He laughed, deafeningly, waiting for confirmation. I only nodded, with a fake smile, not wanting to give him too much. I’d seen his show once, I thought, on a TV in an airport lounge.
“Howie’s very interested in talking to you about The Way the Clown Cried,” Dena jumped in.
“The Day,” I said to my cousin.
“Oh, sure, sure,” Howie went on, my big pal now. “I’ve done some research. I called Jerry Lewis about it, but he hasn’t called back. It’s a sore spot with him. I’m working on it …” he groped for my name.
“Roy.”
“I’m working on it, Roy. Did you know that Jerry came to our set one day? All kinds of people did. But these days, I just see my wife, my kid, and the grocery delivery guy. And that’s the way I like it.”
Howie gave the impression of a man who had already risen to the heights of his life. To his shock, he now found himself, at a relatively young age, still alive and bored to death.
As he spoke, I noticed that he had slipped a hand around Dena’s waist and kept it there. She allowed it, clearly uncomfortable. Maybe this was another reason she’d asked me to come: to give Howie something else to think about.
“We’ll talk,” he said to me. “You’ll be here, right? That’s right, Dena said so. There’s plenty of room in the guest house.” My one mild compliment had clearly made him desperate to continue our relationship. He added, with strained excitement that couldn’t hide his terrible disappointment, “Right now, though, I have to take my little cutie to the park.”
On the last remark, he gave Dena an especially tight squeeze. It took me a second to realize that he had meant his son, whose name he didn’t mention.
“I love the slide!” he said shrilly, as he left the room. “That’s all I need now! The slide and the swing! That’s a full day!”
—
Howie lasted exactly twenty minutes at the park before he brought his son back for Dena to mind. Then he disappeared into his den to make phone calls to buy more things.
Dena showed exceptional kindness and patience with the boy, who was four. He had been named Elliot, after Howie’s neurotic sidekick character on Romaine World.
“Where’s his mother?” I asked, as Dena helped Elliot color in an enormous, toy-clogged playroom.
“I think today is feet. Or maybe it’s fingers, I’m not sure.” When I wrinkled my brow in confusion, she explained, “Luna’s getting them done.”
“Oh.”
“Elliot’s a nice boy, and he seems to have his father’s ability to notice small things. Just yesterday we talked for twenty minutes about how to pull on socks. He’s very methodical.”
In fact, the boy was coloring very consistently and deliberately. By displaying these qualities, he seemed to take after Dena more than his comical father. Maybe that made sense, given who was really raising him.
She looked up at me then, answering a question I hadn’t asked. “I was prelaw. But I never finished my degree.”
I perked up at this. Her aimlessness made Dena more a candidate for our community than ever. Maybe all she needed was an area of expertise. Could she discover one by deciphering her father’s death?
I was about to find out.
“That’s my father’s things,” she said, hearing the doorbell ring. “This could be the answer we’re looking for.”
IF HIS BELONGINGS WERE ANY CLUE TO TED SAVITCH’S LIFE, IT WAS ONE lived on the go.
In the boxes and envelopes were bills from utilities in different states. Receipts of purchases from New York to Denver to Palo Alto. Paycheck stubs from jobs that ranged from bookkeeper to cashier to movie theater manager.
Dena’s father favored undershirts and pleated pants. He read copiously, whether it was history or classic fiction or movie star biographies. He took pills for his heart. His last-known address seemed to have been in Bar Harbor, Maine.
There were a few blurred and torn photographs. They were all of a little girl, taken from a distance, in public places. Dena’s eyes filled with tears when she saw these.
“Look. That’s me as a kid,” she said. “He must have taken them secretly. Then I guess he ran away again.”
As was her wont, Dena willed herself to stop crying and brushed the tears away. Then she carried on with the business at hand. She turned one picture over. On the back, her father had written Dena’s name with various phone numbers, crossing out each one as they changed over the years. It was how the police had found her, I figured.
“He kept track of me,” she said, quietly.
There were no videotapes, let alone any mention of The Day the Clown Cried. But there was, on the bottom of the last box, a copy of my newsletter, Trivial Man.
Dena and I didn’t speak for a while. She had clearly been shaken by the shabby facts of her father’s life, as well as his continuing interest in her. I was disappointed and confused by the lack of any clues. Finally, she broke the silence with typical hardheadedness.
“So, do you think,” she said, “that someone was at my father’s room before you?”
“Looks like it,” I replied. “He said, ‘The other guy …’ ”
“Did he have any marks of … I don’t know—He wasn’t bleeding or anything?”
I shook my head.
“So it was like someone had just threatened him?”
“Right.”
“Or not. You said his door was open?”
“Yes.”
