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I walked over to him and said I wanted to speak to the manager. "I'm the owner," he said. "Will that do?"
I showed him the cassette. "I believe you rented this," I said.
"That's our label, so it must be one of ours. The Dirty Dozen, always a popular favorite. Something wrong with it? And are you sure it's the tape or has it been a while since you cleaned your heads?"
"A customer of yours checked this out two days ago."
"And you're returning it for him? If it was two days there'll be a late charge. Let me look it up." He went over to a computer terminal and keyed in a code number from the label. "William Haberman," he said. "According to this it was three days ago, not two, so that means he owes us four dollars and ninety cents."
I didn't reach for my wallet. I said, "Are you familiar with this particular tape? Not the film itself but the individual cassette?"
"Should I be?"
"There's another film recorded over half of it."
"Let me see that," he said. He took the cassette from me and pointed at one edge. "See right there? Your blank cassette has a tab there. You record something you want to save, you break the tab off and you can't record over it by mistake. A commercial cassette like this comes with a gap where the tab would be so you can't ruin it by accidentally hitting the Record button, which people would do all the time otherwise, geniuses that they are. But if you bridge the gap with a piece of Scotch tape, then you're back in business. You sure that's not what your friend did?"
"I'm very sure."
He looked suspicious for a moment, then shrugged. "So he wants another copy of Dozen, right? No problem, it's a popular title, we've got multiple copies. Not an even dozen, dirty or otherwise, but enough." He was on his way to get one when I stopped him with a hand on his arm.
"That's not the problem," I said.
"Oh?"
"Someone recorded a pornographic movie over the middle section of The Dirty Dozen," I said. "Not just the usual X-rated romp but an extremely violent and sadistic specimen of kiddie porn."
"You're kidding."
I shook my head. "I'd like to know how it got there," I said.
"Jesus, I'll bet you would," he said. He reached to touch the cassette, drew his hand away as if it were hot. "I swear I had nothing to do with it. We don't carry any X-rated stuff, no Deep Throat, no Devil in Miss Jones, none of that garbage. Most rental shops have a section or at least a few titles, you get married couples who want some visual foreplay, they're not the type to patronize the cesspools on Times Square. But when I opened up I decided I didn't want to have anything to do with that kind of material. I don't want it in my store." He looked down at the cassette but made no move to touch it. "So how did it get here? That's the big question, isn't it?"
"Someone probably wanted to make a copy of another tape."
"And he didn't have a blank cassette handy so he used this one instead. But why use a rental tape and then turn it in the next day? It doesn't make sense."
"Maybe someone made a mistake," I suggested. "Who was the last person to rent it?"
"Before Haberman, you mean. Let's see." He consulted the computer, frowned. "He was the first," he said.
"It was a brand-new tape?"
"No, of course not. Does it look like a new tape? I don't know, you get everything on computer and you can keep records like never before, and then it does something like this. Oh, wait a minute. I know where this tape came from."
A woman, he explained, had brought in a whole shopping bag full of videocassettes, most of them good solid classics. "There were all three versions of The Maltese Falcon, if you can believe that. One from 1936 called Satan Met a Lady, with Bette Davis and Warren Williams. Arthur Treacher plays Joel Cairo, and the Sidney Greenstreet role is played by a fat lady named Alison Skipworth, believe it or not. And then there's the original 1931 version, with Ricardo Cortez playing Spade as a real slimeball, nothing like the hero Bogart made him into in 1940. That was called The Maltese Falcon, but after they released the Huston version the first one was retitled. Dangerous Female, they called it."
The woman had said she was a landlady. A tenant of hers had died and she was selling off some of his things to recoup the back rent he owed.
"So I bought the lot," he said. "I don't know if he really owed back rent or she just saw a chance to pick up a couple of dollars, but I knew she wasn't a burglar, she hadn't gone and stolen the tapes. And they were in good condition, the ones I looked at." A rueful smile. "I didn't look at all of them. I certainly didn't look at this one."
"That would explain it," I said. "If he owned the tape, whoever he was-"
"And he had a tape to copy, and maybe it was the middle of the night so he couldn't go out and buy a blank cassette. Sure, that makes sense. He wouldn't record on a rental cassette, but this one didn't become a rental cassette until I bought it from her, and by then he had already dubbed something else onto it." He looked at me. "Really kiddie porn? You weren't exaggerating?"
I said I wasn't. He said something about the kind of world it was, and I asked the woman's name.
"No way I'd remember it," he said, "assuming I ever knew it in the first place, which I don't think I did."
"Didn't you write her a check?"
"Probably not. I think she wanted cash. People generally do. There's a chance I wrote out a check. Do you want me to see?"
"I'd appreciate it."
He took time out to wait on a customer, then went into a back room and emerged a few minutes later. "No check," he said. "I didn't think there would be. I found my memo of the transaction, which is amazing enough. She had thirty-one cassettes and I gave her seventy-five dollars. That sounds low, but these were used items, and it's the overhead that's everything in this business."
"Did you have her name on the transaction memo?"
"No. The date's June fourth, if that's any help. And I've never seen the woman before or since. I gather she lives in the neighborhood, but I don't know anything more about her than that."
He couldn't come up with anything else, and I couldn't think of any more questions to ask him. He said that Will had a one-night rental of The Dirty Dozen coming, an unimpaired copy, and at no charge.
When I got back to my hotel I looked up Will's number- it was easy now that I knew his last name. I called him and told him he could pick up his free movie whenever he wanted.
"As far as the other movie goes," I said, "there's nothing for either of us to do. Some guy copied a tape onto his own cassette of The Dirty Dozen and it wound up finding its way into circulation. The man whose tape it was is dead and there's no way of finding out who he was, let alone tracing the tape back from him. Anyway, items like that get passed around and around like that, with people interested in that sort of thing copying each other's tapes because that's the only way to get the stuff, it's not available on the open market."
"Thank God for that," he said. "But is it all right to just forget about it? A boy was killed."
"The original tape could be ten years old," I said. "It could have been shot in Brazil." Not likely, not with everybody speaking American English, but he let it pass. "It's a pretty horrible piece of tape, and my life would be every bit as rich and fulfilling if I'd never seen it, but I don't see that there's anything to be done about it. There are probably hundreds of similar tapes around the city. Dozens, anyway. The only thing special about this one is that you and I happened to see it."
"There's no point in taking it to the police?"
"None that I can see. They'd confiscate it, but then what? It would just go in a storeroom somewhere, and meanwhile you'd have to answer a lot of questions about how it happened to wind up in your hands."