It Happened One Knife (19 page)

On the other hand, those jeans looked really good.

“Come on,” I said after a couple of eternities. “Hamlet took less time to make a decision.”

“Don’t rush me.” Sharon was lingering in the romantic comedy section.

“I’m not. It’s just that I’d like to put on a movie before I start getting mail from AARP.”

She stuck out her tongue at me. But with great dignity.

I sat down on the foam rubber futon that was pretending to be a sofa. I should have considered that move more carefully, because if Sharon ever did manage to choose a movie for us to watch, I’d need a spotter to get me back to my feet. The futon is a little low to the floor. Ants have been known to look down on it.

“Here,” she said, and handed me
Adam’s Rib
. A good choice, and appropriate to the company. Now if I could just get to a standing position . . .

Sharon regarded my efforts to slither across the floor and asked, “Do you need some help?”

“That’s a rather existential question,” I attempted.

She held out a hand, and feeling idiotic, I took it. She helped me up.

“This is just a thought, but maybe you should have invested in furniture that could hold
you
up before the furniture that holds up the DVDs,” Sharon said as I approached the video system.

“I had a responsibility to safeguard the collection,” I said.

Sharon sat down heavily on the “sofa.” “Ouch,” she said. “You have a responsibility to safeguard my behind.”

I put the disc into the player and pushed Close, then walked back to the futon. “I’ll try to keep your behind at the top of my priority list.” I sat down, sank, and mentally vowed never to move again.

Naturally, with a video collection that vast and important, I’d had to replace the twenty-two-inch television I’d been using with a flat-screen, high-definition beauty that had an audio system far superior to the one in my theatre, which I charged people money to hear. So
Adam’s Rib
had never looked nor sounded better.

I wasn’t paying much attention, though. Just to my right, a warm, loving, sensitive, intelligent woman in jeans that were just tight enough was close enough to touch.

So I did.

To be specific, I put my left hand on her right forearm, and left it there. Sharon looked at me and smiled, and everything inside my body melted into a gelatinous, lava-related substance. I was, in a word, lost.

She leaned over and put her head on my shoulder. “Watch the movie,” she said.

“I can’t help it. You look better than Katharine Hep-burn. ”

Sharon’s head came up and she stared into my face to see if I meant it. She gasped. “That’s the nicest thing you’ve ever said to me,” she said. She leaned over to kiss me, and we spent a few perfect minutes doing just that.

“Do you really want to see this movie tonight?” I asked her finally.

“I’ve seen it before,” she answered.

“You’ve seen lots of things before,” I told her. “I hope that doesn’t mean you won’t see them again.”

“Don’t spoil it.” And we kissed some more. Finally, Sharon broke the clinch, and managed—without help, I noticed—to stand up. “Come on,” she said.

Having planned ahead, I put my hand on the side table (needed for drinks when watching movies and baseball) and got up on my own. “But the movie,” I protested, grinning.

“I’ll tell you how it turns out.”

We had made it to the stairs when the phone rang. Sharon looked at me, and I shook my head. We started up the stairs, and then I heard Barry Dutton’s voice on the answering machine.

“Elliot. I called the theatre and they said you were at home. This is Chief Dutton. Get back to me as soon—”

I had no choice; I ran to the phone and picked it up. “What’s the matter, Chief?” I asked. “Did something happen at the theatre?”

“No,” he said, but his tone didn’t calm me down. “Something happened up at the Booth Actors’ Home in Englewood. There’s been a fire.”

“Chief . . .”

“Elliot, Harry Lillis is dead.”

24

There are moments when everything goes well; don’t be frightened, it won’t last.

—JULES RENARD

SHARON
looked at me with concern; I must have been as white as Wonder Bread. I put my hand over the mouthpiece—for no reason; I didn’t have to keep Dutton from hearing me—and said to her, “Harry’s dead. A fire.” She gasped, and sat down on the stairs.

“What happened, Chief?”

Dutton’s voice was deep and serious. “The Englewood PD put it on the radio about a half hour ago. I called over there, and it seems that a gazebo on the grounds behind the main building went up in flames, and there was a body in the center of it, burned beyond recognition. They counted up inside the home after the fire department got it under control, and Harry was the only resident who wasn’t accounted for.”

“How sure are they it’s him?” I asked Dutton. “Just because Harry isn’t jumping up and down and yelling, ‘Lookit me,’ doesn’t mean he’s the body in the fire, Chief. He could be out for the evening or something. Remember, he’s in a wheelchair.”

I could practically hear Dutton nod. “I know, but he’d have had to sign out, and he didn’t. The body matches his general description, and once they get everything under control and remove it to the ME’s office, there should be confirmation. I’m sorry, Elliot. They’re pretty sure it’s Harry Lillis. There were traces of clothing that matched what people saw him wearing at dinner, and like I said, he’s the only one missing. But they haven’t finished investigating the scene yet. We don’t know what they’re going to find.”

“How did the fire start, Chief?” I didn’t want to think about Lillis being dead. Distracting myself with the details was considerably easier and more therapeutic.

“I don’t know yet, but I’ll ask the Englewood department to keep me informed. Tell them there’s a similar case I want to keep track of, or something.”

“Can I talk to them?” I asked.

“In what capacity, as a guy who met Lillis a few weeks ago?”

Sharon had gathered herself, walked down the stairs toward me, and put her hand on my arm. I responded by wrapping the arm around her waist. “He didn’t have any children. Could I say I’m his son, or grandson, or something?”

“Let me get this straight,” Dutton said. “You want the chief of police to advise you to lie to another police department? Of course, Elliot! And be sure to mention my name, won’t you?”

I switched gears as quickly as I could—there’d be time to consider approaching the Englewood cops soon enough.

I needed to sit down, and my kitchen phone doesn’t provide a natural place for that. “Thanks for letting me know, Chief,” I said, and I meant it.

“I’m sorry I had to be the one,” Dutton said, and we both hung up.

I let out a long breath and guided Sharon back to the stairs. She understood that I wasn’t suggesting anything more than sitting on the stairs—the only real means of support in my downstairs living space even if you count the futon. I didn’t look her in the face until we sat down, she just to my right.

She was crying.

I put my arms around her and held her close to me. I felt her tears dampen my shirt, and just pulled her closer. There was nothing sexual about the way we embraced; nothing at all suggestive in my fingers on her skin.

“It’s so crazy,” she said. “I barely met the man. I’ve seen him in a few movies, only since I met you. But now . . .” Sharon drew a hard breath, and didn’t say anything else for a while, but her head, down on my chest, continued to move just a little as she sobbed.

“I know, baby,” I said. “I know.”

SHARON
went home about an hour later, and I went to bed, but I couldn’t sleep.

If the Englewood firefighters were so sure it was Harry’s body in the gazebo, had they seen his wheelchair nearby? Did they have some DNA samples they could match with the remains? Were they sure Lillis wasn’t simply sitting somewhere playing the guitar? Had anyone looked?

My problems were twofold: first, I wasn’t a cop, and I didn’t have any friends in Englewood, so I couldn’t insinuate myself into the investigation and ask all the questions I had. I’d be relegated to the news coverage and whatever information I could squeeze out of Chief Dutton, which wouldn’t be much. I was a civilian. And I hated that.

Second, and more disturbing: a fire.

Exactly the way Vivian Reynolds died.

Fifty years later, a replay of the initial crime? Or simply a coincidence?

And that’s where my natural cowardice took hold: after having been warned off by Wilson Townes, did I really want to get myself involved in the exact activity I’d been warned about? Did I want to get Les Townes, suspected double murderer, and his son, who had probably doubled for King Kong in long shots, mad at me? Or more to the point,
madder
at me?

It didn’t make for a frame of mind that was really conducive to sleeping, so I didn’t sleep.

The next morning, having “awakened” at six, a good four hours earlier than usual (which didn’t really matter much under the circumstances), I hit the Internet again, and started taking notes and printing out anything—any slight hint—that made Vivian Reynolds’s death look like something other than a tragic accident.

There wasn’t much beyond what I’d already found. Vivian Reynolds had been a minor celebrity, and while there were countless websites devoted to similarly minor celebrities, most of what was available consisted of “tribute” sites, with pictures, appreciations, filmographies, and other means of justifying the site owner’s slavish devotion to the bit player, second (in some cases, third or fourth) banana, or one-hit wonder.

It was astonishing, even to a classic movie maniac like me, that you could find sites devoted to Dwight Frye, Margaret Dumont, J. Carroll Naish, and Zasu Pitts. For Vivian Reynolds, the material concentrated, not surprisingly, on her work with Lillis and Townes. She was rarely mentioned as an actress separate from the team.

Aside from the site I’d already accessed, .
www whokilledviv.com
, there was nothing specifically focusing on Reynolds’s death. But there were mentions on some sites, most simply that she’d died in a fire on November 10, 1958.

Bits and pieces did point to some oddities in her death, though. On
www.fabulous50s.com
, Reynolds’s demise was mentioned, but the “suspicious circumstances” attached had suggested the fire was not accidental. An article from the
Los Angeles Times
two days after the fire expressed some skepticism over the fact that the arson squad of the LAPD had not been assigned to the case. But it didn’t elaborate on what details of the fire made it seem at all suspicious.

It wasn’t until I got to
www.studiocoverups.com
that I found anything at all helpful. This wiki site, devoted to virtually every conspiracy theory ever proffered in the movie business (apparently James Dean’s brake line was cut, possibly by Sal Mineo but more likely by space aliens), had only a few paragraphs on Vivian, but the fanatics who posted had managed to find a colossal plot behind her death.

Even in my current mental state, I found it hard to buy some of the claims the site (hosted by an unnamed poster) put forth—that Vivian was having an affair with Natalie Wood, for example—but others were eerily plausible, especially given the events of last night.

According to whomever was posting (backed up, it should be noted, by filed blueprints of the house in which Reynolds died), a steel plate in the wall between the kitchen, where the fire started, and the upstairs bedroom, where Vivian was found, should have contained the fire before it reached her.

In addition, there was reference made to the “official autopsy report” (which was not reproduced here) that suggested the victim “should have noticed the smoke and been alerted before the fire reached her location,” but for some reason had stayed in the bedroom. “Had she been drugged?” the site asked. “Was she dead
before
the fire was set?” No answers were offered, but it was fairly clear where the poster came down on the subject.

The most damning evidence, however, was in the form of an in-house studio memo, which
was
reproduced online. Granted, it was shown as a PDF file that assumedly represented a carbon copy of the original, but it looked authentic (which I suppose is the point if you’re trying to prove a conspiracy, true or not).

The memo, from the studio’s head of publicity Milton Kresge to H. R. Mowbrey—the studio owner himself— was dated the day after the fire, Veterans Day, 1958. It put forth the case for a studio cover-up (hence the name of the website) to keep Les Townes, and by extension the studio and the movie being filmed, clear of any suspicion in Vivian Reynolds’s death.

“It is necessary to establish that Mr. Townes was on the set at the time of the fire,” the memo read. “Toward that end, the production staff should provide the sign-out sheet without Townes’s name included. Since it is not (some of this sentence was smeared and therefore unintelligible), an alternate sheet might be provided.”

The memo, three pages long, went on to suggest that “any hint of wrongdoing in this case could be avoided” by “cooperating completely with the police investigation, and by—(more smeared copy)—the investigating officers.”

It was clear, through my talk with Sergeant Newman, that there had been no serious investigation of the fire as anything other than an accidental electrical mishap that had turned tragic. But this memo, if it were accurate, would indicate something much darker—that the studio executives in charge of
Step This Way
had decided to deliberately impede the police investigation, and it could be inferred, if you stretched a little, that there might have been some studio bribery of the police. Dynamite.

But what could I do with the information? I wasn’t sure that it was accurate, and I didn’t know how to verify anything I saw online. It’s easy enough to find websites confirming beyond a shadow of a doubt that Elvis was seen at a Wal-Mart in Iowa a couple of weeks ago, or that eating a Big Mac every day was actually beneficial to one’s cholesterol numbers. I hadn’t worried too hard about the accuracy of things I’d found on the Internet before, mostly because it hadn’t mattered all that much before.