Samuel Holt - The Fourth Dimension is Death

Given the combination of a celebrity name and a novel legal situation, the publicity potential for the civil case was much broader than that for the original killing. Dale Wormley’s murder, with my name attached, had made the wire services and the cable news programs, but only briefly, having then receded pretty much to the level of a local New York story, which I’d been able to defuse by moving back to California; this time, there would be no place to go. “Mort?” I asked, during the conference call. “Should I stay here, or go back there? Or does it make any difference?”

“You’ll have to come back to be deposed,” he told me. “Until then, do as you see fit.”

“Deposed,” I said. “Ah, yes.” I’d been through that part of civil cases before, the part where the other guy’s lawyer gets to ask you all kinds of irritating and irrelevant questions in his office while your attorney sits beside you being restrained and the whole thing is taken down by a court stenographer to haunt you later.

“I think Sam ought to stay here,” Oscar’s voice boomed from the phone and echoed from his person in the next room, and on the sofa near me Bly emphatically nodded. “If he starts moving around like a bug on a griddle,” Oscar went on, an image I could only too unhappily identify with, “it’ll look as though he’s reacting to the suit.”

“Which I will be,” I pointed out, “no matter what I do.”

“Still,” Mort said, his manner such a measured contrast to Oscar’s, “I do take Oscar’s point. Unless you have some actual reason for returning to New York prior to the deposition, you might as well stay where you are.”

Oscar said, “Mort? Anything to be gained by asking for a change of venue?”

“Out there? I don’t see what. Delay and expense for both sides, an air of shiftiness on our part, and not much hope of success, since Sam is certainly a domiciliary of this state. And the alleged action took place here.”

“I suppose you’re right,” Oscar said, sounding rueful. “I wish I could take part,” he said, and then he added the absolute worst thing you can ever hear your own attorney say: “It’s a fascinating case.”

There’s snow in the San Gabriel Mountains in late November; clean white drifts on the tan ground, with gray boulders elbowing through. The air is dry and crisp and cold, so that you can see with clarity for miles over the tumbled slopes, and the sky is so pale blue it’s almost white. In fact, though you’d expect the sky to be closer when you drive up there, it seems farther away, higher and more remote and less comprehensible than usual, as though it were the sky of some other planet.

Thursday we drove up, Bly and I, fleeing the media’s voracious interest in my murder trial and aiming for Zack Novak’s ski lodge, which he was loaning me until further notice. I was driving the big Chrysler station wagon, for the weather and because we’d filled it with supplies. Robinson would stay at the house in Bel Air to feed the dogs and repel the press, and with luck we wouldn’t be found until we wanted to be.

We took route 2, the Glendale Freeway, northeast out of LA. After it crosses the Foothill Freeway at La Canada it becomes Angeles Crest Highway, climbing and twisting steeply up into the mountains. A sign early on informed us that the road was closed well ahead, beyond the turnoff for San Gabrial Canyon Road but before Big Pines; there was that much snow up there already. But that was all right; Zack’s place was not far past the turnoff, in one of the patches of private inholdings among Angeles National Forest and Devil’s Punchbowl County Park and Crystal Lake Recreation Park and the Mount Wilson Observatory and all the rest.

We drove upward in silence a while, relaxing, looking at the spiky cactus plants in the snow like weird Christmas decorations, and then Bly turned and spoke in a tough gun-moll guttural, saying, “This is it, Earl. Our last job. Then we’ll be happy.”

“I get that one,” I told her. “High Sierra.” Glancing at her, beside me in the station wagon, I said, “You’re even doing Ida Lupino’s mouth.”

“Have you ever considered getting a brush cut?” she asked, with a critical look at my hair.

“Never. And I think his last name was Earle. Roy Earle.”

“You’re right,” she said, surprised, dropping the Ida Lupino bit. “Damn! I hate it when you know something better than I do.”

“It won’t happen again,” I promised her.

Zack’s ski lodge was very simple, really, not at all what the name implies. A small two-story clapboard house painted dark green, it was built against a steep slope, so that only the large living room and a half bath and the utilities were downstairs, everything else up: master bedroom and dining room above the living room, kitchen and two more bedrooms and two baths behind that, the structure built on and within the hillside, so that the two rear bedrooms and the kitchen all had ground-level outer doors. The furnishings throughout were studiedly simple and rustic, and the views at the front, out over scrambled gorges and thick descending stands of dark green pine, were fantastic. Both living and dining rooms had large stone fireplaces at the right side, out of the way of the view. Also out of the way of the view was the road in, a snowy slippery mix of gravel and mud, very narrow, angling in through thick second-growth pine, ending just to the left of the building.

The air was very cold and sweet, like thin apple cider, and our breath fogged as white as the snow mounds under the trees all around us as we made three trips to carry everything from the car into the house; luggage and groceries. We went in through the upper level to the kitchen, which was nearest to where we’d parked the station wagon, and then, while Bly opened a can of soup — she is not a cook, and on those rare occasions when she tries it’s a horror — I went downstairs to turn the electricity on, the master switch being at the circuit breaker box in the half bath down there. Various hums started — heat pump, hot water heater, refrigerator — and I went out to bring split logs in from the pile beside the house. I laid two fires, one upstairs and one down, only lighting the one downstairs in the living room.

When I went back upstairs the soup was heating on the electric stove and Bly was in the master bedroom, unpacking. “Hello,” I said.

She grinned over her shoulder at me, her arms full of jackets. “Hello.”

She looked so good, and the setting was so snug, and my relief at being away from everything was so strong, that we then spent a considerable time longer in the bedroom than we’d planned, as a result of which we ruined that pot and had to open a second can of soup. Which was delicious.

All in all, it was a good day. Bly rummaged through Zack’s cassettes and decided that thirties Duke Ellington was most appropriate to the circumstances, and so we spent the rest of the day surrounded by the dark, rich, urban, honey-aggressive sounds of that well-drilled big band, pulsing at us, prodding us, but gently, so we didn’t become too vegetable in our relaxation.

After a while, we went out to check the woodpile and feel the air and get into a snowball fight, and then back in to play Scrabble — Bly always wins, or almost always — so that it was late afternoon before we sat down in front of the fire together in the living room and began at last to talk about what was going on.

Bly started it, by cutting — as she would say — to the car crash: “What are you going to do about it, Sam?”

“The lawsuit?”

“That’s the dead baby on the table, yes.”

“Lawsuits are for lawyers,” I told her.