The Cutting Room (2 page)

“And what did he do, turn it on and drop his pants or something?”

“No. He usually showed old film clips.”

“Oh, wait, I know this guy,” the first cop said to the second. “He shows, like, the Stooges.”

“That’s right,” I said. “Sometimes Alan showed the Three Stooges.”

They just spoke to each other: “Like Moe cracking up and everything.”

“Yes,” I said, “rare old Stooges outtakes.”

Just to each other: “Right. Whenever I see it, I think, I wouldn’t want this to be
my
life, but I like to watch it, anyway.”

“Me too.”

“I’m sure Alan would have found that a touching tribute,” I said.

They ignored me. I remembered what happened at Ernst Lubitsch’s funeral. William Wyler had turned to Billy Wilder and said, sadly, “No more Lubitsch.” And Wilder had replied, “No more Lubitsch
movies
.”

“At Ernst Lubitsch’s funeral—” I started.

But as before, the cops were uninterested in any wisdom but their own. “So what were you doing there?”

“Alan had called me. I came over.”

“You do that a lot?”

“A fair amount.”

“Did you know that his wallet was lying on the floor, empty?”

“No.” I hadn’t, actually. “I guess I was too rattled to notice anything.”

“Did you know that an empty bottle of amphetamines was lying in the sink in the john? And so was an almost-empty bag of grass?”

“No,” I said, honest again. “But Alan liked to get high.”

“I wonder why,” one said, and both of them chuckled.

“
You
like to get high?” the other asked me.

“No,” I said. That was true, too.

The cops looked at each other, and each shrugged a bit. They seemed to have nothing but contempt for Alan, and they hadn’t even known him. I remembered Red Skelton’s famous remark at the hated mogul Harry Cohn’s funeral. He looked at the huge crowd and said, “You know what they say: ‘Give people what they want, and they’ll turn out.’ ”

I began, “Well, you know what Red Skelton said—”

But they were talking to each other again. They had even more contempt for me, who did not even medicate himself against his own insignificance. Okay, I thought, let them think I’m a bug, a nerd with no life. First off, it was sort of true, though I liked to think of myself as a hard-boiled nerd. Second, it was as good a cloak to hide behind as any other.

“Loser really didn’t have a lot to steal,” one said.

“More than some other loser did, apparently,” the other responded.

On the word
loser
, they turned to me again.

“Okay,” the first said. “Just make sure you leave your address and phone number.”

“And don’t leave town?” I asked.

Again, they were not interested in my amusing remark, a reference to film clichés.

“Do whatever you want,” was all one cop said.

On my way out of the precinct, I passed a closed room in which someone else was being interrogated. Through the small window in the door, I recognized one of the junkies who had been smoking crack in Alan’s vestibule. I could faintly hear her responding to badgering questions in a forlorn and confused whisper.

I could have stopped and told them that I didn’t think she did it, killed Alan. But I kept walking, and didn’t look back. They wouldn’t have cared what I had to say, anyway.

See, I didn’t think Alan was killed for his drugs or for his cash, such as they were. I was sure he had been killed because of what he had told me he had.

He was killed because of Orson Welles.

Orson Welles, of course, made what many consider the greatest American film,
Citizen Kane,
in 1941. Though Welles went back and forth about what would be his next project, he finally decided on an adaptation of Booth Tarkington’s novel about a disintegrating American family,
The Magnificent Ambersons.

The story was close to the director’s heart, given his own privileged upbringing. Welles had been born in . . .

But I do go on.

To cut to the chase, Welles made
Ambersons
with some of his usual cast from his old radio Mercury Theatre players: Joseph Cotten, Agnes Moorehead, and others. When the film was finished—a dark and heartrending masterpiece, over two hours—and about to be previewed, World War II was breaking out. Welles agreed to go to Brazil to make a film encouraging Latin American participation with the Allied cause.

While he was down there, his version of
Ambersons
was previewed in California, disastrously. Instead of coming back to help re-edit it, he stayed in Brazil—some say to party, some say to avoid confrontations about his movie and to essentially abandon it, and still others say to fulfill his patriotic duty.

Either way, the film—with the help of his loyal but powerless editor, Robert Wise (who later directed
The Sound of Music
)—was drastically recut by the studio and, in some places, reshot. The new version, running only eighty-eight minutes, was released, basically dumped, on the bottom half of a double bill.

It made little money but received glowing reviews, some critics’ awards, and Oscar nominations. Still, the original version, the lost footage, has obsessed film fans, has become in a sense the Holy Grail of the trivial community. While other seemingly lost movies have been found and resurrected,
The Magnificent Ambersons
remains the one that got away, the one that plays on in the imagination of any film detective. It would, many believe, surpass
Citizen Kane
as the greatest American movie ever made.

I left out a crucial part of what Alan had told me on the phone.

“Taping starts at eight. Be there on time,” he had said. “You’re going to faint.”

“Why?” I’d asked.

“Because I’ve got it.”

I’d waited, then pushed on, a faint chill coming over me. “Got what?”

“I’ve got
The Magnificent Ambersons
.”

Would Alan have bragged about it if it weren’t true? Maybe, but I suspected that, for once, secretive Alan just couldn’t keep his mouth shut. He really believed that this would be his break, propel his show into the big time—or at least into the mainstream—and the thought was too juicy to keep to himself.

Still, I had my doubts—until I got to his apartment. When I saw the reels missing from his old projector, when I saw his little screen toppled over, when I saw him dead, I knew he had been telling the truth. To any trivial person worth his salt, the full version of
The Magnificent Ambersons
was indeed worth killing for.

I didn’t tell the police, because I knew they wouldn’t understand. Or maybe I feared they
would
understand, at least feel compelled to include this as another motive in Alan’s murder. In other words, they might start nosing around for the film, just to look like they were doing their jobs.

I couldn’t have that. I had to find the film myself—not to avenge Alan’s death or even to solve his murder, though these were perhaps auxiliary motives. I had to find
The Magnificent Ambersons
in order to see the
The Magnificent Ambersons
, in order to
know
at long last what had been missing all those years.

How many more people had Alan told? Even though he’d said I was the only one, I couldn’t be sure. If I had been the only one with Alan’s confidence, it would mean that he was even lonelier than I thought. But it would also mean that I had the best chance of finding the film.

Of course, as I left the police station, I realized something else: Even if Alan hadn’t told another soul, at least one other person knew. The one who killed him.

That made me know that this piece of detection would be dangerous. And that made me start to run.

I ran to Midtown. There, I paced myself, slowed down, so as not to seem crazed. In fact, I wanted to be appear casual as I began my own private investigation.

“Gus!” I yelled, nonetheless.

I was glad that Gus Ziegler was at one of his many day jobs, the ones he did to finance his—unpaid—position as Alan’s cameraman. Gus was an aspiring trivial man, someone who just hung around our fringes, never seemed to have the energy or initiative to do anything on his own. He seemed content to run a camera, to copy pages, to take advantage of others’ hospitality, to lurk.

Rare for a man in the trivial community, Gus actually stayed in shape, compulsively, training at a gym for hours every day. Given his stature and Marine buzz cut, this gave him a squat and overbuilt look, bullheaded and thick-necked. His bulky veins and straining skin made him look much older than his—I didn’t know, probably thirty-eight—years.

Today, Gus was hiding his stocky frame under doctor’s whites. He was working at one of his more peculiar jobs: for a clinic, checking people’s blood pressures on the street. As I approached, he was sitting at a little table, squeezing a wrap around the arm of a businessman, as the regular world of commuters, yuppies, cops, and vendors swirled about him.

Did he know about Alan and
The Magnificent Ambersons
? That was what I was here to find out. And it was why I hadn’t mentioned his name to the police.

“Gus,” I said again, a bit quieter, as the businessman was unwrapped and went away.

“Hey, Roy,” Gus said, his voice oddly deep, from what I could only assume were steroids. “Fancy seeing you.”

“Have you heard about Alan?” I said.

I thought Gus flinched for a second, but I couldn’t be sure. He only said, in a conspiratorial whisper, “What do you mean? Wait, here, put this on.”

Sitting on the chair at his table on the busy sidewalk, I let Gus place the wrap around my arm. As we spoke, he pumped his little attachment, inflating my wrap.

“Now, what’s this about?” he said.

“He’s dead,” I blurted out. “Alan.”

Gus pumped the wrap so tight that it unpleasantly squeezed my arm. Then, with an apologetic grunt, he let it deflate.

“Jesus Christ. When was this?”

“Last night. You didn’t know?”

“No, I . . . how did it happen? Was it a heart attack? I begged him to come work out with me! Anger can be as bad as fat.”

“No, somebody murdered him. Stabbed him through the heart with a steak knife.”

“Jesus Christ. I told him to stay away from meat!”

Now Gus’s grip grew slack. The attachment slid from his hand. Absently, he detached the Velcro of the wrap from my arm. Then he just sat there, his big head bowed, as if in mourning. To any observer, it must have seemed bad news about my blood pressure. Then, after a respectable period, he looked up again.

“How do you know?” he said.

“I was there. I found him.”

“That is so weird,” he said.

“I know. Who’d want to kill Alan? I mean, for real, you know what I mean.”

“No, because—you know, he called me last night. He told me not to come over, that the taping was off. Otherwise I’d have been there. I’d be dead, too.”

Gus’s self-interest seemed genuine, so I was persuaded to believe him.

“Yeah,” I said. “I thought it was strange you weren’t around. He seemed ready to go, and nobody was working the camera.”

“So the taping
wasn’t
off?” Now Gus seemed grave, as if there were teamsters who should have been alerted about Alan’s amateur show.

“Apparently not. He didn’t tell you what the topic was, or anything?”

There was a pause. Gus looked at me very directly. I couldn’t tell if his face showed guilt or anger or complete confusion. His unique combination of sloth and compulsion always made Gus seem totally stupid, but I could never be sure.

“I think it was Abbott and Costello bloopers,” he said. “Why?”

“Nothing,” I said. “It’s just—any information might help.”

“But you don’t think that that had anything to do with—”

“Oh, no,” I backtracked quickly. “The cops are pretty sure it was the junkies in his lobby. He’d been robbed. And his, you know, his drugs were stolen.”

Gus shook his head, sadly, the world making sorry sense again. With his steroid-slowed voice, he said, “I kept trying to get him into Health.”

“I’m sure.”

Suddenly, Gus looked behind me. When I turned, I saw a heavyset woman, impatiently waiting her turn at the table.

“Well,” I said. “I better let you get back to work.”

“Okay,” he said despondently.

Gus spoke as if his job was pointless now; with Alan’s show over, what was he working for? Nothing.

“I just thought I’d let you know.”

“Thanks.” Gus nodded. “Your blood pressure’s fine, by the way.”

Gus extended his meaty hand, which I shook. I could not tell if the crushing grip in which he held me—for what seemed a terribly long time—was accidental or intentional, sad or somehow angry, or merely typical.

But I couldn’t help but feel it was a warning.

I decided to make a return trip to Alan’s apartment house. Some crime scene tape lay on the ground outside, as if hastily and indifferently discarded. That was the only evidence now that anything untoward had happened inside.

A drawn woman of about fifty, her head covered by a colorful but sagging hat, sat on the stoop. Her legs crossed, her right foot kicking, she read a magazine in the setting sun of the cool September day.

I stood there until she noticed me. Then I gave her a friendly—and vaguely sympathetic—smile. To my surprise, rolling up her magazine, she spoke first, and as if we were old friends.

“So. You hear about what happened?”

“Yeah,” I said. “It’s a shame. He was a sort of friend of mine.”

“I thought I’d seen you around.”

“Damn crackheads,” I said, and tried to sound indignant.

“Oh, please,” she said, her voice rising slightly. “I mean, maybe. But there was so much coming and going last night, it could have been anyone.”

I felt my heart lurch a little. I tried to appear calm.

“Is that right?” I said.

“Yes, it’s right.”

“You tell the police?”

She gave me a look that meant,
Are you kidding?
And since she was black and this was New York, I gave
her
a look that meant,
Say no more.