“Not this time, I don’t think,” I said. “I don’t know what it’s about at all, that’s why we’ll follow him.”
The maroon Cadillac pulled away from the curb, and Ralph moved us out after it. Leaning forward, I could see the red, white, and blue New York State diplomatic corps plates: DPL and a set of three numbers. Unfortunately, snow and grime obscured all three numbers. Another coincidence?
There was a stop sign where the feed from the airline building’s arrival area led into the main airport road. The car ahead stopped, its red brake lights gleaming. Ralph said, “We’ve had a good amount of snow, as you can see.”
Dirty mounds of gray snow topped by a layer of black soot flanked the roadway. Again I remembered my last limo ride, through glaring sunlight, five hours before.
The maroon Cadillac’s brake lights winked off, and the car moved smoothly out into a very light flow of traffic. Ralph pulled up to the stop sign, stopped, and a black Buick Riviera on the main road came to a halt directly in front of us, no more than a yard from our front bumper, blocking our exit. “Well, Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” Ralph said, and honked his horn.
The Buick’s interior light went on. The driver, a bundled-up middle-aged man, was alone in there, studying a roadmap. Ralph honked again, and lowered his window to shout a few unfriendly comments into the cold night, and the man in the Buick just kept frowning at his roadmap. Cars behind us honked.
It was only a minute, maybe a minute and a half, but it was enough. Tabari was gone. Then the man in the Buick looked up, saw us with complete astonishment, switched off his interior light, and drove on. He had ordinary New York State plates, gone too fast to be read.
Ralph eased forward and gave me an ironic look in the rearview mirror. “Your friend didn’t want to be followed, did he?”
“Apparently not.”
A little farther on we saw the Buick turn left away from the airport exit, on a loop that would take him back deeper into JFK. We didn’t follow him. What was the point?
24
It was easy to avoid talking with Anita about Ross’s problems and my strange seatmate on the plane; I held up my end of the conversation instead with Danny Silvermine and the comic book lawsuit. I hadn’t told Anita last November about Ross, when he’d showed me the tape, and I saw nothing to be gained by opening that story now. In the first place, I was still ambivalent about my own part in it, and didn’t want to have to justify my continuing silence, my agreement not to go to the police. In the second place, Bly’s reaction when I’d finally told her had been enlightening; she hadn’t cared at all to know I’d kept a secret from her so successfully for so long, even though the secret had nothing directly to do with her. Maybe the rule is, if you’ve succeeded in keeping a secret, don’t spoil your record.
There were still several tables of customers in Vitto Impero when I got there at quarter to ten, coming directly from JFK. Anita stayed at her post at the cash register and I sat by myself at the round corner table in the back where we’d had dinner with Brett Burgess the night his play opened. (It had closed again long since.) Marcie the waitress brought me a number of things Angelo the cook thought would restore me after my journey, and I washed it all down with San Pellegrino and Pinot Grigio, taking my time, because by my own body clock it was barely seven in the evening.
When the last of the regular customers left, Anita came over to sit with me and help finish the wine. I told her then about Danny Silvermine, and she asked to see the scripts, which were in the attaché case on the empty chair beside me. I handed them over and finished eating while she skimmed The Man Who Was Overboard. My meal and her reading were finished at the same time; Marcie took away the plates, I said no to coffee, and Anita said, “What’s the point?”
“Exactly,” I said.
“You already did this, right?” She tapped a sharp fingernail on the script’s blue cover. “I mean, you already wrote it, you already played it.”
“That’s what I keep thinking,” I told her. “But on the other hand, it’s work, isn’t it? It’s doing something as opposed to doing nothing.”
“So do something else.”
“I’ve been trying to, honey.”
“No, I mean with this guy Silverman.”
“Mine, Silvermine. In what way, do something else?”
“Write a play,” she said.
I just looked at her. She finished her wine and said, “You want more vino?”
“No. What do you mean, write a play? Write what play?”
“Whatever you want to appear in. Maybe another detective story, where you’re not Packard, but it’s still the same kind of form. Maybe you could be the murderer.”
“Wait a minute,” I said. “Write a play? I’m not a writer!”
Another fingernail tap on the scripts. “You wrote these.”
“For television!”
“They’re still plays. Silvermine — is that really his name? — he just changed them over for the stage, that’s all. Dialogue, plot, characters, it’s all the same, and here’s two times you already did it.”
“But—” I was stymied by this brand new way of looking at things. I said, “But that was just PACKARD, I already knew the setting and the characters and the whole thing. I had people to help me—”
“People could help you,” she said. “What if you went to Whatsisname and said, ‘Look, I don’t want to do Packard anymore, but I’ll write you a brand new original play and star in it, and you can promote it as Sam Holt, the star of PACKARD.’ I mean, you’re saying the guy’s gonna pay peanuts anyway, it’s just a stunt for dinner theater—”
“Yeah, but—”
“But,” she said, “why wouldn’t he say yes to a whole new original play on the cheap? You’ll let him have it for no advance or anything, the same deal as if he used these PACKARD scripts. In fact, he could help you; he’s good at this kind of thing. Do you like the guy?”
“Well, actually, he makes my flesh crawl,” I said. “He’s one of those people where you can’t say exactly anything he’s done wrong, but he just tries too hard or something, and he comes over very creepy.”
“So you wouldn’t want to collaborate.”
“No.”
She shrugged. “You could do it on your own. You did it before.”
“But I don’t have a story, I don’t — I wouldn’t have the first idea how to write a play.”
“You’d figure it out. What about that writer friend of yours?”
Did she mean Bly? Neither of my lady friends makes much mention of the other. Warily, I said, “Who?”
“The guy who did the scripts for your show, helped you—”
“Oh, Ross!” But now I was doubly wary. Did Anita know? How was that possible? “What about him?”
No, Anita didn’t know. She said, “He could help you, show you the format, explain how it works. The same as he did on these,” tapping the scripts again.
“I could ask him,” I said doubtfully, because who knew how much longer Ross would be around to ask anything of. And as I said that, I found myself wondering if Ross’s story could be a play. The double on the videotape. Instant Replay, was that a title? Was there any way to show that on a stage? Who would I play? Maybe Ross himself.
But that was awful, to turn a friend’s trouble into a story to advance your own career. Trying to turn my mind away from the idea, I said, “I’ll think about it, anyway. It just might be the solution.”