Some Like It Hot-Buttered (4 page)

“Mr. Freed, we just met, but I think I know you well enough to leave a message,” the deep voice said. “This is Chief Dutton of the Midland Heights Police Department, and I’d appreciate it if you would call me back as soon as possible. I’ll be waiting at the following number.” And the rumbling voice gave a local phone number, which I assumed was his home or cell, given that it did not end in a “00,” and was probably not the department’s headquarters.

This was not good news. I dialed the number immediately, and the phone was answered on the first ring. That didn’t bode well, either.

“Barry Dutton.”

“Chief, this is Elliot Freed. I just got your message. I assume this is about Mr. Ansella?”

“Yes it is, Mr. Freed. Thanks for calling back. I’m afraid there’s been a wrinkle in the case since we left the theatre tonight.”

A wrinkle? What kind of cop uses the word “wrinkle” about a heart attack? “Is there a problem, Chief?” I asked.

“I’m afraid so. I got a call a few minutes ago from the medical examiner’s office in New Brunswick. They’re not issuing a report for quite some time, but something leapt out at them immediately on the arrival of the body.”

Images from
Alien
were hard to repress. Something
leapt out at them
from the body?

“It was just a heart attack, wasn’t it?”

“No, it wasn’t,” Dutton said. “Mr. Ansella was murdered. There appears to have been some kind of poison used on his . . . um . . .”

“His what?”

“His popcorn.”

3

Chief Barry Dutton seemed even larger in daylight. The next morning, when we had agreed I could come in without an attorney (luckily, Dutton didn’t see any reason why I would poison a customer—yet), I sat in his extremely utilitarian office, between a file cabinet and a vinyl sofa that must have been left there by the set decorator on
The Nutty Professor
(the original Jerry Lewis version).

“I know you, don’t I?” he asked. Not a reassuring way for a cop to open a conversation. “I thought so when I met you last night.” He made a show of snapping his fingers. “You wrote that book that they made into that movie.”

I suppressed the impulse to tell him how eloquent he was, and said, “Yeah.”

“Meet a lot of police officers, doing the research for the sex picture?” I couldn’t decide if he was James Earl Jones or Yaphet Kotto. Right now, he was leaning toward Mr. Jones, in his Darth Vader mode.

“It wasn’t a sex picture when I sold them the book,” I said. “I tried to accurately portray the police I met.”

But his face was already wearing a mischievous grin that said he’d been kidding. “I read the book, and thought it was very good,” Dutton said. “Never saw the movie.” Maybe I was being too hard on him. He had a Yaphet Kotto quality, especially in his jollier
Homicide: Life on the Street
episodes. Yes. Kotto, for sure.

“Kind of you, Chief,” I said. “Thank you.”

“So. Why are you poisoning your customers’ popcorn?” Wow, he could really segue.

I said something like, “Ahhhh . . .” Don’t feel bad. Not everyone can match my quick wit.

Dutton smiled. “Take it easy, Mr. Freed,” he said. “Since you’ve done your homework, you understand that I have to look into every possibility. If there was something in all the popcorn at your theatre . . .”

“Then I would have had a lot more people staying through the end credits, Chief. If the county coroner . . .”

Dutton stopped me. “We’re required to say ‘medical examiner, ’ ” he said. “I think it started around the time of
Quincy
.”

So, our chief of police had a sense of humor. That was going to make this easier. “Okay, so if the
medical examiner
found something that caused Mr. Ansella to keel over halfway through the first movie, anyone with a decent popcorn habit would now be residing in the next drawer over from him, wouldn’t they?”

Dutton nodded. “Yes, I’m assuming this was done to Ansella and Ansella alone. That’s what leads me to believe it was done deliberately, and that’s what makes it a homicide and not a very, very odd accident.”

“So why am I here?”

“I’ve already called the Middlesex County prosecutor, and they’ll be sending investigators over. I need you to understand why we’re going to have to close your theatre for a day or two.”

Close the theatre? Just when, after six months in business, we were starting to establish . . . Okay, so we hadn’t actually been starting to establish anything in terms of attendance, but having the place closed for two nights certainly wasn’t going to help. There had to be a way I could avoid that.

“Why do they need so much time when you and your officers were in and out of the theatre in less than an hour?” I asked.

“I thought we were investigating a heart attack,” Dutton said. “Now it’s a murder. I’ve had officers watching the building since last night to make sure the scene isn’t contaminated. I’m taking the municipal responsibility for this case myself. For the duration, I’ll be the primary for Midland Heights, and the county prosecutor will be sending someone to handle it from their end. We do that with any major crime. We’re a small force.”

“Chief, I understand the problem, but can’t the investigators get through with any physical investigations they need to do before we open at eight o’clock tonight? Comedy Tonight is still a new business in town, and we’re going to have a hard time building a following if we have to shut down with no advance notice. I’m already advertised in this morning’s
Press-Tribune
.”

Dutton picked up a sheet of paper from his desk, and actually put on a pair of half-glasses to read it more clearly. It was charming.

“In the past week, you’ve had a grand total of two hundred and fifty-two ticket-buying customers in your theatre, ” he said. “That’s over a seven-day period, and on Friday and Saturday nights, you averaged a total of fifty-seven and a half people per evening.” He put the paper down and looked over the half-glasses at me. That was not so charming.

“Yeah, but we made the half-person pay full price,” I answered. Okay, I was embarrassed to hear those figures, and not on top of my game. So write your own joke and insert it there.

“I promise you, I’ll see to it that your business is closed for the shortest length of time possible,” Dutton said, ignoring my attempt at hilarity. “And we’ll reimburse you for your advertising costs on anything you can’t cancel. But we’ll also need the full cooperation of your staff and, of course, you.”

“My
staff
consists of a Rutgers kid who’s still trying to understand
The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari
and a high school girl who can’t scratch Goth together on her best night,” I told him. “A half hour with each of them will be enough to wipe their minds clean.”

“And you?” Dutton asked.

“I was stupid enough to buy the Rialto and rename it Comedy Tonight,” I told him. “I am the innovator who brought old movies back to a market flooded with DVDs. I am the genius who refuses to screen Academy Award contenders because the Academy is resolute in its failure to recognize comedy. I’m the marketing master whose theatre brought in two hundred and fifty-two patrons in a seven-day week. I have exactly one regular customer, a man with a life so full he shows up to watch old comedies
seven nights a week
. Exactly how much useful information do you think you’ll be able to get from me?”

“It’s a decent point,” the chief nodded. “Maybe we’ll be done faster than we anticipate.”

I remember thinking on my way out of the office that the interview could have gone better. Maybe I should have brought donuts. I’m told cops like donuts.

4

"Why is this bothering you?” My wife—sorry,
ex
-wife— Sharon sat across from me at the outdoor portion of C’est Moi!, a cafe whose name is fifty-six times more pretentious than its food. I was having a caesar chicken wrap and Sharon was wolfing down huge bites of a reuben sandwich and maintaining her figure, which bugged me. “It’s just a couple of days out of your life. Your business won’t be hurt that badly.”

“It’s the principle,” I told her, not looking up from my food so I could avoid seeing her roll her eyes. “The cops think they can simply shut me down just because a guy chose to have a heart attack in the middle of a Mel Brooks movie.”

“It wasn’t a heart attack, and you know it.” Sharon brought her eyebrows down in a V that should have made her look like a Klingon, but didn’t. “They have to investigate. Your problem, Elliot, is that you want this to be a freedom-of-speech issue, and it’s not.”

“You’ve always been good at pointing out what my problems are.”

Sharon and I have lunch once a week, usually at C’est Moi!, but sometimes elsewhere. We frequented a diner in Highland Park called Penny’s until it changed hands, and now we stay in Midland Heights, where my business and her practice exist within a couple of blocks of each other.

It started as a way to keep our divorce from being a typical, no-holds-barred, knockdown event in which the two people forget what it was they liked about each other to begin with and merely try to inflict as much damage as possible. But I still find talking to Sharon a way to define my strengths and weaknesses. I specialize in the “strengths” department, and she handles the rest.

I didn’t say it was a perfect arrangement.

“Don’t be snippy, Elliot,” she said. “I know you’re frustrated. But I can’t believe it’s the police closing your theatre for a couple of days that’s getting you so angry.”

“Stop saying, ‘your theatre’ like that. It makes my business seem like a cute little toy I’ve decided to play with that you think is just adorable, but that I’ll outgrow.”

“What should I say?”

“You should say ‘
the
theatre,’ or ‘Comedy Tonight.’ I realize you don’t appreciate the name I’ve chosen, but it illustrates what the place is about.”

“Okay, fine. So, what’s
really
bothering you, if it’s not the police closing Comedy Tonight?”

Ah, who was I to argue? She was right (as was irritatingly often the case)—I
was
more worked up about losing two nights’ worth of negligible business than I should have been. I just hadn’t had the time, nor the inclination, to think about it long enough to understand why.

“I guess I’m insulted,” I said finally. “Some person decides to off poor Mr. Ansella, whoever he was, and they go out of their way to do it in my theatre. I mean, poisoned popcorn? That’s not a crime of passion; that’s not an impulse buy of a murder. It’s not a question of someone seeing an opportunity to get rid of a guy they really don’t like and then possibly regretting a rash action later. This person had to plan it. Go over Ansella’s schedule. Determine he was coming to my theatre last night, maybe lure him there.”

“You just said, ‘my theatre.’ How come it’s okay when you do it?”

I ignored her, which was another one of the issues in our marriage. “They had to decide how to kill him—poisoned popcorn. That was a decision
based on
his coming to Comedy Tonight—see, I said it correctly—and they used
my business
as the place to do it. They had to find a poison that wouldn’t be detectable in popcorn, or one that would work so quickly that the bad taste wouldn’t matter. And they had to get it onto his popcorn somehow,
knowing
that he’d order popcorn at the movies, and get him to eat it, then scurry away before they could be discovered. They did it on my watch, and they counted on my not stopping it.”

There was a long pause.
“Scurry?”

“Would you prefer ‘slink’?”

She frowned. “So you’re choosing to take it personally that whoever killed Mr. Ansella didn’t just pour the poison into his coffee or do him in at the Laundromat? You think that the fact they killed him at . . .
Comedy Tonight
. . . was a personal affront to you? Geez, it’s all about you, isn’t it, Elliot?”

“Well. Not
all
.” I felt sheepish, except for the woolly part.

“Maybe you need a life outside your theatre. Maybe you should start dating again. You said there was a blond cop? Was she cute?”

“You just want me to remarry so you can stop paying alimony. ”

She made a face like Donald Duck does right before he says something unintelligible. “Yes, Elliot. That’s why I ask. Because between Gregory and myself, two practicing physicians, we really can’t afford your alimony.” Sharon could have left it there, but she was unable to resist. She mumbled, “Not that you actually
need
it . . .”

“Ha!” I am a man of few syllables.

My ex is not someone who is easily dissuaded. After all, it took six years of marriage before she divorced me—she probably kept thinking the following year would be better. She regrouped and dove back in. “I sincerely believe that you would be a happier man if you were seeing someone good for you,” she said, putting a hand over mine. This was awkward, as I was actually reaching for one of her french fries.

“You want to assuage your guilt over leaving me for an anesthesiologist,” I said. “A man who is paid large sums of money to put people to sleep.”

She took her hand away, and I got the fry. “You’re impossible, ” she said.

“On the contrary, the fact that you see me makes me possible. Highly improbable, perhaps.”

“Lunch,” said my ex-wife, “is on you.”

“It’s your money.” I smiled.

5

The Middlesex County Prosecutor’s Office wasted no time in sending someone to Comedy Tonight a mere six hours later. I had already been waiting in the theatre—looking for odds and ends I could repair quickly—for four hours when the investigator, Detective Sergeant Brendan O’Donnell, announced himself ready to begin his work. There were Midland Heights officers scouring the place—a couple of them had let me in when I proved I was the theatre owner. They told me to stay away from “the crime scene,” so I was sticking to the front of the auditorium, repairing some broken seats in row C. I had briefly seen Officer Leslie Levant, but she was in the lobby, and I was in the auditorium. It was going to be one of those days.