NORTH SAT SLUMPED at his desk, dozing.
When his phone rang, he fell out of his chair and cracked his elbow on the floor. Coffee spilled from a paper cup all over the front of his shirt. “Son of a bitch,” he shouted. He stood and picked up the phone. “Detective North.”
“It’s Test, I have something I need to fill you in on.”
“Shoot.”
“In person.”
“What’s it about?”
“Brad. In a way. Maybe.”
“That sounds concrete.” North looked around, bewildered. “What time is it?”
“Ten thirty.”
“Shit. Meet me at the coroner’s in ten. We’ll talk then.”
“I—”
“It’s there or nothing.” He hung up and strode out of the office.
NORTH MARCHED DOWN Main Street, past the old Palladium Movie House.
Its marquee had gone unlit for fifteen years, though now with a grant and donations it was under renovation to regain its former prominence as the town centerpiece.
North had seen The Omen, Rosemary’s Baby, Soylent Green, and every other horror or sci-fi movie that had passed through town at the Palladium. The old theater was unlike any movie experience in suburbia today, the Cineplexes with their stadium seating and plush chairs and surround sound. The Palladium was grand but intimate, its plaster and tin ceiling ornate, the screen set on a proscenium stage whose smoky velvet curtains lifted at the start of each showing in the tantalizing manner of a burlesque performer slowly hiking up her skirt.
The Palladium boasted a balcony, an adolescent hideout. What better place in the world for a kid to while away a wintry Saturday than in the balcony at a movie house, his girl beside him? The thrill and heartbreak of it: holding hands, that first kiss. Even just being close enough to smell a girl’s shampoo, to watch the Junior Mints melt on her fingertips, leaving them stained with chocolate she licked off, utterly oblivious to how her every tiny, casual gesture cleaved a boy’s heart in two. North’s heart, anyway.
The darkness made a boy brave, too. If you got there early, you got the front row of the balcony. You could prop your feet up on the rail. You could see the screen better than from any other place in the house, and you could see the audience laid out below you. At times, if he’d seen a film more than twice, which he often had, he would spend most of the matinee observing how the audience reacted to certain scenes. Mrs. Marsh, petite and bespectacled, one of the two pharmacists at Whipple Pharmacy, always squished herself up into a tiny ball when a character inflicted a wound on his own self, cut a wrist, or held a hand over a candle. Yet, when mass bloodshed took place, she leaned in closer, plucking Jujubes from her box with the frenzy of a squirrel heisting seeds from a bird feeder. Coach Jenkins—Victor Jenkins—North remembered, was unmoved by violence. He sat stone-faced during the most brutal of acts. He stirred only for sex scenes. He would fidget, unable to get comfortable. He seemed to be a movie buff. But around the time of North’s freshman year, Coach had stopped going to the movies. He was rarely seen in public. People talked. Then, he’d reappeared. Born again.