Westlake, Donald E - Sam Holt 04

by The Fourth Dimension is Death (v1. 1)

  “Call about having the car picked up, will you?” I asked him, and went into the living room to find the detectives dressed in different but similar clothing and seated in the same chairs as last time. Once again, Robinson had given them coffee. “My lawyer told me you’d be back,” I greeted them.

  Feeney raised his eyebrows and grinned at me, saying “He did?” LaMarca didn’t react at all.

  I said, “Because of the possibility that I was the one who was supposed to be killed.”

  Feeney smiled more broadly, and nodded, either in understanding or agreement. LaMarca, with frowning interest, said, “Do you think that’s so?”

  “No,” I told her. “I’ve thought about it, and of course people in my position get crank letters and death threats every once in a while, but that hasn’t happened since my show went off the air. The only person I can think of, in fact, who might want to kill me,” I added, trying to return Feeney’s smile but somehow unable to make contact with it, “is Dale Wormley.”

  LaMarca looked disapproving. Feeney laughed, and said, “Killed himself by mistake, huh? Thought he was you.”

  “He did think he was me.”

  LaMarca was the no-nonsense partner. “We’d like to show you a picture,” she said.

  I waited, having not the slightest idea what was coming, as Feeney nodded at his partner and picked up a tan manila envelope from the floor beside his chair. He withdrew an 8 x 10 glossy color photograph—every day, someone was handing me an 8 x 10 photo—and extended it toward me.

  It was a close-up, in excellent detail, well lit. The camera looked straight down at a linoleum or tile floor, probably a kitchen floor, of a light cream color. A hand and wrist and part of a forearm were visible on the floor, palm down, fingers partly curled. It was a slender hand and wrist, with pale rose polish on the nails and a small digital watch on the wrist. The clarity was such that I could read the time: 7:48. The sign for AM or PM was too small to make out. Above the hand, in some brownish impasto medium, capital letters were very shakily drawn: SAM, and then a space, and then h The index finger of the hand was at the right end of the crossbar on the last unfinished letter.

  The photo, silent and clear and in beautifully realized color, was chilling. It was also enraging. I heard the tremor of anger in my voice as I said, trying to say it calmly, “Is that blood?”

  “Her own blood,” LaMarca said, unnecessarily.

  It’s Julie Kaplan, I thought, and visualized that heavy wool-like shawl of hair shrouding her head. I said, “Is that AM or PM?”

  They both seemed surprised by the question. “PM,” Feeney told me, then answered my next question before I asked it. “We called here last night. Your man told us where you were and when you’d be back.”

  I said, holding up the photo toward them, “Is it Julie Kaplan?”

  That also surprised them. Feeney said, “No,” and LaMarca said, “It’s Kim Peyser.”

  The name meant nothing to me. Frowning at them, I said, “Who’s that?”

  “Julie Kaplan’s roommate,” LaMarca told me, watching my face.

  Of course; Julie Kaplan had mentioned the name yesterday. The girl she’d moved in with after leaving Wormley, the one who’d told her she was nuts to think I was Wormley’s murderer. Handing the photo back to Feeney, I said, “Do you have any idea why they faked this?”

  “Fake?” Feeney asked me, as though I was trying for a joke he didn’t understand, and LaMarca looked almost outraged as she said, “You don’t think she did it herself?”

  “Of course not,” I said. “Do you? The mortally wounded girl writes her killer’s name in her own blood on the floor, managing to write just enough to make it identifiable before she dies? Do you really think that’s what happened?”

  “It can’t be discounted,” LaMarca told me.

  “Sure it can. The thing’s a fake. Can’t you see that?”

  “No,” LaMarca said, and Feeney held the photo at arm’s length, squinting at it, making a putdown routine out of it as he said, “Looks pretty good to me.”

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake.” I got to my feet, which startled them both. Realizing they both thought they might reach for their pistols—they believed that hokum—I stopped and faced them and carefully said, “I am going to open that drawer over there and take out a pen and a piece of paper.”

  “Okay,” Feeney said.

  I did so, both of them watching me alertly, and brought both back to LaMarca. “Use the drum table here,” I told her. “Print a capital H.”

  She looked at me, at Feeney, at the paper. She shrugged and printed a capital H.

  “Good,” I said. “Do it again.”

  “I don’t see the point,” she told me, “but all right.” She started to print another capital H. She drew two of the three lines of the letter, and I said, “Stop!” putting my hand on the paper to keep her from drawing the third. Then I took my hand away and said, “Take a look at it. That's how you print an H.”

  They looked at the two vertical lines. They looked at one another. Feeney looked at the photo.

  I said, “Everybody who prints a capital H does the two vertical lines first and then connects them with the crossbar. But the name ‘Sam’ followed by two vertical lines wouldn’t establish the accusation clearly enough. The killer wanted to be sure he’d made his point. Not an entire capital H, just enough to show that’s what was intended. The last wonderful milligram of melodrama. So now you know something about the killer. He’s an artiste.”

  “Just a minute,” LaMarca said. “You had lunch with your lawyer yesterday in the Oyster Bar at Grand Central, and left him a little before two. You didn’t get home until nearly three. Where were you in that hour?”

  “That’s when she was killed, huh? I walked home. I usually do in New York, in good weather.”

  Feeney said, “Aren’t you kind of well-known to just walk around the—”

  “No,” I told him, and plucked the photo out of his hand and showed it to him. “Whatsemame didn’t write this,” I told him. “The murdered girl. She didn’t write it. If you come up with a reason why I would have written it, let me know.” I dropped the photo back in his lap and he slapped at it to keep it from falling to the floor. “In the meantime,” I told them both, “I’m busy.” And I turned my back on them and walked to the door.

  “We have more questions, Mr. Holt,” LaMarca said. I looked at her cold-schoolteacher face.

  “Screw you,” I said, and went upstairs to unpack. When Robinson called me for lunch a little later, they were gone.

  10

  It isn’t smart to say screw you to a pair of cops, no matter how much they irritate you, a fact I knew (from both sides of the equation) and of which Mort gloomily reminded me when I phoned him after lunch. I called because my irritation had departed, leaving nervousness, which Mort did little to ease. “I could have preferred, Sam,” his voice said slowly and plaintively in my ear, “if you had chosen some other phraseology to express your discontent.”

  “So could I,” I told him, “but they were being so deliberately obtuse, and—”

  “Never,” he interrupted, “accuse anyone of being stupid on purpose. Some people do it quite automatically and naturally.”

  “I’m not sure about those two,” I said, thinking about Feeney and LaMarca, unable to make up my mind about them. “But they were definitely just going through the routine they’d worked out ahead of time, regardless of what might happen.”

  “Twitting the celebrity, perhaps? Letting him know he gets no special treatment?”

  “Maybe, I don’t know. Anyway, I’d just had the long drive in from the Island, and I just didn’t feel like putting up with them.”

  “Which you let them know.”

  “Which I let them know. And now, I guess, the question is, what can they do about it?”

  “Well, they can’t arrest you for the murder of Kim Peyser, we know that much,” he said. (The murder itself, without the fakery about my name or
my being connected with it in any way, had made this morning’s papers, so Mort had already known about it when I phoned.) “But they can of course try to make life difficult in other ways,” he went on. “What’s your relationship generally with the officers in the precinct?”

  “Slim but friendly,” I told him. “I appeared at a PAL benefit for them six years ago when PACKARD was still on. Not much since. And these two are Homicide South, not precinct.”

  “I understand that. I was hoping you might have a champion somewhere in the force.”

  “Sorry,” I said, meaning it.

  He sighed. I hate it when Mort sighs. “Let me make some phone calls,” he said, “see how bad the damage is, and what we can do to repair it.”

  “Thank you, Mort,” I said humbly.

  “I’ll call you back,” he promised, and I said, “I’ll be here.”

  For the next half hour, I merely roamed the house, waiting uselessly for the phone to ring. I sat at my desk, but there was nothing to do there but look out the window at West 10th Street and think about the death on that pavement of Dale Wormley. The dumpster from which the murder weapon had probably come was just visible down to the right, toward 5th Avenue.

  I couldn’t read. I looked at my cassettes, and there was nothing I wanted to watch. The idea of undressing and going down to the lap pool was no good; I wanted to be here, ready, when Mort phoned back.

  Finally I found myself again at my desk, this time with the phone book open, looking for Julie Kaplan. There were no Julies listed, but there were four /s; she would probably be one of them.

  It was this not knowing anything that had eventually worn me down. Why was Kim Peyser killed? Was it connected to the murder of Dale Wormley? Where had it happened? Why did the killer make that rough and stupid attempt to put the blame on me?

  Julie Kaplan was my only entree to that world, whatever world it was in which Dale Wormley and Kim Peyser had moved. She would know where her friend had been killed. She might even have an idea who had done it, who would think it a good plan to borrow her own suggestion that I was a murderer. That was what pushed me to act, plus the fact that the phone wasn’t ringing, which meant I was stuck here with nothing to do but think. All of that is why I picked up the phone on my desk and started calling J. Kaplans.

  The first was an answering machine, a nasal-voiced woman who was not the right one. The second was a suspicious older man. And the third was Dale Wormley:

  “Hi,” said the voice, in pleasanter tones than I’d ever heard from him in life. “You’ve caught Dale Wormley’s smart answering machine here.” (Of course! Julie Kaplan had shared Wormley’s apartment until three weeks ago, and would naturally have her own listing.) “I’m really sorry I can’t be present to take your call, but you go ahead and tell this friendly machine whatever you want and I’ll sure get back to you. In the meantime, have a nice day, y’hear?”

  The studied folksiness of it grated, but under the circumstances I also found myself feeling sorry for the poor son of a bitch. He had simply been trying to make some sort of statement, trying to rise up out of the crowd, be noticed. That’s what his life had been about, after all; that’s what all actors’ lives are about.

  And that’s where he and I were linked, however reluctant I was to admit it. I possessed something Dale Wormley had wanted, and this answering machine message of his made it clear: I was, through no fault of my own, someone. He had been, regardless of his efforts, no one. His message, by being neither sincere nor professional, had shown the hopelessness of his try.

  I left no message.

  Kim Peyser was in the phone book under her full name, with an address on West 74th Street. I called, and listened to another voice from beyond the grave: “Hi. Kim here. Or not here, you know what I mean. When you hear the beep, leave a message. See you later.”

  A cheerful, youthful, innocent voice. She shouldn’t have been killed, I thought, while in those same few seconds I was also deciding whether or not this time to leave a message. Had Kim Peyser been killed right there, in the apartment she shared with Julie Kaplan? If she had, would Julie Kaplan continue to stay there? I think it was just the need I felt to do something that decided me: “Julie,” I said, after the beep, “if you’re still there, this is Sam, uh, Sam.” At the last second, it had occurred to me I had no way to tell who’d be listening to this machine, and I didn’t want to identify myself too closely. Julie Kaplan would recognize the voice and know who it was. I left one of my numbers— the general one, used in the less personal part of my life—and hung up. And then, once again, I had nothing to do.

  Twenty minutes later, the phone did ring at last. I let Robinson answer as usual, while I sat at attention at the desk, and when he buzzed me it was to say the person calling was neither of the ones I’d expected, but was Terry Young. “I’ll take it,” I told him, and pressed the button.

  Terry Young was the fellow I’d had dinner with in Brooklyn the night before last, when Dale Wormley was killed. We had first met nine years ago, he a reporter with the New York Daily News and I the hot new TV star he’d been sent to interview. We hated each other on sight, like cats, I seeing him as a professional fat slob, he seeing me as a posturing wimp, and it was only when our growing irritation with one another led to an honest—if loud-voiced—exchange of these views that we discovered it might be possible to get along after all. I now count Terry and his German-born wife, Gretchen, among my closest friends.

  Picking up the phone, smiling already in anticipation, I said, “Hi. What’s happening?”

  “Well, you, to begin with,” he said. He didn’t sound cheerful.

  Now what? I said it aloud: “Now what?”

  “Have you annoyed a couple of cops recently?”

  “Oh, Christ, yes. How do you know?”

  “They’re spreading the word,” he told me sourly, “among their friends in the press.”

  Homicide detectives usually have a friend or two in the press, because the press quite naturally cultivates them. I said, “What word are they spreading?”

  “This is third or fourth hand,” he warned me, “but what I get is that you are implicated in two ongoing homicide investigations and—”

  “Hell.”

  “—and are being uncooperative.”

  “Damn.”

  “Are you? And are you?”

  “Not the way it sounds,” I told him.

  “In other words,” he said, “yes.”

  “Damn it, Terry,” I said, “does this mean I’m going to get a million reporters hanging around again?”

  “Not a bit of it. In a situation like this, hearing from the other side could only spoil the story. You’ve already referred everybody to your PR people, haven’t you?”

  “Before this.”

  “So that’s good enough for the troops. Mr. Holt declines comment through his spokesperson.”

  “Shit.”

  “May I quote you?”

  “No.”

  “Well, how about for real, then?”

  Was he serious? I said, “In your column, you mean?” “It’s up to you,” he said. “If you want to get your side of the story out, I’m your man. If not, not.”

  “I hate to hear me saying this to you, Terry, but I’d better talk that over with Mort first.”

  “I don’t hate to hear you saying it,” he told me. “It shows a certain maturity at long last. These two homicides they’re tying you to. The first one was the guy imitating you on the commercials, right?”

  “That’s right.”

  “What’s the other?”

  “A girl named Kim Peyser.”

  He had me spell it, and then said, “What’s the link?” “To me? There is none, that’s the dumb part of it.” He let the silence on the phone line grow a certain amount of fur, and then he sighed and said, “Listen, Daddy. Do you want to tell me the facts yourself, or do you want me to hear them in the gutter?”

  It was my turn to sigh. “They haven’t released thi
s yet,” I said, “so far as I know.”

  “For my information only. Not for use without your consent, not for attribution without your consent.”

  So I told him about the name written in blood and why it was a fake, and he said, “Hold on,” and there was a brief silence, and then he said, “By God, you’re right. That’s the way you make an H.”

  “I demonstrated that for Feeney and LaMarca,” I told him, “and they just sailed over it and kept on asking questions about my whereabouts at the time of the murder and all that crap.”

  “Why, do you suppose?”

  “I really don’t know. Mort said it might have something to do with twitting a celebrity.”

  “Well,” he said, “there are cops who like the idea of putting the arm on a celeb, because guess who else gets in the newstape at ten o’clock. Did you get the idea they were needling you?”

  “No. To be honest, the only idea I had was that they were ignoring me. And ignoring the facts of the case.”

  “I’ll see what I can find out about them. Feeney and LaMarca?”

  I agreed that was their names, and promised to check with Mort before the end of the day about granting him an interview, and we hung up, and then I had to decide if this was a legitimate excuse to call Mort before he got around to calling me. I knew it really wasn’t, so it took me nearly ten minutes to convince myself it was and make the call. Mort came on the line saying, “No news yet, I’m afraid. I have some calls out and I’m waiting for a response.”

  “This is something else.”

  I told him about Terry’s information, and the offer of a rebuttal in Terry’s column. He brooded about that briefly, saying, “Mmmmmm,” and, “Uh-huh, uh-huh, uh-huh,” and finally deciding, “No. At least not yet.”

  “If you say so,” I said, sorry that he had.