“I think the resale value on this thing,” I told the dogs, “has just taken a nosedive.”
They grinned their agreement, and I left them there and went into the house, where Robinson was fitting a frozen pie crust into a pie plate. “Quiche again?” I asked.
He didn’t deign to answer, which was quite a spectacle. Robinson, when he’s not deigning to answer, looks like Abraham Lincoln with a wasp in his nose. Speaking around the wasp, he said, “Mr. Novak has been telephoning and telephoning. I had to tell him I had no idea where you were.”
“You should have put him on hold,” I said, and went through into my bathroom, where I scrubbed my face in an effort to feel normal again. It didn’t actually work, but at least I then felt coordinated enough to use a telephone, which I did, though not to call the ever-loving Zack. My first call was to Oscar Cooperman, my attorney, who took it in his car, which meant he kept fading in and out. “Where are you, Oscar?” I asked. “God knows. Harbor Freeway? Somewhere.”
“How soon can you get here?”
“Sam, I’m on my way to a closing.”
“I’m about to phone the cops, Oscar,” I said, “and tell them four guys in two automobiles deliberately tried to kill me just now on the San Diego Freeway. When the cops arrive—”
“Wait a minute, wait a minute, you’re fading in and out.”
“Tell your chauffeur to drive to Bel Air!”
“Hold on. Hold on. You there?”
“Oscar, are you going to put me on hold?”
“This phone doesn’t have hold,” he said. He sounded wistful.
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—”