Watching, I said, “When was this taken?”
“Wait for it.”
So I waited. Nothing much was happening, just a couple of drunks mouthing off at each other. Then the Ross on tape banged his glass down onto the white plastic end table beside one of the sofas, and pointed at Delia in unmistakable anger. She apparently yelled something. He went over and grabbed the front of her bra between her breasts and yanked hard, and the material tore, and he flung the bra backhand out of camera range. She slapped his face. He punched her in the face and she staggered back, dropping her drink on the little white shag carpet near the fireplace. She was yelling, still angry, not yet scared. Ross waded in after her, punching at her head again. She put her arms up to protect her face and he hit her in the stomach, and when her arms shot downward, he put both hands round her neck.
From there on it got grim. They struggled, she went over backward, him on top, bearing her down, clutching to her throat. She kicked and writhed, she tried to scratch his face, pull at his hands, but nothing worked. I found myself tensing up, my stomach muscles clenching, my own throat feeling burned and sore.
The camera just kept watching. It didn’t move. It didn’t cut to later in the same scene. And it seemed to take a long long time for Delia West to die.
At last the Ross on tape staggered back away from the body. He knelt on the floor, staring at her, then seemed to cry out, then turned away with his hands over his face.
Jump-cut. Extreme close-up, Delia’s face. My God, how awful it looked! Tongue so thick and purple, jutting out. Eyes like joke eyes you’d buy in a carnival arcade, huge and round and covered with veins. Throat battered and bruised, pushed in in some horrible way.
I made a sound, backing away from the monitor. I could hear Ross swallowing and swallowing, very loudly.
I reached forward to turn the damn thing off, but before I got there the entertainment part of the show ended, and we went back to the snowstorm of black tape. I said, “Is that all of it?”
“Isn’t that enough?”
It was. I hit Stop and Rewind, and turned to look at Ross. There was no sound but the whirr of the VCR.
Ross stared at me. His face was covered with sweat. He ran a hand over it, then drank brandy, then looked at the brandy snifter. He looked at me again. He said, “I don’t have blackouts.”
“All right.”
“I didn’t kill her.”
Click. The rewind was complete. I said, “You mean that wasn’t you?”
“I didn’t kill her! Of course it wasn’t me.”
“Ross, it looked like you. I thought it was you.”
“The bastards,” he said, and grimaced at the blank monitor.
“Don’t tell me about twin brothers, anything like that, all right?”
“This isn’t a story.” He was mad and scared in equal parts.
I turned away from him, switched on the tape, watched the room appear, the girl enter, the seeming Ross enter. I pushed Freeze, and hunkered down to stare at that tiny Ross figure. After a while I saw the possibility. “All right,” I said.
“Somebody who doesn’t know me,” he said. “Somebody like a cop, for instance. What’s he gonna say?”
Stop. Rewind. I looked back at Ross. “Where’d this tape come from?”
“In my mailbox, yesterday. Not mailed, just put in there.”
“What did the note say?”
“You’re right, there was a note.” He reached into the crumpled paper bag and brought out a sheet of blank typewriter paper, folded in half. I took it, opened it, and read the words from newspapers Scotch-taped onto it: We will be in touch. We will call ourselves Delia.
“Did they get in touch?”
“No,” he said. “I looked at the watermark on that paper, by the way, and it’s the kind I use in my scripts. They think of everything, don’t they? I could have done the note myself.”
I said, “And they waited two weeks before they dropped the other shoe. Psychologists.”
“Maniacs. But also magicians. I did not kill her, Sam.”
“They left her for you to see. If you called the police, so much for that. But once you disposed of the body, they had you. Psychologists. They knew their man.”
“Bastards, bastards, bastards.”
I permitted myself a little smile, though there wasn’t that much in view that was amusing. “They guessed you wrong in one way, though,” I said.
“How was that?”
“They figured to let you stew two three days before they called. They figured you’d stick around, scared, getting more scared. They didn’t know you had a famous criminologist pal named Packard, and that you’d go all the way to New York to see him.”
9
If I accepted Ross’s statement that he hadn’t killed Delia West, and for the moment I did accept it, then the big question was, how did this tape come into existence?
Fakery. Some sort of fakery. Had to be.
And the dead girl had had to be part of the fake. She’d gone into it knowing they were pulling a scam on Ross Ferguson, but the part she hadn’t known about was that she would actually be dead at the end of the set-up.
Because that was definitely Delia West. We looked at the tape a lot more times that night, Ross and I — usually punching Stop and Rewind just before that awful final close-up — and there was no question in his mind but that the nearly naked woman we were seeing in the last moments of her life was Delia West. “I knew her, Sam, I knew her, and that’s her.”
“And is that you?”
“Jesus, Jesus.” He stared at the monitor, his nose almost touching the screen. “He looks like me and yet he doesn’t, you know? Jesus. Does he move like me?”
“Almost,” I had to say. “Not quite right, for somebody who knows you. Do you actually have a white jumpsuit like that?”
“Sure. It’s hanging in the closet in the Malibu place right now, or at least I think it is. That’s where I last saw it.”
“Do those look like your chains?”
“Sure, why not? There’s a thousand out there all alike. Chains is chains.”
We looked at the tape. We looked at the tape. We looked at the tape.
It was not the original, it was a copy, and therefore just the slightest bit blurry around all the edges. It looked like the tapes you see of undercover FBI men in sting operations, except it was in color and there was no date and time numeration along the bottom. Until the bit at the very end, it was one continuous long shot, with the full figures of the people visible throughout. I said, “Where was it taken from? Where in the room?”
“On that side— This side here, where we’re watching from, is where I keep all my VCR and stereo stuff. The same as you’ve got here.”
“You have a VCR camera out there, for U-Matic?”
“Sure.”
“Where do you keep it?”
“Mostly on top of the machine, the VCR machine, just sitting there. Available, you know, if we want to fool around.”
“Ross, might there be tapes out there of you and various people, maybe even Delia, doing other kinds of things together?”
He ducked his head, and managed to look at the same time embarrassed and pleased with himself. “A few,” he said.
“They’d look a little like this tape here.”
He looked at the monitor. The two people walked back and forth, arguing. His face felclass="underline" “Yeah, they would.”
“So if somebody says ‘How come this tape exists?’ the answer is, you thought you and Delia were going to fool around a little, so you switched on the camera and then things turned nasty.”
“Oh, shit,” he said. He was working his way through my brandy. “Shit shit shit.”