Free The Devil's Analyst by Dennis Frahmann Page A

investment firm, Endicott-Meyers, had bet big when they provided second round financing for Premios. No doubt he saw Linsky’s invitation not only as an endorsement of the company but also as a promising indicator of a big IPO payoff. Orleans just seemed relieved, which made no sense whatsoever to Danny. Sometimes he didn’t understand her. And he disliked that Jesus Lopez was hanging around this group. He didn’t belong, and it chafed Danny that he still found the man attractive.
    Lopez spoke, “Barbara, couldn’t you extend an invitation to this minor novelist? It would be so interesting to hear what Josh might say.” Now Kenosha was annoyed. She didn’t want someone horning in on her triumph.
    Linsky didn’t care. “Don’t put me on the spot, Mr. Lopez. Guest invitations are never sent before May. But don’t consider yourself a minor novelist. Didn’t the New York Review of Books just call you a major voice for the outcast society?”
    Lopez beamed. Maybe some element of the former homeowner’s directorial aura infected Danny, but he had flashes of being transported into a film. It wasn’t the first time he felt like a trapped character in a staging directed from off-screen. In this instance it was some scene from All About Eve , Bette Davis, and every other arch story about social climbers, but as in all of his disorienting flashes, Danny had no clue as to what character he was playing.
    Danny blamed his overactive imagination on Pete. After his mother died, his only confidante was Pete, who once owned the only movie theater in Thread. He befriended Danny, gave him small odd jobs, and occasionally convinced him to watch old movies.
    Those old films introduced him to a world beyond Thread and were treasured moments. Even though finances had forced Pete to close the Thread Theater more than a decade prior to befriending Danny, he continued to own the building and the projectors still worked. Tattered publicity posters for Cabaret still hung in those days in the glass cases on the building’s exterior, but only Danny was able to see a movie inside the building.
    Because Pete loved films and couldn’t let them go, he’d occasionally rent an old print to view by himself in the empty theater. He would sit on a stool in the projector’s booth, watching the scenes unreel on the dingy screen, peering through the booth’s small window, and letting the sound echo in the abandoned room with its missing seats and peeling paint. The theater was fading away but in the transforming light of the cinema, it didn’t matter. Nothing mattered but the film.
    It took only a few months of Danny doing odd jobs around Pete’s house, before Pete made a daring decision to share his passion with Danny. He tentatively asked him if he’d like to see a real movie. That afternoon Pete projected a W.C. Fields flick that also starred Mae West. The two laughed together, and Danny no longer felt so forgotten. He had a friend and he had a life of imagination.
    When Danny’s mom was still alive, she and his dad used to talk about the movies they once saw. In Milwaukee when they first met, a theater had been their customary weekend date. After they moved back to Thread, his mother stopped working to care for Danny, and somehow Danny always knew his parents’ lives changed. But when Danny sat on a stool in the projection booth with Pete and watched the flickering shadows play across the large screen at the end of an empty room, Danny felt a lingering of his mother and life seemed bearable. He owed Pete for that.
    What would his mother think of his life now? Would she approve of how he lived with a man in a mansion near Hollywood, slept in the same bedroom used by a once-famous director, and entertained famous faces that most people only knew from photos in a fan magazine? If she could have foreseen his future, would it have been enough to keep her alive?
    “Premios is expanding,” Josh declared.
    Still encircled by Colby, Orleans and