Samuel Holt - The Fourth Dimension is Death

Bly gave my reflection a rueful look. “Would you buy a used horse from this man,” she commented.

“Exactly,” I said.

When Robinson called us for dinner some time later, I walked into the dining room with all the gear on, and he looked at me appalled. “I hope the personality hasn’t changed to match,” he said.

“How do I look?” I asked him.

“Reprehensible,” he told me. “Not like yourself at all, if that’s any satisfaction.”

“It is.”

“If you were to come to the door unexpectedly,” he said, peering at me closely, “I would assume you were some distant relative of Samuel Holt’s, whose sudden presence in our lives would give no one pleasure.”

“Terrific,” I said. “Let’s eat.”

As it turned out, I wasn’t going straight to New York after all, but to Miami, where Julie Kaplan had lengthened her employment after the dinner theater job her agent had found to get her out of town. I wanted a good long talk with Julie about the world she’d lived in with Dale Wormley, before trying to enter that world myself.

Starting my trip, I found it strange to be anonymous again, after several years of television celebrity. Maybe I should say it was a humbling experience, but it wasn’t; just strange, and a little uncomfortable.

For instance. I didn’t at all mind not being boarded onto the plane in the special ahead-of-time category reserved for celebrities and wheelchair-riders and infants in arms and unaccompanied minors, but by golly I did mind traveling coach. There’s no room back there, not for somebody six foot six. Also, the food in that part of the plane seems to have come directly from some northern European prison; to be presented with something that claims to be steak but is rectangular and curls up at the corners like old cardboard is never going to be pleasant. And finally, somehow the rear of the plane takes two or three hours longer to cross the country.

Robinson had bought my tickets, to Miami and on to New York, using his credit card, so I traveled as William Robinson, but other than that I was on my own in a very strange way; I had to live on cash. I haven’t done that for years, but cash is the only anonymous way of paying for things like meals and hotel rooms. I also couldn’t rent a car, of course, since I wasn’t willing to show ID to anybody, so that meant all my ground travel would be by cab.

Beginning with the run from the airport over to Miami Beach, where I would be staying at one of the lesser hotels on Collins Avenue, that Art Deco area south of the acceptable zone. My being neither Jewish nor Hispanic was just as remarkable as my height in that neighborhood, but the moustache and Racing Form were just passport enough to support my claim to belonging there. (My paying for one night’s residence in cash was not at all suspect, but merely served to bolster my bona fides in this place.) I signed the check-in card as ‘Ed Dante,’ in honor of Bly’s Monte Cristo conceit.

Alone in my small room with its view of Collins Avenue past the hotel sign — that wouldn’t start flashing off and on tonight, would it, like an oldtime bad movie? — I immediately pulled off the wig, which had started to itch somewhere over St. Louis, and scratched .

This was going to be a problem. Miami was too hot and humid for most of my disguise, the moustache being about the only part that didn’t eventually become uncomfortable. But the moustache was the wrong color to go with my natural hair, so that meant wearing the wig. And the glasses, too, though they pinched my nose after a few hours. In place of the raincoat and tweed jacket and trousers, a Hawaiian shirt worn outside lighter-weight slacks would just have to do, combined with a kind of hurried shuffling walk as though I were trying to cross a piece of open ground as rapidly as possible without being noticed. When I was a cop, I’d come to recognize that as a movement a lot of wrong guys had picked up in prison. And when I was on PACKARD I’d learned that observation and imitation are two of the most useful tools of the acting trade. So, when I left the Mar Vista Hotel a little after six, I wasn’t Sam Holt at all, nor Jack Packard either. I looked like some sort of tough guy on one or the other side of the law. Whoever I was, your immediate instinct on seeing me would have been to look away, not wanting any kind of contact.

November sunset had come and gone, leaving Miami a plain of jagged black teeth against a darkening orange sky. Empty cabs did not drift this far south, so I headed on foot up Collins and had gone two blocks when I suddenly remembered that most of my money was still back in the room. I’d left the San Gabriel Mountains with a thousand dollars in cash, mostly in fifties and hundreds in a long zipper compartment in my belt, and I’d barely thought about that money since. And that belt was still on my other, heavier pants. (It’s easy to forget cash, I was beginning to realize.)

Since the Mar Vista was partly a residence hotel, and also since there wasn’t necessarily always somebody on duty at the desk late at night, they didn’t keep their keys attached to those large awkward artifacts meant to discourage guests from carrying their keys out of the building, so mine was still in my pocket and I merely climbed the stairs, to find my door open and two guys inside, going through my luggage.

They were both Hispanic, wiry guys with real moustaches much bushier than my false one. They were both more than a foot shorter than me, but that didn’t bother them; when I walked in, they looked at me, looked at one another, shrugged in disgust, and came for me.

They were mean fellas, particularly after the first time I threw them across the room and they found knives in their pockets. They were mean, and they were two against one, but I had a few advantages they didn’t know about, the first being that they didn’t know I had any advantages at all. Such as police training, and such as MP unarmed combat training. On the other hand, they had a strong advantage over me in attitude. That is, I didn’t particularly want to kill them, but they wouldn’t have minded in the least killing me; an intensity of commitment that equalized the situation between us to some extent.

When the knives came out, I yanked an empty drawer from the dresser and used it as both a shield and a club, trying to keep them both in front of me. We were making a lot of noise, but I didn’t expect that to draw much of a crowd in this place. Though I tried to keep my self-confidence intact — it’s strategically better to think you’re going to win than to think you’re going to lose — I couldn’t help feeling a certain angry disgust at the prospect of having it all come to an end like this: Under an assumed name, in a stupid little false moustache, in a tiny room in a fleabag at the wrong end of Collins Avenue, dressed in a Hawaiian shirt featuring surfboards. This was worse than flying coach.

And it wasn’t going to happen, dammit. I lunged and parried with the drawer, kicked a few near-misses at kneecaps, and seemed to be holding my own until all at once one of them jumped over the bed and got behind me and tried what should have been a guaranteed winning move: Grab my hair, yank my head back, run the knife across my Adam’s apple. Except that when he grabbed my hair, of course, it came off in his hand and the force of his movement knocked him back ass over teakettle onto the floor and into the wall.

The other one stopped still, astonished, and stared at me. “Pah- karr?” he asked me, unbelieving, and I kicked him twice: First in the crotch and then, as he bent double, in the face.

The guy with my wig in his hand was coming off the floor, not caring who I was. I did a roundhouse swing with the drawer, which shattered into splinters against the side of his head, leaving me with a handle that did very well for brass knuckles. With his head bouncing between the handle and the wall, he decided to become as unconscious as his friend, and did.