Manhattan Is My Beat

course. Would he offer her a highball? What
was
a highball exactly?
    They turned another corner.
    She pictured Weinhoff fat and wearing a three-piece checkered suit, smoking cigars and talking like a baby to movie stars. What if Tom Cruise called while she was sitting in his office? Could she ask to say hello? Hell, yes, she’d ask. Or Robert Duvall! Sam Shepard? Oh, please, please, please …
    They turned one more corner and stopped beside a battered Pepsi machine. The receptionist nodded. “There.” She turned around.
    “Where?” Rune asked, looking around. Confused.
    The woman pointed to what Rune thought was a closet, and disappeared.
    Rune stepped into the doorway, next to which a tiny sign said S. WEINHOFF.
    The office, about ten feet by ten, had no windows. It wasn’t even ten by ten really, because it was stacked around the perimeter with magazines and clippings and books and posters. The desk—chipped, cigarette-burned wood—was so cluttered and cheap that even the detective with the close-together eyes would’ve refused to work at it.
    Weinhoff looked up from
Variety
and motioned her in. “So, you’re the student, what’s the name again? I’m so bad with names.”
    “Rune.”
    “Nice name, I like it. Parents were hippies, right? Peace, Love, Sunshine, Aquarius. All that. Can you find a place to sit?”
    Well, she got one thing right: he was fat. A ruddy nose and burst vessels in his huge cheeks. A great Santa Claus—if you could have a Jewish Santa. No checkered suit. No suit at all. Just a polyester shirt, white with brown stripes. A brown tie. Gray slacks.
    Rune sat down.
    “You want coffee? You’re too young to drink coffee, you ask me. ‘Course my granddaughter drinks coffee. She smokes too. God forbid that’s all she does. I don’t approve, but I sin, so how can I cast stones?”
    “No, thanks.”
    “I’ll get some, you don’t mind.” He stepped into the corridor and she saw him making instant coffee at a water dispenser.
    So much for the highballs.
    He sat back down at his desk and said to her, “So how’d you hear about me?”
    “I called the public relations department here?” Her voice rose in a question. “See, I’m in this class—
The Roots of Film Noir
, it’s called—and I’m writing this paper. I had some questions about a film and they said they had somebody on staff who’d been around for a while….”
    “‘Around for a while,’ I like that. That’s a euphemism is what that is.”
    “And here I am.”
    “Well, I’ll tell you why they sent you to me. You want to know?”
    “I—”
    “I’ll tell you. What I am is the unofficial studio historian at Metro. Meaning I’ve been here nearly forty years and if I were making real money or had anything to do with production they’d’ve fired my butt years ago. But I’m not and I don’t so I’m not worth the trouble to boot me out. So I hang around here and answer questions from pretty young students. You don’t mind, I say that?”
    “Say it all you want.”
    “Good. Now the message said—do I believe it?— you’ve got some questions about
Manhattan Is My Beat
?”
    “That’s right.”
    “Well, that’s interesting. You see a lot of students or reporters interested in Scorsese, Welles, Hitch. And you can always count on Fassbinder, Spielberg, Lucas, Coppola. Three, four years ago we got calls about Cimino. That
Heaven’s Gate
thing. Oh, we got calls! But I don’t think anybody’s ever done anything about the director of
Manhattan Is My Beat
. Hal Reinhart. Anyway, I digress. What do you need to know?”
    “The movie was true, wasn’t it?”
    Weinhoff’s eyes crinkled. “
Nu
, that’s the whole point. That’s why it’s such a big-deal movie. It wasn’t shot on sets, it was based on a real crime, it didn’t cast Gable, Tracy, Lana Turner, Bette Davis, Gary Cooper, or any of the other sure-draw stars. You understand? None of the actors that’d guarantee that a film, no matter it was a good film, it was a bad film, that a film
opened
, you know what I mean,
opened?
“
    “Sure.” Rune’s pen sped across the pages of a notebook. She’d bought it a half hour before, had written
Film Noir 101
on the cover, then smeared the ink with her palm to age it, like a master forger. “It means people go to see it no matter what it’s about.”
    “Right you are. Now,
Manhattan Is My Beat
was probably the first of the independents.”
    “Why don’t you hear about it