“You know how Leonard came to work at FamilyFlicks, don’t you?”

This stopped me. “Well … tell me what you know.”

“Leonard was working as an editor for a publishing house in New York. Alice and I once tried to sell him a book, Precode for Kids: Films for the Whole Family, 1930–1933. But he said it was too limited.” Claude sniffed, clearly still annoyed. “Anyway, he had bought a history volume for their military imprint. About the Luftwaffe. And it was generally believed that the book was … so he must be … pro-Nazi.”

“Is that right?”

“Yes. So, since the publisher had been bought by a German conglomerate, he was shown the door. Then I guess he decided, well, my cover’s blown, why not really commit, you know? Hence FamilyFlicks.”

Soon Claude was shaking his head, chuckling again. Before long, he began a new lecture on the joys of fatherhood and family. There was a very nice, recently widowed adjunct professor he wanted me to meet.

I thought of what I’d just been told. From Claude’s chubby, ruddy face, I moved my eyes to a bookshelf above his head. There were dozens of film studies, from academic treatises to popular biographies. There was a history of religious imagery in the works of Harold Lloyd. There was Troy Kevlin’s The Boy-O Keeps Ringing the Bell! and Howie Romaine’s Fatherhood Is No Joke.

And there was I Am Graus!

I waited until after he gave me the available woman’s phone number. Then I pointed vaguely to the books. “May I …?”

“What? Oh”—Claude turned—“Sure. Anything you like. Just, you know, watch the bindings.”

I opened Graus’s profane memoir to the acknowledgments page. Among his self-serving thank-yous was one to his editor. It was just as I had suspected.

“Is this the, you know, uncensored edition?” I asked, casually.

Claude noticed which book I had chosen. “Of Graus!? No, no. Who on earth has that?”

I thought but didn’t say: maybe Leonard Friend, that’s who.

THEY MAY HAVE BEEN FAMILY-FRIENDLY, BUT THEY WEREN’T FRIENDLY.

That was the feeling I got as I sat in the FamilyFlicks waiting room. The place was around the corner from Philly’s Avenue of the Arts, the reconstructed thoroughfare full of theaters and hotels. It was in a nondescript walkup above a Blimpie’s on a street as yet ungentrified.

There was no name on the buzzer. The waiting room had only bland landscape paintings on the wall. A well-scrubbed young woman sat at the reception desk, as perky as she was steely.

“I called earlier,” I said, for the third time.

“Oh, right.” The girl checked me out, as if assessing if I were a lawyer, reporter, or another kind of troublemaker. She finally decided I was someone to ignore, not fear. “Let me try him again.”

She apparently buzzed Leonard, waited endlessly, then whispered.

“Tell him Katie Emond sent me,” I said, but she waved a discouraging finger at me.

There was more waiting and more whispering. I knew I was about to be given the heave-ho, so I opted for the obnoxious. I had only one piece of ammunition, and no idea how powerful it would be.

“Katie sent me!” I said, loud enough to permeate the receiver.

The girl gave me a furious look. Then, as I had hoped, she heard a new tune from Leonard. She hung up, then glared at me.

“He’ll be with you in a minute,” she said.

It was sooner than that. A paunchy, pasty-faced, balding guy of about forty-five stood in the doorway of the inner office.

“You know Katie?” he said.

—

Leonard Friend’s office had even more of an uncharacterized quality as the rest of the place. His walls were, in fact, bare; a few nails and hooks in the wall attested to posters recently taken down.

“Excuse the minimalist look,” he said. “We’re switching our design scheme.”

Hiding any evidence of the movies you’re cutting T and A and exploding heads out of, I thought. But I only smiled.

Leonard smiled back. He had a nervous quality, and already seemed defensive, without my having said a word.

“Some people don’t understand what we do here,” he said quickly. “We’re taking movies away from the cultural elite and giving them back to the people. It’s the wave of the future. Malleable movies.”

As he spoke, he was arranging papers on his desk. Something to keep his idle hands from being the devil’s playthings, I thought.

“I hear you,” I said, apparently not taking a side.

“It’ll all become clear. It will be a crucial new kind of interactivity.”

I thought of such hot potatoes as Billy Wilder’s raunchy Kiss Me, Stupid, made in 1964. Ray Walston had replaced Peter Sellers. Leonard would have replaced a lot more.

“Must be a change from doing old-fashioned publishing,” I said.

He stopped fiddling, and looked up. Instead of resenting my knowledge of his life, he seemed eager to relive old times. His tone became wistful. “Well, I had quite the experience there. I edited lots of movers and shakers. I was about to start editing the Olsen Twins when … things went south.”

I nodded, again trying not to express an opinion. I couldn’t know, of course, who else Leonard had worked with. And the one name I knew, he had conspicuously omitted.

“What about Graus Menzies?” I said.

There was a long pause. Then Leonard seemed to take it in stride.

“What about him?”

“Well—”

“And how do you know Katie?” His tone stopped at clarification on its way to suspicion.

“Just good friends.”

“I see.” Leonard seemed to find this improbable, given the man he was looking at.

“Well, I haven’t seen her since I left my old job. She was in the publicity department. What exactly do you …”

“Chapter Fourteen.”

Suddenly, Leonard stared at me, as if it had been a “trigger” and he was entranced. His hands started bunching and collating papers again, as if acting independently of him. “I see. And was Katie the one who—”