The information just fell out of me, to divert Losson from my ineptitude. It had a different effect.
Losson moved back a bit, as if from a hideous smell. He paused, as if deciding whether to reveal something. Then he skipped his snicker and went right to his sigh that meant, what do I care? I’m crap.
“Look,” he said. “It must be Stanley Lager.”
I stared at him, shocked. “What?”
Stanley Lager was a trivial man I hadn’t heard of in a while. He was an amoral borderline nut who skipped from one expertise to another. In recent years it was said he’d fallen into dissolution, using drugs, altering himself with plastic surgery, living off of male and female lovers. He now just used trivia opportunistically, culling and selling collectibles online. The rest of us prided ourselves on knowing things; we lived through it, not off it; what Stanley did was a desecration.
In truth, he frightened us. Stanley Lager was, we secretly felt, our dark, unstable side. But trying to kill Abner over a fantasy novel?
“Can that really be true?” I asked.
Losson shrugged. “I’ve heard Stanley’s hiding from someone he ripped off. He’s been living in a maid’s room in an old, upstate mansion. One of those big-ass houses near West Point, used to be owned by the Roosevelts, or somebody. Now it’s open to the public. Turns out, despite tourism, the joint is crumbling and getting broken into a lot, so they took in a border. Those fake dimes are the souvenirs they hand out at the tour.”
I nodded. “Jesus.”
“It’s in Millwood, I think.”
The town rang a bell. It was near Rhinebeck, the site of a fan film festival, in which Ambersons had figured. I suddenly remembered a whiff of sour rye; it was also where Annabelle’s bakery was. It took me a second to snap out of the romantic reverie.
“Thanks, Losson,” I said, sincerely.
“Sure, Roy. But, if you see Stanley, be careful. He’s …” Losson circled the side of his head with a finger. He snickered. Then he sighed one last time, as if to say, look who’s talking.
—
When I got home, I was feeling pretty cocky. Even though the discovery was totally accidental, I now had a good lead on Abner’s tormentor. It wasn’t just a lead; I knew exactly who it must be: Stanley Lager.
An online search yielded one fuzzy photo of Stanley. It was an LA Weekly feature from a few years back; he was a guide on an I Love Lucy landmarks tour. His obscured face seemed ferrety beneath his jaunty cap. But if he liked plastic surgery, who knew how he looked today?
Then I stopped short. What an idiot I was. That meant it was the end of the case. I hadn’t even negotiated a bonus or anything if I found the perpetrator. One unsigned check from Abner—how much health care for my mother was that going to buy?
I had no stomach for doing anything else now. I turned back to my computer, hoping to divert myself on a trivia site.
Then one e-mail made me forget everything else.
It came from an address I’d never seen before: Ted6569. It was addressed to me personally. It read:
Dear Roy,
Love your work. I’ve got Clown. Let’s meet.
I CAUGHT MY BREATH. I KNEW EXACTLY WHAT IT MEANT.
My mystery correspondent was referring to The Day the Clown Cried, Jerry Lewis’s famous uncompleted film. It was a departure for Lewis, a serious drama based on a true story about a circus clown used by the Nazis to escort children into the gas chambers. Directing and starring, Lewis had shot the film in Sweden in 1972 with a cast that also included one of Ingmar Bergman’s leading ladies, Harriet Andersson.
The film was reportedly plagued by money problems and creative angst. In the end, Lewis never officially finished or released it. As the years went by, he refused to even discuss it publicly. Though rough cuts have apparently been screened for various colleagues and insiders—and the entire script featured on a guerrilla Web site—it had never been seen by any real critic or film historian, let alone the general public.
Next to The Magnificent Ambersons, it was the most notorious and elusive “get” in the trivial world.
My hands nearly shaking, I proceeded to answer the e-mail. I wrote back what I thought was a cool and cryptic reply, not betraying my almost head-bending need.
Dear Ted 6569:
If you mean what you say … [I originally wrote a hip “let’s get it on,” then a belligerent “let’s rumble,” then a wimpy] why not?
The reply was almost instantaneous. A meeting was arranged in two days at a flophouse hostel that called itself a hotel in Hell’s Kitchen. He left a room number but no last name.
As I got offline, I reflected on the writer’s probably temporary and definitely impoverished address. If he really had the film, I couldn’t arrive empty-handed and come away with it. If he didn’t have the film, I could be rolled the minute I walked in. Only the first possibility gave me pause.
Forget working for Abner, this was the kind of job I’d been waiting for. But with Abner’s case solved, my access to cash would be over. No amount of typesetting or, for that matter, loaf hawking, would make it up. Now I had more than my mother to support: I again had my trivial habit, and it gnawed at me like the need for a needle.
My only option didn’t make me particularly proud: stall Abner, keep collecting his checks for my own secret purposes, and run the risk of Stanley Lager attacking him once more, maybe fatally.
How much did I dislike Abner? How much did I love—or at least, feel obligated—to my mother? How much did I want to see The Day the Clown Cried? As a movie detective’s life got more complex, so did his moral quandaries.
To my surprise, Abner made the first move.
“I never went to Cali,” he said, on a scratchy, inadequately charged cell phone. “Let’s take a meeting.”
—
The meeting wasn’t with Abner alone.
I showed up at the plush apartment he now shared with Taylor Weinrod, which was their “New York base,” as opposed to “our L.A. pad.” Immediately, I saw a leather jacket and a suede vest slung on a coat-rack in the vestibule. As I proceeded into the living room, I heard low, satiny murmurs coming from within.
They were the voices of two men, obviously the studio suits Abner had mentioned. The moniker was misapplied today: trying to look bohemian for their East Coast trip, the executives had donned pressed jeans and Polo shirts. One wore sandals on his pedicured feet, the other had expensive lace-up sneakers. Abner sat opposite them, still intentionally or helplessly, looking big and ragged by comparison.
