It Happened One Knife (27 page)

Dutton clearly thought the bicycle trauma was hitting me too hard now. “How are you going to do that?” he asked.

I never got the chance to answer—which was lucky, since I had no idea what I was talking about—because Officer Broeker of the Englewood Police Department came striding purposefully into Comedy Tonight. He noticed Dutton immediately (it couldn’t be helped; the man is essentially the Washington Monument in pants) and strode purposefully again, directly toward us in the straightest line imaginable. Broeker had to be an ex-Marine.

Under one arm was a small cardboard mailer, the kind that online services use for audio CDs and DVDs. Broeker stood straight as a totem pole between Dutton and me, and faced me directly. I was relatively sure he hadn’t blinked since entering the theatre.

“Have you been drinking, Broeker?” I asked. “You seemed a little wobbly on the way in.” Dutton gave me a disapproving look.

“Negative,” Broeker said. “I don’t drink.”

“My mistake.”

He reached under his arm and pulled out the mailer. “Detective Lieutenant Honig requested that I give this to you,” Broeker said. “It was obvious that Mr. Lillis intended you to have it.” He held out the mailer in a hand that miraculously was ungloved, and I took it.

“What is it?” I asked.

Broeker was silent, which apparently was his best thing.

The mailer was sealed, Honig being a stickler for protocol, so I broke open the seal and reached inside. Dutton craned his neck over my shoulder to see. Broeker stared straight ahead, no doubt waiting for General Patton to give him the attack order.

Inside the mailer was a small videotape cassette.

“What the heck is this all about?” I said, not to anyone in particular.

“It’s a videotape,” Dutton said. “Maybe it’s famous out-takes or something from Lillis and Townes movies.”

I looked at Broeker, who didn’t move a muscle, and I shook my head. “I don’t think so,” I told Dutton. “This is a digital tape, one that would probably have come from a camcorder. This is a home recording, and a relatively recent one.” I turned to Broeker. “And you’ve already seen it, haven’t you?”

“Affirmative,” Broeker said. How his eyes could stay open all that time without drying out was a mystery. “What you have there is a copy. Detective Lieutenant Honig retained the original.”

“What’s on the tape, Broeker?” I asked.

Broeker blinked.

"I don’t think you’re going to enjoy it very much,” he said.

36

HARRY
Lillis looked me directly in the eye and said, “You see, Elliot? I told you I had a plan, and this is it.”

Lillis stared out at me from the screen of a monitor we keep in the projection booth that hooked up to a camcorder Anthony provided from his car. As a film student, Anthony has access to every piece of technology short of nuclear launch codes. Probably.

Anthony, Dutton, Broeker, and I were gathered around the console, watching the fifteen-inch monitor. I didn’t hear anyone in the room so much as breathe.

“I’m going to go through the rehearsal for the show, and get Les to repeat his threat to kill me,” Lillis continued, placing the camera on something high (I was relatively sure it was the bureau in his room) from which it could take in the view from the top of the window to the top of the bed. The light on the dresser, next to the window and in the camera’s view, was on, but there was no light near the camera, so the lower half of the room was in shadow. “See? I told you I can stand, but walking is still a problem.” He sat back down in the wheelchair in a white dress shirt and dark slacks, exhaled broadly, and looked up at the camera.

“Once he says he’s going to kill me again, it’ll be on tape, and we can have him arrested,” Lillis said to the camera. “I’ll see if I can get him to confess to killing Viv, too. But right now, I’m going to use this remote control to turn the camera off until Les gets here. See you soon, Elliot.”

“You see,” Broeker said to me. “The frequent references to you. That’s why Detective Lieutenant Honig thought Mr. Lillis wanted you to have the tape.”

“Maybe he knew someone else named Elliot,” I said, but Broeker shook his head, and I knew it was nonsense, too. I just didn’t want to see what was coming.

The image on the screen flickered again, and suddenly, Les Townes was standing next to Lillis and his wheelchair. He took off a nylon jacket he was wearing and threw it onto Lillis’s bed. Townes wasn’t facing Lillis, and didn’t see him put down the remote control next to his left leg on the wheelchair.

“After all these years, Harry, a Saturday night show for a bunch of old people? Why is this so important to you?” Townes asked his partner.

“It’s these uppity snobs from
the thea-tah
,” Lillis replied. “Always going on about the thrill of a live performance and how us film hacks don’t know anything about
real
acting. I had to show them what we were really all about. You have no idea what it’s like to live here, Les. For a burlesque clown like me, there’s just nobody to talk to.”

Townes sat down on the desk chair. “Okay, you got me here,” he said. “What’s your plan?”

“The barber bit,” Lillis said. “I can do it sitting down, and it won’t be any different than the way we used to do it.”

“This doesn’t make any sense,” I told Dutton. “Lillis is explaining what sketch he wants to do, and he told me Townes had threatened him with the razor the last time they rehearsed. Why doesn’t Townes know that already?” Dutton shook his head.

On the screen, Townes nodded. “Sounds easy enough. We did that bit so many times, I don’t even know why we’re rehearsing.”

“So let’s get started,” Lillis replied.

Townes found a leather vest hanging on the doorknob, and put it on over his white shirt.

Lillis rolled his chair to the center of the room— directly in the line of the camera, I noticed—as Townes came over. Lillis pointed at a little table he’d set up behind himself, and to the right (down camera).

“There’s the props,” Harry said.

Townes gave a careful look at the objects on the table. “That’s a real razor,” he said. “Since when do we use a real razor?”

“This is the exact conversation Harry said they’d had at the first rehearsal,” I told Broeker and Dutton.

“Maybe Mr. Townes has a faulty memory,” Anthony said. “Alzheimer’s, or something.” We turned our attention back to the screen.

“You think I could get a prop razor here in the old folks home?” Lillis asked his partner. “Just don’t slit my throat and everybody will be happy.”

Behind Lillis’s back, Townes made a face at him, puffing up his cheeks and crossing his eyes. I laughed in spite of myself; he’d made that face at Lillis in
Step This Way.

“So what’ll it be today, Mr. Hansracker?” Townes began, in character now and snipping at the air with his scissors.

“Just a trim and a shave,” Lillis answered. “I’m getting married tomorrow, and I want to look neat.”

“You’re getting married? Aren’t you old to get married? ” Townes then broke character and looked down at Lillis. “Funny what we used to think was old, isn’t it?” he said.

Lillis frowned. “Don’t stop in the middle. Keep going.”

"Excuse me, Mr. DeMille.” Townes composed himself, and resumed the scene. “Aren’t you old to get married?” he repeated.

“You’re only as old as the woman you feel,” Lillis said.

“That’s not the line. You’re stealing from Groucho now.” Townes looked annoyed.

“I’m not stealing. I made that up.”

“You didn’t. That’s Groucho.” Townes’s eyebrows lowered.

“It’s me.”

“You know I hate when you do this, Harry,” his partner warned.

“Do what? I’m spicing up the scene. The old line was tired.” Lillis reached for the wheels on his chair to move, but they seemed stuck. “You just . . . you don’t . . . goddamn this thing, I can’t . . .”

“Don’t turn around!” Townes ordered, fists clenching. “Finish the scene! You were so worried about putting on a show for the old people; let’s get it right. Now, do the line the way we always did the line!”

“Jesus Christ, Les, you always had a stick up your ass. What’s wrong with the new line?”

“
Do the old line!
”

Harry Lillis gathered himself, then looked up at his ’barber” and said, “Old? I’m not old; I just worry.”

But Townes couldn’t let it go. “Even after all this time, Harry, you have to try to make it harder. I always felt like you were trying to get a rise out of me and not the audience. Why couldn’t you just do the act?”

Lillis shook his head sadly. “I’m trying to just do the act now, Les. Do your next line.”

“What’s the point? You’ll just do something to annoy me. You always did. I never understood it.”

And Lillis sealed his fate. “Viv understood,” he said in a low voice.

Les Townes’s face morphed into something you’d be likely to see on a rampaging animal. His eyes widened, his nostrils flared, and his mouth became a tight line of frustration and pain. “
Leave Viv out of it!
” he hissed.

“She told me,” Lillis continued, as if his partner hadn’t spoken. “She said that you just learned the lines, but I was always listening onstage, even when the cameras were rolling. She said you were like that in other circumstances, too. Just doing what you were supposed to do, while I was always looking for a better angle.”

“Stop it!” Townes said, and reached for the handles of the wheelchair.

Lillis tried to turn at the same time, but the brakes were applied to the wheels, and he couldn’t move. When Townes tried to move him and jostled the wheelchair hard in his fury, Harry Lillis tumbled forward and fell out of the chair. It wasn’t possible to see the floor, but it appeared that Lillis landed headfirst.

“Harry, you son of a bitch!” Townes said, and rushed around the chair. There were mumbles from the floor, but the camera angle made Lillis invisible.

Townes, still looking crazed, disappeared from view, and appeared to be reaching for Lillis as he knelt down. The camera looked at what appeared to be an empty room, but it was possible to hear what sounded like very heated grunting. “Take it easy, Harry,” Townes said. “This’ll go easier if you take it easy.”

And then there were some terrible gurgling sounds for a long period, followed by wheezing.

“This must have been when his neck was broken,” Broeker said.

None of us spoke after that for some time.

The next time there was movement on the screen, we all started just a little bit. Even Broeker, who had seen the tape before. Coming up from the floor, facing the window, Les Townes was breathing heavily. And he was dragging Lillis’s lifeless body back into the wheelchair.

“Come on, Harry,” he said when the body was slumped in the chair. “Let’s go out to the gazebo for a little air.”

And he pushed the chair out of the picture. The sound of the door opening and closing was all that was left, while the same still view of the room, now silent, occupied the screen.

Broeker looked over at Anthony. “It stays that way for the rest of the tape,” he said. “Another forty-three minutes. After a while, you hear fire alarms.”

Anthony nodded, and turned off the camcorder. He started to rewind the tape.

None of us made eye contact with each other for a long moment. The whirring of the rewinding videocassette was the only sound in the room. Finally, Dutton coughed, and we all looked at him.

“I guess that makes it pretty clear what happened,” he said.

“Yeah,” I said. I looked at Broeker. “Do you need the tape back?” I asked.

He shook his head. “No. That one’s yours to do with as you please.”

“I doubt it’ll make my collection of favorites,” I told him.

Broeker’s face showed no emotion at all, but he said, “I’m sorry I had to show it to you.” Then he spun on his heel and left the projection booth.

“Yeah,” I said. “Me, too.”

37

“IT
was horrible,” I said. “Just the callous disregard for another human being. I’m still shaken up.”

Bobo Kaminsky looked at me over half-glasses that normally hung from his neck on a chain. “So somebody beat up your bicycle,” he said. “Geez, Elliot, did they steal your lunch money, too?”

We stood in what Bobo likes to call his “showroom,” a dingy storefront that houses every possible type of bike imaginable, from racing models to dirt bikes to things that young parents put their kids into so the toddlers (and infants) can experience urban biking close-up, sucking in exhaust fumes from passing buses in the name of an “outdoor experience.” Maybe it’s me.

“I just feel so violated,” I said.

“Suck it up,” Bobo scolded me. “I’m a bike salesman, not Dr. Phil. Now, I can show you something that’ll take your mind right off that old hunk of tin.” Bobo is under the impression that I have millions stored away from the sale of my novel to Hollywood and am just being obstinate in not sharing the wealth, mostly with him. He doesn’t seem to have noticed that I spent a large percentage of the movie money (which wasn’t anywhere near millions) buying a white elephant of a movie theatre and bringing joy to a large . . . a group of people every night.

“I’m not spending thousands of dollars on a new bike,” I told him. “I want to know if you can fix the old one.”

He looked as if I’d asked him to build the Empire State Building out of mashed potatoes. “Are you out of your mind?” he asked delicately. “From what you’ve told me, your old bike looks like a Jackson Pollock painting done in metal and rubber. What’s left to restore?”

“Well, if you’re not up to the challenge . . .”

Bobo let the glasses drop from his face and dangle around his massive chest. “Who do you think you’re talking to?” he asked. “Does a lame negotiating tactic like that really work with other people?”

“Some.”