coffeemaker, and put on Taj Mahal’s “Phantom Blues” good and loud. He sorted through his bills and catalogues distractedly for a few minutes while the coffee brewed and the apartment cooled. Then he poured himself a mug of strong coffee, laced it with two fingers of rich chocolate milk, and plunged back into his essay.
When he had finished polishing it he phoned Lacy.
“Young Mr. Berger,” his editor said brightly. “I wondered when I’d hear from you.”
“I’m responsible for his death, Lacy.”
“What are you talking about? The first set of wire stories are labeling it ‘an apparent suicide.’ ”
“I could have prevented it. I gave him some advice. Bad advice. And now he’s dead. He was the best damned actor of his generation and he’s dead. He deserves a critical tribute in tomorrow’s paper, Lacy. His career was so much more than tabloid tiffs and that stupid Dark Star. His real story needs to be told. I need to tell it. What do you think, am I being too self-indulgent?”
“What I think, darling boy, is that you’re the only arts critic I’ve ever worked with who actually wonders whether someone would be interested in what he has to say. Don’t you realize that there are one million avid readers who can’t wait to read your final take on Tito? They will gobble up every single word. Go for it, Mitch, do you hear me? Give me something.”
“On its way,” he announced, e-mailing her the file.
Then Mitch went off in search of his relief.
He found it exactly where he had found it ever since he was a small boy. Most of the favorite childhood haunts were long gone now-the New Yorker, the Regency, the Little Carnegie, the Bleeker Street Cinema. Skyrocketing rents and the advent of video rentals had driven them out of business. Fans could watch the old movies in their own homes now. And that was well and good. But for Mitch, the movie up on the screen was only one aspect of his viewing experience. He loved being inside of the theater itself. The world made sense to Mitch when he was in a movie theater after the lights went down. It wasn’t merely his refuge from the painful disorder of the outside world. It was his natural habitat.
In the darkness of a movie theater, Mitch Berger came alive.
A precious few sanctuaries still remained scattered here and there across the five boroughs, if you knew where to go. And on this steamy July afternoon Mitch knew exactly where to go-to a matinee double bill of The Deadly Mantis and Them! at the Film Forum on Houston Street.
He was practically alone there in the blessed darkness. No one sat within ten rows of him as he sank into a seat, loaded down with sandwiches, pickles, potato salad, cookies, candy, and soda. He unwrapped a sandwich and got busy chomping on it, sore jaw or not, as Craig Stevens got busy examining those very curious tread marks in the snow outside the demolished arctic lookout station. And so, as The Deadly Mantis played out on the screen, Mitch found his solace.
Until suddenly someone tall and slim slid into the seat next to him and whispered, “Is that corned beef I smell?”
“No, it’s pastrami,” he whispered back, stunned. “What are you doing here?”
“Looking for you, doughboy,” Des replied. “What did you think?”
“But how did you know where to find me?”
“I know you, that’s how. Besides, this isn’t my first stop. I’ve already been to the American Museum of the Moving Image out in Astoria-”
“Naw, I wasn’t in a Bergman mood. Want a half sandwich?”
“Uh-uh. Then I stopped at the Thalia, where they were running a Laurence Olivier retrospective.”
“Yech, he was a poseur. How about a piece of pickle?”
“Damn, there sure are a lot of white men in this city who look like you and go to films by themselves in the middle of the day. And here I’d thought you were unique. What are we watching? Look out, that’s one gigantic bug!”
“It’s a praying mantis,” Mitch whispered excitedly, as the two of them sat there with their heads together. “This is actually a classic cautionary tale about the effects of nuclear radiation on nature. They’re saying that we shouldn’t mess around with powers we don’t understand, because really bad things can happen. We have to be humble. Can’t think that we know everything.”
She glanced at him curiously. “Are we still talking about this movie?”
“Well, yeah,” he replied, frowning. “Hey, want a Mallomar?”
She leaned over now and kissed him with an urgency that surprised Mitch. “You scared me, baby.”
“I’m sorry, Des. I didn’t mean to. I just had to get away.”
“I know that,” she whispered, squeezing his hand. “My ride’s double-parked out front. I need for you to come back out into the world, okay? I have some important things to tell you.”
“Are we going to come back in and watch the rest of the movie?”
“No, we’re not.”
He gathered up his food and followed her up the aisle and out into the hot sun, blinking at the bright light and colors. Horns honked. Tires screeched. People shouted. People rushed. The world was never a more vivid place than it was in that first moment after emerging from a movie theater into daylight.
The interior of her cruiser was already hot and stuffy. Des turned on the engine and cranked up the air conditioning to high. Now that he was able to get a good look at her Mitch realized that the love of his life looked exceedingly frazzled and upset.
It was me. She was worried about me.
“We won’t get toxicology results for several days, so we have no idea how stoned Tito was or wasn’t,” she informed him, sitting there with her hands on the wheel, shoulders squared inside her uniform. “But the medical examiner’s autopsy has turned up some indications that are not entirely consistent with suicide as the cause of death.”
“What indications, Des?” Already, he could feel his heart beginning to race.
She turned her steady, green-eyed gaze on him, and said, “They found moss and lichen under Tito’s fingernails, which were severely torn. And the tips of his sandals were scuffed. A crime scene tekkie went back with a long-range lens to check out the side of the cliff, and the moss that’s growing six feet or so from the top has definitely been disturbed. All of which indicates that the man was hanging there, scrabbling and kicking, before he went over.”
Mitch gulped. “He was murdered, is that it? Somebody pushed him.”
“Slow down, cowboy,” Des cautioned him. “Nothing is obvious yet. If you want to spin it that he jumped, there’s still a perfectly plausible explanation.”
“Which is?…”
“That the man changed his mind at the very last second. Tried to save him himself, failed, and over he went. Which would also explain the position of his body when he landed.”
“Oh.”
“Except for one other interesting piece of information our canvassing turned up,” Des continued. “A lady who lives in one of those farmhouses on the Devil’s Hopyard Road says she heard a car sideswipe the guardrail near her house sometime around one in the morning. It’s a harsh, god-awful noise. She knows it well. She claims the car was heading in the direction of the falls. This would correspond with the fresh scrapes we found on Tito’s Jeep, okay? Now here comes the interesting part-she couldn’t get back to sleep. Was still up at about two-thirty, heating up some milk in her kitchen, when she heard another car speed by. Only this car was heading backdown to Dorset from the falls. It’s a dead-end road, Mitch. That means somebody else was up there when Tito died.”
“His killer,” Mitch declared.
“Or a material witness, at the very least. Not that we’ve found any physical evidence to support it. The rain washed all of the shoe prints away. The only fingerprints on the schnapps bottle were Tito’s. The only tire tracks in the ditch belonged to his Jeep. Of course, somebody could have just left their car in the middle of the damned road at that time of night.” Des paused now, her face tightening. “There’s one other ingredient we have to stir into the mix… Esme Crockett’s fat lip.”
“You think Tito hit her, don’t you?”
“Somebody sure did.”
“How did she explain it?”
“She hasn’t. She’s in seclusion. Too distraught to talk, according to her big-time New York doctor. Her big-
