One of Us Is Wrong

by Samuel Holt

  “Plus the shortness of the time,” I suggested.

  He knocked back some Remy, a little more than if he were tasting it and enjoying it. He said, “Sure, that’s why she switched over to breach of promise. Takes no time at all to say ‘Will you marry me?’ No conjugal domicile necessary before the wedding bells.”

  “Did you say ‘Will you marry me?’

  “Are you crazy? My accountant would kill me! Oh, shit, there I go again.”

  “Ross, is there killing in this story?”

  “Wait for it,” he said, like any good writer. “The point is, Delia and I were done and over with more than a year ago. I’d let her stay out at the Malibu place when I wasn’t there, and she had some sort of weird freaks in for a party; they fucked the place over good, and that was the last straw. Good-bye, I said, and she went to her lawyer, and it’s been a life of writs and summonses and threats ever since.”

  “She’s actually going forward with the breach of promise?”

  “It’s just a nuisance suit,” he said, shaking his head. “My lawyer tells me she just wants to make enough trouble so it’s easier to pay her off than fight her. I told him screw that, I’ll pay you twice what I’d pay that bitch, so that’s where we are. Or where we’ve been.”

  “Now we cut to the car crash.”

  He managed a shaky grin. “That’s right, Sam,” he said. “Now we cut to the car crash.” He finished his brandy and held out the glass. “Okay? Would you mind?”

  Ross isn’t a lush, I’ll say that for him, so I got up and said, “Sure,” and poured him a second drink twice as large as the first, a good third of the way up the balloon. This I gave him, and sat again on the sofa, and said, “Crash.”

  “Two weeks ago,” he said, “I went to the Malibu place. I’d had a fight with Doreen—”

  “Delia, you said.”

  “No, no, Doreen.” At least he looked sheepish about it. “That’s the new one,” he said. “She is living in the house. So when we had this big ruckus a couple weeks ago, I went out to the Malibu place—I intended to go out there the next day anyway—and when I walked in, there was Delia, dead on the floor.”

  “Good God, Ross! Dead? That must have been terrible.”

  “It was.”

  “When was this?”

  “Two weeks ago.”

  I was horrified and embarrassed. “Ross, I never heard a thing about it.”

  “Nobody did.” He grimaced, looking away, then took a deep breath and said, “She was murdered, Sam, and I’ll admit it, I panicked.”

  “Oh, oh.”

  “I looked at her, dead. Strangled, you know? A murder victim, in my house. Jesus, a terrible sight, Sam.”

  “I’m sure it was.” I’d seen a few victims of violence back when I was on the Mineola force, but this was Ross’s story, so I let him alone with it.

  He shook his head, stuck on the memory. “A terrible sight.”

  “What did you do, Ross?”

  “I could see how it was going to be. Say I called the cops, tell them what I found, they come over. Delia and I did some public fighting while we were together, you know. More than once I said various wild things in restaurants and at parties and like that.”

  “Things like ‘I’ll kill you, you bitch,’ for instance.”

  “You must have been there,” he said with another shaky grin. “Also, there was the lawsuit going on. Also, I’d had a few drinks, it was late at night, she was in my own place in Malibu. What’s anybody going to think? Sam, I put my old plot maven’s mind to work on this thing, and I saw absolutely nothing between me and the electric chair but my own wits.”

  “No electric chair,” I told him. “No death penalty at all in California, and when it was—”

  “Yeah, yeah, I know, the pellet in the bucket, I wrote that scene myself five six times over the years.

  ‘Rocco’s forearm muscles tense, pulling on the straps.’ But you know what I mean.”

  ‘‘You mean you turned it into a story,” I told him. ‘‘A plot.”

  ‘‘Well, that’s what I do, right?”

  ‘‘You said to yourself, ‘Here’s the situation. The hero’s innocent, but he looks guilty as hell. So what’s the next scene?’ ” And as I said that, I saw what he’d done. “Oh, Ross,” I said. “You didn’t.”

  “I did.”

  “You hid the body.”

  “I disposed of the body. No corpus delicti around this bunny rabbit. I made the whole thing un-happen.”

  “That’s bad,” I told him.

  He shook his head, grimacing at himself. “What can I tell you? It seemed like a good idea at the time.”

  “What did you do, exactly?”

  “Took her out in the boat. She was still almost warm when I picked her up. The boat was anchored just off the beach. I carried her out to the dinghy, putt-putted out to the boat, went way out. It was after dawn when I came back.” He looked portentous, and said a line he’d have put in a script: “I came back alone.”

  I looked at the tape in his lap. “Somebody taped you? Carrying her out?”

  “Worse.” At last he pulled the tape out of the paper bag and extended it toward me. “Take a look.”

  I stood up, took the tape, and hesitated. Ross was really looking bad; troubled, scared, out of his depth. I said, “Why me, Ross?”

  “I know you. I like you. I trust you. Also, you used to be a cop.”

  “Years ago, on Long Island. I gave speeding tickets.”

  “Come on, Sam,” he said. “We worked together on that show; we know each other. I know you’ve got a good mind, you’re really not just another pretty face like those other clowns.”

  “Ross, is this the next scene in the story? You find the dead girl, you panic, you dispose of the body, all fine script material. Then what’s the next scene? You go to your old pal Packard?”

  He blinked. “I don’t know. That hadn’t occurred to me. Do you think so?”

  “I’m not Packard, Ross. I never was. I’m barely Sam Holt.”

  “Look at the tape, Sam,” he said.

  So I put the tape in the machine and switched on the monitor, and after what seemed like a lot of snowy leader, all of a sudden we were looking at a fairly grainy wide shot, in color, of a living room. Low sprawly canvas-covered sofas, tile floor, a white free-standing fireplace with a mouth like the shark in Jaws. Lots of wide glass sliding doors. It appeared to be a night-time shot, without sound. I said, “That’s your Malibu place, isn’t it?” I had stayed there a few times, but I didn’t remember it that well.

  “Yes,” Ross said as a girl appeared, wearing a bikini. Good hard skinny body, hard attractive face, mass of blond hair. “That’s Delia,” Ross said, as he himself appeared in a white jumpsuit open to the waist, chains swinging on chest, sunglasses on top of head. Both Ross and Delia were carrying drinks in short wide thick-bottomed glasses. They gave the impression they were a little drunk, and having an argument. The camera was stationary, not panning with them as they moved back and forth and talked and gestured as people do when they’re a little smashed and trying to make some idiot understand their point of view.

  Watching, I said, “When was this taken?’’

  “Wait for it.’’

  So I waited. Nothing much was happening, just a couple of drunks mouthing off at each other. Then the Ross on tape banged his glass down onto the white plastic end table beside one of the sofas, and pointed at Delia in unmistakable anger. She apparently yelled something. He went over and grabbed the front of her bra between her breasts and yanked hard, and the material tore, and he flung the bra backhand out of camera range. She slapped his face. He punched her in the face and she staggered back, dropping her drink on the little white shag carpet near the fireplace. She was yelling, still angry, not yet scared. Ross waded in after her, punching at her head again. She put her arms up to protect her face and he hit her in the stomach, and when her arms shot downward, he put both hands round her neck.

 
From there on it got grim. They struggled, she went over backward, him on top, bearing her down, clutching to her throat. She kicked and writhed, she tried to scratch his face, pull at his hands, but nothing worked. I found myself tensing up, my stomach muscles clenching, my own throat feeling burned and sore.

  The camera just kept watching. It didn’t move. It didn’t cut to later in the same scene. And it seemed to take a long long time for Delia West to die.

  At last the Ross on tape staggered back away from the body. He knelt on the floor, staring at her, then seemed to cry out, then turned away with his hands over his face.

  Jump-cut. Extreme close-up, Delia’s face. My God, how awful it looked! Tongue so thick and purple, jutting out. Eyes like joke eyes you’d buy in a carnival arcade, huge and round and covered with veins. Throat battered and bruised, pushed in in some horrible way.

  I made a sound, backing away from the monitor. I could hear Ross swallowing and swallowing, very loudly.

  I reached forward to turn the damn thing off, but before I got there the entertainment part of the show ended, and we went back to the snowstorm of black tape. I said, “Is that all of it?’’

  “Isn’t that enough?’’

  It was. I hit Stop and Rewind, and turned to look at Ross. There was no sound but the whirr of the VCR.

  Ross stared at me. His face was covered with sweat. He ran a hand over it, then drank brandy, then looked at the brandy snifter. He looked at me again. He said, “I don’t have blackouts.’’

  “All right.’’

  “I didn’t kill her.’’

  Click. The rewind was complete. I said, “You mean that wasn’t you?’’

  “I didn’t kill her! Of course it wasn’t me.’’

  “Ross, it looked like you. / thought it was you.’’

  “The bastards,’’ he said, and grimaced at the blank monitor.

  “Don’t tell me about twin brothers, anything like that, all right?’’

  “This isn’t a story.” He was mad and scared in equal parts.

  I turned away from him, switched on the tape, watched the room appear, the girl enter, the seeming Ross enter. I pushed Freeze, and hunkered down to stare at that tiny Ross figure. After a while I saw the possibility. “All right,” I said.

  “Somebody who doesn’t know me,” he said. “Somebody like a cop, for instance. What’s he gonna say?”

  Stop. Rewind. I looked back at Ross. “Where’d this tape come from?”

  “In my mailbox, yesterday. Not mailed, just put in there.”

  “What did the note say?”

  “You’re right, there was a note.” He reached into the crumpled paper bag and brought out a sheet of blank typewriter paper, folded in half. I took it, opened it, and read the words from newspapers Scotch-taped onto it: We will be in touch. We will call ourselves Delia.

  “Did they get in touch?”

  “No,” he said. “I looked at the watermark on that paper, by the way, and it’s the kind I use in my scripts. They think of everything, don’t they? I could have done the note myself.”

  I said, “And they waited two weeks before they dropped the other shoe. Psychologists.”

  “Maniacs. But also magicians. I did not kill her, Sam.”

  “They left her for you to see. If you called the police, so much for that. But once you disposed of the body, they had you. Psychologists. They knew their man.”

  “Bastards, bastards, bastards.”

  I permitted myself a little smile, though there wasn’t that much in view that was amusing. “They guessed you wrong in one way, though,” I said.

  “How was that?”

  “They figured to let you stew two three days before they called. They figured you’d stick around, scared, getting more scared. They didn’t know you had a famous criminologist pal named Packard, and that you’d go all the way to New York to see him.”

  9

  If I accepted Ross’s statement that he hadn’t killed Delia West, and for the moment I did accept it, then the big question was, how did this tape come into existence?

  Fakery. Some sort of fakery. Had to be.

  And the dead girl had had to be part of the fake. She’d gone into it knowing they were pulling a scam on Ross Ferguson, but the part she hadn’t known about was that she would actually be dead at the end of the set-up.

  Because that was definitely Delia West. We looked at the tape a lot more times that night, Ross and I—usually punching Stop and Rewind just before that awful final close-up—and there was no question in his mind but that the nearly naked woman we were seeing in the last moments of her life was Delia West. “I knew her, Sam, I knew her, and that’s her.”

  “And is that you?”

  “Jesus, Jesus.” He stared at the monitor, his nose almost touching the screen. “He looks like me and yet he doesn’t, you know? Jesus. Does he move like me?”

  “Almost,” I had to say. “Not quite right, for somebody who knows you. Do you actually have a white jumpsuit like that?”

  “Sure. It’s hanging in the closet in the Malibu place right now, or at least I think it is. That’s where I last saw it.”

  “Do those look like your chains?”

  “Sure, why not? There’s a thousand out there all alike. Chains is chains.”

  We looked at the tape. We looked at the tape. We looked at the tape.

  It was not the original, it was a copy, and therefore just the slightest bit blurry around all the edges. It looked like the tapes you see of undercover FBI men in sting operations, except it was in color and there was no date and time numeration along the bottom. Until the bit at the very end, it was one continuous long shot, with the full figures of the people visible throughout. I said, “Where was it taken from? Where in the room?”

  “On that side— This side here, where we’re watching from, is where I keep all my VCR and stereo stuff. The same as you’ve got here.”

  “You have a VCR camera out there, for U-Matic?”

  “Sure.”

  “Where do you keep it?”

  “Mostly on top of the machine, the VCR machine, just sitting there. Available, you know, if we want to fool around.”

  “Ross, might there be tapes out there of you and various people, maybe even Delia, doing other kinds of things together?”

  He ducked his head, and managed to look at the same time embarrassed and pleased with himself. “A few,” he said.

  “They’d look a little like this tape here.”

  He looked at the monitor. The two people walked back and forth, arguing. His face fell: “Yeah, they would.”

  “So if somebody says ‘How come this tape exists?’ the answer is, you thought you and Delia were going to fool around a little, so you switched on the camera and then things turned nasty.”

  “Oh, shit,” he said. He was working his way through my brandy. “Shit shit shit.”

  We looked at the tape. We looked at the tape. We looked at the tape.

  I said, “You say Delia used to be married to a stuntman?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, she learned how to fake taking a punch.”

  He watched. “Shit, she is faking, isn’t she?”

  “This isn’t where she got strangled,” I said. “Look at her face.”

  “Oh, come on, Sam.”

  “Ross,” I insisted, “look at the tape. At the end of this we get when she’s really dead, but look at it now. Her eyes aren’t bulging out, we can’t see her tongue. This is fake.”

  Jump-cut; no fake. I hastily hit Stop and Rewind, then Stop and Play. “Watch her, Ross, she’s acting.” He watched, and this time I managed to hit Stop before the jump-cut. We looked at each other. He said, “They killed her afterward.’’

  I said, “So the fake Ross wasn’t in on the murder part either. He was just the guy who looked a lot like you, or could be made to look a lot like you.’’

  “Jesus, these makeup guys now—’’

  “I know it. All these peopl
e needed was the Academy Guide, just turn the pages, looking at every actor’s face until they find you.”

  “All right,’’ Ross said. “We know how they did it. The question is, what do I do now?’’

  “You take this tape to the law.’’

  He stared at me. “Are you crazy?’’

  “No. You’ve got to get out from under this thing, whatever it is, and the only way to do that is go straight to the police. Give them the tape, tell them what you’ve done, hope for the best.’’

  “I can’t deal with the police!”

  “You think you can deal with these people? Whoever they are, they’re very smart and they’re very mean. You’d rather have them to deal with than the law?’’

  He thought about that. He said, sounding dubious, “I don’t know what they want from me yet.’’

  “If it was something you’d like, they wouldn’t set up a scam this elaborate.’’

  “But we don’t know what it is.’’

  “Look, Ross,’’ I said. “You wanted Packard’s advice? There it is. Take this problem straight to the cops. Show them how it’s a fake.”

  “Come on, Sam, we’re in the business, we can see how it could be done, but the cops! Tell them that isn’t me?”

  “Why not? Explain how it’s done.”

  “They won’t listen,” he said. “They’ll have me, they’ll have the tape, they’ll have my confession that I disposed of the body. Or do I lie about that?”

  “You can’t. You have to give them the whole truth,”

  “And nothing but the truth.” He brooded at the monitor, now dark and blank.

  There was no longer any reason to look at the tape. I rewound it one last time, gave it and the note to Ross, and he put them away in the paper bag. We talked about the police some more, he remained dubious but said he’d think about it, and finally, around four in the morning, he left.

  The next day I called Ross at the Pierre, and they told me he’d checked out, so the day after that I called him at home in Beverly Hills and his service said he was out of town, she didn’t know where, didn’t know when he’d be back, would be happy to take a message. He didn’t respond to the message.