that, and I couldn’t decide if I was glad or not.

I deposited the Lexus back at Moe’s, with less than a quarter tank of gas in it, but no additional dents. It had taken effort, but I managed not to drive the stupid thing into a telephone pole on purpose.

Afterward, I walked back to the theatre. It was still there. Strangely, nobody had painted the walls or repaired the marquee in my absence, nor given a moment’s thought to how a single-screen theatre that insisted on showing one old movie a week could possibly survive in the current marketplace. Funny how that never happens when I’m not around.

There wasn’t much to do to set up, and I had three hours before the doors opened. For the first time in weeks, I didn’t have very much to do. I could go home and sift through Vincent Ansella’s collection some more, but at the moment, that didn’t seem like a joyous thing to do.

Suppose, someday, for whatever reason, I stopped laughing. Suppose the jokes were just a part of a ritual for me, that I didn’t appreciate the comic timing of Buster Keaton or the sublime facial expressions of Harpo Marx. What if, as I got older and spent more time alone, I no longer found solace in Bugs Bunny, or companionship from the Monty Python boys? Would I end up, like Ansella, wondering what my life had been about, and desiring only to end it before the pain became unbearable?