One of Us Is Wrong Read online

  So I heard him giving revised instructions to his chauffeur, and when he came back to me, I told him the story twice, and when he’d assembled the parts he’d heard from each telling, he said, “Holy shit!”

  “That’s what I said. Precisely what I said.”

  “Who are these people?”

  “I don’t know. Not fans.”

  “You’d better call the authorities.”

  “Yes, Oscar, thank you for your legal advice, that’s why I want you here for the interview. See you in a few minutes.”

  Call the authorities. That turned out to be easier said than done, since there seem to be several hundred police forces in the Greater Los Angeles area, each of which has its own narrow area of responsibility. Since my attack had come on the southern slope of the San Diego Freeway where it crossed into the Valley, the general consensus was that the Los Angeles Sheriff’s office was what I wanted, and a female with a southwestern twang at that number assured me deputies would be right out to talk to me about my experience.

  Then I called Zack, who said, “What happened to you?”

  For just a second I wondered how he’d already heard about it, but then I realized he simply meant that he’d carefully filed me away under hold, and when he’d returned I was gone. “Don’t ask,’’ I said. “You were talking about work.’’

  “There’s a fellow,’’ he said, “Danny Silvermine, he’s got a pretty good track record, he’s put together some nice packages in his time, never a major leaguer, you understand, but—’’

  “What does he want me to do?’’

  “Dinner theater.” Zack, when prodded, was capable of cutting to the essence.

  “Where?”

  “A tour. Open in Miami, on to Houston, Chicago, possibly the Westbury Music Fair on Long Island, that’s your old stamping grounds, isn’t it? Possibly finish here in L.A.”

  “Why, Zack? What’s in it for me?”

  “Work,” he said. “Exposure. Keeps your name and face before the people. Good reviews, other people see it, say, ‘Maybe Sam Holt is good for this part, that part.’ ”

  “In other words, the money stinks.”

  “In spades. My commission won’t keep me in Turns.”

  But, as Zack had said, it was work, exposure, the infinite possible. I sighed and said, “What’s the play, Zack?”

  “Well, that’s the genius of it,” he said. “Danny Silvermine’s genius.”

  Oh, God; stunt casting. He wants me to do Uncle Vanya, or Hotspur, or Willy Loman. I said, “All right, Zack, I’m braced. Lay it on me.”

  But I wasn’t braced. This idea had never occurred to me. “Packard,” he said.

  I frowned, and the red light on the phone blinked.

  “Hold it,’’ I said, and switched to in-house, and Robinson’s voice said in my ear, “Two gentlemen are at the gate, claiming to be police officers.’’

  “That’s fine, yes, let them in.’’ I switched over to Zack and said, “What?/”

  “I wish you wouldn’t put me on hold, Sam.’’ “Somebody wants me to do a play about Packard?”

  “Dinner theater,’’ he said. “Danny Silvermine, it’s his notion, we—’’

  “This is work? This is exposure? Zack, this is the last nail in my coffin! Packard is the reason I can’t get any other part; if I go on the goddamn road with—’’

  “A new field, Sam. The theater. You show you’re a real actor.’’

  “Playing Packard; there’s a stretch. Who’s writing this masterpiece?’’

  “Well, uh . . . you did.’’

  I didn’t get that one the first time it went by. “Say that again?’’

  “Two of the episodes you wrote for the show,’’ Zack explained. “That way, there’s no problems about rights, credits, residuals, all that.’’

  “Zack, wait a minute. Are you actually telling me you want me to go into a large room in Miami, Florida, where people are eating dinner, and reenact one of my old television shows?’’

  “Two. We call it An Evening with Jack Packard.”

  “Those are TV scripts, Zack, they can’t—’’

  “Very easily adaptable,’’ he insisted. “The one on the yacht, remember that one?’’

  “It wasn’t very good,’’ I remembered.

  “The nice thing about your modesty, Sam,” he said, “is that it’s so unforced.”

  “It still wasn’t very good.”

  Outside my window a tan car with stars on its doors and a red and white Tootsie Roll on its roof came up and stopped. Two tan-uniformed Smokey the Bears got out and looked at the house through their sunglasses. “I’ll have to get back to you, Zack,” I said, and hung up as the Smokeys ambled toward the front door.

  Nearly noon. Do sheriff’s deputies eat quiche?

  4

  Yes.

  Oscar arrived some time after the deputies. I’d already told my story once, and Ken and Chuck and I were out looking at the battered Volvo. Oscar, having bustled over from his Daimler, was just demanding I go back to the beginning and tell the tale all over again when Robinson came out squinting into the sunlight and in his most exasperated manner said, “How many for luncheon?”

  “Four,” I said. “We’ll eat out by the pool.”

  “Very well.” He raised an eyebrow at the ex-Volvo. “Good God,” he said, and returned to the house.

  Ken grinned behind his sunglasses at the idea of having lunch with a TV star out by the pool, but Chuck frowned after the retreating Robinson, saying, “I’ve seen that fellow before.”

  “Not on a wanted poster,” I assured him. “That’s William Robinson, he—”

  “He’s an actor!”

  “That’s right, he used—”

  Chuck snapped his fingers, delighted at his own powers of observation. “I’ve seen him in the old movies on TV. He played snooty butlers and valets all the time.”

  “He still does,” I said, which was a sort of a joke, except that nobody got it. The fact is, Robinson, who is now seventy-three, hasn’t had an acting job in fourteen years. As that career wound down, he filled in the at-liberty spaces between roles by actually working as a butler or valet for various of the stars he’d met in films over the years. I didn’t know him then—he was passed on to me six years ago and has been here, disapproving of me, ever since—but apparently for at least a decade he migrated between those two lives, being a butler for a while, then acting like a butler, back and forth. He’s still performing, of course, still doing the lovable curmudgeon, the cranky old Arthur Treacher bit, and I doubt by now he himself knows if his English accent is real or fake.

  But all actors get to live twice these days, the second time on the Late Late Show, where Chuck had apparently been seeing him. Grinning, shaking his head, Chuck said, “Only in L.A., huh? You want a butler, you get an actor that specializes in the part.”

  “I guess so,” I said. “Shall we go around back? Robinson gets testy when I keep him waiting.”

  So we went around back. Ken and Chuck, being on duty, said no to white wine, while I said yes. I would also have a small bottle of San Pellegrino mineral water, a lunchtime habit I learned from my friend Anita Imperato back in New York. Oscar felt he could choke down a vodka martini. Ken and Chuck asked for Tab, and Robinson gave them a look of searing hate. Tab, with his quiche!

  All of that out of the way and the four of us seated around the glass table on the shady side of the pool, Ken grinned at me and said, “Probably you think I’m dumb, but you know the one thing I wonder about in what’s happened here?”

  “What’s that?”

  “Why you wanted your attorney present,” Ken said, and passed his boyish grin on to Oscar as well.

  Oscar is a bald man on top with a wiry thick fringe of astonished gray hair around the sides, sticking way out beyond his ears. He’s in his mid-forties, and is essentially sort of baby-faced, but that bald head and halo of gray shrubbery make him seem as though he must be ancient, so the final effect i
s of an old baby. And one thing he’s good at, as an old baby, is pouting. He pouted now, in friendly Ken’s direction, saying, “Is there any reason, Deputy Donaldson, why Mr. Holt should not have his attorney present?”

  “Wait a minute, Oscar,” I said.

  “It’s a little unusual, that’s all,” Ken explained.

  “That’s right,” I agreed, and leaned forward to tell them my story. But then I leaned back again while Robinson put down our drinks. Clack, clack, went the glasses of Tab in front of the deputies, and he announced, “Luncheon will be served immediately.” Then he left.

  I leaned forward again. “I don’t know if you guys know this,” I said, “but I was a police officer myself for a year and a half, back on Long Island.”

  They looked politely interested.

  “If I remember the way the cop’s mind works,” I said, “it goes like this. This fella Holt says somebody tried to kill him. He says he doesn’t know who they were or why they were doing it, but it was four of them in two cars, very well organized, almost professional. Now, if I was still taking the county’s dollar, the first thing I would say to myself is, ‘Maybe there’s cocaine in this story. There’s a lot of cocaine in these hills, a lot of cocaine stories being told around this neighborhood; this looks like a falling out among druggies.’ That’s what / would have said to myself. ’ ’

  They both smiled. I waited, but they didn’t feel like making any comments at that moment, so I went on.

  “I’m drug-free. I always have been, always will be. I’m a bit of a fitness freak, I guess, and there’s things I wouldn’t want to do to my body. So this is not a cocaine story, and if it is, they got the wrong guy.”

  Ken said mildly, “That’s a very distinctive red car you’ve got there.”

  “That’s right. And they hit on me very shortly after I got out on the freeway, which isn’t that far from home. I figure they were staked out around the corner on Bellagio, and followed me.”

  Chuck said, “So you don’t claim it was mistaken identity.”

  “I don’t claim anything. Except that four guys put a lot of thought and effort into killing me, and the reason I asked my attorney to be present here is that I’d appreciate it if you put the same amount of thought and energy into finding out who they are instead of what possible thing / might have done to trigger it, because I haven’t done anything.”

  “Sure you have,’’ Ken said.

  “What?’’

  “I won’t know until you tell me.’’

  Robinson interrupted at that point with quiche and cobb salad and cucumber slices in vinegar and water. I asked for another spritzer and Oscar felt he might do justice to another vodka-mar. Ken’s and Chuck’s Tabs were just fine. I said, “Robinson, is Mr. Cooperman’s chauffeur being taken care of?’’

  “He is in the kitchen,’’ Robinson said absolutely deadpan, “showing me how to make something called a Sloppy Joe.’’ With a slight tilt of the head Robinson took himself off.

  We ate a bit, and then Ken said, “Sam, I don’t think we ought to start off on the wrong foot with each other. You figured we’d come up here and just see some crazy movie star—’’

  “TV star.”

  “It’s all the same from my point of view.”

  “Okay. Sorry.”

  “You figured,” he said, “we’d jump right to drugs as being what it’s all about, and you’re pretty sure it isn’t drugs, so you wanted your attorney present to impress us a little.”

  “Without getting your back up,” I said.

  “That’s what I’m working on,” Ken told me, “not getting my back up. This is a very nice lunch.”

  “It sure is,” Chuck added.

  Oscar said, “I think Sam just wanted to be sure you fellas remembered he was the victim and not one of the perpetrators.”

  “Still and all,” Ken said, putting down his fork and taking off his sunglasses at last and giving me a level stare from intelligent blue eyes, “as you pointed out, Sam, those people put a lot of time and effort and organization into that attempt. Now, when I went out to the car and called in just before Mr. Cooperman arrived, I learned a couple things.”

  I looked alert. Ken said, “That gold car you say you hit, or made it hit you, whatever it was. It did crash into the divider, and the two men in it were seen to run away. The vehicle is a Hertz rental, picked up late yesterday afternoon at LAX. The belief now is it was paid for with a stolen credit card.”

  “Very elaborate,” I said.

  “It was you they were after, and they were serious about it. You don’t attract that much high-intensity input, Sam, you really don’t, without having done something to catch somebody’s eye.”

  “I don’t know what it is,” I told him. “That’s the truth.”

  “I believe you. But if I were you, I’d think real hard on the subject. People who work with that kind of devotion at killing somebody maybe won’t be discouraged just because they missed once. They might believe in that old saying.”

  “If at first . . .”

  Ken nodded. “That’s the one,” he said.

  5

  I spent the rest of that odd lunch—just me and my West Coast lawyer and a couple of deputies—trying to think what I had done or said or seen anywhere in the world in the last few months that could have caused that big a reaction. Nothing came.

  Of course, stupid though it may sound, I was also distracted by Zack’s suggestion that I go do a couple of Packard shows on the dinner theater circuit. The idea was too ridiculous to think about, of course, but nevertheless I did think about it, and what I mostly thought was:

  Which was the second script?

  Okay, the one on the yacht, that could be cut down to one fairly simple set involving the wheelhouse and the lounge and the afterdeck, I could see exactly what Zack—or his genius, Danny Silvermine—had dreamed up for that one, but which was the second adaptable script? I had done a total of seven, all in the last two years of the show, and I just couldn’t keep myself from thinking about them all, wondering which was the one Danny Silvermine saw me doing in front of six hundred people eating roast beef.

  Well, I didn’t manage to answer either of my pressing questions during lunch, and finished the meal still not knowing either which script or why kill me. Ken and Chuck offered police protection, which they knew I would decline and which I declined, so then they said I should keep in touch and I said I would. Ken wrote out a phone number and gave it to me, saying, “It’s in there somewhere, Sam, their reason is inside your head. For your sake, I hope you find it.”

  “Me too. I’ll phone the instant anything surfaces.”

  I walked them around to their car, where Chuck grinned and said, “I just got to tell you, Sam, I was a real fan of yours. I watched your show all the time when I was a kid.”

  “Thanks, Chuck,” I said with some kind of smile on my face. When he was a kid? The show’s been off the air only three years!

  Oscar stayed a while longer, to chat about legal problems. I’d be making a quick trip to New York tomorrow to appear for the defendant’s discovery proceeding in my lawsuit against the New York-based comic book company that had used my “image and likeness” without payment or permission. Morton Adler, my attorney in the East, was actually handling the case, but Oscar was quite naturally taking an interest, so we talked. Instead of his normal third vodka-mar, he asked for coffee, saying, “Believe it or not, I’m going to a mosque from here, and there shouldn’t be anything on my breath.’’ “Funny,’’ I said. “You don’t look Arab.’’

  “Ha-ha,’’ he said sarcastically, and pouted. “It’s Al-Gazel, the new one they just built in Beverly Hills.”

  “And they have a Jewish lawyer?”

  “They do not. They have an Italian supplier of copper sheeting, and there’s some question now about who has to pay for all the security arrangements over there, and it is Mr. Catelli who is wise enough and lucky enough to have a Jewish lawyer.”

  �
�With nothing on his breath.”

  “Absolutely.”

  Finishing his coffee, Oscar gathered up his chauffeur—a short stout man sated with Sloppy Joes—and departed for his mosque. Once I was alone I phoned my insurance agent to describe what had happened to my Volvo. She said somebody would come out to look at it, but it sure did sound totaled, and I could undoubtedly expect full replacement costs. “Except for the adaptations, of course.”

  “What do you mean? Why ‘of course’?” Since I’m so tall, I usually have to have cars adapted to suit me; front seat mounted farther back, things like that. I said, “If you don’t pay for that, it isn’t full replacement.” She sounded dubious, saying, “I don’t think the company will go for it, but let me see what I can do.”

  “Thanks,” I said grumpily, and hung up, and it was then, while brooding about the minginess of insurance companies, that it hit me.

  Ross Ferguson.

  Had to be. Ross Ferguson and the tape he showed me last November in New York. He hadn't got out from under after all; he’d lied to me.

  Ross Ferguson. The people who’d nailed him were after me.

  If this were a television story, the first commercial would come along just about now.

  6

  This began three months earlier, back in New York. I have a town house there on West Tenth, and I like to spend the fall and early winter in the city, when the weather’s at its best. I do my shopping, go to the theater, hang out with friends. I get to walk a lot, a thing that’s impossible in L.A. I usually stick around till after Christmas, spend the holidays with my family out on Long Island, and then fly west with the first snow.

  So it was November, I’d been in town a little over a month, it was late afternoon, and I was in the lap pool I’d installed in the basement, to keep my swimming muscles in shape while I’m in Big Town, when Robinson called over the loudspeaker-intercom from upstairs that Ross Ferguson was on the “blower” for me. “He says it’s most urgent,” boomed out his voice, resonating, bouncing back from all that pale green tile in the long low-ceilinged room. My lap pool is the only echo chamber in Robinson’s life these days, and he makes the absolute most of it.