Free Never Street by Loren D. Estleman

on the next level rescued me from a general strike on the part of my feet.
    The room number I’d gotten from Portman belonged to a small auditorium, illuminated solely by the black-and-silver images fluttering on a square screen at the base of the graduated tiers of wooden seats. Fifteen or twenty heads were silhouetted against the screen; in the brief intervals between music and dialogue, fifteen or twenty pens scribbled in notebooks propped on kidney-shaped writing boards attached to the seats. I sat in the vacant top row. The room smelled of varnish and ink and the hot bulb burning in the projector whirring away on a metal desk before and below the screen.
    Beyond and above it, where the shaft of white light ended, Robert Mitchum, in fedora and trenchcoat, careered down a dark country road at the wheel of a big car with bug-eye headlamps. Beside him, her shining hair covered by a silk scarf, rode Jane Greer: midnight-eyed, beautiful, corrupt. They were both achingly young. It was 1947.
    The music built. As a police roadblock hove into view ahead, Greer’s expression turned venomous.
    “Dirty double-crossing rat!” She clawed a revolver from her purse and shot Mitchum. The car went into a spin. She fired through the windshield at the officers, who returned fire. After she was killed and the car came to a stop, one of the cops opened the driver’s door and Mitchum flopped out, dead.
    The lights came up and a small man with a big head and a short beard, half the age I associated with a college professor, turned from the wall switch to address the class.
    “Impressions! David?”
    A student in his early twenties with the right side of his head tattooed and the left side shaggy to his collar lowered his hand. “Robert Mitchum’s—excuse me, Jeff Bailey’s— fatal flaw is his affection for Jane Greer. Kathy Moffat. However, according to Aristotle—”
    “Aristotle never spent Dime One at the Bijou. Save that for your philosophy instructor. And it’s okay to refer to the characters by the names of the actors. What you’re saying is Mitchum let his crotch do his thinking when he should have handed Greer over to Kirk Douglas, as he was hired to do in the first place. You can get that much from Leonard Maltin’s movie guide. What else? Heather?”
    A woman of eighteen or nineteen, in a man’s work shirt, with her hair cut short, rose from her seat. “Jane Greer is not the villain of this piece; she’s the victim. In a society less dominated by aggressive males, she would not have had to resort to crime to realize her full potential as a human being.”
    “Bullshit. She’s a scheming vixen guilty of triple homicide. How does Mitchum’s fate relate to that of the hero in another film we’ve watched this semester? Yes, Darice?”
    Darice was a black woman, older than most of the class, wearing a tailored silk jacket and her hair in rich brown waves. She’d caught Portman’s eye with the end of a gold pencil. “What happened to Mitchum is what might have happened to Humphrey Bogart if he’d refused to send Mary Astor over at the end of The Maltese Falcon.”
    “Exactly! We’re talking movie reality, boys and girls. Not Aristotle’s, and certainly not Betty Friedan’s. Any resemblance to the world outside Hollywood is purely coincidental. If the script calls for a detective as tough as a forty-minute egg, you go to Bogart, or Lloyd Nolan if Bogie’s on loan to Columbia. Mitch is the boy you want for strong-but-squishy. The heavens and the earth were created on the first day of the shooting schedule, and Central Casting is God. Go now into the sunshine, and don’t forget your papers are due Tuesday.”
    The students climbed the steps toward the exit, talking among themselves. David and Heather looked perturbed. Darice, sliding her notebook and gold pencil into a calfskin portfolio slung from her shoulder, looked like someone whose paper was already written.
    Portman reversed the projector, rewinding the