It Happened One Knife (24 page)

“
What
situation?”

"May I get back to my workstation, please?” Sophie asked.
Workstation
?

I got out of the way and turned to face Jonathan. I didn’t care if Sophie heard the question now.

But Jonathan was gone.

Sophie went back behind the snack bar, and as she sat down, I thought she winced a little. Well, good. Maybe I wouldn’t get her that new stool, after all.

31

No one will ever win the battle of the sexes. There’s too much fraternizing with the enemy.

—HENRY KISSINGER

IT
is never easy for me to knock on the door at Sharon’s house. Since she and Gregory moved in together (about twenty minutes after she moved out of my house), I’ve felt like I did on the set of
Split Personality
: that someone had taken something that was mine and turned it into something I could barely recognize, while I stood by and watched.

Of course I know (before Sophie can get on my case about the previous sentence) that Sharon never belonged to me, and that she is still the same woman she was when we were married. But there’s something unnerving about seeing a person with whom you were that intimate move on to someone else. I have enough of an ego for it to hurt, deeply. So entering their home had always been awkward.

Tonight, though, took the prize for weirdest yet, because I was knocking on Sharon’s door for our third date since starting this experiment. We were going out to a play being performed at the George Street Playhouse in New Brunswick (Sharon’s idea), but instead of her picking me up at the town house, from which we could have walked to the theatre, Sharon had suggested first having dinner at her house. Gregory was in Las Vegas, at a convention of people who put other people to sleep for money. I hoped there’d be a hypnotist working the hotel lounge, just for the irony.

But somehow, the two thousand miles between us didn’t seem quite far enough.

Sharon opened the door and, as usual, immediately riveted my attention. She doesn’t favor low-cut tops, but the one she was wearing was tighter than usual, and she had on those jeans again.

She knows exactly what effect they have on me.

“Come on in,” she said, gesturing. The house, as befitting a two-physician income, was large and well furnished. Sharon doesn’t show off, but she has really good taste. As evidence, I offer the fact that she divorced me. As more evidence, I offer the fact that she was divorcing Gregory. She doesn’t always get it right the first time, but, eventually, she manages.

I offered the red rose I’d been holding behind my back, and she took it, smiling. I didn’t tell her I’d bought it at the Shop Rite, but the UPC code on the wrapping may have betrayed my lack of class. She pretended not to notice. “It’s beautiful,” Sharon said. “Thank you.”

And she leaned over and gave me a kiss that would kill a normal man.

“Wow,” I said when we came up for air. “If I’d known the flower would get that kind of reception, I’d have bought the whole dozen.”

My ex-wife smiled the smile she thinks is mysterious, but is really just adorable. “The night is young,” she said.

“That doesn’t make any sense, but I’m really turned on,” I told her.

“Good. I made dinner,” she said. “Are you hungry?”

“That’s one of the things I am, yes.”

I followed her into the dining room, where Sharon had set the table and put out covered dishes. We sat, feeling way too formal, and she served out chicken Kiev and rice pilaf, as well as asparagus and a white wine that I’m sure has a name, but don’t ask me to repeat it. She is a wonderful cook, but I could barely eat a bite for the first few minutes. The atmosphere was just a little too intense.

Finally, hunger took over, as well as my fear that I seemed less than enthralled with the evening Sharon had planned. “This really beats the dinner I made for you,” I told her. “I’m embarrassed.”

“Don’t be. You’re very good at things that aren’t cooking.”

It wasn’t like Sharon to be this forward, but I certainly wasn’t complaining. I think we’d both felt disappointed— and ashamed of our petty disappointment—when the call about Harry Lillis’s death had interrupted us the previous week. We were picking up where we’d left off, and it was making the atmosphere in the room a little strange.

It didn’t help that I was flirting madly with another man’s wife in that man’s house. The fact that the man in question had done the same with my wife in my house provided little solace. I can’t say whether revenge is a dish best served cold, because Sharon was serving a hot dinner. In a number of ways.

Eventually, we settled into our normal pattern, although the underlying tension was still there. We started to discuss Lillis, the implications that Townes or his son had killed him, and Sophie’s odd behavior of late.

Neither of us said a word about
Killin’ Time
. I was, frankly, afraid to break the mood—women respond so unpredictably when you accuse them of robbery. I can’t vouch for Sharon’s motivations.

“The problem is, I really don’t
want
Les Townes to be the killer,” I said. “I grew up watching the guy in movies and wishing I could be more like him. I can’t just tear down that part of my character and start fresh now.”

Sharon’s eyes were sympathetic. “I’m afraid you may have to get used to the idea,” she said. “It seems everything Harry said about Les was true.”

“I know.” I sighed. “I’ll admit, all the evidence is circumstantial, but Lillis was killed in almost exactly the same way that Vivian Reynolds died in 1958. I’m not sure how reliable my Internet evidence on that one is, but the parallels are eerie.”

“How much more can you find out about Vivian without going to L.A.?” Sharon asked.

“I’m not sure I could find out much more even if I did go,” I told her. “All of the studio insiders are dead now, and so are most of the cops. There’s nobody to ask.”

“Did you check on the insurance?”

“Yes.” I hadn’t told her this before. “I called the insurance company saying I was researching a book on famous insurance claims in Southern California.”

“You didn’t. And they bought this?”

“Hook, line, sinker, pier, and coastline,” I said. “They were thrilled to be included in such a long-overdue project. ”

Sharon giggled. I could have eaten her alive.

“Anyway, the diligent girl working in the records department spent about an hour digging into the archives and called me back. The house had fire insurance, of course, but it was for the right amount—nothing inflated, just what the house was worth—and Townes didn’t appear to be in any serious financial straits. Vivian’s life insurance named Wilson the beneficiary, but in trust to Townes.”

“Does the plot thicken?” Sharon asked. We had finished eating, so I helped her carry the plates into the kitchen and put them into the dishwasher.

“I don’t know. It’s natural she’d leave her money to her son. The policy had been changed when he was born, but Townes had signed it, too, and changed his own to mirror Vivian’s.”

“So the money went to Wilson, who was where when the fire started?” Sharon was all attention now.

“He was at his grandmother’s. Les Townes’s mother.”

“So what does this all mean?” Sharon closed the dishwasher, and I was standing right behind her. I didn’t move back to give her room.

“It all looks awfully normal, from an insurance point of view,” I said. “Now, we’d better get going, or we’re going to be late for that play.”

Sharon grinned mischievously. “Well, here’s the thing about the play . . .” she said.

“Yeah?” I moved a little closer. It was that kind of a grin.

“I never actually bought the tickets,” she said.

I put my hands on her hips and pulled her just slightly toward me. Sharon moved close enough to kiss. “You didn’t?” I asked.

“No. I didn’t want to see it. It sounded dumb.”

“Then why did you invite me to the play?” I said. “Is this how the whole dating thing is going to go?”

“I knew you don’t like coming here, so I had to pretend we were going out,” she said. “It’s practical.”

“No, practical would have been if we’d gone to my house. That’s practical.”

“I don’t like going to your house,” she said. “I wanted this to happen here.”

“You wanted
what
to happen here?” I asked. It was going to come from her, not me, if I had any say in the matter.

“This,” Sharon said, and gave me another coronary-threatening kiss. This time, I didn’t try to come up for air very soon.

When we finally did start to breathe again, I said, “Here’s good.”

Then we didn’t talk again for quite some time.

32

I
woke up in a strange bed in a strange room in a strange house, something I hadn’t done for a very long time. That odd feeling of disorientation is overwhelming for a brief period, but it usually dissipates quickly.

Not this time.

It didn’t help that Sharon wasn’t there when I woke up. I could hear the water running in the shower, so I knew she was still in the house. But her absence from the bed made for extra weirdness, and that was something I didn’t really need.

A lot of men wake up after spending a night in bed with a woman and wonder what they might have been thinking the night before. I knew exactly what I’d been thinking, and didn’t mind having thought it. But I was asking myself a lot of questions in the bright morning light.

There was one other question that hung over the room, and having cooled down considerably from the night before, I could ask it now:
Did Sharon steal Anthony’s movie?
Suppose she had—for altruistic reasons, surely— then what would I do? What
should
I do?

Men also make a lot of ill-considered choices after a night like I’d just spent. And I was no exception: I decided that being alone in Sharon’s bedroom (which these days thankfully bore no traces of Gregory, not even a tie clip— he’d occupied the guest bedroom since returning to the house in this weird arrangement they’d worked out), I had a rare opportunity to eliminate the possibility that my ex-wife had committed robbery, so it was my right—no, my
duty
—to prove her innocent.

You can talk yourself into all sorts of things after you’ve had a night you’ve been dreaming about for a long, long time.

I got out of bed, after doing a quick visual scan of the room for hiding places that could hold large cases of film reels. Discounting the closet as too obvious, I started by dropping to the floor and looking under the bed. But there was nothing to be seen except shoes and a baseball bat. Sharon considers a baseball bat the first line of defense against nighttime burglars. She believes in strict gun control, but insists the Second Amendment guarantees each citizen the right to wield a Louisville Slugger.

Maybe the closet wasn’t too obvious after all. I crossed the room and opened the door, and took a few moments to drink it all in.

I’ve never lived in a home that had a walk-in closet. The best I’ve ever been able to do is an arm-in closet, which allows an arm to be extended all the way in if a shirt is far in the back. But this was almost a whole room.

It had a full-length mirror, and shelves on three sides, as well as a closet pole on each wall, holding Sharon’s suits, skirts, and blouses. It was all so tidy, she could find anything she needed with a quick glance. My closets in the town house, on the other hand, were more receptacles for piles of clothing, out of which I would pull what was needed at any given moment. I’m clean, but I’m not neat.

The thing about such a well-organized closet, with everything immediately visible, was that it drove home the point: there were no cans of film here. But there were plenty of shoes. Women seem to need a truly horrifying number of shoes, despite the vast majority of them having only two feet. Males don’t understand this, but we put up with it because, well, they’re women. As long as they’re nice to us, we figure they can indulge that shoe jones anytime they want.

Hang on, though: the floor of the closet was built up on a riser, meaning there was storage space beneath the shelves on one side. Storage space with a door that was closed, hiding the items being stored.

Just enough space for film canisters.

This bore investigation. I walked to the spot where the raised section began, and got down on the floor to reach for the handle. I stole a quick glance toward the closet door, saw no one there, and opened the storage space.

It was in shadow, and difficult to see inside, so I lowered myself closer to the floor, face almost inside the storage area. If I’d had a flashlight, I’d be able to see in, but maybe . . .

I reached inside and felt around. Something grazed the back of my hand, so I grabbed for it and pulled it out.

It was a fuzzy blue slipper, the left one, with a two-inch heel on it. I vividly remembered a very interesting evening that had begun a few years ago with that slipper and its brother on Sharon’s feet. Yes, I remembered that fondly. But it wasn’t a can of film. I put the slipper back where I’d found it and closed the door.

About four feet farther into the closet was another section with a door. I crawled toward it, scraping my knees on the carpet, and resumed my position, face inches from the floor, and felt for the door handle.

“Okay, I give up. What the heck are you doing?”

I’m crazy about hearing Sharon’s voice, but it wasn’t what I was hoping for at that moment. I spun, as well as a man can spin on his bare knees, and faced her. She had her hair in the traditional female towel-turban, but that was all she was wearing.