That’s what I learned from the detective who came by to ask me about going to the love hotel with Sano that night.
Then I realized there was something familiar about all this, about sending a toe to a victim’s house. I’d seen it before. But where? A movie. One with that gross guy in it, and with that other even grosser guy. And something about bowling, and a man in some kind of purple outfit dancing around in slow motion after he gets a strike. What was it?—directed by the something-or-other brothers. A rich old guy’s wife gets kidnapped and they send her toe to the husband. And then the bowling, and then somehow bowling and kidnapping get all mixed up. What was it called?
Oh! And Buscemi was in it too! Steve Buscemi! I’ve been a huge Buscemi fan ever since Con Air—something about that long, lanky frame and those big round eyes, that loose mouth, he just gets to me. Buscemi, Buscemi.
The Coen Brothers.
That’s it! The Hudsucker Proxy!
No, that wasn’t it. I checked the old movie programs on my bookshelf, and it turned out that Tim Robbins was in The Hudsucker Proxy, not Steve Buscemi. The movie about bowling and kidnapping was The Big Lebowski. Jeff Bridges played Buscemi’s gross friend, and John Goodman was the really gross fat guy, and the weird guy who danced after getting the strike was John Turturro. How could I have been so far off?
John Goodman was so gross in The Big Lebowski that I didn’t even buy the program—shit! It would have come in handy about now. But I remember, I’m sure of it. This lady gets kidnapped, and they cut off her toe and send it to her stinking-rich husband. But I don’t remember how it all turned out.
I seem to remember that John gave this crazy speech about something.
…And?…that the kidnapping was all a fake.
But I don’t really remember the ending.
I’ll have to rent the DVD. Maybe I can watch it with Yoji. That would be fun.
Like a date.
But I shouldn’t be thinking about that right now. A guy I did it with—even if it was just once!—has been kidnapped. I have to be more serious.
But just then a text came from Yoji. Skipping class. Looking for Sano with Kita, Shiba & Satoru. Where are you? Got things we want to ask you.
What? What was he doing with those boys? My phone started ringing, and Yoji’s name came on the display. I tossed it on the bed. What good was he if he came with Kita, Shiba & Satoru? We had to be one-on-one—anything else was claustrophobic.
The ringtone—from Life is Beautiful—played all the way through, twice. It stopped for a minute, and then, just as I went to put away The Hudsucker Proxy program, it started playing again—dadadadadada. It played a couple more times, then stopped.
Now that it was quiet again, I picked up the phone, erased the incoming messages, and put it away in my bag. Then I put on a bra, T-shirt, and jeans, pulled up my hair and fastened it with a clip, put on my glasses, combed my bangs, put on some lip gloss, picked up my bag, and left. I was going to get The Big Lebowski, even if I had to watch it alone. Maybe the movie would offer some kind of clue to Sano’s disappearance.
But even after I got back and watched the DVD, my opinion hadn’t changed: John Goodman is really gross. He’s fat and he doesn’t listen to anybody, and he says all this dumb stuff, all of which is wrong and screws everything up—and still he’s clueless. So I really can’t stand him. But I was right: Steve Buscemi as Donny is really cute. He gets killed somehow or other at the end, but he has this excellent, Buscemiesque way of dying.
Any—way! The point is the kidnapping. Kidnapping. In the end, the kidnapping in the movie is a fake. They haven’t really kidnapped the wife at all. They just cut off the toe of a woman in the kidnappers’ gang and sent it to the rich husband. And it turns out he’s tired of his wife anyway and realizes he could use the kidnapping to get rid of her. But he has to seem like he’s worried about her, so he hires Lewbowski—aka Jeff Bridges—the biggest slacker in LA, to make the payoff to the kidnappers. He’s pretty sure Lewbowski will fuck things up and get her killed. That’s when John Goodman gets involved and things get really screwed up, and everybody gets totally disgusted, the kidnappers, the rich guy—and me too.
When the movie was over, I thought for a while. Was Sano’s kidnapping based on The Big Lebowski?
What if we assumed the kidnapping was a fake?
That left you with two possibilities right off the bat. One was what John Goodman’s idiot character was thinking: the victim had staged it herself—or himself. In other words, Sano had faked his own kidnapping. But then you had the problem of the toe. John Goodman kept saying the wife had cut off her own toe and sent it to her husband, but that’s a dumbass theory at best. Even an idiot like Sano wouldn’t go around cutting off his own toe. So he must have found someone else’s toe to send. But whose?
But supposing he did find somebody, it still would have made the toe donor pretty mad, so you can assume there was a big fight over the donation. But maybe it didn’t stop there. Maybe Sano killed the owner of the toe and cut it off? Then he was guilty of murder in addition to faking
