“I’m sorry, Carla, I didn’t mean to upset you. It’s just that I’m offended that everyone seems to simply assume I took Anthony’s movie, and I guess I took it out on you. Please forgive me.”
Since I was actually being sincere, I was glad Carla stopped and considered, then smiled at me. “I understand,” she said. “You were using reverse psychology.”
“I was?”
“Sure. You wanted me to know how it felt to be suspected, so you pretended to suspect me. Now I know what you’re going through.” Carla reached up and kissed me on the cheek. “Don’t worry, Mr. Freed. I’ll talk to Anthony for you.” And she squeezed past me and walked out into the lobby to talk to Sophie.
Yeah, that was it.
It took a while, but I regained my senses and found the piece of paper on which I’d written the phone number Meg Vidal had given me. I dialed carefully, as it was long distance, and our budget is, for lack of a better metaphor, stretched to the limit.
I expected the voice that answered to be crusty. Ex-cops are supposed to be crusty, especially those who used to be big-city homicide detectives. But this voice was soft and patient, almost cozy. You wanted to crawl up inside it and wrap it around you.
“Sergeant Robert Newman?” I asked, figuring this was his roommate, his manservant, or his nurse.
“That’s who I used to be,” he answered. “And who exactly is this, calling me thirty years after I left the force?”
I told him who I was, and dropped Meg’s name—and her father’s—early in my explanation. In fact, I dropped the “Magpie” reference, and got a chuckle from the other end. Sergeant Newman listened quietly, until I brought up the reason for my call.
“I wasn’t the primary on the case,” he explained. “It was investigated by the fire department first, then the arson squad, but there was never any evidence that the fire had been set. It was electrical; started in a wall in the kitchen, if I recall correctly.”
“If you
recall
correctly?” I marveled. “I wish I could remember something that happened to me last week as well as you remember what happened to you fifty years ago.”
“So do I,” Newman said.
“So there was nothing suspicious about the fire at all?” I asked. “Why did they call in Arson?”
“I never found out,” Newman told me. “But I heard kind of behind the scenes that there’d been a tip. Somebody had seen the victim’s husband in the area of the house before the fire started.”
I sat up a little bit in my chair. I’d have sat up a lot in my chair, but then, you’d have to know my chair; it’s just not possible. “Was it suspicious that Les Townes would be in the vicinity of his own house?” I asked Newman.
He took a while before answering. “You understand I can’t verify any of this. It was just something I heard around the station house.”
“I understand.”
“Well,” Newman said, “whoever saw the husband said that he was carrying things
out
of the house. Awards, pictures in frames, things like that. As if he was leaving.”
“Or cleaning out the things he didn’t want to lose in the fire,” I said.
“Yeah,” Newman agreed. “Like that. Allegedly.”
“Did Townes report anything like that—awards, photos, posters—lost in the fire afterward?”
“That I don’t know,” Newman told me. “You’d have to check the insurance records, if they still exist.”
“It doesn’t seem to add up,” I said, half to Newman, half to myself. “There appears to be all this evidence that the fire might have been set deliberately, and that Townes would be a great suspect, but no one ever followed up.”
“Hey, I was just a cop,” Newman said. “I wasn’t a detective and I wasn’t the primary.”
“I’m not blaming you, Sergeant,” I told him. “I just find it strange.”
“In those days? The studios could have covered up World War Two if they wanted to.”
I thanked Newman and called the Booth Actors’ Home in Englewood to ask Harry Lillis for Townes’s phone number. After a few minutes of complaining (“What, I’m not enough of a celebrity for you now?”), he gave me a number in Queens, New York, about an hour’s drive from where I was sitting.
I walked out into the lobby and looked around. Rarely had such a hive of inactivity been recorded in modern life: Sophie was still reading, Jonathan standing around. Carla must have gone up to the booth on inside the theatre. There was hardly a sound from inside the auditorium, other than that of the movie itself. I walked to the snack bar.
“Hey, Sophie,” I began, “how’d you like to give me a ride?”
She looked up from her book and rolled her eyes in time-honored teenager fashion. “Typical male,” she said. “Need, need, need.”
11
AFTER
Staten Island, Queens is probably the least understood borough of New York City. Everyone knows Manhattan—they see it on TV every New Year’s Eve. They
think
they understand Brooklyn, because they’ve seen lots of World War II movies where one of the “earthy” characters is named “Brooklyn,” and there are reruns of
Welcome Back, Kotter
on TV every once in a while. They’ve heard of the Bronx, because Yankee Stadium is there. But Queens? Since the World’s Fair moved on in 1965, not many people outside the tristate area have given it much thought. Except when they watch
King of Queens
, which was shot in Culver City, California.
The fact is, Queens encompasses a lot of space, and runs the gamut. There are parts of it that constitute the most suburban areas within New York City limits, and the directions Les Townes had given me on the phone indicated he lived in one of them. Sophie, hands clenched tightly at ten and two on the wheel, her two-month-old driver’s license no doubt burning a hole in her pocket, watched the road intently as I navigated through the streets. So far, we seemed to be doing all right. Everything was right where the paper in my hands said it would be.
“Why don’t you drive yourself?” Sophie asked me through clenched teeth. “Why are you always making women drive you around?”
“First of all, I
do
drive; I just don’t own a car,” I answered. “And I don’t
only
get women to drive me; sometimes men drive me, instead.”
“Why?”
“Because I don’t believe in destroying our environment strictly for our own convenience,” I told her. I figured the political conviction in my voice would impress her.
“So how is
me
driving you better than
you
driving you?”
“I’m still working on that.”
We rode in silence for a few minutes, other than my reading out directions when appropriate. Sophie hadn’t blinked since the Queens Midtown Tunnel. The obvious lightning bolt finally hit me in the head. “This is your first time driving in New York, isn’t it?” I asked her.
Her silence told me I was right.
“Do you want to pull over and let me drive?” I asked.
Sophie’s eyes narrowed. “So you think the little lady can’t handle it, is that it, Elliot? You think the big, strong man has to step in and save the day every time . . .”
Women (or in Sophie’s case, girls) were making less sense than usual to me lately. But instead of saying “shut up and drive,” like I wanted to, I said, “I think this is it.” Because I thought it was.
Sophie pulled her car (a year-old Prius her parents had bought her) over in front of a respectable, if not wildly impressive, brick detached row house that had been expanded in the back. Not the kind of home where you’d expect to find a legend, but hey, Louis Armstrong lived in a house like that in Queens for decades after he became a star— until he died, after which living there would have been impractical.
It was Les Townes in that house, a guy I’d spent my twenties trying to be as cool as. Never at a loss for the right thing to say to a lady. Never unable to smile his way into your heart. Always able to hit the high notes without breaking a sweat. Nothing
ever
bothered him.
At the screening Friday night, I hadn’t been prepared to meet Townes the way I was when Dad drove me to Englewood to meet Lillis. And he’d gotten the best of me in every conversation we’d had so far, because I didn’t know how to react to him. I had no sense of what the man was like offscreen.
I got out of the car, but Sophie demurred, saying she’d prefer not to “be introduced as your chauffeur,” and stayed in the car. As I walked up the steps, she put iPod buds into her ears. I guess car stereo is for the Male Establishment.
It wasn’t like I hadn’t met Les Townes just a few nights before, but now, I was barging in on him to ask whether he’d murdered his wife fifty years earlier. It’s not a social situation in which I’m particularly well practiced, nor comfortable. I didn’t
want
Townes to have killed Vivian Reynolds; I wanted him to be smooth and dashing and swilling a martini with a carnation in his lapel. That probably wasn’t going to happen, though. I stood there for a moment, gathering my thoughts.
Sophie lowered the power window on the passenger’s side and yelled up at me, “If you push that button, a bell will ring.” I gave her a look that emphasized my position as a Patriarch of Society and turned away from her. For a moment, I felt like I should check under my arms or try to smell my own breath.
There wasn’t anything else to do, so I rang the doorbell.
I heard a good deal of clatter behind the door, and two voices—both male—speaking to each other loudly, but not in anger. I couldn’t quite make out what they were saying. After a few moments, the door opened, and standing in front of me was a large man.
Okay, a
very
large man. A man whose build might bring other men (like, say, me) to their knees if it decided to do so. He was tall, and probably would have been thin, but he’d clearly been spending the past twenty years working out on very serious exercise equipment. This effect was emphasized by the tight gray T-shirt that advertised said brand of very serious exercise equipment. In case I’d missed the point.
But around the eyes and the forehead, especially, there was something eerily familiar: he had a face very reminiscent of his mother. Vivian Reynolds. I did some quick math, and realized that despite being constructed something like the Space Needle, the Hulk would have to be in his early fifties. Which meant he could still kill me, but there was a chance I could run faster than he could.
I must have stood staring at the structure in front of me for some time, because it looked at me and said, “What?”
Startled out of my heightened state of intimidation, I answered with surprising lucidity, although my voice seemed a full tone higher than usual. “Does Les Townes live here?” I asked.
The Sears Tower turned and called into the house, “Dad! There’s some dude here to see you!”
From inside, I heard Townes’s voice ask, “Is that Elliot Freed?”
“How the hell should I know?” Mr. Kong answered.
“There’s this new thing just invented,” Townes called back, his voice getting louder as he approached the front door. “It’s called ‘asking.’ You could try that. Besides, he called and said he was coming.”
“I never saw him before,” said the ogre.
“That’s because you couldn’t be bothered to go to the theatre Friday night,” his father answered.
Townes’s large son turned back toward me and asked, “You Elliot Freed?”
I had little to gain by lying, so I admitted it. By now, Les Townes had made it into the front hallway and was peering around his son’s superstructure to identify me.
“Mr. Freed,” he said. “Back to ask for a return performance so soon.”
“You were a big enough hit, Mr. Townes,” I said. Might as well butter up the subject before you go in for the kill. Especially when there’s a guy standing between you who could tear you in half by looking at you the right way.
Like Lillis, Townes’s the face was older, wrinkled, with less hair on top, but you didn’t have to squint to see Les Townes in there. He’d been a handsome man, reportedly a ladies’ man until he got married, but after Vivian’s death . . . there’d been no talk of another woman after that. Ever.
“Come in,” Townes said, and the Colossus of Rhodes moved to one side so I could enter the room. It was less a living room than a sitting room, where a few overstuffed chairs and one sofa were framed by bookshelves and a fire-place on one side. It was a considerably grander room than I had thought when standing on the outside looking in. I complimented Townes on his home. His son eyed me from his high perch, and didn’t seem impressed. The old Freed charm wasn’t working on
anybody
these days.
Maybe there was no “old Freed charm.” I’d have to give that some thought.
Townes nodded in the direction of the giant redwood and said, “This is my son, Wilson.”
I said hello to Wilson, which was similar to saying hello to the Great Wall of China, but then, the Wall might have given a more animated reply. I’m not sure what it was about me that was annoying the comedian’s offspring, but Wilson sure didn’t care for me being around.
“What can I do for you, Mr. Freed?” Townes asked.
“The first thing you can do is call me Elliot,” I told him, and Townes smiled and nodded. “But I’m also here because since the show Friday night, I’ve been getting a lot of questions about your career, and some of them I couldn’t answer.”
Townes feigned looking surprised. “Even you?” he asked. “From the way you were talking to the crowd the other night, I thought you knew more about us than we did.” He gestured that I should sit in one of the easy chairs, and I did. Townes walked slowly to the other, and Wilson loomed in the archway to the dining room. He did not sit.
“I’m a pretty enthusiastic fan,” I said, “but I’ve only read what’s been printed. You were the guy who did it.”
“
One
of the guys,” Townes replied with diplomacy.
“Granted, but you were
there
. I wasn’t.”
“You should be happy you weren’t. Then you’d be as old as me. So, okay,” Townes said, “what do your customers want to know?”