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 people 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.
Three months went by. After the holidays Robinson and I returned to Bel-Air, collected the dogs back from Bly, and settled into our western life. Then last weekend I noticed in the TV listings a PACKARD rerun that Ross had written, and it reminded me, and I phoned him.
“Oh, hi, Sam! It’s been a long time, kid!” He sounded chipper, happy, even frenetic.
“Not since New York,” I said, to remind him.
“Say, listen,” he said, lowering his voice, becoming confidential. “About that, uh, thing we discussed—”
“The tape,” I said.
“Jee-sus! Sam, forget it, okay? Never mind it, I took care of things.”
“Did you talk to—”
“Listen, Sam, I’m on my way to Warner’s, we’ll talk soon, okay? We’ll take lunch.” And he hung up before I could ask him anything more. And just three days later four guys I didn’t know did their level best to murder me.
10
And that’s the point when, following my own advice to Ross back in November, I should have gone to the police. Normally I would have. That deputy Ken had given me a phone number to call, barely an hour before, and if my suspicions had settled on any story other than Ross Ferguson’s, I would have called Ken the instant I’d figured it out. But under the circumstances, as a courtesy, before talking to Ken I called Ross.
Or tried to. I got his service, who said Ross was “unavailable at the moment,” which was not the same as being out of town. I knew what the phrase meant. Sometimes Ross is working furiously toward a deadline and doesn’t want to be disturbed, so he tells the service to say he’s unavailable. Once or twice a day he’ll collect his messages, and decide for himself who he wants to chat with. I told the service, “Tell him it’s Sam Holt, it’s urgent, I need to talk to him about the tape.”
“Yes, sir,” she said, and took my number, and I went out to the kitchen, where Robinson was cleaning up after Oscar’s chauffeur’s Sloppy Joes. He gave me a look and not a word, but the message was absolutely clear: He couldn’t see how he could go on accepting me as an employer if my circle of acquaintances was going to include people whose chauffeurs made such messes as this in his kitchen, a sentiment easier expressed in a look than a sentence, come to think of it.
“Sorry about that, Robinson,” I said.
“Your vehicle and my kitchen,” he said, with possible plans to forgive and forget. “May I ask what occurred to the Volvo?”
“Dodg’em cars. A deliberate effort to run me off the road and erase me out of life.”
Robinson paused in his clean-up to frown at me in wonder and doubt and incipient anxiety. “Is that the truth?”
“I would never lie to you, Robinson,” I said. I perched on one of the stools at the work island, and said, “That’s why the police were here.”
“Then it’s out of your hands. Good.”
“Well, not entirely. In the first place, those guys are still running around loose, and I don’t think they’ve changed their minds about me very much.”
“Perhaps we should go back east,” he said.
“Not yet. Because, in the second place, I think maybe Ross Ferguson is mixed up in the story somewhere.”
“That fellow.” Robinson had not much use for Ross, had been known to refer to Ross as a “flibbertigibbet.”
“An enraged husband, do you think?”
“Robinson,” I said, “there are no enraged husbands anymore.”
“Pity,” he said. “It’s a sadder world.”
“Not for Ross.” Except that wasn’t true either, was it? I said, “Anyway, the point is, I need to talk to Ross and he’s not answering his phone. So I’ll go over there—”
“And reduce another car to smithereens? Not to mention your own self.”
“I’ll go out the back way,” I told him, “and I’ll take the wagon.”
Robinson was dubious. “I think you should phone the police.”
“I already talked to the police.”
“I think you should not leave the house without surrounding yourself with policemen.”
“Now you’re overstating the case,” I said. “It’s a fifteen-minute drive from here. What I want you to do, if Ross calls after I leave, is tell him I’m on my way over and he should let me in.”
“If you get that far.”
“Very funny,” I said, although Robinson is not exactly one for making jokes. “I’ll be right back,” I said, and left him to his clean-up and his pessimism.