One of Us Is Wrong

by Samuel Holt

  The apartment itself is odd in one respect; it has no kitchen. Anita has the restaurant, of course, one flight down, and in any event she has such little interest in food that for her a kitchen would be a severe waste of valuable space. For ice and mixers there’s a small refrigerator built into the cabinetry in the outer part of the bathroom.

  What used to be the kitchen, at the rear of the apartment, is now the bedroom, complete with working fireplace and two sets of french doors leading out to the terrace. When she’d bought the house, there had been merely a tarred roof back there, created by the ground floor’s being twelve feet deeper than the stories above, but now the space was duckboarded and, in summer, full of plants. In February the potted plants were inside, crowding the bedroom, and the larger planters outside were merely dead earth streaked with aging snow.

  I wasn’t due to become a New Yorker again until April, so this was an oddly askew twenty-four hours. When I’ve been in California awhile, living there seems comfortably open and relaxed, and New York feels awfully cramped, whereas after I’ve adjusted to my East Coast life, it seems snug and cozy, while L.A. looks disjointed and barren. I was in my western mind right now, and wouldn’t be back here long enough to adjust, so I simply tried to ignore the fact that Anita’s circular staircase was so awkward and narrow, that her entire apartment was small enough to fit in half my garage out in Bel-Air, and that, with summer’s plants brought inside, her bedroom was so crowded I didn’t dare stretch without looking first to see what I was going to hit.

  I was still on California time as well, meaning that my body clock thought it was barely nine p.m. when we went to bed, and not much later than ten when Anita said, “Enough.”

  She didn’t mean sex; she meant the conversation that had followed sex, she bringing me up-to-date on the goings-on of mutual friends, people like Brett Burgess and Dr. Bill Ackerson, who would drop in to the restaurant from time to time. We’d been talking about Bill Ackerson’s habit of dating his beautiful show biz patients, and how all his girls seemed to be equally pretty and vacant and interchangeable, with names like Muffin and Bunny, when all at once Anita’s eyes glazed over, her head lolled back on the pillow, and she said, “Enough.”

  “Are you pooping out on me?”

  “You say you want to get up at eight,” she pointed out, “and that’s seven hours from now.”

  “Oh, all right.”

  So we turned off the light and Anita curled up against my right side and went immediately to sleep, while I lay awake for some time longer, looking at the faint gray rectangles of the french doors, with New York outside. The city never sleeps. Neither do I, I thought, refusing to turn my head the other way to see the illuminated numbers of the digital clock.

  So strange to be here in this fashion. I’d been with Bly yesterday and I’d see her again tomorrow, and here I was with Anita. My two lives are usually more distinct and disparate than that, me spending months or at the very least weeks in one place or the other, adjusting gradually.

  But what else should I have done? If I’d gone home to Tenth Street instead and hadn’t seen Anita at all, or if I’d just dropped by for dinner and then gone home to sleep alone, she would have become very annoyed, and I wouldn’t blame her. But it was this hit-and-run aspect of the thing, the wham-bam-thank-you-ma’am, that made my odd life suddenly stand out for me in unusually stark relief.

  In every part of my life, it now seemed to me, the story was the same, I was neither one thing nor the other and yet both. I was neither a New Yorker nor an Angeleno, but I was both. I was neither Bly’s fella nor Anita’s, but I was both. I was neither a true star nor a has-been, but somehow I was still both. What frequently seemed to me a good and rich and rewarding life now seemed, in this wakeful February night in Manhattan, merely a life of well-controlled vacillation. “Indecision is the key to flexibility,” read a sign I’d once seen over a producer’s desk; it was meant to be a joke.

  As time went on, and the dim light through the french doors didn’t change, it was almost a relief to find myself fretting about Ross Ferguson instead, and what might or might not be happening in his life during my absence. God knows I hadn’t been particularly useful or brilliant on that front so far, and yet I couldn’t help the feeling that my being away, even for this short a time, would make things worse. I shouldn’t have left; I should have insisted on a delay in the discovery proceeding. I should be there when Ross and his lions do whatever it is they plan to do.

  Eventually, the grayness of the french doors blurred, and I slept.

  26

  Next morning I thought I saw Tabari in the back of a cab. I’d left Anita’s place, weary but awake, at eight-thirty, walking across the Village toward my house, surrounded by overcoated people hurrying to work through the cold and the dirty remnants of snow. As I waited for the light at Sixth Avenue, the cab passed me, headed uptown. It was gone before the image sank in, and I couldn’t be exactly sure it was Tabari I’d seen, but I was less than a block now from home, and if it really had been him, I wouldn’t call that coincidence, either. I’m going to find something at my house, I thought, and walked a bit faster.

  I was right. I saw the two police cars and the ambulance from half a block away, and as I neared the house, its front door opened and two dark-uniformed men came out, awkwardly carrying by its straps a body bag.

  Who? Robinson flashed through my mind, but, of course, he was home in Los Angeles with Doreen. There was no one in residence here. Except me.

  The body bag was carried over to the ambulance, and I went up the stoop to talk to a uniformed cop in a parka standing guard outside my closed front door. He gave me an extreme fisheye as I came up, not recognizing me, clearly believing I was a reporter or worse, and before I could say a word he told me, “Nothing’s going on, pal, just keep walking.”

  “Well, no,” I said. “I live here.”

  He frowned, but then his suspicion switched to astonishment. “Jesus Christ, it’s you” he yelled.

  “Always has been.”

  I would have brushed past him to talk to whatever higher-ranking person might be inside, but he preempted me, turning, pushing open the door, yelling into the house, “Sergeant! It’s him! He’s back!”

  “Could I go in there?” I asked.

  “Just a second.” He didn’t make a big show of blocking the doorway, but it wouldn’t have been easy to get around him. And standing still, wearing over my California clothing only the light topcoat which was all I’d had waiting at Anita’s place, I became aware of just how cold it actually was.

  I said, “What’s going on here?”

  That surprised him for some reason. “You tell me,” he said, and a woman’s voice behind him said, “Okay, let him in.”

  The cop moved over and I crossed my threshold to find in my hallway a short woman of about thirty with extremely pale blond hair and a round, snub-nosed face. She was wide-hipped, in black slacks and a bulky rose-colored sweater, with her badge ID clipped to the sweater above the left breast. “Sergeant Shanley,” she introduced herself.

  “Sam Holt,” I said. There was some sort of sharp metallic odor in the air, faintly familiar.

  “I know who you are,” she said, sounding impatient, but mixed with some kind of excitement; not at meeting a TV star, something else, something similar to that sharp odor. “So you got away from them, did you?” she said. “That’s great. Come on in here and tell us all about them.”

  27

  Sergeant Shanley was very disappointed when it turned out I hadn’t been kidnapped after all. It made the case both less interesting and more puzzling. If those guys hadn’t made off with me, what the hell had they been after?

  Once it was established that I’d spent last night somewhere other than at home—Sergeant Shanley gave me the look of a den mother catching a cub scout cheating with his knots—I at last found out what was going on around here. I have two alarm systems in this house, including a silent alarm that phones the precinct f
arther west on Tenth Street. At seven-ten this morning that alarm had gone off, and the first patrol car to respond had been fired upon. Back-up cars had arrived, shots were exchanged, four panes of glass in my living room windows were broken, and the residual smell of gunfire was what I’d noticed when I’d first come in.

  After a while no more firing had come from the house, and the police had approached it to find the front door jimmied open, the other alarm system short-circuited, the rear door to the garden standing open, and the house apparently empty. At that point they’d found out the name of the owner—me—and called my house in Bel Air, where Robinson, awakened from sleep at what was for him five in the morning, had naturally told them I was in New York. Thus they’d decided it was a celebrity kidnapping and that I’d been taken away out the back.

  In the meantime a normal search of the house had produced a dying man in a second-floor closet. The police return fire had apparently got him, hitting him in the lung. Abandoned or forgotten by his friends, he had hidden away in the closet, and now he was drowning in his own blood. He’d carried no identification and was already terminally unconscious when he was found. An ambulance had been called, but the man was dead before it got there, and was being carried out when I arrived; a swarthy white male, approximately twenty-five years of age, with black hair and black moustache, wearing ordinary workclothes except that the shirt was French.

  It was clear this wasn’t an ordinary burglary; the police estimated half a dozen men inside my house during the gunfight. Nothing appeared to have been taken, nothing searched or disturbed except as a result of the breaking in and the shooting. It had been reasonable to assume a kidnapping. But if it wasn’t a kidnapping, what was it?

  That was Sergeant Shanley’s question, and I was sorry I couldn’t help her. That is, I was sorry I could help her but wouldn’t. Because this had to be Ross’s friends again, of course, up to who knew what. Maybe kidnapping had actually been their idea, in which case it was a damn good thing I’d stayed with Anita last night. (It was anyway, it always was, but this added a reason.)

  And what did all this mean about my friend from the plane, Hassan Tabari? Had that been him in the taxi, leaving the scene of the crime? Was he a part of the group around Ross? What had he wanted from me on the plane, anyway? Every day, it seemed, when it came to Ross and his tame lions, I knew less and less about more and more.

  Once I was filled in I asked permission to call Robinson, who would be very worried right now. “I’ll be right here,” Sergeant Shanley told me, and I went upstairs to call from the office.

  They hadn’t been upstairs at all, or at least there was no trail left, unlike the first floor. Only the dead man, who’d left a few blood drops along the way, nothing more. I phoned Robinson, who so forgot himself that he actually sounded pleased to hear from me: “Where are you? Are you all right?”

  “I’m fine, I’m at the house.”

  “But the police—”

  “Yes, they’re here. I spent the night with Anita.” That changed things. Robinson’s loyalty to Bly Quinn is so total that he can’t bring himself to think anything good of Anita at all. When we’re in residence in the East, he’s stony-faced and monosyllabic every time he’s in her presence, and now there was a sudden distinct chill in his voice when he said, “Yes, I might have known.”

  “Poo,” I told him. “You should have known. How’s Doreen?”

  “Asleep,” he said, still chilly. “It’s quite early here, you know.”

  “All right, Robinson, I just wanted to tell you everything’s fine.”

  “Well, hardly that,” he said, then decided to forgive me again. “Thank you for calling.”

  “Sure,” I said, and broke the connection, and phoned Walter, the contractor who’s overseen all the work I’ve done on this place. I told his answering machine about my broken windows, jimmied door, and spoiled alarm and asked him to take care of it before a whole lot of people moved into my place in my absence. Then I phoned Morton Adler, my New York attorney, and told his secretary I might be a few minutes late for the discovery proceeding, but would get there as soon as possible. Then I went back downstairs to chat with Sergeant Shanley, whose first name was Maureen, though she didn’t encourage me to use it.

  A second plainclothesman was in my living room now, a gloomy narrow-shouldered fortyish man introduced as Clifford. After how-do-you-do he said absolutely nothing, but merely sat and observed while Sergeant Shanley and I talked.

  During my years on PACKARD, the absolutely most frequent problem we had with scripts could be summed up in the question, “Why didn’t he call the police?” A story line that would seem perfectly reasonable and acceptable when the writer pitched it in the office would crumble in your hands once it had been laid out in a script, and you could see the only reason for the protagonist not to call the cops was that it would end the story right there. And particularly if in the story line somebody were trying to kill the protagonist, the question would always be “Why didn’t he call the police?’’ Sometimes the writer would find another way to do it, but more often than not it would turn out to be a script we couldn’t use, though, of course, having assigned it, we had to pay for it.

  I remembered all that now as I sat down to talk with Sergeant Shanley and Clifford. People had broken into my house at an hour when they might have expected to find me home, which meant they had plans for me I wouldn’t like, whether kidnapping or murder or whatever. I didn’t even have to call the police; they were right here. So why didn’t I tell them what I knew?

  Here’s what I could have said: “A writer friend of mine is being blackmailed by a very brutal ruthless gang of people, but he wants to stay with them because he thinks he can write a best seller about them. He squeezed a promise out of me not to break his story prematurely. Knowing that I’m aware of them, they did try to kill me once, but failed, and now the story is they’ll leave me alone because of the promise I gave my friend. They planted a guy on the plane coming in with me yesterday, though I’m not sure why, and I think I just saw that same guy this morning. I don’t have any idea why they broke into this house. I’ve discussed this situation with sheriff’s deputies in Los Angeles and have lied to them and withheld information.’’

  Which was the very first sticking point, even before my absurd promise to Ross. I hadn’t called Ken and Chuck, the deputies in L.A., once I’d figured out the truth, because I’d wanted to give Ross a chance first to get out from under. It had grown from there, each step temporary, each one seeming like the right thing to do at that particular time, until by now I’d dug myself a hole that was going to be very tricky to get out of.

  What if I told the whole story—or as much of the confusing mishmash of a story as I knew—to Sergeant Shanley, here in New York? One of her first moves would be to get in touch with Ken Donaldson and Chuck Nulty out in Los Angeles, and that would put their noses out of joint a whole hell of a lot. I’d lied to them, I’d stymied their investigation, and now I was going three thousand miles away to tell the truth to cops in New York. There were a number of serious legal difficulties Ken and Chuck could make for me if they wanted to, and they would definitely want to.

  So. At each stage along the way there’d been a different answer to the question, “Why didn’t he call the police?” and now we’d probably reached the most ridiculous reason of all: I wasn’t telling the police the truth because I hadn't told the police the truth.

  And Sergeant Shanley, in her own way, was as sharp as Ken and Chuck. She said, “The house has been empty how long?”

  “About two months.”

  “And you just came back to New York last night?”

  “Yes.”

  “Was this a spur-of-the-minute trip,” she asked, “or planned?”

  “Planned for about three weeks,” I told her. “I’m involved in a lawsuit, and I had to come back for the defendant’s discovery proceeding.”

  “What lawsuit?”

  So I told her about the
unauthorized use of Packard in drawings of my own recognizable person, and our ongoing suit, and she wanted to know everything I knew about the comic book company. Clifford took notes while Shanley kept watching my face both during her questions and my answers. Finishing with the lawsuit, she said, “I understand you were a cop yourself once, out on the island.”

  “Mineola, year and a half, mostly auto patrol.”

  “So how does this thing look to you?”

  “You mean the coincidence?”

  She grinned. She wasn’t a pretty woman, but there was a buoyancy and a quickness to her that were appealing. She said, “The day you come back to town, this one house in the whole block is hammered.”

  “The comic book company didn’t send people to hit me, if that’s what you think.”

  She raised an eyebrow. “They didn’t? You’re sure?”

  “They aren’t a fly-by-night outfit,” I said. “They’ve been around for years. They’re very cheap and schlock, bottom of their market, but they’re businessmen, not mafiosi. At any one time they’ve probably got two or three ongoing suits; they settle as late as they can for as little as they can. What we’re doing here is tying them up and costing them money and letting all the other schlock outfits know we won’t be messed with.”

  “So it’s just a coincidence, is that right?”

  I shook my head. “You’ll have to ask the guys that did it.”

  She didn’t like that answer; it smacked of the smartass. Compressing her lips, she said, “How many people knew you were making the trip?”

  “Dozens. Household, friends, agent, lawyer, I don’t know how many people. It wasn’t a secret.”

  She nodded, thinking it over, and then said, “How long you plan to stay?”