Some Like It Hot-Buttered by JEFFREY COHEN Read Free Book Online Page A

name. It could have been him.
    “It couldn’t have been him,” I said.
    O’Donnell nodded with great sarcasm, the unofficial State Language of New Jersey. “Let’s go ask him,” he said.
    After directing Patel to stay with the cartons, O’Donnell led Levant and me upstairs. Sophie and her parents were still in the lobby, where Sophie was busying herself with washing down the frames for the Coming Soon posters, and her parents were finding the tiny spots she missed before she had a chance to check for herself.
    We walked directly into the auditorium as I tried to think of ways to a) accuse Anthony of video piracy and send him to a federal penitentiary, and b) wake him. As it turned out, neither of those tactics would be necessary.
    Row H was empty. So were all the other rows and seats.
    Anthony was gone.

6
    It had been useless to search for Anthony, I realized the next morning as I was biking back into Midland Heights from New Brunswick. He had turned off his cell phone, never gone back to the off-campus apartment he rented with three other Cinema Studies majors, hadn’t called his parents (and the police calling them had made for a truly memorable experience, I’m sure), and had no girlfriend, which wasn’t a tremendous surprise. Most women wouldn’t flock to Anthony until he had won his first Golden Globe Award.
    If he were behind the pirated videos, did they have anything to do with Vincent Ansella’s murder? How did the two fit together, if at all? And how much longer did this mean Comedy Tonight would have to remain closed? (Not all my impulses are altruistic.)
    Sergeant O’Donnell had again questioned Sophie and her parents, but they insisted they hadn’t seen Anthony leave the auditorium, and I believed them. The officers had followed us out of the auditorium when we left, assuming Anthony was asleep, and he’d probably gone out one of the side exits, which the cops had been using all day. Normally, those doors set off an alarm, but I’d turned off the bell at the request of the police.
    See? It pays to show that fire exit announcement before every movie.
    I had no idea where to start looking for Anthony, although O’Donnell had been skeptical about that the night before. I’d shown him my records, which listed Anthony’s parents as the “in case of emergency” contacts, and his address on Guilden Street in New Brunswick as his local address, but the investigator had insisted I must know of some other contact in case Anthony didn’t show up for work one night.
    “Anthony hasn’t missed a day of work since I hired him,” I’d told O’Donnell. He wasn’t happy about that, either.
    I rode up Edison Avenue past the Dunkin’ Donuts to Comedy Tonight. My father, Arthur Freed, stood in front of the theatre, ahead of me as always, dressed in polyester slacks, a belt, and a double-knit shirt that was less wrinkled than the tuxedo I’d worn at my wedding. I stopped the bike just at the door.
    “I thought we were painting today,” I told my father. We get together once or twice a week to do repairs and continue the restoration of Comedy Tonight.
    He looked puzzled. “We are.”
    “You dress better for painting than I would to apply for a bank loan.”
    Dad chuckled. One of his many virtues is that he thinks I’m funny, even when I’m being perfectly serious. The man hasn’t raised his voice to me once since I was fourteen, and that’s mostly attributable to the fact that even when I was doing my adolescent best to infuriate him, Arthur Freed thought I was a riot.
    I unlocked the front door and let him inside. Today we were working in the auditorium, not the lobby, since I didn’t have to worry about patrons smelling paint fumes or getting ladders out of the way in time for the show. Not today. Maybe not tomorrow. (But soon, and for the rest of my life?) In fact, who knew when? Now that evidence of a second crime had been found on the premises, it was anybody’s guess when Comedy Tonight