“I think I can imagine the advice,” I told him. “It would consist mostly of the word don’t.”
“Not entirely.” Leaning back in his chair, frowning at his desk as though he’d just noticed how sloppy it was, he said, “You do have some background in this sort of thing, of course. And I understand your frustration at the moment. But you see the danger.”
“With Mrs. Wormley, you mean.”
“Well, that primarily,” he agreed, “though not exclusively. But let’s take that situation in the apartment, yes. Technically, you had more right to be there than she did, since you had the tenant’s keys and the tenant’s permission to enter, but the instant you slid under that bed — an instant I would pay a considerable amount to have seen, by the way — you placed yourself irrevocably in the wrong.”
“I know I did. The alternative...” I shrugged. “The alternative was to introduce myself, as somebody or other, to Mrs. Wormley.”
“The alternative,” he agreed, “was equally unhappy, once you were there. And you can’t be certain you won’t find yourself in other difficult situations, while this goes on. So now let me get to my advice.”
“Sure.”
He leaned even farther back, twisting around to look out his window at the air rights over Grand Central, enclosed by gray dull slabs of plate glass and stone. “You have a good working relationship with the police officer who took over the Wormley case,” he suggested.
“Sergeant Shanley,” I said. “Yes, I do. A lot better than Feeney and LaMarca.”
Turning back to me, smiling at his desk drawers, he said, “Of whom we hope to hear no more.”
“Amen.”
“I strongly urge you, Sam,” he said, “to telephone to Sergeant Shanley, meet with her at the earliest opportunity, and tell her precisely what you’re doing and what you’ve already done.”
I said, “Ask her okay, you mean?”
“Not at all,” he said. “If she’s any good, she won’t give you an okay. Partly because she shouldn’t, and partly because she can’t.”
“What if she tells me to stop?”
Smiling faintly, Mort shook his head. “Nor can she do that,” he told me. “She can tell you not to break the law, of course, but she can’t tell you not to go around asking people questions. She can’t even tell you not to wear a ridiculous moustache or call yourself by made-up names. What she can do is tell you to stay within the law; which of course you will agree to do.”
“Of course.”
“And then,” he said, “if another delicate situation arises, you won’t have to crawl under any beds. You can merely stand your ground and announce that the police officer in charge of the Wormley homicide investigation is aware of your activities.”
“I see,” I said. “It could take the heat off, you mean, in a situation with someone like Mrs. Wormley.”
“Not,” Mort told me, “if she were to find you lying about under her bed. But certainly it would be a help if she were to find you standing in an ordinary fashion in the living room, Julie Kaplan’s keys in your hand.”
“All right,” I said. “I’ll call Sergeant Shanley right after lunch.”
“Speaking of which,” he said, bracing both hands on the edge of the desk preparatory to rising, then pausing to look up at me with a slightly pained expression and to say, “Is it your intention to wear all that excess hair at lunch?”
“Absolutely,” I told him. “From what I heard of Mrs. Wormley’s conversation with her lawyer—”
“And that went over the line,” he pointed out. “Eavesdropping on a conversation between your court adversary and her attorney is absolutely and totally improper.”
“I won’t do it again,” I promised. “But from what I heard the last time, they have private detectives looking for me, here in the city. I really don’t want to go anywhere in public as Sam Holt.”
“I accept that, unfortunately,” he said, and got to his feet, adding, “Not the face I would prefer across the lunch table, but we will survive. After you.”
35
After lunch, we went back up to Mort’s office, where Myrtie told me Gretchen Young had called and wanted me to get back to her at home. So I did, and Gretchen said Blair Knox, Brett’s agent, was trying to get in touch with me. Delaying Sergeant Shanley, I called Blair and she came on the line to say, “Well, Kay Henry is definitely interested in you.”
“Talent will out,” I said.
“Do you think that’s true? Anyway, he called this morning to discuss you. He went through that resumé you gave him item by item, wanting to know how you’d handled each part and what sort of reviews you’d got, and how you’d related with the rest of the cast and the director and all that.”
“Wow.”
Laughing a bit shakily, she said, “I had no idea, Sam, what you were going to put me through.”
“Neither did I,” I told her. “I’m really sorry, Blair. I thought at the most he’d just call to see what your opinion of Ed Dante was.”
“Oh, he wanted that, too,” she said. “But he was very interested in the career. I think I held my end up.”
“I’m sure you did.”
“In any case,” she said, “he seemed satisfied when he hung up. But I thought you should know, he’s out there, tracking you down.”
This investigation better not take much longer, I thought, my little construction is an extremely temporary affair. Living inside a house of cards. “Thanks for the warning,” I told Blair, and tried calling Sergeant Shanley, to be told she was out of the office but was expected back within half an hour. I left my name and Mort’s number, and then Mort and I retired to his office to discuss the lawsuit against Kwality Food-Marts that had gotten me into all this mess in the first place.
What it came down to at this point was that the lawsuit was going to die of inertia — or perhaps had already died of inertia — and all that was left to discuss was how to bury it. Court costs was the name of the game by now; Kwality FoodMarts had no intention of finding another Packard lookalike to do more commercials, the earlier commercials with Dale Wormley had finished their run and would never be seen again in this world, so Kwality had no interest now but to defend their right to have arrogated my appearance and the Packard persona in the first place. If we would accept a consent from them not to offend any more in the future (which they didn’t intend to do anyway), with no acknowledgment of wrongdoing on their part in the past, we could all go home and forget about it.
And right here was where the alliance on my side of the issue fell apart. So far as Mort was concerned, it made no economic sense for me to go on paying for a lawsuit on an issue that had become moot. So far as the syndicators who were my co-copyright owners and co-suers were concerned, however, the point here was to make Kwality FoodMarts hurt sufficiently badly that other potential infringers — both of PACKARD and of other shows these syndicators controlled — wouldn’t dare take the field against them.
So Mort’s principal dealings now were not with Kwality’s attorneys but with our own partners’ attorneys, with Mort trying to get them to agree to pick up one hundred per cent of continuing costs of the litigation from this stage forward. “If they win,” Mort pointed out, “they’ll be reimbursed out of the settlement. If they lose, you didn’t want to be a party to it anyway, so it’s improper for you to share in the burden of expense.”
“Whatever you say, Mort,” I said.