“Stranger things have happened,” Feeney said, grinning cheerfully.
“I can’t think of any,” I told him. “Do you really and truly believe I went out last night and bludgeoned Dale Wormley to death, for being a pest?”
He looked as though he wanted to say stranger things have happened again, but he contented himself with an amiable smile while his partner LaMarca said, “Mr. Holt, up till now we don’t believe anything. We’re just taking this step by step, and you’re the next step.”
Feeney said, with his meaningless grin, “There’s gonna be lots more to learn about Wormley before we’re done. Other people with motives, maybe. An obsessive character like that, maybe you weren’t the first one he leaned on. Or maybe Julie Kaplan did it herself, tried to shift suspicion over onto you.”
“Or the Senator from Nebraska,” LaMarca said.
I frowned at her. “The Senator from Nebraska?”
Feeney’s grin turned into an actual laugh, and he said, “That’s a little catch phrase of Marie’s. Means you never know, when you start, work your way into your victim’s life, where the road’s gonna take you. First thing you know, the victim knew the Senator from Nebraska.”
“Went to school with him,” LaMarca explained, “or in the army with him. Sat beside him on a plane once.”
“This time,” I said, “I get the feeling I’m the Senator from Nebraska.”
Laughing again, Feeney said, “See how much progress already.”
LaMarca unlaced her fingers to gesture at the room, saying, “About having a little look through the house. Any problems?”
“Not at all,” I told her, suddenly weary with it. Why had Dale Wormley yoked himself to me like this? “Search to your hearts’ content,” I told them both.
And I wouldn’t have been a bit surprised if they’d found a bloodstained two-by-four somewhere in the house; it felt like that all of a sudden. However, they didn’t.
7
The suit was still alive. Dale Wormley’s death really meant nothing at all in that regard, since the television commercials still existed and Kwality FoodMarts would have no particular reason to stop running them; except an order from a judge. But Wormley’s death would delay things, confuse things, which is one of the reasons I spent most of the morning in Morton Adler’s office high in the Graybar Building next to Grand Central.
A rumpled man with a neat round balding head, Mort’s usual manner is one of shy amusement, as though he doesn’t particularly see why everybody else wants to make such a fuss. His office, with its large windows overlooking the remaining air-rights in midtown Manhattan, is probably large enough, but is so cluttered and messy as to look small. Stacks of papers and books mound messily everywhere, most of them crowned by some recent copy of the New York Times, quarter-folded with the crossword puzzle on top, completed in neat black inked letters.
After we’d talked about the lawsuit a while, our conversation turned to the idea of me as a murder suspect, which made Mort lower his eyes and smile privately at the papers all over his desk. “The police are doing their job, Sam,” he told the papers. “You know that. You’ve been in their shoes.”
“Not really,” I said.
“You’ve been a police officer,” he insisted, shaking his head at the papers. “You know they’re doing their work by the numbers, the way they should.”
“It feels different,” I said, “when I’m one of the numbers.”
“Of course it does.” Head still down, he glanced up through his eyebrows at me and smiled. “You know it’s ridiculous to think you might have beaten this fellow with a stick,” he said, “so you quite naturally resent the idea that anyone else might not see how ridiculous it is.”
“In fact,” I said, “I was violent with him twice before. The cops made a point of that.”
“So your resentment,” he said, nodding, looking at the messy desk again, raising his eyebrows as he followed the implications, “is combined with a little bit of nervousness. You did bend this fellow’s thumb the first time you saw him. The second time, the physical violence increased.”
“I knocked him out,” I said. “It escalated.”
“Escalated.” He shook his head slowly and looked away out the window at the gray sky. “One of the more minor bad effects of the Vietnam war,” he said, “though no less annoying for being minor, was the emergence of that word out of the department stores where it belonged and into uses in general speech where it never really quite applies.”
“Sorry,” I said. “I didn’t know that was one of your pet peeves.”
“Neither did I,” he said, looking both surprised and amused. “However, escalation or no, there is, I agree, a progression in the level of violence between you and Wormley. First he pushes you and you bend his thumb. Second he tries to punch you and you knock him out. Third . . .” And he grinned slyly at me.
“Sure,” I said. “The police could see it that way. Third, I come home tired and probably half drunk, late at night—”
“Were you half drunk?”
“I had wine with dinner at the Youngs’. I don’t believe I was half drunk, no. But say I was, or just tired and aggravated. And Wormley appears, and attacks me again, and this time I lay him out with a two-by-four.”
“But what then ensues ...” he said, and shook his head.
I hadn’t so far thought about that part of it, the events after the death of Wormley, but now I saw what Mort meant. “That’s right,” I said. “Killing him I might have done, but the rest no.”
“It does seem unlikely,” he agreed. “Have you, by the way, ready access to heavy pieces of wood around that place of yours? Any construction or repair work going on, anything of that nature?”
“No,” I said, “not in my house. But there’s always two or three dumpsters around that neighborhood.”
He looked alert. “Dumpsters? Why don’t I know that word?”
“Those are those large open-top metal boxes,” I told him, “that look like a truck without cab or wheels. Construction crews use them for all the debris and trash. I think there’s one on my block right now, down toward Fifth, on the other side of the street.”
“The opposite way from where Wormley was found.”
“Yes. Why?”
“I have no idea,” he said. “But to return to the point, if Wormley did attack you a third time last night, and if you did go to this dumpster—thank you for that word, it makes up for escalate—and if you did take a piece of wood and hit him with it—”
“On the back of the head,” I pointed out. “Three times.”
“I agree,” he said. “You would not, and you would not. Not with his back turned, and not more than once. But even so, you would not have then clumsily hidden the fellow just a few doors away from your own and gone to bed as though nothing had happened.”
“That’s right.”
“What you would have done, Sam,” he went on, smiling now reproachfully at me, “if you had just beaten Dale Wormley to death on your doorstep, you would have gone into your house and made two phone calls, the second one to the police.”
I laughed, despite the grimness of the subject, seeing what he meant. “And the first one would have been to you,” I said.
“Waking me, I assure you,” he told me, “from an extremely pleasant sleep.”
“None of this,” I said, “does me much good when it comes to convincing the police I didn’t kill Dale Wormley.”
He looked surprised. “But you don’t have to,” he said. “That isn’t your job, it’s theirs. They must find the evidence, sift it, come to a conclusion, convince their superiors. At the moment, I imagine you are a name on their suspect list, but not very earnestly, not enough to keep them from looking farther for more names to add.”
“I suppose you’re right.” I felt a bit easier, but not much. Do nothing is always the hardest advice in the world to follow. “But there really is nothing for me to do, is there?”
“Of course not.”
He peered through his eyebrows at me again, with that sly amused smile. “Our old friend Packard isn’t thinking of taking a hand, is he?”
“No no,” I assured him, feeling embarrassed, and the intercom buzzer on his phone sounded. “I’ll just wait and let the police work their way through it,” I went on. “And if it ever looks as though there’s something to worry about, the first thing I’ll do is call you. That’s a promise.”
He nodded his approval, and rested his hand on the phone as he said, “But not, if you can possibly avoid it, in the wee hours.”
“Do my best,” I said.
Mort smiled and picked up the phone and said into it, “Yes, Myrtie?” Then he raised an eyebrow at me, and said, “Hmmm.” He considered for a few seconds, then said, “I’ll come out,” and hung up. Then he looked at me. “We have a visitor,” he said.
“We?”
“Julie Kaplan,” Mort said.
8
“The woman who told the police I was the only one who could possibly have murdered Dale Wormley?”
“Yes,” Mort agreed, getting to his feet. “She is here, and wants to speak with me about you.” Moving toward the closed door of his office, he said, “I’ll leave the door slightly open, so you can hear. You needn’t come out.”
I also stood, and followed him to the door, and stood behind it as he went out, leaving it a few inches open behind himself. I heard Myrtie the secretary say, “Here’s Mr. Adler,” and then Mort’s calm voice saying, “Miss Kaplan?”
“Yes. You’re Sam Holt’s lawyer, aren’t you?” Her voice was young, breathy, the words pushed out in a rush. She sounded brisk, but unsure. As though she weren’t used to being unsure.
“I am indeed,” Mort told her. “How do you happen to know that, if I may ask?”
“Dale’s papers,” she said. “I wanted to find Sam Holt’s address, but he didn’t have it written down anywhere. But I found your name, with the lawsuit papers.”
“Excuse me, Miss Kaplan,” Mort said, “but let me understand something. You have Dale Wormley’s papers? I’m afraid I don’t quite follow that.”
“At his apartment,” she said. “I still have my key.”
“Ah, I see.”
“We used to live together.”
“Yes, so I understand.”
“Anyway,” her quick breathy voice went on, “I have to talk to Sam Holt, but I couldn’t find his address or anything at Dale’s place, so that’s why I’m here.”
“Because you have to speak to Mr. Holt?”
“Yes. As soon as possible.”
“May I ask why?”
“I owe him the most awful apology,” the voice said, fast and urgent. “I want him to know I called the police back, I told them I was crazy before—”
“When you said that Mr. Holt was surely the murderer of your friend?”
“Oh, gosh,” she said, and sounded younger than ever, and penitent, but in a hurried and careless way. “They told him, I guess,” she said, “and he told you.”
“Naturally.”
“The thing is, I want to explain to him . . . Listen, Mr. Adler, I’ll tell it all to you, okay? But I don’t want to just leave a message or something like that, I want to tell Sam Holt face to face, I want him to know I’m really serious about this, I feel terrible if I made any trouble, and I just want him to understand why I said what I said. But I have to see him himself. I really do.”
Well, I’m an actor, right? I know an entrance cue when I hear one. Besides, I didn’t like eavesdropping from behind a door. So I stepped around it, pulled it open, stepped into the doorway, and said, “Okay, you can tell me then.”
She was in profile to the doorway, facing Mort, her left side toward me. She turned at the sound of my voice, and her eyes widened, her mouth dropped open, she staggered as though she’d been punched. “Oh!” she said, and made a quick erasing kind of gesture with her free hand; then put that hand to her breast and looked faint, but no longer terrified. “Oh, my gosh,” she said, more breathy and weak than ever. “Oh, you do look like him!”
Up till then, I’d always thought of the equation the other way; Dale Wormley looked like me. But this was the girlfriend, or former girlfriend, and when I made my unexpected appearance she reversed the order, and for just a second she’d seen her murdered lover in the doorway. “I’m sorry,” I said, raising a hand, realizing what I’d done to her. Another reversal; she was here to apologize to me.
“Oh, wow,” she said, panting for breath, shaking her head. She looked to be twenty-two or twenty-three, short, barely five feet, dressed in jogging sneakers and jeans and a bulky green jacket. A large floppy black leather shoulderbag hung at her left side, and in her left hand she carried a large maroon folder. She had a small pretty face with very large eyes, but then she also had a lot of heavy brown hair done in complex waves, like a shampoo model on television. The hair was a mistake, meant for a larger and older and more imposing woman, and making her face seem tinier than it was, almost pinched. When she shook her head, the hair moved like a large garment. “That’s really amazing,” she said, gazing at me. “To see you in person—”
Mort looked as though he wasn’t entirely sure I’d done the right thing. His expression troubled, he extended a hand toward Julie Kaplan, saying, “Perhaps we should all go into my office, sit down, discuss—”
She was paying no attention to him. Still looking at me, she said, “It’s even more than in the pictures. Here, let me show you—” And she opened the flap of the maroon folder.
I’ve never seen Mort move so fast. In fact, I didn’t know fast movement was possible to him. But, before Julie Kaplan could reach into that maroon folder, he had lunged forward, knocked it out of her hand, pushed her back against the astonished Myrtie’s desk, and planted one foot firmly on the folder on the floor.
“Ow!” the girl cried, more startled than hurt, and then continued to lean backward against Myrtie’s desk, slightly off-balance, as she stared in disbelief at Mort, who looked more rumpled than usual, and very uncomfortable, but determined. “What—?” she started, and her voice broke, and she tried again: “What was that for?”
“Earlier today, young woman,” Mort told her, his own voice trembling and out of breath, “you accused my client of having murdered your paramour. Now you insist on a face-to-face meeting with my client, which he has for some reason chosen to grant. Your immediate response is to reach inside this parcel you were carrying.”
Staring now as though Mort were a dangerous lunatic, Julie Kaplan cried, “For Christ’s sake, what did you think I was going to do, shoot him?” And as she said that, the most farfetched thing she could think of to say, I could see her realizing that, yes, that was exactly what Mort had thought. She gaped at him, and then at me. To me she said, in a hollow kind of voice, “I wanted to show you the pictures. The pictures on his resume.”
Mort, with a little grunt, bent and picked up the folder. Opening it, he looked inside, reached in, moved his hand this way and that, then closed the folder again and extended it toward Julie Kaplan. “My apologies for the melodramatic interpretation,” he said, “but I thought it better to be safe than sorry. Stranger things have happened, you know.”
That’s what Feeney said, I thought.
What happened now was, the three of us went into Mort’s office, leaving the connecting door open, and while Mort cleared stacks of documents and junk off another chair Julie Kaplan removed her green jacket, under which she wore a lightweight tan sweater. The three of us sat down, and Mort, smiling at the girl in what he clearly intended to be a reassuring fashion, said, “So you’ve changed your mind about Sam here. May I ask what made the change?”
“Well, I just saw it was crazy,” she told him. “For weeks and weeks, all Dale could talk about was . . .” She moved her head, glanced at me, shrugged, said, “Well, you know.”
“Me.”
“That’s all he could talk about,” she repeated, “the pressure on him from you, how h
e couldn’t breathe with you on top of him, how you didn’t leave him room to live, and everything that went wrong in his whole life was somehow Sam Holt’s fault. And I’d say, ‘Dale, he didn’t make you fight with Matty Pierce in class, he didn’t make you punch that man from Paramount Pictures, Sam Holt didn’t make you get drunk and miss performances and get fired from Li’l Abner.’ So then he’d get mad at me and say I was taking Sam Holt’s side, even his own girlfriend had to kowtow to the star and all that, and finally I just said, ‘Listen, Sam Holt doesn’t even know you’re alive, he’s got his own things to think about—’”
I glanced over at Mort and saw him grinning faintly in my direction. I grinned just as faintly back. We were both, I knew, imagining the calmative effect she must have had on Dale Wormley by pointing out to him that his bete noire, Sam Holt, didn’t even know he was alive.
She went on, not noticing our side glance: “That’s finally why I couldn’t take it any more, why I just left, three weeks ago. So then— ”
“You and he,” Mort interrupted gently, “have only been apart three weeks?”
“It wasn’t a real separation,” she said, bright-eyed, looking from him to me and back to Mort again. “It was just I couldn’t take his carrying on about, you know, all the time. It was kooky. I think we both know we’re just, I mean we both knew—Oh, my gosh.”
The eyes got brighter as she looked at us, overtaken by her thoughts. She and Wormley had, after all, been involved together emotionally and the fact of his death was still very new to her. The way things like that work, you don’t learn the bad news all at once, you hear it and absorb it just a little bit, and then later on you hear the echo and absorb it some more, and so on, each time getting the news fixed a little more deeply into your brain; as much as you can stand, each time. Like waves breaking over you one after another, until you’re thoroughly soaked. Julie Kaplan was right now feeling the effects of another wave.
Westlake, Donald E - Sam Holt 04 Page 4