Westlake, Donald E - Sam Holt 04

by The Fourth Dimension is Death (v1. 1)

  “You’re entitled,” she told me, and grinned, and gestured at me, saying, “It goes with the new look.”

  Which made me laugh, as it was supposed to, and I said, “Okay. Now let’s talk about Dale.”

  “Fine. What do you want to know?”

  “Everything,” I said. “Well, all right, more specific. You mentioned a couple of things one time. That he’d been fired from a production of Li’l Abner, for instance. And that he’d punched a man from some movie company.”

  “Paramount Pictures, when he was an extra.” Julie gazed at me. “You want to know the troubles in his life, you mean.”

  “I want to know the people he rubbed the wrong way. I want to know who had reason to like him, or dislike him, or fear him.”

  “Fear him? Dale?” Julie offered a sad laugh, and shook her head again. “Nobody had any reason to be afraid of Dale,” she said. “Not really afraid. He was bad-tempered and he got mad at things, but when I left him it wasn’t because I was afraid, it was because when he was mad and frustrated all the time he just sounded petulant, like a little boy, and I didn’t like to see him that way.”

  “That’s about the only way I ever saw him.”

  “He cared about his career, that’s all, and he thought he should have been farther along than he was. And then at the end, he thought he was finally just on the verge of his big break, and everything was going to be fine.”

  “That play you mentioned, you mean.”

  “Four Square, with Rita Colby.”

  “What I don’t understand about that,” I said, “is how he could have been so sure, so absolutely certain, that far ahead of time, that the part was definitely his. It wasn’t the lead, and he wasn’t a star, and that’s usually the only two circumstances where casting is done that far ahead.”

  “It was Kay Henry who told him,” Julie explained. “Who promised it to him.”

  “His agent.”

  “Right. Dale’s agent. And mine. And Rita Colby’s.”

  “Okay,” I said. “If Henry had decided it was time to groom him, build him, then it makes sense.”

  “That’s why Dale was so excited,” Julie agreed, “because that’s what he figured it had to mean. He was really really pleased.”

  “Then I wish he’d spent his time thinking about that,” I said, “and not about being mad at me.”

  “Maybe,” she said, “he thought you should treat him better from then on, because he wasn’t going to be an also-ran any more.”

  “Maybe so. Tell me about this business of getting fired from Lil Abner. ”

  So she did, and about the man from Paramount Pictures that Dale had punched, and a number of other incidents, most of them from periods of time when Wormley had been fueling his anger and frustration with booze. The hostility would apparently flare up for a while—as it had with me—and then either disappear when something good happened in his life and career, or be replaced by a fresher source of rage.

  Soon I’d filled up the back of the play program, so I bummed a piece of notepaper from the Cuban waiter so we could go on to Wormley’s circle of friends and acquaintances. Julie gave me the phone numbers of a couple of people who’d be able to tell me more—the agent, for instance, and someone who’d been in an acting class with Wormley—and promised to call them herself and let them know I’d be around. “Quietly,” I said.

  “Quietly,” she agreed.

  Mostly, in fact, I wouldn’t be my normal self at all, but this new persona, Ed Dante; that’s who Julie would announce me as.

  So we ate our hamburgers and drank our beers; Julie gave me names and incidents and I wrote them down; I asked questions and she answered them; and through it all I could see that time had done its normal work. She could speak about Wormley much less emotionally now, less painfully. He was fixed in that receding moment in the past when his history had ended, and now he had become history, a story Julie told rather than an agony she was going through.

  When we were finished, when I could think of nothing more to ask and she could think of nothing more to volunteer, when I’d given her Terry Young’s phone number in Brooklyn and she’d promised to call if anything else useful occurred to her, she sat back and looked at me and said, “I don’t know if it’s because you don’t look like Dale this way, or what it is, but it’s easier to talk to you now.”

  “Time,” I suggested.

  “More than that,” she said. “I’d like to take a look at you without all that stuff on, so I could see what difference it makes.”

  Grinning, I said, “Sorry. I can’t unwig in here.” “Well,” she said, slowly, as though she’d just now thought of the idea and were still considering whether or not it was a good one, “you could always come to my place. It isn’t far. We could talk some more, and you could let me see you au naturel. ”

  Ah. I hadn’t seen that coming. In the early days of my celebrity, these offers had been made rather often, and at first I’d accepted as many of them as I possibly could. Soon, though, I discovered two dismaying things: The women I most preferred to be around were the ones who didn’t make any offers; and I wasn’t really having that good a time getting myself listed on everybody’s scorecard. Now that I’m no longer accepting offers, they aren’t made so frequently—I guess we have unconscious ways to signal one another about such things —but when they do appear the problem has become how to turn them down without coming across as smug or a prig, and without embarrassing anybody or hurting anybody’s feelings.

  In this instance, though, there was a very simple reason to say no. “Julie,” I said, “sometime in the middle of the night, you’d turn over and call me Dale, and neither one of us would get over it.”

  She studied me. “I don’t think so,” she said, slowly, thoughtfully, “but maybe you’re right. Are you done here?”

  “Oh, I think so,” I said.

  25

  The reason the hotel’s sign wouldn’t be flashing all night in my window was that it was broken; which was all right with me. No one was on the desk when I arrived, and no one appeared to have been in my room while I was gone; which is to say, it was still the same mess my friends and I had left it. I reordered the place as much as necessary, wedged a chair under the doorknob to discourage visitors, took a long hot (though rusty) shower, and slept easily. In the morning, I drove the Plymouth over the causeway and through Miami out to the airport, where I left it at a meter and took my flight to New York, arriving in midaftemoon.

  Terry Young recognized me instantly as I came down the umbilical and into the terminal with the rest of the passengers. Approaching, grinning, hand out to be shaken, he said, “Who are you supposed to be? The teenage wolfman?”

  “I’m supposed,” I told him, “to be nobody you know.”

  “Or want to. Got any more luggage?”

  “No, just what I’m carrying,” I said. “And I’ve just learned the stews aren’t as easygoing about carry-on luggage in coach.”

  “Oh, my God,” he said, rearing back to gaze upon me in mock awe. “It isn’t teenage wolfman, it’s The Prince And The Pauper. ”

  Terry always makes me laugh. He’s a burly Irishman with a fine brain distorted by years of observing the City of New York for the daily press. Rather than be embittered by his experiences, though, he’s managed mostly to be amused by them, which has probably saved his sanity.

  Now, in Terry’s station wagon, salted with evidences of his children—everything from candy bar wrappers on the floor to a basketball rolling around the storage compartment—he drove me across Queens and Brooklyn toward his house and filled me in on the situation here in re the Dale Wormley murder investigation. Which didn’t take long, because in effect there wasn't any Dale Wormley murder investigation. Nothing had changed since I’d talked with him from California, and nothing was likely to change. At least not on the official side.

  “But it’s all different now, right?” he asked me, taking his eyes from the Belt Parkway long enough to give me an
ironic look. “Here comes Packard for real.”

  “I know, Terry, I know. I feel stupid about it, but what else is there? That lawsuit isn’t going away.”

  “I realize that, Sam,” he said, relenting. “I was just giving your leg a little tweak, that’s all.”

  Terry and his wife Gretchen live in the Midwood section of Brooklyn, just east of Flatbush Avenue. A few blocks away are big chunky apartment buildings in beige brick, but the area around the Youngs is mostly, like their own place, sprawling one-family houses on large lots. When we arrived, Terry had to wait while I got out of the car to move a tricycle before he could park in the driveway, and then we went inside for a warm greeting from Gretchen, a gemutlich German girl Terry wooed and won when her job with Interpol brought her temporarily to New York several years ago. These days, she’s the total hausfrau with her three kids, inexorably putting on a few pounds a year—though hardly anything to complain about as yet—and only rarely expressing a kind of wistfulness for the free soul she’d been before Terry Young came into her life.

  She was at her most cheerful now, laughing uproariously over my disguise, insisting I let her try on my moustache—ever since Dietrich, German women have had this unhealthy interest in suggestive crossdressing —and then showing me the guest bedroom, where I’d stay. I’d seen that room before, and it was the attic to end all attics, crammed to the ceiling with last year’s toys and last decade’s clothes; now, it was clean, neat, spotless. “Gretchen,” I said, “where’d you put all the stuff?”

  “It was time some things were thrown out,” she said, a glint in her eye hinting at a fierce family battle that had come out her way. With the moustache, it made her look sexy in a challenging fashion. I told her so, and she said, “Kiss me, my fool.”

  So I did. I’d never kissed a woman wearing a moustache before, and the tickle made me laugh. Which made Gretchen laugh, too. “You’ve spoiled all my illusions,” she said, and put the moustache on my nose, and left me alone in the cleaned-up room to change back into my original self.

  I was staying with the Youngs because at either of my normal places in New York—at home on 10th Street or with Anita in her apartment upstairs over Vitto Impero —there was too much likelihood that my presence would be noted. Gretchen had called Anita yesterday, at my request, to tell her what was going on, and since this was Sunday, a moderately slow night at the restaurant, Anita would be coming out to have dinner with us this evening, bringing along a suitcase of clothing for me from 10th Street.

  It was a good evening, all in all, spent mostly on subjects other than Dale Wormley, though Terry did insist I put on my scoundrel drag for Anita’s amusement. I did, Anita agreed she probably wouldn’t serve me if I walked into the restaurant looking like that, I took it off, and that was the end of it. Anita decided to stay over, happily, and in the morning I put my gear back on and we drove into the city together with Terry, who at last raised the main subject, saying, as we neared the Manhattan Bridge, “Anita? What do you think of Packard Rides Again?"

  “I think it’s good,” she said, surprising me.

  I said, “You do? How come?”

  “Do your own dirty work,” she said, and shrugged. “Don’t leave it to agents and lawyers and all those people all the time.”

  “But— They’re trained in their jobs.”

  “So are you,” she told me. “You’re a trained cop, to begin with. And you’re a trained observer. And you’ve been around all this mystery solution stuff for years.”

  “But that’s make-believe.”

  “It’s plausible, though, isn’t it?” she asked me. “If it wasn’t at least plausible, it wouldn’t have been such a big hit.”

  This was the last reaction I’d expected. In fact, I’d been fully braced for Anita to share the same attitude of barely repressed scornful amusement as Terry. “Well, I’ll be damned,” I said.

  Laughing, Terry said to me, “There you are, Sam. You should go ahead because otherwise you’re nothing but a passive wimp. And because it is after all your life and reputation on the line. And because, even though your background for this sort of job may be halfassed, it’s anyway plausible.”

  “Right,” Anita said.

  I nodded. “Thanks for the vote of confidence,” I said.

  26

  IBecause I was trying to keep my presence in New York—and its reason—as quiet as possible, and also because I didn’t want people to be on guard when talking with me, I’d asked Julie to use my false name, Ed Dante, when she phoned ahead to introduce me. I’d also asked her to give false reasons for my wanting to meet these people. With Kay Henry, for instance, Dale Wormley’s agent, she had described me as an actor she’d met in Florida, who was without an agent and who she thought highly of; professionally, that is. At my request, she’d also suggested I might be right for the part in the Rita Colby play that Wormley had been cast for. This was a little dangerous, asking Henry to study me up close as a Dale Wormley substitute, but I couldn’t think of a better way to get around to the subject I was actually interested in.

  There wasn’t much I could do about my raffish appearance, except dress a little more conservatively and comb my wig down more flat, but I thought I could get away with it if I acted like a conceited boob. Agents think of actors as conceited boobs anyway, so Henry shouldn’t have any trouble believing I’d made the visual mistake of this moustache under the impression it made me look like a ladykiller. The hardest thing for any of us to do is deliberately place ourselves in a bad light, but that was my acting exercise for the day, so I’d give it my best shot.

  My appointment with Henry was for ten. His address was a townhouse in the east forties off 3rd Avenue, converted to offices. He had the third floor of five, with the street floor shared by a travel agent and florist, the second occupied by a food brokerage (whatever that is), and the top two floors given over to InterArab Imports (whatever that is, and it doesn’t sound good).

  I arrived a few minutes early, on purpose, and took the slow small elevator up to three, stepping out to a receptionist’s area doing its absolute damnedest—or Bloomingdale’s damnedest, I guess—to look like a private person’s living room, though what it actually looked like was a moderately important room in a small well-endowed museum. The receptionist, a cool anorexic English girl in black, sat at a Chippendale reproduction writing table, its legs as polished and curved and slender as her own, visible beneath. Chintz sofas and chairs, nice old floorlamps, and coffee tables and end tables echoing or complementing the writing table’s design, all worked toward the same homey effect. It was an interior room without windows, its peach-colored walls furnished with 19th-century English family portraits: curly-haired little girls in white, with puppies; stern stout gentlemen with their hands on globes. It was a large room, with several seating areas, at two of which little clusters of people sat, talking together animatedly, gesturing broadly with hands and eyebrows, keeping one eye alert toward the elevator in case Liza Minelli should chance to drop by. It was easy to see how Julie Kaplan could have stayed here all day, after the killing of Kim Peyser, when she’d been afraid to go home.

  The receptionist gave me a jaded look as I emerged from the elevator and sauntered toward her. “Hi, beautiful,” I said, and smiled like an idiot under my moustache. “Would you tell Mr. Henry that Ed Dante’s here?” Instead of trying to disguise my well-known voice, I used the flat nasal Long Island twang I’d grown up around.

  “Of course,” she said, cool and professional. “If you’ll take a seat...”

  I kept the stupid smile, and leaned forward, shifting some of my weight to my palm, pressed down on her table. “And what’s your name?” I asked.

  She was used to jerks. “Miss Colinville,” she said, clipping the syllables off, her eyes astonishingly hostile.

  “Brrrr,” I said, still grinning as I turned up the collar of an imaginary overcoat. “I’ll be over there fighting frostbite,” I told her, pointing at an empty area of the room. />
  “You do that,” she agreed, but she did release a faint and frosty smile as she reached for the phone to announce my presence.

  That was sufficient. I wanted to be enough of a jerk to go with my appearance, but not so obnoxious that no one would talk to me. So I went over and sat on a flowery sofa and beamed at the groups of chatting people as though I’d just love to join in. As expected, they worked very hard not to be aware of me.

  The fact is, within obvious limits we do decide what we look like. Our clothing, jewelry, eyeglasses, hairstyles, way of standing and walking, a hundred other things, all go together to create that person who is not exactly us but is the person the rest of the world sees. Every element of that involves a choice, and in our choices we make a lot of declarations, including which other human beings we’re most comfortable having contact with.

  So that’s what I was using now. Ed Dante—that is, this Ed Dante, in Kay Henry’s office—was an amiable but sleazy guy who tried to cover his inadequacies with a lover-boy image and failed. With very slight changes of appearance and manner, he had become much less dangerous and off-putting than the guy who’d been acting tough down in Miami. You probably still wouldn’t want him for your best friend—unless you were a failed Errol Flynn yourself—but you wouldn’t mind being in the same room with him for a while. At least, that was the idea.

  It was twenty to eleven before the icy Miss Colinville ushered me into the inner office. In those forty-five minutes, a number of cast changes had taken place out here. A bright-eyed cheery girl who could have been Julie Kaplan’s cousin came out from the inner sanctum and a couple of the people from one of the chatting groups went away in the elevator with her. Other people from this waiting area went inside, came out, left. A few times, the elevator opened to produce either a messenger delivering a package—scripts, mostly, from the look of them—or an actor to pick up a check; or at least a slim envelope. Most of these people (except the messengers) portrayed ebullience and hopefulness and happiness all the time, as though life itself were one endless audition.