One of Us Is Wrong

by Samuel Holt

  ONE OF US IS WRONG

  Samuel Holt

  * * *

  TOR

  A TOM DOHERTY ASSOCIATES BOOK

  This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

  ONE OF US IS WRONG

  Copyright © 1986 by Samuel Holt

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form.

  First printing: July 1986

  A TOR Book

  Published by Tom Doherty Associates 49 West 24 Street New York, N.Y. 10010

  ISBN: 0-312-93550-1

  Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 85-52259 Printed in the United States

  0 987654321

  * * *

  This is for Otto and Michael: unindicted co-conspirators.

  Fame is nothing but an empty name.

  —Charles Churchill, Ghosts

  * * *

  The technique of murder must be presented in a way that will not inspire imitation.

  —A Code To Govern The Making Of Motion And Talking Pictures By The Motion Picture Producers And Distributors Of America, Inc. March 31, 1930

  1

  When you invest in a shopping center,” Karen told me, “you don’t look at the shopping center. It’s not a shopping center, it’s an investment, and what you look at is the people running the investment. Leopold Associates has an excellent history in this area. Did you read the backgrounder?”

  “I’ll go take a look at the place, just for fun,” I said, because of course I had not read the backgrounder and didn’t want to admit it. Karen Platt is my accountant, and she is absolutely serious; when she sends you a backgrounder, pages and pages of computer printout complete with charts and graphs and references to annual statements, she expects you to read it.

  Well, I can’t read backgrounders. On the show I could never read the plot summaries, the character descriptions. Just tell me what I say and what the other guy says, and I’ll figure out the details for myself. That system worked pretty well on the show, so why shouldn’t it work now, when the question was whether or not to invest two hundred forty-two thousand for three points in this shopping center in Woodland Hills? “I’ll just wander by the place,” I said. “Sit behind the wheel, kick the tires.”

  “Do what you want,” she said, expressing deep disapproval. “But you should have read the backgrounder,” she told me, and that was the end of the conversation.

  Of course, Karen was right about my not needing to go look at the actual shopping center before either investing in it or not investing in it, and, in fact, that afternoon I didn’t go over to the Valley at all, and might never have gone except that the following Monday my agent Zack Novak put me on hold.

  I hate to be put on hold, and the reason is, God has put me on hold. I’m ready to go, ready to make use of myself, ready to show what I can do, and nothing ever happens. It’s ironic, I suppose, because I started life as somebody with absolutely no drive or ambition, just another feckless kid drifting through the Mineola, Long Island, school system, with no goal out in front of me at all. Because I’m six foot six I got a basketball scholarship to a college upstate, but just fooled around and dropped out after the first year, sliding into the army instead. They sent me to Germany, mostly to be on the brigade basketball team, and assigned me to the Military Police to keep me handy to headquarters.

  After the army I drifted, didn’t want to go back to college, wasn’t good enough for pro basketball, eventually got a job with my hometown police. A year and a half later, scenes for a movie were shot in Mineola and a few of us cops were given short bits in it. An agent thought I showed promise, and signed me. I went out to Los Angeles, enjoyed myself, and got a few acting jobs, but worked mostly as a uniformed security guard.

  That first agent eventually dropped me, having changed my name from Holton Hickey to Sam Holt, so it was my second agent, Zack Novak, who put me up for the lead in a new TV series called PACKARD, about a criminology professor who sometimes does private-eye-type work for his friends.

  PACKARD was a big success; too big, maybe. It ran five years and was canceled only because we all ran out of steam; the audience was still there. A bunch of us got rich off that series, and as long as it stays in reruns, I’ll stay rich. (I also wrote seven of the episodes, my only writing before this.)

  You can’t involve yourself in a TV series for five years without developing some strong work habits, and maybe even a taste for the work itself. By the time PACKARD went off the air three years ago, when I was thirty-one, I’d matured from an easygoing drifter to somebody who knew how to work and wanted to work. And the work wasn’t there.

  That’s why I say God put me on hold. You’d think I could get a movie part somewhere, or a guest shot on a TV series, maybe even a play, but no. I’m too identified with Jack Packard, like that fellow years ago who was so identified as the driver in the Greyhound bus commercials (“. . . and leave the driving to us!”) that he never worked again. Like him, I’ve been typecast as one specific character, and that character doesn’t exist anymore. Other people—James Gamer, for instance—got past that problem by taking other roles while still at work in their series, but I never did; I just drifted along for five years being Packard, and this is what I got: Sam Holt is Jack Packard, and Jack Packard is Sam Holt. I’m thirty-four, I have no money worries, and it’s looking more and more as though, damn it to hell and back, I’m retired. “Come on, God,” I say. “Gimme a break.”

  “I’ll get back to you,” God says, and puts me on hold.

  Well, I’ll take that treatment from God because I don’t have much choice in the matter, but I won’t take it from Zack Novak. Not from my agent. And he was the one who called me “I know you’ve been wanting to work, Sam,” he started with wonderful understatement.

  “Yes, I’ve been wanting to—”

  “Oop! Hold it! I’ll be right back, Sam.”

  And he put me on hold.

  I waited three minutes exactly by the digital clock on my desk, and then I’d had enough. “God can do this to me, Zack,” I told the silent phone, “but you can’t.” And I hung up.

  After that, naturally, I didn’t want to be home when he called back, so I remembered Karen and the shopping center in Woodland Hills and decided I would go look at the place after all.

  And that’s how I happened to be heading north on the San Diego Freeway seven minutes later in my red Volvo when the four swarthy men in the two Impalas tried to murder me.

  2

  The freeway at that point is eight lanes wide, four in each direction, with a tall rail and fence divider. I was in the third lane, being passed on my left by a block-long moving van, when a golden Chevy Impala came up out of nowhere into my right flank, sides wiped me hard, bounced off, and accelerated away.

  I slammed on the brakes, yelling, “Holy shit!” as I shimmied. I used to do some of the stunts on PACKARD; not enough to risk life and limb, but enough to know something about how it’s done, so now I fought the wheel into a half turn right to keep away from that monster truck beside me, and I was still fighting for control when the other one took a shot at me.

  Also a Chevy Impala, this one was a metallic green, and I had just enough time to see a grim-faced olive-skinned guy at the wheel, staring straight ahead, when he hit me. I was already rattled, the Volvo was bouncing around like a football, and there was no way this time I was going to stay in my own lane.

  What saved me first was that I’d already hit the brakes, and the moving van was really moving, so most of him had already gone by when I invaded his territory. And what saved me second was that I actually did hit the va
n.

  Slightly. Left corner of the front bumper ricocheted off the rear right edge of the moving van, which I don’t think the driver of that big rig ever noticed, but what it did for me was keep me from flailing all the way over into the guardrail and fence by bouncing the Volvo backward into its own momentum.

  Up to that point I hadn’t really been thinking, just reacting, but I suppose with that first hit some thought such as “That clown’s an idiot!’’ would have crossed my mind, and even with the second one I still would have been more inclined to call it coincidence—“Just my luck, two meatballs the same day!’’—but when I finally had the Volvo under control and looked out at the world around me, and when I saw the golden Impala ease into my rearview mirror just as the green one was sliding into position again on my right flank, I knew I was in trouble.

  This was a Monday in February, a pleasant, sunny day after January’s rains, about eleven in the morning. Traffic was moderate, and moving fast. And two Chevy Impalas, with a pair of swarthy men in each, had me boxed into the left lane of the San Diego Freeway, behind a fast-receding moving van, where they absolutely intended to give me a fatal accident, and no substitutions accepted.

  One thing I’ve always had, and I’m glad of it, and that’s good reaction time. The instant I realized what was happening, I leaned forward against the pressure of the shoulder strap of my seat belt, rested my brow on my crossed forearms on the steering wheel, and kicked down onto the brake pedal as hard as I knew how.

  The Volvo didn’t exactly stop on a dime, but it slowed abruptly, and a lot sooner than the guy behind me, who came climbing up my tailpipe, jolting me, giving me a rabbit punch in the back of the neck. But I’d known what was happening and the other driver hadn’t, so when I accelerated again, the golden Impala got smaller and smaller in my rearview mirror, wobbling over to thump itself into the center divider.

  I didn’t have time to see what happened next back there, because I still had number two, Captain Green. He was staring at me open-mouthed, no longer pretending he didn’t know I was there, while his passenger craned back over the seat, looking for their other team. I put on a spurt, Captain Green did, too, and then I slammed on the brakes again for just a second, accelerated, and steered over into him.

  What he’d done, he’d braked when I’d braked, but he was still braking when I accelerated and rammed him, coming up from his left, hitting his left front wheel obliquely with my right front fender, driving hard, turning into him so that he went bouncing off into the lane to his right amid a blare of horns from the other traffic in the vicinity, while I spun back to the left, found my opening, and shot through it.

  But not to freedom, not yet. Captain Green was still after me in a car that was bigger and heavier than mine, and on the open highway like this he would also be faster.

  But Mulholland Drive was just ahead. I gave no hint to what I planned, staying in the third lane while he came roaring up in my mirror in lane two, and I only moved over to lane two myself at the last second to keep him from passing me.

  That’s what he thought. He feinted as though he’d go to lane one, then shot off at an angle into lane three, committing himself to the move, halfway into it when I peeled off, ran across the road at an almost dead right angle, and shot out the Mulholland Drive exit.

  What he managed to do to follow me off that major road I have no idea, though I could hear it causing a whole lot of angry horn-blowing. Whatever it was—did he make a U-turn on the San Diego Freeway?—just as I was heading up onto Mulholland, here the son of a bitch came again.

  Well, that’s why I’d wanted Mulholland. A ridge of hills runs east and west here, separating Los Angeles on the south from the San Fernando Valley on the north, and little-used Mulholland Drive is the mostly two-lane winding road that runs along the top of that ridge. My friend’s size and weight and speed meant a lot less up here; what counted was my Volvo’s maneuverability.

  Parts of Mulholland are very dusty when it isn’t raining. I ran through a stretch like that, chalky white clouds rising behind me as I sawed the wheel back and forth through the sharp and twisty curves, and when I came out the other side, my rearview mirror was empty. Feeling very shaky, I slowed just a bit, and headed toward home.

  3

  We didn’t do a lot of car chases on PACKARD—he was a criminologist, more cerebral, a kind of dry-cleaned Columbo—but we did do some. What the heck, it’s television, you have to do some car crashes. I’d helped out with the stunt driving, and I’d sat back to watch the professionals do the rollovers and the arroyo leaps, and I’d thought I knew pretty much what it was all about. But now I understood that the difference between all of that and actually having four guys in two big heavy Chevy Impalas try to pound you and your little Volvo into the concrete on the San Diego Freeway is the difference, as Mark Twain said, between the lightning and the lightning bug. My nerves were shot all the way home, my reaction time was terrible, and now that the emergency was over, my driving skills had gone all to hell; if a cop had seen me then, he’d have had reasonable cause to search the car for little packets of white powder.

  There are two main entrances into Bel-Air from Sunset Boulevard, both featuring great white arches; no embarrassment or shyness about money around here. Coming out westward from Los Angeles through Beverly Hills, you come to the first and more grandiose entrance at Stone Canyon, but if it’s me you’re visiting, you continue on to what my friend Brett Burgess calls Bel Air’s servants’ entrance; a somewhat more modest white arch at Bellagio, across the way from the west gate to UCLA. Turning north through this arch, you follow Bellagio as it twists and turns, being at different intervals Bellagio Way, Bellagio Place, Bellagio Road, and even Bellagio Terrace, before you turn off on San Miguel Way, which is labeled dead end and at the very conclusion of which I live. San Miguel is a continuous curve to the left from its beginning at Bellagio to its finish at my house, so you can’t see one end from the other.

  Normally, that’s the route I take home, but when people are out and about with ideas of committing murder on me, I think twice about entering a street where I can’t see who’s parked in front of my house until after I’ve made the dead-end turn. Fortunately, I have a back way in.

  Behind my house, my property extends southwest down a steep scrub-covered slope. Beyond my land are a few large houses facing the other way, onto Thurston Circle, from which, via Thurston Avenue, you can drive down to Sunset Boulevard just east of the San Diego Freeway. Between two of those large houses I have an easement, and a one-lane blacktop road that looks like a driveway for a house down there, but which actually curves up onto my land, where it meets a fence, an electronically controlled gate, and a call box. I use that entrance only if I’m trying to avoid somebody, and at the moment I would say I was definitely trying to avoid somebody.

  The same little box on my visor controls both front and back gates. Driving up from Thurston Circle, my own dear land ahead of me, I buzzed the gate open, drove through, and went on up as the gate automatically swung shut behind me. The blacktop stream continued up and around the left side of my house, where it joined the lake of blacktop in front of my garage, where Sugar Ray and Max, my two palomino-colored boxer dogs, came frolicking out of the shade to see if I wanted to play. “Not today, guys,” I muttered as I stopped the Volvo and with some difficulty opened my door.

  Max immediately presented her head for me to pat, which I did, while Sugar Ray stood happily and alertly in the background, waiting to be told to do something interesting. “Yeah, yeah,” I said, and elbowed myself out of the car. I had to lean against it for a second until my dizziness waned, and then I walked around the Volvo, Sugar Ray and Max strolling with me, to assess the damage.

  Jesus. And I walked away from that? The right side of the Volvo, formerly red, looked as though several people had been whamming away at it with sledgehammers, to the extent that sheet metal was scraping the sides of both tires—I could see white threads in the bottom of those new g
rooves—and that passenger door would never open again. The rear, where I’d encouraged the first Impala to cream himself, now looked like a caricature of the front end of Sugar Ray, and the front, where I’d nicked the moving van, was a crumpled Kleenex of red metal around a shattered headlight.

  “I think the resale value on this thing,” I told the dogs, “has just taken a nosedive.”

  They grinned their agreement, and I left them there and went into the house, where Robinson was fitting a frozen pie crust into a pie plate. “Quiche again?” I asked.

  He didn’t deign to answer, which was quite a spectacle. Robinson, when he’s not deigning to answer, looks like Abraham Lincoln with a wasp in his nose. Speaking around the wasp, he said, “Mr. Novak has been telephoning and telephoning. I had to tell him I had no idea where you were.”

  “You should have put him on hold,” I said, and went through into my bathroom, where I scrubbed my face in an effort to feel normal again. It didn’t actually work, but at least I then felt coordinated enough to use a telephone, which I did, though not to call the ever-loving Zack. My first call was to Oscar Cooperman, my attorney, who took it in his car, which meant he kept fading in and out. “Where are you, Oscar?” I asked. “God knows. Harbor Freeway? Somewhere.”

  “How soon can you get here?”

  “Sam, I’m on my way to a closing.”

  “I’m about to phone the cops, Oscar,” I said, “and tell them four guys in two automobiles deliberately tried to kill me just now on the San Diego Freeway. When the cops arrive—”

  “Wait a minute, wait a minute, you’re fading in and out.”

  “Tell your chauffeur to drive to Bel Air!”

  “Hold on. Hold on. You there?”

  “Oscar, are you going to put me on hold?”

  “This phone doesn’t have hold,” he said. He sounded wistful.