It Happened One Knife (33 page)

“He
killed her!
” Lillis was weeping, but he didn’t loosen his grip on the knife. “He was a murderer, and I showed him justice!”

He was too far gone. There was no point in reiterating that Vivian Reynolds had died in an accidental fire; Lillis refused to believe that. I started walking, very slowly, toward the steps, to get a better look at Lillis’s face. “It was more than that,” I guessed. “You couldn’t stand being anonymous. You couldn’t deal with the fact that nobody knew who you were anymore. You were going to get Lillis and Townes back in the headlines.”

Lillis’s eyes narrowed.

“You could’ve left it alone. You could’ve committed the crime and then faded into oblivion.” I was almost at the foot of the stairs. “But you kept improvising. You wouldn’t stick to the script. You should be thousands of miles from here, but you stuck around, sending Godzilla here”—that would be Wilson—“to threaten me and destroy my property. Because you didn’t really want people to think Townes had killed you. You wanted them to know exactly who’d had the last laugh.”

“You’re smarter than you look, Elliot,” Lillis said. “But then, you’d almost have to be.”

Barry Dutton loomed up behind Lillis, his weapon drawn, and put the barrel to Lillis’s head. “Drop the knife, Mr. Lillis,” he said. Behind him, Officer Patel was already in position.

Lillis dropped the knife, and Anthony dropped to the floor, breathing hard. I didn’t see any blood, so I assumed Lillis hadn’t cut him. Anthony must have been petrified.

And then Harry Lillis, the man who’d made me laugh countless times, said very calmly to Wilson Townes, “Shoot the boy.”

It took Wilson a moment to react, and in that moment, I realized there wasn’t enough time for Dutton or Patel to train their weapons on Wilson. I also knew that there wasn’t any chance at all that I could overpower Wilson. I’m wiry, and he was enormous and muscular. No match. Wilson aimed at Jonathan, who wasn’t looking up.

During that moment, however, I was monumentally glad that I’d repressed the question I wanted to ask moments before. Because if I’d asked Lillis where Sophie was, he would have wondered that himself.

Having crawled out from behind the snack bar, where she must have dropped to the ground when Wilson appeared, Sophie grabbed one of the heavy posts we use to hold up the velvet rope when we cordon off the balcony. With an expression of pure focused fury, she hefted it like a baseball bat and clocked Wilson across the back of the head. I couldn’t have lifted it that high. Wilson dropped like a stone, and the shotgun fired into the floor.

“That’s brand-new carpet, you bastard,” I said to the unconscious Wilson.

Sophie’s face had a look of such uncontrolled anger that it was a miracle steam wasn’t rising from her nostrils. “Don’t you dare hurt my boyfriend!” she told Wilson, although it was a decent bet he couldn’t hear her.

“Your . . .” I began. Sophie dropped the post, ran to Jonathan, and hugged him. She started to sob. He looked positively thrilled.

“We’re going to have to have a talk,” I told them.

Patel began placing cuffs on Lillis, who looked crestfallen at Wilson’s failure. “You just can’t get good help these days,” he said, his voice sounding very far away.

“Is he really your son?” I asked.

Lillis shook his head. “Viv never cheated on Les. But I told him he was, and he believed me.”

“And Wilson helped you kill his father.”

Lillis almost didn’t answer, but then said, “I put his name on my insurance. He gets all Les’s money and all of mine. Comes to over six million, when you add it together. ”

“He couldn’t collect as a fugitive, but you figured that, too. Pretty cold,” I answered, but Lillis’s face was impassive; he seemed to be somewhere else entirely.

With the cuffs on his prisoner, Dutton put his weapon back in his holster and exhaled. “All right, Mr. Lillis, let’s go,” he said.

But before Patel or Dutton could grab Lillis’s arms, the comedian put on a satisfied smile and looked up at an imaginary adoring audience. “Thank you, ladies and gentlemen, and good night,” he said in a theatrical voice.

He took a step to the edge of the top stair, and then simply picked both feet up and threw them in front of himself. Lillis landed on his neck, hard, on the top step, and then tumbled all the way down the long staircase, finally landing in a heap at the foot of the stairs.

I rushed to him, but it was obvious from the angle of his head that there was no helping Harry Lillis now. Dutton and Patel ran down the stairs, Dutton already calling for EMS on his cell phone. But everyone in that room knew rescue workers wouldn’t be anything more than a formality.

Harry Lillis had taken the most perfect, most graceful, best-planned pratfall of his career. And the last.

43

YOU
know you’ve had an interesting day when the highlight is Sid Caesar telling you that you “throw a hell of a funeral.” It’s a bittersweet experience at best.

The guests had been interrogated and released, the TV crews allowed to leave with ecstasy to return to their home bases, carrying a remarkable story they hadn’t expected, and my father, having assessed the carpet damage and declaring it in need of replacement, packed into his truck to go home and tell my mother she really needed to come along with him next time because she didn’t know what she was missing.

I sat behind my desk trying to figure out how to get another chair into the office. I’d had a lot of visitors lately, and this was getting tiresome. Anthony stood by my desk, as animated as I’d ever seen him, which normally wouldn’t be saying much. But now he was positively electric. He was pale, his hands were still a little shaky, his eyes were wide, and for reasons I couldn’t explain on my best day— which this clearly wasn’t—he was grinning.

“Mr. Freed,” he said for the fifth time. “You saved my life.”

“No, I didn’t,” I reiterated. “Chief Dutton saved your life. Go thank him.”

“It was you,” Anthony insisted. “You got the police on the balcony to begin with. I’m sorry I ever doubted you, Mr. Freed. You talked Mr. Lillis out of killing me. You’re my hero.”

This was worse than having him think I was a movie-thieving scoundrel. “Anthony, please. I’m not the person to thank. If anything, I put you in more danger than I could have anticipated. You never should have been that close to Lillis to begin with. I’m sorry, Anthony.”

But he just grinned away. “Thank you, Mr. Freed. Thank you. You don’t even have to pay me anymore. I’ll just come to work for free. Honestly. Thank you.”

Eventually, I convinced Anthony that he should go upstairs (apparently going back to the projection booth was not a source of great trauma for him) and get ready to run tonight’s movie. He did everything but kiss the hem of my garment on his way out.

Before I could stand, Chief Barry Dutton replaced Anthony in the doorway of the former broom closet and shook his head. “You always have it all figured out, don’t you?” he said.

“Obviously not.”

“You knew Harry Lillis would come out of the cold if you threw a memorial service.”

I rolled my eyes a bit, more at the thought of Lillis than at Dutton. “Anybody who’s ever met a comedian would have figured that one out. He’d be here just to see who showed up and who didn’t. I just hadn’t realized how far over the top he’d gone. I won’t sleep tonight thinking about how close Anthony and Jonathan were to . . .” I shuddered.

“Patel and I were in the projection booth,” Dutton said. “I’m the one who should have realized Wilson wouldn’t be in the balcony. I figured he’d try to pick you off from up there, not that he’d be Lillis’s insurance policy downstairs. ”

“Why doesn’t that make me feel better?” I wondered aloud.

“We had a talk with Wilson,” Dutton said. “He admitted to sending the ‘bomb’ to you, as per Harry’s directions. It was supposed to scare you, but also to make you want to investigate Vivian’s death more closely.”

“Harry really thought Townes had killed Vivian Reynolds, ” I marveled. “You could have laid all the evidence out in front of him, and he still wasn’t going to change his mind.”

“Think about it, Elliot,” Dutton said. “Lillis was in love with Vivian. How long did it take Sharon to convince you that she was better off with Gregory than with you?”

“It would have taken forever,” I nodded. “But I believed she’d be
happier
, and that turned out to be wrong, too. Did you see if she’s still here? I think she was going to stay for the movie.”

Dutton’s eyebrows started to orbit his head. “You’re going on with the showing tonight?” he asked.

“I let Leo in for free. He’d kill me if I didn’t show the movie. But just
It Happened One Night
. After all the police activity, there won’t be time for the new one.”

Dutton shook his head. “Movie people are crazy,” he said. Then a thought occurred to him, and he smiled at me. "You know, C. Francis Jenkins was one of the men credited, along with Thomas Edison, with inventing the motion picture projector.”

He had me. “Okay,” I said. “Go upstairs and tell Anthony I said it was okay for you to push the start button when it’s time for the showing.” Dutton turned to leave. “How’d you find that one out?” I asked.

“Ya gotta love Google,” Dutton said, and he left, looking like the world’s largest seven-year-old about to play with a really cool set of electric trains.

I got up and walked to the snack bar, where Sophie was leaning on the case and talking to Jonathan, staring into his eyes with a rapt attention that I’d never seen her use on anything or anyone before.

“So, how long has this been going on?” I said by way of greeting.

Jonathan grinned the most Cheshire cat-like grin I’d ever seen, and said, “A week or so.”

“Five days,” Sophie corrected him. She started to move boxes of candy from the floor behind the snack bar to the counter, so she could empty them into the display.

Of course. “You weren’t looking for Les Townes’s phone number that night in my Rolodex, were you, Jonathan?”

He stared at me as if I’d grown a horn in the middle of my forehead and sprouted hooves. “Of course not,” he said. “I didn’t want to go out with Mr. Townes.”

“Your card must have been next to Les Townes’s,” I said to Sophie, who looked confused. “I came down one night and found Jonathan looking through my Rolodex. It was open to Townes’s card, and I thought Jonathan might have been in on the fake bomb.”

Sophie’s eyes widened. “
Jonathan
?” she said. “Shame on you, Elliot. My Jonathan wouldn’t do such a thing.”

“
Your
Jonathan?” Then I recovered. “But that was more than five days ago. It was at least two weeks.”

Jonathan stared at his shoes. “It took me a while to work up the nerve,” he said.

Sophie actually ruffled his hair. “He’s so shy,” she said. I wondered if Dutton could bring back his fingerprint kit to make sure she was the same Sophie who rolled her eyes at
The Philadelphia Story
.

Jonathan reached into his back pocket. “By the way, Mr. Freed,” he said. “I forgot I had this.” He produced a Rolodex card with Sophie’s address and phone number. “Sorry I borrowed it from your office.”

I took it from him. It was wrinkled and looked like ketchup had been spilled on it and cleaned off. “Thanks, Jonathan,” I said. “The next time you want something, just ask, okay?”

Sophie gave me a sharp look. “You’d give away my phone number to anybody who’d ask?”

“No, but at least I’d know he wasn’t a mad bomber.” I started away from them to open the front doors for the night’s show.

As I did, Jonathan walked behind the counter. “Do you need help with those boxes?” he asked Sophie.

“I can handle it,” she said. “Don’t be such a
man
.”

On my way to the doors, I noticed Sharon walking out of my office. “I really need to remember to lock that door,” I said. “Everybody’s walking in and out of there lately.”

“I’m just leaving,” she said. “Came to say good night, and you weren’t there.”

“You’re not staying for Claudette Colbert and Clark Gable?” I asked. “Mostly Clark Gable?”

“He never did that much for me, I’m sorry to say,” my ex-wife told me. “I prefer less oily hair. Something curlier.” She put her hand on top of my unruly mop.

“Clark couldn’t help it that it was the 1930s,” I said.

“I guess, but he could have cut back on the Vitalis.”

“Anyway, you’re skipping it,” I reminded her.

“Yes.”

“Thanks for coming today,” I told her, running the risk that I could easily start getting far too gushy. “I meant everything I said.”

“I know, Elliot.” Sharon got close and kissed me lightly. “Let’s not make major decisions this week, okay?”

I nodded. “Okay. But eventually, right?”

“We’ll see. I think maybe I need to not have a husband for a while.”

“How about a boyfriend?”

She lowered her eyebrows and her voice the same amount. “Not this week.”

“Okay. I . . .”

The lights in the lobby went out, and then came back on. Sharon looked around.

“Chief Dutton is playing with my equipment,” I said.

“Are you sure you
want
a girlfriend?” Before I could answer, she kissed my cheek and started toward the front doors.

44

Bananas
(1971) and
Guacamole
(this week)

TWO
weeks later, the closeness of my office (which is similar to the closeness one would feel stuffed into a shoebox) had overwhelmed me, and it was too cold to go outside for long—I am a warm-blooded animal, and should be living in a more temperate climate—so I set up camp for the late afternoon in the lobby of Comedy Tonight, where I could look out onto Edison Avenue and ponder life, since I didn’t actually have anything to do.

Sophie and Jonathan were behind the snack bar, setting up for the evening and making each other giggle. Sophie’s style had shifted away from the baggy sweatshirts and combat boots, and was trying to decide whether it should return to its Goth roots or move onto something that allowed for a color other than black. Right now, she was wearing black pants and ballet slippers (pink, of all things) with a black tuxedo shirt open at the neck. I don’t know how, but she pulls it off.