He pointed at me a finger that trembled slightly. “You’ve gone too far, Sam, dragging real policemen into your fantasy conspiracies. Making trouble for me — If we weren’t such longtime friends, I’d be up at the house right now calling my lawyer to sue your ass from here to China.”
Ken said, “Mr. Ferguson, is your lady friend at home?”
“Sure. Why?”
“Maybe we could go up and chat with her, she could confirm your story.”
Ross looked exasperated, but then he turned and bellowed, “Doreen!”
We all looked up at the house, and there was a dramatic pause. The tiny sound I heard was Ross tapping his foot against the blacktop of his driveway, the sandal doing a muffled slap-slap. Then there was movement on the small porch at the near end of the house, and here came Doreen, very slowly, down the drive. She was in sneakers and blue jeans and a short-sleeved high-necked pale blue sweater; somewhat overdressed for the day, but not for the people presumably inside the house. She, too, was hiding her eyes behind large dark sunglasses, but her mouth was strained and sullen and obstinate.
“Come on, Doreen,” Ross called, waving an arm to hurry her. “Don’t take all day; you know I’ve got work to do.”
It was hard to say what her eyes were doing behind the glasses. Looking at me? At Ross? At the deputies? She said, “Go ahead and work, then. Who’s stopping you?”
“Sam is still at it,” Ross told her. “For all I know, he told the cops I’d murdered you.”
“Only Delia West,” I said.
He pretended not to hear that, but I saw him flinch. He said to the deputies, “You have questions? Here she is.”
“Mr. Ferguson,” Ken said, “I’ll ask you again to cooperate. Please let us in so we can conduct this conversation like grown-up human beings.”
“Absolutely not,” Ross told him. “That just stretches the whole ridiculous thing on for hours. You’ll have to go to a judge and get a warrant, and no judge would listen to what Sam has to say and give you a warrant. I don’t even have to stand here and talk to you.”
Chuck said, “Miss, who else is in the house right now?”
Doreen’s shoulders twitched. She said in a low, unwilling voice, “The cook and the gardener.”
I said, “Not the pool cleaners?”
“No,” she said, lower than before.
Ross said, “Doreen, did National Enquirer people follow Sam to my place in Malibu?”
“Yes.”
“Did it rattle him?”
“He fought with the photographer man, knocked him down.”
Ken said, “We’re not interested in the National Enquirer, Mr. Ferguson.” That having seemed to me irrelevant, I hadn’t mentioned the National Enquirer to the deputies, and I was glad they weren’t interested in being sidetracked by it.
“All right,” Ross said to Ken. “You don’t care about the National Enquirer. I don’t care about any of this. Doreen, did Sam fill you full of conspiracy theories?”
“Yes.” Barely audible.
“Did you come back here of your own free will?”
“Yes.”
“Do you want to go back with Sam?”
“No.”
“All right, then.” Ross glared in triumph at the deputies and spread his hands. “I can’t think of anything else to talk about. Good day to you. And Sam,” he added, turning his glare in my direction, “when you’re in your right mind once again, I may accept your apology.” With that he took Doreen by the elbow and they both headed back up the driveway toward the house.
We watched them go. What else was there to do? “Shit,” I said as Ross and Doreen disappeared onto the porch. A door slammed up there.
“Well, goddammit,” Chuck said.
What an anticlimax. I’m sure the deputies felt it, but I felt it much worse. All of my agonizing over whether or not to call the police, and once I did, what happened? Nothing. A fizzle.
Ken said, “His pals are still inside there, that’s for sure.”
I said, “You still believe me; good. Thanks for the vote of confidence.”
Chuck said, “Are you kidding? Deceit came off that man like body odor.”
Ken said, “I’m trying to figure out what sort of complaint you could sign that would get us in there.”
Chuck said, “What about, you say he’s harboring the people who deliberately tried to run you off the road? Or the ones broke into your house back in New York?”
Ken shook his head. “Where’s his evidence, his probable cause? It’s too thin for a judge; Ferguson is right about that part.”
I said, “I remember, years ago, back in Mineola, there’d be a situation, nothing to do, and somebody would turn to us, we were the cops, we were the last resort, and they’d say, ‘Do something, why don’t you do something?’ I’m having to bite my tongue to keep from saying the same thing to you guys.”
“We’ll talk to the B.H. police,” Ken said, “ask them to keep a special lookout in this neighborhood. We’ll hope to figure out who their target is, the middle of next week, though I’m not hopeful on that. But Sam, you say you’ve been in our position, so you have to know as well as us what we mainly have to do now.”
“Yeah, I do.” I looked through the chain link gate at the house, silent and closed. “You have to wait for somebody to break a law,” I said.
“That’s right.”
I shook my head. “I shudder to think,” I said, “what law that’s going to be.”
35
The deputies left first, while I took time to give Max and Sugar Ray a walk. I suppose I was hoping that once the official police presence had departed, either Ross or Doreen would come back out to talk to me, but of course they didn’t. What would they have to say? Ross had convinced Doreen to go along with his story, and without her to corroborate my version there was just no evidence of wrongdoing on Ross’s property, and therefore no way for the deputies — or the Beverly Hills police, this would actually be their jurisdiction — to force their way past the gate. I’d played my last card, I’d effectively closed off communication for good with both Ross and Doreen, and I’d accomplished nothing.
“Come on, guys, let’s go home. We’ve done enough for one day.”
Once again, rather than do a lot of backing and filling, I drove on uphill from Ross’s house to the next intersection. I was about to turn left there when I noticed that same glint of gold way up to my right that I’d spotted the last time. (That’s gold, Zack, I thought; your conference room is definitely yellow.) It was some sort of large shallow dome farther uphill, seen obscurely through a filter of scrub pines and other weedy trees, and what it looked most like was the first sight of the flying saucer in a science fiction movie.
Oh, come on, I told myself. The situation with Ross was ridiculous and melodramatic enough already, I didn’t need extraterrestrials as well. But curiosity had me now, and I was in no hurry to get home and face the fact there was nothing left for me to do about Ross, so instead of turning left, downhill, toward Sunset Boulevard, I turned right and drove up past the Dead End sign to see what that golden dome was all about.
One curve from the intersection and I couldn’t see it anymore, but it was definitely still up ahead somewhere. A second curve, still climbing, and all at once there was a guard shack and a barrier ahead.
It was exactly like a border post on a small road between two European nations. A small square wooden building painted light green stood beside the road. A long pole, banded in red and white, lay across the road at just about hood height. A black and white police car — Los Angeles County, I thought — and two blue sedans and a white van were parked in a blacktop area behind the little building. As it all came into sight, two uniformed men — one in blue, one in brown — emerged from the building, looking at me through their reflecting sunglasses and resting their right hands on the gunbutts at their sides.