Of course, stupid though it may sound, I was also distracted by Zack’s suggestion that I go do a couple of Packard shows on the dinner theater circuit. The idea was too ridiculous to think about, of course, but nevertheless I did think about it, and what I mostly thought was:
Which was the second script?
Okay, the one on the yacht, that could be cut down to one fairly simple set involving the wheelhouse and the lounge and the afterdeck, I could see exactly what Zack — or his genius, Danny Silvermine — had dreamed up for that one, but which was the second adaptable script? I had done a total of seven, all in the last two years of the show, and I just couldn’t keep myself from thinking about them all, wondering which was the one Danny Silvermine saw me doing in front of six hundred people eating roast beef.
Well, I didn’t manage to answer either of my pressing questions during lunch, and finished the meal still not knowing either which script or why kill me. Ken and Chuck offered police protection, which they knew I would decline and which I declined, so then they said I should keep in touch and I said I would. Ken wrote out a phone number and gave it to me, saying, “It’s in there somewhere, Sam, their reason is inside your head. For your sake, I hope you find it.”
“Me too. I’ll phone the instant anything surfaces.”
I walked them around to their car, where Chuck grinned and said, “I just got to tell you, Sam, I was a real fan of yours. I watched your show all the time when I was a kid.”
“Thanks, Chuck,” I said with some kind of smile on my face. When he was a kid? The show’s been off the air only three years!
Oscar stayed a while longer, to chat about legal problems. I’d be making a quick trip to New York tomorrow to appear for the defendant’s discovery proceeding in my lawsuit against the New York-based comic book company that had used my “image and likeness” without payment or permission. Morton Adler, my attorney in the East, was actually handling the case, but Oscar was quite naturally taking an interest, so we talked. Instead of his normal third vodka-mar, he asked for coffee, saying, “Believe it or not, I’m going to a mosque from here, and there shouldn’t be anything on my breath.”
“Funny,” I said. “You don’t look Arab.”
“Ha-ha,” he said sarcastically, and pouted. “It’s Al-Gazel, the new one they just built in Beverly Hills.”
“And they have a Jewish lawyer?”
“They do not. They have an Italian supplier of copper sheeting, and there’s some question now about who has to pay for all the security arrangements over there, and it is Mr. Catelli who is wise enough and lucky enough to have a Jewish lawyer.”
“With nothing on his breath.”
“Absolutely.”
Finishing his coffee, Oscar gathered up his chauffeur — a short stout man sated with Sloppy Joes — and departed for his mosque. Once I was alone I phoned my insurance agent to describe what had happened to my Volvo. She said somebody would come out to look at it, but it sure did sound totaled, and I could undoubtedly expect full replacement costs. “Except for the adaptations, of course.”
“What do you mean? Why ‘of course’?” Since I’m so tall, I usually have to have cars adapted to suit me; front seat mounted farther back, things like that. I said, “If you don’t pay for that, it isn’t full replacement.” She sounded dubious, saying, “I don’t think the company will go for it, but let me see what I can do.”
“Thanks,” I said grumpily, and hung up, and it was then, while brooding about the minginess of insurance companies, that it hit me.
Ross Ferguson.
Had to be. Ross Ferguson and the tape he showed me last November in New York. He hadn’t got out from under after all; he’d lied to me.
Ross Ferguson. The people who’d nailed him were after me.
If this were a television story, the first commercial would come along just about now.
6
This began three months earlier, back in New York. I have a town house there on West Tenth, and I like to spend the fall and early winter in the city, when the weather’s at its best. I do my shopping, go to the theater, hang out with friends. I get to walk a lot, a thing that’s impossible in L.A. I usually stick around till after Christmas, spend the holidays with my family out on Long Island, and then fly west with the first snow.
So it was November, I’d been in town a little over a month, it was late afternoon, and I was in the lap pool I’d installed in the basement, to keep my swimming muscles in shape while I’m in Big Town, when Robinson called over the loudspeaker-intercom from upstairs that Ross Ferguson was on the “blower” for me. “He says it’s most urgent,” boomed out his voice, resonating, bouncing back from all that pale green tile in the long low-ceilinged room. My lap pool is the only echo chamber in Robinson’s life these days, and he makes the absolute most of it.
“Take a number,” I shouted in the general direction of the mike in the far wall. “Tell him I’ll call back in five minutes.” And I swam underwater for a while, to keep from having to answer questions or make decisions.
Actually, it was eleven minutes later when I called Ross back — he was staying at the Hotel Pierre — I having in the meantime finished my laps, taken a quick shower, put on my blue terry robe, and come upstairs to the bedroom floor. There used to be an elevator in this four-story building — five if you count the basement — but I had it taken out during the conversion, much to Robinson’s dismay.
Ross sounded his usual self — which is to say, a bit pompous, attitudinizing, self-centered — but according to his dialogue he was desperate. “I’m desperate, Sam. I have to see you at once. I can be there in twenty minutes.”
“But I can’t,” I told him. “Sorry, Ross.”
“Sam, I’m not kidding you, this is urgent.”
I was in the bedroom, and my calendar was next door in my office, so I said, “Hold it a second, Ross, don’t go away,” put him on hold, went through into the office with its view over Tenth Street — the bedroom gets the garden and the interesting building-backs and the occasional shots of sunlight — and I sat at my desk, picked up the phone there, and said, looking at my calendar, “I’m free all day tomorrow. You want lunch?”
“Sam, please,” he said, and this time I could hear an edge of something different in his voice. Tension? Fear? “I can’t spend another night like this.”
“Christ, Ross.” I shook my head, though he wouldn’t be able to see it. “The thing is, Brett’s opening in a play tonight.”
“Brett Burgess?”
“That’s right.”
“And noblesse oblige, huh?” Which was more like the Ross I was used to; unnecessarily nasty even while asking a favor.
“Ross,” I said, “he’s one of my oldest friends. He taught me what little I know about acting, just as you taught me what little I know about writing.”
“Well, I’m in more trouble than he is. It’s barely six o’clock; what time’s the curtain?”
I sighed. “We’re having dinner before,” I said. “I promised. Look, Ross, if it’s really that bad—”
“It’s worse, Sam. Am I somebody who goes around crying wolf?”
“No, you’re not,” I had to admit.
“Okay,” he said, and yelled, “Wolf!”
“All right, all right, there’s a real wolf. I tell you what, after the show, I could probably get away, uh...how about midnight? Will you still be up?”