Mort, frowning thoughtfully at the papers on his desk, seated well forward with one arm behind him, elbow up, hand clasped on chair-arm, said, “Let me see if I can guess what happened. Dale Wormley’s attitude toward Sam Holt seemed to you obsessive and unreal—”
“That’s right,” she said, still very bright-eyed.
Mort nodded. He kept watching the desk. I knew he felt uncomfortable around high emotion, and this was his delicate way of keeping the temperature in the room bearable. “When the police came to you this morning,” he said, “and told you what had happened, your immediate thought was, ‘I was wrong, and Dale was right.’ You thought he must have been telling you about a real danger, and you’d ignored him, and if you’d paid more attention and been—I think we say ‘supportive’ these days—if you’d been all that, nothing bad would have happened to him.”
“That’s the first thing I told the cops,” she agreed, nodding, leaning toward Mort as though he were the physician with the diagnosis that would save her. “When they told me, right away I said, ‘Dale was right! I should have listened to him!’ ”
“And so,” Mort said, nodding slowly, seeming to read his words off the strewn papers on his desk, “having been converted to Dale’s belief, you immediately passed it on to the police as your own.”
“I did! That’s exactly what I did!” She was bobbing up and down on her chair now, and she turned from Mort to me to say, “And I really believed it, I wasn’t trying to just make trouble or anything like that. I believed it!”
“May I ask,” Mort said, peering almost surreptitiously at her through his eyebrows, “what changed your mind?”
“Kim,” she said.
He actually raised his head to look at her directly. “Kim?” he echoed.
“My roommate,” she explained. “See, when I left Dale I just moved in with this friend of mine, Kim Peyser.”
“A young woman,” suggested Mort.
“Yes, sure,” she said, and flashed a brief sunny smile, and said, “Dale and I aren’t, weren’t—You know, we weren’t through, neither of us thought we were, well, you know. So Kim had room, and I moved in with her, cause it would just be for a while.”
“Yes, of course.”
“So when the police came and told me,” she said, and shook her head at the memory, making that heavy garment of her hair lift and move in a slow wave around her face, “when they were going,” she explained, “they said I shouldn’t be alone for a while, so I called Kim at work and she—Kim works with one of those phone-survey places, you know? Call you up and ask you what toothpaste you use and all that. So it’s kind of loose, you can come and go kind of when you want. So she came home, and I told her everything, and right away she said, ‘Julie, you gotta be nuts. Sam Holt didn’t kill Dale.’ And right up till then I was believing it, believing the whole thing, I really was.” Turning to me—as the injured party, I suppose—appealing directly to me, she said, “And the second Kim said that, it just fell apart. I mean, I knew you didn’t do it.”
“Thank you,” I said.
“No, I mean it,” she said, utterly serious and determined to make me understand. “It was like being with your friends and you get high,” she said earnestly, “and you all talk about how the human race really came from another planet and all that, and everybody in the room really and truly believes it. And then you come down and you say, ‘Oh, wow, that was weird.’ You know what I mean?”
I had to grin and nod and say, “Yes, I do.”
“Well,” she said, “that’s exactly what it was like. I told Kim the story, and she said, ‘Julie, you gotta be nuts,’ and that second I saw she was right, and it was crazy to think you were gonna go out and kill Dale. I mean, somebody who sues somebody is not somebody who goes out and kills somebody, it’s like a whole other mindset, you know?”
Mort laughed. “Very cogent,” he said. “Very well reasoned, Miss Kaplan.”
“So I called the police,” she told the both of us, “right away, and of course I couldn’t get to the same people that talked to me before. It was a man and a woman and—”
“Feeney and LaMarca,” I said.
She gave me a stricken look, reminded of her guilt. “They went right to you, didn’t they? Right after me, they went to you.”
“Of course,” I said.
“Well, I left a message for them,” she said, nodding to show her determination, her heavy hair nodding after her. “I told them I was crazy before, I explained the whole thing, but it was just a message, you know? Not like really talking to them or anything like that. I mean, who knows when they’ll see it or what they’ll think. So I just wandered around the apartment, and I said to myself, ‘Julie, you’ve got to do more, you’ve got to fix this up somehow.’ So that’s when I decided the thing to do was find you and tell you what happened and explain how I was crazy, and tell you I’m ready to do anything I can to fix it up again. I’ll talk to those cops, I’ll do whatever you say.”
“I appreciate that,” I said, though I couldn’t see much she could do to repair any damage she might have made.
“However,” Mort said slowly, thoughtfully, and now his chin had sunk again, it was the desktop that absorbed his attention once more as he said, “At this point, Miss Kaplan, I’m afraid, by far the best thing you could do for Mr. Holt is nothing.”
She leaned forward to stare at him, frowning, intense. “Nothing? But I want to—”
“You have made your statement to the police,” Mort explained, not looking up. “They will now evaluate it, along with other statements from other concerned individuals, and along with whatever physical evidence they may obtain, and eventually they will decide the proper weight to give your statement. Now, however, if you approach them and say, ‘I wish to retract my statement, I wish to make a quite different, in fact reversed, statement,’ they will want to know what changed your mind. In the course of your interview with them, they will ask you if Mr. Holt has talked to you, and you will have to say yes, that you talked not only with Mr. Holt but also with his attorney.” Looking shocked, she said, “But that isn’t—”
“You are going to say,” he interrupted her, “that I am making the wrong inference. But I have made no inference, it’s simply implicit in the statement of the facts. So the best thing you can do, Miss Kaplan, is not volunteer to state those facts.”
She sat back, almost withdrawing within that cloak of hair as though into another room, to think about what he’d said. From the way her mouth moved, she was chewing the inside of her cheek. Then she shook her head—her hair heaved slowly after—and looked ruefully in my direction, saying, “I really loused up, didn’t I?”
Why did I want to reassure her? After all, she was the one who’d wronged me. And yet I did; I said, “The police don’t jump to conclusions, you know.”
“I guess not.” Then she brightened, saying, “I guess you’d know that for sure, wouldn’t you? I mean, you used to be a cop and all.”
“That’s right,” I agreed, surprised she knew that bit of my biography.
She must have seen the surprise in my face; she grinned back at it, saying, “I know a lot about you, Mr. Holt. Not through my own fault. Dale knew everything there was to know. He did scrapbooks. You were like his hobby.”
The idea made me uncomfortable. I said, “I was?”
“He knew all kinds of things,” she assured me, “stuff I bet you forgot yourself. He knew more than your biggest fan would know.”
“But he wasn’t a fan,” I said.
The smile turned rueful again, and she said, “No, he wasn’t.” She’d put the maroon folder on the floor beside her chair, and now she stooped to pick it up, glancing at Mort half humorously and half apprehensively as she said, “Can I show the pictures now?”
Feeling uncomfortable, not wanting to see Dale Wormley try to be me, I said, “Why? What’s the point?”
“I want you to see for yourself,” she told me, “he wasn’t just—he was more than that
. The part you know.” She drew a paper out of the folder, not quite looking at it as she did so, and extended it toward me.
I recognized it; or, that is, I recognized the kind of thing it was. I used to have such things of my own, in a stack on the shelf in my closet, when I had the studio in Santa Monica, before PACKARD was born. A typewriter-size sheet of heavy paper. On one side is a glossy black-and-white photo of the actor, posed to look what he thinks of as his best. On the reverse, usually on a separate sheet glued or taped in place but sometimes more expensively printed on the back of the photo itself, the actor’s resume, his list of credits. Which parts in which shows at what theaters on what dates; which movies; which television commercials; maybe which industrial shows. Some resumes include theatrical training history, and all include the name and address and phone number of the agent or “contact” (a word meaning the actor doesn’t yet have an agent), plus an answering service number.
I took this photo reluctantly, and tried to keep my expression blank as I looked at it. Or them, actually; Wormley had chosen, as many actors do, a format meant to show his versatility. Instead of one picture, the glossy side of the resume was divided into four photos, showing Wormley in four different poses and costumes and settings. In the upper left, he wore a cowboy hat and an open-necked plaid shirt, and he smiled openly and directly at the camera in a howdy- ma’am style. In the upper right, he wore a tux and leaned forward and down to his right a little, smiling kind of suggestively and secretively up toward the camera. In the bottom left, he wore boxing gloves and trunks and stood in classic boxer-photo pose. And in the bottom right, in trenchcoat, winking at the viewer, he was Packard.
Mm. A pretty good Packard, actually. If looking like that were all it took, the job was as much his as anybody’s. Or was I being ridiculously defensive to even think that way?
Julie Kaplan said, with some strain in her voice, trying to convince me, “You see what I mean, that he wasn’t just imitating you. I mean, he was a—”
“Yes, I see that.”
“He was an actor, ” she finished. “Before he ever got mixed up with you.”
Mixed up with me? I turned the sheet over and saw that he’d spent some of his Kwality FoodMarts money having a first-class resume prepared. The facts of his career were printed on the back of the photo itself. He had a pretty respectable history there, with a number of regional theaters, a few commercials before Kwality FoodMarts, and minor parts in a couple of drive-in type movies (“‘State Trooper’ in BIKERS FROM HELL”). There was probably no more than half here of what Brett Burgess’s resume could show, but to be honest it was a lot more than mine without PACKARD.
“He was an actor,” Julie Kaplan said. It was important to her that I understand and accept that.
“I see he was.”
“And things were going to get better for him, too,” she told me, sitting up straighter, clenching her hands in her lap. “That’s why I knew we’d get back together. Once he was in that show, he’d stop worrying about you all the time—” said, though unconsciously, as though I were the villain of the piece “—and things could be the way they used to be.”
I looked at her. “Show?”
“Four Square,” she told me. “The new play at Lincoln Center with Rita Colby. It’s going into rehearsal in January.”
Three months from now. I said, “He was cast in it?”
“Not officially, not yet. But he knows Rita Colby, he dated her a few times.”
That surprised me, though on second thought it shouldn’t have. In her early fifties, well-preserved in a gaunt but dramatically attractive way, Rita Colby would be about twenty years older than Dale Wormley; but why not? One of those rarities these days, a true theater star, Rita Colby was the closest thing America had to England’s Maggie Smith. An extremely talented and dedicated performer, she was also maintaining the Broadway mythos of the overwrought grande dame, the Tallulah Bankhead tradition; a tall handsome blond fellow like Dale Wormley would be quite naturally one of the perks of that position. But in my eyes it lessened Wormley, and I wondered how he himself had taken it. I said, “Rita Colby promised him the part?”
“Oh, no,” Julie Kaplan said. “Not like that. Kay did. Dale’s agent. He’s Rita’s agent, too, and he absolutely promised Dale the second male lead in Four Square. Dale told me there was no question at all, he had the part.”
I looked again at the back of the resume, and saw that the agent listed was Kay Henry Associates, on Third Avenue here in New York. I didn’t know the agency, but there was no particular reason why I should.
“May I see that?” Mort asked, reaching toward the resume.
I handed it to him and, as he studied it, turning it over and over like an archaeologist with a particularly fine piece of pottery he’d dug up, I said to Julie Kaplan, “I am sorry about what happened.”
“I was just being stupid,” she said, misunderstanding me. “I feel like such—”
“I meant Dale’s death.”
“Oh.” Her eyes brightened again, with unshed tears. “It leaves things so up in the air, you know? We didn’t—finish the argument.”
“I know.”
Seeming satisfied, Mort extended the resume across his desk toward Julie Kaplan, saying, “Thank you. And Mr. Holt, I’m sure, appreciates your attempt to correct your mistake.”
“That’s right,” I said.
Taking the resume, putting it in the maroon folder, she told me, “I’m sorry I didn’t get to talk to those cops direct. But at least they’ll get the message.”
“Of course they will.”
With a little smile toward Mort, she said, “And I won’t do anything else, I promise. Not a thing.”
“We both appreciate that,” Mort told her.
She got to her feet, then, and we said our goodbyes, and she left. Closing the door after her, returning to his desk, Mort said, “We can only hope she won’t decide to be helpful after all.”
“Oh, I think you scared her off,” I told him. “You were imitating John Houseman, weren’t you?”
“Was I?” His private smile, directed as usual at his desk, was impossible to read. But then he looked up at me and said, “Now, when the police come to talk to you again, probably later today, it would be best if you didn’t mention this meeting with Miss Kaplan, unless they themselves bring it up.”
“Am I going to see the police again?”
“Oh, yes, I think so,” he said, nodding at a corner of the room. “That’s why I asked to see the pictures. All I know of Dale Wormley is those commercials, where of course he’s trying to look like you. I wanted to know how much similarity there was under normal circumstances.”
I didn’t get it. “Why?”
He looked directly at me, with his quizzical smile. “Has it really not occurred to you?” he asked. “This is carrying modesty to a fault, Sam.”
“What is?”
“Dale Wormley looked very much like you,” he said. “He was murdered in front of your house. It will have occurred to the police by now, though I can see it hasn’t crossed your mind, that Dale Wormley might not have been the intended target at all.”
I had a sudden mental image: The man who looks like me crosses the street toward my house. It is night. He could easily be me. A dark figure rises behind him, lifting the two-by-four. “Oh,” I said.
9
I still have family out on Long Island, a number of uncles and aunts and cousins, so phone calls from all of them were among the messages waiting for me when I walked downtown and home that afternoon, after lunch in the Oyster Bar with Mort. But those messages were swamped numerically by the calls from reporters. The murder of a celebrity lookalike in front of the celebrity’s house is a natural media event, so the phone had not been still since the news had broken. In fact, Robinson told me, shortly after I’d left for Mort’s office this morning several journalists had arrived at the house, clearly prepared to camp on my doorstep forever if necessary. Fortunately, Robinson’s
phone call to the precinct had produced a police response heavy enough and irritable enough to end that nonsense right away. (Though, as it later turned out, both the New York Post and the National Enquirer had kept photographers parked down the block, who had recorded for posterity, with the aid of telephoto lenses, the fact of my midaftemoon return.)
My PR outfit is in Los Angeles. I phoned there, talked to a girl who always wants me to call her Babs—I never do—and she gave me the name and number of their associated New York firm, who would deflect all further public attention. So I called them— the woman there introduced herself crisply as Ms. Henderson—we worked out my simple and dignified public statement on the tragedy, and Ms. Henderson went briskly off to erect that necessary buffer. Only then did I begin the calls to reassure my kin that their most famous relative was still alive and intact, and when Uncle Edgar said, “Get the hell out of that city a minute. Come on out here,” I found myself saying, “You’re right.”
There were only two more calls to make, then; the first being to Anita, who agreed with Uncle Edgar at once: “Go,” she said, “get away from it, call me when you get back.”
“Can you take time off from the restaurant?”
“You know I can’t,” she said. “Call me tomorrow.” I laughed. “Stay as long as I like,” I said, “but call you when I get back tomorrow.”
“You got it. Take your time, and be back tomorrow.” The other call was to the place on West 56th Street where I occasionally rent cars. I ordered a Mercury Montego—one of the few cars in which my long legs can be reasonably comfortable—and one of their guys drove it down to me. At last, leaving Robinson to deal with the house and whatever else might happen, I slipped out of the city just ahead of the rush hour.
After a pleasant evening with relatives, who’ve grown a lot calmer about me since PACKARD went off the air, and a restful night in the guestroom of Uncle Edgar’s clifftop North Shore home, with its morning view of the Sound—a few hardy souls still sailed out there, ignoring the end of summer—I drove back to the city, arriving just at lunchtime, to find Detectives Feeney and LaMarca waiting for me. “I put them in the living room, as before,” Robinson told me, taking my overnight bag.
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