by Samuel Holt
Three months went by. After the holidays Robinson and I returned to Bel-Air, collected the dogs back from Bly, and settled into our western life. Then last weekend I noticed in the TV listings a PACKARD rerun that Ross had written, and it reminded me, and I phoned him.
“Oh, hi, Sam! It’s been a long time, kid!” He sounded chipper, happy, even frenetic.
“Not since New York,” I said, to remind him.
“Say, listen,” he said, lowering his voice, becoming confidential. “About that, uh, thing we discussed—”
“The tape,” I said.
“Jee-sus! Sam, forget it, okay? Never mind it, I took care of things.”
“Did you talk to—”
‘‘Listen, Sam, I’m on my way to Warner’s, we’ll talk soon, okay? We’ll take lunch.” And he hung up before I could ask him anything more. And just three days later four guys I didn’t know did their level best to murder me.
10
And that’s the point when, following my own advice to Ross back in November, I should have gone to the police. Normally I would have. That deputy Ken had given me a phone number to call, barely an hour before, and if my suspicions had settled on any story other than Ross Ferguson’s, I would have called Ken the instant I’d figured it out. But under the circumstances, as a courtesy, before talking to Ken I called Ross.
Or tried to. I got his service, who said Ross was “unavailable at the moment,” which was not the same as being out of town. I knew what the phrase meant. Sometimes Ross is working furiously toward a deadline and doesn’t want to be disturbed, so he tells the service to say he’s unavailable. Once or twice a day he’ll collect his messages, and decide for himself who he wants to chat with. I told the service, “Tell him it’s Sam Holt, it’s urgent, I need to talk to him about the tape.”
“Yes, sir,” she said, and took my number, and I went out to the kitchen, where Robinson was cleaning up after Oscar’s chauffeur’s Sloppy Joes. He gave me a look and not a word, but the message was absolutely clear: He couldn’t see how he could go on accepting me as an employer if my circle of acquaintances was going to include people whose chauffeurs made such messes as this in his kitchen, a sentiment easier expressed in a look than a sentence, come to think of it.
“Sorry about that, Robinson,” I said.
“Your vehicle and my kitchen,” he said, with possible plans to forgive and forget. “May I ask what occurred to the Volvo?”
“Dodg’em cars. A deliberate effort to run me off the road and erase me out of life.”
Robinson paused in his clean-up to frown at me in wonder and doubt and incipient anxiety. “Is that the truth?”
“I would never lie to you, Robinson,” I said. I perched on one of the stools at the work island, and said, “That’s why the police were here.”
“Then it’s out of your hands. Good.”
“Well, not entirely. In the first place, those guys are still running around loose, and I don’t think they’ve changed their minds about me very much.”
“Perhaps we should go back east,” he said.
“Not yet. Because, in the second place, I think maybe Ross Ferguson is mixed up in the story somewhere.”
“ That fellow.” Robinson had not much use for Ross, had been known to refer to Ross as a “flibbertigibbet.”
“An enraged husband, do you think?”
“Robinson,” I said, “there are no enraged husbands anymore.”
“Pity,” he said. “It’s a sadder world.”
“Not for Ross.” Except that wasn’t true either, was it? I said, “Anyway, the point is, I need to talk to Ross and he’s not answering his phone. So I’ll go over there—”
“And reduce another car to smithereens? Not to mention your own self. ’ ’
“I’ll go out the back way,” I told him, “and I’ll take the wagon.”
Robinson was dubious. “I think you should phone the police.”
“I already talked to the police.”
“I think you should not leave the house without surrounding yourself with policemen.”
“Now you’re overstating the case,” I said. “It’s a fifteen-minute drive from here. What I want you to do, if Ross calls after I leave, is tell him I’m on my way over and he should let me in.”
“If you get that far.”
“Very funny,” I said, although Robinson is not exactly one for making jokes. “I’ll be right back,” I said, and left him to his clean-up and his pessimism.
The battered Volvo in the sunlight was more daunting than Robinson’s doom and gloom. I looked at it, looked away, walked on over to the five-car garage, and lifted door number four. Immediately, Sugar Ray and Max appeared, wagging their tails. Door number four, they knew, led to the big Chrysler station wagon, the only car in which they got the occasional ride. “Sorry, guys,” I said. “Not this time.” Still, they hung around, looking bright-eyed and hopeful and eager to be of service.
I went into the garage. To my left was the empty slot number three, where the Volvo used to live, before it died. Beyond that, in slot number two, was the Porsche that I mostly used when going up to my land in Oregon, and in slot number one was the two-tone-tan Rolls that I almost never drove anywhere, not certain I could live up to it. Also, the space around the driver’s seat was too small for me, and I’d been assured I would harm my investment in the thing if I started making structural changes. So there it sat, a thing of beauty and a toy forever, unused. (The fifth space was filled with the power mower, tools, sacks of cement and fertilizer, pool-cleaning equipment, and all the other usual stuff.)
The station wagon was my best bet for this trip because it was just about the biggest and heaviest passenger car on the highway; this here Country Squire could eat Impalas for breakfast.
I drove out the back way, Sugar Ray and Max smiling good-bye, and went down and around to Sunset, where I turned east, headed back through Bel Air into Beverly Hills, turned left again off Sunset, wound around and up through the increasingly steep streets, and eventually came to the stone wall and locked gate of Ross’s half-timbered fake Tudor mansion, on the right. A well-known comedian used to own the place, and when Ross bought it, he kept all the security gizmos because they appealed to his dramatic side.
I stopped the Chrysler with its nose not quite touching the chain link gate, and got out to go over and open the little door of the combination mailbox and call system. This was how the tape was delivered. I picked up the telephone receiver, pushed the button, and waited.
Nothing. Was he really not home?
Still with the receiver to my ear, I looked through the chain link diamonds at the slope of a somewhat shaggy lawn, the ornamental plantings, the blacktop drive, and the huge, sprawling pseudo-English house that was actually about the size of a normal English village. There was no one in sight. A small closed blue van was parked at the top of the drive: the poolman. The uncertainties of private enterprise were recorded mutely on the side of the van, just above the yellow letters reading pool service. The original company name had been painted out in a different shade of blue from the van body, and the new name had been thickly and sloppily painted on in garish red: barq. Barq Pool Service. Terrific name. The owners’ initials probably: Bill, Artie, Ray and . . . Quincy.
If the poolman was there, Ross must be there, to have let the guy in. Irritated, I pushed the button again. Come on, Ross, don’t be so damn coy. I wished for a moment I knew Morse code, so I could spell out my name on this button, but then I realized Ross surely didn’t know Morse code either. I tapped out a jazz sequence anyway, to see what would happen, and nothing did.
Was it possible he really wasn’t home? Maybe he let the poolman in and then went out. Or maybe the poolman has his own key; that wouldn’t be unheard of. All these houses in Beverly Hills and Bel Air and the other rich communities along the hills, they’re all armed with walls and gates and electronic alarms and guard dogs and actual private security guards (of which I had been one for a whi
le), and yet there’s a constant stream of people going in and out of those houses all the time.
The poolman, the gardener, the house cleaner. Appliance repairmen, painters, interior decorators. Plumbers, electricians, carpenters. Delivery men.
Everybody but Sam Holt, apparently. If Ross was there, he wasn’t about to answer this buzzer, so at last I gave up and got back into the wagon. The street was too narrow for a U-turn, so I went on up to the next cross street which, with a Dead End sign, climbed up to the right into pine woods, through which I caught a glimpse of something oval that gleamed like a yellow spaceship in the sun. To the left, this street descended toward Sunset and Bel Air and home, and that’s the way I went.
But I felt frustrated, incomplete. Had Ross been there? It was possible, if the work was going slowly and the deadline was really close, that he’d leave the house entirely for a few days, get completely away from normal life and normal temptations, and when that happened, I knew where he always went.
The place in Malibu.
I drove on past my turnoff to the back way into the house. Malibu was half an hour farther west.
11
Malibu is a peculiarly Los Angeles sort of idea. A narrow strip of land along the ocean’s edge, it is backed by steep precarious hills, with most of the slender flat band between ocean and hill given over to a six-lane highway, generally without dividers, called Route 1. Stores and fast-food joints are shoehorned between the road and the hills, while restaurants and luxury vacation homes are lined up like houses on a Monopoly board between the traffic and the tides. From time to time the sea reaches out a crooked finger and plucks some of the houses away. From time to time one of the unstable hills falls over onto the shops and, occasionally, the highway itself. The whole place is insecure and transitory and ephemeral, and besides that the traffic is dreadful and the houses are too close together. And yet . . .
And yet.
Real estate values are through the roof. If you can talk about real estate in a place where at any moment the ocean may foreclose your house or a mountain fall on it or a runaway tractor-trailer dropkick it into the next wave, then the values are through the roof. If the wind doesn’t take it.
The expensive houses are expensively furnished, as though it doesn’t matter that all that leather and chrome and steel and high design and original oils and museum-quality statuary may be edifying the off-shore fish next week. Famous names are on the ownership papers if not always on the mailboxes, and I admit I almost bought a place in Malibu myself at one time—the second year of PACKARD, that was—before my sensible Long Island upbringing saved me. It’s the stars who grew up in Omaha and St. Louis who live in Malibu; if you had my background, with photos in Newsday every winter and spring of beach destruction from Fire Island all the way along the coast to the Hamptons, you, too, would find Malibu a nice place to visit, but you wouldn’t want to live there.
Ross’s place was a few miles north of where Sunset ends at Route 1; from his deck you can see the surfers farther north, up toward the point. After I made the turn, I stopped at a Dairy Queen on the right and phoned my house to tell Robinson I’d be a little longer than anticipated.
“I had gathered that.” I could tell he was concerned about me, which he expressed by becoming more disapproving than ever.
“I’m just checking if Ross is at his Malibu place,” I said. “He didn’t call, did he?”
“No. There have been three calls, none from Mr. Ferguson. Mr. Novak—”
“Tell me all that when I get back.”
“Miss Quinn telephoned,” he insisted. Robinson likes very few people on this Earth, but he does like Bly Quinn, and at times acts as though his primary job is to protect her from the likes of me. So he wasn’t about to let me off without hearing Bly’s message, no matter what else might be going on.
“What did she have to say?” I asked, since he was going to tell me anyway.
“She wished you to be reminded of your dinner engagement this evening.”
Bly cooks for me from time to time, a trauma for both of us but somehow a necessary element in our mating ritual. “I didn’t forget,” I promised. “Seven o’clock at her place, I know.”
“That’s correct.”
“Hold the other messages till I get back. I should be less than an hour. ’ ’
“Or possibly an eternity,” he said.
“How you lighten my day, Robinson,” I told him, and hung up, and drove on to Ross’s place, which from this side looked to be nothing but a weatherbeaten gray board fence hung with wrought iron numbers and a black iron mailbox. In a small break in the oncoming traffic I made the left turn and parked against that section of the gray fence I knew was actually the garage door.
No one answered my ring. The fact I was getting used to this didn’t mean I liked it. I rang several times while traffic whizzed and roared behind me, and the silence from the house continued.
Well, this time I could do something about it. It happens Ross had loaned me his beach house a few times, so I know about the key hidden in the hollowed-out space behind the wrought iron number 3, which swivels from the one screw in its top crossbar. I wanted to know if Ross was actually here. If he wasn’t, I wanted to look for some hint as to where he might be. And I suppose, if truth be told, I wanted to look at the scene of the crime.
The entrance door is fashioned to look like the rest of the fence, and the round black iron keyhole might even be, from a distance, a knot in the wood. I unlocked and opened, returned the key to its hiding place, and stepped through into the narrow gray-green space between the entrance and the actual house. Vertical boards on both sides hid the four-foot gap behind the fence, which Ross used for storage.
The house door, a more elaborate one with four small diamond-shaped windows in it, was also kept locked, but this key was practically in plain sight atop the doorframe. I went on in and, before shutting the door, stood on the first of the many white shag rugs with which Ross had strewn his house—not fur or wool, some washable fake—and called, “Hello? Ross? Anybody home?”
Did a floor creak? Was there movement somewhere ahead? I listened, and heard only silence.
The house was two stories high, or low. I had entered on the upper floor, which contained the bedrooms plus Ross’s office, with its own view of the ocean and its own small deck for when he needed actual sea air in order to gather his thoughts. Downstairs were the living room and kitchen and so on, with a wall of glass doors facing the sea and leading to the main deck, the width of the house, with broad bleacher-style plank stairs descending to the beach—or ocean, depending on whether the tide was in or out, the moon was full or new, the weather was malignant or benign. Also down on the lower floor, of course, was the murder scene.
It was with a conscious effort that I decided to look around upstairs first. If Ross were here, it would most likely be the office he was holed up in, and if he were away, the office would be the likeliest spot to find hints to where he might have gone. The murder scene could wait.
From the front door a broad hall with a skylight led forward past a couple of closed bedroom and bathroom doors to a wide opening in the right wall and then a double door at the end. The wide opening led to a free-form staircase which curved down and around into the living room. (It would have been just out of camera range to the left in that videotape.) The double doors led to the master bedroom, which led to Ross’s office, so that was the way I went, glancing down the stairs at the living room on the way by, opening the left-hand of the double-doors—the right was sort of a fake, fixed in place—and entering a cool dim bedroom with the shades drawn and a woman’s blouse and jeans tossed onto the king-size bed.
The brightest spot in the bedroom was the doorway in the right wall, leading to Ross’s office. I glanced at the clothing on the bed—could that possibly still be Delia West’s things, after all this time?—then walked diagonally across the floor toward that farther doorway. Movement seen in my peripheral vision was me in th
e gray-tinted wide mirror above the two dressers.
Ross’s office was also empty, though considerably more sloppy than the bedroom. One of the sliding glass doors out to the deck stood open; would he go away and leave it like that? Outside there, the gray Pacific idled away, out and out, under a pink and orange haze.
Ross’s desk was a U-shaped multilevel construct of his own design, which always reminded me of Habitat. Word-processor components, filing cabinets, an old black Remington manual office typewriter for both its nostalgic value and back-up use during blackouts, electric pencil sharpener, a madly complex telephone system, more gimmicks and machinery than the villain in a James Bond movie, and all of it covered with a messy mulch of paper—manuscripts, letters, magazines, memos, notes, postcards, reference books lying open, photostats, newspaper clippings, and who knows what all. I stood looking at it; in this jumble I hoped to find directions to Ross’s whereabouts?
A sound. A definite sound from behind me. The bedroom.
I turned, trying to be fast and silent at the same time, and bumped clangily into Ross’s desk chair, which rolled away to smack into a filing cabinet. So much for the element of surprise; I hurried back across the office and through the doorway into the dim bedroom.
Nobody. Nothing. No sound. And yet the room felt different, as though the dust molecules in the air still vibrated from someone’s recent passage.
To my left a pair of louvered doors fronted the closet. I went over there, listened, reached out to grasp both handles, and abruptly pulled the two doors open.
A girl wearing nothing but blue bikini panties lunged out at me with a knife, crying, “Get away from me!”
12