“A killer,” he said, and then looked startled. “Jesus,” he said. “Language is coming up and hitting me in the face.”
“Delia West,” I reminded him.
“Yeah. She was married to a stuntman; he did some stuff on PACKARD in the early days. She split, divorced him, went to live with a lady psychiatrist for a while, then switched back to men, then maybe a year and a half ago she took up with me. We hung out for, I don’t know, three four months. She never actually did live in the house, you know, I’m not that stupid, so that was what went wrong with the palimony.”
“Plus the shortness of the time,” I suggested.
He knocked back some Remy, a little more than if he were tasting it and enjoying it. He said, “Sure, that’s why she switched over to breach of promise. Takes no time at all to say ‘Will you marry me?’ No conjugal domicile necessary before the wedding bells.”
“Did you say ‘Will you marry me?’”
“Are you crazy? My accountant would kill me! Oh, shit, there I go again.”
“Ross, is there killing in this story?”
“Wait for it,” he said, like any good writer. “The point is, Delia and I were done and over with more than a year ago. I’d let her stay out at the Malibu place when I wasn’t there, and she had some sort of weird freaks in for a party; they fucked the place over good, and that was the last straw. Good-bye, I said, and she went to her lawyer, and it’s been a life of writs and summonses and threats ever since.”
“She’s actually going forward with the breach of promise?”
“It’s just a nuisance suit,” he said, shaking his head. “My lawyer tells me she just wants to make enough trouble so it’s easier to pay her off than fight her. I told him screw that, I’ll pay you twice what I’d pay that bitch, so that’s where we are. Or where we’ve been.”
“Now we cut to the car crash.”
He managed a shaky grin. “That’s right, Sam,” he said. “Now we cut to the car crash.” He finished his brandy and held out the glass. “Okay? Would you mind?”
Ross isn’t a lush, I’ll say that for him, so I got up and said, “Sure,” and poured him a second drink twice as large as the first, a good third of the way up the balloon. This I gave him, and sat again on the sofa, and said, “Crash.”
“Two weeks ago,” he said, “I went to the Malibu place. I’d had a fight with Doreen—”
“Delia, you said.”
“No, no, Doreen.” At least he looked sheepish about it. “That’s the new one,” he said. “She is living in the house. So when we had this big ruckus a couple weeks ago, I went out to the Malibu place — I intended to go out there the next day anyway — and when I walked in, there was Delia, dead on the floor.”
“Good God, Ross! Dead? That must have been terrible.”
“It was.”
“When was this?”
“Two weeks ago.”
I was horrified and embarrassed. “Ross, I never heard a thing about it.”
“Nobody did.” He grimaced, looking away, then took a deep breath and said, “She was murdered, Sam, and I’ll admit it, I panicked.”
“Oh, oh.”
“I looked at her, dead. Strangled, you know? A murder victim, in my house. Jesus, a terrible sight, Sam.”
“I’m sure it was.” I’d seen a few victims of violence back when I was on the Mineola force, but this was Ross’s story, so I let him alone with it.
He shook his head, stuck on the memory. “A terrible sight.”
“What did you do, Ross?”
“I could see how it was going to be. Say I called the cops, tell them what I found, they come over. Delia and I did some public fighting while we were together, you know. More than once I said various wild things in restaurants and at parties and like that.”
“Things like ‘I’ll kill you, you bitch,’ for instance.”
“You must have been there,” he said with another shaky grin. “Also, there was the lawsuit going on. Also, I’d had a few drinks, it was late at night, she was in my own place in Malibu. What’s anybody going to think? Sam, I put my old plot maven’s mind to work on this thing, and I saw absolutely nothing between me and the electric chair but my own wits.”
“No electric chair,” I told him. “No death penalty at all in California, and when it was—”
“Yeah, yeah, I know, the pellet in the bucket, I wrote that scene myself five six times over the years. ‘Rocco’s forearm muscles tense, pulling on the straps.’ But you know what I mean.”
“You mean you turned it into a story,” I told him. “A plot.”
“Well, that’s what I do, right?”
“You said to yourself, ‘Here’s the situation. The hero’s innocent, but he looks guilty as hell. So what’s the next scene?’” And as I said that, I saw what he’d done. “Oh, Ross,” I said. “You didn’t.”
“I did.”
“You hid the body.”
“I disposed of the body. No corpus delicti around this bunny rabbit. I made the whole thing un-happen.”
“That’s bad,” I told him.
He shook his head, grimacing at himself. “What can I tell you? It seemed like a good idea at the time.”
“What did you do, exactly?”
“Took her out in the boat. She was still almost warm when I picked her up. The boat was anchored just off the beach. I carried her out to the dinghy, putt-putted out to the boat, went way out. It was after dawn when I came back.” He looked portentous, and said a line he’d have put in a script: “I came back alone.”
I looked at the tape in his lap. “Somebody taped you? Carrying her out?”
“Worse.” At last he pulled the tape out of the paper bag and extended it toward me. “Take a look.”
I stood up, took the tape, and hesitated. Ross was really looking bad; troubled, scared, out of his depth. I said, “Why me, Ross?”
“I know you. I like you. I trust you. Also, you used to be a cop.”
“Years ago, on Long Island. I gave speeding tickets.”
“Come on, Sam,” he said. “We worked together on that show; we know each other. I know you’ve got a good mind, you’re really not just another pretty face like those other clowns.”
“Ross, is this the next scene in the story? You find the dead girl, you panic, you dispose of the body, all fine script material. Then what’s the next scene? You go to your old pal Packard?”
He blinked. “I don’t know. That hadn’t occurred to me. Do you think so?”
“I’m not Packard, Ross. I never was. I’m barely Sam Holt.”
“Look at the tape, Sam,” he said.
So I put the tape in the machine and switched on the monitor, and after what seemed like a lot of snowy leader, all of a sudden we were looking at a fairly grainy wide shot, in color, of a living room. Low sprawly canvas-covered sofas, tile floor, a white free-standing fireplace with a mouth like the shark in Jaws. Lots of wide glass sliding doors. It appeared to be a night-time shot, without sound. I said, “That’s your Malibu place, isn’t it?” I had stayed there a few times, but I didn’t remember it that well.
“Yes,” Ross said as a girl appeared, wearing a bikini. Good hard skinny body, hard attractive face, mass of blond hair. “That’s Delia,” Ross said, as he himself appeared in a white jumpsuit open to the waist, chains swinging on chest, sunglasses on top of head. Both Ross and Delia were carrying drinks in short wide thick-bottomed glasses. They gave the impression they were a little drunk, and having an argument. The camera was stationary, not panning with them as they moved back and forth and talked and gestured as people do when they’re a little smashed and trying to make some idiot understand their point of view.