Westlake, Donald E - Sam Holt 04
Page 1
SAMUEL HOLT
(Donald E. Westlake)
There was a body. Then there was another body...and a photograph. Then there were too many cops asking too many questions and the gossip began and got worse-gossip about how money can buy you anything, about how power meant you could destroy anybody. All Sam Holt was doing was defending himself. Nonviolently and almost against his will. But things were out of control and racing away and Sam was left with only one direction in which to turn. He may have played a private eye, but that didn’t mean he was one. But...
It all began with the lawsuit: a young actor with a remarkable resemblance to Sam was portraying the character Sam had created in a series of commercials and the people who owned the character wanted it stopped. There was to be a hearing, and that’s why Sam was at his New York town house. He didn’t want to ruin anyone’s career; after all, if Holt didn’t know the problems facing an out- of-work actor, no one did.
Holt doesn’t know the problems of the dead, of course, but he does know the difficulties they can cause for him. Especially when the first body is discovered near his town house, and the second provides a clue pointing directly at him.
Also by Samuel Holt
published by Tor Books
One of Us is Wrong
I Know a Trick Worth Two of That
What I Tell You Three Times is False
SRITIUEL HOLT
A TOM DOHERTY ASSOCIATES BOOK
NEW YORK
This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events
portrayed in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to real
people or events is purely coincidental.
THE FOURTH DIMENSION IS DEATH
Copyright © 1989 by Samuel Holt
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book
or portions thereof in any form.
A TOR BOOK
Published by Tom Doherty Associates, Inc.
49 West 24 Street
New York, NY 10010
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Holt, Samuel.
The fourth dimension is death / Samuel Holt.— 1st ed. p. cm.
“A Tom Doherty Associates book.”
ISBN 0-312-93140-9: $16.95.
I. Title
PS3558.042F68 1989
813’ .54—del9 88-29165
First edition: January 1989
0987654321
Contents
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2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
46
47
1
I never did think Dale Wormley looked like me.
We all have that experience, I suppose, the false twins out there in the world, people who are claimed by our relatives and friends to look astonishingly like us. A roommate or a brother comes home and says, “I just saw somebody on the bus and I could have sworn it was you, I almost said something, it was absolutely uncanny.” And for a little while we find ourselves wondering about that doppelganger, what that other life might be, is it better or worse than our own, happier, sadder, easier, more exciting . . .
Well, I met my doppelganger, and I don’t believe he looked that much like me. And I didn’t envy his life, either. Nor his death.
If your face and voice become known to the public in a positive sense, because you’re a famous politician, perhaps, or a major sports figure, or, like me, because you did time for five years as the lead in a successful television series, your doppelganger may turn out to be someone who will try to make a career out of that accident of similar appearance. There are now “talent” agencies specializing in celebrity look-alikes and celebrity sound-alikes (there’s even a kind of ghostly living still to be made from looking like Charlie Chaplin or sounding like W. C. Fields, which is a joke on somebody), and the result is, from time to time it becomes necessary for a person in my position to guard the shores of his own existence, to beat back incursions made by the doppelganger into what is, after all, private turf.
And that’s what happened between me and Dale Wormley. For five years I played the brilliant criminologist Jack Packard in the television series called PACKARD, and then three years after I was finished with the part (I hope) this Dale Wormley started playing a Jack Packard look-alike on television commercials for a supermarket chain throughout the northeast. The imitation of a living person and of a copyrighted fictional character was offensive to begin with, and the manner of the imitation made it even worse, since Jack Packard was portrayed in the commercials as a self-satisfied bully, so when we first became aware of the impersonation Morton Adler, my New York attorney, sent letters to the ad agency and the supermarket chain, requesting them to stop, and when that didn’t convince them we sued.
Which was ironic enough to begin with. I had come to actively dislike Jack Packard, and here I was forced to defend him against unauthorized use. The five years I’d spent in the part had been fine, but once the series was finished—ended by the weariness of everyone connected with it, not by any lack of public enthusiasm—I had been ready to move on to other things, but it turned out Packard wasn’t ready to let me go. My identification with that character and that series is still so strong that I’m essentially unemployable in any other role, though God knows my agent, Zack Novak, and I have both done our best to find me something. Not for the money, PACKARD reruns have solved my financial problems for the foreseeable future, but for the work. I don’t want to hang around, I want a job.
So I certainly didn’t feel like defending Jack Packard from imitation, but there it was. My co-owners of the syndication rights were also part of the suit, of course, and the actual process was being handled by Morton Adler, so it more or less progressed without me the first few weeks—except for a couple of long LA-NY phone calls with Morton—and didn’t become an actual ongoing thing in my life until October and my semiannual migration to New York.
For a kid like me, who grew up on Long Island, New York City always was, is now, and ever will be the center of the known and unknown universe. As soon as I became rich enough to indulge my every whim, I bought a nice brick townhouse on West 10th Street in Greenwich Village, and filled it with dark comfortable furniture, and got on first-name terms with Tony, my neighborhood Italian greengrocer. Of course, since then Tony has retired to Florida, and his business has been taken over by a numerous and hardworking Korean family, with whom I am on merely smiling and nodding terms; I cannot attempt to find out the first names of people whose hand-lettered signs announce they are selling such items as reeks and arugura. (“Curryflower” is their finest and most complex creation so far, I think.)
However, despite being the center of the universe, New York City happens to have a climate which is at times inimical to man. Summer in the city duplicates the environment on the surface of the planet Mercury, and deep winter there is rather like downtown in the A
steroid Belt. Therefore, I keep my house in Bel Air as well, where I don’t have to check the calendar before using the pool, and split my life between these two bases. I’ve heard my kind of bicoastal existence described as ‘apples and oranges’: spring and fall in New York, summer and winter in LA.
Fall. October 12th. The leaves were flying, and so was I. Normally, Robinson and I would have flown LAX- Kennedy on commercial air, but at a party recently in Malibu I’d met an executive of a multinational computer company called DSI, and had accepted his invitation to travel east on a company jet. In addition to the pilot and copilot and stewardess, there were six of us aboard, being Robinson and me, our host, and three other DSI executives, all on their way to DSI’s world headquarters in New York. They’d be taking meetings there on some major drive DSI had planned for Great Britain, where the computer revolution is coming along briskly, just a few years behind ours. Their stock market had just recently undergone what they called the Big Bang, which in essence meant that British subsidiaries of American brokerages were permitted at last to do business in the City, and with American businesses would inevitably come American business methods, which these days means one computer terminal per employee; a nice opportunity for DSI.
My own business has never reached Great Britain, I’m not sure why. When PACKARD was still an active show, it was sold in Italy and Sweden and parts of South America, all dubbed into the foreign language, and in Holland, where it was shown in English with subtitles. Rerun money still comes sporadically from all those places, but the British market was just never interested in the affairs of Jack Packard. I’ve heard theories ranging all the way from the idea that Packard was too American, to the idea that he wasn’t American enough. Now, of course, with the show long gone and only me left on my raft on the empty ocean, the question is academic.
I thought the flight with the DSI people was pleasant and fun, a superior way to get from one coast to the other, but Robinson found it absolutely delightful, and that’s because he met a fan; a thing that doesn’t happen to Robinson very often. William Robinson, now 73, was himself an actor for nearly forty years, coming into his own in the movies of the thirties and forties, where he played hoity-toity servants, far more upper class than the people they worked for. He did disagreeable butlers, disapproving valets, supercilious majordomos and, in the war years, the occasional stiffbacked aide- de-camp. He played a fifty-year-old for twenty years, until he became a fifty-year-old, and then went on playing the same age for another decade.
What happened to Robinson’s career was neither age nor ambition, but a simple profound change in American fiction. Gruff millionaires and their heedless headstrong daughters faded from the scene, as did willowy semi-male upper class amateur detectives, madcap heirs and heiresses, luxury travelers on transAtlantic liners and lovable nouveau-riche midwesterners scaling the social walls of Boston and New York. With them, their trains of servants also disappeared, and there went Robinson’s occupation.
Apparently—I didn’t know him then—there was about a ten year transition period, when Robinson still found the occasional role (ultimately in television commercials) as the same old stuffy retainer, but in the increasingly long intervals of being, in actors’ euphemism, “at liberty,” he paid his rent by taking frequent work as an actual butler or valet for some of the stars he’d appeared with in movies. First he and William Powell, say (it wasn’t William Powell, I don’t think, but people like that), would appear in some film as master and man, and then for the'next six months or year they’d recreate their roles in real life, which must have been strange for both of them.
By the end of this transitional decade, acting work had dried up entirely for Robinson, and he had become totally a servant, but with none of the subservience the word suggests. He brought his characterization along from the world of celluloid, and still plays the same old cantankerous pest as ever. Six years ago he was passed on to me by his then employer, a man I’d met as a guest star on PACKARD, and Robinson has been staring down his long nose at me ever since.
And here, on DSI’s Lear, was a William Robinson fan. “I know you!” said the man, a portly sixtyish fellow named Kendall, who had the right look to have played those Robinson parts himself, though a bit more warmheartedly, less accerbically. “You were in the movies!”
“Several,” Robinson murmured. A good servant—that is, a good portrayer of servants—he always manages to simulate a subtle and long-suffering unease when required to sit with the gentry and be served by someone else; in this case, the very pretty stewardess.
“You were great!" Kendall told him. Our plush chairs swiveled, so we could turn toward each other for conversation, and now Kendall demanded one of the other execs switch seats so he could swivel closer to Robinson and tell him all about it. “You were with Joel McCrea,” Kendall announced, tapping Robinson on the knee.
“Occasionally,” Robinson admitted demurely.
Kendall mentioned a title. Robinson nodded, beginning to smile. Kendall quoted a Robinson line from that picture, and Robinson did his best, the old fraud, to look modest. Kendall mentioned other titles, other stars, quoted other lines, recounted bits of business with telephones and breakfast trays, and Robinson did everything but roll over on his back to have his belly scratched. While the rest of us conducted a grown-up discussion about worldwide computer sales, Kendall and Robinson ransacked every nook and cranny of Robinson’s long and middling career. I sensed with foreboding—the kind of foreboding Robinson himself used to manifest when the various Bertie Woosters playing opposite him would describe their latest stratagem—that sooner or later Kendall would, in all innocence, ask Robinson why he wasn’t acting any more, and I knew what then came next.
And he did, and it did, and Robinson raised his voice to be absolutely certain I heard his version of events; just in case I wanted to argue with him. Which I did not.
Here’s the story. In LA I have a good friend named Bly Quinn, who writes for television sitcoms, and last spring she had a pilot being shot for a new series called Akers* Acres. An irascible old servant named Leemy was to be a regular in the series, and Bly asked Robinson to play the part. After some hesitation, he said yes.
There are two versions of what happened next. Bly’s is that Robinson tried to lord it over everybody in sight; that he rewrote all his own lines and most of everybody else’s; that he argued with the director; that his time away from the profession had left him rigid and authoritarian and utterly incapable of following the simplest instructions. Robinson’s version, delivered in the minutest detail to the enthralled Kendall, was that he was a professional with many years of experience to offer in this particular story milieu, and that his co-workers’ refusal to be guided by his hardwon expertise had convinced him the show would be a disaster. In any event, he quit.
My only quibble, which I was much too cautious to mention, was with Robinson’s assumption that, because Bly’s my girlfriend, I was on her side. In fact, I’ve grown very used to having him around, prickly old fart though he may be, and if he’d stayed with the series he would have left my employ, so I’m just as happy things didn’t work out, and I don’t care who was right or wrong.
Anyway, the one-man William Robinson Fan Club took us most of the way through the second half of the journey, after our refueling stop at Grand Island, Nebraska, a dot on the map that isn’t grand, is a thousand miles from a body of water large enough to have islands, but is certainly in Nebraska, possibly the flattest place on Earth. We had twenty minutes to stand there and look around and know exactly how an ant feels on a kitchen table, and then we were airborne again, and the Robinson retrospective took us all the way to New York.
Where Kendall insisted on driving us home. Usually I have a car pick me up, but since we were coming in non-scheduled and couldn’t be sure of our arrival time I’d intended to call for the car from Butler Aviation, where we landed at Kennedy. But no; Kendall wouldn’t hear of it. His own car and driver were there, Kendall had n
o pressing engagements, and this was probably his last opportunity to repay all the hours of pleasure Robinson had afforded him over the years. So we accepted the offer, and that’s how it happened we had two outside witnesses—Kendall and his driver—when we got to 10th Street.
We’d landed at just after seven in the evening, having left LA at nine this morning West Coast time, so traffic to Manhattan wasn’t too bad. We made good time, and pulled up in front of my place at quarter to eight. Thanks and appreciation were expressed on all sides, the driver and Robinson unloaded our luggage—not much of it; we keep duplicates of most things in our two houses—and Kendall and I shook hands, he belatedly and laughingly assuring me he’d always enjoyed my acting work as well; meaning Packard.
We were all four of us on the sidewalk in front of my house, then, when this big fellow came forward out of the semi-dark. I’m six foot six myself, a onetime basketball player, and this guy was at least the same height. I didn’t notice much else about him, build or hair coloring or any of that, but I did see that his face was twisted and distorted by some strong emotion. He came striding forward out of nowhere, as though he’d been waiting years for this moment, and reached out to push his right hand against the upper left side of my chest, just below the shoulder, and shove. “You!” he said; he snarled, I mean. He shoved me again. “You!” What was this? I pushed his hand away, while Robinson and Kendall and the driver stared in astonishment. “Watch it!” I said.
He glared at me. “You fucking think you’re something , don’t you?”
My doppelganger.
2
At that moment, I had no idea who he was or why he thought he had a complaint. I only knew he was being physically violent, he was grimacing with rage or some other desperate emotion, he was large and strong and probably capable of doing some damage if that’s what he had in mind, and I’d never seen him before in my life.