Westlake, Donald E - Sam Holt 04

by The Fourth Dimension is Death (v1. 1)

  Starting my trip, I found it strange to be anonymous again, after several years of television celebrity. Maybe I should say it was a humbling experience, but it wasn’t; just strange, and a little uncomfortable.

  For instance. I didn’t at all mind not being boarded onto the plane in the special ahead-of-time category reserved for celebrities and wheelchair-riders and infants in arms and unaccompanied minors, but by golly I did mind traveling coach. There’s no room back there, not for somebody six foot six. Also, the food in that part of the plane seems to have come directly from some northern European prison; to be presented with something that claims to be steak but is rectangular and curls up at the corners like old cardboard is never going to be pleasant. And finally, somehow the rear of the plane takes two or three hours longer to cross the country.

  Robinson had bought my tickets, to Miami and on to New York, using his credit card, so I traveled as William Robinson, but other than that I was on my own in a very strange way; I had to live on cash. I haven’t done that for years, but cash is the only anonymous way of paying for things like meals and hotel rooms. I also couldn’t rent a car, of course, since I wasn’t willing to show ID to anybody, so that meant all my ground travel would be by cab.

  Beginning with the run from the airport over to Miami Beach, where I would be staying at one of the lesser hotels on Collins Avenue, that Art Deco area south of the acceptable zone. My being neither Jewish nor Hispanic was just as remarkable as my height in that neighborhood, but the moustache and Racing Form were just passport enough to support my claim to belonging there. (My paying for one night’s residence in cash was not at all suspect, but merely served to bolster my bona fides in this place.) I signed the check-in card as ‘Ed Dante’, in honor of Bly’s Monte Cristo conceit.

  Alone in my small room with its view of Collins Avenue past the hotel sign—that wouldn’t start flashing off and on tonight, would it, like an oldtime bad movie?—I immediately pulled off the wig, which had started to itch somewhere over St. Louis, and scratched.

  This was going to be a problem. Miami was too hot and humid for most of my disguise, the moustache being about the only part that didn’t eventually become uncomfortable. But the moustache was the wrong color to go with my natural hair, so that meant wearing the wig. And the glasses, too, though they pinched my nose after a few hours. In place of the raincoat and tweed jacket and trousers, a Hawaiian shirt worn outside lighter-weight slacks would just have to do, combined with a kind of hurried shuffling walk as though I were trying to cross a piece of open ground as rapidly as possible without being noticed. When I was a cop, I’d come to recognize that as a movement a lot of wrong guys had picked up in prison. And when I was on PACKARD I’d learned that observation and imitation are two of the most useful tools of the acting trade. So, when I left the Mar Vista Hotel a little after six, I wasn’t Sam Holt at all, nor Jack Packard either. I looked like some sort of tough guy on one or the other side of the law. Whoever I was, your immediate instinct on seeing me would have been to look away, not wanting any kind of contact.

  November sunset had come and gone, leaving Miami a plain of jagged black teeth against a darkening orange sky. Empty cabs did not drift this far south, so I headed on foot up Collins and had gone two blocks when I suddenly remembered that most of my money was still back in the room. I’d left the San Gabriel Mountains with a thousand dollars in cash, mostly in fifties and hundreds in a long zipper compartment in my belt, and I’d barely thought about that money since. And that belt was still on my other, heavier pants. (It’s easy to forget cash, I was beginning to realize.)

  Since the Mar Vista was partly a residence hotel, and also since there wasn’t necessarily always somebody on duty at the desk late at night, they didn’t keep their keys attached to those large awkward artifacts meant to discourage guests from carrying their keys out of the building, so mine was still in my pocket and I merely climbed the stairs, to find my door open and two guys inside, going through my luggage.

  They were both Hispanic, wiry guys with real moustaches much bushier than my false one. They were both more than a foot shorter than me, but that didn’t bother them; when I walked in, they looked at me, looked at one another, shrugged in disgust, and came for me.

  They were mean fellas, particularly after the first time I threw them across the room and they found knives in their pockets. They were mean, and they were two against one, but I had a few advantages they didn’t know about, the first being that they didn’t know I had any advantages at all. Such as police training, and such as MP unarmed combat training. On the other hand, they had a strong advantage over me in attitude. That is, I didn’t particularly want to kill them, but they wouldn’t have minded in the least killing me; an intensity of commitment that equalized the situation between us to some extent.

  When the knives came out, I yanked an empty drawer from the dresser and used it as both a shield and a club, trying to keep them both in front of me. We were making a lot of noise, but I didn’t expect that to draw much of a crowd in this place. Though I tried to keep my self-confidence intact—it’s strategically better to think you’re going to win than to think you’re going to lose—I couldn’t help feeling a certain angry disgust at the prospect of having it all come to an end like this:

  Under an assumed name, in a stupid little false moustache, in a tiny room in a fleabag at the wrong end of Collins Avenue, dressed in a Hawaiian shirt featuring surfboards. This was worse than flying coach.

  And it wasn’t going to happen, dammit. I lunged and parried with the drawer, kicked a few near-misses at kneecaps, and seemed to be holding my own until all at once one of them jumped over the bed and got behind me and tried what should have been a guaranteed winning move: Grab my hair, yank my head back, run the knife across my Adam’s apple. Except that when he grabbed my hair, of course, it came off in his hand and the force of his movement knocked him back ass over teakettle onto the floor and into the wall.

  The other one stopped still, astonished, and stared at me. “Pah-karr?” he asked me, unbelieving, and I kicked him twice: First in the crotch and then, as he bent double, in the face.

  The guy with my wig in his hand was coming off the floor, not caring who I was. I did a roundhouse swing with the drawer, which shattered into splinters against the side of his head, leaving me with a handle that did very well for brass knuckles. With his head bouncing between the handle and the wall, he decided to become as unconscious as his friend, and did.

  They both wore jogging shoes. I took a shoelace from the guy who’d called me Packard and used it to tie his thumbs together, then repeated the operation with the other one; a quick and easy controlling method when you don’t happen to have handcuffs available. Then, with my sleepers immobilized, I turned to the knives.

  They were similar but not identical. Each was a three-inch blade, well-sharpened, that folded into a worn handle. I pocketed them both, then went into the bathroom to put myself back together again. First I adjusted the wig in place, then washed my face and hands, put the clear-lens glasses back on (they’d gone flying into a corner at the very beginning of the fight), switched to my money belt, and generally readjusted my clothing. Now I looked a little rougher around the edges than before, which was fine.

  I came out to the main room to find my visitors both climbing shakily to their feet, looking sullen and bewildered and in pain. Both had bloody scrapes on their faces and surprise in their eyes. “Just hold it there a second, boys,” I told them, and they blinked at me while I looked over the room’s door, finding—as I’d expected—that it had not been forced.

  “Well, well,” I said, and knocked one of them to the floor again, to keep him out of my hair—or wig—while I searched the other. Then I reversed the process. I found a number of useful things, including about eighty dollars which, now that I was in a cash economy, I pocketed. I also found a key to my room. And in addition, I came up with a key to a Chrysler Corporation automobile. “Good,” I said, and ke
pt the car key, and pushed the boys ahead of me out the room and down to the lobby, where the desk clerk looked up with wary surprise as we three approached him. “What’s this?” he said.

  I said, “Do you know these fellas?”

  “Me?” His innocence was wonderful to behold. “Why would I know these people?”

  “One of them says he’s married to your sister,” I said.

  The desk clerk’s face flushed with rage. Glaring at my prisoners, he let loose a flood of Spanish that they responded to with their own versions of injured innocence. While this was going on, I took the two knives out of my pocket, opened them, and thumped them one at a time point down into the counter, hard enough to make it a little difficult for anybody to pull them out again. This action ended the discussion; all three stared at the knives. Then the desk clerk gaped wide-eyed at me, wondering what next.

  You look the part, Sam, I told myself. Now play it. “I want you to hold onto these knives for me,” I told the desk clerk.

  “Hold—? Why?”

  “Because,” I told him, putting on my face the kind of mean smile that went with the moustache, “if anybody else gets into my room, I’m going to use them on you. Both of them.”

  “Me? What I got to do with it?”

  “I just put you in charge,” I told him. “Remember that.”

  Then, while the desk clerk stood there and tried to figure out what to say to get himself off the hook, I took by the elbow the one who’d had the car keys. “Now you show me your car,” I said.

  23

  It was an eleven year old Plymouth Fury, orangy-tan in color and covered with the bumps and scars of a long hard life. It was parked a block and a half from the hotel, and in that distance no one at all had remarked on the oddness of a guy walking along with his thumbs tied together by a long dangling white shoelace.

  This wasn’t the guy who’d called me Packard. That one I’d left back at the hotel for the desk clerk to deal with. He couldn’t have been sure he was right about my identity, he would have plenty of time to second-guess himself now that I was gone, and in any case he didn’t strike me as somebody who made much of a habit of passing on information to the national media, so I doubted there’d be much trouble from that front.

  Things were looking up.

  And I liked the idea that I was about to get a car.

  It worked fine, the engine turning over the instant I tried it, while the guy stood in the street beside the open driver’s door and expressionlessly watched me. I have no idea what he thought I was doing; maybe planning to drive him to the police station. In any event, he looked surprised when I shut the driver’s door, opened the window, and said, “Take a walk.”

  “This my car,” he said.

  “Now it’s mine,” I told him.

  “And you got my money.”

  “That’s right,” I agreed, and drove away from there.

  24

  Miami has no legitimate theater area as such, but merely has a few stages scattered here and there along the coast, ranging from Burt Reynolds’ dinner theater up north of Fort Lauderdale down to the Coconut Grove Playhouse. New theatrical enterprises tend to nestle in somewhere near one of the established places, and that’s where Julie Kaplan’s employment had now taken her; to a small new theater in Coconut Grove, doing a revival of a Sam Shepard play. In a bare set supposed to be a motel room somewhere in the farthest boondocks of the empty American west, Julie Kaplan’s small face and heavy helmet of hair seemed more appropriate than in ordinary life; as though she’d been outfitted for this part from birth.

  It had taken three calls to reach her from Zack’s ski lodge before I’d flown east, the number she’d originally given me when we were both in New York having been superseded by a second which in its turn had been replaced by the third. When I’d finally tracked her down, she’d agreed to meet with me, and I’d said I would see the show, then talk to her afterward, and that’s what happened. I got lost briefly on the way down, Coconut Grove somehow being half jungle and half city, with entire blocks where you can’t see the sky for all the overhanging trees and vines. But I made it just before curtain time, and took a seat in the small half-empty theater as the lights went down.

  Someone connected with the production, of course, would have called the place half full. Optimism is necessary in the theater, more so than in most places. Having been the most popular form of storytelling from Euripides to Gillette, it is now a minority sport, superseded by movies and television, which not only share the theater’s basic attraction for the illiterate but also provide a fake reality the theater can’t match. It’s easier to pretend you’re watching two people alone in a motel in the American southwest if they aren’t actually in the same room with you. Every theatrical performance today, therefore, is an act of bravery; that’s really relying on the kindness of strangers.

  This production, in the shadow of the well- established Coconut Grove Playhouse, was a fairly standard example of mediocre regional theater today; technically competent, methodical and accurate, but rarely involving. Only once or twice did those people stop occupying space in the same room with us, the audience, and take up residence instead in that bleak motel room two thousand miles away.

  I often wonder what the people who attend such performances hope to get out of them. Culture? A change of pace from Rocky XX and Perry Mason number nine hundred and two? A chance to become involved in a story that hasn’t been artificially pumped up with unmotivated and irrelevant scenes of violence? Whatever it is, such audiences tend to seem quietly satisfied no matter what they get, laughing too little along the way, applauding too much at the end, retreating to their cars afterward without much fuss.

  This Saturday night audience was as normal as the show; I joined their shuffling departure from the small auditorium at the end and then hung around the pocket lobby waiting with a few other friends of the cast, my Hawaiian shirt and nasty moustache keeping the others from looking at me.

  And keeping Julie from recognizing me, when she came out ten minutes later in jeans and a T-shirt. She frowned as she looked around the lobby, her gaze sliding rapidly past me twice before I went over to stand directly in front of her and say, quietly, “Hello, Julie.”

  She looked at me. Then she stared at me. “My God!” she said. “It is you!”

  Which attracted exactly the kind of attention I didn’t want, so I casually took Julie by the elbow and said, “Let’s get out of here, okay?”

  “Sure.” As we headed from the poorly air- conditioned interior to the humid night outside, she said, “Did you see the show?”

  “You were terrific,” I told her. (I’m an actor, and I know this. We don’t want to know about the play, we want to know about us.)

  “Thanks!” she said, beaming all over. “It means more, coming from another pro, you know?”

  “I know.”

  She hadn’t eaten before the show, so I followed her directions to a Cuban-tinged hamburger and beer place, where we ordered hamburgers and beer and then Julie sat back and stared at me and said, “It’s amazing, you know? It’s a whole different personality. And where did you get that car?”

  “Borrowed it from a fella.”

  “Well, it’s perfect,” she said. “It goes absolutely perfect with the image.”

  I grinned at her. “Props and costumes,” I said. “That’s what it’s all about, isn’t it?”

  “I’m learning,” she told me. “I’m sitting here learning all the time.”

  “Now it’s my turn to learn.” I took the play’s program from my hip pocket—a simple typed-and- Xeroxed affair—and put it on the table with its blank back upward. I took my pen from my shirt pocket, poised it, and said, “Dale.”

  “Before we start,” she said, “I want to try to explain about his mother.”

  “You don’t have to.”

  “I know I don’t have to, but I want to.” She was very solemn and serious, and I could see there was nothing to do but let her hav
e her say, so I sat back and listened, and she said, “Dale was her whole life, she lived his career almost as much as he did, he was the only thing that was—I don’t know how to put it—that was interesting in her life. Now, it’s as though she’s the one that’s dead, and nobody will let her just, just go away and get buried somewhere.”

  “I’m willing.”

  “She’s mad at you,” Julie said, “because you look so much like Dale—not now, but usually—and you’re so much more successful than he ever was. And Dale’s dead, and you’re still alive.”

  “And she thinks I killed him.”

  “I’m not even sure about that,” Julie said, surprising me. “That’s the way she talks, I know, and I guess she believes it in some way or other. But I think the main thing is, you look like Dale, you rejected Dale, you’re more successful than he was, and you’re alive when Dale is dead.”

  “Not things you can sue me for,” I said.

  “I don’t know whose idea that was,” she said, shaking her head, her hair moving sorrowfully after. “Suing you. That wasn’t Laura’s idea.”

  “Mrs. Wormley?”

  “She’s not that sophisticated. I guess, when she was sounding off in the newspapers, some smart lawyer saw it and got the idea and suggested it to her.” Something else to thank Feeney and LaMarca for. “But the other part of it is,” Julie said, “now Laura’s got something interesting in her life again.”

  “Ah,” I said. “I hadn’t thought of that. She used to live through Dale, and now she lives through suing me. Almost makes it seem worthwhile, as though I should be able to take her off as a charitable contribution.”

  “You know,” she said, “you’re sounding bitter. I didn’t think you would.”

  “Neither did I,” I admitted. “But, I got involved in a little trouble tonight, and I realized just how far I’m being pushed away from my normal quite comfortable life, and I guess yes, I’m feeling bitter about it.”