The Bright Silver Star (17 page)

“Only when he’s awake.”

“You didn’t tell me he was so cute. He squeak when you squeeze him?”

Des smiled at her. “That’s not all he does.”

That morning’s New York newspapers were stacked on Mitch’s desk, the
Daily News
and
Post
featuring identical page-one photographs of Tito astride Mitch with his hands around his throat. Already it was old news.

“Have you been getting a lot of calls from reporters?” Des asked him.

“I wouldn’t know. I unplugged the phone after I spoke to you.”

He washed his hands and face in the deep, scarred kitchen sink, then poured each of them a tall glass of iced tea with sprigs of mint from his garden. He handed them around, then flopped down in his one good chair as Des and Yolie took the loveseat. “Whew, it’s sticky as hell out there this morning,” he said, breathing heavily. “I apologize if I smell like a plow horse, but I’m learning that physical work helps me when I’m down.”

“I head straight for the weight room myself,” Yolie spoke up, her head swiveling as she took in the view of the Sound from three different directions. She was, Des observed, very uneasy here in Mitch’s cottage. Also very anxious to make a good impression on the Deacon’s daughter. So anxious she was slouching a tiny bit as she sat there beside Des, just enough so that her immense breasts were less of a temptation for Mitch to stare at. Des knew why—Yolie did not want Des thinking that she’d been waving them in her boyfriend’s face. This was an aware, careful girl. A girl who missed nothing.

“Mitch, we need to talk about that phone call you got from Tito,” Des said, shifting them into business gear.

“Yeah, okay,” he agreed, sipping his iced tea carefully. Some of it dribbled down his chin anyway. “I hadn’t been asleep very long. In fact, it seemed as if he’d just left.”

“Whoa, he was
here
last night? You didn’t tell me that part.”

“Yeah, he was sitting right here when I got home from the beach club.”

“How did he get out here?”

“He swam out, which should have told me something right away.”

“Why is that, Mr. Berger?” Yolie asked, gulping down some iced tea.

“Call me Mitch, would you? You’re scaring me with that mister stuff.”

She flashed a quick smile at him. “Done, Mitch.”

“The tide was coming in,” he explained. “It’s dangerous. Anyone who tries that can’t be thinking straight.”

“You couldn’t have known what he’d do,” Des told him. “Besides, it’s too soon to say what did happen. We don’t know yet.”

“I should have known,” he repeated stubbornly.

“Did you give him your Mets T-shirt to wear?”

“He sort of borrowed it. I’m never going to see that shirt again, am I?”

“You wouldn’t want it back, believe me.”

“Please tell us what happened when he was here,” said Yolie, politely taking over the inquiry, pad and pen in hand.

“Nothing,” Mitch replied, shrugging. “We talked.”

“It was a friendly talk? You were vibing?”

“We totally were,” Mitch said, his voice filling with regret. “He told me he wanted to make a movie about his father’s life. He said he’d already written most of it. He asked me if I’d mind reading it. I said I’d be happy to.”

“What time did he leave here?”

“Eleven or so.”

“Was he high?”

“You mean on drugs? I don’t think so. He did drink a lot of my
scotch, but he was plenty coherent. I offered to give him a ride back to his car. He said he was okay to walk.”

“Where was his car?”

“He left it back at the town beach parking lot.”

“How long does it take to walk there from here?”

“I’ve never timed it, Sergeant. A good half hour, maybe forty-five minutes.”

Yolie jotted this down in her notepad. “That would put him in the parking lot by around midnight?”

“Yeah, I guess.”

“Did he mention Esme to you?” Des interjected.

“He said she was his princess. He said she should be wearing a tiara and sash.”

“She showed up just now at the falls wearing a fat lip,” Des told him. “Did he say anything about them fighting? That he’d struck her, anything like that?”

“No, not at all. The only negative thing he had to say about Esme was that she sometimes didn’t listen to him. But he wanted her to play his mother in the movie he was writing. He wouldn’t have mentioned that if they were having serious problems, would he?” Mitch paused, sipping his iced tea distractedly. “Tito also wanted some advice from me.”

“What about?” Yolie asked.

“Sergeant, I’ve been asking myself that very same question ever since Des called,” Mitch confessed, running a hand through his curly black hair. “We were talking about his career, okay? There was this movie called
Puppy Love
that his agent wanted him to do, and Tito really didn’t want to do it. And then he told me he felt trapped. Being a total idiot who doesn’t know how to keep his big mouth shut, I told him that if he was caught up in something he didn’t want to be in that he had the power to get out of it.”

“Sounds fair to me,” Yolie said.

Mitch shook his head at her miserably. “What if he wasn’t talking about his career anymore when he said that? What if he was talking
about
life?
Think about it, he’s sitting here, this unstable, deeply disturbed actor. . . . What if he was trying to tell me that he wanted to end it all? Don’t you realize what I did? I gave him the green light. Look at what happened—as soon as left here he drove straight up to the falls and jumped right off a cliff.” Mitch slumped in his chair despondently. “God, I may as well have pushed him.”

“Don’t go there, Mitch,” Des ordered him.

“Can you tell us about this phone call you got from him?” Yolie said.

“I was in bed asleep,” Mitch said hollowly. “He sounded . . . He was just really down. He said that it was too late. Then he started talking about the hangman. ‘The damage is done. The hangman says it’s time to let her fly.’ That’s from a Neil Young song.”

“Neil Young.” Yolie repeated. “He’s that weird old hippie guy, right?”

Mitch stared at her coldly. “He’s not weird and he’s not old.”

“Do yourself a solid, girl,” Des advised her. “Stay away from pop culture entirely.”

“Mitch, what did you take that to mean?” Yolie pressed on.

“At the time, nothing. But now . . . now I take it to mean that he was about to commit suicide, don’t you?” Mitch got up out of his chair and went over toward the windows, standing with his back to them for a long moment. When he turned to face them, his eyes had filled with tears. “I’m the last person on earth who spoke to him,” he declared, his voice rising with emotion. “If only I’d said something else,
anything
else. Maybe the right words would have changed his mind. Maybe he’d still be alive.”

“I repeat,” Des said to him sharply. “Don’t go there!”

“Des, I’m already there! And I don’t know how to deal with it. How do I live with myself from now on? How do I look at myself in mirror every day? I
killed
him, don’t you get it? I killed Tito Molina!”

C
HAPTER 7

A
S SOON AS
D
ES
and that chesty new sergeant of Soave’s cleared out Mitch threw his Power Book and some blank notepads into his day pack. Put down a three-day supply of kibble and water for Clemmie and Quirt. Closed up the house, jumped in his truck and fled.

He did not tell Des he was leaving. He only knew he had to get gone.

He made a quick stop at the House of Turkish Delights for baklava and good, strong coffee. One look at Nema Acar’s face when he walked in and Mitch could tell she’d heard the news about Tito’s death plunge on the radio.

One look at Mitch’s face and she could tell he didn’t want to talk about it.

“You got your window replaced,” he observed, his voice sounding a bit husky.

“We did, yes,” Nema said brightly. “And we were visited by the Hate Crimes officers. They said our misfortune does not correspond with anything presently in their database. Mitch, they don’t know if they will find these people.”

“They
won’t
find them,” Nuri said insistently as he came out from the back room with a bucket and mop. “I have told you this many times. And did you listen to me? No, you did not.”

Nema’s mouth tightened, but she said nothing in response.

“I made very clear to them my feelings,” he went on, speaking to Mitch now. “They offered to station a cruiser here for one, perhaps two, weeks, as protection. I told them no, thank you. I do not wish to frighten away my customers, do I? This is a business matter, and therefore I shall raise it with the Dorset Merchants Association.”

Mitch was definitely experiencing the tension between the Acars
that Des had mentioned. And he most definitely did not want to get caught in the middle.

He pocketed his change and got out of there as fast as he could, devouring his baklava as he drove to the Old Saybrook Amtrak station. Here he caught what the locals called the Toonerville Trolley, the poky little Shoreliner train that connected up the beach towns with New Haven, where the Metro-North commuter train into Grand Central could be picked up. It was a two-and-a-half-hour trip altogether.

The morning rush hour had passed so he had a seat to himself. His Power Book could run for up to six hours on its battery. He immediately fired it up, drained his coffee, and got to work.

First, he made notes. Tried to remember every single word Tito Molina had said to him as he sat there in Mitch’s chair, drinking his scotch. Every mannerism, every inflection. Tried to summon up the phone call that woke him in the night. Then he moved on to his other recollections, such as how exhilarated he’d felt that night he’d seen Tito on stage in
Death of a Salesman.
He wrote about the high point of Tito’s movie career,
Rebel Without a Cause.
He wrote about Tito’s unfulfilled dream to film his father’s life story. When he changed trains at New Haven Mitch kept right on writing. He had to keep on writing—until he could get to the city and find some real relief for what ailed him. Mitch wrote and he wrote, stitching all of his recollections and impressions together now into a cohesive essay. So totally absorbed in his work was he that he was surprised when he discovered they were already arriving at the station at 125th Street. The trip had flown right by.

When his train pulled into the belly of Grand Central he caught the Times Square Shuttle, rode the Number 1 subway train down to Fourteenth Street, and hoofed it the rest of the way home, slowing his pace to a crawl in the fetid noon heat of New York City in July. The street tar was as soft and gooey as fresh-baked brownies underfoot as he crossed Hudson Street; the heat positively radiating off of the cars idling at the intersection. He paused at the little market on
Hudson Street to buy a fresh pint of chocolate milk, then headed for his place.

Mitch maintained a parlor floor-through in a nineteenth-century brownstone on Gansevoort between Greenwich and Washington Streets in the West Village’s old meatpacking district. Once, the apartment had belonged to Maisie and him. It was their place. Right now, the place was dim and stuffy and smelled like either very old cheese or very dirty socks. He cranked up the window air-conditioners front and back, flicked on his coffeemaker, and put on Taj Mahal’s “Phantom Blues” good and loud. He sorted through his bills and catalogues distractedly for a few minutes while the coffee brewed and the apartment cooled. Then he poured himself a mug of strong coffee, laced it with two fingers of rich chocolate milk, and plunged back into his essay.

When he had finished polishing it he phoned Lacy.

“Young Mr. Berger,” his editor said brightly. “I wondered when I’d hear from you.”

“I’m responsible for his death, Lacy.”

“What are you talking about? The first set of wire stories are labeling it ‘an apparent suicide.’ ”

“I could have prevented it. I gave him some advice. Bad advice. And now he’s dead. He was the best damned actor of his generation and he’s dead. He deserves a critical tribute in tomorrow’s paper, Lacy. His career was so much more than tabloid tiffs and that stupid
Dark Star.
His real story needs to be told.
I
need to tell it. What do you think, am I being too self-indulgent?”

“What I think, darling boy, is that you’re the only arts critic I’ve ever worked with who actually wonders whether someone would be interested in what he has to say. Don’t you realize that there are one million avid readers who can’t
wait
to read your final take on Tito? They will gobble up every single word. Go for it, Mitch, do you hear me? Give me something.”

“On its way,” he announced, e-mailing her the file.

Then Mitch went off in search of his relief.

He found it exactly where he had found it ever since he was a small boy. Most of the favorite childhood haunts were long gone now—the New Yorker, the Regency, the Little Carnegie, the Bleeker Street Cinema. Skyrocketing rents and the advent of video rentals had driven them out of business. Fans could watch the old movies in their own homes now. And that was well and good. But for Mitch, the movie up on the screen was only one aspect of his viewing experience. He loved being inside of the theater itself. The world made sense to Mitch when he was in a movie theater after the lights went down. It wasn’t merely his refuge from the painful disorder of the outside world. It was his natural habitat.

In the darkness of a movie theater, Mitch Berger came alive.

A precious few sanctuaries still remained scattered here and there across the five boroughs, if you knew where to go. And on this steamy July afternoon Mitch knew exactly where to go—to a matinee double bill of
The Deadly Mantis
and
Them!
at the Film Forum on Houston Street.

He was practically alone there in the blessed darkness. No one sat within ten rows of him as he sank into a seat, loaded down with sandwiches, pickles, potato salad, cookies, candy, and soda. He unwrapped a sandwich and got busy chomping on it, sore jaw or not, as Craig Stevens got busy examining those very curious tread marks in the snow outside the demolished arctic lookout station. And so, as
The Deadly Mantis
played out on the screen, Mitch found his solace.