“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 is 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 I 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 I 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.