Westlake, Donald E - Sam Holt 04

by The Fourth Dimension is Death (v1. 1)

  When I went back upstairs the soup was heating on the electric stove and Bly was in the master bedroom, unpacking. “Hello,” I said.

  She grinned over her shoulder at me, her arms full of jackets. “Hello.”

  She looked so good, and the setting was so snug, and my relief at being away from everything was so strong, that we then spent a considerable time longer in the bedroom than we’d planned, as a result of which we ruined that pot and had to open a second can of soup. Which was delicious.

  All in all, it was a good day. Bly rummaged through Zack’s cassettes and decided that thirties Duke Ellington was most appropriate to the circumstances, and so we spent the rest of the day surrounded by the dark, rich, urban, honey-aggressive sounds of that well-drilled big band, pulsing at us, prodding us, but gently, so we didn’t become too vegetable in our relaxation.

  After a while, we went out to check the woodpile and feel the air and get into a snowball fight, and then back in to play Scrabble—Bly always wins, or almost always —so that it was late afternoon before we sat down in front of the fire together in the living room and began at last to talk about what was going on.

  Bly started it, by cutting—as she would say—to the car crash: “What are you going to do about it, Sam?”

  “The lawsuit?”

  “That’s the dead baby on the table, yes.”

  “Lawsuits are for lawyers,” I told her.

  “This one?” She seemed really surprised, and really troubled. “Sam, hon, don’t you realize how badly you could be smeared in this thing? You still have some hope for your career, don’t you?”

  “Well, don’t say it like that,” I said. “Of course I do. And in fact, the longer it is since PACKARD’S off the air, the better chance I have to break out of this typecasting thing.”

  “Except for this lawsuit,” she insisted. “They don’t have to prove you murdered that fellow, all they have to do is say you did and then pretend to talk about something else, like civil rights and damages. You’ll never live that down, you’ll never work again or be asked to give your name to charities or present awards or talk to film classes in colleges or—”

  “Some of that wouldn’t be so bad,” I said, trying for comedy, but hearing myself how hollow it sounded.

  “Oh, yes, it would,” she said. “For the rest of your life, you won’t be Packard any more, you’ll be the TV star who murdered the poor struggling actor, and got away with.”

  “Got away with it? How do you figure—”

  “No electric chair,” she said. “Not even prison. Just paid some damages. People will say you bought your way out of it, you’ll be mentioned in editorials talking about justice being different for the rich and the poor. Sam,” she said, “if you let the lawyers just do their normal gavotte through this one, there’s no way you can win. Because the judge isn’t even going to rule on whether or not you’re a murderer, not really. He’s going to rule on whether or not you owe damages to the dead man’s mother. This is the worst example I’ve ever seen, Sam, of the old question, ‘Do you still beat your wife, answer yes or no.’ Do you owe Mrs. Wormley money for killing her son, answer yes or no.”

  “Jesus Christ,” I said, “you make it sound even worse than I thought.”

  “It is even worse than you thought.”

  “But what am I supposed to do about it?”

  “I don’t know, "Bly said, staring at me. “Think about it, anyway, try to find some way . . She shook her head, waved her arms in frustration. “I don’t know what to do, Sam, but we can’t just sit here and wait for it to roll over you, and this is not just me making up stories again and doing sitcom plots.”

  “No, I know it isn’t,” I said. “You’re right, I’m in trouble no matter what. Unless . . .”

  “Unless what?”

  “Unless the cops are going to break the case soon. Arrest the real murderer, and that makes the lawsuit moot.”

  “If that was going to happen,” Bly said reasonably, “wouldn’t it have happened by now?”

  “Not necessarily.”

  “But probably,” she said, and then she said, “What if you hired a private detective? Now, wait a minute,” she said quickly, when I looked at her, “don’t look at me like that. There are private detectives in the real world, and people hire them all the time—”

  “Not to find murderers,” I said. “In fact, Mort Adler probably will hire one or two, to do backgrounds on Mrs. Wormley and her son, see if we can prove she doesn’t need the money, or her son never provided for her when he could, or something like that.”

  “Stuff that won’t help you at all,” she said.

  “I agree completely,” I told her. “But that’s the kind of thing you hire a private detective for, in the real world.” I raised a hand, saying, “Wait wait wait, let’s find out a little more what’s going on in the case, before we decide what we should or shouldn’t do about it. It’s almost nine o’clock at night in New York now, so I probably can’t reach Sergeant Shanley any more today, but—”

  He’s the one who took over the case?”

  “She,” I corrected, “and yes, she’s the one. I’ll try her in the morning, but I could at least call Terry Young tonight, and see what the press knows that it isn’t saying, if anything.”

  “Then do it,” she said.

  I looked around at this pleasant rustic living room, with the fire crackling in the fireplace, and night spreading like blue smoke across the view out the big front windows, and soft illumination from the bedroom upstairs where we’d left the light on and the warmth of our lovemaking would still be in the air, and I said, “I guess I’m just not going to get away from it, am I?”

  Bly looked at me sympathetically. “Apart from that, Mrs. Lincoln,” she said, “how did you like the play?”

  20

  When I tried calling Terry Young that night I got a babysitter, who told me Terry and Gretchen were out to a screening in Manhattan and wouldn’t be back till late. I didn’t want to leave my number—that’s right, I was feeling so harried and paranoid I didn’t even want Terry to know where I was—so I just said I’d call back in the morning, and I did. “Well, well, it’s the civil wrong,” he said, when he heard my voice. “Betsy said you called last night. What’s happening?”

  “That’s why I called,” I said. “To ask you that same question.”

  “Well,” he said, not getting it, “so far as I know, you're happening. On the international scene, of course, there’s always the Middle East, but that’s not the question, is it?”

  “No. The question is, what’s happening on the murder of Dale Wormley? Not this goddam lawsuit, the killing itself.”

  “Nothing that I know of,” Terry told me. “When the lawsuit broke, an enterprising fella on Newsday asked the police if they expected to prove your guilt any time soon, and an official spokesman’s answer was that the investigation was still proceeding.”

  “They opened it, in other words,” I said.

  “Exactly. They opened it.”

  In police parlance, to ‘open’ is to close, which is about as near as the American language has come so far to the Newspeak of 1984. Since in theory the police can only actually close a case by solving it, all unsolved cases are open, but not all open cases are by any means active. Therefore, active really means ‘open’, and open really means ‘closed’, and that meant the Dale Wormley murder wasn’t being worked on by anybody in this world.

  Terry and I talked about this good news for a while, I promised him that when I had something public to say I’d say it to him, and then I went outside and stomped around by myself in the snow for a while, getting the stiffness out of my body and the negative feelings out of my brain, while Bly watched me from the living room window, like a sea captain’s wife worried about storms. Then I went back inside and started calling Sergeant Shanley.

  It took four tries, and when at last I reached her— again, I wouldn’t leave a callback number with anybody—she said, “I
was wondering if I’d hear from you. Where are you?”

  “In California.”

  “And what can I do for you?”

  “Find the murderer of Dale Wormley,” I said.

  She chuckled. “That would be a nice thing, wouldn’t it? But at the moment, I’m afraid, it isn’t looking very good.”

  “I understand you’ve opened the case,” I said. There was a little surprised silence, and then she said, “Oh, that’s right, you used to be a cop.”

  “That’s right.”

  “So I shouldn’t blow smoke.”

  Myself surprised by that, I involuntarily laughed, and said, “I’d appreciate that, yes.”

  “Okay, then. If I’m called to testify in this civil trial of yours, I’ll say there’s no reason to suppose you killed Dale Wormley any more than anybody else did. Insufficient motive and no physical evidence.”

  “Thank you.”

  “But then, ’’ she went on, “under questioning from the other side, and you know this is gonna happen, I’ll say we don’t have a prime suspect at all, that we don’t know anybody with sufficient motive, that there isn’t physical evidence pointing in any particular direction, and that yes, you did have opportunity, since the crime occurred in front of your house.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Yeah, I see that.”

  “I don’t think I’ll hurt your case much,” she said, “but to be honest, Mr. Holt, I’m not gonna help it a whole hell of a lot either.”

  “I doped that out,” I told her.

  “Maybe we’ll get a break between now and then,” she said. “You’re right, the case is open, but that means if anything new turns up, anything new at all, we’ll notice it and we’ll be ready to do something about it.”

  I said, “But up till now, there’s no arrows pointing anywhere.”

  “Just at the files,” she said. “Sorry.”

  What else was there to ask her? Nothing. I thanked her, said I expected I’d see her in court, and hung up.

  Behind the house, a clear trail of packed earth and strategically placed stones led farther up the mountain to a huge flat boulder, windswept clear of drifting snow, with a view of what appeared to be the entire North American continent. I was feeling restless and edgy, naturally, so Bly and I climbed up there before lunch, not speaking, just concentrating on the movement of muscles and the crisp coolness of the air we pulled into our lungs. At the boulder, we stood hand in hand, looking out, the steeply slanted A-roof of Zack’s lodge a short way below us down the slope, not another sign of humankind anywhere except for the insect-looking march of powerline poles across the shoulder of a hill far away.

  “You know,” I said, “how everybody, at one time or another, dreams about escaping from it all, going somewhere new, getting a new name, starting a new life? This is one of those moments for me.”

  Smiling in understanding, Bly said, “So here we are on Mount Cristo.”

  “I suppose.”

  “But you aren’t Eddie Dantes,” she said. “You know who you are, and you know what you’re going to do.”

  “Oh, Christ,” I said, feeling the weight of it landing like an Inverness cape on my shoulders. “It’s so stupid.”

  “You don’t have any choice,” she told me. “This time, Sam, there’s nobody else to do it.”

  She was right, dammit. I could feel the old stance come back, the set of the head, position of the elbows, placement of the feet. I looked down at Bly, the old smile on my face, calm and superior but friendly, the assurance in the very lift of my eyebrows. “Packard’s the name, Ma’am,” I said. “Jack Packard.”

  21

  After lunch, when we were both sure the list was complete, I phoned Robinson and read it to him; everything I wanted him to bring up here from the house. “The press has been quite intrusive,” he said. “Despite the best efforts of your public relations person.”

  “Babs, you mean.”

  “That is what she would prefer me to call her, oddly enough,” he agreed. “In any event, she has failed to satisfy them. They are not precisely here, but they are very much in the neighborhood.”

  “Take the Volvo,” I told him, “and go out the back way.” There’s another driveway out from my place, down the slope of land behind the house and out between two houses on Thurston Avenue, closer to the San Diego Freeway. “And bring an overnight bag for yourself,” I said.

  “And the dogs?”

  “Leave out a bunch of food. You’ll be back there tomorrow some time.”

  “But not you,” he asked.

  “That’s right,” I said, not satisfying his curiosity.

  Having made the decision, having accepted the absurdity of my situation—“Hello; I’m not a crime solver, but I played one on TV”—I became more relaxed, able to think more clearly about my problems and plans, and to go over my ideas with Bly, whose worst regret was that she couldn’t come along. “You know I want to,” she said, “and I know why I can’t. So that’s that.”

  So we didn’t discuss it, which was probably just as well. The fact is, although Bly and Anita are well aware of each other’s existence, they’ve never met, and there’s no desire on anybody’s part that such a meeting should ever happen. I am part of two pairs, each complete, each in its own world. For Bly to come with me to New York and not meet Anita would be artificial and straining and awkward, but for her to come along and meet Anita would be chaos.

  Which was more than usually unfair, given the situation. Bly would love a chance to play gumshoe, Robin the Girl Wonder to my Packard, the capeless crusader, whereas Anita—however concerned and interested she might be—would never even consider taking an active role in the case. If something like this had to happen to me, it should have been on the west coast, not the east. All of this we both knew and neither said; some knots can only get more tangled if you fuss with them.

  I made some phone calls east, to set up a few meetings, but without quite explaining to anybody the mad scheme I had in mind, and then there was nothing to do but hang around and get beaten at Scrabble and wait for Robinson, who arrived in late afternoon, brimming with—sloshing over with—unasked questions. I volunteered nothing, and his portrayal of the crusty old servant prohibited him from admitting curiosity, so that was that. He took over the kitchen immediately upon arrival, to everybody’s relief, while Bly and I carried all the new gear into the master bedroom and considered my disguise.

  Which was going to be necessary, if I meant to accomplish anything. Unfortunately, when you’re six foot six it’s not that easy to adjust yourself to become less noticeable, and this problem is compounded if you’ve been the star of a recent popular television series for five years. But Packard wasn’t going to get a chance to strut his stuff at all in a spotlight of avid attention, so some alternative would have to be found, even if only to get me east without heralding my arrival.

  Fortunately, I’d kept a lot of stuff from the show, and Packard himself had not been above the occasional disguise; mostly moustaches and wigs and now and then a neat submarine-captain beard. These were good quality items, made specifically for me at the studio, so when I wore one of them it was impossible to tell it wasn’t natural, no matter how close you got. Also, when thinking or otherwise displaying intelligence, Packard often used to wear clear-lensed dark-framed glasses; alone, those did for me about what they do for Christopher Reeve when he’s being Clark Kent, but in conjunction with some facial hair and a graying-at-the-temples wig, a surprising difference could be obtained.

  For the facial hair, I chose a slender Errol Flynn moustache that made me look somehow untrustworthy, as though I might try to get you into a card game or into bed or into a land deal; into trouble of some sort. “Why on earth do you want to look like that?” Bly asked me, and I said, “Because if somebody looks like a con man or a sleaze nobody studies him very closely. You don’t want to catch his eye, because then he could catch you. ”

  “Holmes, you amaze me,” Bly said, and shook her head.<
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  For the same reason, I chose the most worn clothing in the batch; a baggy tan tweed jacket with shiny leather elbow patches, a patterned shirt with frayed collar, gray slacks in need of a pressing, and tasseled brown loafers I’ve always hated and can’t remember why I ever bought in the first place. Without the seducer’s moustache, and with Packard’s old pipe, I could have been an associate professor in a small two-year college, but that wouldn’t have given me the added protection of this slightly raffish appearance. “I’ll buy a Racing Form at the airport tomorrow,” I said, studying myself in the full-length bedroom mirror with no little satisfaction, “and carry it under my arm. That’ll complete the picture.”

  Bly gave my reflection a rueful look. “Would you buy a used horse from this man,” she commented.

  “Exactly,” I said.

  When Robinson called us for dinner some time later, I walked into the dining room with all the gear on, and he looked at me appalled. “I hope the personality hasn’t changed to match,” he said.

  “How do I look?” I asked him.

  “Reprehensible,” he told me. “Not like yourself at all, if that’s any satisfaction.”

  “It is.”

  “If you were to come to the door unexpectedly,” he said, peering at me closely, “I would assume you were some distant relative of Samuel Holt’s, whose sudden presence in our lives would give no one pleasure.”

  “Terrific,” I said. “Let’s eat.”

  22

  As it turned out, I wasn’t going straight to New York after all, but to Miami, where Julie Kaplan had lengthened her employment after the dinner theater job her agent had found to get her out of town. I wanted a good long talk with Julie about the world she’d lived in with Dale Wormley, before trying to enter that world myself.