Westlake, Donald E - Sam Holt 04

by The Fourth Dimension is Death (v1. 1)

  Nasty old bitch, I thought, while Mrs. Wormley slowly wound down her conversation with Helen, repeating things, agreeing to things, adding one more reminder about watering the plants. Why does the nasty old bitch, I thought, have to live her life through me? Why doesn’t she devote herself to good works? Become a Gray Lady, join the Peace Corps, go down among the lepers. Maybe she’d catch something.

  At last she ended that phone call, and I heard her immediately dial another one. “Mr. McCormack, please. It’s Laura Wormley.”

  Laura; somehow the name seemed inappropriate. She should be a Hannah, or a Bertha. Of course, I still hadn’t seen her, but I visualized the kind of battleaxe who used to give W. C. Fields so much trouble. I was so happy with this image that I didn’t even want to know the truth.

  “Mr. McCormack? Laura Wormley. Did they find him yet?”

  Me again.

  “Really?” Sounding very interested. “Right here in New York? Are they sure?”

  I leaned almost through the doorway, listening.

  But then, sounding disappointed, she said, “Oh, them. I know that kind of paper, they don’t know anything, they just make it all up.” And I leaned back again.

  Then she said, “Do I have to? Well, yes, of course I want to flush him out. Well, it just seems all I do is go to your office and sign things, and nothing ever happens.” A long put-upon sigh; poor lady. “Well, if I have to, I will. But it takes forever to get way over there from here, I’ll be lucky to be back in time for lunch.” Another sigh; but then, in a steelier voice, she said, “You know I’m not losing interest, Mr. McCormack. I told you at the beginning, I’ll do whatever it takes. All right. I’ll be there as soon as I can.”

  She cradled the phone, with an exasperated sniff, and I went back under the bed.

  33

  At last the door slammed shut behind her. Then she rattled the knob from outside, to be certain it was locked. And then there was silence.

  I waited three or four minutes, lying there, to be sure she hadn’t forgotten something that would make her come abruptly back, and then finally, feeling stiff by now—I hadn’t been exercising or swimming my laps lately, and it was beginning to tell—I crawled out from under the bed for what I hoped was the last time.

  And while I’d been under there, waiting, I’d had another thought, another way of looking at the Kim Peyser murder, induced by my own current experience. One of the questions I’d been asking myself about her murderer was: Why here? Why did he kill Kim Peyser in Dale Wormley’s apartment (and Julie Kaplan’s)?

  And the idea that had now come to me was: What if he were here first, as I had been here first when Mrs. Wormley arrived? What if she had surprised him, as Mrs. Wormley had almost surprised me? And what if, like me, he’d been here because he was searching for something? (Unlike me, he would probably have known what he was searching for.)

  Let’s look at it from that angle. Let’s say the murderer killed Wormley in the first place because Wormley was some sort of threat to him. But with Wormley dead the threat still continued in some way, and the killer had to come here to look for it, whatever it was; the thing that continued the threat after Wormley was dead. And while he was here, Kim Peyser came in, and Kim Peyser knew him.

  The story hung together this way, better than all the theories about Kim Peyser having been killed in error. In the first place, the error theory required him always to be behind her, not seeing her face; and that couldn’t be for very long. Now, looking at the layout of this apartment, the only scenario I could come up with that made that idea workable at all would be if the killer had been in the bedroom when Kim Peyser entered the apartment, that he already had the knife for some reason, and that when she came into the apartment the first thing she did was turn away from both bedroom and living room and enter the kitchen. That version seemed to me improbable, for a number of reasons.

  So let’s say he’s here to search the place, not to kill anybody, and Kim Peyser walks in, surprising him. There was no sign of struggle before the killing, so she knew the guy. He gave her some reason or excuse for his being here, something that would seem plausible for the moment but would break down later; so she wasn’t suspicious right then, but he didn’t dare let her leave.

  One of them, let’s say, suggested a cup of coffee. So they went into the kitchen together. He opened drawers, making a show of being unfamiliar with the kitchen, and when he found the knife he simply turned and used it.

  The next question, the big question after that, is: Did he then go back to searching the apartment, with Kim Peyser dead in the kitchen, or did he leave, spooked by what had happened? And, in either case, did he find whatever it was he was looking for?

  I was making a lot of assumptions here, but it seemed to me these assumptions had a feeling of coherence I hadn’t found up till now in all the various ways that had been tried of looking at these two murders. And they seemed to me to be coherent enough to make just one more assumption worth making: That it would probably pay me to search this apartment.

  I knew I had time. From the way Mrs. Wormley had talked on the phone, she’d be gone at least an hour, possibly more. So I started in the kitchen, and I gave the place as complete a toss as I could without actual carpentry; that is, without removing molding strips and window frames and such. I did unscrew switchplates and disassemble lamps, but mostly it was a matter of simply moving everything in the apartment, from the largest to the smallest. That’s the essence of a search right there; you touch everything, lift everything, move everything, study everything, and at the end you put it all back the way you found it. The work was hot and dusty, and before I was half-finished I was down to socks and shorts; if Mrs. Wormley had come back then, we both would have gotten a hell of a surprise.

  And I did find something. Or, that is, I found an anomaly that suggested there had been something to find. The kitchen had contained nothing of interest, and the only oddity in the living room was that one of the audio cassette boxes was empty. It was supposed to contain the original cast recording of the musical Grease. I looked in the cassette player, but it wasn’t there, so I went on, and in the bedroom I found the Grease tape in the top dresser drawer, under Dale Wormley’s socks and underwear.

  Why? I put the tape back where I’d found it—leave everything where you found it—and thought about that anomaly while finishing my search, coming across nothing else of interest and ending in the bathroom, where I washed and cleaned myself up, and where the medicine chest seemed to have been taken over mostly by Mrs. Wormley’s nostrums. (All of the bottles and boxes contained, as best as I could tell, only what they were supposed to.)

  When I was finished with everything, and back into my clothes, the tape of Grease was the only oddity I’d found. And it seemed to me that putting the tape of Grease in that drawer had not been an innocent act. It wasn’t a mistake or carelessness, there being no natural reason to have moved the tape from one room to the next in the first place, since it could only be played on the machine in the living room. Which meant it had been hidden there. And the only reason I could think of for hiding that tape was because the box it had come in was being used for something else, and Dale Wormley hadn’t wanted to draw attention to the box by leaving its tape lying around.

  What had Wormley concealed in that box? Another tape? Probably so. And if that’s what the killer had been looking for, he’d found it.

  Which made my new set of assumptions look better than ever.

  34

  Before I left the Wormley apartment I phoned Tom Lacroix, this being the time he’d suggested I do so, and he said both the acting teacher, Howard Moffitt, and Matty Pierce, the guy Dale had fought with in class, had agreed to meet with me at five this afternoon, following the class. Lacroix sounded surprised that Pierce had agreed without having to be urged; he said, “I didn’t even have to tell him your speak-ill-of-the- dead-anonymously offer.”

  “Then I’m really looking forward to what he has to say. Thanks f
or setting it up.”

  “No problem.”

  “Will you be there?”

  “Just to introduce you,” he said. “Then I have to go to work. I’m a waiter, at the moment.”

  “Waiting for a show,” I said.

  “Oh, you know it.”

  He gave me the address, I promised to see him there at five, and then I left the Wormley apartment at last, and walked across and downtown toward the Graybar Building, since I had a twelve-thirty lunch appointment with Mort Adler.

  Myrtie, Mort’s receptionist/secretary, didn’t recognize me at first and gave me an extremely dubious look when I walked into the office; this wasn’t the sort of client she wanted for the firm. “It’s okay, Myrtie,” I told her, grinning (like myself, not like Ed Dante), “down inside here I’m Sam Holt.”

  “Oh, my God,” she said. “Whatever you’ve done, undo it.”

  I promised her the transformation was merely temporary, and she buzzed Mort to tell him I was here, adding, “And you will not believe it.”

  Whether he believed it or not, Mort was certainly amused by it. “Come in, come in,” he said, chuckling to himself, looking down at various pieces of baseboard as he reached up to pat me on the shoulder like a basketball coach with a star center who just booted the ball into the stands.

  We sat together in his office, and I explained what I was doing and why, feeling only moderately foolish in the telling. He sighed a long sigh when I mentioned hiding under the bed while Mrs. Wormley walked around the Kaplan/Wormley apartment, but he said nothing one way or the other until I was finished, and then he glanced at me briefly from under his eyebrows and said, “Would you care for advice?”

  “I think I can imagine the advice,” I told him. “It would consist mostly of the word don't!”

  “Not entirely.” Leaning back in his chair, frowning at his desk as though he’d just noticed how sloppy it was, he said, “You do have some background in this sort of thing, of course. And I understand your frustration at the moment. But you see the danger.”

  “With Mrs. Wormley, you mean.”

  “Well, that primarily,” he agreed, “though not exclusively. But let’s take that situation in the apartment, yes. Technically, you had more right to be there than she did, since you had the tenant’s keys and the tenant’s permission to enter, but the instant you slid under that bed—an instant I would pay a considerable amount to have seen, by the way—you placed yourself irrevocably in the wrong.”

  “I know I did. The alternative ...” I shrugged. “The alternative was to introduce myself, as somebody or other, to Mrs. Wormley.”

  “The alternative,” he agreed, “was equally unhappy, once you were there. And you can’t be certain you won’t find yourself in other difficult situations, while this goes on. So now let me get to my advice.”

  “Sure.”

  He leaned even farther back, twisting around to look out his window at the air rights over Grand Central, enclosed by gray dull slabs of plate glass and stone. “You have a good working relationship with the police officer who took over the Wormley case,” he suggested.

  “Sergeant Shanley,” I said. “Yes, I do. A lot better than Feeney and LaMarca.”

  Turning back to me, smiling at his desk drawers, he said, “Of whom we hope to hear no more.”

  “Amen.”

  “I strongly urge you, Sam,” he said, “to telephone to Sergeant Shanley, meet with her at the earliest opportunity, and tell her precisely what you’re doing and what you’ve already done.”

  I said, “Ask her okay, you mean?”

  “Not at all,” he said. “If she’s any good, she won’t give you an okay. Partly because she shouldn’t, and partly because she can’t.”

  “What if she tells me to stop?”

  Smiling faintly, Mort shook his head. “Nor can she do that,” he told me. “She can tell you not to break the law, of course, but she can’t tell you not to go around asking people questions. She can’t even tell you not to wear a ridiculous moustache or call yourself by made- up names. What she can do is tell you to stay within the law; which of course you will agree to do.”

  “Of course.”

  “And then,” he said, “if another delicate situation arises, you won’t have to crawl under any beds. You can merely stand your ground and announce that the police officer in charge of the Wormley homicide investigation is aware of your activities.”

  “I see,” I said. “It could take the heat off, you mean, in a situation with someone like Mrs. Wormley.” “Not,” Mort told me, “if she were to find you lying about under her bed. But certainly it would be a help if she were to find you standing in an ordinary fashion in the living room, Julie Kaplan’s keys in your hand.”

  “All right,” I said. “I’ll call Sergeant Shanley right after lunch.”

  “Speaking of which,” he said, bracing both hands on the edge of the desk preparatory to rising, then pausing to look up at me with a slightly pained expression and to say, “Is it your intention to wear all that excess hair at lunch?”

  “Absolutely,” I told him. “From what I heard of Mrs. Wormley’s conversation with her lawyer—”

  “And that went over the line,” he pointed out. “Eavesdropping on a conversation between your court adversary and her attorney is absolutely and totally improper.”

  “I won’t do it again,” I promised. “But from what I heard the last time, they have private detectives looking for me, here in the city. I really don’t want to go anywhere in public as Sam Holt.”

  “I accept that, unfortunately,” he said, and got to his feet, adding, “Not the face I would prefer across the lunch table, but we will survive. After you.”

  35

  After lunch, we went back up to Mort’s office, where Myrtie told me Gretchen Young had called and wanted me to get back to her at home. So I did, and Gretchen said Blair Knox, Brett’s agent, was trying to get in touch with me. Delaying Sergeant Shanley, I called Blair and she came on the line to say, “Well, Kay Henry is definitely interested in you.”

  “Talent will out,” I said.

  “Do you think that’s true? Anyway, he called this morning to discuss you. He went through that resume you gave him item by item, wanting to know how you’d handled each part and what sort of reviews you’d got, and how you’d related with the rest of the cast and the director and all that.”

  “Wow.”

  Laughing a bit shakily, she said, “I had no idea, Sam, what you were going to put me through.”

  “Neither did I,” I told her. “I’m really sorry, Blair. I thought at the most he’d just call to see what your opinion of Ed Dante was.”

  “Oh, he wanted that, too,” she said. “But he was very interested in the career. I think I held my end up.”

  “I’m sure you did.”

  “In any case,” she said, “he seemed satisfied when he hung up. But I thought you should know, he’s out there, tracking you down.”

  This investigation better not take much longer, I thought, my little construction is an extremely temporary affair. Living inside a house of cards. “Thanks for the warning,” I told Blair, and tried calling Sergeant Shanley, to be told she was out of the office but was expected back within half an hour. I left my name and Mort’s number, and then Mort and I retired to his office to discuss the lawsuit against Kwality Food- Marts that had gotten me into all this mess in the first place.

  What it came down to at this point was that the lawsuit was going to die of inertia—or perhaps had already died of inertia—and all that was left to discuss was how to bury it. Court costs was the name of the game by now; Kwality FoodMarts had no intention of finding another Packard lookalike to do more commercials, the earlier commercials with Dale Wormley had finished their run and would never be seen again in this world, so Kwality had no interest now but to defend their right to have arrogated my appearance and the Packard persona in the first place. If we would accept a consent from them not to offend any more in
the future (which they didn’t intend to do anyway), with no acknowledgment of wrongdoing on their part in the past, we could all go home and forget about it.

  And right here was where the alliance on my side of the issue fell apart. So far as Mort was concerned, it made no economic sense for me to go on paying for a lawsuit on an issue that had become moot. So far as the syndicators who were my co-copyright owners and co-suers were concerned, however, the point here was to make Kwality FoodMarts hurt sufficiently badly that other potential infringers—both of PACKARD and of other shows these syndicators controlled—wouldn’t dare take the field against them.

  So Mort’s principal dealings now were not with Kwality’s attorneys but with our own partners’ attorneys, with Mort trying to get them to agree to pick up one hundred per cent of continuing costs of the litigation from this stage forward. “If they win,” Mort pointed out, “they’ll be reimbursed out of the settlement. If they lose, you didn’t want to be a party to it anyway, so it’s improper for you to share in the burden of expense.”

  “Whatever you say, Mort,” I said.

  “That’s probably best,” Mort said, judiciously, and Myrtie buzzed to say that Sergeant Shanley was on the line.

  The sergeant expressed surprise without pleasure at my presence in New York, and when I asked for an appointment she said, “You know, we really don’t have anything new. I’m sorry, but that’s the way it is.”