Samuel Holt: The Fourth Dimension is Death

I didn’t need this guy to come along, though; I just needed him to stop. Applying very slight pressure, but enough to let him know what had happened, that he was mine now, I said, “That’s enough.”

His eyes widened in hurt and surprise, his mouth opened in an exaggerated O, and he reached across himself toward the imprisoned thumb with his other hand. I gave him a quick short squeeze: “Hand at your side!”

That’s like an electric shock, that pain. You don’t think about it, you don’t argue with it, you just do what it says. His hand snapped back to his side.

Kendall had found voice: “Good God!” he cried, with the astonished outrage of the proper burgher assaulted in a decent neighborhood. “Harry, help the man! Do something!”

Harry was the driver, who had the good sense to give me a questioning look, to be sure I wanted help before he offered any. I shook my head at him, and looked the stranger in his furious, frustrated eyes. “What’s it about?” I asked him.

“You know what it’s about!” His voice was artificially high-pitched and shrill, affected by emotion. “It all has to be yours, doesn’t it?” he demanded, leaning his head and shoulders back away from me but making no effort to move that thumb. “Everything has to be the great Packard’s , doesn’t it?” Said with violent raging sarcasm bearing down on that name.

I said, “Buddy, I don’t know you or what your problem is. If you—”

“You don’t know me? You’re suing me, aren’t you?”

So I looked more closely at him, and then I began to see it, the way shapes change when a lamp is moved. The height was right, the hair coloring, and through the distortions that anger had brought to his face it was possible to make out something in the bone structure, the line of eyebrow, the shape of the nose...

Well, yes and no. That was not, absolutely not, the face I see when I look in a mirror, but it was him, all right; the doppelganger, the pseudo-Packard of Kwality FoodMarts. “For God’s sake,” I said. Startled, repelled, not wanting to know this other me, talk to him, look at him, certainly not touch him, I pushed his thumb away and stepped back. “Don’t be stupid,” I told him, feeling rattled and unclean.

Something in my manner broke the line of his attack, and he too became nervous and unsure. Instead of whatever forceful snarling statement he’d been rehearsing for hours — maybe for weeks — he stared at me almost as though confused, and said, “I’ve got a right to live too, you know.”

I was vaguely aware of Kendall, somewhere behind my right shoulder, saying sharply, “Harry, the police!” I knew we didn’t need police, but I wasn’t sure what we did need. “Look,” I said to the imitator, trying to remember his name, feeling somehow it would insult him not to remember, “look, I’m not suing you. A company’s suing a company. PACKARD’S owned by a corporation, they have to protect the asset.”

“It doesn’t matter to you,” he insisted. He looked bruised and resentful, as though I were the one who’d forced the confrontation on a public sidewalk. “This is my chance,” he explained, earnest now. “This is my chance.” Then he looked at something past my shoulder, out in the street, and his face changed again, becoming desperate and harried. “Oh, Christ!” he said, and spun away, as though to run down the street.

“Hold it right there!”

I turned, and a police patrol car was now stopped just behind the limo. When I’d heard Kendall call to his driver about the police, it had been because this car was coming down the block. Harry had stopped it, Kendall had said a quick word of explanation, and my celebrity would do the rest. While the resentful and defeated imitator stood waiting, the two cops came to the sidewalk and asked, in that heavy intimidating manner that goes with the uniform, just what was going on.

“A misunderstanding, officers,” I said. “It’s all over now.” The last thing I wanted was for this guy to be arrested, and it wasn’t exclusively for humanitarian reasons. This thing, badly handled, could become a public relations nightmare, the big-wheel celeb dumping on the little guy.

Kendall, seeing the humanitarian motive and not the selfish one, would have nothing of it. “Misunderstanding, my eye!” he announced. “Sam, you don’t have to bend over backwards with these people. Officer,” he said to the nearest cop, “that fellow came charging out at us the instant we got out of the car. My name’s Kendall, here’s my card. I’m with DSI, my driver and I were bringing Mr. Holt and Mr. Robinson home, and this—”

“Yeah, right, right,” the cop said, nodding seriously, holding Kendall’s card like something he was glad to have been handed. “I got the picture,” he assured Kendall, and turned to me, saying, “You live here, don’t you, Mr. Holt?”

It’s part of their job, knowing the rich and/or famous on the beat. I said, “Yes, I do.”

Turning to the imitator — what was his name? — asking as though it were merely a fact he was interested in for its own sake, the cop said, “You live around here, too?”

“Not me ,” he said; his resentment was in full flower again. “I don’t have houses like that.”

Tucking Kendall’s card away in a pocket, the cop moved closer to the imitator, saying, “Could I see some ID, please?”

“Listen, officer,” I said, then had to interrupt myself, saying, “Kendall, believe me, it’s all right.”

And now the other cop stepped in, effectively dividing us into two groups, his partner with the imitator, himself with us, as he said, “Mr. Holt, you were on your way home, is that right?”

“Yes,” I said. “And nothing happened here except a couple words, it really doesn’t matter, I’m not asking you to do a thing.”

“Fine,” he said, nodding. His partner was studying the imitator’s driver’s license, talking to him quietly, absorbing his attention, giving the imitator time to calm down and rethink his position. “Understood,” our cop said to me, and turned to Kendall, saying, “Were you going in with Mr. Holt?”

“No, no, we were just dropping him off, when that fellow—”

“So everything’s okay, then,” the cop pointed out, and raised an eyebrow at me.

“We’re just going in now,” I told him, and picked up one of our bags. To Kendall I said, “Thanks for the flight, I appreciated it. Not as much as Robinson, of course.”

Which finally distracted Kendall from his desire to make a fuss. Grinning, he said, “I can’t tell you what a treat it was, meeting the both of you.”

We exchanged civilities, Robinson permitted his fan to shake his hand, and at last Kendall and his chauffeur got back into the limo and drove away. Both cops were now talking with the imitator, calmly, quietly, their backs to us. There was no point interrupting; they knew I wasn’t going to press charges, so they were merely defusing the situation in a way calculated to keep it from happening again. Robinson and I went on into the house, and when I looked out my office window on the second floor a few minutes later the police car, the cops, and the imitator were all gone. It was over.

Dale Wormley. Then I remembered his name.

The next — and last — time our paths crossed was not Dale Wormley’s fault. It was just an unfortunate accident, but no less unpleasant for that, and it was caused by the lunch arrangements I’d happened to make with my friend Brett Burgess.

Brett Burgess is an actor, I’m a star, and there’s our story in a word. Two words. We met out on the Coast nearly a dozen years ago, before Packard entered my life. The same agent who changed my name to Sam Holt (because it sounded more manly than Holton Hickey, the name I’d been born with) changed his to Brett Burgess from whatever it had been. We got to know each other in that agent’s office and in various waiting rooms where we’d been sent to try out for same parts, and the friendship has luckily survived all the changes since.