It Happened One Knife

Table of Contents

“Something for everyone!
Some Like It Hot-Buttered
bursts
with mystery, action, romance, and laughs. Buy this book today !
Cohen’s boffo Double Feature Mystery series is a surething
smash hit. Jeffrey Cohen is the Dave Barry of the New
Jersey Turnpike.” —Julia Spencer-Fleming,
Edgar
^®
Award nominee and author of
All Mortal Flesh

“Movies, murder, characters who are real people, laughs,
danger, and damn good writing.
Some Like It Hot-Buttered
truly has something for everyone: a comedy tonight—and so
much more!” —Linda Ellerbee, television producer, journalist,
and bestselling author of
Take Big Bites
and
And So It Goes

“Cohen’s debut Double Feature Mystery is a double winner. He doesn’t just make you laugh, he makes you care about his characters. I give it two buttery thumbs way up!”

—Chris Grabenstein,
Anthony Award-winning author of
Tilt-a-Whirl

“Knock, knock. Who’s there? Cohen. Cohen who? Cohen buy yourself this most entertaining book.”

—Larry Gelbart, writer of
M*A*S*H
,
Tootsie
,
Oh, God!
,
A Funny Thing Happened on the
Way to the Forum
,
Barbarians at the Gate
, etc.

“Cohen fires up the gag reel for a new tongue-in-cheek mystery . . . Ruffling feathers and getting violent warnings, Freed solves the mystery and earns his amateur-sleuth credentials, promising more comic adventures to come. Cohen develops his lively characters almost as effortlessly as he delivers the jokes—and the occasional guffaw—and manages to sneak in some suspenseful twists besides.”

—
Publishers Weekly

“Many authors create good characters, but to create side-splittingly
funny ones and make them believable is a tour
de force. Jeffrey Cohen accomplishes that in his delightful
Some Like It Hot-Buttered
, which comes roaring in like a
blast of fresh air.” —Denise Dietz,
author of the Diet Club Mysteries

“You’re in for a treat; that is, if you like a good mystery written with great humor as well as warmth and wit . . . Solving the mystery and finding those responsible for the crimes is only part of the fun in this wonderfully entertaining book—Mr. Cohen’s writing and wry sense of humor is a delight . . . I can’t wait to read the next one!”

—
Crimespree Magazine

“[Elliot Freed is a]
schleppy
hero with a heart of gold. This seems to be [Cohen’s] specialty and I, for one, couldn’t be happier. Nice guys do finish first . . . This new book has, at its heart, an everyman who just happens to get involved in murderous doings, and we, thankfully, get to go along . . . Not only is the book funny, which you would expect from Jeff Cohen, but it is also well plotted (also expected) and loaded with plenty of misdirection. Plus you get to meet another terrific bunch of characters for whom the author obviously has great affection. Always a very good thing.” —
Mystery Ink

“A twisty mystery with lots of laughs and lots of heart. This is the first in the Double Feature Mysteries, and hopefully it won’t be too long a wait for the next.”

—Stacy Alesi, aka the BookBitch

THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP
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Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

IT HAPPENED ONE KNIFE

A Berkley Prime Crime Book / published by arrangement with the author

PRINTING HISTORY
Berkley Prime Crime mass-market edition / July 2008

Copyright © 2008 by Jeffrey Cohen.

All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form
without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in
violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.
For information, address: The Berkley Publishing Group,
a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.,
375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.

eISBN : 978-1-436-22927-2

BERKLEY® PRIME CRIME
Berkley Prime Crime Books are published by The Berkley Publishing Group,
a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.,
375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.
The name BERKLEY PRIME CRIME and the BERKLEY PRIME CRIME design are trademarks
belonging to Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

Something appealing; something appalling;
Something for everyone: a comedy tonight!

—STEPHEN SONDHEIM,
A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum

THIS
wasn’t just another DVD: this was life or death. Or life
and
death. I was hoping for life; there had already been enough death.

I sat down in front of my own television with a great deal of trepidation. For other people, this wouldn’t be an unduly tense moment, but I think it’s been noted more than once, I’m not exactly other people. For a classic comedy fanatic like me, this was a very scary moment.

What if this movie wasn’t funny for me anymore? What if
no
movie was funny for me anymore? I’ve spent so much of my time, my energy, my
life
on the idea that comedy is therapeutic; suppose I was about to discover that it not only couldn’t heal my wounds, but had actually caused them?

A man sitting alone in his postdivorce, furniture-challenged home in the wee hours of the morning is never entirely rational.

In this case, though, I had logical reasons for being a little nuts. When you spend most of your life idolizing people, and then get to meet them, it’s something of a disappointment when they end up dead.

It’s even more of a problem when you feel you had a hand in killing them.

I turned on the TV, reached for the remote control, and literally held my breath. The next few minutes would tell the tale: either I’d laugh, or—

Well, I didn’t want to think about the alternative . . .

1

If you can do comedy, you must do comedy.

—BILL MURRAY

Without heroes, we’re all plain people and don’t know how far we can go.

—BERNARD MALAMUD,
THE NATURAL

A Special Attraction

“IS
he dead?” Vic Testalone asked me.

“They’re all dead,” I said. “He didn’t leave any of them alive.”

“How can that
be
?” he asked. “Does this kid know what he’s done?”

Vic, a sales rep from one of the film distribution companies I work with, was probably born smoking a cigar; he had one in his mouth now, but knew better than to light it in the lobby of my theatre. Comedy Tonight, like all New Jersey movie theatres, has a strict no-smoking policy, but I would have insisted on it even if the state didn’t. I hadn’t spent the past four months getting this place repaired just to have Vic impose the smell of a cheap stogie on my new carpet.

I shook my head. “Anthony just thinks it’s cool,” I answered him. “He’s not considering the moral implications of his actions.”

“I’m not concerned with moral implications,” Vic answered, snarling. “He’s killing the sequel possibilities.”

That threw me for a loop. I’d only agreed to let Anthony Pagliarulo, the theatre’s projectionist/ticket taker, show his first film—an ultraviolent pseudo-Western called
Killin’ Time
—as a one-time-only break from our all-comedies-and-nothing-but-comedies policy because he’d caught me at a vulnerable time. Suffice it to say that four months earlier, when I agreed to show the film, my theatre had looked like one of the cowboys in Anthony’s “Western”
after
the branding-iron scene. I’d made good on my promise after the renovation because I couldn’t think of a graceful way to pull the plug. But now Vic was treating this glorified (if relatively high-budget) student film as if it were something
real
.

“What the hell do you mean by ‘sequel possibilities’?” I asked him. “You think someone would to want to distribute that thing?”

“It’s got blood.” Vic held up a finger. “It’s got cursing.” Another finger. “Killing, sex, cruelty, characters nobody could possibly like.” Finger, finger, finger, thumb on the other hand. “It can’t miss.”

Vic and I had left the auditorium when the credits started to roll (but long after heads had started to roll, which made it too late for me), and now the rest of the “crowd” was spilling into the lobby. “This was a movie in which we saw a bullet enter a man’s head
from inside
,” I told him quietly. No sense giving the rest of the invited audience a chance to voice their displeasure as well. “We saw intestines being pulled out. We saw a man’s tongue put through a meat grinder.”

“Now you’re catching on,” Vic said. “Oh, and before I forget, are we set for the next month?”

Vic’s a sales rep for Klassic Komedy Distributors (they think the "K”s make it funny), which handles many of the vintage comedies I show each week in conjunction with a contemporary comedy. He doesn’t really need to come down to Comedy Tonight to get his order; we could complete our business in three minutes on the phone. But he says I’m “the only schmuck who knows movies so obscure Leonard Maltin’s never heard of them.” Vic likes to visit.