One of Us Is Wrong

by Samuel Holt

  So maybe the person to be kidnapped was from Dharak, but the kidnappers were from a different, wilder place, fundamentalists planning to put a moderate on trial in a public way. Judging by that strange phone call just now from Ross, Tabari wasn’t an ally of those people after all; it seemed as though it worried them that I’d been talking with the man. So maybe he was on the good guys’ side, if there was a good guys’ side. Or maybe I didn’t know enough of the story to figure out good guys from bad. Can’t tell the players without a program.

  All I accomplished, finally, in the five-hour flight, was to muddle my brain entirely, so that I was glad when it was over and I walked out to three p.m. California sunlight, the topcoat from Anita’s place over my arm, the attache case in my other hand. At the end of the ramp down which the passengers were shunted were several chauffeurs and messengers holding up pieces of paper or cardboard with handwritten names; among them stood a tall, light-toned young black man in tan suit and yellow shirt and brownish figured tie, showing a piece of letterhead stationery with the word Holt written on it. I went over to him, saw that the letterhead was from CNA, and said, “I’m Sam Holt.”

  “Yes, sir,” he said, grinning, happy with life. “I recognized you. I’m Toby Packer from the agency, I have your car. ’ ’

  “Fine.”

  It was my station wagon, which I’d left at CNA yesterday when I took the limo instead with Zack and Danny Silvermine. Toby Packer led me to where he’d parked it in the loading zone outside. Rank does have its privileges. I said, “Can I give you a lift back to the office?”

  “Not if it’s out of your way, sir.”

  It was, but what the hell. “Get in,” I said.

  On the drive to Century City, Toby Packer cheerfully told me about himself. He was a recent UCLA graduate— film school, I guessed, though he didn’t say so exactly— working as an assistant agent with CNA, but clearly with larger plans for the future. A very smooth kid, he worked me with assurance and aplomb because, as we both knew, the day might come when he would be in a position to hire me or represent me or negotiate with me. At this early stage of his career, the best thing he could do with every meeting was try to leave a good impression.

  I dropped him off at the agency, then headed home, deciding to go in the front way this time, just to see who, if anybody, was hanging around. Joggers thumped along the verges of Sunset Boulevard, most of them emerging from the lunar city of UCLA off to the right. Do joggers realize that what they are doing is acting out both escape and, through their treadmill style, the impossibility of escape?

  Leaving them, I made the left turn through the servants’ entrance arch into Bel Air, slowly traveled the various Bellagios, and turned into San Miguel without seeing anything suspicious at all. No one seated in a parked car, no pool-company truck—or any other commercial vehicle—stationed with a good view of my house or street, nobody walking their dog back and forth over the same route. Not even any joggers.

  At the end of San Miguel stood my rough stone wall and chain link gate, which opened to my buzzed command. Sugar Ray and Max came bounding downslope to greet me, and I stopped to let them into the car. They enjoy climbing back and forth over the seats, wagging their tails, bumping into each other and into me. I let them do it on the property, but they know they have to settle down once we’re on a public street. With them gamboling and frisking, I drove on up to the house, put the station wagon away, reaffirmed to the dogs our good relationship, and went into the kitchen, where I found a very worried-looking Robinson. “I don’t know if I did right,” he said.

  I looked around, but I already knew from his expression that it didn’t have anything to do with this kitchen, that it was something more serious than a problem with lunch; one too many quiches, or whatever. It wouldn’t be that. “Tell me about it,” I said.

  “Miss Doreen seemed to think there was nothing wrong,” he said.

  “Doreen?” I lifted my head, as though to hear her somewhere deeper in the house. “Where is she?”

  “Well, that’s the problem. She’s gone.”

  32

  It seemed Ross hadn’t been deceived after all by my saying I’d sent Doreen east. She’d received a phone call around ten this morning, which would be just after Ross had talked to me at JFK. Then she told Robinson she’d be leaving soon, someone would come around to pick her up. They arrived half an hour later, a pair of tough guys so thuggish that Robinson began to have his doubts, but by that time it was too late. They were on the property, Doreen was packed, and she was willing to leave with them. From Robinson’s description, they were more of the crowd from Barq Pool Service, though they’d arrived in an ordinary automobile. “It was brown or green or something like that,” he said, getting a little pettish. “Does it make any difference?”

  “None,” I told him. “You didn’t have any choice, so don’t worry about it.”

  “I didn’t have any choice, and I do worry about it.”

  So did I. In the first place, I didn’t like it that any of those people had been on the property, and in the second place, I was pretty sure Doreen had made a mistake going back to Ross, which was where I assumed she’d gone.

  So I phoned him, and got his service, and left a message: “Tell him it’s Sam Holt, and he has fifteen minutes to call me back before I make my other phone call.’’

  The fellow at the service was dubious: “I’m not sure I’ll hear from him that soon, Mr. Holt.’’

  “Well, that’s his problem, isn’t it?’’

  It was barely five minutes later that he called back, sounding worried and innocent. “Sam? I thought we had everything worked out.’’

  “Doreen,’’ I said.

  “Hey, buddy, what do you want with her! Aren’t you and Bly still pals?’’

  “The last time your pals saw Doreen they gang-raped her.’’

  A little shocked silence; then, “No, come on. Sam? Where’d you get that idea?’’

  “From her. She said she didn’t tell you because she didn’t want to put you in any impossible situations.’’ “Sam, buddy, I could wish you had the same attitude. I mean, maybe, talking to you, she was dramatizing for effect, you know what I mean?”

  “Are you saying she lied to me, Ross?”

  He sighed, long-suffering. “Sam, listen. Whatever happened in the past—and if that’s true, what you said, I feel rotten about it, I really do—but whatever happened in the past, it’s the past, it’s over and done with; there won’t be anything, anything else.”

  “Why do you need Doreen there?”

  “I told the troops that was gonna upset you, I told them.”

  “Why do you need her, right in the middle of the trouble?”

  “Because she’s a loose end, Sam,” he said, exasperated. “Because you took her away, and the guys here know it, and that means maybe she knows as much as you do, without promising to keep her mouth shut. So the best thing is, she comes and shares my bed and board again for a while,”

  “Let me talk to her,” I said.

  “Christ on a crutch, Sam, you’re making me sorry I ever asked your help in the first place!”

  “Ross, let me talk to Doreen.”

  “You don’t have to, dammit. What are you gonna do, try and talk her into leaving? Ask her if she’s got enough towels? She came here of her own free will, Sam, you’ve got to know that. Ask your man Robinson.”

  “Let me talk to Doreen.”

  “Next week. After this is all over, we’ll all have a nice celebration dinner, the four of us, you and Bly and Doreen and me. You want Chasen’s, or you want Ma Maison?”

  “I want to talk to Doreen.”

  “Sam, I won’t let you upset her. Just forget the whole thing,” he said, and hung up.

  The bastard. The stupid, arrogant, self-centered bastard. Why did Doreen go back to him? Was it because I turned her down yesterday morning? Maybe she was embarrassed, or irritated, or just simply bored. The PACKARD tapes must have been fairly cold
comfort.

  Now, wait a minute. / wasn’t the heavy here, the villain making all the trouble. That was Ross, who should have known better than to draw the girl right back into the very middle of all the trouble.

  Answers to questions never seem to come to me when I concentrate on them and rack my brains. Now, thinking about Doreen, not thinking about New York at all, I suddenly saw why those people had broken into my house and what it meant about which side Tabari was on.

  Tabari’s presence troubled them; therefore he was on the other side. It troubled them enough to have them make Ross phone me even before I got on the plane, to find out what was going on. They’d been listening in, obviously, and what would have happened if they hadn’t liked my answers? Would the plane have blown up? I wouldn’t put it past them.

  But that would have been their second effort to find out what was going on. You could trust these people, every time, to shoot first and ask questions later. Their first idea had been to break into my house while I was asleep and ask me, as the British say, with menaces. Only when that hadn’t worked had they gone for the gentler route.

  They liked to be activists, these people.

  I prowled my house, restless, my mind a jumble of Tabari and Doreen and Ross and the people from Barq and some unknown person who was to be kidnapped and put on trial somewhere in the Middle East.

  Was Tabari the person to be tried?

  Entering my bedroom, I stood by the window and looked out at the pool, gleaming in sunlight. A brief cloud went over, and then there was sunlight again.

  Doreen, swimming back and forth in that water out there, a lithe fish in the sunlight, fleeing from sharks when the clouds came by.

  I sat on the edge of the bed. With one hand I reached for the phone, while the other hand opened the bedside table drawer and pulled out that folded piece of paper.

  Ken Donaldson’s phone number.

  33

  Ken took notes while Chuck simply watched my mouth as I talked. It was four-thirty in the afternoon, and we sat out on the lawn in the sporadic sunshine, the house spread whitely on one side and the land dropping away toward Thurston Circle on the other. Max and Sugar Ray, having been assured by me and by their own sense of smell that the deputies were all right, lay on the grass beside us, listening, hoping for something nice to happen. Neither Ken nor Chuck interrupted me, and when I was finished, Ken said, “I must admit, Mr. Holt, I have trouble figuring out how your mind works.” I didn’t like that retreat from California first-name-itis. I said, “What do you mean?”

  “You’re saying you lied to us. You’re saying you lied to the New York police. You’re saying you covered up a murder. Two days ago, when all you wanted to report was an attempt on your life, you insisted on having your attorney present. Today, when you want to confess to three felonies, maybe more, you’re willing to talk to us alone.”

  “When this all started,” I said, “I wasn’t sure you’d take me seriously.”

  “If you’d told us all this, we would have.”

  “I didn’t make the connection, not right away. Ross showed me that tape over three months ago.”

  Chuck said, “Sir, do you believe there was an actual murder on the tape?”

  “Not exactly,” I said. “I think the scene was faked, but the girl at the end was very dead.”

  Chuck nodded. “And you believe the man on the tape who looked like your friend wasn’t your friend.”

  “That’s right. I’m pretty sure now he was this actor who just died, Beau Sheridan.”

  Ken said, “Is there a phone I could use?”

  “In private?”

  He smiled thinly. “If I needed privacy,” he said, “I’d go to the car and call in. In fact, I’d prefer you present.”

  “Sure,” I said, and raised my voice: “Robinson!” When he appeared in the back doorway I called, “Could we have the phone, please?” He nodded, and went away.

  While we waited, Chuck said to Ken, “I’m trying to think who’s coming to town next week.” To me he said, “He told you it was next week, right?”

  “He said everything would be over just about a week from now.”

  “Tuesday or Wednesday, next week.” Chuck frowned at his partner again. “Anybody special you can think of?”

  Ken shook his head. “This town is always full of big names. That doesn’t narrow it.’’

  “Middle East,’’ Chuck said. “Arabs or something, from Sam’s description. Maybe they’re after Omar Sharif.” I was pleased to hear my first name being used again.

  Robinson was coming across the lawn with the cordless phone, an item he held in his fingertips to express the disdain he felt for all innovations since about 1952. (Except Cuisinart; that he likes.) Putting the phone in the center of the table, he said, “Will there be anything else?”

  “San Pellegrino,” I told him. “You gentlemen want Tab?”

  “Sure,” said Chuck. “Thanks.”

  “I’ll try that water of yours,” Ken said. An adventurous sort.

  “Certainly,” Robinson said, and went away as Ken picked up the phone and dialed.

  Chuck said, “Sam, tell me about your pal’s house. Who’s his next-door neighbor?”

  “I don’t really know. He’s up in the hills in Beverly Hills, a big house, big houses on both sides, some rough ground out back. Hilly, upslope. I don’t know how much of it is his, or whose land is next to him up there.” I gestured in the direction of Thurston Circle, saying, “Like here. I own a kind of triangle of land down that way, and I couldn’t tell you exactly who my neighbors are. You see that Russian olive?”

  “That tree down there on the left?”

  “That’s a couple feet the other side of my boundary line. I have no idea who owns it, maybe that gray house down there, or maybe somebody back up this way on Bellagio.”

  Meantime, Ken was on the phone, talking quietly, and now he said, “Hold on,” and turned to me, saying, “Delia West. Was she married or single?”

  “Divorced, I think,” I said. “She used to be married to a stuntman.”

  “Was West her married name?”

  “Yeah. He was Eddie.”

  “Was?”

  “No, not like that,” I said. Robinson was coming out with our liquids, on a tray, in two bottles and a can, with three ice-cube-filled glasses. “So far as I know he’s still alive. I just meant I haven’t seen him since the show went off the air.”

  “All right. Was it Edward? Edwin?”

  “Sorry, I don’t know. His guild could tell you.”

  “Thanks,” he said, and went back to his conversation on the phone as Robinson arrived and poured for us all. He didn’t mind Chuck drinking Tab so long as no food of his own preparation was involved.

  “I guess it’s like the hostages,” Chuck said, watching Robinson pour.

  I frowned at him. “What is?”

  “The Americans in Iran, that whole bunch held hostage. They got out, they came back, they wrote a lot of books about it. Probably that’s what your pal is thinking. All he has to do is make it through the rough part, then write a book.”

  Robinson went away again with the tray. I said, “That’s why I almost didn’t call you guys, I didn’t want to queer Ross’s pitch.”

  Chuck nodded. “A lot of people think that,” he said. “They’ve got a friend, gonna sail his homemade balloon across the Pacific, gonna make just one million-dollar deal with the Colombian drug importers, gonna spray-paint their name on the inside of the polar bear cage. Their friends know they shouldn’t do it, but friendship says you gotta leave the guy alone. Ken and me, we’re the ones scrape them off the pavement.”

  I suddenly remembered a few parallel incidents from years ago, back when I was on the force in Mineola. “What a waste,” we’d say to each other while the body bag was carried out. “And his pals knew about it. Why didn’t they stop him? Why didn’t they call us ahead of time?” I was wincingly aware of what Chuck was trying to tell me, and I had abs
olutely nothing to say.

  Ken hung up. He said, “There is no missing persons on anybody called Delia West. The deaths of Beau Sheridan and Michael Olsztyn are considered a straightforward one-car vehicular accident.”

  “What would they have called my death, yesterday?” I asked him.

  He grimaced. “Yes, of course,” he said. “That part of the Ventura Freeway where they bought it is raised about fifteen feet above the surrounding area. They were in a Honda Accord belonging to Sheridan. Some bigger heavier vehicle could have just sideswiped them off the highway and through the chain link fence.”

  “And by the time they land— They crashed through a store roof, didn’t they?”

  “A Seven-Eleven.”

  “So by then,” I said, “the car’s so mangled, there’s nothing to show what happened to it up on the highway.”

  Ken drank some of the San Pellegrino. “Very pleasant,” he said.

  “Refreshing.”

  “Yes.” He was distracted. Putting the half-full glass on the table, he said, “It’s time to go see Ross Ferguson. You’ll come along, won’t you?”

  34

  They let me lead the way in my own car, for which I was grateful. I’m always uncomfortable in the backseat of a patrol car, where I was a few times when PACKARD did location shooting. Maybe it’s the drop in status, I don’t know. The people in the front seat of a patrol car own it, they are native to that world, they have assurance and authority, whereas the people in the backseat are civilians, they’re witnesses or victims or whatever, who don’t really belong. Having at one time been one of the people in front, I just don’t like being the guy in back.

  I was in the station wagon again, and this time I’d brought the dogs along, which made them very very happy. Max, ladylike, sat smiling on the front seat, looking at me sometimes and otherwise studying the world beyond the windshield, while Sugar Ray stood in the cargo area staring out the rear window to be sure the deputies didn’t get lost. Once we left Sunset Boulevard and started curving up through the twisty streets of Beverly Hills, Sugar Ray could no longer keep his balance and had to drop onto his stomach, but he still kept an eye on the police car behind us.