It Happened One Knife Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Further Funny Film Facts For Fanatics

  Acknowledgements

  Praise for Some Like It Hot-Buttered

  “Something for everyone! Some Like It Hot-Buttered bursts

  with mystery, action, romance, and laughs. Buy this book today !

  Cohen’s boffo Double Feature Mystery series is a surething

  smash hit. Jeffrey Cohen is the Dave Barry of the New

  Jersey Turnpike.” —Julia Spencer-Fleming,

  Edgar® Award nominee and author of All Mortal Flesh

  “Movies, murder, characters who are real people, laughs,

  danger, and damn good writing. Some Like It Hot-Buttered

  truly has something for everyone: a comedy tonight—and so

  much more!” —Linda Ellerbee, television producer, journalist,

  and bestselling author of Take Big Bites and

  And So It Goes

  “Cohen’s debut Double Feature Mystery is a double winner. He doesn’t just make you laugh, he makes you care about his characters. I give it two buttery thumbs way up!”

  —Chris Grabenstein,

  Anthony Award-winning author of Tilt-a-Whirl

  “Knock, knock. Who’s there? Cohen. Cohen who? Cohen buy yourself this most entertaining book.”

  —Larry Gelbart, writer of M*A*S*H, Tootsie, Oh, God!,

  A Funny Thing Happened on the

  Way to the Forum, Barbarians at the Gate, etc.

  “Cohen fires up the gag reel for a new tongue-in-cheek mystery . . . Ruffling feathers and getting violent warnings, Freed solves the mystery and earns his amateur-sleuth credentials, promising more comic adventures to come. Cohen develops his lively characters almost as effortlessly as he delivers the jokes—and the occasional guffaw—and manages to sneak in some suspenseful twists besides.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “Many authors create good characters, but to create side-splittingly

  funny ones and make them believable is a tour

  de force. Jeffrey Cohen accomplishes that in his delightful

  Some Like It Hot-Buttered, which comes roaring in like a

  blast of fresh air.” —Denise Dietz,

  author of the Diet Club Mysteries

  “You’re in for a treat; that is, if you like a good mystery written with great humor as well as warmth and wit . . . Solving the mystery and finding those responsible for the crimes is only part of the fun in this wonderfully entertaining book—Mr. Cohen’s writing and wry sense of humor is a delight . . . I can’t wait to read the next one!”

  —Crimespree Magazine

  “[Elliot Freed is a] schleppy hero with a heart of gold. This seems to be [Cohen’s] specialty and I, for one, couldn’t be happier. Nice guys do finish first . . . This new book has, at its heart, an everyman who just happens to get involved in murderous doings, and we, thankfully, get to go along . . . Not only is the book funny, which you would expect from Jeff Cohen, but it is also well plotted (also expected) and loaded with plenty of misdirection. Plus you get to meet another terrific bunch of characters for whom the author obviously has great affection. Always a very good thing.” —Mystery Ink

  “A twisty mystery with lots of laughs and lots of heart. This is the first in the Double Feature Mysteries, and hopefully it won’t be too long a wait for the next.”

  —Stacy Alesi, aka the BookBitch

  THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP

  Published by the Penguin Group

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  Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  IT HAPPENED ONE KNIFE

  A Berkley Prime Crime Book / published by arrangement with the author

  PRINTING HISTORY

  Berkley Prime Crime mass-market edition / July 2008

  Copyright © 2008 by Jeffrey Cohen.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form

  without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in

  violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

  For information, address: The Berkley Publishing Group,

  a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.,

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.

  eISBN : 978-1-436-22927-2

  BERKLEY® PRIME CRIME

  Berkley Prime Crime Books are published by The Berkley Publishing Group,

  a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.,

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.

  The name BERKLEY PRIME CRIME and the BERKLEY PRIME CRIME design are trademarks

  belonging to Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  http://us.penguingroup.com

  This book is dedicated to the memory of Etta Sanders.

  The real crime is that she’s not here to read it.

  Don’t believe politicians when they say you’re safe.

  Something appealing; something appalling;

  Something for everyone: a comedy tonight!

  —STEPHEN SONDHEIM, A Funny Thin
g Happened on the Way to the Forum

  PROLOGUE

  THIS wasn’t just another DVD: this was life or death. Or life and death. I was hoping for life; there had already been enough death.

  I sat down in front of my own television with a great deal of trepidation. For other people, this wouldn’t be an unduly tense moment, but I think it’s been noted more than once, I’m not exactly other people. For a classic comedy fanatic like me, this was a very scary moment.

  What if this movie wasn’t funny for me anymore? What if no movie was funny for me anymore? I’ve spent so much of my time, my energy, my life on the idea that comedy is therapeutic; suppose I was about to discover that it not only couldn’t heal my wounds, but had actually caused them?

  A man sitting alone in his postdivorce, furniture-challenged home in the wee hours of the morning is never entirely rational.

  In this case, though, I had logical reasons for being a little nuts. When you spend most of your life idolizing people, and then get to meet them, it’s something of a disappointment when they end up dead.

  It’s even more of a problem when you feel you had a hand in killing them.

  I turned on the TV, reached for the remote control, and literally held my breath. The next few minutes would tell the tale: either I’d laugh, or—

  Well, I didn’t want to think about the alternative . . .

  1

  If you can do comedy, you must do comedy.

  —BILL MURRAY

  Without heroes, we’re all plain people and don’t know how far we can go.

  —BERNARD MALAMUD, THE NATURAL

  THURSDAY

  Killin’ Time

  A Special Attraction

  “IS he dead?” Vic Testalone asked me.

  “They’re all dead,” I said. “He didn’t leave any of them alive.”

  “How can that be?” he asked. “Does this kid know what he’s done?”

  Vic, a sales rep from one of the film distribution companies I work with, was probably born smoking a cigar; he had one in his mouth now, but knew better than to light it in the lobby of my theatre. Comedy Tonight, like all New Jersey movie theatres, has a strict no-smoking policy, but I would have insisted on it even if the state didn’t. I hadn’t spent the past four months getting this place repaired just to have Vic impose the smell of a cheap stogie on my new carpet.

  I shook my head. “Anthony just thinks it’s cool,” I answered him. “He’s not considering the moral implications of his actions.”

  “I’m not concerned with moral implications,” Vic answered, snarling. “He’s killing the sequel possibilities.”

  That threw me for a loop. I’d only agreed to let Anthony Pagliarulo, the theatre’s projectionist/ticket taker, show his first film—an ultraviolent pseudo-Western called Killin’ Time—as a one-time-only break from our all-comedies-and-nothing-but-comedies policy because he’d caught me at a vulnerable time. Suffice it to say that four months earlier, when I agreed to show the film, my theatre had looked like one of the cowboys in Anthony’s “Western” after the branding-iron scene. I’d made good on my promise after the renovation because I couldn’t think of a graceful way to pull the plug. But now Vic was treating this glorified (if relatively high-budget) student film as if it were something real.

  “What the hell do you mean by ‘sequel possibilities’?” I asked him. “You think someone would to want to distribute that thing?”

  “It’s got blood.” Vic held up a finger. “It’s got cursing.” Another finger. “Killing, sex, cruelty, characters nobody could possibly like.” Finger, finger, finger, thumb on the other hand. “It can’t miss.”

  Vic and I had left the auditorium when the credits started to roll (but long after heads had started to roll, which made it too late for me), and now the rest of the “crowd” was spilling into the lobby. “This was a movie in which we saw a bullet enter a man’s head from inside,” I told him quietly. No sense giving the rest of the invited audience a chance to voice their displeasure as well. “We saw intestines being pulled out. We saw a man’s tongue put through a meat grinder.”

  “Now you’re catching on,” Vic said. “Oh, and before I forget, are we set for the next month?”

  Vic’s a sales rep for Klassic Komedy Distributors (they think the "K”s make it funny), which handles many of the vintage comedies I show each week in conjunction with a contemporary comedy. He doesn’t really need to come down to Comedy Tonight to get his order; we could complete our business in three minutes on the phone. But he says I’m “the only schmuck who knows movies so obscure Leonard Maltin’s never heard of them.” Vic likes to visit.

  “Yeah,” I told him. “We’re got The Ghost Breakers, Never Give a Sucker an Even Break, and Back to the Future .”

  “I still say Back to the Future is too new,” Vic protested. “It’s less than twenty-five years old.”

  “By what, twenty minutes?” I asked. “I need a time-travel comedy to go with the new Adam Sandler. What do you think I should run?”

  “How about Where Do We Go From Here?”

  “Fred MacMurray is funny? Anyway, that’s a musical,” I told him. Vic waved a hand at me.

  “You should show this thing from tonight,” he said. “You’ll have an exclusive before the kid makes a deal somewhere.”

  I spied my ex-wife across the room. “I don’t want to talk to you anymore,” I told Vic, and walked toward Sharon. Vic had the nerve to look surprised.

  Before I reached my ex, however, I was waylaid by Leo Munson, a former merchant marine who is Comedy Tonight’s one and only regular customer. Leo, a trim man in his sixties who looks to be a head-to-toe callus, comes to the theatre every night it’s open, and is as obsessed with classic comedy as I am, but with broader taste. He keeps asking me for Three Stooges shorts. I keep playing Bugs Bunny cartoons.

  “That was really something,” Leo said, tilting his head in the direction of the auditorium.

  I’d been dreading this moment. “I warned you not to come tonight, Leo,” I told him. “I know it’s not your thing, but you insisted . . .”

  “It was terrific!” he said, breaking into an eerie grin. “The kid has a wild sense of humor, doesn’t he?”

  “Um, yeah,” I nodded, unable to blink. Yeah, that amputation scene was a laugh riot.

  “I spent four months watching Turner Classic Movies because you were closed for repairs,” Leo said. “That’s four months of Mildred Pierce twice a week. Gives a man perspective.”

  “Perspective? Four months of Joan Crawford makes you appreciate an artistic sensibility that includes a man being pulled apart by buffalo?”

  “Your projectionist is gonna be a big deal director, Elliot, ” Leo said. “You’re lucky to have him now, before he gets famous.”

  “Uh-huh.” It was the best I could do. “Yeah. You’re right, Leo. Gotta go now.” I headed for Sharon again, but Sophie, our ticket seller/snack bar attendant, was beckoning me toward her. I sighed, and changed course for the new refreshment stand.

  It was, I had to admit, a vast improvement over the previous one, which had been essentially a glass-topped table with some candy boxes on it, next to a card table for napkins, straws, and popcorn salt. This one was gleaming, lit from within, and tastefully and skillfully displayed all the varieties of chocolate-coated self-destruction we sold. It was even refrigerated to keep the candy from melting. It was, for snacks, a better home than the one I lived in. My insurance company, upon being informed of the refreshment case’s price tag, had helpfully offered to recommend another agency for any future business insurance needs I might have, but had ponied up nonetheless.

  In the four months Comedy Tonight had been under reconstruction, I hadn’t seen either Sophie or Anthony. But I’d continued to pay both of my young employees, as I’d decided it wasn’t their fault the theatre couldn’t open. So it had been a shock this afternoon when Sophie had shown up for work in something other than the funereal teenage Goth wardrobe I’d been ac
customed to her wearing. Until recently, Sophie had resembled Christina Ricci in The Addams Family. Now she was wearing a loose-fitting gray sweatshirt emblazoned with the slogan “A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle” and black sweatpants over high-top sneakers. She looked like a figure from The Life of Gloria Steinem, as performed by the enrolled class roster of Feminism 101.

  “Should I keep selling candy after the movie’s over?” Sophie asked me when I got there.

  “If people want to keep buying it, yeah,” I said. “Why not?”

  “Because continuing to sell these high-calorie, sugar-coated products simply perpetuates the cycle of control, the corporate patriarchy keeping women docile and distracted,” she said.

  “Yeah. Because we all know men don’t buy candy or popcorn.”

  “Men aren’t subject to the same unreasonable standards of ‘beauty’ as women,” Sophie said, miming the quotes.

  “Try to stick to one argument,” I advised. “What did you think of Anthony’s movie?” I’d seen her watching through the rear auditorium doors.

  “The objectification of women was deplorable,” Sophie said. “I was appalled by the sexism.”

  Finally, someone who had seen the same movie as I had. Well okay, not the same movie, but at least an objectionable one. “I understand exactly where you’re coming from,” I told Sophie.

  “Other than that,” she continued, “it was awesome.”

  I fled to Sharon, allowing no one to get in my way.

  She looked great, of course, and was standing by herself. Sharon’s second husband, Gregory the Anesthesiologist, had not accompanied her, which livened up the proceedings by roughly 20 percent. Gregory had moved back into their house recently, despite Sharon telling me they’d separated. I considered this latest move a bad thing, but that’s just an opinion.

  Given the reactions I’d gotten about the film so far, I was almost afraid to ask Sharon (after all, it was possible the rest of the gathering was right, and I was wrong— maybe Killin’ Time really was the next step in the progress of the cinema, and I would have to kill myself), but I plunged ahead. “What’d you think?”

  Sharon is a lovely woman, slim and just tall enough not to be considered short, but now her eyes were open about a quarter inch wider than normal, which gave her a somewhat stunned expression, like Carol Channing circa 1962. “What was that?” she said.