One of Us Is Wrong

by Samuel Holt

  16

  From my bedroom window I could see Doreen in the pool, doing her laps, a lithe, slender fish the color of sandalwood in an inland topaz sea. Little playful clouds in a washed-out blue sky rolled in front of the sun from time to time, and whenever that golden light left the pool, replaced by gray, Doreen looked to me like a shipwreck victim, swimming hard, pursued by sharks.

  It was a little after eight in the morning. I’d come home from Bly’s just over seven hours ago, to find only the all-night lights on, both Robinson and Doreen retired, no notes or messages from Robinson on my desk, no further events in Ross Ferguson’s problem, whatever it was. My flight to New York wasn’t till one this afternoon, so I should have time for everything I had to do before then. I put on my blue swimsuit, grabbed a towel, and went out to the cool air, emerging from the house just as another cloud overtook the sun. Max and Sugar Ray came over for a brief morning chat, and accompanied me to the pool, where I dove into the wavelets of Doreen’s wake, and the two of us plugged companionably back and forth, grinning occasionally as we passed, neither of us wasting breath on words. The dogs watched us awhile, decided we were boring, and went off around the house in search of adventure.

  Having started earlier, Doreen was finished first, and hoisted herself out to sit at the edge of the pool, breathing hard through her diaphragm and smoothing her hair down with the edge of her hand to get some of the water out. Sunlight alternated with cloud, and I worked my water loom back and forth, counting toward forty. As I did, I wondered how much to tell her about what was going on, and decided she didn’t need to know any more than she already did. She was away from the Malibu house, just in case Ross’s new friends were to decide she was a loose end to be tied up after all, and she was safe as long as she stayed here. Any talk about murders and attempted murders and faked videotapes might just make her nervous and unpredictable.

  Forty. My pool has no shallow end, so I made it forty-one today, climbing back to the end where Doreen still sat, beginning to look cold. She’d taken her feet out of the water and sat cross-legged tailor fashion in a rust-colored bikini, watching me, occasionally rubbing her arms, shivering a bit whenever the sun went away.

  “You should have gone into the house,” I told her, and surged up out of the pool like a walrus, water geysering all around me. “It’s cold out here.”

  “I’m fine.” She grinned, looking very happy this morning, though cold. “It’s great out here. I feel clean, brand new all over again.’’

  “That’s good.’’ Standing, I gave her a hand and she came gracefully to her feet.

  “All the badness is gone,’’ she said. “I’m ready for a fresh start.’’ She was still holding my hand, smiling at me.

  Oh-oh. “I guess you got a good night’s sleep,’’ I said, as bland and oblivious as could be, gently reclaiming my hand. “You were already turned in when I got back from my girlfriend’s house.”

  “You’re right,” she said, “it is a little chilly out here.” And we went off to our respective rooms to shower and dress.

  When PACKARD first hit big, I suddenly found all sorts of attractive women making themselves available, and for several months I said a whole lot of “Yes, ma’am.” I’m afraid I even spoke aloud more than once that fatuous line, “A gentleman never refuses a lady.” Whatever women had been to me before, they had now become an endless flow of birthday presents, to be unwrapped and played with and outgrown.

  For a long while I didn’t notice how I’d changed, but women did, and more and more of them walked away from me, avoided me. Women in business meetings, wives of friends, actresses on the show—they all treated me as an uninteresting piece of driftwood they noted in passing and had no use for. There were still plenty of women eager to climb into bed with me, many of them absolutely beautiful, but somehow they weren’t the best. The interesting women had turned away.

  It was when I met Bly that I finally paid attention to what had happened. I liked her from the beginning, and at first she was open and cheerful with me, but then that disinterest came into her eyes, and when I pursued her, she was polite but nothing more. I even tried to get our story editor to assign her a PACKARD script, though it was absolutely wrong for her; trying to buy her, I suppose. She turned it down, to the story editor’s relief.

  When I started saying no to other women’s invitations, it was as a kind of sympathetic magic: If I turned enough women down, Bly Quinn would come around. Of course, Bly wasn’t watching and couldn’t know about my abstinence and wouldn’t have cared anyway, but nobody ever said magic was logical. In any event, the result of the abstinence was my discovery that all those women hadn’t been going to bed with me at all. It was money or power or fame they wanted to have sex with, and I was merely the instrument; the tool, if you know what I mean. Everybody was using everybody, and the beds were actually empty.

  Well, if I’m going to be in an empty bed anyway, I’d rather not have to make conversation, so I long since gave up the candy-store approach to sex. There are two women in my life now, which is probably too many, but I can’t see how to say good-bye to either, and I have no reason in the world to make it three, not even briefly. Doreen was a good body and a cute face and a rather unformed personality, and it seemed to me our relationship was just about right as it stood. So I would go on playing stupid, and I would bring Bly back into the conversation whenever Doreen got provocative, and soon she’d grow bored with it, without anybody having been embarrassed.

  We had breakfast together in the appropriately named breakfast room, light green and pale yellow, with a view over the ornamental hedges and the lawn toward the back road in. Robinson served us correctly and, for him, pleasantly. He was undoubtedly aware that Doreen and I had not shared a bed, and so was prepared in a conditional way to accept her. (Robinson watches out for Bly’s interests much more than Bly does.)

  Over breakfast I explained about the quick trip I’d be taking to New York; just overnight, arriving back here probably by five tomorrow afternoon. I saw no necessity to explain the reason for it, the details of my lawsuit.

  In any case, she showed no particular curiosity. “I thought I’d watch some TV,” she said. “You got any of your old shows?”

  “Some,” I said, surprised. “But you don’t have to please the host by watching his program.”

  “I’m interested. Okay?”

  “Sure. Robinson will show you where it all is, and how to work it.”

  Outside, I once again had to disappoint Max and Sugar Ray, who came bounding when I opened the garage door in front of the station wagon. “Your job is important too,” I told them. “You watch the house.” They accepted that, though they were dubious.

  As I drove down toward the rear gate, I glanced in the rearview mirror at the house, and suddenly thought of Doreen in there, curled up on the sofa in the den, watching old PACKARDs. I connected it with that sheriff s deputy, Chuck, saying he’d watched the show when he was a kid. That would be true of Doreen, too, of course.

  Was she subtle enough to have done that on purpose, to make me feel old, as revenge for having turned her down?

  Packard never had tricky ones like that to solve.

  17

  I went into the Malibu house as cautiously as yesterday, but this time it was empty. I was a few minutes early, so spent some useless time looking at Ross’s video equipment and studying the murder scene before going up to his office, where I intended to take the call.

  Before leaving yesterday we’d closed the glass door leading from office to deck, so now the room felt stale and stuffy. I slid open the door, went outside, and was looking at the Go Project, thinking how it was only a long-time fiction writer who could have been mouse-trapped in exactly this fashion—and how would they go about throwing their rope around an actor?—when the phone rang. I went back inside, sat at the desk, picked up the phone, and held the receiver to my ear, not speaking.

  There was a little silence, like a comic strip cloud bal
loon with a question mark in it, and then Ross’s voice said, “Doreen? Baby?’’

  “Hello, Ross,” I said. “It’s Sam.”

  “Sam! Oh, my God!”

  “Don’t—” I started, but he did anyway. He hung up. I phoned his house, and quit after ten rings. The son of a bitch was still playing hard to get. I sat at his desk, furious, looking out at his boat, thinking I’d like to go out there with a hatchet and punch a hole in the bottom of the damn thing, when the phone rang.

  “Hello?”

  “Sam, how you doin’? We were cut off, baby! What are you doing there, buddy boy?” He sounded manic, like the world’s worst fake orgasm.

  “Waiting for your call,” I said.

  “Uh.” He ran out of steam very briefly, and I could imagine him at the other end, blinking rapidly, building himself up again. “Is, uh, is Doreen there?”

  “I sent her east. She has school friends back there.”

  “Some pal. Saving her from the dirty old man, huh?”

  “Something like that. Ross, I’ve been wanting to talk to you before I call the police.”

  “Police!” All the crap and flapdoodle went right out of him. “Jesus, Sam, what/or?”

  “Yesterday,” I told him, “four swarthy guys in two cars deliberately tried to cream me on the San Diego Freeway. The cops told me if I could figure out why anybody’d want to do that, I should call them. I figured it out, but I wanted to talk to you before I made the call.”

  “Wait a minute, Sam.” He sounded very serious. “Are you telling me somebody tried to kill you?”

  “My guess is, some of your poolmen.”

  “No no no,” he said, though not as though arguing with me. “We can’t have that. Wait right there; I’ll get back to you.’’

  “Oh, I don’t think so, Ross,’’ I said. “For all I know, those guys are headed this way right now.’’

  “But listen, Sam, I don’t know what went wrong, I don’t know who got— All right, somebody made a mistake, and I’m glad it didn’t— You aren’t, uh, banged up or anything, are you?’’

  “No, I’m not,’’ I told him, “but my Volvo will never play the violin again.’’

  “Look, uh, do you want to go home? I’ll call you there.’’

  “Come see me.’’

  “No, I’ll call you, I’ll phone you, you say where, anyplace you say.’’

  It seemed to me important to get Ross away from his house and whoever he was sheltering in there, so I said, “Not on the phone, Ross. I want to see you and look at you and know you’re all right. I want to be able to see your face when you explain things.’’

  “I’m not sure I—’’ He dithered a minute, then sighed and said, “All right, I’ll work it out, they can’t— Your place?’’

  I didn’t want that, not with Doreen there. I said, “No. You know where Zack Novak’s office is, in Century City?’’

  “Sure.’’

  “I’ll meet you there at eleven.’’

  “This morning? Sam, I might have to—’’

  “I don’t want to give your friends time to set anything up,’’ I told him. “Besides, I have a flight at one this afternoon. I’ll be at Zack’s place at eleven. If you don’t show, I call the cops right then.”

  He sighed. “There’s no reason for this goddamn thing to get out of hand,” he said, more to himself than to me. “No reason to kill people.”

  I could have mentioned Delia West, but there didn’t seem to be any point. “See you at eleven,” I said.

  18

  “This is Danny Silvermine,” Zack said.

  Of course it was. Five foot eight, round and soft of body, dressed with expensive informality in shades of tan, ingratiating smile trying to distract attention from android eyes, Danny Silvermine stuck out a ring-laden hand and said, “You been outta work too long, Sam. I hope we can make a team here.”

  “Uh-huh,” I said. This was the result of my having phoned Zack from Malibu to ask for the loan of one of his conference rooms. Clearly, he’d immediately called this guy to come right over, and I wouldn’t be astonished if it soon emerged that Danny Silvermine was also a client of the agency.

  The corridor fluorescents gleamed off Zack’s bald head but were absorbed in his impeccable dark blue tailoring. A tall cadaverous man who combined courtly manners with a full range of agent jargon, he liked to present to this California world a kind of smoothed-down Savile Row facade. Now, he said, “I know you have to chat with this other fellow first, but Danny’s right here in the office, we could take a meeting when you’re done, Danny could open out his thinking on this.”

  “Or lunch,” Danny said, and grinned as though he knew we shared already a lot of jokes and attitudes. “Not to be pushy,” he said. That was the joke, and the attitude.

  Having a guy tell me, ten seconds after we’ve met, that he doesn’t intend to be pushy, makes me want to go away somewhere and think about something else. “I’m flying out this afternoon,” I said. “One o’clock, out of LAX.”

  Danny looked downhearted at that news, but Zack smiled and said, “Perfect. We can ride out together, talk it over in the limo.”

  “I have my car.”

  “Leave it,” Zack said. “When are you coming back?”

  “Tomorrow.”

  “I’ll have you picked up. You know, Sam, the sooner we discuss this concept, the better.”

  “But it’s at your convenience, Sam,” Danny said, waving his rings to show he wasn’t being pushy. “I am the handmaiden here.”

  Essentially, Zack was right, of course; the sooner we got into the discussion of Danny Silvermine’s concept, the sooner I wouldn’t have to think about it anymore. “Okay,” I said. “Just get me there by twelve-thirty.”

  “Absolutely,” Zack said, and Danny said, “I really appreciate this, Sam.”

  “See you in half an hour or so,” I said.

  Zack said, “Sam, this other matter, you want me to sit in?”

  “It’s not work,’’ I told him.

  “I sure hope not,’’ Danny said, smiling all the way back to his ears, fidgeting with his rings. “I don’t want to lose ya before I getcha.’’

  I said to Zack, “It’s a personal thing, that’s all, we need neutral turf. You know the guy, he’s another client. Ross Ferguson.’’

  “Ex-client,” Zack said, but without bitterness. In this business people change agencies too often for anybody to get scars.

  “I didn’t know that.”

  Zack shrugged and grinned, above the fray. “It is in Ross’s nature to get divorced.”

  All of a sudden Danny was a small round creature with antennae. “A writer?” he asked, looking extremely casual and extremely alert.

  I decided to be mean. “A hyphenate,” I explained. “A writer-producer.” Let Danny think there might be competition.

  Danny smiled and smiled, having nothing to say. Zack told me, “We’ll be in my office when you’re done. Cindy tell you where you are?”

  Cindy was the receptionist. I said, “Yes, in the little yellow room at the end of the corridor.”

  Zack shook his head with a sad but forgiving smile. “We like to think of it as gold,” he said.

  On that note we went our separate ways, the smiling Danny following Zack back to his office, me heading down the corridor toward the little yellow/gold room. All around me hummed the morning activity of CNA. If clients like Ross Ferguson tend to change agents a lot, the agencies themselves are usually also in a state of flux, though CNA had been in its present configuration for almost eight years. Back when I’d first signed with Zack, he was part of a much smaller outfit called Novak-McCarthy, but shortly after I got the PACKARD job that agency merged with two others, Career Representatives Associates (CRA, then, with a home office in London) and Allied Management, to form Career-Novak-Allied. All over town people changed CRA to CNA on their Rolodexes.

  Over these last years McCarthy and a couple of the Allied people have splintered
off to form their own management group, CNA bought out its London parent’s interest, and another small agency called Tar-Gray was absorbed, but the essential CNA agency has remained more or less intact. They represent writers, actors, directors, producers, and a few composers; they put together talent packages for films and TV programs when they can; and on that inevitable day when a publicity-hungry Congressional committee starts to investigate the antitrust implications of the packager-agencies, I’m afraid CNA is going to be among the first under the microscope. I do smile sometimes at the mental picture of Zack Novak taking a meeting with a panel of unamused Congressmen on television, explaining to them that even though CNA gets a packaging fee only if it loads a project with its own clients, nevertheless there are no unfair trade practices involved. I’ve never mentioned the fancy to Zack; he wouldn’t smile.

  The room was yellow, dammit, gold has more brown in it than that. The other color in the room, in the carpet and upholstery, was rust. The conference table was wood-grain Formica, but I think the chairs were actual wood, at least in part. Posters of forgotten movies and TV shows graced the windowless walls, though not yet PACKARD; that poster was still out in the corridor among the shows that might still be remembered.

  A yellow phone—not gold—was the only thing on the table, down at the far end. Leaving the hall door open, I took the seat at that end of the table, in front of the phone and facing the doorway. Removing from my shirt pocket the slip of paper on which Deputy Ken’s phone number was written, I was smoothing it on the table when Ross himself appeared in the doorway, sunglasses on top of head, blinking, smiling on and off like a neon sign, and saying, “Don’t tell me I’m late.’’

  I looked at my watch: “Two minutes early.’’

  “And under budget. I always make deadlines.’’ Ross came in and shut the door behind himself. He was very nervous, covering it with panic. Glancing at the phone, and the piece of paper under my left hand, he said, “You really want to bring in the law, huh?’’