I said, “What’s going on here?”
That surprised him for some reason. “You tell me,” he said, and a woman’s voice behind him said, “Okay, let him in.”
The cop moved over and I crossed my threshold to find in my hallway a short woman of about thirty with extremely pale blond hair and a round, snub-nosed face. She was wide-hipped, in black slacks and a bulky rose-colored sweater, with her badge ID clipped to the sweater above the left breast. “Sergeant Shanley,” she introduced herself.
“Sam Holt,” I said. There was some sort of sharp metallic odor in the air, faintly familiar.
“I know who you are,” she said, sounding impatient, but mixed with some kind of excitement; not at meeting a TV star, something else, something similar to that sharp odor. “So you got away from them, did you?” she said. “That’s great. Come on in here and tell us all about them.”
27
Sergeant Shanley was very disappointed when it turned out I hadn’t been kidnapped after all. It made the case both less interesting and more puzzling. If those guys hadn’t made off with me, what the hell had they been after?
Once it was established that I’d spent last night somewhere other than at home — Sergeant Shanley gave me the look of a den mother catching a cub scout cheating with his knots — I at last found out what was going on around here. I have two alarm systems in this house, including a silent alarm that phones the precinct farther west on Tenth Street. At seven-ten this morning that alarm had gone off, and the first patrol car to respond had been fired upon. Back-up cars had arrived, shots were exchanged, four panes of glass in my living room windows were broken, and the residual smell of gunfire was what I’d noticed when I’d first come in.
After a while no more firing had come from the house, and the police had approached it to find the front door jimmied open, the other alarm system short-circuited, the rear door to the garden standing open, and the house apparently empty. At that point they’d found out the name of the owner — me — and called my house in Bel Air, where Robinson, awakened from sleep at what was for him five in the morning, had naturally told them I was in New York. Thus they’d decided it was a celebrity kidnapping and that I’d been taken away out the back.
In the meantime a normal search of the house had produced a dying man in a second-floor closet. The police return fire had apparently got him, hitting him in the lung. Abandoned or forgotten by his friends, he had hidden away in the closet, and now he was drowning in his own blood. He’d carried no identification and was already terminally unconscious when he was found. An ambulance had been called, but the man was dead before it got there, and was being carried out when I arrived; a swarthy white male, approximately twenty-five years of age, with black hair and black moustache, wearing ordinary workclothes except that the shirt was French.
It was clear this wasn’t an ordinary burglary; the police estimated half a dozen men inside my house during the gunfight. Nothing appeared to have been taken, nothing searched or disturbed except as a result of the breaking in and the shooting. It had been reasonable to assume a kidnapping. But if it wasn’t a kidnapping, what was it?
That was Sergeant Shanley’s question, and I was sorry I couldn’t help her. That is, I was sorry I could help her but wouldn’t. Because this had to be Ross’s friends again, of course, up to who knew what. Maybe kidnapping had actually been their idea, in which case it was a damn good thing I’d stayed with Anita last night. (It was anyway, it always was, but this added a reason.)
And what did all this mean about my friend from the plane, Hassan Tabari? Had that been him in the taxi, leaving the scene of the crime? Was he a part of the group around Ross? What had he wanted from me on the plane, anyway? Every day, it seemed, when it came to Ross and his tame lions, I knew less and less about more and more.
Once I was filled in I asked permission to call Robinson, who would be very worried right now. “I’ll be right here,” Sergeant Shanley told me, and I went upstairs to call from the office.
They hadn’t been upstairs at all, or at least there was no trail left, unlike the first floor. Only the dead man, who’d left a few blood drops along the way, nothing more. I phoned Robinson, who so forgot himself that he actually sounded pleased to hear from me: “Where are you? Are you all right?”
“I’m fine, I’m at the house.”
“But the police—”
“Yes, they’re here. I spent the night with Anita.” That changed things. Robinson’s loyalty to Bly Quinn is so total that he can’t bring himself to think anything good of Anita at all. When we’re in residence in the East, he’s stony-faced and monosyllabic every time he’s in her presence, and now there was a sudden distinct chill in his voice when he said, “Yes, I might have known.”
“Poo,” I told him. “You should have known. How’s Doreen?”
“Asleep,” he said, still chilly. “It’s quite early here, you know.”
“All right, Robinson, I just wanted to tell you everything’s fine.”
“Well, hardly that,” he said, then decided to forgive me again. “Thank you for calling.”
“Sure,” I said, and broke the connection, and phoned Walter, the contractor who’s overseen all the work I’ve done on this place. I told his answering machine about my broken windows, jimmied door, and spoiled alarm and asked him to take care of it before a whole lot of people moved into my place in my absence. Then I phoned Morton Adler, my New York attorney, and told his secretary I might be a few minutes late for the discovery proceeding, but would get there as soon as possible. Then I went back downstairs to chat with Sergeant Shanley, whose first name was Maureen, though she didn’t encourage me to use it.
A second plainclothesman was in my living room now, a gloomy narrow-shouldered fortyish man introduced as Clifford. After how-do-you-do he said absolutely nothing, but merely sat and observed while Sergeant Shanley and I talked.
During my years on PACKARD, the absolutely most frequent problem we had with scripts could be summed up in the question, “Why didn’t he call the police?” A story line that would seem perfectly reasonable and acceptable when the writer pitched it in the office would crumble in your hands once it had been laid out in a script, and you could see the only reason for the protagonist not to call the cops was that it would end the story right there. And particularly if in the story line somebody were trying to kill the protagonist, the question would always be “Why didn’t he call the police?” Sometimes the writer would find another way to do it, but more often than not it would turn out to be a script we couldn’t use, though, of course, having assigned it, we had to pay for it.
I remembered all that now as I sat down to talk with Sergeant Shanley and Clifford. People had broken into my house at an hour when they might have expected to find me home, which meant they had plans for me I wouldn’t like, whether kidnapping or murder or whatever. I didn’t even have to call the police; they were right here. So why didn’t I tell them what I knew?
Here’s what I could have said: “A writer friend of mine is being blackmailed by a very brutal ruthless gang of people, but he wants to stay with them because he thinks he can write a best seller about them. He squeezed a promise out of me not to break his story prematurely. Knowing that I’m aware of them, they did try to kill me once, but failed, and now the story is they’ll leave me alone because of the promise I gave my friend. They planted a guy on the plane coming in with me yesterday, though I’m not sure why, and I think I just saw that same guy this morning. I don’t have any idea why they broke into this house. I’ve discussed this situation with sheriff’s deputies in Los Angeles and have lied to them and withheld information.”