The initial flaw with the scheme was that neither of us knew what this breakthrough play should be, and for some stupid reason that seemed to create a great deal of tension between us. It was a ridiculous reason to fight, but neither of us seemed able to get out of its way. Bly’s point, apparently, was that if the play were to be tailor-made for me, I was the one who should choose it. But my point was, it’s up to the playwright to write the play; make a suggestion, see if I like it, that’s how a tailor-made play gets done.
This argument seemed, luckily, to be confined to the car. It simmered between us all the way up the coast, then disappeared for the weekend, then started up again on the drive back, getting worse and worse, reaching some sort of manic peak when I turned off the San Diego Freeway at Sunset Boulevard and drove eastward to the Bellagio Way entrance to Bel Air. We squabbled up through the various Bellagios (Place, Road, Terrace) and off onto San Miguel Way, at the dead end of which I live.
Because of this bickering, I paid no particular attention to the dent-fendered orange Pinto parked to the left of my drive, and didn’t even notice—though I should have—the young guy dressed like a tennis player who climbed out of it, carrying a sheaf of papers, as I stopped the Porsche and punched the button that electronically opens my driveway gate. The broad chainlink gate swung back in its inexorable but leisurely fashion and I did at last become aware of the young guy walking toward me, grinning amiably, the sheaf of papers held like schoolbooks in his swinging left arm.
“Mr. Holt?” he called.
I knew it wasn’t a fan, looking for an autograph. I didn’t know what it might be instead, or how seriously I should take it. I didn’t know if I should crash my own gate, or back up, or just sit there; so I just sat there, head half-turned so I could watch both the young guy approach and the gate recede, and the guy swung his left arm out farther than usual, calling, “You’ve been served, sir!” as the sheaf of papers left his hand and rose fluttering like a pigeon coming apart, up over my raised side window and right into my lap.
A bomb? My hands were under it before it hit, lifting it, throwing it back over my shoulder, out of the car and onto the pavement behind me, as the young guy nonchalantly but smoothly got behind the wheel of his Pinto and drove quietly away, without any fuss.
“What—?” Bly’s face was bloodless, her eyes huge. “What was that?”
“Jesus.” I looked in the rearview mirror. The Pinto was disappearing around the curve of San Miguel toward Bellagio. The papers fluttered faintly on the ground, just visible beyond the trunk of the Porsche. Served. “By God,” I said, finally recovering, “I think that was a process server.”
“A what?” She twisted around, staring at the empty road where the Pinto had been, then at the forlorn papers on the ground. “Just a sec,” she said, and jumped from the Porsche, and darted back to retrieve the papers. She returned slowly to the car, studying them, lifting the top sheet as she sat down beside me, shaking her head, murmuring, “Jarndyce and Jarndyce, by golly.”
Bly does that. She makes references to things, things in history or literature or wherever, and I rarely know what they are, and I’ve learned not to be troubled by them nor to ask what they mean nor to let them distract me from the main point, which in this case was, “What is it?”
“You’ve been served, all right,” she told me. “Civil suit, Federal court. Who’s Laura Wormley?”
“Laura?” I frowned, trying to think, then vaguely remembering a conversation with Julie Kaplan, back at Vitto Impero a month ago. “I think it’s— It may be Dale Wormley’s mother.”
“Well, she’s suing you,” Bly said. “In Federal District Court in New York County, New York State, which I take to be Manhattan.”
This made no sense. “Suing me for what?”
“For violating her son Dale’s civil rights.”
I just couldn’t get it. “Violating his civil rights? How in Christ’s name am I supposed to have done that?”
Bly put the papers on her lap. She looked at me. “By murdering him,” she said.
16
The papers in her lap, Bly sat on the sofa and watched me pace my office, until the intercom buzzer sounded and I picked up the phone on my desk. “Yes?” “I have Mr. Cooperman on the line.”
“Thanks, Robinson,” I said. Oscar Cooperman is my California attorney, and I’d never needed him so much in my life. I pushed the lit button and said, “Oscar?” and heard fuzzy air, full of static. “Goddamit, Oscar,” I said, “are you in the goddam car again?”
Static. The words “. . . that impor . . .” drifted to the surface, and the static closed in again.
“You’re goddam right it’s that important, Oscar! Oscar? Where are you?”
Suddenly his voice was loud and clear, as though he were in the room with me: “You don’t have to shout.”
“Oh, yes, I do,” I said. “I’m being sued.”
“Of course you’re being sued,” he told me calmly. “Everybody in your income bracket is being sued. You’re involved in three suits or countersuits that I know, and Mort may be handling one or two back in New York that I wot not of.”
“Not like this, Oscar,” I said.
“Oh, really?” He sounded skeptical. “And what makes this fright different from all other frights? And why should I—” Static.
Furry static, with hairballs. “God damn it, Oscar, come back! Where are you?”
Static. “Coldwater Canyon.” Static.
“Oscar? Can you hear me?”
“Perfectly,” he said, imperfectly. “You’re the one having trouble, not me. These cellular phones are—”
“Could we talk about the lawsuit, please? I’m not in the market for a car phone.”
“Mistake on your part. I find it indispensable.”
“So I’ve noticed. Oscar, do you remember somebody named Dale Wormley?”
Static: thoughtful static. “The lookalike, wasn’t it? He died, Sam, he can’t sue anybody any more.”
“His mother is suing me,” I said, enunciating carefully into that cellular telephone careening either up or down Coldwater Canyon, “for violating her son’s civil rights by murdering him.”
Silence. Profound silence, not even static. “I’ll be right there,” Oscar said.
17
Well, that’s very pretty,” Oscar said, sitting in my living room, leafing yet again through the papers that had been served on me.
“You have a different sense of beauty than I do,” I said.
“A poke of the sharp stick in the eye of the beholder,” Bly said.
“I agree, I think,” I told her.
“Hmmmmm,” Oscar said, smiling indulgently on the papers like an uncle viewing his favorite nephew. Oscar is a stocky man in his mid-forties with a round baby-face, a gleaming bald dome, and a thick Brillo pad of gray hair around the sides, sticking out beyond his ears, making him look like an astonished and very old baby. Now, talking more to himself than to Bly and me, he said, “This wasn’t, of course, the intent of the law, but it certainly comes within its range.”
I said, “You mean, this can happen? She can do this thing to me?”
“Oh, absolutely,” he assured me. “Sue you, that is. Not necessarily win. But she can certainly sue you under the cited statute.”
“Even though I’ve never been found guilty of murdering her son, or even charged with it, or even very seriously considered for it?”
“Well,” he said, “that’s what the statute was all about, in the first place. When the civil rights struggle heated up, starting in the fifties, activists were murdered from time to time and very little was done about it, the crimes being against state laws and coming under the jurisdiction of state courts, most of whom were antithetical to the goals of the activists to begin with. This law was designed to find a way to bring those miscreants into Federal court, out of the state system, and at least find them guilty of something. Get the facts on record. Brand the killers in the public eye and cause them
as much trouble and expense and inconvenience as possible.”
“The law,” Bly said perkily, in a singsong voice as though reciting a poem, “is the true embodiment of everything that’s excellent.”
Oscar considered her for a long moment, as though she were another set of tricky legal papers, and finally said, “Gilbert and Sullivan?”
“Just Gilbert, unless I sing it,” she told him. “Trial By Jury. ”
“Well, that I don't recommend,” Oscar said, returning his attention to me. “You don’t want a jury in a case like this, full of people who can get even with you for being rich and famous.”
I said, “Oscar, you mean this is going to court?”
“Well, I don’t quite see how we could settle out of court,” he told me. “Any settlement at all would imply some acceptance of their allegations, whether we publicly admitted to them or not.”
“First thing we do,” Bly said, “let’s kill all the lawyers.”
“Steady,” Oscar told her.
I said, “Oscar, how can she do this?”
He hefted the papers. “Her new cause of action,” he said, “is the transfer of the original investigating detectives off the case, which had the effect of ending all active efforts to solve the murder of Dale Wormley.”
“That isn’t why they were replaced,” I objected, but even as I said that I could imagine how much Feeney and LaMarca would enjoy testifying against me in court. That was the instant when I stopped being merely astonished and started being scared.
Oscar was going blithely on, saying, “That’s only her doorway into court. The suit itself is for violation of Dale Wormley’s civil right to the uninterrupted enjoyment of his life, and the effect of that interruption on his mother. Her call for damages is based on her son’s anticipated future support of her, projecting—quite optimistically, I think, though it hardly matters—her son’s probable future earnings, now cut off. But those, of course, are not the details we wish to argue, or even pay much heed to. The main issue in this suit is the accusation of murder.”
I said, “The fact is, this woman really and truly does think I killed her son. She told the papers in New York that I was getting away with it because I was rich and powerful and the police were afraid to come after me.”
Oscar grinned. “That’ll be the day.”
“But she doesn’t know that, does she?” I shook my head, answering my own question. “And now she’s found some lawyer who sees publicity for himself in all this—”
“First thing we do,” Bly said, and stopped, and grinned amiably at Oscar, who gave her a crooked grin and nod right back, his eyes on me.
I said, “So this way she gets to have me tried for the murder after all.”
“That’s true. And in a much worse venue,” Oscar pointed out. “From your point of view, that is.”
“Worse venue? Meaning what?”
“The rules of evidence,” he told me, “are less rigorous in a civil court than in a criminal court. The standard of proof, for instance, in criminal cases, is that guilt must be established beyond a reasonable doubt. But in civil cases judgment can be derived merely from the preponderance of the evidence. All the rules are looser and simpler.”
“Good God, Oscar,” I said. Beside me, Bly looked as worried as I felt, and as though she wasn’t even trying to find an appropriate quotation.
Oscar looked grim, as though he’d scared himself as much as us. “You’re right,” he said. “You’re going to be tried for murder. And it’s going to happen in a court that was never set up to fairly handle such a matter.”
18
A conference call involving Oscar here in LA and Mort Adler in New York didn’t add to my joy. Mort’s assessment of the situation was at least as gloomy as Oscar’s. And he had the additional bad news to convey that three civil rights legal organizations had joined the case as friends of the petitioner; for the publicity involved, of course, but so what? None of the three organizations were large or well-known or particularly respectable—nothing like the ACLU, for instance—but their names would still add a sheen of social responsibility to Mrs. Wormley’s efforts.
Given the combination of a celebrity name and a novel legal situation, the publicity potential for the civil case was much broader than that for the original killing. Dale Wormley’s murder, with my name attached, had made the wire services and the cable news programs, but only briefly, having then receded pretty much to the level of a local New York story, which I’d been able to defuse by moving back to California; this time, there would be no place to go. “Mort?” I asked, during the conference call. “Should I stay here, or go back there? Or does it make any difference?”
“You’ll have to come back to be deposed,” he told me. “Until then, do as you see fit.”
“Deposed,” I said. “Ah, yes.” I’d been through that part of civil cases before, the part where the other guy’s lawyer gets to ask you all kinds of irritating and irrelevant questions in his office while your attorney sits beside you being restrained and the whole thing is taken down by a court stenographer to haunt you later.
“I think Sam ought to stay here,” Oscar’s voice boomed from the phone and echoed from his person in the next room, and on the sofa near me Bly emphatically nodded. “If he starts moving around like a bug on a griddle,” Oscar went on, an image I could only too unhappily identify with, “it’ll look as though he’s reacting to the suit.”
“Which I will be,” I pointed out, “no matter what I do.”
“Still,” Mort said, his manner such a measured contrast to Oscar’s, “I do take Oscar’s point. Unless you have some actual reason for returning to New York prior to the deposition, you might as well stay where you are.”
Oscar said, “Mort? Anything to be gained by asking for a change of venue?”
“Out there? I don’t see what. Delay and expense for both sides, an air of shiftiness on our part, and not much hope of success, since Sam is certainly a domiciliary of this state. And the alleged action took place here.”
“I suppose you’re right,” Oscar said, sounding rueful. “I wish I could take part,” he said, and then he added the absolute worst thing you can ever hear your own attorney say: “It’s a fascinating case.”
19
There’s snow in the San Gabriel Mountains in late November; clean white drifts on the tan ground, with gray boulders elbowing through. The air is dry and crisp and cold, so that you can see with clarity for miles over the tumbled slopes, and the sky is so pale blue it’s almost white. In fact, though you’d expect the sky to be closer when you drive up there, it seems farther away, higher and more remote and less comprehensible than usual, as though it were the sky of some other planet.
Thursday we drove up, Bly and I, fleeing the media’s voracious interest in my murder trial and aiming for Zack Novak’s ski lodge, which he was loaning me until further notice. I was driving the big Chrysler station wagon, for the weather and because we’d filled it with supplies. Robinson would stay at the house in Bel Air to feed the dogs and repel the press, and with luck we wouldn’t be found until we wanted to be.
We took route 2, the Glendale Freeway, northeast out of LA. After it crosses the Foothill Freeway at La Canada it becomes Angeles Crest Highway, climbing and twisting steeply up into the mountains. A sign early on informed us that the road was closed well ahead, beyond the turnoff for San Gabrial Canyon Road but before Big Pines; there was that much snow up there already. But that was all right; Zack’s place was not far past the turnoff, in one of the patches of private inholdings among Angeles National Forest and Devil’s Punchbowl County Park and Crystal Lake Recreation Park and the Mount Wilson Observatory and all the rest.
We drove upward in silence a while, relaxing, looking at the spiky cactus plants in the snow like weird Christmas decorations, and then Bly turned and spoke in a tough gun-moll guttural, saying, “This is it, Earl. Our last job. Then we’ll be happy.”
“I get that one,” I told her. '
High Sierra. ” Glancing at her, beside me in the station wagon, I said, “You’re even doing Ida Lupino’s mouth.”
“Have you ever considered getting a brush cut?” she asked, with a critical look at my hair.
“Never. And I think his last name was Earle. Roy Earle.”
“You’re right,” she said, surprised, dropping the Ida Lupino bit. “Damn! I hate it when you know something better than I do.”
“It won’t happen again,” I promised her.
Zack’s ski lodge was very simple, really, not at all what the name implies. A small two-story clapboard house painted dark green, it was built against a steep slope, so that only the large living room and a half bath and the utilities were downstairs, everything else up: master bedroom and dining room above the living room, kitchen and two more bedrooms and two baths behind that, the structure built on and within the hillside, so that the two rear bedrooms and the kitchen all had ground-level outer doors. The furnishings throughout were studiedly simple and rustic, and the views at the front, out over scrambled gorges and thick descending stands of dark green pine, were fantastic. Both living and dining rooms had large stone fireplaces at the right side, out of the way of the view. Also out of the way of the view was the road in, a snowy slippery mix of gravel and mud, very narrow, angling in through thick second-growth pine, ending just to the left of the building.
The air was very cold and sweet, like thin apple cider, and our breath fogged as white as the snow mounds under the trees all around us as we made three trips to carry everything from the car into the house; luggage and groceries. We went in through the upper level to the kitchen, which was nearest to where we’d parked the station wagon, and then, while Bly opened a can of soup—she is not a cook, and on those rare occasions when she tries it’s a horror—I went downstairs to turn the electricity on, the master switch being at the circuit breaker box in the half bath down there. Various hums started—heat pump, hot water heater, refrigerator— and I went out to bring split logs in from the pile beside the house. I laid two fires, one upstairs and one down, only lighting the one downstairs in the living room.
Westlake, Donald E - Sam Holt 04 Page 9