Lois DiNunzio, Means of Production accountant, first met Arnie Lovitz in the one foolproof place to meet eligible men these days, the smoker’s ghetto. The civic legislation on the subject of cigarette smoking was profound, was far-reaching, or that’s how the city council talked about it when they passed the relevant legislation in 1995. How profound, how far-reaching wasn’t clear exactly, until these little societies of smokers began to appear at street level. Cast out of their places of employment. The tide of public opinion had turned against these miscreants, as if all at once. Once, they were worldly, they were crime novelists or back-room politicians. They were salesmen out late indulging in whiskey and women and cigars. Lois’s father, Louis DiNunzio, was like that, on the road thirty weeks a year, overnight in cheap motels, with sample industrial chemicals. Who knew what he got into? Now here they were, out in front of the building.
Suddenly, your coworkers were contemptuous of you. As if the legislation tapped an enmity that had long been gathering. Madison McDowell, for example, the poor little rich girl, frequently offended with insensitive comments about Lois’s smoking. If Lois closed the office door, it was her own business whether her bronchi were sprouting malignancies. It was not Madison’s business. When Lois emerged from her office with the budgetary printouts for Vanessa or the paychecks, when she emerged for whatever stack of envelopes was in her in-box, the women of Means of Production were always staring at her. Oh, there’s the smoker again. Lois began going downstairs.
For a while, Lois stood on Fifth Avenue and smoked. In fair weather and foul. Because she liked looking at the cathedral. Sometimes she ventured into the cathedral after work, where she lit candles for the other girls in the office. It wasn’t that she cared so much about the other girls. But she liked the long wooden matchsticks, the deep red cups in which the candles flickered. In the distance, clericals in vestments scurried about. Lois had been raised on Long Island and had gone to Pace, not to some fancy school. It didn’t mean that she didn’t have any feelings. She did her job, and she would bake a chocolate cake from a mix if it was someone’s birthday. She made a cake for Annabel’s birthday. That was just a couple of months ago. Devil’s food cake. Lois didn’t understand why no one expected a kindly gesture from her. She was full of polite and well-meaning thoughts. Annabel was a good kid, and Lois wanted to do the right thing.
One day, she’s out there smoking, and this fellow is smoking alongside her, and he’s smoking a foreign kind of cigarette. It’s black and it has gold foil around the filter. There’s a sensual manner to his smoking. Like with smokers of old. He’s a big man; Lois would say he is a stout man, even. He has a mustache, thinning hair. Mirror sunglasses. And the foreign cigarettes. She doesn’t mind admitting it: She was a little boy crazy back in her day. So Lois goes straight up to the stout man with the foreign cigarettes and she asks, “What kind of cigarette you have there?” She’s never picked a guy up before, even though she was a little boy crazy, but maybe now she is going to do it, because there’s a first time for everything. Arnie, that’s his name, replies with the brand of the cigarette, some brand she can’t remember. He offers her one. Remember that stretch in summer where all it did was rain? She smoked the black cigarette in the drizzle, and what it made her feel was light-headed.
Or maybe it was Arnie who made her light-headed. Those foreign cigarettes were more potent, they were nicotine delivery systems, like the politicians said, and so she was dizzy, but there was also the stout man, Arnie. A little girl was carrying past a brace of balloons, she remembers, and Lois thought, I’m going to see this man again. The balloons prove it. And she planned to take her break the next day at the exact same time, which was 11:14. Arnie wasn’t there the next day, with his foreign cigarettes, but the day after that he was, and soon they were talking about many things.
Arnie grew up in Forest Hills. Lois grew up in Great Neck. They were from the same part of the world and they had common interests. Horror movies, for example. They had both seen a whole bunch of horror movies. Of course, Lois was working for this company that made movies, but she didn’t think she had seen more than one or two of the movies they made at her company. Means of Production movies were nonsense, really. They were in English, but they could have been from Timbuktu for all Lois cared. Arnie liked Nightmare on Elm Street, those sorts of things. When he talked about teenagers getting hacked up on-screen, he cackled in a nervous way that was endearing, as though he didn’t expect anyone to feel likewise, but he couldn’t stop himself.
Soon there was a good crew of them out there, a shifting constituency, a society of smokers facing the promenade and the ice-skating rink. Mostly secretaries, but occasionally there would be a middle-management fellow in his bow tie, or maybe the prim and proper office manageress in midcalf skirt and square-heeled pumps. They were all out there, and they were the society of the medically uninsurable. Laughing and gossiping and complaining. They discussed going bowling on the weekends. They were all going to go bowling one day, to the lanes in the bus terminal. But you took one look at Arnie, you’d see he hadn’t done any bowling in years. If he tried to go bowling or do yard work, well then he was going to have an aneurysm, because all he did was smoke and come up with plans for his business. He was a smoker and he did all his best thinking while flourishing a Gitane or a Dunhill.
Though the smokers were warm and supportive, though theirs was a caring environment, it was months before Lois realized that Arnie had once been an accountant. Isn’t that amazing! She can still remember how it came up, that day when Arnie was stubbing out one of his cigarettes and plunging the butt into the stylish metallic receptacle there. “What is it that you do, Lois?” She thought he’d never ask, but now he had, and she told him, because she liked it when people asked a question of her. He said, “I’m a consultant, myself. I do some other things on the side. I’m an innovator, I guess that’s what you’d call me.”
He’d been with a consultant division at one of the Big Five firms. He got hired onto the teams that went into large-cap companies and he advised the companies on public offerings, portfolio review, acquisitions, all kinds of things, and then he explained the angles from his unique vantage point, which was the vantage point of a guy with a proven track record who worked at one of the Big Five firms. What Arnie liked to say was there was nothing he wouldn’t do for the client, the client was number one, “Anything within the bounds of law and several things without.” That’s what he liked to say, and then he would give Lois this look.
They went to one of those new horror movies where all the jokes are about other horror movies. The homely kid knows he’s going to get killed first because he’s seen it all before in other horror movies. Arnie was explaining to her, before the trailers, how he’d done anything within the bounds of law and several things without, and he was telling her not to repeat any of this because if anyone found out, Arnie said, “I’d have to kill you.” After the movie he asked, “Do you think that serial killers really kill pets and all that?” It was sort of unsettling, Lois thought, but a little endearing at the same time. “They’re always saying this kind of thing. The serial killers, when they’re kids, supposedly they kill other people’s pets. They don’t feel any remorse.” He laughed nervously.
She said, “So you’re a serial killer now?”
That’s not what he meant at all! Arnie said. “But if someone wanted me to play one in a movie, I think I’d be good at it.”
People thought she could get them parts in movies. They offered up their thespian moves, their high school dramatic credentials, every day of the week, but she didn’t pay any attention, and especially not when Arnie said what he said. Maybe she had become light-headed because she’d started smoking his foreign cigarettes. She was neglecting things at the office or just barely getting the work done but not in any particularly satisfying way. She was smoking foreign cigarettes and going out for Kahlua and milk at Hank’s Franks with Arnie from Forest Hills. He knew the accountant for the Ramones. He had a summer rental down the shore. A weekend at Atlantic City was a good thing. At Hank’s Franks, Arnie remarked that a man could certainly find that he had become devoted to a woman. That’s what he said. And she replied, “Don’t try to flatter me, Arnie. I know who I am.” Who she was was a plain middle-aged woman without a husband, who didn’t expect flattery because if she did, she would have got frustrated a long time ago. “I live a quiet life and I stay home in my neighborhood and I don’t wait around for anyone.” She was as serious as she’d ever been because even if the society of smokers, with its daily menu of humor and gossip, was never serious, it didn’t mean that Lois couldn’t be.
Arnie said, “Don’t make me have to explain it.”
“Don’t make you explain what?”
He said maybe he was falling hard. It should have been in a nicer place than Hank’s Franks. Because Hank’s Franks was just what it sounded like, a place where the entrées were wrapped in tinfoil, where there were always young men at the bar whose faces should not have been so crimson. Dog-faced young entrepreneurs who came from nothing, who tried drunkenly to make it across the avenue to the bus terminal and instead did the face plant in front of a hydrant. Miracle a taxi had not backed over them. When they woke, their wallets would be gone. That’s the kind of place where Lois first heard sentimental things from the mouth of Arnie Lovitz. When she was a teenager, no one ever said they cared, and even when she lost her virginity to the older brother of a friend on the girls’ basketball team, this older brother hadn’t said he cared, and he’d seemed uncomfortable when he passed her on the street after that. She hadn’t been nervous, she liked it, the thing they had done, and she didn’t care if that boy, Carl, loved her, because what she wanted was life’s experiences, which included taking your clothes off. Still, it would have been nicer to hear that you were loved in a museum, in front of a beautiful painting that showed a princess in a diaphanous robe, pregnant and standing with her soon-to-be prince of the realm. That would be a nice place to be told that you were loved. But this was Hank’s Franks. She needed to work fast.
The scene changes to a hotel out by the airport in Queens, because that was the kind of hotel that they could afford, if they were being fiscally sensible. Lois could see that Arnie was flush temporarily with his good fortune. He was proud of his love. The smokers of the promenade, watching the skaters go around and around, would have this bit of gossip to embellish soon enough. The smokers would be like hummingbirds over nectar. They would edit the story of Arnie and Lois into a little movie for the consumption of future smokers, Arnie’s tie winched over his head without being unknotted, flung onto the grimy wall-to-wall, his suit coat and his pants, pinstripes, cast onto the floor as if they were the body of a murder victim. And how about this, the two of them in the shower, two accountants, neither of them exactly thin and neither of them exactly beautiful, and here was her nipple, and she was presenting it as if it were a delectable item, and here were his lips upon it, and if they weren’t the most beautiful people God had ever put on the planet, or the most beautiful people to walk up and down the promenade to the ice-skating rink, at least they were two people in a cheap motel who could believe in this moment of love as much as anyone who ever believed in any romantic encounter. Reflections in the mirror in the bathroom were a little humbling, but soon the water vapor on the mirror made them as indistinct as any movie lovers; she wanted to laugh, it all made her so giddy, as he was putting his arms around her, because he had these gigantic arms and he was crushing her, naked in the shower, and she didn’t know that any man could fit his arms around her. It made her feel like a little girl. Soon the lights came up on the lovers on the couch, just like that, and she was the one saying that she would do anything he wanted her to do, all he had to do was to tell her, just say the words, and she would be whatever kind of lover he wanted her to be on this night, she swore it, and she believed she could be this lover, believed it without any reservation, in the motel near the LaGuardia Airport, and because of her belief no lover was any better. Arnie was stammering, throbbing with his nervousness, saying that he wanted that one thing that all men were always seeming as if they wanted, or at least that’s what she’d heard back when. It was a long time ago, a long time since she put that part of a man in her mouth, and she didn’t know if she could do it in a way that would be pleasurable for him because she wasn’t very experienced, even if she was a genius at believing. She thought that gentleness was the thing. If you treated this homely part of a body as though it were a beautiful little hatchling, no matter who it belonged to, then that person and that body would be stretched out before you like a little gossamer thread of heaven. So she treated the particular part of Arnie’s body, which was actually kind of small, as though reverence was invented for it. There was an awful lot of sadness in reverence, but that was what was good about reverence, that it was not easy. It was performed with a recognition of the absence of perfection in the world, closing in on midnight. Many things had already happened that day, and Arnie was starting to thrash around, and the thrashing said that this life was not as before, and she was about to taste bittersweet dignity in her mouth, a little bit of dignity that was coming out of Arnie Lovitz for the first time, and it was salty like tears, and also it tasted a little like bleach, bleach and tears. Arnie was being made into a good man, and Lois was being made into a tramp with a good heart at the same time. That’s how she felt about it; she felt that she was not sure. All she knew was that in the movies, sex was supposed to be excellent and you heard God’s voice, or else it was supposed to be sinful and you got an ice pick in the temple when the marauder appeared in the margin of the shot. But it was just two people on a banquette in a motel. Arnie started crying after he came.
He said, “Lois, I have to tell you something. I know we don’t know each other all that well, but I feel like I have to tell you just the same.”
She said, wiping off her chin, “Don’t you give me any bad news now. I don’t do this kind of thing very often, and it is not fair to give me any bad news right now, because I just acted like I was a porn star. So don’t give me any bad news.”
What he said was that he was an embezzler. It took a good thirty seconds for the information to sink in.
“You’re a what?”
“I’m an embezzler,” Arnie said. “Or I have been. I’ve been an embezzler, a thief. And God help me.”
If she were going to reach a preliminary conclusion, a snap judgment, her conclusion would have been that every good thing contains its opposite. The foul thing is all mixed up with the fair thing, they’re next-door neighbors, and any time you have a good afternoon, you can bet your last dollar that some nightmare is next on your schedule. You feel warm feelings for a person, and right behind those warm feelings will be a big challenge.
What Arnie did, apparently, was set up these fictitious corporations on these islands in the Caribbean. It was just one scam at first, one fictitious subsidiary for one particular corporation, except that no one knew that it was a wholly owned subsidiary and that it didn’t even exist. No one knew. There was no office in the Cayman Islands with a gently rotating ceiling fan and a rack of mainframes and an excellent view of that blue green water. The wholly owned subsidiary was Arnie’s creation, on paper and nowhere else, and it was so successful that soon he was setting up a second one. In this second instance, he had the parent company selling portions of itself to a subsidiary corporation and booking the sale as income and using the sale proceeds to set up another subsidiary on these islands in the Caribbean, on an island called St. Jude, appropriately enough, an island that didn’t even exist. He had even started making up geography now, in addition to office buildings. And this wholly owned subsidiary was buying and trading futures, using derivatives and other fiscal transactions that Lois didn’t understand because she had always worked for small arts-related organizations.
Arnie got out of the consulting business because the rats were starting to jump off the ship at this one particular company, which company was under investigation for inflating the dollar value of some of its transactions, and that meant that soon they were going to start looking at the fine print, and Arnie didn’t want to be anywhere around when that happened. And yet when he set up his own company, he was using his references from before, and for some reason he was again landing the sorts of clients who would be attracted to certain kinds of transactions, a fictitious business with fictitious offices and fictitious transactions, or maybe a company that doesn’t make a product but just buys and sells ideas about products. These were all businesses where the rats were jumping off the ship. This one company, Arnie said, was being run by people from Salt Lake City, all Mormons, and their company had ties with the FBI, though that didn’t mean it wasn’t dirty. He got out. Except that he couldn’t get out entirely, because what was he going to do? Suddenly there were no clients at all, and the phone didn’t ring, and if it did, he didn’t answer it because he was afraid that it was the FBI, and so what he started doing, because he had time on his hands, was that he started taking some of the business money, the stake that had enabled his consulting business, and he began moving it around. Day-trading, that’s what they called it.
When he had lost that money, what he had to do in order to keep his business was to write a few things onto the books of this one client, the venture capital company from Salt Lake City. He saddled them with some bad trades. He concealed it all on their books as a business expense.
Now what he wanted was that Lois should forgive him for these things, because he knew what he’d done. Women had this magical capacity, according to Arnie, to forgive a man, and maybe it wouldn’t change the situation, but he’d feel a little better for a few hours. He wanted to go legit, he said, in the hotel by LaGuardia Airport, and he wanted her to see that he was a man who had no choice but to do what he did, namely, write off fifty thousand shares of a fly-by-night biotech stock onto the books of a Mormon venture capital company. Sooner or later those Mormons were going to find out. His story was confused; his despair was violent. His mood swung back and forth all over the place, on the bed in the motel.
When he’d calmed down a little, they went to sleep.
In the morning, Lois DiNunzio slipped out of the motel early, because she slept fitfully, and she paid the bill and left Arnie Lovitz there, temporarily peaceful. She drove back to Astoria and got herself into a clean outfit for work. Where another woman would have cried on that drive, on account of how passionately she had felt the night before, Lois didn’t cry, because she wasn’t the sort of woman who cried over things like failure. You’d end up crying too often.
Means of Production was in one of its flush periods. The market was “top ticking.” That’s the kind of thing Arnie said. It seemed as if there was more money around for their kinds of movies, or this is what Vanessa told her whenever she called Lois into her office. Means of Production was on the gravy train with a Dutch conglomerate, with the guy who helped pioneer some programming language for servers, and with some French producers for a film about Catholic priests molesting kids in the suburbs. Cauldron of Belief, it was called. Lois thought the subject of this movie was appalling. She thought the movie painted a bad picture of her church because it claimed that the higher-ups were always protecting the lower-downs, that they didn’t care what these priests did.
It was the day after Arnie had said what he said. Lois didn’t have the usual DiNunzio detachment, the kind that comes from losing your mother to congestive heart failure and taking care of your younger brothers, those spoiled brats. And so she made the mistake of saying to Vanessa that she didn’t think Catholic priests really did stuff like that. She reminded Vanessa that the church gave a lot of money to the poor, and it was a place for people to go who didn’t have anything, and anyway the church was the sum of all its parts and it didn’t need to be demonized just because of a couple of rogue priests who couldn’t keep their privates under their robes.
“Leave the development issues to me,” Vanessa said.
“I’m just saying.”
“Have you read the script?”
“I don’t need to read it,” Lois said. A big mistake.
“When I start developing a movie about accountants, I’ll be sure to call you in.”
She was eating, of course. Vanessa was always eating when she was in a mood for a tirade. Today it was jelly beans. Vanessa turned her back on Lois, looking in the direction of the window, toward the deluge.
Lois said, “Your boorish displays don’t wash with me. I’ve heard it all before. You can say what you like, but I don’t pay attention to your rudeness. I’ve worked for you for two years. I’ve made sure you could keep the company going. I’ve kept the rest of the girls in line, and I make sure they are okay when you’re behaving like a little child. So you watch your mouth with me.”
Vanessa needed a couple of breaths to really get going, but when she got going, it was as if she were a superhero swelling up in some fabulous demonstration of strength from the sheer force of her dissatisfaction.
“You’re the accountant. You’re like the back part of the set, where all the two-by-fours are showing. You’re the classic example of a person who’s never had a creative thought and who never will have a creative thought, and that may play well at the big studios, where they have not had a creative thought in twenty-five years, but in here, in this office, it means that we tolerate you. We tolerate you here just because we need someone to cover the books. But don’t ever get the idea that your opinion is welcome or that it matters, because we barely recognize that you’re here. You were hired to do the numbers and to shut up. And, for the record, I’m a Catholic, too, in case you haven’t noticed, and every day that I have failed to slump in the pews of the Catholic Church is a day that I’ve improved as a person. I could show you some of the spots where I was personally scarred for life by the priests and nuns I’ve known, but I’m not going to because you’re not smart enough for that particular conversation, the one in which I get stronger and begin to overcome these things through the vitality of disgust. I’m the one developing Cauldron of Belief. I’m the one who story-edited a story where a priest in Wisconsin abuses a bunch of boys and tries to get away with it, okay? And every day that they shoot the movie, I feel a little bit better, just on principle, but also because every day that they shoot that movie, I’m getting paid. And so are you. And so are the women out there in the hall, right? They’re getting paid now because this movie is being made, because some French people hate the church as much as I do. So let’s collect the checks, and let’s deposit them, and let’s bill this particular conversation as a general administrative expense, all right? Now get the fuck out of my office.”
What followed did not include any slamming of doors, nor any bitter tears. Lois DiNunzio simply walked out of Vanessa’s office and back into her own, passing, on the way, Annabel and Jeanine. They were blushing at what they’d overheard. But Lois didn’t pay any attention to this because she’d already made her decision. She wasn’t at her desk fifteen minutes before she’d cut a check made out to St. Patrick’s Cathedral in the amount of a thousand dollars, which, as accountant, she was empowered to sign in the absence of Vanessa Meandro, who was leaving that afternoon for the West Coast to sit in on the beginning of editing on Cauldron of Belief. The check was backdated by one day. It was legal tender in every one of the fifty states. She took a package of foreign cigarettes from her purse, and she rode the elevator down to the promenade, and she smoked for a few minutes, and then, with a lightness in her step, she carried the check across the street to St. Patrick’s Cathedral and slipped it into one of the little boxes where people leave coins in exchange for an illuminated candle. Lois said a little prayer, the gist of which was that Vanessa Meandro should be struck with grace, as if grace were a safe falling out of the sky, and should, in that dizzy experience of being so concussed, suffer with a love for her fellow mankind and womankind that was so overwhelming that her present life would be rendered unlivable because of it. And also, dear Lord, please make her business acumen seize up and make her smitten with some fabulous unrequited longing for some grossly unpleasant and homely person. That is my prayer, amen.
That was maybe twelve weeks ago. And in those weeks, during which Vanessa got involved in a fight to the death with the director and editor of Cauldron of Belief, and during which the market began its unmistakable downward spiral, Lois felt like a robin picking worms from the lawn of life. She was happy, and even her neighbors in Astoria remarked on how happy she seemed. It was a good feeling at first, because she could understand Arnie now, as she was a fellow embezzler, and she would try to comfort him, and she could take him out to see the play-offs at Shea featuring his beloved Al Leiter, and in this way Arnie could try to get comfortable with the idea that men in trench coats weren’t following him each and every day. Lois felt happy because she was now charging administrative expenses to various French people that were nonetheless going straight into the coffers of St. Patrick’s Cathedral, twice a month, to the tune of about six thousand dollars, bottom line.
It had been a good fiscal quarter for Means of Production. Or at least for Lois. It was all good until she got the call from Arnie in late October. One of the online brokerage firms that Arnie used was calling in some short positions. Shorts were a satisfying way of seeing the world. He loved looking for companies that were fraudulent. It was the fraud in him that loved thinking about all his fellow frauds. She’d go over to his apartment in Yonkers, and he’d be calling up reporters, telling them that some company called Primadon or something was intimidating its wholesalers. He’d be smoking and laughing about the whole thing. Until this particular call came. He needed to cover this short, on Interstate Mortuary Services, a large-scale, publicly traded mortuary company that offered family burial plans at bargain rates and shipping across state lines, but which had not even checked the federal statutes on interstate shipping of caskets and dead bodies. A great company for Arnie. But apparently they were about to be bought out in a major deal.
“Lois,” he said, “I don’t want to put you through this.”
Living with Arnie was like plugging the dike of truth. You got one set of holes plugged, but you could see the tempest-tossed sea breaking through someplace else. Still, Lois and Arnie were an item now, and Lois didn’t give up easily. That’s just not what the women of the extended DiNunzio clan did. They were stick-around girls. They were loyal and they were tough. She picked up a towel from the floor of his mildewy bathroom. She carried it to the hamper in the closet. She fetched spray-on bleach.
“Don’t be ridiculous.”
“I’m telling you the truth.”
“I’ve heard that one before.”
Arnie said, “Just look at me.” And here he gestured at MSNBC on the cable television and the scrolling of stock prices as though the scrolling of prices were somehow identical with him.
For a moment she was impatient: “Arnie, act like you can do something about your predicament. Go out there and make fifty thousand dollars somehow, and show me and the world how you can do it. People have overcome a lot worse things. People who know less than you do. Be yourself and do the thing you can do. Create wealth!”
Lois felt sort of hollow even as she was saying the words. If you tipped over a rock and looked for chicanery and betrayal, you’d find these things under every rock. In every closet there was fraudulence secreted away, next to the frilly dresses. Fraudulence was there. Betrayal was there. And fraudulence was always in greatest supply where righteousness camped out. Arnie agreed with her sentiment. He agreed that he was going to try, as he always said, he was going to try to find the money in some legitimate way, like by selling cars or something, something he could do with his bounteous charm.
Which brings us up to date. Bad news brings us up to the Friday after the election, Friday, the tenth, the day that Lois DiNunzio, the Robin Hood of St. Patrick’s Cathedral, has decided to loot her employer, an independent production company known as Means of Production, of sixty-three thousand dollars, in order to cover the losses of her fiancé, who is posing as a day trader under an assumed name—the name of a deceased brother—so as not to attract the attention of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, nor the Securities Exchange Commission, which may or may not now be looking into the matter of a certain falsely constructed subsidiary of a holding company owned chiefly by several prominent investors from Salt Lake City, whose former accountant and consultant was one Arnie Lovitz. Lois has not told Arnie she is doing this, looting the sixty-three thousand dollars, nor has she told anyone else. She is constructing fraudulent payments to some real publicists, these publicists being known as the Vanderbilt girls, who are working to get the name of a motion picture, Cauldron of Belief, into the paper, and she is billing this sixty-three thousand dollars as a series of publicity-related expenses on a series of bills she is submitting to the American distributor of the film, which isn’t even finished, and after she submits the bill and writes the check to Arnie’s all-but-liquidated consulting business, Lovitz Offshore Consulting, she will walk out of the Means of Production offices, and she will get in a used Honda Civic with a hundred and forty thousand miles on it, and she will tell her fiancé that they are going to Arizona, and then they will begin to drive, spending, she calculates, the first night in the Toledo area, where she has already researched a really good place for them to eat dinner, a family restaurant. After that, they will stop at the first mall in the area that’s showing one of the season’s slasher flicks.