Some Like It Hot-Buttered Page 6

  Vincent Ansella, forty-three, insurance executive, had left a wife, Amy of Piscataway; a mother, Mrs. Olivia Ansella of Little Ferry; and a sister, Lisa Ansella Rabinowitz of Red Bank. No children, which I confess made me feel a little better. Apparently, his whole life had been about insurance, since the four-paragraph obit mentioned little else. Once captain of his high school track team, he had still run six miles a day. Until recently. Very recently. Two nights ago.

  Because the medical examiner’s report wasn’t complete, the body hadn’t been released to Ansella’s family yet (the obit didn’t mention this, only saying he had “died very suddenly”). But there was a memorial service planned for the next day at Carmeliso’s Funeral Home in Edison.

  Suddenly, Ansella wasn’t just a dead guy to me anymore. I hadn’t actually considered his life before, well, his death, until now, and it was gnawing at me. The guy had died under my roof, if you wanted to see it that way. I owed it to him to find out a little bit more about who he was.

  I didn’t want to bother his wife. I decided to call the office where he had worked, Mutual Life, Home, and Auto, in Bridgewater. I didn’t know who his supervisor was, so I asked for the actuarial department, where the obit mentioned (at great length) Ansella had been a vice president.

  It would have been, let’s say, awkward to explain to the receptionist that I was the guy in whose theatre Vincent had been murdered, so I decided on a slightly less scrupulous approach. Okay, I lied outright.

  “Hi, this is Elliot Freed of the Press Digest,” I said, making up the name of a newspaper on the spot, and mumbling just a bit. “I’m following up on the death of Vincent Ansella, and I’m wondering who I should be talking to there.” Let them decide.

  “Hold on,” the receptionist said, no doubt looking for someone to take this problem off her hands. I waited through two recorded explanations of an exciting new term life product while she no doubt ran around the office trying to foist me off on the least suspecting actuary.

  Just when I was considering getting the insurance, but unsure who my beneficiary would be, the phone clicked back to life. “This is Marcy Resnick,” a rather tentative voice said. “Is there some way I can help you?”

  I reiterated the bogus story about being with a newspaper, although I think this time I was working for the News Digest. I’d have to work at my phony profession a little more diligently next time. “I’m just trying to get some background on Mr. Ansella,” I added. “We’re considering running a follow-up piece.” I felt the “considering” would ease the blow when Ms. Resnick went to pick up her fictional newspaper the next morning and found no fictional article there. No doubt she would assume that not only was the story unworthy of print, but the company had decided to fold the whole publication, having decided that the public no longer had a right to know anything. It’s a philosophy that has worked wonders at Fox News.

  “Well, I don’t know what I could tell you,” she said. “We weren’t exactly close friends.”

  “Did he have any close friends at the office?”

  “Not really,” Resnick said. “I don’t like to say it, with him being gone, and all . . .”

  Oh, go ahead and say it, I thought.

  “. . . Vincent wasn’t really the kind of guy who told you much about himself,” she continued. “He was very friendly, but he kept it casual. Everybody liked him.”

  “So you don’t know much about him, I guess,” I said. I wasn’t really sure what I was looking for, anyway, and might as well terminate this conversation.

  “No, not much he ever told me,” she answered. “Listen, I don’t like talking this way on company time. Do you want to meet for lunch or something?”

  That was just what I needed, an hour’s worth of conversation with a woman who didn’t know anything about the subject I wasn’t sure what to ask about. Not to mention, I’d already eaten lunch. There had to be some way to get out of this gracefully.

  “Well, I don’t want to take up your time,” I said.

  “Oh, it’s no bother. I was going to go for lunch in a half hour, anyway.”

  I sighed, but inwardly. “Why don’t you give me the directions? ” I asked.

  Moe Baxter wasn’t pleased to see me hanging around his auto repair shop on Edison Avenue. “You leeching off me again, Freed?” He moaned, his voice a rusty hinge. “Why don’t you just buy a car?”

  “Don’t you see how this is a better deal for both of us, Moe?” I grinned. He was going to give in, like he always did, but we had a ritual to perform, and Moe was giving it his all. “I get the ride I need for the afternoon, and you get someone reliable to test out the cars you repair. It’s a mutual benefit. This way, you don’t lose valuable time from one of your mechanics, and I don’t charge you a dime.”

  “You don’t charge me? I like that! I should charge you a rental fee. What happens if you smash up the car, Mr. Mutual Benefit? Which, by the way, is the name of the insurance company that’s going to sue my ass.”

  “I’m the best driver you ever had, Moe, and you know it. Besides, if the car undergoes any damage at all, I’ll pay to have it repaired. You get paid to fix the same car twice. How’s that?” We had been through this at least once a month for the past six years, and had honed the routine down from twenty minutes to two.

  He threw me a set of keys from a pegboard he had on the wall. “The red Mazda,” he said, pointing. “Watch for a shimmy in the front wheels.”

  “I’ll report back in excruciating detail, Moe,” I told him.

  He closed his eyes and sighed. “I know, I know.”

  I had plenty of time to evaluate the ride on the way to Bridgewater. Moe’s employees had done their usual impeccable job, and there was no sensation of shaking in the steering wheel or the front end at all. Once satisfied on that score, I decided to evaluate the stereo system, although Moe hadn’t asked me to do so. I considered it a value-added service for Moe. What are friends for, anyway?

  The CDs in the console leaned heavily toward Willie Nelson and Johnny Cash, which would have been fine if I was trying desperately to become depressed. Luckily, the owner of this fine Japanese vehicle was also an aficionado of movie soundtracks, and had an Elmer Bernstein collection I found impressive, especially for carrying around in a car.

  If you’re driving with a purpose at all, you can’t beat the music from The Magnificent Seven, even if it does remind a person of Marlboro ads, back when there were Marlboro ads.

  I met Marcy Resnick at an Applebee’s on Route 22 West, just beyond the Bridgewater Commons, a fancy name for a fancy mall in a relatively fancy town. And yet, still room for an Applebee’s (and for that matter, room for Route 22, the least fancy road in the state). You have to love Somerset County.

  Marcy waved to me from a corner table, and we shook hands. I had brought a small cassette recorder to embellish the fiction of being a newspaper reporter. We had given each other rudimentary physical descriptions to recognize each other by (she had shoulder-length brown hair and was wearing a gray suit, and I looked exactly like me), and I had gone so far as to wear the Split Personality jacket, assuming (correctly) that no one else in the area would have one, or would at least have the good taste not to wear it in public.

  I had resigned myself to not finding out anything useful (especially since I had no idea what constituted “useful”) , so I settled down to order a beer—which was what I figured a reporter would drink—and to watch Marcy, an attractive woman in her early thirties, eat a shrimp salad.

  It came as something of a surprise when she opened the conversation with, “I didn’t want to say this over the phone, but Vincent was definitely not acting like himself lately.”

  Instinct immediately led me to push the record button on the cassette unit. “What do you mean, not acting like himself? Was he depressed?”

  “No.” She shook her head. “Although Vincent was usually a happy sort of a guy; not in an annoying way, like one of those chipper little secretaries who is always wearin
g a pin to commemorate some holiday or another, but just . . . happy. He was glad to be alive. Things were always good for him. He never told jokes—he hated jokes— but he liked banter. He was always using lines from Tracy and Hepburn movies, or the Marx Brothers.” Damn. Now I liked the guy.

  “So, what happened?” I asked her.

  Again, Marcy shook her head. “I don’t know. He stopped being happy. He wasn’t sad, you know. He didn’t mope around. But if you asked him how he was, he’d say, ‘Fine.’ Before, he’d say something cute, like ‘That’s kind of a personal question, isn’t it?’ He’d just lost his spark.”

  “But he wasn’t depressed.”

  “No. He seemed more . . . mad, I guess. Angry. He started sniping at the other actuaries. Not a lot, but he’d kind of jump down your throat if you made a simple mistake. It was the kind of thing he’d have laughed off a few months before; but now, he’d just lose it.”

  “Any idea what changed?” I had taken three sips of my Anchor Steam, before remembering that I was driving Moe’s client’s car. Hell, I weigh 185 pounds; I should be able to handle one beer.

  “I don’t like to gossip . . .” Marcy said. But the look in my eye encouraged her. “There was talk around the office that he had, you know, trouble in his marriage.”

  “His wife was cheating on him?”

  “No. I heard the other way around, but I don’t know if it’s true.” She backed off. “You know what they say about speaking ill of the . . . you know.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. We sat for a few moments in silence, and I finally got up the courage to say, “Were there rumors about whom he was cheating with?”

  “Of course. But no consistent ones. Everyone from his secretary to Julia Roberts, to . . .”

  “You?”

  “I’ve heard that was going around, but nobody said anything to my face.” Her face was, at the moment, pinched and angry. “In any event, it wasn’t true.” That led to an even more awkward silence. And Marcy looked down at the table.

  “You’ve already eaten, haven’t you?” she asked me.

  “I’m afraid so.”

  She smiled a sad smile. It was actually a very nice smile. “And you’re not really a reporter, are you?”

  My eyebrows might have raised a bit. “How could you tell?”

  Marcy smiled another half-smile. “Most reporters probably would have put a tape in the cassette deck,” she said.

  8

  We sat and talked for quite some time after that, as I had to explain myself to Marcy, which is something I’m not terribly skilled at doing. She didn’t really understand why I was pursuing information about Ansella, but then neither did I, which made explaining it that much harder.

  Finally, she realized she was overdue back at her office, and I needed to bring the car back to Moe, so we parted ways in the Applebee’s parking lot, doing that awkward-handshake-when-you’re-not-sure-if-you-should-hug thing that adults do if they have social skills deficiencies, like I do. Ask my ex-wife.

  On the drive back to Midland Heights, I ditched The Magnificent Seven for a Susan Werner CD I found in the console. I couldn’t sing along with a voice that feminine, but I could appreciate it, and it fit my mood, which was somewhat wistful but also a little bit amused.

  What I had discovered about Vincent Ansella had been less a relief and more a cattle prod: he was another rabid comedy fan, and someone had offed him when he should have been in his element. Something had been bothering him lately, possibly involving his marriage. I can’t say that kind of issue is completely alien to me, either. He didn’t like jokes. I don’t like jokes. Friends send me e-mails containing what they think are hilarious jokes all the time, because they figure the “comedy guy” must love these things. I hate jokes. I like wit, not contrived stories that end with someone making an obscene pun or confusing his wife with a horse or something.

  Let’s face it: if I had been Italian, drawn to actuarial tables, and dead, I could be Vincent Ansella.

  Meanwhile, I was, in fact, the owner of a theatre that couldn’t open, with a projectionist who had vanished into thin air upon being suspected of video piracy. And I was tooling around Central New Jersey in a borrowed car, looking into the life of a man I had never actually met while he was, you know, breathing. I’m sure Sharon would have been able to define exactly how this scenario showcased six or seven character flaws, but I was at a loss as to how to do so myself at the moment.

  I dropped the car off with Moe, reported on its complete lack of a shimmy and the quality of the sound system, which could have used a subwoofer, and was given an extensive lecture on leaving the car the way the customer had brought it in. I thought that was silly, since the customer had taken the car in to have something done to it that would make it different from the way it was brought in, but my point of view was, as usual, discounted. I thanked Moe and left.

  I rode my bike from Moe’s shop to the Midland Heights police station, a short, squat building that could just as easily house the tax assessor’s office, the public works department, and the water department. All of which it did.

  I told myself the trip was based on the strong desire to help Anthony, to punch holes in the awful accusations being made of him, and to see that truth and justice would, indeed, prevail. And I did want to help the kid, but who was I kidding? I was riding over there as an excuse to “run into” Leslie Levant. Sly dog that I am.

  I chained the bike to a rack in front of the building, but left the front wheel on. Somehow, walking around with a bicycle wheel at the age of thirty-seven doesn’t really impress the ladies the way it did at, say, fourteen. Funny how life moves on, isn’t it?

  There was a small waiting area right through the front door of the police headquarters, where a dispatcher sat behind bulletproof glass, apparently dispatching things. It’s not a huge confidence-builder that the police department feels the need to reinforce its own reception area with bulletproof glass, but I guess if someone’s going to fire at people, this would be the area for it. I’m told that a gun was once shot within town limits, but that was to start a 10K race, and doesn’t really count.

  The dispatcher, a painfully thin African-American woman in uniform, was talking into her microphone as I entered, so I waited until the orders to de-tree someone’s cat or investigate a mysterious lack of froth on the cappuccino at the local coffee bar was given, then walked up to the small area of the glass where holes large enough to carry sound (and air) were drilled through. Just then, I noticed Chief Dutton through the window of the locked metal door to my right. The dispatcher looked at me.

  “Can I help you?”

  I thought of saying “That’s a good question,” but the gun on the woman’s hip had a tranquilizing effect on my sense of humor, and instead, I answered, “Yes, please. Is Officer . . .”

  Before I had the chance to make myself sound like a sophomore with a nasty crush, Dutton opened the door and called to me.

  “Mr. Freed! I was just about to call you.”

  He was? “Can’t be parking tickets, Chief,” I said. “I don’t have a car.” I don’t know why, but Dutton’s shoulder holster didn’t intimidate me nearly as much as the dispatcher’s hip model, even if she was behind glass that could stop a bullet. I mean, I don’t think anyone has invented one-way bulletproof glass, have they?

  Dutton chuckled, sort of, a rumble that made me think of the late Peter Boyle in, well, Young Frankenstein. I can’t imagine what had brought that film to my mind this week. “No, I just have a question or two for you. Would you come through, please?” He gestured inside. I looked at the dispatcher, as if to verify with her that it was okay for me to obey her boss, and she, inexplicably, nodded. I walked into the station, and followed Dutton down the hall.

  We entered Dutton’s office and both sat, after he indicated that I should. “Was there something we missed earlier, Chief?” I asked.

  “No, it’s just that things have developed a little bit, and I’m trying to make certa
in of a few things. Are you absolutely sure you don’t know Anthony Pagliarulo’s whereabouts right now?”

  “No. I’ve tried everywhere I could think to look. He’s nowhere to be found, so far as I can tell. Why, is he in more trouble?”

  Dutton ignored the question, and pressed on. “No girlfriend? ”

  “Me, or Anthony?”

  He smiled impatiently. “For now, Anthony,” Dutton said.

  “Have you seen Anthony?”

  “I’ll take that as a no. Any siblings in the area?” He caught himself in time. “Anthony, not you.”

  “Neither of us, as far as I know.”

  “Has he been having money troubles? Asked you for a raise recently?” Dutton’s eyes narrowed a bit.

  “You’ve seen my box office receipts. I’m barely making the payments on the Milk Duds. No, Anthony hasn’t mentioned any financial problems. I don’t think he even notices I pay him every two weeks.” Okay, so Anthony had always wanted to make his own movies, but that would take millions; even if he were in on the piracy scheme, he wouldn’t have made anything close to that. I figured the police must have had something more that pointed to Anthony in connection with the pirated videos, but I couldn’t imagine what.

  “So it’s not sex, and it’s not money,” Dutton said. “What’s left?”

  “I can’t answer that, because I don’t know what we’re talking about. Anthony’s not the type to pirate DVDs of a bad movie, Chief. He’d sooner digitize a copy of The Grand Illusion and distribute it for free on the Internet.”

  Dutton leaned forward just a bit. “Has he done that?” he asked.

  “No! Chief, it doesn’t make sense. A man is poisoned in my theatre, and you seem more concerned about a few copies of a comedy written by six chimpanzees and an escaped mental patient. If you really want to witness a crime, you should watch that movie. You should arrest the people who want to buy it, and get them help.”

  Dutton leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes for a moment, measuring how much he should tell me. “You don’t think it’s a little more than unlikely that a man was killed in your auditorium at the same time a piracy operation was going on in the basement? This goes beyond a few pirated DVDs, Mr. Freed,” he said.