I used to be a cop a long time ago, for a year and a half on the force out in Mineola, Long Island, and an MP during my army tour in Germany before that. In both jobs, the unarmed neutralizing of the potentially violent is one of the things they teach you before they give you the gun and the shield. So when the hand I’d pushed away came reaching again, I reacted: My own left hand went out, closed around his right thumb, and held the thumb folded in on itself, cupped between my bent fingers and the heel of my hand. It’s known as the come-along hold, because it doesn’t take much of a squeeze to give that bent thumb excruciating pain and make the subject of the exercise more than willing to come along.
I didn’t need this guy to come along, though; I just needed him to stop. Applying very slight pressure, but enough to let him know what had happened, that he was mine now, I said, “That’s enough.”
His eyes widened in hurt and surprise, his mouth opened in an exaggerated O, and he reached across himself toward the imprisoned thumb with his other hand. I gave him a quick short squeeze: “Hand at your side!”
That’s like an electric shock, that pain. You don’t think about it, you don’t argue with it, you just do what it says. His hand snapped back to his side.
Kendall had found voice: “Good God!” he cried, with the astonished outrage of the proper burgher assaulted in a decent neighborhood. “Harry, help the man! Do something!”
Harry was the driver, who had the good sense to give me a questioning look, to be sure I wanted help before he offered any. I shook my head at him, and looked the stranger in his furious, frustrated eyes. “What’s it about?” I asked him.
“You know what it’s about!” His voice was artificially high-pitched and shrill, affected by emotion. “It all has to be yours, doesn’t it?” he demanded, leaning his head and shoulders back away from me but making no effort to move that thumb. “Everything has to be the great Packard's, doesn’t it?” Said with violent raging sarcasm bearing down on that name.
I said, “Buddy, I don’t know you or what your problem is. If you—”
“You don’t know me? You’re suing me, aren’t you?” So I looked more closely at him, and then I began to see it, the way shapes change when a lamp is moved. The height was right, the hair coloring, and through the distortions that anger had brought to his face it was possible to make out something in the bone structure, the line of eyebrow, the shape of the nose . . .
Well, yes and no. That was not, absolutely not, the face I see when I look in a mirror, but it was him, all right; the doppelganger, the pseudo-Packard of Kwality FoodMarts. “For God’s sake,” I said. Startled, repelled, not wanting to know this other me, talk to him, look at him, certainly not touch him, I pushed his thumb away and stepped back. “Don’t be stupid,” I told him, feeling rattled and unclean.
Something in my manner broke the line of his attack, and he too became nervous and unsure. Instead of whatever forceful snarling statement he’d been rehearsing for hours—maybe for weeks—he stared at me almost as though confused, and said, “I’ve got a right to live too, you know.”
I was vaguely aware of Kendall, somewhere behind my right shoulder, saying sharply, “Harry, the police!” I knew we didn’t need police, but I wasn’t sure what we did need. “Look,” I said to the imitator, trying to remember his name, feeling somehow it would insult him not to remember, “look, I’m not suing you. A company’s suing a company. PACKARD’S owned by a corporation, they have to protect the asset.”
“It doesn’t matter to you,” he insisted. He looked bruised and resentful, as though I were the one who’d forced the confrontation on a public sidewalk. “This is my chance,” he explained, earnest now. “This is my chance.” Then he looked at something past my shoulder, out in the street, and his face changed again, becoming desperate and harried. “Oh, Christ!” he said, and spun away, as though to run down the street.
“Hold it right there!”
I turned, and a police patrol car was now stopped just behind the limo. When I’d heard Kendall call to his driver about the police, it had been because this car was coming down the block. Harry had stopped it, Kendall had said a quick word of explanation, and my celebrity would do the rest. While the resentful and defeated imitator stood waiting, the two cops came to the sidewalk and asked, in that heavy intimidating manner that goes with the uniform, just what was going on.
“A misunderstanding, officers,” I said. “It’s all over now.” The last thing I wanted was for this guy to be arrested, and it wasn’t exclusively for humanitarian reasons. This thing, badly handled, could become a public relations nightmare, the big-wheel celeb dumping on the little guy.
Kendall, seeing the humanitarian motive and not the selfish one, would have nothing of it. “Misunderstanding, my eye!” he announced. “Sam, you don’t have to bend over backwards with these people. Officer,” he said to the nearest cop, “that fellow came charging out at us the instant we got out of the car. My name’s Kendall, here’s my card. I’m with DSI, my driver and I were bringing Mr. Holt and Mr. Robinson home, and this—”
“Yeah, right, right,” the cop said, nodding seriously, holding Kendall’s card like something he was glad to have been handed. “I got the picture,” he assured
Kendall, and turned to me, saying, “You live here, don’t you, Mr. Holt?”
It’s part of their job, knowing the rich and/or famous on the beat. I said, “Yes, I do.”
Turning to the imitator—what was his name?— asking as though it were merely a fact he was interested in for its own sake, the cop said, “You live around here, too?”
“Not me, ” he said; his resentment was in full flower again. “I don’t have houses like that.”
Tucking Kendall’s card away in a pocket, the cop moved closer to the imitator, saying, “Could I see some ID, please?”
“Listen, officer,” I said, then had to interrupt myself, saying, “Kendall, believe me, it’s all right.”
And now the other cop stepped in, effectively dividing us into two groups, his partner with the imitator, himself with us, as he said, “Mr. Holt, you were on your way home, is that right?”
“Yes,” I said. “And nothing happened here except a couple words, it really doesn’t matter, I’m not asking you to do a thing.”
“Fine,” he said, nodding. His partner was studying the imitator’s driver’s license, talking to him quietly, absorbing his attention, giving the imitator time to calm down and rethink his position. “Understood,” our cop said to me, and turned to Kendall, saying, “Were you going in with Mr. Holt?”
“No, no, we were just dropping him off, when that fellow—”
“So everything’s okay, then,” the cop pointed out, and raised an eyebrow at me.
“We’re just going in now,” I told him, and picked up one of our bags. To Kendall I said, “Thanks for the flight, I appreciated it. Not as much as Robinson, of course.”
Which finally distracted Kendall from his desire to make a fuss. Grinning, he said, “I can’t tell you what a treat it was, meeting the both of you.”
We exchanged civilities, Robinson permitted his fan to shake his hand, and at last Kendall and his chauffeur got back into the limo and drove away. Both cops were now talking with the imitator, calmly, quietly, their backs to us. There was no point interrupting; they knew I wasn’t going to press charges, so they were merely defusing the situation in a way calculated to keep it from happening again. Robinson and I went on into the house, and when I looked out my office window on the second floor a few minutes later the police car, the cops, and the imitator were all gone. It was over.
Dale Wormley. Then I remembered his name.
3
TThe next—and last—time our paths crossed was not Dale Wormley’s fault. It was just an unfortunate accident, but no less unpleasant for that, and it was caused by the lunch arrangements I’d happened to make with my friend Brett Burgess.
Brett Burgess is an actor, I’m a star, and there’s our story
in a word. Two words. We met out on the Coast nearly a dozen years ago, before Packard entered my life. The same agent who changed my name to Sam Holt (because it sounded more manly than Holton Hickey, the name I’d been born with) changed his to Brett Burgess from whatever it had been. We got to know each other in that agent’s office and in various waiting rooms where we’d been sent to try out for the same parts, and the friendship has luckily survived all the changes since.
There are two real differences between Brett and me. First, I got the part, the one that launched me and established me and made me rich, while he’s still struggling along with small movie roles and brief uncertain stints off-Broadway. And second, while I just drifted into this profession, not even knowing it was a profession for quite a long time, Brett has been an actor, solid and talented and devoted, all his life. I know there are times when he wishes our positions were reversed, that he was the one with the fame and fortune, but mostly he realizes he’s happier where he is, at work almost anonymously in the career he loves.
The silly thing is, I too have moments of feeling the grass must be greener on the other side. If I’d never been Packard, I could, like Brett, be working at something in the acting profession today. On the other hand, I wouldn’t have the house in Bel Air, nor the house on West 10th Street. So Brett and I, in an odd way, embody each other’s daydreams, and we like to stay in touch, see each other from time to time, get caught up on our fantasies of might-have-been.
I’d been back in the city four days when Brett and I had lunch. That morning he was auditioning in the Lucille Lortel theater on Christopher Street in the Village, so we arranged that I’d meet him there around twelve-thirty and then we’d stroll together up to Abingdon Square for lunch at Vitto Impero, the restaurant owned by my friend Anita Imperato. The weather was fine—New York in the fall can be absolutely beautiful—and I had time on my hands, so I walked across from home. Although I’m six foot six and have a rather well-known face, I’ve learned that if I wear a cap and keep my eyes front and walk as though I have a purpose in mind, I very rarely get bothered on the street. At least in New York.
I made my way without interruption over to the theater, arrived a few minutes early, and went in to find about twenty actors, all of the same outdoorsy leading man type, lounging in the rear seats, and one more of the same on stage with an earnest plain young woman, both holding red-bound scripts. The four people doing the casting were distributed in the front two rows. I saw Brett in the rear row on the other side and started toward him when a narrow balding young man with a goatee and a clipboard stopped me with a harshly whispered, “You’re late! What’s your name?”
“I’m not auditioning,” I whispered back. Up on stage, the auditioning actor and the earnest girl were reading a scene together, full of artificial gaiety. I pointed toward Brett. “I’m here to meet my—”
“No one’s permitted in here, ” he whispered, fiercely self-important, “except—” Then he stopped, and squinted up at me, under the brim of my cap. I saw recognition change his face from disapproval to surprised delight. “Aren’t you—?”
“Yes,” I whispered, happy once again to accept this fringe benefit of celebrity; everybody thinks they already know you and already like you.
“Are you sure you don’t want to audition?” He almost simpered when he said that, looking at me sidelong, virtually flirting with me.
And I considered it, by God, for one millisecond. All of the pros, all of the cons. I didn’t even know if it was the lead; not that that mattered, since the idea was ridiculous anyway.
And what if I were to waltz in and take Brett’s part away from him?
“Thanks, but no,” I whispered, smiling back at my seducer with the clipboard. “All right if I sit over there?”
“Yes, of course.” Rapping the backs of his fingers against the papers on his clipboard, he whispered, “Which one’s your friend?”
“Brett Burgess.”
“I’ll call him next.”
“Thank you,” I said, pleased and surprised. “We both thank you.”
I went on across the rear of the theater and slid into the seat next to Brett, nodding a silent greeting. He nodded back, then spread his hands to display helplessness. Leaning toward me, he whispered, “They’re running late. As usual.”
“You’re next at bat.”
That made his craggy face smile. (Not only does he look like the Marlboro Man, he’s been the Marlboro Man, in a magazine ad.) “Used your influence, did you?”
“Yes. But from here on, you’re on your own.”
“I’m not sure I want this anyway,” he whispered. “It’s Alan Alda as a lumberjack.”
“Isn’t that a contradiction in terms?”
He grinned, but then looked toward the stage and gestured for me to wait. The actor who’d been reading was now coming down into the small auditorium, leaving the plain girl with both scripts. The goateed man with the clipboard gestured to him, then called, “Brett Burgess,” and Brett squeezed my knee as he got to his feet and headed down the aisle, moving more heavily than usual; not a limp, exactly, but a stiffness in the knees as though he had arthritis there, or an old war wound. I suspected that meant he was already getting into the part.
While the previous contender and the goateed man murmured together briefly to one side, a stout man with a wheezy voice called questions up to Brett on stage from the second row; stage experience, parts played, theaters where he’d worked in different parts of the country, things like that. The information, I knew, wasn’t so much wanted for its own sake as to give Brett a minute to get comfortable on stage and to give the people below a chance to see him separate from the part they wanted him to read. Then the previous man left, the goateed man faded into the darkness, the plain girl handed one of the scripts to Brett, and an angry voice near me yelled, “And what the fuck are you doing here?”
I looked over, astonished, and it was him again, one row down and over to the right. And of course he would be here; he was an actor. A part that Brett might be right for, that I might be right for, was naturally something he’d also take a run at. I shook my head at him, scrunching down as low as possible in my seat, hoping he’d understand there was no need to make a fuss, but one thing I already knew about Dale Wormley was that he was an emotional type. A fuss, unfortunately, was about to be made.
While everyone else in the theater craned around to see what was going on, and while poor Brett stood helpless and ignored on stage with the script in his hand, Dale Wormley came half-trotting sideways—a ludicrous comic crablike movement that could only make him madder—hurrying along the row toward me, yelling, “Come down to sneer? Come down to laugh at the losers?”
“Oh, for Christ’s sake, don’t be stupid,” I muttered, but probably too low, still trying hopelessly not to attract unnecessary attention.
“I don’t like your goddam face, you know that?” he demanded, almost parallel with me now; and that was another stupid thing to say, though I didn’t point it out, since it was his presumed similarity to this face that was getting him whatever gainful employment he had these days. But then, his double-time sidle having brought him over directly in front of me, he backed up the stupid remark by taking a swing at the face he didn’t like.
Sitting there, I parried that wild right, saying, “Cut it out.” Meantime, people all over the theater were on their feet, moving this way, yelling at us to stop whatever we were doing, yelling that they wanted to know what was going on.
Wormley didn’t cut it out. He swung again, the left now, and I blocked that one, too, saying, “Goddamit, grow up. ”
No. Teeth clenched, eyes glaring, he swung the right again.
Oh, enough. Still sitting there, I leaned forward and decked him.
4
“Thanks a lot,” Brett said.
“Think of it as an acting exercise,” I suggested. “Practice in maintaining concentration on the part during a brawl.”
We were in Vitto Imper
o, as planned, for our lunch, and Brett was pretty sure he hadn’t gotten that part. The fact is, he had not managed to maintain his concentration during the brawl, which had been brief but dramatic. After I’d knocked Wormley down, a couple of the other auditioning actors carried him out and the wheezy stout man told Brett to go ahead, the distraction was over and everything was all right now. But it just hadn’t been the same. Brett’s reading with the girl was slow and wandering, as though his attention were elsewhere, and none of the intended lightness in the lines came through. At the end, I could see the disgusted expression on Brett’s face when he went through the final sidebar colloquy with the clipboard man, a disgusted expression that remained intact all the way up Hudson Street, as we walked along and I explained who Dale Wormley was and why he felt he had a gripe against me. “He’s got a great sense of timing, anyway,” Brett said. “I’ll give him that.”
“I don’t want him in my life any more,” I said, “that’s all I know.”
At the restaurant, Anita was too busy running the place to sit with us, though she did come over and chat from time to time. She and I were getting along very well, having become reacquainted the first two nights at her place upstairs from the restaurant and last night at mine, and she went so far beyond her normal style in the expression of her approval as to rest a hand on the back of my neck while she stood at the table to talk. From most people I wouldn’t have cared for that gesture, as being a little too cloyingly proprietary, but Anita’s so independent, so like a cat in her selfsufficiency, that I could accept it from her as simply a comradely statement.
A tall and sharply good-looking woman, slender to the point of skinniness, Anita runs her life to her own plan, and has done so for at least eight years, ever since her husband, the man for whom the word “feckless” was invented, skipped out and left her with a failing restaurant and a sense of deep irritation. She rescued the restaurant, got over the irritation, settled down to an independent existence, and then met me.
Westlake, Donald E - Sam Holt 04 Page 2