One of Us Is Wrong

by Samuel Holt

I got away from her, back-pedaling halfway across the room, holding my hands palm outward so she could see I wasn’t armed. “Don’t shoot, lady,” I said. “I’m friendly.”

  The girl had come one quick catlike pace out of the closet, still pointing that blade at me, and now she looked sharply left and right, obviously searching for the rest of my gang. Then she stared at me again, and frowned. “I know you,” she said.

  “Of course you do.” I tried an amiable grin, noticing that the knife wasn’t actually a knife at all but a long, shiny pair of scissors. Almost as effective a weapon, but making a messier cut. Still, I was relaxing, because I knew I was about to receive one of the few valuable fringe benefits of celebrity—instant recognition and trust.

  “You’re— Wait a minute.” She shook her head. “You’re Packard.”

  “I played Packard,” I corrected her, as I always do. “I myself am Sam Holt.”

  “Ross—Ross wrote for your show.”

  “Oh, I get it,” I said. “You’re . . .” Not Delia, that was the dead one. “Doreen. You’re Doreen.”

  Her mouth twisted. “Mentioned me, did he? Some nice little locker-room gossip?”

  That was irritating. “Last November,” I told her, “Ross said he’d had an argument with the girl he was living with. Her name was Doreen. He came here. He didn’t volunteer any more details about the relationship, and I hope you won’t either.”

  She gave me a doubtful but cynical look. “Have I been put in my place?”

  “I hope so. Will you put the weapon down?”

  She looked at the scissors, as though surprised to see them, then tossed them onto the bed. Then she stared at the clothing lying there, down at herself, and cried, “My God, I’m naked!”

  “I had noticed that.” Now that she was unarmed I felt it safe to move, and where I moved was toward the hall door. “Why don’t I go downstairs,” I said, “and you join me in a minute.”

  “Sure. Sure.” She seemed distracted.

  “Is there anybody else in the house?”

  “No, no. Just me. Just us.”

  “You want coffee?”

  “Sounds good.”

  So I went downstairs and primed Mister Coffee and then went into the living room to look at the place I’d last seen on videotape. I don’t know why I thought there should be some sign, some evidence of what had happened. It had been three months, and of course there was no reminder at all. I went down on one knee, patting the shag rug where Delia’s drink had fallen when the imitation Ross punched her. It had been washed, naturally.

  “Lose a contact lens?’’

  I looked up, and Doreen was coming down the stairs, wearing the blouse and jeans from the bed. She looked fragile but tough-minded, the spunky girl in the sentimental movie about horses, or orphans. “Just patting the rug,’’ I told her, rising. “I think the coffee’s ready.’’

  She frowned at the rug, but tacitly agreed not to make a point of it. We went into the kitchen and I poured the coffee while she got milk from the refrigerator. “Let’s sit on the deck,’’ she said.

  We did. On this side of the house one was almost alone. Tall wooden fences echoing the style of the fence out by the road marched down the property lines on both sides, extending nearly to the sea. The traffic noise of Route 1 was either muffled by distance or absorbed within the constant shuffle and slush of the surf. Ross’s boat, the Go Project, bobbed in the sunlight off shore. The dinghy was pulled up almost to the house and tied by a long rope to one of the deck supports.

  Doreen was like Ross’s women, and at the same time not like them. Physically, she was correct, being quite tall and thin, and she’d demonstrated earlier that she could curl her lip with the best of them. But her hair was brown instead of blond and she was somewhat younger than his usual style, probably under twenty-five. Most of Ross’s women look like producers’ ex-wives or the writers of best-selling sex novels, but this one looked like a UCLA student; possibly the daughter of a Santa Barbara dentist.

  We sat together on the low wide chairs, half-facing each other and half-facing the sea, and I said, “I’m looking for Ross.”

  “I figured that out,” she said. “What do you want him for?”

  “I think he’s in trouble,” I said, “and I think his trouble is making trouble for me.”

  She almost said something, but then decided not to. I waited, giving her a chance to say it after all, then pushed a little. “Why were you hiding in the closet?”

  She brooded at me. “Are you a good friend of his?”

  “Ross? I think so. Why?”

  She considered her coffee, but didn’t drink any. “I think he’s at his house.”

  “I called and got the service. I went there, and got no answer. ’ ’

  “Something’s going on,” she said.

  “Sure. What?”

  She shook her head. “I don’t know a thing about it, Mr.— Do I call you Packard, or what?”

  “Sam. Why were you hiding in the closet?”

  She thought that over very hard, wanting to talk and yet not wanting to talk. Her manner was that of the hip unaffected urban kid, and it was impossible to guess what was underneath; maybe even more of the same. Finally she shrugged, and in a low voice said, “I thought it might be those guys back.”

  “What guys?”

  She heaved a long sigh, shaking her head, staring out at the sea. “Shit,” she commented. “Ross told me not to say anything to anybody. Shit, I don’t even know anything.”

  “What happened?”

  “What mostly happened,” she said, “Ross threw me out of the house for a while. Not a fight or anything, he just said I should come live here for a couple of weeks, don’t talk to anybody about it, and he’ll give me a call when I should come back.”

  “And then some guys showed up. Who were they?”

  “I don’t know, some kind of foreigners. Arabs or Greeks or something. They talked some other language with each other.”

  I immediately thought of the guys in the two Impalas. “Tell me about them,” I said.

  “They came here night before last. Just walked right in, around ten o’clock. I was watching Channel Five news.”

  “Just walked in like me? They knew where the key was?”

  “No, they came in this way,” she said, gesturing at the ocean. “They had some kind of boat, I saw it when they left.”

  “They came and then they left?”

  “There was more to it than that,” she said, and grimaced at some annoying or painful memory. “They came in—I think they thought the house was going to be empty. They were mad that I was here, they argued about it a lot with each other. I yelled at them to get out, I’d call the cops, all the normal stuff, so they slapped me around a little bit and I shut up.”

  “Uh-huh,” I said. What she was telling me here with this laconic narration was that until the three guys had come in from the sea, she had always thought she was as tough as her pose, or thought it wasn’t actually a pose but the real Doreen. The three invaders had taken away her belief in her own unflinchable hipness, but hadn’t given her any new mode to replace it. So now she was doing a Hemingway, being stronger in the broken places, except she was trying to do it before the broken places healed. My function then was to pretend she was successful.

  She went on, not meeting my eyes directly, in the same flip unemotional style. “They asked a lot of questions, who was I, what was I doing here, when did I last see Ross, all of that, and then two of them stayed down in the living room with me while the third one went upstairs. I heard him on the phone up there.’’

  “Calling Ross,’’ I suggested.

  “That’s right. Because after a while he hollered down I should get on the extension. I did, and it was Ross.’’ “How did he sound?’’

  “Very scared and very happy. You’re his friend, right? You know how he gets when he doesn’t know what’s gonna happen next.’’

  “Tap-dancing on the tightrope.’�
�

  “That’s right.’’ She grinned a little. “I like that image. I can see him; that’s perfect for Ross. Tapdancing on the tightrope.’’

  “What did he say to you?’’

  “He said the guys were all right, they were just looking for some stuff he needed, they were helping him in the research on some project.’’

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Sure uh-huh. If those guys were research assistants, Colonel Qadhafi’s a band leader.’’

  “What else did Ross say?”

  “Stay stay stay. Keep my mouth shut. Only a few days more. Lova ya, honey, keep a tight asshole.” She grimaced. “That was good advice anyway.”

  “Oh, yeah?”

  She looked at me. “What do you think? Wherever those guys come from, there’s two kinds of women, and the good kind stay under lock and key with their whole bodies wrapped in black cloth, maybe even their faces. I’m some Jewish-American tramp in shorts, not married, not a virgin, living with a guy old enough to play golf with my father. Are they going to pass this up? A chance to make a brief male statement about bad girls?”

  “Okay,” I said.

  “After they finished searching the house, they ran me through a little basic repertoire, nothing kinky, and the only question is, at the end of it are they gonna let me live?”

  “I can see how that would be on your mind.”

  She picked up her coffee cup, noticed that her hand was shaking, and put it down again. Watching herself do so, she said, “I kept thinking, if I show some response, do they kill me because I’m a whore, or if I show no response, do they kill me because I didn’t give them a good time? I figured I’d rather go out a bitch than a whore, so what they got was already dead. And then they left.”

  “What time was this?”

  “A little before one.”

  “Then what happened?”

  “Nothing.” She frowned at me. “You think I should have called the cops?”

  “Not necessarily.”

  “Not necessarily,” she echoed, shaking her head. “The guys were gone, right, they were finished. They didn’t come for me in the first place. They were mad I was even here, they were just coming to check the place out. Besides which, if I call the cops, do I tell them these guys are friends of my boyfriend, or not?”

  “Okay,” I said. “But how about going someplace else? Until whatever Ross is mixed up with is over.”

  “No,” she said. “I stay here, I’m obedient, after a while it’s over.”

  “You hope.”

  “I hope. Ross phoned me yesterday, in the morning, around ten. All chipper and happy and how-you-doing-honey and it-won’t-be-long-now. Was I okay? Sure, I said.”

  “You didn’t mention the rape.”

  She sighed as though I were an idiot. “No,” she said, “I did not place him in any impossible positions. Okay?”

  “Okay.”

  “He called again this morning,” she said. “Same time, same message.”

  I didn’t want to tell her about the death of Delia West, but I did want her to understand somehow the seriousness and the danger involved here. “Doreen,” I said, “something very bad is going on. Ross has let himself get in over his head, and now part of what’s happening is, he’s told these people not to hurt you if they want him to go on cooperating, and they promised him they wouldn’t hurt you, and that’s why he calls every morning to make sure. But what happens when the game is over, whatever it is?”

  “I don’t know,” she said.

  “Neither do I. But I do know one thing about the crowd Ross is tied up with; they aren’t afraid to kill people.”

  “So what do you suggest?”

  “Go somewhere else,” I told her. “Call Ross in a couple weeks, maybe a month, see how he is.”

  She sighed, shaking her head. “I burned a lot of bridges when I took up with Ross. My parents were not amused. And I’m almost broke. There’re a couple friends I could impose myself on, but then there’s a whole lot of questions, and I’m lousy at making up answers. Besides, right now I think the danger’s over, at least for the next little while.”

  “You have no idea what’s going on,” I told her, “so how can you say when it’s over, or how dangerous it is? You’re just whistling in the dark.”

  “In the dark is where I am, so I might as well whistle.” She grinned at me. “What else is there?”

  “Come with me now, to my house,” I said. “Stay as long as you like.”

  She smiled, but in a wistful, troubled way. “You’re something of a hunk, you know?” she said. “And you seem to be a nice guy, so normally I’d jump at the chance. But just at the moment, the absolute truth is, I don’t feel very much like sex. I was just about to take my maybe eleventh shower when you walked in.”

  “I have a girlfriend already,” I assured her. “In fact, I’m having dinner with her tonight, so you’ll eat with Robinson.” Then I grinned, looking at her. “I wonder what Robinson is going to make of you,” I said.

  13

  She didn’t have that much to pack; it all fit in a zippered canvas bag which I carried out so she could lock doors behind us when we left. I waited in the sunlight out front while she returned the key to its hiding place, and then we walked together to the station wagon.

  He had been hiding on the other side of the car, and just as we got to it, he jumped up into view across the hood and pointed something at us. I didn’t even think; I just threw Doreen’s bag at him and followed it in a long flat dive over the hood that ended in me banging into him around the waist and the two of us toppling over onto the gravel-covered ground.

  “Look out!’’ Doreen shrieked, and I twisted away, looking back and up to see a determined-looking woman— skinny, mid-thirties, large glasses, severe hairstyle— reaching for me. She, too, had been hidden behind the car.

  I rolled again, but it wasn’t me she was reaching for, it was the thing the man had pointed at us. I made a lunge for her, but too late; she grabbed it by the strap and went running, while her male partner sat up and blundered into my way.

  “God damn it,’’ I said. The woman was pegging it up Route 1 like an Olympic entrant. I glared at the man, the two of us sitting on the sharp gravel next to each other like a pair of infants in a sandbox.

  He grinned at me, a bulky balding blond-haired guy in sweater and chinos. “Gotcha,’’ he said.

  “What assholes you people are,’’ I said, disgusted, and got to my feet.

  Doreen had come around the wagon and was staring in bewilderment at both of us. “What was that all about? Is he— Are they part of it?’’

  “No,’’ I said, while laughing boy clambered upright, brushing dust and gravel off his pants. “This is a photographer from the National Enquirer. Right?’’

  “Read all about it,’’ he said cheerfully. “ ’Bye now.’’ And he limped off after the woman, who with his camera was long out of sight.

  Doreen still didn’t get it, and said so. “I don’t get it.’’ “I made a police report this morning,’’ I told her. “The National Enquirer always follows up stuff like that if there’s a famous name involved, just in case it leads to something they can use. They have everybody’s license plate numbers, they follow people, they’re everywhere. Do you have a scrapbook?’’

  “I don’t lead that kind of life,’’ she said. “Why?’’ “In a week or two,’’ I told her, “you’ll have a nice newspaper photograph of the two of us, suitable for framing, coming out of our love nest.’’

  14

  Robinson treated Doreen exactly like a stray cat I might have brought in on a rainy night—distant sympathy not quite covering a fastidious conviction that this creature is probably flea-ridden. In lieu of putting a saucer of milk on the kitchen floor, he took her away to one of the guest rooms, plied her with thick towels, and urged her to take a good long soak in the tub. In the meantime I phoned Bly to tell her I hadn’t forgotten tonight’s dinner and to ask her what the Arabic word wa
s for “lightning.”

  The reason for this strange request was something Doreen had said on the way over. I’d mentioned the poolman’s van having been in the drive when I’d made my failed attempt to find Ross at home, and she said, “The Steno girls? Maybe that's the whole secret; they were in there screwing.”

  “No, no,” I said. “A pool-cleaning service.”

  “Sure. Steno Pools. Don’t you know them?”

  “I don’t think so. Are we talking about the same thing?”

  She nodded, her expression cynical. “It’s one of our very local kinda gimmicks,” she said. “Steno Pools, the all-girl pool-cleaning service. They come around in their hot pants and halters and bend over the pool a lot, and nobody gives a shit if they miss a couple leaves. Ross has used them ever since I’ve known him, but I don’t think he’s ever actually scored with any.”

  “Well, he’s stopped using them now,” I said. “There was some scruffy van there from an outfit called Barq.”

  “Barak?” she asked, surprised.

  So I spelled it, and then she spelled hers, and explained, “That’s Hebrew for ‘lightning.’ My father made me learn Hebrew for three years, just in case I ever wanted to go live on a kibbutz, which tells you how much he knew me. Now every foreign language sounds like Hebrew to me. When those guys broke into the house back there, at first I even thought they were talking Hebrew.”

  “Well, ‘lightning’ would be an unfortunate name for a pool service,” I suggested. “And it wasn’t your Hebrew word anyway. It had that Q at the end.”

  “Like Arabic,” she said. “A lot of Arabic words have Q at the end, and a lot of Arabic words are very similar to Hebrew.” She grinned slyly. “They’re both Semitic languages, you know.”

  “An Arabic pool-cleaning company in Beverly Hills,” I said. “Sounds unlikely.”

  But the more I thought about it, and about the swarthy guys who’d been drop-kicking the Volvo, the more I wondered just how unlikely Barq Pool Service was. At home, after turning Doreen over to Robinson’s flinty care, I looked in the Yellow Pages under Swimming Pool Svce and was not surprised by Barq’s absence. Directory Assistance had never heard of them either.