Blockbuster

by Richard H. Smith

  Chapter Nine

  After we entered the lobby, I grabbed napkins from a dispenser on the concession counter and mopped every corner of my face. The lobby was warm, but it felt cool compared to the outside. I suggested we go to the office where I had the employees’ numbers on a Rolodex. Riggs liked this idea, but he advised not touching anything unless he okayed it. Yes, he was trusting me.

  I asked, “I’m guessing we won’t be able to open the theater today? And tomorrow too? I’d like to call people about not coming in.”

  “Closed today. Tomorrow—we’ll see. Hold off on making calls.”

  Riggs asked for the office key. He retrieved the latex glove from his pocket and pulled it over his fingers, snapping the rubber against his wrist. I smelled the fresh latex. He inserted the key and opened the door by twisting the key rather than touching the knob. He lifted the light switch, barely touching its surface.

  I noticed the closet door at the back of the office was ajar. Bullock’s cot was unfolded like it had been recently used. Normally, he kept it tucked away in a corner. Had he been planning on sleeping there instead of at Swofford’s? I detected something faint and floral in the air. Perfume or cologne. It was hard to tell. I had smelled something like it a few times before, usually on Saturday mornings. Had another one of Bullock’s women visited?

  Riggs took a quick look around. I pointed toward the Rolodex. He picked it up and said,

  “Let’s go down to the lobby. I’ve got more questions for you, but I need to tell my partner something first.”

  Riggs introduced me to Detective Dupree, who had been standing at the bottom of the stairs. I thought I recognized him. Or at least he reminded me of someone. I took him to be in his early thirties, his hair closely cropped and receding an inch or two. He was chewing gum, and, except for this and his plump cheeks, his wire-rimmed glasses gave him a scholarly appearance.

  “Pleasure, Mr. Burton. My wife and I have enjoyed movies here on many occasions. We crave your popcorn, truly.”

  His voice enhanced the sense of the scholar in him, each word, resonant and mellow, leaving an imprint in the air. I detected the unmistakable aroma of Juicy Fruit. And yes, I remembered. I’d seen him before at the theater, indeed with a woman who must have been his wife.

  “Mr. Burton, excuse us for a moment,” said Riggs, as he peeled off his glove. They moved far enough away to talk in private, and then Dupree left, maybe to retrieve something from his car.

  Riggs returned, and we sat on one of the lobby benches.

  I said, “I’m glad we won’t open tonight. Saturday is our busiest day, even though we’re in a holding pattern until Jaws starts in two weeks. It would have been tough.”

  “Saw the poster,” Riggs said. “Will you take over as manager?”

  “The main office will find someone from another local theater, I guess.”

  “Why not you?” Was he wondering what I had to gain from Bullock’s murder?

  “Too young?” he said before I could respond. “You look like you’re still in high school.”

  I hadn’t wanted Bullock’s job, and I didn’t want him thinking I did.

  I said, “I told the district manager I might want to go college soon, law school eventually. They prefer people who want to make a career in the theater business. Didn’t want to promote me.” I adjusted my accent to be just a little less Southern.

  “I see,” Riggs said.

  I added, “I mean, that was fine with me. Their reasoning made sense.”

  “Remind me to tell you about my first career as a lawyer when all this is over,” Riggs said. I liked the turn in the conversation.

  Dupree came back with a legal pad. He wrote all the employees names and numbers as I read them out from the Rolodex. He shifted his gum from one side of his mouth to the other, smiling as he wrote. What was so amusing?

  “We understand Mr. Bullock was married,” Riggs said.

  “Yes, Sue Ellen. I was about to ask if anyone had contacted her. You’ll need to check the phone book. I don’t have her number.”

  “Lonnie, why don’t you find it and give her a call? Better yet, take a trip over to her home,” Riggs said.

  “Affirmative,” Dupree said.

  “Before you go,” I said. “There’s something I need to tell you. Sue Ellen ordered Horace not to come home last night. She was real angry with him about him being with another woman. And so I don’t know how she will react.”

  I did wonder what her reaction would be. We’d only met a few times, and briefly. She’d stop by in their old Falcon. One time I’d seen her chewing Bullock out in the parking lot. It lasted a good five minutes. He managed two words somewhere in there. But I couldn’t see her doing this murder, couldn’t imagine it, not the way it happened. So brutal. She might have come at him with a rolling pin, not a knife, Wilma to his Fred Flintstone.

  “Why was she angry?” asked Riggs.

  I told them all I could about Bullock’s women, which wasn’t much.

  “Noticed the cot,” Riggs said.

  “The scene of his crimes,” Dupree said. Riggs seemed irritated.

  “That’s where he met them, the women. At least I assume he did. I never asked. Never wanted to ask.”

  “We can comprehend that. No need to put your oar in it,” Dupree said. Riggs looked even more irritated.

  “Naturally,” Dupree added. “She didn’t take well to his philandering.”

  “I guess not,” I said. “And yet I have to believe it wasn’t the first time she’d kicked him out. I figured they’d patch things up.”

  “Your boss had a randy streak. Just a provisional stay in the doghouse?” Dupree said as he picked up the pace of his chewing.

  “Lonnie, put a lid on the editorializing. Let the man tell us what he knows.”

  “Roger,” Dupree said, his persistent grin turning into a laugh. He gave Riggs a salute and left.

  Riggs got right back to it.

  “You can’t tell me who the woman was? Her name?”

  “Sorry,” I said, frustrated I was unable to tell him more.

  “About how many women did he meet?”

  “I have no idea. He was careful about it. Probably because of Sue Ellen being onto him.” There was a reason he wanted me to leave early the previous night. Was another woman visiting him?

  “You’ve seen no one?”

  “I saw women visit him during the day. But he never introduced them to me. They’d be up in the office for a while, and then they’d leave. I never knew what was going on. Didn’t want to.”

  It occurred to me that Friday was one of his favorite nights for meeting the women. Of course, this was why he’d offer to make the deposit. This gave him an excuse to stick around. I’d be out of the way. He didn’t want me to know. And it came across like he was doing me a favor. Saturday mornings, that’s when I’d smell the residue of the perfume.

  “No names?” he said, sounding frustrated.

  “I bet Spence Reeves can tell you more. Phil Hogan too.”

  Riggs switched gears and said, “Mr. Burton, reason it through for me. Why did anyone want to kill Mr. Bullock? Do you have any idea what happened here?”

  I blew out a breath and said, “Yes and no, Detective Riggs. I’m shocked. I expected nothing like this. But now it’s happened, it makes sense. Well, not murder, but something bad was going to happen to Horace. I’d even been half imagining it.”

  “How so?”

  “It’s complicated.”

  I told Riggs about Bullock’s gambling debts and about the men who had shown up earlier in the week. I told him about Swofford too and the scuffle with the Navy vet.

  Riggs probed for details, sometimes holding up his hand for me to pause while he wrote.

  “Horace was hot-tempered, impulsive,” I said, as I struggled to find the best way to describe the difficult, combustible person he was. “I figured he would get into a serious fight, one that would escalate into something terrible, but not this b
ad.”

  “Anyone truly hate him?

  “I don’t know for sure, but something happened last night involving one of our ushers, Milton Spicer. He’s young, only sixteen, a student at Hillside High School. Horace fired him for coming in late.”

  “Bad blood?”

  “Ah, yes,” I said.

  I wanted to be careful. I didn’t want Milton to get into more trouble than he deserved. “But I doubt that Milton would have killed Horace. Both his parents are high school teachers. He’s just a kid.”

  “So, what was the problem?” Riggs asked, with slight impatience.

  “He pulled a knife on Mr. Bullock.”

  “A knife? What was the name again?”

  “Milton Spicer.”

  Riggs listened intently as I gave the details of what had happened.

  “I understand why being called ‘boy’ would upset him, make him mad, but what’s a good kid doing with a knife?”

  “It surprised me too. But again, I don’t think Milton did this thing.”

  “Listen. I’ll be right back.”

  Riggs strode to his car and contacted someone using his radio. Probably Dupree. I figured it was about Milton. The incident with the knife begged for further investigation, and I felt foolish for being slow to bring it up. At the same time, I worried that I’d put Milton in a worse situation than he deserved.

  Chapter Ten

  Riggs returned and continued probing. “So, how did Mr. Bullock get along with other employees? What about Mr. Hogan?”

  I hesitated.

  “Ah, they didn’t like each other.”

  Again, I wanted to be careful. I described the dispute with the projectionist union but stopped short on other details.

  “And tell me again,” Riggs pressed. “When would he have left the theater?”

  “Right after the last movie ended. About eleven-thirty. That would be my guess.” I wondered again whether Spence had seen something. He wouldn’t have finished the cleaning by then.

  “We’ll be sorting all this out,” Riggs said.

  “Honestly, it looks like a robbery to me,” I said. “Except for the way he got killed. I don’t see Phil doing it. He’s smart. This would have been a dumb thing to do.”

  “How do I get to his projection booth?” He seemed eager to move on.

  “There’s the entrance door,” I said, pointing across the lobby. “But I don’t have a key. Horace did. On his key ring. Phil hardly ever let anyone in. Even Horace was scared of going up there.”

  “You’ve never seen it?”

  “No. I know that’s hard to believe.” Not that I hadn’t been curious and tempted.

  “What is it, a Mormon temple? We’ll need to take a look. From what you say, I’m wondering whether there was anyone who didn’t have it in for Mr. Bullock. They spring up like mushrooms.” Riggs said, shaking his head and running a hand through his hair. “And you keep defending every last one of them.”

  “Sorry, I don’t mean to—”

  “Don’t worry about it. I’d want people to do the same for me,” Riggs said.

  I listed all the other people working the previous night and noted those who had seen the knife incident. Riggs seemed satisfied. And he had asked no questions about Spence.

  He took a card from his wallet and gave it to me. “Call me if you think of something. We’ll need this place closed another day. I’ll keep the lobby and office keys until tomorrow.”

  I gladly found the two keys I needed off my key ring and handed the rest back to him.

  “Another thing. I still need the number of your landlady. I’ll give her a call.”

  “I understand, believe me, I want you to call her,” I said, forcing a smile. I told him Mrs. Roe’s number, which he added to his notepad. His eyes bore down on me, taking in my reactions. Was he testing me again? Well, that was his job.

  I said, shifting to practical matters, “I really would like to talk with all the employees. When can I call them?”

  “Hold off for a couple of hours.”

  We walked outside together, the heat engulfing us. Riggs asked me when employees would arrive, and I gave estimates. He was particularly interested in Hogan, whose Thunderbird I noticed had just come to a stop across from the theater. Here was an opportunity to end the conversation while I appeared in the clear.

  “Phil Hogan’s here,” I said.

  “The guy in the Thunderbird?”

  “Yeah.”

  “We’ll talk again.”

  Riggs was already making a beeline to where Hogan had parked.

  I spent half a minute in my car watching them. Hogan looked surprised, but not as much as I thought he would be. Riggs led Hogan into the lobby. I figured that he would get the same treatment I received. And maybe Spence would be next.

  Spence was talking with Officer Slocum, who had removed his sunglasses. Both had grins. That Spence could make friends with anybody. And, Spence, I reminded myself, could handle any situation. I recalled him telling me of his time in prison way back in the 1940s. I mean Spence was old. He had shot a man, one of a mob of hooded Klansmen. They didn’t like Spence’s union organizing and had tried to bully him by firing bullets into the living room of his farmhouse one evening. Spence had returned fire. Turned out the man he shot was a lawyer who went around in a suit and tie by day, Klan outfit by night. The man survived. Spence had only used birdshot. Otherwise, Spence might have been lynched or sent to the chair, even though he was defending himself and his property.

  A news truck from Channel 5 showed up. Not wanting to do any interviews, I left for the Riverview Theater, where I could use a phone to call Dan Drucker.

  Chapter Eleven

  I found Kaywood Turrentine, the manager of the Riverview, in the back room heaving a sack of popcorn kernels onto a shelf next to a popper. Turrentine was a small man with wide hips, rounded shoulders, and a fleshy neck. As he’d lost all his hair and had yellowish skin, he closely resembled a summer squash.

  “Nate Burton,” he said, not missing a beat. “Take a look at this.”

  Behind the popper in the corner of the backroom, a short stem of growth, pale with a hint of green, had appeared from a single, unpopped kernel of corn.

  “Ain’t that the weirdest thing you ever saw?” he said. “Where did it find enough light and water? I mean it’s just sitting on linoleum.”

  “Didn’t even know they could sprout, Kaywood. Gives me the creeps. Like it’ll turn into a triffid, or the blob, and do us in.”

  Turrentine said, “We’d better kill it while we have the chance.”

  “Probably indestructible,” I said, with fake seriousness. “Steve McQueen used a fire extinguisher for the blob. Hey, plant it. Might be good luck.”

  “The humane thing to do, I guess. But, know what, I won’t.” Turrentine crushed it under his shoe.

  “You killed a new life-form, Kaywood.”

  “At least it’ll never become an old maid.”

  “What?”

  “A kernel that never popped. At the bottom of the popcorn box.”

  “Is that what they’re called?”

  “Didn’t you know that? Now, what brings you, Nate?”

  Kaywood had been in the theater business for some thirty years and had seen it all. It had taken him a long time to become a manager, and he prized the position, giving him just enough power and respect he needed. That was my read. To Kaywood, nothing was new under the sun, but when I told him what had happened to Mr. Bullock, he raised an eyebrow of surprise and said, “Jesus H. Christ.”

  He cracked the knuckles on each hand as he digested the information.

  “Horace, that poor bastard. Let’s talk in my office.”

  Kaywood finished two cigarettes as I gave him the details.

  “I’ll say this. Owing Wayne Swofford money was plain stupid,” Kaywood said. “But do you think Hogan might have done it? I know for a fact he hated Bullock with a purple passion. But, not like you tell it. I mean, his bei
ng butchered.”

  I said, “That detective, he’ll be looking everyone over, even me.”

  “Come on, Nate. That’s crazy.”

  “Well, he gave me the third degree.”

  “Nah, you don’t look the part. Looks like robbery to me.”

  “I guess.”

  Why a theater in town hadn’t been robbed before now amazed us. Fortunately for Kaywood, the Riverview was a local operation, and the owner let him make the deposit the following day rather than the evening.

  “You’ll be needing a new manager. Tell what’s his name, that district manager of yours, Drucker, I’ll give him Kenny.”

  Kenny Riley was the assistant at the Riverview. But as much as I liked him, I didn’t see him running the whole show. I didn’t want to insult Kenny, and so I said,

  “Seriously? That’s generous. Not that it’s my decision.”

  “Immediately, if not sooner. Well, no, I wouldn’t do that to you. He’d make a mess of things. You know Kenny. He likes movies too much. Forgets he’s got a job to do.”

  “I guess you’re right,” I said, though I liked that Kenny liked movies.

  “I wish someone would take him off my hands. I want Russell Weaver, from over at the Center.”

  “Russell does a good job.” As a matter of fact, for an assistant at least, I’d prefer Kenny.

  “Did they tell Sue Ellen yet?” Kaywood asked, changing the subject.

  “Probably.”

  “I’ll call her later. It’s hard to believe, but, you know, they loved each other.”

  “I wouldn’t know. Anyway, one reason I came over here is to call my district manager, Dan Drucker. Can I use your phone? They wouldn’t let me use ours. I guess they’re checking for prints and who knows what.”

  “Sure, I’ve got things to take care of downstairs. Take your time.”