It Happened One Knife (25 page)

“You’re naked,” she said.

“So are you.”

“I was coming in here to get my clothes. What’s your excuse?” She walked into the closet and I stood up, somewhat painfully. My knees weren’t made for friction, no matter how plush the carpet.

"Ah, I was . . . See . . .” S. J. Perelman would have been proud of the razor-sharp wit, no?

“Elliot,” my nude ex-wife said, “I don’t understand why you’re naked in my closet. And the weird part is, it’s more the ‘in my closet’ part than the ‘naked’ part that’s confusing.”

There was no point in concocting a story. “I was looking for Anthony’s film,” I said.

“And you thought the most logical place to find it would have been in my underwear drawer?”

“Well, I didn’t
know
it was your underwear drawer, did I?” There’s a sentence you don’t get to say often.

“Wait a minute—you were looking for Anthony’s movie in my closet? You think
I
stole it?” The expression on her face was exactly the one she’d had at our divorce settlement—disappointed, sad, and angry all at once.

“I don’t think you stole it, but other people might,” I answered, feeling only slightly hypocritical. “I was trying to prove that you hadn’t.”

Sharon walked past me to what I now knew was her underwear drawer, and started pulling out various garments. This morning wasn’t shaping up the way I’d hoped. “That’s so gallant of you, Elliot, accusing me of the crime and then trying to exonerate me all by yourself. Would it be prying to ask why in the name of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart I would steal Anthony’s film?”

“Um . . . because you wanted him to stay in school,” I mumbled. I was starting to wish my underwear were in here as well.

Sharon was almost completely dressed now. “I think maybe you’d better go,” she said. “Put some clothes on.” And she walked out of the closet.

Nope, not the way I’d hoped for at all.

33

IF
waking up alone in a strange house was weird, trust me, it had nothing on getting dressed alone in a strange house and beating it out the door as quickly as is humanly possible. Sharon was nowhere to be seen, and I wanted to be gone before she reappeared. I had too many thoughts running through my head—all bad—at the same time, and the loudest one was screaming, “
Speed!
” So I found my clothes, put them on, and tried as meticulously as possible to eliminate all traces that I’d ever been there at all. I even started the dishwasher before I left.

The twenty minutes it took me to get to Comedy Tonight was enough to allow some of the other competing voices in my mind to sort themselves out and speak freely.

“You’re an idiot,” one said. “You were finally back with the one woman you’ve ever really loved, and you threw it away over a suspicion you never seriously believed, anyway. ”

“You didn’t see that smile on her face in the projection booth,” I defended myself.

“Of course I did,” it countered. “I’m a voice in your head.” Touché.

“What about Anthony’s movie?” another one piped up. “If Sharon didn’t take it, who did?”

“Carla?” the first voice ventured. “She’s the one who
really
doesn’t want to see Anthony leave New Jersey for Hollywood. ”

I was much too tired for a bout of schizophrenia this morning. “Can we leave that to Dutton, finally?” I tried. “We’ve done everything we can do.” The voices didn’t answer back, but I got the impression they were giving me a disapproving look.

A third chimed in, “You’re nowhere on the Vivian Reynolds and Harry Lillis murders, you know,” but I ignored it. I hate negative head-voices.

It went on like that the whole way. The debate going on between my ears could have filled an hour of time on a cable news talk show, if I could have increased the volume to dangerous levels. You can’t purposely change the volume in your head. Seriously, try it. Can’t be done.

By the time I reached the theatre, I was thoroughly discouraged about pretty much everything from international relations to the price of dog food, and I don’t even have a dog. When I get going on being discouraged, I’m a pro.

I dragged myself into Comedy Tonight a good eight hours before I needed to be there, dropped myself into my office chair, ignored the lingering sting in my butt, and wondered what the hell I should do with the rest of my short stay on this planet. I had certainly destroyed any chance I had of spending my life with Sharon, even if she did get over this latest outrage. I figured she would eventually, but then I’d just come up with another and another down the line until finally she saw the colossal error in her ways and broke off all contact with me entirely.

The three oversized children with whom I spent my working hours would eventually grow up and leave the nest, to be replaced by others (Rutgers University and Midland Heights High School will have an endless supply of cheap labor for the foreseeable future) who would also ingratiate themselves to me and then take off to start their actual lives, while leaving mine in a perpetual neutral gear.

The shining achievement of my professional life had been writing a novel that was pretty good but took enough out of me emotionally to be my only effort in that area. And it had been turned into a truly lousy film that had made everyone forget there was a book to begin with. Now I played dusty old movies to an indifferent audience—a small one, at that—and took a solid financial loss every night I stayed open.

The sad fact was, I’d never been happier than the night I’d introduced Harry Lillis and Les Townes in front of a packed house at Comedy Tonight. But that memory was now, let’s be fair, just a little tainted, as it seemed to have triggered a set of events that ended with Townes murdering Lillis and then disappearing into the night. Talk about your downers.

I had begun to make friends with one of my honest-to-goodness heroes in this life, and had ended up helping to hasten his death. That wasn’t going to be a real strong line on my interpersonal resume.

I couldn’t even find Anthony’s movie, and hadn’t told him where it was when I actually knew. Nice guy I was.

What had begun as a minor case of self-pity was growing into a full-blown inner tantrum. Sadness was being overrun by anger. Was I going to just let the circumstances of my life roll over me? Was I that defeated, at the relatively tender age of thirty-seven?

Yeah, pretty much.

But I didn’t have to take it lying down. I could fight back at the karma that had brought me to this rotten Tuesday morning. I could choose one of the things that was tormenting me and attack it frontally, just to prove I could do it. It was just a question of summoning the determination, persevering when the inevitable hardships arose, and not even considering the possibility of failure.

I decided, after three cups of heavily caffeinated coffee from the Dunkin’ Donuts down the street (in New Jersey, there’s a Dunkin’ Donuts down
every
street), to avenge my friend Harry Lillis. Not the comedian; not the legend. My friend. Because somebody had done something unspeakably bad to a man I cared about, and it was time to get the word out that you didn’t do that on Elliot Freed’s watch.

I’d solve Harry Lillis’s murder, prove Les Townes had killed him and Vivian Reynolds, and see justice done. And if that’s not a bold plan for a Tuesday morning, I’ve never heard one.

The way to prove my suspicions was to illustrate the parallels between the murder of Harry Lillis and the death of Vivian Reynolds in 1958. It was way too large a coincidence that they had died under almost identical circumstances, and that Townes could not account for his whereabouts either time (to be fair, no one knew if Townes could account for his whereabouts the night Lillis died, because no one knew where Townes was now). So I started calling the few remaining names that Sergeant Newman had given me of ex-studio employees who might still be alive.

It took a great deal of the morning. Who am I kidding— it took the whole morning, and part of the early afternoon, and I spoke to a number of people. Some of the numbers were either disconnected or had been passed to new Verizon customers who had no idea what the hell I was talking about. Other numbers led to people who were still alive, but hadn’t had any direct contact with either Lillis or Townes on the day of the fire, or didn’t remember. I heard the sentence “It was fifty years ago” at least fifty times. But, eventually, I reached Estelle Mason, who had worked in the commissary at the studio while most of the Lillis/Townes films were being made. She lived in, of all places, Edison, New Jersey, not fifteen minutes from the uncomfortable chair in which I was sitting. But I didn’t ask to see her face-to-face; I wanted my answers immediately. Mrs. Mason was kind enough to indulge me.

“I remember that day all too well,” she said. “I knew poor Viv; I’d worked with them on
Cracked Ice
and a few of the others.” I suppressed the urge to ask about behind-the-scenes details of the Lillis and Townes films and managed to stay on subject. I asked Mrs. Mason why Townes hadn’t shown up for shooting that afternoon.

She sounded as if I must truly be demented. “But he did,” she said. “I was in the room when Les heard the news of the fire. He looked like someone had drained the blood out of his body, he was so white. All he wanted to know was ‘What about Viv? Is Viv okay?’ He left that minute to get to the house.”

What? Now Townes
was
at the studio after three in the afternoon? “But I saw a studio sign-out sheet that had him leaving long before the fire began,” I said.

“I don’t know anything about a sign-out sheet,” Mrs. Mason said with a firm tone. “I know Les was there waiting for the scene to be lit. We were playing cards in the commissary for hours.”

When I got off the phone with Mrs. Mason, I was stunned, but not entirely convinced. The story contradicted everything Marion Borello had told me; it didn’t seem possible Mrs. Mason was right. So I called one of the “secondary” names on Newman’s list, an arson cop who had not been on the force at the time of the fire (he was twenty years too young), but who, Newman said, had made a “hobby” of old Hollywood fire cases and would know this one as well.

I reached Martin Donnelly at his home in Mentor, Ohio, and he immediately owned up to being a former Los Angeles police lieutenant, now retired. It was amazing how many people left L.A. as soon as they could. Considering the number of people who are attracted to the place with celluloid fantasies (now being rapidly replaced with computer-generated digital fantasies), I guess things evened out.

“I won’t waste your time, Mr. Freed,” Donnelly said. “I spent six years looking over every report, every piece of evidence, every newspaper account. I’ve even looked at the Internet stuff. I can tell you one thing: nobody set that fire. It began as an electrical fire in the kitchen wall. What was criminal was the way that house was constructed, but you can’t blame anyone at the time for that; it was thirty years old
then
.”

“There weren’t any traces of kerosene, chemical fertilizer, no igniters on the scene?” I asked.

“Nothing. And they went over that place with a fine-tooth comb, I’m telling you. The Reynolds woman must have fallen asleep upstairs and by the time she woke up, it was too late to get out. No good escape route in that house, and she didn’t have a ladder to get down from the second story. No, she was trapped, no question. It’s even possible she died of carbon monoxide poisoning, and never woke up at all.”

“Was her neck broken?”

“Her neck? Hell, no. The skeleton, after it was removed, was determined to be in perfect condition. No breaks. Why, do you have evidence her neck was broken?” Donnelly sounded amazed.

“I guess not,” I said, and thanked him for his time.

For a long time, I sat there and stared. It was starting to look like Vivian Reynolds hadn’t been murdered after all.

34

ESTELLE
Mason’s firm insistence about Les Townes’s presence on the soundstage when Vivian Reynolds died took a good deal of wind out of my sails, and there hadn’t been much more than a light breeze to begin with. If Townes had been at the studio, then he couldn’t have set the fire, nor could he have been seen taking his possessions out of the house before it began. Les Townes couldn’t have killed his wife.

And I couldn’t hang this one on Wilson Townes, either, as he’d been less than a year old at the time, and probably incapable of standing up, let alone strangling his mother and setting the house on fire before he managed to get out, put on adult clothing, and start hauling mementos out of the house. If his present-day physique were any indication, even at that age, Wilson might have been big enough, but not mature enough to do all that. I was only marginally sure he was mature enough now.

Besides, Donnelly’s information, which sounded awfully official and comprehensive, made it seem pretty clear that no one had murdered Vivian Reynolds—she’d just been a sad, unfortunate victim of bad luck. The smoke-screen (no pun intended) by the studio, if there had really been one, was probably just a hysterical response, an attempt to keep two bankable stars bankable.

Sophie walked by the office door, shoulders slumped, head down. If she’d been followed by an enormous cloud of dust, she could have been Pigpen from an old Peanuts cartoon. I decided against trying to wrest the source of her angst out of her, assuming it had something to do with her oppression by the Male Establishment, of which I was the most convenient symbol. I had enough women angry at me today.

That meant I couldn’t call Sharon; there’d be no point. And I couldn’t call Dad, because he’d ask me about Sharon and I’m incapable of lying to him successfully. So I called Chief Barry Dutton, because at least I could be cynical with him. Besides, I figured he’d probably be out of his office.

As with most other things that day, I was wrong. Dutton answered his phone, and I started with, “By the way, nice job on the missing film. Yup, you sure cleared that one up.”