Florent was a stocky, handsome guy of forty with a well-trimmed head of curly gray hair. He seemed only slightly more interested in my answers than the other cops had been. An old man with a flophouse heart attack. A loser who found him. I could tell this case would not be a priority.
“He had a movie I wanted,” I mumbled.
Despite my cool demeanor, I felt a sharp pain in my left breast and imagined that it was spreading to my arm. To calm down, I tried a meditation technique I’d seen on a TV infomercial; I was supposed to picture a space between my eyes, or something. When I saw the cop’s perplexed expression, I realized I must look like Jerry Lewis in one of his usual roles. So, for comfort, I went back to trivia.
“Clint Eastwood replaced Frank Sinatra in Dirty Harry,” I blurted out. “Don Siegel replaced Irvin Kershner as director.”
I hadn’t meant to say it out loud, but it was too late. The cop nodded, with a thin, impatient smile. Between my crossed eyes and my comment, he must have thought I was a mental patient.
“What kind of movie did he have?” he asked, as if speaking to a foreign child.
Could I risk telling him? Confiding in Abner had been bad enough; the last thing I needed was someone else finding out. But what were the chances of a cop caring about this film? Virtually none.
“He said he had The Day the Clown Cried.”
“Jerry Lewis’s famous, unreleased drama?” he asked.
I closed my eyes and cursed, in silence. The trivial community was growing so large, yet staying so secret, that you never knew who it included. Even cops, apparently, were now part of it. Come to think of it, this guy looked like he could have been an actor once. Well, in high school plays.
“That’s the one,” I said, almost inaudibly.
“Huh.”
“You know your movies.”
“I’m a big fan. You know that CD-ROM game? I’m the best.”
I smiled, trying to keep my condescension hidden. The trivia game he mentioned was for amateurs, but let the cop have his dream. He was too powerful to be truly trivial.
“Great.”
“A lot of people would kill to see that film.”
The remark had an edge. Detective Florent wasn’t dismissing this case so easily now, I thought, with trepidation. I could offer to cut him in, but the pie was getting awfully thin.
Florent toyed with a baggie that held a scuffed-up, old man’s wallet.
“But you say you didn’t know the old guy, Ted Savitch?”
I shook my head. “I didn’t even know his whole name.”
“Well, he knew you.”
“Some people do,” I shrugged. “I’ve got a newsletter. Would you like a subscription? It’s called Trivial Man, and in it, I …”
As I’d secretly hoped, the cop’s attention waned the more I spoke. No matter how much he liked movies, he occasionally thought of other things. I droned on and on, hoping to bore him to death and, not incidentally, firmly establish how harmless I was. But before he could interrupt to dismiss me, the door opened. A patrolman stuck his head in.
“She’s here,” he said.
“Great,” Florent said, relieved.
He asked me to inform him if I went anywhere. Then, with a last, contemptuous laugh, he added, “But that’s not going to happen, is it?”
After he left, I let out a grateful sigh that turned into a racking cough. Above all, I was glad Detective Florent hadn’t seen my gun.
—
I shuffled toward the door of the station house, attacked by a sudden wave of self-disgust. I’d been so desperate that I’d believed Ted Savitch, the dead old man. Why hadn’t I just assumed he was a fraud or a nut? I’d been hearing from enough of them lately. He’d probably thought he’d pull a fast one, hand me a phony film, and make a killing. Instead, the stress had killed him.
Between my mother, Abner Cooley, and this, my life had become a disaster. I could only look forward to scrounging up some typesetting work.
Yet I couldn’t help but wonder: What did Ted Savitch say before he died? “The other guy …”? Had he just seen someone else? Who had it been?
I started to open the precinct door. Then I looked to the left, and stopped. Through the glass window of a closed room, I saw a woman, waiting. She was about thirty, slightly built, and kind of peculiar-looking.
“Who’s that?” I asked Detective Florent, who was passing by.
He stared at me a second, confused. Then he remembered who I was. “That’s his daughter.”
“Who?”
“You know,” he said. “The dead guy.”
Then he went into the room and joined her.
I WAITED ACROSS THE STREET FROM THE PRECINCT. IN A MAGAZINE STORE, I browsed through movie reviews in magazines, checking out the window every few seconds. Just when the proprietor approached to throw me out, I saw the door of the precinct open. Detective Florent was bidding the dead guy’s daughter good-bye.
After she left, he shook his head. It was the same kind of dismissive reaction he’d given me. This made me move even faster to follow her.
