There was nothing here, no profit in staring around at emptiness in the dark. Doreen would be waiting, probably getting nervous. I turned away to go between the house and garage, but then paused to look back at the swimming pool.
What was wrong with it? Something out there bothered me, but why? It was merely a full swimming pool in the darkness, like a thousand others in these hills, rectangular, not quite Olympic-size. But something troubled me about it, and I walked slowly toward it, frowning, trying to make sense of my unease.
Unease; that was it. Something about the swimming pool made me uneasy. And yet it was simply there, a black rectangle in the night, surrounded by pale stone walks.
A black rectangle. But doesn’t water reflect whatever light there is? Why could I see the stone walks, yet the pool was merely a bottomless black rectangle? It certainly wasn’t empty, or I’d see its pale wall on the farther side.
I was reluctant to get too close, and only partly because I would be outlined against the light stone terraces in case anyone was looking out an upstairs window of the house behind me. There was also a faint touch of a kind of atavistic dread as I looked at the wrongness of that enigmatic black. A chilly breeze ruffled the hair at the back of my neck; why didn’t it ruffle the surface of the water?
I had no choice, really, atavistic dread or not. I had to walk out over the stone slabs to the pool, I had to go down on one knee and lean forward and reach my fingers down into the cold loose...
What?
Still unbelieving, I lifted my hand, the dark coolness in my palm, some of it trickling out between my fingers, dropping back into the pool. The clammy smell was here again, stronger than it had been in the cab of the truck.
This entire huge swimming pool was filled with dirt.
40
Why?
I looked out over the pool, and it was all earth. Not mud, but ordinary dirt, so the water must have been drained from the pool before it had been dumped in.
A grave? What was buried down in there?
The dirt I was holding felt unhealthy; I flung it back into the pool, got to my feet, compulsively rubbed my hand on my pants-leg. What was this? Why had it been done? Was it something to do with their religion? Bewildered and crazy ideas crowded through my head, and I backed away from the pool, finding myself thinking, absurdly: How could Ross let them do this?
Would Doreen know? She must have seen it, she might have some idea why it had been done. With one last look at that strange casket I turned away and went down between house and garage, then crossed the sloping lawn among the ornamental trees to the wall on the other side.
A pear tree, beyond the wall, that’s what she’d said. It was really very dark tonight, I could barely see the wall itself, much less pick out some tree on its far side. I moved leftward along the wall, staring up into the darkness, and found Doreen at last by stumbling into her where she waited, leaning against the wall. She gave a tiny cry, and I grabbed her arm to keep us both from falling. “Doreen!” I whispered. “It’s me, Sam.”
“Oh, my God,” she said, but not whispering, saying it in a normal tone of voice. “You’re inside already.”
“That’s right. Let’s get you—”
“He’s here!” she shouted, suddenly flinging her arms around me, draping her weight on me. “He’s inside! He’s here!”
“What? What are you—?”
Floodlights. The entire house and grounds leaped into existence, and men were running this way across the lawn. I fought loose of Doreen, shoving her away, but half a dozen men crowded around, all with pistols in their hands. I’d never make it over the wall.
I stared at Doreen, who backed away from me, her face bruised-looking in the harsh light. “It was you or me,” she cried, defiant. “All right? It was you or me.” Ross was among the half-circle of men, wearing his usual chains and open shirt, his reading glasses nestled on top of his head. Some sort of ghastly smile twitched on his face as he said, “Sam, take it easy. Nobody’s going to get hurt. Sam? You’re just going to be my houseguest for a while. Sam? Take it easy, Sam.”
41
They put me in the safe room, the first one I’d seen since I worked as a security guard out in these neighborhoods nine years ago. Because of the danger of kidnapping, and because there are more Charles Mansons out there in the valleys who haven’t exploded yet, a lot of Los Angeles’s rich and famous — and some just rich — have installed these safe rooms in their houses. The comic whom Ross bought this place from used to get hate mail from groups he’d insulted in his act, which was why he’d spent the thousands of dollars such a room costs.
Here’s what it is: An interior concrete room, without windows, built either directly on the ground or over a concrete block base extending down through the basement to the ground. Separate electric and water and telephone lines are installed — the utilities around Beverly Hills and Bel Air are old hands at this kind of thing — in underground pipes from outside the property to the base of the safe room, meaning attackers can’t cut off the phone in there and you’ll have light to read by while waiting for the police, and a small attached cubicle contains sink and toilet, in case the cops take too long to get there or you have a nervous stomach. Back when I was a guard, I saw the families of famous people practice quite seriously their safe-room drill. Daddy, stopwatch in hand, would shout that the alarm bells had rung, and would then time how long it took Mom and the kids to get into the safe room with the metal door bolted shut.
Not everybody takes their safe rooms that seriously, of course. I remember one place I guarded that belonged to a Las Vegas singer, who had lined her safe room with cedar to make it the storage closet for her costumes. One man used his as a wine cellar. But they always leave enough room for the family to get inside and lock that door, just in case.
Ross used it for his manuscripts and videotapes of his shows and scrapbooks and show posters, but there was still plenty of space for me. The room contained a sofa to sit on, an old sagging one that had been banished from public life, and a coffee table for your feet. The collected works of Ross Ferguson were available, to while away the time. The phone had been unplugged and taken away, but the electricity was on, and the plumbing worked.
They marched me there from the lawn, Doreen fading out of sight almost at once, the exterior lights going off as we entered the house. Four armed men, Ross, and me. Ross led the way to a door that on the outside looked to be an ordinary reproduction of a Colonial style, but when he opened it, the inch-thick steel became visible, and the heavy-duty piano hinges to hold it.
Ross said a word or two before they stowed me away: “I hate this, Sam,” he assured me, “I really do, and I know I’m costing myself your friendship. After this is all over and we can all calm down, I just hope you’ll be able to understand, to see it from my side just a little bit.”
I shook my head, saying nothing. What was the point of talking to him?
He said, “Sam, you wouldn’t be here except you’d just never leave it alone. I called you to tell you everything was all right, you didn’t have to do anything else and we wouldn’t do anything else—”
“We?”
“For the moment, Sam, yes.” Ross looked impatient with my lack of understanding of the artist. “When Capote was writing In Cold Blood,” he said, “don’t you think he thought of Hickok and that other guy and himself as us?”