Some Like It Hot-Buttered Read Online Free PDF Page A

I’m afraid there’s been a wrinkle in the case since we left the theatre tonight.”
    A wrinkle? What kind of cop uses the word “wrinkle” about a heart attack? “Is there a problem, Chief?” I asked.
    “I’m afraid so. I got a call a few minutes ago from the medical examiner’s office in New Brunswick. They’re not issuing a report for quite some time, but something leapt out at them immediately on the arrival of the body.”
    Images from Alien were hard to repress. Something leapt out at them from the body?
    “It was just a heart attack, wasn’t it?”
    “No, it wasn’t,” Dutton said. “Mr. Ansella was murdered. There appears to have been some kind of poison used on his . . . um . . .”
    “His what?”
    “His popcorn.”

3
    Chief Barry Dutton seemed even larger in daylight. The next morning, when we had agreed I could come in without an attorney (luckily, Dutton didn’t see any reason why I would poison a customer—yet), I sat in his extremely utilitarian office, between a file cabinet and a vinyl sofa that must have been left there by the set decorator on The Nutty Professor (the original Jerry Lewis version).
    “I know you, don’t I?” he asked. Not a reassuring way for a cop to open a conversation. “I thought so when I met you last night.” He made a show of snapping his fingers. “You wrote that book that they made into that movie.”
    I suppressed the impulse to tell him how eloquent he was, and said, “Yeah.”
    “Meet a lot of police officers, doing the research for the sex picture?” I couldn’t decide if he was James Earl Jones or Yaphet Kotto. Right now, he was leaning toward Mr. Jones, in his Darth Vader mode.
    “It wasn’t a sex picture when I sold them the book,” I said. “I tried to accurately portray the police I met.”
    But his face was already wearing a mischievous grin that said he’d been kidding. “I read the book, and thought it was very good,” Dutton said. “Never saw the movie.” Maybe I was being too hard on him. He had a Yaphet Kotto quality, especially in his jollier Homicide: Life on the Street episodes. Yes. Kotto, for sure.
    “Kind of you, Chief,” I said. “Thank you.”
    “So. Why are you poisoning your customers’ popcorn?” Wow, he could really segue.
    I said something like, “Ahhhh . . .” Don’t feel bad. Not everyone can match my quick wit.
    Dutton smiled. “Take it easy, Mr. Freed,” he said. “Since you’ve done your homework, you understand that I have to look into every possibility. If there was something in all the popcorn at your theatre . . .”
    “Then I would have had a lot more people staying through the end credits, Chief. If the county coroner . . .”
    Dutton stopped me. “We’re required to say ‘medical examiner, ’ ” he said. “I think it started around the time of Quincy .”
    So, our chief of police had a sense of humor. That was going to make this easier. “Okay, so if the medical examiner found something that caused Mr. Ansella to keel over halfway through the first movie, anyone with a decent popcorn habit would now be residing in the next drawer over from him, wouldn’t they?”
    Dutton nodded. “Yes, I’m assuming this was done to Ansella and Ansella alone. That’s what leads me to believe it was done deliberately, and that’s what makes it a homicide and not a very, very odd accident.”
    “So why am I here?”
    “I’ve already called the Middlesex County prosecutor, and they’ll be sending investigators over. I need you to understand why we’re going to have to close your theatre for a day or two.”
    Close the theatre? Just when, after six months in business, we were starting to establish . . . Okay, so we hadn’t actually been starting to establish anything in terms of attendance, but having the place closed for two nights certainly wasn’t going to help. There had to be a way I could avoid that.
    “Why do they need so much time when you and your officers were in and out of the