Westlake, Donald E - Sam Holt 04

by The Fourth Dimension is Death (v1. 1)

  Am I good for Anita? I know she’s good for me, a sharp-witted, sharp-tempered woman who keeps me in line and makes me laugh. We’re together as much as possible when I’m in New York, but that means for half the year we don’t see one another. I hang around instead with Bly Quinn out on the Coast; what Anita does then, I don’t know. I’ve never asked, and she’s never volunteered. She knows about Bly and mostly keeps her attitude to herself, only occasionally making an unfair—but usually funny—remark about my bubbleheaded Hollywood starlet. (Bly may look that part, but in fact she’s a TV scriptwriter, with her own brains and wit.) Maybe the truth is, to have a fella like me for just a few months at a time is best for Anita, all the involvement her spirit can accept. I hope that’s it.

  Anyway, Vitto Impero does a good lunch trade, and not just of neighborhood people. Its reputation draws lunch customers ranging from midtov a admen to lawyers from the courts way downtown. Anita prowls the place like a leopard, keeping it smooth and efficient, making a relaxed place by never relaxing herself; which meant Brett and I were left mostly on our own. There was a lot to get caught up on, we not having seen each other since spring, but Brett just couldn’t leave this morning’s experience alone. We’d talk briefly about a play he did in Canada in August, or about my recent near-miss in getting to perform Brick in a revival of Cat On a Hot Tin Roof in LA—the financing disappeared, and it would have been too uncomfortably like a vanity production if I’d financed it myself—but then Brett would veer off again, and be right back with this morning’s disastrous audition. He knew he’d done badly, he knew what he’d intended to do instead, and he just couldn’t seem to get it all behind him.

  So we were there again, rehashing it yet once more, when Anita finally felt she could join us, a little after two. At that point, of course, the entire story had to be given a complete airing all over again for Anita’s benefit, to bring her up to date. She knew about the PACKARD lawsuit against Kwality FoodMarts, but I hadn’t seen any reason to mention the scene on the sidewalk, so she was hearing the whole story of the active and truculent Dale Wormley for the first time. Listening, managing to be both sympathetic toward Brett and amused toward me, she heard the whole saga out and then grinned and said, “You really slugged him?”

  “He wouldn’t stop swinging,” I explained. “What would you have done?”

  “I’m not saying you were wrong,” she assured me. “I just wish I’d been there to see it.”

  Which was when Brett finally lightened up. With his own reluctant grin, he said, “It was pretty impressive, actually, Anita. I’ll have to use it some time, in the right part. Sam didn’t even stand up. He just leaned forward and wham. ”

  “Sitting down?" Gazing upon me in mock wonder, she said, “That’s what I call insouciant.”

  “I’ve never called anything insouciant in my life,” I said.

  “Now, don’t get bad-tempered,” Anita told me, patting my arm.

  “You’ve got to look out for him when he’s seated,” Brett warned her. Anita’s presence at the table had done wonders for his mood.

  “The question is,” I said, “what am I going to do about Dale Wormley?”

  “I thought you’d already done it,” Anita said.

  “I hope so. But what if I just made him madder? I don’t want him hanging around, pestering me, lousing things up all the time.”

  Anita said, “Did you talk to Mort?”

  Mort was Morton Adler, my New York attorney, who was taking part in the Kwality FoodMarts suit. “I mentioned the sidewalk thing,” I said, “when I talked to him day before yesterday. You know, just in passing. I haven’t called him today. Why? What do you want me to do, get a court order against the guy?”

  “Why not?”

  “It’d be kind of like running to the principal for protection,” I said, feeling uncomfortable.

  She shook her head at me, impatient with the tender sensibilities of the male. “Life is not a schoolyard, Sam,” she said.

  “May I quote you?”

  “You may heed me,” she said.

  “Anita could be right,” Brett told me. Even males don’t worry a lot about the tender sensibilities of other males. “You can’t just go around laying the guy out every time you see him. Sooner or later, you'll be the one in the wrong.”

  “All right,” I said, reluctantly seeing the sense in it. “If he shows up again, I’ll put Mort on the case.”

  But Dale Wormley never showed up again. He didn’t get the chance.

  5

  I was in my lap pool when the police arrived. In Bel Air I have the normal swimming pool, but it’s hard to find ways to exercise those long torso muscles back east, so when I bought the townhouse in the city I had a lap pool put in the basement, and a certain period down there every morning is a part of my routine. The in-house communication system includes a loudspeaker and microphone behind a grid high in the tile wall above the lap pool, and that combination of tile and water creates the only really good echo effect in Robinson’s life these days. He loves opportunities to talk to me from upstairs when I’m down there, and enunciates even more unctuously than usual. Even with one ear in the water and both arms churning up spray, I had no trouble making out the reverberating tones of his, “The police are here!”

  I heard it. It threw me off, I floundered, I filled my mouth with chlorinated water, found my footing, stood up with wavelets at my chest, coughed, and called up at that grid, “What?” Even though I’d heard.

  “The police. Detectives, to be precise, ” he said precisely. “They wish to speak to you. ”

  “Tell them to give me five minutes,” I called, clambering out of the pool. I padded down to my robe flung over the back of the bench at one end of the pool, shrugged into it, and hurried upstairs.

  It took more than five minutes. I had to shower off the chlorine, then dress. I moved as quickly as I could, but still it was probably a quarter of an hour before I reached the living room and found the two detectives seated there, chatting together, drinking coffee that Robinson must have offered. Robinson himself was not present.

  Why had I expected them both to be men? I guess the ingrown assumptions don’t change. Anyway, one was male, the other female, both probably in their late thirties. The man was short, chunky, with thinning brown hair and a blobby lumpy face, like something made of Play-Doh. The woman was an inch or so taller than he, big-boned rather than fat, with straight black Vampira hair and a long horsy face. The man wore a brown jacket, checked shirt, dark blue bow tie and gray slacks, while the woman was dressed in a severely cut dark blue suit, plain white blouse, dark hose and sensible shoes. All in all, he looked like a high school math teacher and she looked like the woman who interviews you when you plan to adopt a child. They both got to their feet when I came in, giving me expressionless looks. I said, “Sorry to hold you up.”

  “No problem,” said the man, and the woman said, “We understand you were swimming.”

  “Exercise,” I explained. Swimming indoors in one’s own house in Manhattan in October would be the depth of decadence if it didn’t have a morally correct purpose behind it.

  “So your man said,” the woman agreed, smiling faintly to let me know she accepted the morally correct purpose as an adequate excuse.

  The man said, “I’m Detective Feeney and this is Detective LaMarca.”

  “How do you do? Sit down, sit down, drink your coffee.”

  They sat down, and so did I. They didn’t say anything about how good the coffee was, so I could then tell them it was Robinson’s pride and joy, and thus ease us forward through the civilities. In fact, they didn’t go on with the chitchat at all. Detective Feeney said, “Do you know a man named Dale Wormley?”

  This was four days after the incident in the Lucille Lortel theater, and my first reaction was surprise it had taken Wormley so long to try to make trouble out of it. Then my second reaction was surprise they’d send two detectives to my house over such a thing. And then my third re
action was disbelief; this was something else, some further annoyance from Wormley. Little I knew. I said, “I know who he is, yes.”

  Detective LaMarca laced her fingers in her lap, frowning at me slightly. “You know who he is? Does that mean you know him, or you don’t know him?”

  “We’re not pals,” I told her. “I’ve met him twice. He’s on the other side of a lawsuit I’m party to.”

  “Kwality commercials,” said Feeney.

  “That’s right.”

  “You met him twice,” LaMarca said. “The first time was here?”

  “Not in the house. Out on the sidewalk.”

  “Would you tell us about it?”

  Maybe that was the point where I should have asked them to tell me about it, to ask what their interest was and why they were here, but I felt they’d prefer to run this interview in their own way at their own pace, so I simply told them the story of Dale Wormley accosting me on the street, Kendall bringing in the cops, and that being the end of it. “I don’t know if the beat guys made a report,” I finished.

  “They did,” Feeney told me.

  LaMarca said, “Wormley complained you twisted his arm or something. Is that what happened?”

  “Not exactly,” I said. “He kept shoving me, putting his hand on my chest and shoving, so I put a come- along hold on his thumb to make him stop. As soon as he calmed down a little, I let him go.”

  “You bent his thumb, you mean,” Feeney said. “That’s right.”

  LaMarca said, “Tell us about the other time you saw him.”

  “Is that why you’re here?” I asked her, though I still didn’t believe it.

  “We’ll get to that,” she said. “Let’s just take it in order, the way things happened.”

  “Okay,” I said, and described round two. At the end, I said, “There were a lot of other people there. They can verify that he swung at me three times before I finally did something about it.”

  LaMarca said, “You knocked Wormley out?”

  “I think he was groggy, or unconscious, something like that,” I said. “He went down, and a couple of people there carried him out. He was gone when I left the theater.”

  Feeney said, grinning at me, “Just as well by you, huh?”

  “I wasn’t in any hurry to see him again,” I agreed.

  LaMarca leaned forward, hooking her laced fingers over her skirted knee. She said, “The first time, you saw Dale Wormley here and he shoved you and you bent his thumb. The second time, you saw him at the theater, and he swung at you and you knocked him out. And the next time you saw him?”

  “There was no next time,” I said.

  She looked faintly surprised. “You just let it go at that?”

  “Let what go? He was the one with the problem. As far as I’m concerned, the company that syndicates PACKARD is suing the company that hired Wormley to do a putdown parody of the Packard character. It’s between them.”

  “‘Putdown parody,’” LaMarca repeated. “You’ve seen these commercials?”

  “Sure. I had to for the suit.”

  “And you don’t like them.”

  “They’re smarmy,” I told her. “They make Packard out to be a bully and a blowhard. There’s probably better ways to sell light bulbs and toilet paper.”

  “So you have to take it personally,” LaMarca pointed out, being calm and reasonable. “It’s you he’s insulting, isn’t it?”

  “I could feel that way sometimes,” I agreed, “but of course it isn’t. I’m not really Packard, after all. I’m not a criminologist with a midwestem university.”

  “Solving crimes,” Feeney said, grinning at me, man to man. “Being brilliant.”

  “Which is, of course, easy to make fun of,” I told him. “When the show was on the air we were made fun of several times. Mad Magazine did a spoof, Saturday Night Live took off on us three or four times. Stuff like that.”

  “And it didn’t bother you,” LaMarca said. “That’s the point you’re trying to make, isn’t it?”

  “Look,” I said. “If Wormley’s made some sort of complaint against me—”

  “He never did,” Feeney told me. “From the way he acted with the beat cops here, that first incident here, he figured the law would just automatically be on your side because you’re a celebrity.”

  “It doesn’t work that way,” I said.

  “We know that, ” LaMarca said, and then she said, “Does anyone live in this house besides you and the man who let us in?”

  “No,” I said, wondering what this abrupt change of subject was all about. “Why?”

  Instead of LaMarca answering the question, Feeney asked one of his own: “Were you out last night, Mr. Holt?”

  It was the first time either of them had called me by name; as though now they were getting down to it, whatever it was. I said, “Dinner with friends in Brooklyn.”

  “Excuse my asking this,” Feeney said, with his friendly grin, “but you came home alone?”

  “Yes.” Anita had been working at her restaurant, of course, so I’d been alone at dinner at my friend Terry Young’s house. Anita and I play our relationship casual, avoiding heavy plans, avoiding the requirements of habit. We wind up spending about half the nights together, at her place or mine; unfortunately, as I was now beginning to realize, last night had not been one of them.

  “And at about what time did you get home, Mr. Holt?”

  “I got home at about one o’clock in the morning, Detective Feeney,” I said, feeling more comfortable about pressuring a male, “and I would really like to know why you want to know.”

  LaMarca said, “Did you see Dale Wormley on your way home?”

  I felt unfriendly toward her, and allowed it to show. “I’ve already said,” I pointed out, “that I haven’t seen Wormley since the incident in the theater. That does include last night. So if he’s decided to make trouble by claiming I—”

  “Dale Wormley isn’t claiming anything, Mr. Holt,” Feeney told me. Then he grinned, almost boyishly, and sat back, shaking his head. “We probably should have mentioned this at the beginning,” he said. “We aren’t from the precinct.”

  “Oh, no?”

  “No.” Feeney’s smile was utterly untrustworthy. “We’re from Homicide,” he said.

  6

  Shortly after six-thirty on that morning, three hours or so before Detectives Feeney and LaMarca came to talk to me, a neighbor of mine whom I don’t know—I know none of my neighbors, in fact—a young woman named Crissy Ladbroke who is a stock analyst with a firm down in the financial district, left her floor-through second-story apartment in a converted brick brownstone essentially similar to mine and five doors away toward Sixth Avenue, and went downstairs for her usual pre-breakfast jog through the neighborhood. When she opened the inner door, however, she found a man crumpled on the floor in the tiny vestibule. Her initial impression that the man was a sleeping drunk lasted only a second or two, until she realized that the odd shape of his head was not a trick of early morning shadows but a result of it having been crushed by a blow with something very hard. Terrified, disgusted, she retreated back into the building and up to her apartment, where she dialed 911 and didn’t emerge again until the first police arrived.

  The man was Dale Wormley. According to the Medical Examiner’s office’s preliminary report, he had most likely died some time between midnight and three in the morning. The back of his head had been struck three times by a piece of wood, probably a two-by-four, minute shreds of which were now mixed with Wormley’s flesh and blood and bone. For a number of reasons, it seemed unlikely that he had been killed where he had been found. There wasn’t much room in that small vestibule, for instance, to swing a two-by- four, and no blood had been seen on the floor or walls. (Potential bloodstains, now being analyzed, had subsequently been found in the street in front of my house, near the curb, between two parked cars.)

  Wormley’s wallet, containing driver’s license and credit cards and a moderate amount of mo
ney, was still in his pocket. There was no apparent violence to him other than the blows to the back of the head. His clothing had not been disarranged.

  By seven-thirty, the police had reached Wormley’s home, a studio apartment in a large building on West End Avenue in the eighties, where he had recently been living alone. Searching the apartment, they had found a letter he had written to me but never sent, dated the day after our encounter in the Lucille Lortel theater, in which he complained bitterly that I was depriving him of his “right to live,” a phrase that appeared four times in the three page rambling hand-written letter. They had also found the name and current phone number of his former girlfriend, Julie Kaplan.

  At first, Julie Kaplan was merely shocked and stunned by the news, but she then told the police that Wormley had had no enemies other than me. She told them that Dale had felt his life was totally bound up with mine, that he and I formed some sort of binary star in which I was the one with all the light and sustenance, and he was the “dark star,” in his usual phrase for it, made dark by the fact of my existence. She said that his brooding about me, his obsessive belief that I was keeping him from his rightful destiny, was the principal reason she had left him, a few months ago.

  Of course, now that I had murdered Dale Wormley, as Julie Kaplan explained to the police, she saw things in a different light and realized Dale must have been psychic to some degree, must have had a premonition of how it would all end. Of course Sam Holt must have been the one who’d killed Dale, she explained, because there was no one else with any reason. Wormley’s crowding me, pestering me, pressuring me, imitating me, had inevitably led to this result. What other explanation could there be?

  After they’d finished talking with Julie Kaplan, Detectives Feeney and LaMarca came to me, and after that period of preliminary nonsense they described to me this situation and what Julie Kaplan had said, and then they asked if they would have to go get a court order before I would let them search the house. “For a two-by-four?” I asked.