01 One of Us is Wrong by Samuel Holt

Author:Samuel Holt [Holt, Samuel]
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

24

It was easy to avoid talking with Anita about Ross’s problems and my strange seatmate on the plane; I held up my end of the conversation instead with Danny Silvermine and the comic book lawsuit. I hadn’t told Anita last November about Ross, when he’d showed me the tape, and I saw nothing to be gained by opening that story now. In the first place, I was still ambivalent about my own part in it, and didn’t want to have to justify my continuing silence, my agreement not to go to the police. In the second place, Bly’s reaction when I’d finally told her had been enlightening; she hadn’t cared at all to know I’d kept a secret from her so successfully for so long, even though the secret had nothing directly to do with her. Maybe the rule is, if you’ve succeeded in keeping a secret, don’t spoil your record.

There were still several tables of customers in Vitto Impero when I got there at quarter to ten, coming directly from JFK. Anita stayed at her post at the cash register and I sat by myself at the round corner table in the back where we’d had dinner with Brett Burgess the night his play opened. (It had closed again long since.) Marcie the waitress brought me a number of things Angelo the cook thought would restore me after my journey, and I washed it all down with San Pellegrino and Pinot Grigio, taking my time, because by my own body clock it was barely seven in the evening.

When the last of the regular customers left, Anita came over to sit with me and help finish the wine. I told her then about Danny Silvermine, and she asked to see the scripts, which were in the attache case on the empty chair beside me. I handed them over and finished eating while she skimmed The Man Who Was Overboard. My meal and her reading were finished at the same time; Marcie took away the plates, I said no to coffee, and Anita said, “What’s the point?”

“Exactly,” I said.

“You already did this, right?” She tapped a sharp fingernail on the script’s blue cover. “I mean, you already wrote it, you already played it.”

“That’s what I keep thinking,” I told her. “But on the other hand, it’s work, isn’t it? It’s doing something as opposed to doing nothing.”

“So do something else.”

“I’ve been trying to, honey.”

“No, I mean with this guy Silverman.”

“Mine, Silvermine. In what way, do something else?”

“Write a play,” she said.

I just looked at her. She finished her wine and said, “You want more vino?”

“No. What do you mean, write a play? Write what play?”

“Whatever you want to appear in. Maybe another detective story, where you’re not Packard, but it’s still the same kind of form. Maybe you could be the murderer.”

“Wait a minute,” I said. “Write a play? I’m not a writer!”

Another fingernail tap on the scripts. “You wrote these.”

“For television!”

“They’re still plays. Silvermine—is that really his name?—he just changed them over for the stage, that’s all.

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