by Samuel Holt
“Sure,” I said. “It had to be something like that. And six months ago, plenty of time to set up.”
“Not against that place.”
“What I think this group around my friend is up to, there’s somebody important going to be there next week some time, they plan to break in and kidnap him.”
“They’ll never get in, and they’ll never get out.”
“But they’re going to try,” I said. “The question is, who are they likely to be going after?”
“Beats me.” Oscar shook his head. “Next week? The opening ceremonies are this Friday, day after tomorrow, the first holy day’s activities, and from then on it’s a going concern. I suppose they’ll have important people in and out for some time, religious types, some politicos, affirming which side they’re on.”
“One of them is a target.”
“If he’s in Al-Gazel, he’ll be safe from all alarm.”
I remembered the elaborate care and patience with which these people had set up Ross, and how complicated they’d been willing to get to make my own death look accidental. Was this a group who were likely to just climb over a fence and walk onto a guard room’s television screen? “I hope you’re right, Oscar,” I said.
“Well, look at that,” he said. “My glass is empty.”
38
The mind is a strange object, sometimes. If the phone rings at Bly’s place when we’re both there asleep, Bly wakes up and I don’t. But if it rings at my place in the same circumstances, I’m the one who comes awake.
We’d spent the evening together, going out to dinner, talking mostly about the possibility that her actor friend had been murdered, and not at all about my quick trip to New York; that would have required some eventual reference to Anita. I did my best to discourage Bly’s becoming an amateur detective, a role I could see her leaping into with both feet, but I didn’t get very far. She was determined to find some mutual friend who could introduce her to Beau Sheridan’s widow, because the woman just might, all unknowing, have some clue as to who had hired her husband for that nonunion job last fall.
Well, if I couldn’t stop Bly’s sleuthing, I could at least change the subject, which I finally managed by getting her to talk about the script she was writing. From there the evening turned pleasant, and we eventually wound up at my place, which is where we were, asleep, when the phone rang at quarter to four in the morning.
I found the receiver in the dark. “Hello?”
“Sam?”
The reason I was whispering was not to wake Bly. The reason the female voice at the other end was whispering I hadn’t yet figured out. I whispered, “Yes? Who is it?”
“Doreen,” came the faint and guarded voice.
I sat upright. As Bly mumbled and thrashed her legs a bit, I whispered, “Where are you?”
“At the house. I want out, Sam.”
“Just a second. Let me get to another phone.”
I put her on hold and hurried to the office, where I could switch on a light and talk in a normal voice: “Hello? You still there?”
“Yes.” She, of course, was still whispering.
“What is it, Doreen? Tell me about it.”
“I was crazy to come back here.” Through the whisper, and through that veneer of hipness she affected, I could hear how tense she was. “I couldn’t say anything when you showed up with the police; they were at the windows with guns.”
“Terrific.”
“Everybody’s asleep now. Would you— Could you help me get out of here?”
“Sure.”
“The way to do it— You know this house, don’t you?”
“I’ve been there; I don’t know it that well.”
“If I try to get out the front, that’s no good. The lawn lights go on at night when you open the gate.”
All that excess security Ross had never bothered to remove when he bought the place. I said, “Is there another way?”
“On the side— Not the side where the driveway is, the people next door are home there, but on the other side, downhill, you know the one? The big brick house with the pillars?”
“I know it.”
“There’s a pear tree up near the house, over on their side of the wall. If you could like come over the wall there, with a ladder or something, I don’t know, I could meet you, you could help me climb over. Okay?”
“The side with the brick house with the pillars. It’s— let me see, it’s ten to four. I’ll be there in fifteen minutes, twenty at the most.”
“I can get out of the house all right, it’s just climbing over that damn wall.”
“Wait for me by the tree.”
“I will,” she promised.
39
The idea behind PACKARD, and I guess what made it so successful, was what is called “casting against type.” They chose a physical guy—me—to do a cerebral part, the kind of role that would usually go to somebody like Jack Klugman or E. G. Marshall. Putting me in there meant they could have it both ways: I could ratiocinate away like mad for a while, and then go climb a wall. The ratiocinating was actually done by the scriptwriters and directors, but the wall-climbing was done by me.
I climbed the other wall beside Ross’s place, opposite where I was to meet Doreen, dropped, and landed on soft sod. Crouching a minute, I looked up toward the garage and the darkened house beyond it. Nothing moved. There was no sound.
Driving over in the Porsche, making better time than I’d expected on the empty streets, it had occurred to me that if I was going to sneak onto Ross’s property anyway, I might as well poke around some. But if I was going to do that, I’d want to enter on the uphill side, where the garage would screen me from the house. Then I could make a quick reconnaissance as I crossed the property.
Neither of Ross’s next-door neighbors had heavy security, with walls or gates or fences. Having left the Porsche a little farther up the street, I walked back down and went cautiously into the driveway next door on the uphill side. The house at its top showed one dim amber upstairs rectangle, where a night-light burned. The day’s cloud-cover still blanketed the sky, making the night very dark. I went up the blacktop halfway to the house, then pushed my way through the tall ornamental hedge on the right, into the night-cool air between shrubbery and rough fieldstone wall. It was about six feet high, just a bit too tall to see over, but the ragged edges of stone made for easy climbing. I went over and dropped to the soft ground on the other side, and waited a long silent minute before moving up toward the house.
Ross, uncharacteristically, had been letting the grounds get shaggy; too busy with his real-life project, I supposed. Fire Over Beverly Hills. The unshaved grass, wet with condensation, swished against my feet as I moved up the slope, keeping the pale rectangle of the garage between me and the house.
I skirted the garage, blundering once into some shrubbery, then coming out to the brighter area in back, where pale stone terraces and the white rear wall of the house, unshielded by trees, reflected and increased whatever light there was. Lawn furniture and plantings were dark mounds along the way, and just to the right, parked on the lawn behind the garage, was the pool-company van.
I went over to look at it, not opening the door for fear of switching the light on inside, but at least touching it, seeing it up close. The windows were open and a faint, unpleasant odor emerged, both clammy and sharp. I went around to the back, and the rear doors stood open, but the interior was pitch black. I leaned in, trying to see anything at all, and my hands touched cardboard cartons.
I patted the cartons and found they were stacked almost to the roof. They were about the right size and shape to carry four gallons of paint, and when I tried to lift one, they were very heavy. The van seemed to be full of them. I started to slide one out, to see what was inside, but my fingers touched a metal band strapped around it; so much for that. Leaning forward, I sniffed at the cartons and smelled mostly cardboard, with the sharp metallic smell faintly within. The clamminess wasn’t evident back
here at all.
Giving up on the cartons, I hunkered down to try to read the license plate, but it was just too dark. On a PACKARD one time, I’d read a license plate in a darkened garage by feeling the raised numbers with my fingertips, but when I tried that now, I couldn’t make it work at all. Very disappointing.
Moving away from the van, I looked out past the swimming pool at a kind of muddied darkness that would be trees and shrubbery on the hill climbing up away from Ross’s landscaping. Up in there somewhere was Al-Gazel.
There was nothing here, no profit in staring around at emptiness in the dark. Doreen would be waiting, probably getting nervous. I turned away to go between the house and garage, but then paused to look back at the swimming pool.
What was wrong with it? Something out there bothered me, but why? It was merely a full swimming pool in the darkness, like a thousand others in these hills, rectangular, not quite Olympic-size. But something troubled me about it, and I walked slowly toward it, frowning, trying to make sense of my unease.
Unease; that was it. Something about the swimming pool made me uneasy. And yet it was simply there, a black rectangle in the night, surrounded by pale stone walks.
A black rectangle. But doesn’t water reflect whatever light there is? Why could I see the stone walks, yet the pool was merely a bottomless black rectangle? It certainly wasn’t empty, or I’d see its pale wall on the farther side.
I was reluctant to get too close, and only partly because I would be outlined against the light stone terraces in case anyone was looking out an upstairs window of the house behind me. There was also a faint touch of a kind of atavistic dread as I looked at the wrongness of that enigmatic black. A chilly breeze ruffled the hair at the back of my neck; why didn’t it ruffle the surface of the water?
I had no choice, really, atavistic dread or not. I had to walk out over the stone slabs to the pool, I had to go down on one knee and lean forward and reach my fingers down into the cold loose . . .
What?
Still unbelieving, I lifted my hand, the dark coolness in my palm, some of it trickling out between my fingers, dropping back into the pool. The clammy smell was here again, stronger than it had been in the cab of the truck.
This entire huge swimming pool was filled with dirt.
40
Why?
I looked out over the pool, and it was all earth. Not mud, but ordinary dirt, so the water must have been drained from the pool before it had been dumped in.
A grave? What was buried down in there?
The dirt I was holding felt unhealthy; I flung it back into the pool, got to my feet, compulsively rubbed my hand on my pants-leg. What was this? Why had it been done? Was it something to do with their religion? Bewildered and crazy ideas crowded through my head, and I backed away from the pool, finding myself thinking, absurdly: How could Ross let them do this?
Would Doreen know? She must have seen it, she might have some idea why it had been done. With one last look at that strange casket I turned away and went down between house and garage, then crossed the sloping lawn among the ornamental trees to the wall on the other side.
A pear tree, beyond the wall, that’s what she’d said. It was really very dark tonight, I could barely see the wall itself, much less pick out some tree on its far side. I moved leftward along the wall, staring up into the darkness, and found Doreen at last by stumbling into her where she waited, leaning against the wall. She gave a tiny cry, and I grabbed her arm to keep us both from falling. “Doreen!” I whispered. “It’s me, Sam.”
“Oh, my God,” she said, but not whispering, saying it in a normal tone of voice. “You’re inside already.”
“That’s right. Let’s get you—”
“He’s here!” she shouted, suddenly flinging her arms around me, draping her weight on me. “He’s inside! He’s here!”
“What? What are you—?”
Floodlights. The entire house and grounds leaped into existence, and men were running this way across the lawn. I fought loose of Doreen, shoving her away, but half a dozen men crowded around, all with pistols in their hands. I’d never make it over the wall.
I stared at Doreen, who backed away from me, her face bruised-looking in the harsh light. “It was you or me,” she cried, defiant. “All right? It was you or me.” Ross was among the half-circle of men, wearing his usual chains and open shirt, his reading glasses nestled on top of his head. Some sort of ghastly smile twitched on his face as he said, “Sam, take it easy. Nobody’s going to get hurt. Sam? You’re just going to be my houseguest for a while. Sam? Take it easy, Sam.”
41
They put me in the safe room, the first one I’d seen since I worked as a security guard out in these neighborhoods nine years ago. Because of the danger of kidnapping, and because there are more Charles Mansons out there in the valleys who haven’t exploded yet, a lot of Los Angeles’s rich and famous—and some just rich— have installed these safe rooms in their houses. The comic whom Ross bought this place from used to get hate mail from groups he’d insulted in his act, which was why he’d spent the thousands of dollars such a room costs.
Here’s what it is: An interior concrete room, without windows, built either directly on the ground or over a concrete block base extending down through the basement to the ground. Separate electric and water and telephone lines are installed—the utilities around Beverly Hills and Bel Air are old hands at this kind of thing—in underground pipes from outside the property to the base of the safe room, meaning attackers can’t cut off the phone in there and you’ll have light to read by while waiting for the police, and a small attached cubicle contains sink and toilet, in case the cops take too long to get there or you have a nervous stomach. Back when I was a guard, I saw the families of famous people practice quite seriously their safe-room drill. Daddy, stopwatch in hand, would shout that the alarm bells had rung, and would then time how long it took Mom and the kids to get into the safe room with the metal door bolted shut.
Not everybody takes their safe rooms that seriously, of course. I remember one place I guarded that belonged to a Las Vegas singer, who had lined her safe room with cedar to make it the storage closet for her costumes. One man used his as a wine cellar. But they always leave enough room for the family to get inside and lock that door, just in case.
Ross used it for his manuscripts and videotapes of his shows and scrapbooks and show posters, but there was still plenty of space for me. The room contained a sofa to sit on, an old sagging one that had been banished from public life, and a coffee table for your feet. The collected works of Ross Ferguson were available, to while away the time. The phone had been unplugged and taken away, but the electricity was on, and the plumbing worked.
They marched me there from the lawn, Doreen fading out of sight almost at once, the exterior lights going off as we entered the house. Four armed men, Ross, and me. Ross led the way to a door that on the outside looked to be an ordinary reproduction of a Colonial style, but when he opened it, the inch-thick steel became visible, and the heavy-duty piano hinges to hold it.
Ross said a word or two before they stowed me away: “I hate this, Sam,” he assured me, ‘‘I really do, and I know I’m costing myself your friendship. After this is all over and we can all calm down, I just hope you’ll be able to understand, to see it from my side just a little bit.”
I shook my head, saying nothing. What was the point of talking to him?
He said, “Sam, you wouldn’t be here except you’d just never leave it alone. I called you to tell you everything was all right, you didn’t have to do anything else and we wouldn’t do anything else—”
“We?”
“For the moment, Sam, yes.” Ross looked impatient with my lack of understanding of the artist. “When Capote was writing In Cold Blood," he said, “don’t you think he thought of Hickok and that other guy and himself as us?'
“No.”
“Of course he did. Just then, just while it was going on. Not aft
erward.” He sighed, accepting the idea that it was his fate to be misunderstood. “Never mind that,” he said. “The point is, you knew I had people listening here, monitoring my phone, I told you that.”
“Yes, you did.”
“So you made that crack about religious nuts just to let everybody realize you know more than we thought.
Jesus, Sam, didn’t it occur to you they don't want to be known? And don’t you realize they could kill you?”
“They almost did.”
“They could do it right now.”
“And bury me in the swimming pool?”
He raised his eyes to heaven. “There you go again. Sam, you’re going to be here for a few days, and then that’s it. I argued like hell for you, I really did.”
I remember reading once that an insane person is simply a sane person who starts off with one firmly held wrong idea and then everything else has to flipflop to go along with step number one. If you think Martians are communicating through the fillings in your teeth, for instance, you don’t have to have any more wrong ideas to be—and act—crazy. It’s a kind of colorblindness of the mind: Once you think blue is green, you have to make so many other alterations in your view of the world to accommodate it to your belief that eventually either you or the world must be cuckoo, and it isn’t the world.
On that basis, Ross Ferguson was now a certifiable lunatic, so what would I gain by arguing with him? His one wrong conviction was that he and these Barq people were partners, working together toward a common goal; or at least toward similar goals. He’d negotiate with them, he’d bargain and deal with them, he’d do lots of busywork on his project, never knowing that all along they would merely be humoring him, letting him have what he wanted until they didn’t need him anymore. At this moment Ross and I were both under sentence of death, but only one of us knew it. And poor frightened Doreen was in it with us, of course, making it all up as she went along, hoping for the best.