“Sure.” This was dismissal, but rather than accept it I slouched lower in the chair, my legs stretched out, one arm flung over the chairback. Grinning lazily at Rita Colby, I said, “You know, I think you and I could be really great together, if you get what I mean.”
She was amused by me, but distantly. “I think probably I do,” she said. “Forgive me, I have another appointment.”
“That’s too bad.” I beamed my rays of sunshine into her skeptical eyes. “I thought, we’re nice and cozy here, we might get a little better acquainted.”
She nodded slowly, thinking that over, and then she gave me a level look and said, “I don’t want to hurt your feelings, Ed, but if you’re going to be offered the part of Clint, and if you’re going to take it, we really should understand one another.”
“Well, you’re right about that,” I told her, cheerful as a puppy.
“I’m glad you agree.”
I played dumb, spreading my hands, saying, “So what’s the point?”
“The point is, dear,” she said, her voice very soft, almost sympathetic, “I don’t sleep with the help.”
31
It was after five o’clock when I dragged my slaughtered carcass out of Kay Henry’s crash pad, leaving Rita Colby in sole command of the place and finding the social clusters all gone from the waiting room. Miss Colinville was gone, too, which was a relief. I didn’t think I was up to playing Ed Dante with that girl yet again today, particularly after the disemboweling I’d just received from Rita Colby. What a surgeon that woman would have made!
And if that’s the way she viewed life, what the hell was the link between her and Dale Wormley?
I brooded on that question as I rode down in the elevator and walked across town to the subway entrance for the BMT, reaching the platform just in time to squeeze into a Brooklyn-bound Q train. This was the height of rush hour, so I stood crammed in with a million other people on the whole long ride down into Brooklyn. I got off at Avenue J, and walked the few blocks into Midwood and over to the Youngs’ house, reflecting as I did so that Rita Colby’s attitude toward me didn’t necessarily mean she’d had the same attitude toward Dale Wormley. She’d spoken of him dispassionately enough, but had drawn complete contrasts between him and me, emphasizing his anger. Maybe she’d responded to that anger in some way. Or maybe it was merely that I’d presented her with a character who simply had to be slapped down.
That was Gretchen’s theory, when I recapped my day over dinner. Anita hadn’t felt she could take two evenings in a row away from the restaurant, so it was just Gretchen and Terry and me. And the three kids, of course, but they existed in a parallel universe of their own, next to ours. While the kids pursued their own concerns, I made my report and Gretchen said, “Well, the way you were carrying on, she had to do that.”
“I wasn’t exactly carrying on,” I said.
“Oh, yes, you were.” She shook her head at me, saying, “You don’t know what you look like in that disguise. When you look at yourself in the mirror, you’re just standing there, you’re still yourself. But then when you come out and move around, in character, you have this awful toothy smile all the time, and kind of puppy eyes, and you slouch around like Groucho Marx. Any woman in the world would take one look at you and know the best thing to do is just immediately slap you across the face.”
I laughed, and said, “In that case, I’m glad the women I’m meeting show such restraint.”
Terry said, “What were you going to do if she didn't slap you down? What if she’d said, ‘Sure, honey, let’s party’? Were you going to go to bed with her?”
“I was counting on Ed to be oafish enough to louse up the opportunity,” I told him, and grinned openmouthed at him like Ed, and said, with my twang, “Hey, great, baby. Just lemme call my girlfriend first, tell her I’ll be a little late.”
Terry laughed, and choked on his food. “Okay, okay,” he said. “You were safe.”
“Now, then, ” I said, “she would have been justified to bring up the nuclear warheads. But she came on like Darth Vader right away. ”
“Well,” Gretchen suggested, “what I think happened is, Rita Colby saw how good an actor you are, when you did the Nazi soldier, so she knew she’d want you in the play. But she didn’t want to put up with you being a pest all the time, so she slapped you down hard at the beginning, to get all that out of the way.”
“And very effective she was, too,” I said.
Terry said, “But, the question is, are you getting anywhere? Somebody killed Dale Wormley and the girl, whatsername—”
“Kim Peyser.”
“Right. And tried to pin the blame on you. What makes you think it has something to do with that play?”
“Nothing,” I admitted. “Terry, I’m not necessarily going to go now and scrape up introductions to the playwright and the director and the producers and all these people, and try to find out if somebody had artistic reasons not to want Wormley in the part, and they killed him for the good of the theater.”
“Not necessarily,” Terry echoed.
I said, “I’m just following wherever the circumstances lead me. I talked with Julie Kaplan down in Miami, and really the only two things that were hot and current in Wormley’s life at the end were the lawsuit with me and the part in Four Square. Now, he was a bad-tempered guy, who made enemies pretty easily, and I’m following through on a guy named Matty Pierce he had trouble with in his acting class, but that kind of thing doesn’t very often lead to murder, you know.”
“What about the commercials?” Terry asked me. “The ones you were suing him for. What about the supermarket company, the ad agency, all the people involved with that stuff?”
“No conflicts and nothing current,” I said. “He shot those commercials almost a year ago, and had just about nothing to do with any of those people since, except minor things connected with the lawsuit.”
Terry said, “Well, you know, it doesn’t have to be something current in his life. People have been known to hold grudges.”
“So far,” I said, “I haven’t found anything like that. Julie gave me the keys to Wormley’s apartment; it’s still hers, too, I guess. I’ll go there tomorrow and see what I can find. The thing is, Terry,” I said, “I’ve been asking myself the same kind of question. What am I accomplishing? Am I just spinning my wheels? Is Packard going through the motions, playing the part only because it’s better to do that than just sit at home and do nothing? I don’t know. Maybe that’s the truth. For now, all I can do is follow a very cold trail, and see where it leads me.”
32
My cash was running low—when all you can spend is cash, it does tend to run low pretty rapidly— so I’d arranged for Robinson to transfer a couple thousand to Terry Young’s checking account. Next morning, we started the day with Terry taking out five hundred for me from his bank. “By God, it’s nice to have a healthy-looking balance for a change,” he commented, when he came back out to the car. (I’d waited in it, parked by a fire hydrant on Flatbush Avenue, down the block from the bank.) “Even when it’s not real.” And he handed me my cash.
“Thanks, Terry,” I said, stuffing the money away. Twenty-five twenties make a thick wad, but I’d discovered that anything over a twenty dollar bill attracts attention and suspicion. No matter how much inflation pushes the cost of things up, people still notice a fifty.
Again we drove into Manhattan together, Terry dropping me off downtown and me then taking a cab up to 497 West End; just below 86th Street. The name slot beside the bell for apartment 4-E read Wormley Kaplan in careful black-ink lettering on a bit of white cardboard; Julie’s work, I guessed. I rang the bell next to the card, just in case the police still had someone there—though that was extremely unlikely, six weeks after the event on a very dead case—and when there was no answer I used one of Julie’s keys to let myself into the building. After a slow ride up to the fourth floor in the elevator, I used her other key to enter the apartment.
&nb
sp; It was two long narrow rooms next to one another, with a small kitchen carved out at the front of the first, next to the entry door, and a bathroom in the equivalent position of the second. At the far end of both rooms were large double-hung windows overlooking a featureless central court; just the stone building walls around a rectangle the size of a large car, with concrete four stories down and a glimpse of sky seven stories up.
The living room had been furnished with a look to utility and expense rather than style. The sofa, long and low and old and covered with a Mexican-influenced cotton spread, was the largest piece of furniture, with a couple of mismatched easy chairs and tables and lamps grouped in traditional manner around it. The television set and VCR and tape deck and trays of cassettes —mostly original cast show albums, male singers, some easy jazz—were stacked on a wooden bench facing the sofa, with the stereo system’s speakers under the bench.
And here was the cream-colored linoleum kitchen floor I had once seen in a photograph. Nothing showed now; the letters in blood had been cleaned away.
Terry Young had looked up the details of that murder, and so now I knew at least what had been done here, if not yet why nor by whom. Kim Peyser, wearing Julie Kaplan’s coat, had been stabbed, in this room, with a large kitchen knife. She had been stabbed twice, first in the back and then in the chest—the first cut not having killed her, she’d turned around to confront her murderer, who presumably had been startled not to see Julie Kaplan’s face above that coat, but who could no longer pull back from his actions—and the knife had been left in the second wound; it had snagged on a rib. The knife had come from this kitchen, had been the only large useful knife in here.
The immediate result of the stabbings was a trauma, in which Kim Peyser fell to the floor, but didn’t immediately die. So long as she was alive, her heart kept beating, and blood kept pumping from the rips in her body; that would have been for five to ten minutes. It was unlikely but dimly within the range of the possible that she could have been conscious part of that time, and used her own freshly-drawn blood to start writing my name on the linoleum floor. What had in fact happened was that the killer had turned her awkwardly—the awkwardness because of the knife hilt sticking out of the middle of her chest—and arranged the scene, with the letters and the positioning of her hand. And then he’d left.
Who was he? Why had he been here? If Julie Kaplan had been his intended victim, why hadn’t he pursued her to Florida and tried again? If Kim Peyser was the intended victim, did her death link with Dale Wormley’s at all? If she were the intended victim, why did the killing take place here? Had the killer actually come here with Kim? Had he followed, and rung the bell? Had he been here already when she arrived? Did they know each other? Did he have a key to this place? Was he the same person who killed Wormley, or not? Why had he come to this apartment?
There were so many answers I didn’t know. Packard, it seemed to me, was proving not to be such hot stuff without a scriptwriter.
I opened the refrigerator, and was surprised to find it half filled with food. Current food, that is, not spoiled old food from six weeks ago. There was a quart of low-calorie milk, half a grapefruit face down on a saucer, leafy vegetables in the crisper, a jar of diet strawberry jelly, a number of other things.
Somebody was living here. But who? Julie hadn’t loaned the place to anybody, or she would have told me so. If she’d known someone was in residence, whether through her doing or not, she would have warned me about it when she gave me these keys.
I went back out to the living room, where the signs of occupancy were subtler but finally just as clear. The TV Guide atop the television set was this week’s. A plate on an end table beside the sofa contained crumbs—cookie crumbs, I thought—that were not entirely hard; last night’s midnight snack.
Who was living in here? Was it somebody who knew the situation—one tenant dead, the other away for an extended stay in Florida—and just decided to take advantage of the empty apartment and move in? Was it a friend of Dale Wormley’s, or Julie’s, or was it a stranger?
Was it the killer?
Since none of this made the slightest sense, that last idea was no more nonsensical than any other. And while I was standing there in the living room, rolling cookie crumbs between my fingertips, thinking about the lack of sense in this affair, I heard the key grate in the lock and knew the interloper—the other interloper, actually, since I was an interloper, too—was home.
I had no desire to begin with a confrontation; I preferred first to find out who this person was and what was going on. At the entranceway, at that door about to be opened, there were three choices of movement: One could come straight ahead into the living room. One could turn left into the kitchen. Or one could turn right through a doorway and then left through another doorway into the bedroom. Striding, trying to be silent, I went into the bedroom.
And when I saw the black leather purse on the bed, large, rather shiny, with a short black strap and a big clunky chrome clasp on the top in the shape of a rose, I knew exactly who’d moved in here. Even before she got the door open—still unused to the complexity of city locks—I knew Dale Wormley’s mother had taken up residence in his abandoned nest.
She must not see me. She must not find me here. I looked around the room, knowing she would come in here first to hang her coat in the closet—if she then went into the bathroom, I’d have an opportunity to make my escape—which meant I couldn’t hide in the closet. Nor in the bathroom. Which meant, God damn it to hell, there was only one choice.
I went under the bed.
Fortunately, it was a king-size bed, so there was room to get all of me underneath it, but it was very low to the floor, so that every time I lifted my head from the carpet I hit the bottom of the box spring. I felt absurd, as though I’d wandered into a very old farce indeed, but this situation was serious and very dangerous. This woman was suing me. She had publicly accused me of killing her son. I could not be found in this apartment, wearing a disguise, hiding under the bed. It was impossible even to think about the consequences, and therefore it could not be permitted to happen.
The bed had a skirt, almost to the floor, but under its hem I could look out and see her feet as she came into the bedroom. She crossed first to the closet, as expected, to hang up her coat, but then, instead of going to the bathroom, she went back out the way she’d come in, and a minute later I heard water in the kitchen being run into a kettle.
I didn’t dare move. I could only wait, and hope, and feel like the world’s prime idiot. What if I’d stood my ground when she’d come in? What if I’d claimed to be an old friend of Julie’s, showed the keys Julie had given me? It was too late for that now, but what if I’d done it at the very beginning?
No. In the first place, I hadn’t yet realized who was living here when I made my decision to duck into the bedroom. And in the second place, with the lawsuit coming up, it was just too dangerous to actually meet the woman, in disguise, pretending to be somebody else. Whatever credibility I might have in court would vanish, if she ever recognized me.
The kettle boiled. When I heard a voice a minute later, in the living room, I thought at first she’d turned on the television set, but then I realized it must be her own voice, and that she was on the phone.
I squirmed out from under the bed. Tiptoeing, I crossed to the doorway, and leaned against the wall to listen:
“. . . another two or three weeks. Julie’s still in Florida, avoiding me, you know the way she is—Helen, she was never what you would call warm to me when Dale was alive, and nothing has—Well, that’s very forgiving of you. Yes, she probably does feel that way, I don’t doubt it. But I am not going to call her, because then it would look as though I was asking permission to stay in my own son’s apartment, which I am not. Those newspaper people haven’t thought to look for me here, so it’s been very restful.”
Could it be she was embarrassed to be going behind Julie’s back this way? Could that be why she sounded so aggre
ssive? In any event, she abruptly changed the subject, apparently at the instigation of Helen, because she suddenly said, “Him! Well, he’s disappeared!”
That was me she must be talking about. I leaned closer to the doorway, listening.
“Yes, the detectives are watching his house. Both his houses, you know he has one here, too. But he’s just gone, and nobody knows where he is. McCormack says I shouldn’t worry, but I think he’s up to something.”
McCormack was her attorney, or one of her attorneys. I remembered the name from those legal papers that had been dumped on me.
I didn’t much like Mrs. Wormley’s voice. (I couldn’t remember her first name; probably blocking it.) It was a hoarse voice, as though it had been used too much, and there were arrogant, impatient, imperial tones in it. Some spoiled brats remain spoiled brats all their lives, and from the sound of her voice I would guess Mrs. Wormley was one of those.
Now she was saying, “McCormack thinks it’s possible he’ll never even show up in court, just do it all through his lawyers, not even really contest anything.” Don’t count on that, I thought.
“No, Helen, it would not. I’d hate it. Why, because I want to confront the man, that’s why. He thinks he’s above it all, doesn’t he, wouldn’t deign to even notice the likes of us. Well, I’m going to rub that man’s nose in it, you see if I don’t.”
I remembered Julie Kaplan’s suggestion that suing me had become this woman’s vicarious life, to take the place of her previous vicarious life through her son’s acting career. It seemed to me, now, listening to her, that Julie had been right but incomplete. Another part of Mrs. Wormley’s motivation was just good old- fashioned envy. Spite can make a wonderful fuel.
“Yes,” she was saying, “no more than two weeks. Then I’ll have to come back for the trial, of course, but God knows when that will be. Yes, I will. Be sure to water the plants, now. Yes, I will. Yes, I will. I have to go now, Helen, I’m supposed to call McCormack this morning, I was just out to get the paper. I have no idea, I haven’t really looked at it yet, but there hasn’t been anything for days now, because there isn’t any news, you know. When we find Sam Holt, though, and serve the rest of the papers on him, then there’ll be some news. I bet we make the TV again.”
Westlake, Donald E - Sam Holt 04 Page 16