Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 52, No. 7 & 8, July/August 2007

The Palace Roxy by Jas. R. Petrin

The creepy thing about the old movie house, even a little scary, was that the small, dim, shrouded usher lights were glowing near the floor in the aisles. Maybe, she told herself, it was some sort of security effort — leave a light on and frighten the lowlifes away. And that was laughable; she was here, wasn’t she? Or maybe the lights had been burning for ages because the last person to trot home to bed had forgotten to shut them off. Whatever. It was just as well. She had a flashlight somewhere in her pack, but it was dead — dead as the grave.

She’d got in through the unlocked emergency exit on the alley. Unlocked, hell! The door had been standing slightly ajar. And with the rain pouring down like crazy it might as well have had a motel vacancy sign blazing over it. A short dark corridor had led her to this room, the auditorium. So there was security for you.

She shrugged out of her sodden backpack and set it down at her feet. She needed shelter, a place to crash for the night, and this ought to do just fine. She wondered if there was a working toilet here. She’d feel more at ease if she could make out something of her surroundings.

The room was big. She could feel the size of it. She had the sense of floating in a great, black immensity. All that the feeble lights revealed were the broken outlines of two aisles rising toward the back of the room. She couldn’t make out anything else; the banks of seats were a featureless mass.

But if that direction was the back of the room, then — she turned and peered over her shoulder — the screen had to be right up there behind her. She couldn’t make it out, though. It was just part of the contiguous darkness.

Still, it was better than the street. There might be rats, of course. There often were in derelict buildings. But she would spread out her sleeping bag, burrow down deep, pull the rain flap over her face, and they would leave her alone.

But spread it where? It was so darn dark!

She turned away from the barely visible aisles and the indistinguishable seats. If she moved in the direction of where the screen ought to be, she ought to come up against the edge of the stage. Old theaters always had a stage. What had they called it in drama class? A proscenium? Or was that the arch over the stage? No matter. Climb up on that and she’d be safe from rats. Well, she’d feel safer, anyway.

She stooped to grip the pack in her right hand, straightened up, and took a very careful exploratory step. Nothing blocked her way. She took another, then another, placing each foot cautiously, feeling for rotten boards or open holes in the floor before bearing down with her full weight.

After three short, tentative steps she halted. She’d felt something. A gentle draft of air against her face as if a door had opened in the building somewhere. No. She was being ridiculous. The creepy old place was starting to get to her. If she was going to feel like this, maybe she’d be better off out on the street after all.

Another step.

Another—

And then her heart gave a wrenching leap. Somebody had coughed. Or at least she had heard something that sounded like a cough.

She wasn’t alone. That explained those freaky lights. She ought to have realized it in the first place, only—

She heard it again, or thought she did. A thin, short rasping sound that reverberated faintly in the unseen depths of the room. Instantly choked off as if suppressed by the back of a hand.

Her heart was now pounding so hard it seemed to be reverberating off the walls. If only it wasn’t so damn dark in the place. If only she had brought a flashlight that worked. If only—

A floorboard creaked. Now that she was sure of. There was no mistaking it. And she was absolutely certain it came from somewhere off to her right. Now her knees were trembling so violently her whole body was shaking. A cold dread pressed around her like a suffocating weight. She turned back to the tracery of aisle lights.

“Anybody there?”

Her own quavering voice startled her. It didn’t even sound like her. And why ask the question, anyway? She was the intruder. The situation was ridiculous.

Ridiculous but absolutely terrifying.

And then she heard the rasp of a breath. She knew she heard the rasp of a breath. And at the same moment the aisle lights winked as if something shadowy had passed in front of them. She felt herself losing control. Starting to panic. She lurched blindly toward the exit just as a whickering sound whipped past her head. What the hell was that? Were there bats in here?

The whickering sound came at her again, but she only heard the start of it this time.

“Look, Robideau,” Chief Butts said, spreading his hands out flat on his desk and expelling a great whistling sigh, “the point I’m making here is that you can help me out. And you can bill me for it. I’ll make sure you’re paid.”

“If you can get a bill from me past the town manager, I’ll take my hat off to you,” Robideau replied. “Seriously, what do you need me for?”

“I got a runaway on my hands. Wayward daughter of some big shot in the city. And not just any big shot. One with friends. Political associates. I could blow it off with no problem, tell them the kid never showed up here, but the problem is she was spotted by somebody.” Robideau nodded. Only Butts would think spotting a missing person was a problem. “Ate her lunch up there at the Husky. The old man traced her that far himself with a private investigator, some guy named Doyle; and there’s no one, nothing, to say the girl ever left here. No bus ticket bought by a single female, no rumors of anybody thumbing a ride.”

“What’s her name?”

“Mona Crainer.”

“Any money?”

“Forty dollars she stole out of her old man’s wallet.”

“Well, Chief,” Robideau said, “you know all this doesn’t mean much. It rained like the devil last night. She could have been picked up the minute she stuck her thumb out. She could be halfway across the country by now.”

“Yeah. And she probably is, too. But it don’t cut no ice with the father. The kid was last seen in End of Main, and he wants every corner of the town shaken out. What we’re talking about here is optics. I gotta go through the motions. Show that I’m doing something. And that don’t leave me a whole lot of time for anything else on my plate.”

“Like Bulwer Onager.”

“Exactly. If I could phone the guy, drive over and talk to him — hell, if he was a halfway normal human being! — things would be different. But Bullet is Bullet. There’s nothing normal about him. Besides...”

“Besides, I know him and you don’t.”

“Well, that’s a fact, now, isn’t it? I’ve only lived here three, four years. You — hell! You been here all your life. You had my job for twenty years. You grew up here. I bet you were throwing spitballs from the balcony when he was still showing cliffhangers in that dump of a theater of his.”

Robideau smiled. Butts was right. Except for the part about the spitballs.

“It wasn’t always a dump, you know.”

“Fine. And I wasn’t always a potbellied old man. Time flies when you’re having fun.”

“So what do you want from me exactly?”

“I want you to go to him, talk sense to him, and deliver a message from the town council. Tell him he’s got to clean up the Palace Roxy before the town expropriates and knocks it down. Tell him there are rats in it. Tell him anything you want. Tell him he’s single-handedly threatening the Toyota — Koyota—”

“Kyoto?”

“That’s it.” He threw his hands up. “Those dumb pollution accords. And tell him to clean up his house, too, while he’s at it. From what I hear it’s even worse than his theater.”

“He might not listen.”

“I couldn’t care less. Just so long as he’s notified. Person-to-person, the town manager tells me. That’s the rule. No messages left on answering machines, no letters through the mail slot. He has to be given fair warning, and then I can send in the front-end loaders.”

Chief Butts suddenly stopped talking. He seemed to have run out of arguments. He sat behind his desk like a giant rat himself, neckless, shoulderless, looking a tiny bit vulnerable under the glare of the fluorescent light.

“Okay,” Robideau said. “I’ll give it a shot. But the minute the kid turns up, I’m off the case, all right?”

Butts looked alarmed.

“You think it’ll take that long?”

First, Robideau decided, he would find out the latest on Bulwer Onager. He didn’t want to confront an irascible man without learning everything there was to know about him. Leaving the Safety building, and aiming a wink and a grin at his old receptionist Claudia Webb on his way out, he jaywalked across Burton Street to the offices of the Netley Leader, climbed a flight of stairs, and knocked at a door with a sign on it that said: THIS MAN BITES DOGS!

“Come in,” muttered an amiable voice, “if you can stand it.”

When Robideau leaned into the room, the long, lined face of Editor Delyle Allwood lit up. A tall man with wispy white hair, Allwood leaped to his feet and came around his desk with a grin. He gripped Robideau’s hand and forearm, saying in his faintly British tones, “Chief Robideau! Retired Chief Robideau! I knew you had to be alive. I’ve been watching the obits and haven’t spotted your beaming face there yet.” He ushered his visitor to a chair. “What’s your poison? Coffee that’ll remove your stomach lining? Or would you prefer a spot of the other?”

He fluttered his eyebrows.

“Oh, the other,” Robideau said, “by all means.”

“Exactly right. Or no point being retired.”

Allwood opened a sideboard liquor cabinet that was almost entirely filled with office clutter: loose papers, old camera cases, a broken light bar, and a horde of other junk. He rummaged out a couple of mismatched crystal glasses and sloshed a generous portion of Crown Royal into each of them. Passing one to Robideau, he said, “Here’s to homicide,” and downed his in one gulp.

“Woof!” He thumped his chest. “Excellent blood thinner. Better than aspirin.” He dropped into his chair. “Now, what brings you this vast distance? This must be — what? — at least a good block and a half from your house.”

“Sorry I haven’t dropped by sooner.”

“I’m a newspaperman. I’m used to rejection.”

“I was just visiting Chief Butts.”

Allwood’s nose wrinkled. “I thought I detected an air of unpleasantness.”

“He wants a favor. Wants me to speak to Bulwer Onager.”

“Ah, now there’s a mission almost impossible. Bulwer doesn’t take kindly to being spoken to these days. I know. I’ve tried.”

“Yes, well, I’m going to give it a shot. But before I do, I want to know a little more about him. And since you never forget a fact—”

“I see. You want to paw through my files.” Allwood touched his brow. “The ones up here.”

Robideau nodded. Took a small sip of whiskey.

“Well,” said Allwood, “I’ll give you the thumbnail sketch.” He tilted his chair back, pulled out a desk drawer, and draped his long legs over it. “Bulwer is one of those odd individuals who has lived his life more or less in reverse. Where most people start with little or nothing and slowly progress to affluence and influence, he has marched steadily in the opposite direction. His father once owned half the town, as you well know, including the movie house — the Palace Roxy. Of all the Onager interests, only the Palace interested Bulwer, so the old man signed it over to him. A comfortable berth for a year or two, but shortly after that two significant events occurred. In April of ’53, television came to town, and in the fall of that year the old man died, relaxing his grip on the levers of power. Bulwer and his mother faltered. Couldn’t cope. Squabbled. Made a belated effort to shore things up by hiring a boardroom full of MBAs. But too late. By the end of the Fifties it was sell-off time.”

“I didn’t know the Onagers squabbled,” Robideau said.

“Squabbling was their lingua franca. In seven years all they managed to agree on was changing the Onager logo from a bold "O" against a starkly delineated siege engine, to a gentle lower case "onager" superimposed upon a soft black stripe. This was early days. And it was prescient.”

“Was it?”

“You do know what onager means?”

“No.”

“Ah, well. You must do more crossword puzzles. Anyway, after the first Onager establishment fell — Onager Flowers and Gifts — the rest toppled like dominoes. Only the Palace remained upright, but of course it was wholly owned by Bulwer. When his mother passed on, she left him to fight a brave but lonely battle against Jack Benny, Lucille Ball, and Wayne and Shuster of the tiny screen. The experience rattled him. Shook him. He couldn’t walk down a street without compulsively counting the insidious TV antennas sprouting from the rooftops like alien life-forms.”

Robideau mused. “I remember Dragnet...”

“You would. In the middle Sixties Bulwer gambled everything on a second screening of one of the blockbuster Hitchcock films — I forget which. It had been his biggest draw, you see. He figured if that smash hit didn’t pull in the crowds again, nothing would. And the idea worked. To a point. For the first time in years, the Palace had a full house and a line-up. Bulwer even ran out of popcorn and had to rush across to the Family Fare for more kernels to feed into the machine.

“But it wasn’t sustainable. He was soon back to empty seats. His accountant — you remember Heddy Halderson? Hot Heddy, as the fishwives called her? — advised him to start showing blue movies. Bulwer was scandalized. Refused to do it. And very soon after that, the Palace closed.”

“Any brothers or sisters?”

“None.”

“And he disliked his mother?”

“Quite the opposite. Sure, they bickered, but that was surface tension.”

Robideau sat back. “I remember going to shows at the Palace back in the Sixties.”

“Yes, he had a couple of reprieves. Thiessen Electric stopped selling TVs locally after old man Thiessen slipped on an icy patch out front of his store one night, fell down and obligingly killed himself. And then Ronnie Ralston, who rigged TV antennas, met that girl at the Netley and ran away with her.”

A silence descended.

“Is that it, then?”

“That’s it.”

“You’re a wonder, Delyle.”

“I most certainly am. And you, my friend, are a very slow drinker. I believe I’ll have another whiskey while we sit around and wait for yours to evaporate.”

From the offices of the Netley Leader, Robideau drove to the Onager house at 9401 Fairvale. He didn’t need the scrawled address on the ragged piece of notepaper Butts had thrust at him; everybody knew where the old Onager place was. It stood well back on a large lot in an aging, once elegant neighborhood. The town’s first real mansion, it had been joined over the years by the houses of other successful citizens.

It was a hulking place gone to ruin at the top of a commanding bluff. Storm clouds scudded behind it. The lot backed onto a deep ravine. The once stately black iron fence leaned dangerously in spots. As for the house, its paint was scaling away in strips, the roof had lost many of its shingles, and those that remained were curling at the corners and dark with moss. The gate was secured with a twisted coat hanger, which Robideau had to struggle with before proceeding up the walk to the porch.

He followed a line of derelict cars. Each one apparently replaced with a cheaper model as the owner fell upon progressively harder times. Nearest the house was the oldest of these, a robin’s-egg blue 1960 Lincoln, the largest car shy of a limousine that Robideau had ever seen. It had two flat tires.

The front porch looked as if a tornado had roared by. It sagged under the weight of stuff. A rusting bed frame. Headboards with the wood laminate lifting from the damp. Coils of wire, pails of nuts and bolts, boxes of swollen paperbacks bursting open and spilling their contents into the yard. A grungy toaster, a small stuffed rabbit, some chintz pillows, a heap of old office chairs, a pile of food wrappers, a book with no discernable printing on it, a bar of yellowing lye soap still in its dish. And everywhere, bundles of newspapers.

A narrow passage wended its way treacherously through the junk to the entrance. Robideau eased himself gingerly along it until he could knock on the leaded-glass door. Surreptitiously, a curtain lifted and a sallow face peered out, a prank of the light presenting a double-image of it. Robideau gazed back, not sure if he should smile, nod his head, or introduce himself through the glass. The curtain fell back into place.

He knocked again. He knocked several times. On his last attempt he used the ball of his fist to save his bruised knuckles.

No response.

Robideau cleared his throat irritably. He saw why Butts had pushed this job off on him. He backed away through the junk to the sidewalk, then threw one more glance up at the house.

To all appearances, no one lived there.

But he knew differently. Oh yes, he did.

As Robideau got back into his car, it began to rain again in large splashing drops.

Let there be light!

He dropped the douser to allow the carbon-arc light to blaze forth, brought up the sound, and hit the roll-back switch for the drapery. The music swelled, the opening credits blossomed, and the block print shifted eerily across the rattling, gathering folds of the retracting curtain.

The reels revolved in their opposite directions, the old Simplex projector purring steadily like a contented mechanical cat. The lamp house gave off a subtle scorching odor. The lacing lamp glowed on the tips of his fingers as he loaded the second machine with the next reel of film.

The film was no longer in prime condition. It was brittle with age, scratched in places, and had a rash of sparkles at some of the changeover spots. But the movie, well, that was top-notch fare. Nothing better made before or since. And putting aside that small unpleasantness of the night before, he anticipated another enjoyable evening at the movies.

Robideau parked downtown but remained in the car. His gaze traveled along the street, seeking enlightenment among the rain-streaked storefronts, finally settling on the Palace Roxy, its ponderous marquee looking shabby and slumped. He studied the rooftops, where Bulwer’s despised TV antennas had been displaced by a crop of satellite dishes. Progress. But was it really? He sorely missed those days when, after a double feature, he and his friends would saunter home, their minds reeling, filled with delicious thoughts of mad scientists and bug-eyed monsters.

Butts had mentioned throwing spitballs. It was the sort of thing Pete Melynchuk and his pals might have done.

They had been a different bunch. They still were...

Robideau got out of the car.

He found the old-timers just where he expected to, at a back table in the Netley, with an unobstructed view of the nine-foot television screen. Pete Melynchuk, gruff and grizzled; Wilmer Gates, thin and dogged looking; Chuck Lang, brawny elbows on the table; and old silent Wolverton, all arms and legs, with that perpetual and mysterious grin on his horsey face.

These men were a giant step closer to Bulwer Onager than he was.

“Well, well,” said Pete, the usual spokesman for the group, “it’s the cops. I told you not to bury your landlady in that front flower bed, didn’t I, Wove!”

Wolverton’s grin widened, his mirthful eyes all but disappearing under his knobby brow.

Chuck Lang snagged a chair from the next table with his foot and dragged it up for Robideau. Wilmer pushed a beer at him.

“I’m not a cop,” Robideau said, sitting down. “Not anymore.”

“You got that cop look on your face,” Pete insisted. “The look that tells me you’re here to ask questions and take down names.”

“You’re right about the questions,” Robideau said. “I’m helping out Chief Butts. There’s a problem with Bulwer Onager.”

“The Bullet!” Pete exclaimed. “Ha! What did he do, murder his landlady?”

“I’m trying to keep his movie house from being knocked down by the town council.”

Chuck showed his habitual scowl. “The old Palace? They should knock it down. And with him in it too.”

“Now, now,” Pete grinned, “that ain’t neighborly.”

“Have you looked at the place lately? Really looked at it? Have you seen his house up there on the hill? Unbelievable!”

“It’s ‘cause he don’t throw nothing away,” Wilmer Gates observed.

“I knew a guy once,” Pete Melynchuk said, “couldn’t throw away a darn thing. He’d toss an old gum wrapper in the trash, then come back a minute later and take it out again. It’s a sickness—”

“OCD,” Wilmer said with authority. “Your Compression Repulsive Disorder.”

“That would be CRD,” Pete replied dryly.

“Whatever. It’s when you can’t stop doing something even if you want to.”

“Like you. You can’t stop lecturing.”

“I’m not lecturing, I’m discussing. I’m saying Bullet is one of your basic compression repulsives. That’s why he can’t throw nothing out.”

“So it’s not his fault.”

“No.”

“Then how’d he get that way?”

“How do I know? Maybe when he was born the doctor slapped him in the head instead of on the butt.”

“Did he do that to you?”

“Do what?”

But Pete was turning back to their visitor, weighing him coolly with his gaze. “So if it ain’t Bullet’s fault, and it’s nobody else’s, then maybe he oughta be left alone. Maybe the chief here should go home and forget about it. It’s got nothing to do with the police.”

“Neither have I,” Robideau reminded him again. “I’m retired, remember?”

“Yeah. We all are. We’re just a bunch of old retired guys sticking our noses in where we ain’t wanted. Ain’t needed, for that matter.”

Robideau wondered what Pete thought he was retired from, since the man hadn’t, as far as the chief knew, worked a pensionable day in his life. He said, “Well, the fact of the matter is there’s a problem. It may be that Bullet should be left alone, but something has got to be done about that place of his. For his own good.”

Pete leered. Hard-bitten silver bristles stood out defiantly on his chin. “When the authorities tell you something’s for your own good, look out for squalls.”

“I’m not ‘the authorities.’”

“No, Butts is. And you’re workin’ for him.”

“I’m not working for him, I’m representing him.” Robideau glanced around at the smirking faces and sighed. “Look, if none of you are willing to help, if you don’t think you can get Bullet — I mean Bulwer — to see reason, then fine. I’ll try him again myself. I only wanted to get past his suspicious nature, that’s all. It’ll be a shame to see the Palace expropriated.”

He got to his feet.

Pete Melynchuk grinned up at him. “Now you’ve went an’ got your Jockeys twisted. When do you want to go and see the guy?”

“Now the way I’d handle it if it was me,” Pete advised, “I’d first of all visit Oddlot Jenkins.”

Oddlot. A village character who tooled around in an old van. In the old days he had been the Palace projectionist and at the same time general dogsbody for Prancing Al Evans up at the funeral home. He still worked for Al Evans. Took care of the incinerator. Kept the hearse polished up.

Oddlot was almost as reclusive as Bulwer, but Pete had more than a nodding acquaintance with him.

“He’s about the only guy Bullet Onager talks to,” Pete Melynchuk explained as they got into Robideau’s car. “They’ve kept in touch, I guess, since the Palace Roxy closed.”

Oddlot lived in a tidy little minihome, old and cramped but neat as a pin. A sort of cabana jutted over the entrance, and the wheels were hidden behind plywood panels, primly painted with images of tall green grass and daisies. A decorative plastic bumblebee hovered on a stick outside the door. An old Dodge van stood in the drive.

Robideau, his eyes fixed on the place, didn’t notice Oddlot standing behind them until the man spoke out.

“Something I can do for you?”

The men turned. Oddlot was eyeing them suspiciously. He was one of those thin, wiry men and looked as if trouble couldn’t lay a glove on him. He had a hoe in his hand, and his face was reflected in the darkened side windows of the van.

“Oddie!” Pete boomed. “You trying to scare us to death?” He indicated Robideau. “This here’s—”

“I know who he is,” Oddlot answered. “Everybody knows Chief Robideau.” His voice softened. “Too bad you retired. Look at what we got for a police chief now.”

“Listen,” Pete said, “here’s the thing. We’re tryin’ to help out a friend of yours. Bullet Onager.”

Oddlot’s eyes narrowed. He leaned the hoe against the side of the house. He turned back to his visitors with a mixture of suspicion and inquisitive concern on his face. Robideau set out the problem.

“So you see,” Robideau concluded, “if he won’t listen to reason, the town’s going to take action.”

Oddlot deliberated, one hand plucking at his chin. “That wouldn’t be right. He’s a quiet old guy. And it’s terrible what happened to him. The Palace was his whole life, and when he had to close, it busted him up inside. It’s why he lives that way. Hangs onto stuff. He don’t want to lose nothing ever again. It’s sad.”

Robideau agreed. It was kind of sad. A man loses a business he loves because the community stops supporting it; then that same community comes hounding him years later, threatening to knock the place down. Things weren’t supposed to work that way.

“I went to see him,” Robideau said, “to warn him, but he wouldn’t open his door to me. So we thought, you being a friend of his, maybe you could get him to hear what I have to say. We only want what’s best for him.”

Oddlot studied Robideau’s face. He took the hoe in his hand again, leaned on it, and stared at the ground. Then he straightened.

“I suppose I could see what I can do.”

The sky was heavy again with the threat of yet more rain. Mountainous flat-bottomed thunderheads loomed above the lake, and far to the south, out over the marshes, little smoke-white rags of cloud darted swiftly before the wind.

At Onager’s house, they pulled over and stopped. Oddlot, who had arrived there ahead of them, got out of his van.

“Jeez,” Pete Melynchuk breathed, with a sour glance at the house, “would you look at the place!”

“Should we go in with you?” Robideau asked Oddlot, who had sauntered back to stand at the side of the car.

“Nope,” Oddlot said, “I’ll go in alone. I’ll explain things to him and see what he says. If I give you the signal, you can come on in. Otherwise...”

They watched his thin, wiry figure proceed up the walk, negotiate the obstacle course on the porch, and bang on the door. The door opened instantly for him, and he disappeared inside.

Then they waited.

“You ever see a place to beat it?” Pete said, staring sideways out the car window. “Place like that’ll be alive with squirmin’ vermin. Mice, rats, and roaches. Chuck Lang is right. Knock the movie house down, and knock this dump down too.”

Oddlot Jenkins appeared and raised his hand.

“That’s our cue,” Robideau said.

“Ain’t we lucky!”

“I want you to take this,” Robideau handed Pete his little digital camera, “and see if you can get a few snapshots inside the place. They might come in handy. And try not to be too obvious.”

“James Bond, that’s me,” Pete said. He held the camera out with one hand and took an experimental shot through the windshield.

If the front porch was bad, the interior was far worse. And the smell! The smell of decay, the smell of mildew, the smell of cats allowed to run wild. “I’ll just wait here,” Pete said, wrinkling his face and halting in the sty of a kitchen.

Robideau followed Oddlot into a large sitting room, twenty feet on a side. It was piled waist high — in some places shoulder high — with the debris and detritus of life. Looking at the jumble, the muddle, the overwhelming hodgepodge of litter and refuse, it was incomprehensible to Robideau that anyone could amass such a collection of junk. Bulwer Onager sat in a thronelike chair. Once a fine piece of furniture, now the stuffing bulged out where the cats had worried it, and the cushion behind his head was dark with hair oil and perspiration.

He was a big man, round shouldered and bottom heavy. He had flaccid jowls and a dewlapped neck. A tangled gray fringe tumbled over his ears. He looked beaten, worn out, and haunted by his personal demons. He wore slippers, droopy gray sweatpants, and a wrinkled, food-stained T-shirt with the word WIMPY silk-screened across it in large disintegrating letters.

“Now just listen to what the man has to say,” Oddlot advised him.

There was no place to sit. They stood like petitioners before the king. Robideau cleared his throat and laid it all out. While he spoke, the old man watched him like a creature cornered in its nest, head canted, eyes fixed. When Robideau had finished speaking, the big man still stared, but his head had sunk visibly lower on his chest.

“So what do you think?” Robideau asked him. “Can you clean up the Palace a little? Have that sagging marquee taken down, with all its broken bulbs? Slap a little paint on the place?”

Onager shrugged.

“And here too.” Robideau glanced around. “Can’t you get rid of some of this stuff?”

Onager took time to think. His eyes moved slowly, all the way to the left, all the way to the right. Clearly, whatever it was he perceived here was not what other mortals saw.

“Like what?” he muttered.

Robideau nodded at a large, overfilled cardboard box by the door. “Those are cat droppings, Bulwer. Why in the world do you keep something like that around?”

“I don’t know.”

“You can throw them out, don’t you think?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well, here’s the problem. The town doesn’t want you to keep that sort of thing. It isn’t healthy. And they don’t like a lot of that other stuff outside on the porch, all those worn-out cars in the drive. Why hang onto it all?”

“You never know what you’re going to need.”

“An old Oreo cookie bag?” Robideau nodded at a carefully flattened and folded package on a mound of trash next to Bulwer’s chair.

“You never know.” A clutch of at least a dozen garden rakes clawed the air behind the old man’s head.

Robideau glanced at Oddlot Jenkins, inviting a little support. Oddlot’s blank stare was impassive. He wasn’t about to do any heavy lifting.

“It’s important you think carefully about this,” Robideau said. “There’s no use putting it off. The town means business.” He stepped back. “I’m going to ask you to sleep on it. Talk to Oddlot here about what can be done. I’ll check back with you tomorrow evening, and I’ll expect you to have made up your mind about these things.”

Glancing back as they walked away, Robideau could see Bulwer’s stolid reflection in a cracked mirror leaning against the wall.

“Well, that got us absolutely nowhere,” Pete said, as they climbed back in the car and slammed the doors. Oddlot pulled a U-turn in front of them and accelerated on by without a wave or a glance. “We’ll see,” Robideau replied. “I gave him time to mull it over.”

“Tell you what I’d do,” Pete said, “I’d nuke the place. The house and the goddamn theater.” He gave the camera back. “Got you some pictures, though. Just don’t try to flog them to House Beautiful.”

Robideau dropped Pete off at the Netley, then drove slowly home. The mouth-watering aroma of pot roast struck him as he entered the tidy house, and he realized how much he took this clean and cozy little house for granted. Mrs. Robideau took good care of him. She thrust an inviting glass of sherry into his hand.

“Well?”

“Well what?”

“Are you going to throw that poor man out in the street?”

She followed him through to the office, where he sat down at his computer, shaking his head. He connected the camera to the USB port. “You amaze me. How do you know these things? I didn’t know myself what Butts wanted until he explained it to me there in his office.”

“Friends and telephones. Does that answer your question?”

The pictures began to move from the camera’s memory to the computer. Robideau smiled and nodded. “I guess it does.”

“Fine. Now answer mine. What’s going to happen to Mr. Onager if you take his house away?”

“It’s his movie house they want to take away, not his home. And I didn’t take anything except these photos.” He clicked the “view” icon, and the first picture flashed to the screen. It was Pete’s practice shot, showing the back window of Oddlot’s van. The next one showed the inside of the house.

“Oh, my dear Lord and everything that’s holy!” Mrs. Robideau gasped, shrinking back, horrified. “Does he really live like that?”

“He really does.”

“Then the poor man needs help.”

“I can’t help him if he won’t let me, and I’m afraid that’s going to be the problem.”

He flicked through the pictures, an even dozen of them, while Mrs. Robideau emitted little disbelieving gasps and groans.

“Is dinner ready?” Robideau asked her.

She was as pale as the plates on the table. “It’s ready. But I don’t know if I can eat it now.”

Jerry Doyle knew something about old theaters. The detective’s uncle had been a projectionist once. Which was a great thing back then for a kid, getting to see all the latest movies for free. He had practically lived in that magical theater, and his knowledge of it would help him here. He had climbed up the old iron fire escape to the roof of the Palace Roxy, and now stood at the door of the little shack that he knew was the emergency exit for the projection booth. The vent chimney from the carbon-arc lamps stuck out the side of it. Every old theater had one of these, dating from the days of hazardous nitrate film stock. Fire regulations had required it.

The front doors of the building were sealed like a vault; the back door, steel clad, was locked up too. But here...

He wedged the little pry bar into the crack between the door and the frame, punched it with the heel of his hand, and the door sprang open.

Nothing to it.

If that idiot of a police chief, Butts, wouldn’t take some good advice and search the place, then Doyle would just have to do it on his own. It was the only promising lead he had. The girl was crazy about the movies. Especially old movies. Took extra drama classes at her high school and rented every classic video she could find. Had she spotted this old place? Wondered about it? Had she actually been here?

Maybe not, but he would try to find out.

A short flight of steps, almost a ladder, ended in a cramped, narrow electrical room. He switched on his flashlight. There was a short cluttered bench, a DC generator, a lot of cabling, and a fuse box with an enormous lever on the side. There was also a pail and a string mop, the room doing double duty as a janitors’ closet.

He entered the projection booth. Nothing out of place here, but he was surprised to see the original equipment still in place. Well kept too. You could practically eat your lunch off it. Interesting.

He went down some narrow carpeted stairs to the auditorium.

Well! Whoever kept the projection booth tidy certainly didn’t expend a lot of effort down here. Place looked like a cross between a storage warehouse and a recycling station. He walked down to the front of the auditorium and stopped at the end of the aisle. He aimed his torch along the front row of seats.

His attacker must have been standing off to one side in the darkness, waiting for him. He had no warning before something came whistling at him through the air. It struck low, careened off his shoulder, and caught him just above the ear, knocking his glasses off. He stumbled sideways, dropped to his left knee, and crouched there, swaying. The next blow struck him above the eyes and knocked him on his back, with one leg crooked under him. He didn’t feel the furious rain of blows that fell on him after that.

Supplies were becoming harder to get, and the damn prices kept going up. Take the lamp house, for instance. He was buying the cheapest carbon rods he could find. A new pair only lasted an hour. Carbon savers helped — sleeves for splicing two used stubs together, good for about one reel — but they flared a little when they evaporated. Xenon lamps had been around for decades, but they couldn’t be used with this equipment. And in any case, the old ways were best.

Peering through the smoked inspection port, he twisted the knobs that brought the tips of the rods together, touched them briefly, and struck the arc. A flow of white-hot plasma now streamed sun-bright between them.

He double-checked the projectors. The movie, the first reel of it, was cued up in number one. The second reel waited in number two. He gave the lamp another minute for the color to stabilize, and then it was showtime.

He opened the hand douser.

Watching the screen through the observation port, he mused over ways in which he might fill the place with the pungent aroma of freshly made popcorn.

Robideau’s cell phone rang the next evening, just as he was leaving the house. It was Butts. Juggling a travel mug filled with afterdinner coffee, phone, and car keys, he took the call as he got into his car.

After relating his progress thus far to Butts, he deliberately turned the tables. “How about you? Have you found the girl?”

“Sherlock bloody Holmes couldn’t find that girl. Not with what I got to go on. It’s like she fell off the face of the earth. And now I got more trouble.”

“What’s that?”

“Now the private detective’s gone and disappeared too.”

“You’re kidding me.”

“Do I sound like a kidder? I don’t know what to think about him. Maybe he got fed up. As far as the girl’s concerned, I had Claudia Webb print off some posters, and I been slapping ‘em up all over town.” He began reading one of them over the phone.

Robideau pulled out onto the street and headed downtown, only half listening. Then something the chief was blathering about caught his attention. “What did you just say?”

“I said the girl had a backpack. Why?”

“Can you describe it?”

“I guess so. Let’s see. Army surplus. There’s an Alfred Hitchcock patch sewn onto it — that famous drawing, his face in profile. She was an old movie buff apparently.”

Robideau fought to recall why that should mean something to him. Then he remembered the photos, the snaps Pete had taken at the Onager house, and an unpleasant feeling began to build in his gut.

“What have you got?” Butts demanded. “You on to something?”

“I’m not sure. I’ll get back to you.”

Robideau pulled a U-turn, tires chirping, and sped back to his house.

“You already looked at those pictures,” Mrs. Robideau chided him. “You know what they show.” She hovered in the office doorway.

“I think I know what they show,” Robideau answered, “but I just... yes. Here.”

His big hand hung over the mouse button. The picture showed, in digital detail, a cluttered corner of Bulwer Onager’s kitchen. And there at the end of the counter, on top of the milk cartons, on top of the Christmas cards, on top of the stack of out-of-date calendars, open jam jars, and a spray of knitting needles, was a backpack. But the backpack was blue with a Nike logo on it. Definitely not army surplus.

He sat there. He had been so sure...

He slowly searched back through the photos in reverse. The last one to appear was the practice shot Pete had snapped through the windshield of the car. There was a glare across it, the sun striking in across the dash. Behind the glare, and a little washed out by it, was the back of Oddlot’s van.

His eyes narrowed. In the rear window of the van was a backpack. It was desert camo. And he could see what looked like an oversized patch of old Hitch staring at something off-screen.

Robideau stood up. “Oh my God!”

Leaning hard on the accelerator, he made it to Oddlot’s mini-home in minutes. He pounded the steering wheel. The yard was empty. There was no sign of Oddlot’s van around.

“You lookin’ for somebody?” a voice asked. He turned and found Pete Melynchuk’s sardonic face watching him curiously from the street.

The Palace Roxy’s façade extended for one hundred feet along the east side of Burton Street, part of the usual small town brick and mortar continuum of shop fronts. The marquee, which had once blazed with hundreds of tiny incandescent lights, drooped sadly over their heads, dead for years.

“So you figure Oddlot grabbed the girl, do you?”

“No. I’m saying her backpack was in his van.”

Pete raised and lowered his eyebrows. He drew some picks out of his jacket pocket and went to work on the door.

“You’re not supposed to know how to do that,” Robideau observed.

“Good thing I know what I’m not supposed to know, then, isn’t it?”

Pete pulled the door open.

There was the old familiar lobby, the concession stand, the chrome-plated stanchions with the velvet rope drooping between them. The velvet rope was now two-toned: red along the bottom and gray on the top with dust. Ramps at each end of the room led to the auditorium.

“Whasamatter?” Pete asked.

Robideau was caught in a sudden rush of nostalgia. He had watched his first low-budget screen-screamer here: Creature From the Black Lagoon. It had astonished him. Delighted him. He’d loved it so darn much he’d hurried back for Tarantula, Monolith Monsters, and The Deadly Mantis, in that order.

“Did you ever see The Deadly Mantis?” Robideau asked.

“I seen Wilmer’s first wife, does that count?”

“And The Mysterians.” Robideau’s eyes misted over. “I still remember that pointy-nosed robot kicking a jeep out of its way. Pretty silly. But we loved it.”

“I seen that Phantom of the Opera movie here,” Pete said. “The old silent version. Guy with a face like a boiled sheep’s stomach and fingernails down to his knees. Coulda been Howard Hughes. They wouldn’t have needed makeup.” He stopped and glanced around uneasily. “Hope to hell we don’t find nothing like that lurching around in here.”

Framed posters still hung in the lobby. Probably valued by collectors, Robideau thought to himself. One of Janet Leigh in her underwear. And one of Hitch himself dressed in suit and tie, pointing at his watch, with the caption: NO ONE... BUT NO ONE... WILL BE ADMITTED TO THE THEATER AFTER THE START OF EACH PERFORMANCE. And another: DOn’t GIVE AWAY THE ENDING — It’s THE ONLY ONE WE HAVE.

Robideau pulled himself out of his reverie. He was here on business. He had come to find Oddlot Jenkins and ask him some tough questions. He followed Pete into the auditorium.

The room was in darkness. Pete switched on the large nine-volt lantern they had brought from Robideau’s car.

Robideau felt the back of his neck prickle. The Palace had never been luxurious — not a “picture palace.” This was a small town, after all. But it had once boasted a certain grandiosity with its plush-carpeted aisles, Art Deco sconces, pilasters, and not one but two glittering chandeliers, presumably to give the projectors an unobstructed line of shot. Now the chandeliers were clotted with spiderwebs, and dust hung in mats from the sconces.

Pete swept his light out over the seats. Nearly every one was heaped with something: books, paintings, an old typewriter, a large clock, a large number of mounted birds, rolls of carpet, a heap of hard hats, stuffed animals, a huge globe of the moon, boxes of ceramic tile. It was as if a convoy of bulging Salvation Army vans had off-loaded their contents into the place.

“What I think Bullet must’ve done,” Pete said, holding the lantern in his two hands and beaming it around, “is brought stuff from those other Onager businesses when they closed and stashed it here. Wouldn’t get rid of it. And over the years he’s kept on adding things.”

“It looks that way.”

“The guy’s a psycho.”

Heavy industrial furnishings crowded the proscenium. Display cases from the old Onager Department Store, complete with shelving and original merchandise. Stacks of men’s shirts behind the dusty glass. And manikins. There were manikins everywhere.

“I don’t see Oddlot around,” Pete said, stating the obvious.

“No, but someone’s been here.”

“Yeah?”

“Take a look at the floor.”

Pete aimed the light at their feet. There were plenty of footprints in the grime. Trails led off everywhere. Pete planted his own boot down deliberately, and a little mushroom cloud of dust billowed up. “I see what you mean.”

“Listen,” Robideau said, “I don’t dare waste any time. I’m going to take a run over to Bulwer’s. Do you think you can hang around here for a while in case Oddlot shows up?”

“Well, now, just a minute, we still haven’t...”

“Thanks, Pete.”

Robideau rushed off. Pete heard the front door to the street bang shut. He sighed. He went back along the ramp to a sort of switchback, meant to keep stray light in the lobby from filtering down into the auditorium. He moved the beam of the lantern over the walls and found what he was looking for. An almost invisible door. This had to be the way up to the projection booth. He lifted the small black latch.

His feet made no sound on the carpet as he slowly mounted the stairs. At the top was a door. He opened it. Before him was the projection both, dominated by two large movie projectors and two smaller ones. There was a slide projector. There were a couple of plastic chairs, a metal stool, and a light table next to some splicing equipment.

And something else. Something weird. The room was practically spotless. No dust, no clutter. “Someone uses the place,” he muttered, puzzled. “Someone sweeps up here and takes good care of things.”

Then a voice so close behind him that he could feel the breath on his neck said, “Go right in, Pete.”

Oddlot Jenkins squeezed past, holding a large cardboard box in his arms, containing reels of film. He flipped a switch with his elbow, and the room was suddenly bathed in light. He set the box down on a small bench. “I keep these in the fridge,” he confided.

“Oddie,” Pete said evenly, “What’re you doing here?”

“What am I doing here? I’ve got a key.”

“What do you know about that girl? The one everybody’s lookin’ for?”

Oddlot stared at him, blinked, then turned away and started tinkering.

“Nothing.”

“You’ve got her backpack. How come?”

He grinned, as if he at last understood. “You mean that one in the van? I found it.”

“Found it!”

“That’s right.”

“You found it, but you didn’t go through it, find some identification, and make a call to Butts?”

“It was empty.”

“Really.”

“Yes, really.”

“All right, then where did you find it?”

Oddlot kept working, threading the film through the camera mechanism.

“You’re not gonna tell me?” Pete said. “It’s a secret?”

“I don’t have to tell you anything.”

“No. You can answer to Butts and Robideau. She was here, wasn’t she? In this theater?”

“Somebody was here. I don’t know who exactly.” He fed the end of the film into the take-up reel. “You know, people used to come here a lot in the old days. I even gave tours of this room back then.” He glanced around, looking a little dejected. “The insurers ended that. They don’t let you do it now.”

“You’re sayin’ the girl might’ve been here? That she wandered in accidentally?”

“I’m saying somebody did, that’s all. I only left the back door open a second — I was bringing the car around to move a few items in for Bulwer. It might have been her. People do that, you know. Sneak into movie theaters.”

Pete sighed. This guy was living in the past. He tried a different tack. “Does Bullet know you’re here? Does he know you’re screwin’ with his cameras?”

“They’re not cameras, they’re projectors. And, yes, he knows all about it. He likes this movie too. He’s seen it seventy-one times, and I’ve seen it fifty-four times. In fact—” He extended his arm and looked at his wristwatch. “—he should be here by now. We always start right on time.”

“What’re you telling me? You guys get together an’ watch movies in this dump?”

“Sometimes. Sometimes Bulwer comes here and watches the film all by himself.”

Pete shook his head. Weirder and weirder. But he didn’t really care about that.

“Are you gonna tell me where you found the backpack?”

“Stick around, Pete,” Oddlot said. “The movie’s coming right up, and it’s special. We’re showing the 35mm print tonight. We usually show one of the 16s.”

“Oh, you do, huh? So what’s the occasion?”

Oddlot finished loading the second projector, closed it up, then turned and looked at him. “Bulwer thinks this might be the last chance we get. He figures they’re going to shut him down any day now — for good.”

He struck the arc in projector number one, touched a switch, and the booth went dim. The only illumination now was the glow of the lacing bulb, the light in the arc housing, and the glow shining up through the clear plastic top of the splicing bench.

Frustrated, getting nowhere with the guy, Pete stepped to the door.

“Where are you going?” Oddlot glanced up.

“Downstairs.”

“I think you should stay up here. Bulwer wouldn’t like—”

“I don’t care what Bulwer likes or doesn’t like.”

Leaving Oddlot to his movie machinery, Pete headed back down to the auditorium. Robideau could deal with Oddlot Jenkins, drive splinters under his nails or beat him with a hose. And while he waited for the old cop’s return, Pete would make good and sure he hadn’t missed anything. He walked slowly down the sloping aisle, beaming the lantern around. The most unnerving thing was the manikins, rescued, like the shirts, from Onager’s Department Store, dragged in here and crammed into the seats. They looked like rump-naked androgynous movie fans that had wandered in to catch the final show.

And it seemed they were going to get their wish.

The curtain was rattling open. The movie was starting. Evidently Oddlot wasn’t waiting for Bullet. Up on the screen a starry background resolved into a rotating globe with the word UNIVERSAL stretching across it. The logo faded and the music started: a jarring attack of nerve-racking violins. Pete didn’t like violins. Fiddles sure, but not violins.

He clumped on down the aisle.

Black bars stabbed across the screen. Then crisp white block letters: ALFRED HITCHCOCK...

White bars now, the violins screaming.

“Seventy-one times?” Pete grimaced in disbelief. He scowled up at the projection booth but could make out only the shifting and dancing beam of light from the porthole.

Turning back, he caught the tail end of the credits blinking onto the screen. VERA MILES, JANET LEIGH... Black bars, white bars shooting in all directions. Names splitting in half. Jeez! And then finally, thankfully, the opening scene: a cityscape, the camera lens settling birdlike down, down, down over the buildings, and drifting in through a partly raised window.

Reaching the flat area at the front of the theater, he turned and moved slowly along the front row of seats. He could see a heck of a lot better this time with the help of the reflected light from the screen. Here was a seat piled with burlap sacks, probably from the family’s market garden. Then two manikins with concavities for eyes, one with an arm outthrust as if making a warning sign. He turned in spite of himself; nothing there.

Here some old plumbing fixtures. A box of curtain rings. And here—

Pete froze.

In the flickering light from the screen behind him, a dead woman sat staring rigidly back at him. She stared with a look of astonishment and dismay on her face. He knew who it was. The young woman in the poster. And there was more. In the seat beside her was another body. Some big guy Pete had never seen before.

“Oddie!” he hollered, getting his breath back. “Oddie, you get your skinny butt down here!”

This time Robideau approached the house from the rear, following the gully and angling up through the trees. He knew he was going to have to sneak into the house, that there was no way Bulwer would let him in voluntarily. Sheet lightning rippled in the sky, backlighting whole sections of swift, driving cloud. Low, rumbling booms of thunder muttered far out over the marsh.

He had to literally push his way through a mound of garbage bags to get near the back stoop.

The rear door was standing open a crack — no need to lock it behind that malodorous barricade — and in a moment Robideau found himself at the back of Bulwer’s industrial-sized kitchen. A fluorescent panel buzzed over the stove, revealing the obstacle course that surrounded him. Stuff was piled to the rafters in tall, unstable heaps. It looked as if it might collapse on him at the next shivering boom of thunder.

“I know you’re a pack rat, Bulwer,” Robideau breathed, “but oh, my dear maiden aunt!”

Chuck was right. Call in Metro Gariuk’s backhoes.

The thunder and lightning now was almost continuous. Shadows marched and leaped on the walls. Everywhere were the ubiquitous garbage bags and newspapers, stack upon tottering stack of them. He saw a wall of biscuit tins with jolly labels: MCGARRIGALS FOR A TASTY TREAT! YOu’lL LOVE BECk’s CREAMY CENTERS! MIGHTY FINE MUNCHING — HARVEYS! He thought about the little creeping things — Pete’s squirmin’ vermin — moving in all this rubbish, and revulsion traced a cold finger from the nape of his neck all the way down to his tailbone.

There was a passageway through the confusion, circumnavigating a central island. He followed it to the door of the dining room. Beyond the wide French doors, a dark-framed dining table was all but invisible under the junk.

A blinding lightning flash pierced the room, followed hard by a crash of thunder. The strike lit up the room like a flashbulb and made Robideau jump.

He licked his lips and went into the sitting room.

Here again were paths carved through the rubbish. The stink of mildew and cat litter was nauseating. Every few seconds a crack of thunder or flash of lightning struck at his nerves. Bulwer’s chair loomed before him. Empty. Where was the old guy?

He squeezed past it and stepped into the den.

The storm was raging now, going hammer and tongs. It rippled behind the stained glass windows, shedding an intermittent and sulphurous glow on things. Lengths of pipe, a snakelike garden hose, a dozen dry and empty pet shop fish tanks. Stacks upon stacks of old film canisters, so many of them they took up most of one wall. An electric heater. A large fan-back chair.

And...

He caught only an ephemeral glimpse of something. In a flicker of lightning, a shadow closed on his, and something struck him on the back of the head.

When Robideau opened his eyes he found Bulwer Onager looming over him. A floor lamp lit the big man’s face. “I’m very sorry about that, Chief Robideau,” he said, “but you were sneaking around in my house like a thief.”

Robideau’s head felt as if someone was drilling into it with a brace and bit. He realized that he was back in the living room, half sprawled on the floor, his shoulders propped against a yellowing stack of newspapers. He must have been dragged here. He was still groggy.

“The back door was... was open, so—”

“I leave it open sometimes. For the cats.”

“I came here... looking for Oddlot. I thought he might be... hiding here.” Robideau sat up a little straighter, and the room dipped and swayed. He pressed a hand to the back of his head. He saw Bulwer more clearly now, sitting in his raggedy chair, balancing a cricket bat across his knees. He still had his WIMPY shirt on. Haltingly, Robideau explained about the backpack and the missing girl.

“Oddlot isn’t here,” Bulwer said. “He must be up at the theater.”

“I just came from there. The place was closed.”

“Closed to the public, yes. Not to Oddlot and me. We’re different.”

“If Oddlot knows anything about that girl, he needs to speak up,” Robideau said, thinking, Yes, you most certainly are different. We can write that down and have it notarized.

The old man sniffed. He had other thoughts on his mind. “They want to tear the Palace down, you know.” He seemed not to remember Robideau’s appeal to him. “They’ll probably open a video store there. I could never agree to that.”

Robideau began to rise. Bulwer lifted the bat, shook his head, and the chief sank back down again. What was the old man playing at? And then he remembered that in the other room, he had seen... Just what had he seen?

“You could reopen your place.”

“That’s not possible. No money, you see. No credit.”

“You could find investors, Bulwer. Modernize. Divide the place up into one of those multiplexes.”

“Pooh. Those aren’t theaters. They’re just screening rooms with the sound turned up too loud.”

Robideau thought hard. He had to keep the old man talking.

“I used to love going to the Palace, you know.”

Bulwer nodded. His troubled face was suddenly in silhouette as a stab of lightning leaped in the room.

“That’s nice. We had some good years there. But then TV came along and changed all that. We couldn’t afford the new gimmicks: Cinerama, wide-screen, 3-D with those silly eyeglasses. When I showed The Tingler they wanted me to rig buzzers under the seats to give people an extra scare. And then color TV came along. Bigger screens. Vee-cee-ars.” He said it as if the word tasted bad. “And now there’s digital television, did you know that?”

“Yes.”

“TV screens as thin as your hand and two or three meters across. Sound systems. Not speakers. Sound systems. Even the multiplex theaters are going to go under. Just wait and see if I’m not right.”

Bulwer’s eyes slowly lowered to look at him.

“Have you got a TV in your house, Chief Robideau?”

Robideau hesitated. He didn’t want to provoke the old man. “Well, yes. Everybody does these days.”

“I don’t.”

“Well, you’re wise. They’re a darn waste of time.”

“That’s right. That’s just what they are. The old movie houses, they were different. They got you out of the house. Brought you downtown. They were an experience.” Bulwer’s eyes glistened. “On a Saturday night the street was alive out front of the Palace. The marquee was so bright it took your breath away. Go there now, you’d think you were in a ghost town. TV is nothing but a curse.”

“No argument here,” Robideau said.

“In the Forties, movie attendance was ninety million a week. By the end of the Fifties, forty million. Today, twenty or thirty. See where it’s going?”

“Listen,” Robideau said, “you better let me up, okay? We’ll go somewhere and have a coffee, sit down and talk this out.”

“I have to leave soon,” the old man said. “I’m missing the show.”

“The show?”

“Yes. Oddlot’s getting it ready. Mother’s favorite film, you know.”

“What film is that?”

“They don’t make films of that caliber anymore. All blood and gore these days. And special effects. It’s like being at a circus.”

“What film?”

“A Hitchcock film. He knew how to make movies!”

“Which one?”

Bulwer gazed down at him. Robideau felt like a human sacrifice at the feet of an unbalanced god. “Did you like the old Hitchcock films, Chief Robideau?”

“Sure.”

“We had people lining up at the doors when we showed that film.”

“Which one are you talking about?”

“Anthony Perkins should have won an Oscar. I, for one, think he was robbed.”

Bulwer’s chair creaked under his weight. He closed his eyes. His hands relaxed on the cricket bat, big hands, powerful hands, liver spotted and puffy, but strong and capable hands.

“Those were the days. Minnie Scooder there out front in the ticket booth, the Gilmore girl handling the concessions. We called her the glamour girl, did you know that? A little joke we had. And Oddlot and me up in the projection booth. I learned so much from him. How to trim the arc, how to do a changeover. You do a changeover every twenty minutes on the 35s. On the 16s, every forty-four minutes. That’s how long a reel of film lasts.”

“I didn’t realize that.”

“Oh yes. And Oddlot, when I told him how much Mom liked it, had the idea of reporting the movie stolen. The distributor yelled, but what could he do about it? We were going out of business. He had to chase the insurance company.”

Bulwer chortled mirthfully. Robideau got slowly to his feet.

“Of course,” Bulwer went on, more seriously, “a reel of film doesn’t last forever.” His head had tilted all the way back; it gave a curious view of him from under the chin. “It gets brittle, scratched. The sprocket holes wear. So we store our 35mm copy in the fridge behind the concession stand — keep it at forty degrees — and most of the time we use 16mm prints. You can still buy those for a few hundred dollars.”

Robideau wanted another look in the den. He began to edge in that direction.

“Of course,” Bulwer droned on, “the movie’s printed on safety film. If it was the old film, that nitrate stuff, it might have turned to powder or exploded by now. Oddlot made me remove all the old nitrate film from the Palace. He thinks it’s dangerous. Starts on fire if you look at it. It even burns under water; you can’t put it out.”

Robideau reached the den and slipped his key chain Mag-Lite from his pocket. There were the fish tanks. And the wicker chair. The electric heater glowing on the floor.

“To understand what a nitrate fire can do, you should go and see Cinema Paradiso,” Bulwer droned. “Not that I’ve seen it. But Oddlot recommends it.”

Robideau edged forward. The large fan-back chair was pushed up hard against the wall. There was a lot of shadow here, and...

Damn!

Robideau had dropped the Mag-Lite. It bounced on the carpet, rolled, and lay at his feet, its tiny light directed under the chair.

He hunkered down and groped for it. Its bisected beam revealed a pair of ankles. Ankles that looked impossibly thin. The nylon tights around them drooped loosely from skinny shanks. Below, a pair of lady’s oxfords had a layer of dust on them a quarter of an inch thick.

Taking hold of the Mag-Lite, Robideau stood back up. He felt a tingling and sickly presentiment. As he slowly raised the torch he saw a pleated skirt that seemed to have nothing under it but sticks. A pair of clenched, white-gloved hands in the lap. A once-satiny blouse between the lapels of a jacket. A tarnished pendent. The face...

The face before him was hollowed and shrunken. The brow had an onionskin tautness. The hair, a washed-out blond, stood out from the scalp in hideous clumps. The mouth hung open, slack jawed and fleshless, revealing a bone-white section of dental bridgework in a bank of yellow and twisted teeth.

Robideau tried to move but couldn’t. His feet seemed rooted to the floor. He saw that Bulwer Onager had jumped the rails, had swung as far from the tracks of normality as it was possible to go.

“Esta Onager,” Robideau whispered. “You ran the flower shop. You’re Bulwer’s mother.”

The light clicked on.

“Noooooo!” Bulwer hollered, and the cricket bat whistled through the air. Robideau saw it coming, but it never connected because he was struck from the side and bowled over, his aching head crashing into one of the fish tanks. He had a sense of two men struggling, and suddenly Pete was hauling him to his feet.

“Come on, Chief. You’ve outwore your welcome. Don’t worry about those two. I gave Butts a call.”

Gripping Robideau by the shoulders, Pete rushed him quickly back through the cluttered house. A last glance showed Bulwer trying to shake off Oddlot, who was hanging onto the cricket bat with both hands. The light above the men careened crazily. The stacks of film canisters teetered and then crashed down around their legs. Coils of film and an ugly brown powder spilled out of the cans and across the floor and the heater.

Pete and Robideau burst from the house, struggled over the garbage bags, and stumbled into the yard. There was an ominous thump at their backs, and the windows of the den blew out, scattering shards of glass across the lawn. This was followed by a burgeoning flicker, and suddenly the den was shooting flame like a fireworks display. Horrified, Robideau tried to rush back in, but Pete Melynchuk held him back.

Police Chief Butts pulled up with his siren wailing, jumped from his car, and stalked toward them. Heavy, low-hanging, acrid smoke gushed from the shattered windows of the house.

“Damn it, Robideau, I only asked you to talk to the guy. Now I got a murder investigation on my hands and a house on fire. What is it with you?” He squinted. “Did you know your head is bleeding?”

The rain began to fall with such ferocity it drove Butts back into his car at a run.

Oddball had been right. You couldn’t put out the fire by pouring water on it. This was confirmed by none other than Chuck Lang, once a member of the End of Main volunteer fire brigade. He polished off a beer and let out a gaseous belch. “What was he thinking, storing old films there?”

Pete and Robideau were at the table in the Netley. Wilmer and Wolverton were just sitting down.

Robideau touched the bandage on his head and winced. “Oddlot made him remove the film from the theater. There must have been quite a stock of them. They found even more in the wing of the house that didn’t burn. Silents and old newsreels. Even a pile of ancient Russian films that he scrounged from God knows where.”

“He should’ve known better,” Chuck said unsparingly. “Got rid of them. But he wouldn’t part with anything, would he? Not even his poor dead mother.”

“He couldn’t stand to part with food wrappers,” Pete said, as if this explained it. “Why wouldn’t he keep his mother around?”

Wilmer signaled for more beer. “I seen that young fella works at the video rental store this morning, and he told me that ever since this hit the newspapers they can’t keep that Psycho movie on the shelves. They’re ordering more copies from the city. Bullet would’ve liked that.”

“I don’t think so,” Robideau said.

“To think of him in that old theater,” Wilmer continued, “showing his mom that movie over and over again! It’s like I said. OCD. Your Compression Repulsive Disorder.”

Pete rolled his eyes.

“So Bullet killed her too?” Chuck said frowning. “His own mother?”

“No.” Pete shook his head. “He didn’t. Esta died — I think it was lung cancer got her. Smoked like a stove full of sawdust, that old gal.”

“But he kept her around,” Chuck persisted. “Kept her at the Palace. He kills the girl because he thinks she might’ve seen something. He kills the detective when he comes looking for the girl. As for Oddlot...”

They thought about Oddlot.

Had he played any part in the murders? He’d sworn to Pete he hadn’t known anything about them, and Robideau believed that was probably true. On the other hand, Esta Onager had been pretty spry for a dead woman. She hadn’t walked from the Palace Roxy to Bulwer’s house all by herself. Or walked away from the embalming table, for that matter. And it was a fact that the Onagers had owned the funeral home before Prancing Al Evans got his hands on it, and a fact that Bulwer’s pal Oddlot had done the fetch-and-carry jobs there.

“It’s amazing the things you don’t notice when they’re right under your nose,” Robideau said.

Pete nodded. “You got that right.”

“Things are rarely what they seem.”

“You got that right,” Pete said.