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. I 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.