“One of them is a target.”
“If he’s in Al-Gazel, he’ll be safe from all alarm.”
I remembered the elaborate care and patience with which these people had set up Ross, and how complicated they’d been willing to get to make my own death look accidental. Was this a group who were likely to just climb over a fence and walk onto a guard room’s television screen? “I hope you’re right, Oscar,” I said.
“Well, look at that,” he said. “My glass is empty.”
38
The mind is a strange object, sometimes. If the phone rings at Bly’s place when we’re both there asleep, Bly wakes up and I don’t. But if it rings at my place in the same circumstances, I’m the one who comes awake.
We’d spent the evening together, going out to dinner, talking mostly about the possibility that her actor friend had been murdered, and not at all about my quick trip to New York; that would have required some eventual reference to Anita. I did my best to discourage Bly’s becoming an amateur detective, a role I could see her leaping into with both feet, but I didn’t get very far. She was determined to find some mutual friend who could introduce her to Beau Sheridan’s widow, because the woman just might, all unknowing, have some clue as to who had hired her husband for that nonunion job last fall.
Well, if I couldn’t stop Bly’s sleuthing, I could at least change the subject, which I finally managed by getting her to talk about the script she was writing. From there the evening turned pleasant, and we eventually wound up at my place, which is where we were, asleep, when the phone rang at quarter to four in the morning.
I found the receiver in the dark. “Hello?”
“Sam?”
The reason I was whispering was not to wake Bly. The reason the female voice at the other end was whispering I hadn’t yet figured out. I whispered, “Yes? Who is it?”
“Doreen,” came the faint and guarded voice.
I sat upright. As Bly mumbled and thrashed her legs a bit, I whispered, “Where are you?”
“At the house. I want out, Sam.”
“Just a second. Let me get to another phone.”
I put her on hold and hurried to the office, where I could switch on a light and talk in a normal voice: “Hello? You still there?”
“Yes.” She, of course, was still whispering.
“What is it, Doreen? Tell me about it.”
“I was crazy to come back here.” Through the whisper, and through that veneer of hipness she affected, I could hear how tense she was. “I couldn’t say anything when you showed up with the police; they were at the windows with guns.”
“Terrific.”
“Everybody’s asleep now. Would you— Could you help me get out of here?”
“Sure.”
“The way to do it— You know this house, don’t you?”
“I’ve been there; I don’t know it that well.”
“If I try to get out the front, that’s no good. The lawn lights go on at night when you open the gate.”
All that excess security Ross had never bothered to remove when he bought the place. I said, “Is there another way?”
“On the side— Not the side where the driveway is, the people next door are home there, but on the other side, downhill, you know the one? The big brick house with the pillars?”
“I know it.”
“There’s a pear tree up near the house, over on their side of the wall. If you could like come over the wall there, with a ladder or something, I don’t know, I could meet you, you could help me climb over. Okay?”
“The side with the brick house with the pillars. It’s — let me see, it’s ten to four. I’ll be there in fifteen minutes, twenty at the most.”
“I can get out of the house all right, it’s just climbing over that damn wall.”
“Wait for me by the tree.”
“I will,” she promised.
39
The idea behind PACKARD, and I guess what made it so successful, was what is called “casting against type.” They chose a physical guy — me — to do a cerebral part, the kind of role that would usually go to somebody like Jack Klugman or E. G. Marshall. Putting me in there meant they could have it both ways: I could ratiocinate away like mad for a while, and then go climb a wall. The ratiocinating was actually done by the scriptwriters and directors, but the wall-climbing was done by me.
I climbed the other wall beside Ross’s place, opposite where I was to meet Doreen, dropped, and landed on soft sod. Crouching a minute, I looked up toward the garage and the darkened house beyond it. Nothing moved. There was no sound.
Driving over in the Porsche, making better time than I’d expected on the empty streets, it had occurred to me that if I was going to sneak onto Ross’s property anyway, I might as well poke around some. But if I was going to do that, I’d want to enter on the uphill side, where the garage would screen me from the house. Then I could make a quick reconnaissance as I crossed the property.
Neither of Ross’s next-door neighbors had heavy security, with walls or gates or fences. Having left the Porsche a little farther up the street, I walked back down and went cautiously into the driveway next door on the uphill side. The house at its top showed one dim amber upstairs rectangle, where a night-light burned. The day’s cloud-cover still blanketed the sky, making the night very dark. I went up the blacktop halfway to the house, then pushed my way through the tall ornamental hedge on the right, into the night-cool air between shrubbery and rough fieldstone wall. It was about six feet high, just a bit too tall to see over, but the ragged edges of stone made for easy climbing. I went over and dropped to the soft ground on the other side, and waited a long silent minute before moving up toward the house.
Ross, uncharacteristically, had been letting the grounds get shaggy; too busy with his real-life project, I supposed. Fire Over Beverly Hills. The unshaved grass, wet with condensation, swished against my feet as I moved up the slope, keeping the pale rectangle of the garage between me and the house.
I skirted the garage, blundering once into some shrubbery, then coming out to the brighter area in back, where pale stone terraces and the white rear wall of the house, unshielded by trees, reflected and increased whatever light there was. Lawn furniture and plantings were dark mounds along the way, and just to the right, parked on the lawn behind the garage, was the pool-company van.
I went over to look at it, not opening the door for fear of switching the light on inside, but at least touching it, seeing it up close. The windows were open and a faint, unpleasant odor emerged, both clammy and sharp. I went around to the back, and the rear doors stood open, but the interior was pitch black. I leaned in, trying to see anything at all, and my hands touched cardboard cartons.
I patted the cartons and found they were stacked almost to the roof. They were about the right size and shape to carry four gallons of paint, and when I tried to lift one, they were very heavy. The van seemed to be full of them. I started to slide one out, to see what was inside, but my fingers touched a metal band strapped around it; so much for that. Leaning forward, I sniffed at the cartons and smelled mostly cardboard, with the sharp metallic smell faintly within. The clamminess wasn’t evident back here at all.
Giving up on the cartons, I hunkered down to try to read the license plate, but it was just too dark. On a PACKARD one time, I’d read a license plate in a darkened garage by feeling the raised numbers with my fingertips, but when I tried that now, I couldn’t make it work at all. Very disappointing.
Moving away from the van, I looked out past the swimming pool at a kind of muddied darkness that would be trees and shrubbery on the hill climbing up away from Ross’s landscaping. Up in there somewhere was Al-Gazel.