One of Us Is Wrong
- Автор: Holt Samuel
- Серия: Sam Holt #1
- Год: 1986
- Язык: английский
- Год: Tor Books
- ISBN: 978-0-312-93550-4
- Жанр: Иронические детективы
Электронная книга - «One of Us Is Wrong». Краткое содержание книги:
Suddenly, though, someone seems to have a new role for Holt: the role of Dead Body. Years of having watched stunt-drivers do their stuff help Holt avoid becoming a grease-spot on the San Diego Freeway, but his Volvo will never play the violin again. And if Holt can’t figure out where the screenwriters are going with this one, he’s not going to get a chance for a second take.
It was when I met Bly that I finally paid attention to what had happened. I liked her from the beginning, and at first she was open and cheerful with me, but then that disinterest came into her eyes, and when I pursued her, she was polite but nothing more. I even tried to get our story editor to assign her a PACKARD script, though it was absolutely wrong for her; trying to buy her, I suppose. She turned it down, to the story editor’s relief.
When I started saying no to other women’s invitations, it was as a kind of sympathetic magic: If I turned enough women down, Bly Quinn would come around. Of course, Bly wasn’t watching and couldn’t know about my abstinence and wouldn’t have cared anyway, but nobody ever said magic was logical. In any event, the result of the abstinence was my discovery that all those women hadn’t been going to bed with me at all. It was money or power or fame they wanted to have sex with, and I was merely the instrument; the tool, if you know what I mean. Everybody was using everybody, and the beds were actually empty.
Well, if I’m going to be in an empty bed anyway, I’d rather not have to make conversation, so I long since gave up the candy-store approach to sex. There are two women in my life now, which is probably too many, but I can’t see how to say good-bye to either, and I have no reason in the world to make it three, not even briefly. Doreen was a good body and a cute face and a rather unformed personality, and it seemed to me our relationship was just about right as it stood. So I would go on playing stupid, and I would bring Bly back into the conversation whenever Doreen got provocative, and soon she’d grow bored with it, without anybody having been embarrassed.
We had breakfast together in the appropriately named breakfast room, light green and pale yellow, with a view over the ornamental hedges and the lawn toward the back road in. Robinson served us correctly and, for him, pleasantly. He was undoubtedly aware that Doreen and I had not shared a bed, and so was prepared in a conditional way to accept her. (Robinson watches out for Bly’s interests much more than Bly does.)
Over breakfast I explained about the quick trip I’d be taking to New York; just overnight, arriving back here probably by five tomorrow afternoon. I saw no necessity to explain the reason for it, the details of my lawsuit.
In any case, she showed no particular curiosity. “I thought I’d watch some TV,” she said. “You got any of your old shows?”
“Some,” I said, surprised. “But you don’t have to please the host by watching his program.”
“I’m interested. Okay?”
“Sure. Robinson will show you where it all is, and how to work it.”
Outside, I once again had to disappoint Max and Sugar Ray, who came bounding when I opened the garage door in front of the station wagon. “Your job is important too,” I told them. “You watch the house.” They accepted that, though they were dubious.
As I drove down toward the rear gate, I glanced in the rearview mirror at the house, and suddenly thought of Doreen in there, curled up on the sofa in the den, watching old PACKARDs. I connected it with that sheriff’s deputy, Chuck, saying he’d watched the show when he was a kid. That would be true of Doreen, too, of course.
Was she subtle enough to have done that on purpose, to make me feel old, as revenge for having turned her down?
Packard never had tricky ones like that to solve.
17
I went into the Malibu house as cautiously as yesterday, but this time it was empty. I was a few minutes early, so spent some useless time looking at Ross’s video equipment and studying the murder scene before going up to his office, where I intended to take the call.
Before leaving yesterday we’d closed the glass door leading from office to deck, so now the room felt stale and stuffy. I slid open the door, went outside, and was looking at the Go Project, thinking how it was only a long-time fiction writer who could have been mouse-trapped in exactly this fashion — and how would they go about throwing their rope around an actor? — when the phone rang. I went back inside, sat at the desk, picked up the phone, and held the receiver to my ear, not speaking.
There was a little silence, like a comic strip cloud balloon with a question mark in it, and then Ross’s voice said, “Doreen? Baby?”
“Hello, Ross,” I said. “It’s Sam.”
“Sam! Oh, my God!”
“Don’t—” I started, but he did anyway. He hung up. I phoned his house, and quit after ten rings. The son of a bitch was still playing hard to get. I sat at his desk, furious, looking out at his boat, thinking I’d like to go out there with a hatchet and punch a hole in the bottom of the damn thing, when the phone rang.
“Hello?”
“Sam, how you doin’? We were cut off, baby! What are you doing there, buddy boy?” He sounded manic, like the world’s worst fake orgasm.
“Waiting for your call,” I said.
“Uh.” He ran out of steam very briefly, and I could imagine him at the other end, blinking rapidly, building himself up again. “Is, uh, is Doreen there?”
“I sent her east. She has school friends back there.”
“Some pal. Saving her from the dirty old man, huh?”
“Something like that. Ross, I’ve been wanting to talk to you before I call the police.”
“Police!” All the crap and flapdoodle went right out of him. “Jesus, Sam, what for?”
“Yesterday,” I told him, “four swarthy guys in two cars deliberately tried to cream me on the San Diego Freeway. The cops told me if I could figure out why anybody’d want to do that, I should call them. I figured it out, but I wanted to talk to you before I made the call.”
“Wait a minute, Sam.” He sounded very serious. “Are you telling me somebody tried to kill you?”
“My guess is, some of your poolmen.”
“No no no,” he said, though not as though arguing with me. “We can’t have that. Wait right there; I’ll get back to you.”
“Oh, I don’t think so, Ross,” I said. “For all I know, those guys are headed this way right now.”
“But listen, Sam, I don’t know what went wrong, I don’t know who got— All right, somebody made a mistake, and I’m glad it didn’t— You aren’t, uh, banged up or anything, are you?”
“No, I’m not,” I told him, “but my Volvo will never play the violin again.”
“Look, uh, do you want to go home? I’ll call you there.”
“Come see me.”
“No, I’ll call you, I’ll phone you, you say where, anyplace you say.”
It seemed to me important to get Ross away from his house and whoever he was sheltering in there, so I said, “Not on the phone, Ross. I want to see you and look at you and know you’re all right. I want to be able to see your face when you explain things.”
“I’m not sure I—” He dithered a minute, then sighed and said, “All right, I’ll work it out, they can’t— Your place?”
I didn’t want that, not with Doreen there. I said, “No. You know where Zack Novak’s office is, in Century City?”
“Sure.”
“I’ll meet you there at eleven.”
“This morning? Sam, I might have to—”
“I don’t want to give your friends time to set anything up,” I told him. “Besides, I have a flight at one this afternoon. I’ll be at Zack’s place at eleven. If you don’t show, I call the cops right then.”