“That’s all right,” I said. “I do.”
Startled, she said, “New information?”
“No,” I said. “New activity. My activity. Do you have time to see me this afternoon?”
“I think I’d better make time,” she said.
36
I walked over to Midtown Precinct South on West 35 th Street, and announced myself to the officer at the desk. He gave me a skeptical look, but phoned Sergeant Shanley and she came right out. When she saw me in my Ed Dante fig she sighed and nodded and said, “Uh huh. You’ve got things to tell me, all right.”
She led me back to a small impersonal office with plain bare walls and a gray metal desk holding nothing but a telephone. There were a couple of slat-backed wooden chairs as well, as uncomfortable as they looked, and there we sat, Sergeant Shanley leaning her elbows on the desk while I described my reaction to Mrs. Wormley’s civil suit and the lack of progress on the murder investigation. Nodding, she said, “You
The Fourth Dimension is Death 227 know how it is yourself, Mr. Holt. When there’s no one else to interview, no more physical evidence to study, no informants to come forward, you can only wait for something to happen.”
“A civil case,” I said, “doesn’t have to find me guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.”
“I know that, too,” she said. “I think it’s very rough, and very unfair, what’s happening to you, but there really isn’t anything we can do about it. And to tell the truth, I see Mrs. Wormley’s side, too. She’s just as frustrated about this thing as you are. And she’s more personally involved.”
“Not any more. Not if I’m going to go into civil court and not only be branded a murderer but a murderer who got away with it. ”
She thought about that. “Yeah, I guess so,” she decided. “Celebrity can make it a little rougher, can’t it?”
“It can. Sergeant Shanley,” I said, leaning toward her, “I’m not some jerk coming in here trying to do your job better than you. I’m involved’ and I can’t just sit on the sidelines and wait for the steamroller to drive on over me.”
“So you’ve come to town to try to see what you can learn,” she said. Then she grinned faintly and gestured at my head, saying, “And you’re wearing the caterpillar and the rug so you won’t be recognized.”
“I feel pretty foolish about it,” I admitted. “But if I go around as Sam Holt I really won’t get anywhere, except to make things worse.”
She nodded. “Have you actually made any contacts yet? Got up like this?”
“Yes,” I said. “In fact, the reason I wanted to talk to you is to tell you what I’ve done so far, and what I plan to do. Because, frankly, it does get kind of tricky sometimes.”
“I guess it might,” she agreed. “Okay, Mr. Holt, tell me what you’ve done.”
So I told her what I’d done, and she nodded, listening, not interrupting; though her eyes did widen a bit when I went under the bed in the Kaplan/Wormley apartment. When I finished, she said, “Well, you’re a lucky man.”
“So far.”
“I’m glad you realize that,” she said. “Mr. Holt, from what you’ve told me, it seems to me you’ve pretty well established that you can’t do yourself any good at all, but you can make a lot of trouble for yourself. You’re very lucky you haven’t fallen into that trouble already.”
“I know I am.”
“But what are you gonna gain?” she wanted to know.
“Well, I’ll tell you what I’ve gained so far,” I answered. “The physical layout of the Kaplan/Wormley apartment tells me the Kim Peyser murder wasn’t mistaken identity. The killer had to know who he was stabbing.”
She nodded. “We’d about come to the same conclusion ourselves.”
“And,” I said, “that means the killer and Kim Peyser knew each other, or there would have been some sign of struggle prior to the stabbing.”
“Which lets you out, of course.”
But there I had to shake my head and tell her, “Well, no, it doesn’t. Part of the up side of being a celebrity is that people think they do know you. If I’d been the person in there when Kim Peyser walked in, she would have known who I was even though we’d never met, and I could have rattled off some song and dance to keep her calm while I reached for the knife.”
Shanley sat back in her chair, folded her arms, and grinned at me. “I should have thought of that myself,” she acknowledged. “Here I went and took you off the list, and now look.”
“Well, you needn’t put me back on the list.”
“I wasn’t going to,” she assured me. “What else have you learned? Anything?”
“The missing tape.”
She frowned, unfolding her arms and resting her hands on her knees. “Now, that,” she said, “is a leap, if you don’t mind my saying so. You find an empty tape box in with the rest of the cassette tapes. Then you find the tape that belongs in it, only it’s in the other room.” “Hidden,” I pointed out, “or at least buried, under clothing in a dresser drawer.”
“And you jump to the conclusion,” she said, “that some sort of tape—a different tape—had been kept in that tape box, that the killer was in the apartment looking for that different tape when Kim Peyser came in, and that after he killed her he found the tape and took it away.” She shook her head. “That’s a whole bunch of conclusions to jump to.”
“And that isn’t even all of them,” I told her. “I’m jumping to more conclusions than that. But first, what other explanation is there? You don’t just accidentally put a tape in the back of a drawer under all the clothing, and in fact you don’t even carry that tape without its box into the bedroom in the first place, because there’s nothing you can do with it in there except hide it.” “That isn’t absolutely necessarily true,” she told me, “but all right, I’ll go along with you this far: It looks as though the tape was carried into the bedroom and hidden on purpose.”
“And the box, in its place in the living room, was empty,” I added.
She nodded. “So, if the box was being used to hide something else, and if the killer was looking for that something else, then probably he found it and took it away with him. A lot of ifs.”
“But they make sense,” I insisted. “And what would that something else be? The something else that was hidden in the tape box.” I spread my hands, suggesting the answer was obvious. “Those tape boxes are small, and they have two little plastic projections in them that the tape fits over. You might be able to put two or three cigarettes in one of those boxes, or maybe a folded note, but it seems to me if you’re going to hide something in a tape box, what you’re probably going to hide in there is another tape.”
“And here comes the big final jump to a conclusion,” she said. “Am I right?”
“You can see where I’m going.”
“Sure,” she said. “But tell me anyway.”
“The motive for killing Dale Wormley was blackmail,” I said. “And the hidden tape was the evidence.” She nodded, but dubiously, and then she said, “Mr. Holt, you make a very neat package there, and that’s what I don’t like about it.”
“The neatness?”
“That’s right. I’ve seen this kind of thing happen a lot,” she told me. “I’ve seen it happen in this building. A fella gets a theory about a case, all the evidence he has so far dovetails in nice and neat, and the fella decides that is what happened. Then, when some other evidence comes along that doesn’t fit into that package so neatly, the fella refuses to see it, refuses to admit that evidence even exists. Your kind of package there, it isn’t a way to close a case so much as it’s a way to close a mind.”
“I’ll remember that,” I said, impressed by her. “You may be right, and I thank you for saying it.”
She grinned: “But you still like your theory.”
“Oh, I like it, but not enough to make a fool out of myself,” I assured her. “Not if I can help it. I really do appreciate the warning, Sergeant. I still think the hidden tape is m
eaningful, but I’ll remember that I can’t be sure about it, not yet.”
“That’ll do,” she said, and got to her feet. The interview was over. “I can’t tell you to stop what you’re doing,” she admitted, as I also stood up, “but I can tell you, if anybody makes a complaint against you, don’t hope for any help from over here. The department doesn’t like free-lancers. If they get a chance, they’ll land on you with both feet.”
“I’ll be careful,” I promised.
“More careful than you’ve been,” she suggested.
37
Matty Pierce, the acting student who’d had the fistfight with Dale Wormley, had that indefinable look of the actor who plays tough guys. It’s all layers of pose and posture, veneer over veneer, with no apparent reality beneath at all. These guys, with thick gleaming black hair, chunky bodies, overly bright eyes as though they’d had a plastic surgery eye-tuck at the age of ten, cocky smile, slightly lumpy “rugged” good looks, are palpably different from actual street toughs. There’s no anger in them, for one thing (though there is arrogance), and none of the defensiveness of the real punk. These are guys who’ve never had their bluff called. They get a lot of work in teen movies, riding motorcycles.
Tom Lacroix introduced me to Pierce and to Howard Moffitt, their acting teacher, at five that afternoon in the narrow old building on Bethune Street in the West Village—not far from Anita and Vitto Impero—where Moffitt’s class and theater were located. Moffitt, a stooped and craggy tall man of about sixty, reminded me of three or four other acting teachers I’ve met in my career, people who are theoretically fine actors, who not only know how it’s done but—much rarer—know how to communicate their knowledge, but nevertheless their credits in actual performances and productions are amazingly skimpy. Whenever one of these people takes a small part in a movie or a play, talked into it by some old student who’s made good, you see what the problem is: There they are, in the corner of the screen or the stage, acting. You can see them do it. Their strength as teachers is their weakness as performers: they don’t know how to not show you how it’s done.
Moffitt’s building was very narrow, probably twenty feet, and three stories high, wedged in among other quaint nineteenth-century brick townhouses, most of them now broken up into tiny apartments, a few converted to nursery schools or doctors’ and dentists’ offices. The ground floor of Moffitt’s place, behind a broad wooden garage door painted brown and apparently non-functional, had been turned into a small theater, with sixty or seventy seats—whatever maximum number would permit non-union productions in here—and the most basic lighting and backstage area. Minimalist experimental theater was the only kind possible here.
One entered the building through a small ornate door next to the garage door. A tiny box office and doorway on the right led to the theater, and a warped steep staircase straight ahead led up to the acting studio and theater’s storage rooms and male and female restrooms on the second floor. Moffitt’s living quarters were one more flight up, at the top.
We met on the second floor, in the studio classroom at the rear of the building. The room was nearly square, the width of the building, with two tall broad windows facing back yards filled with starkly leafless plane trees. The floor was well-oiled old broad planks, one side wall was brick and the other mirrored with black curtains drawn in front of the mirrors, and the furniture consisted of about fifteen metal folding chairs or wooden kitchen chairs, plus three battered wooden tables of various sizes. The front wall, opposite the view, contained a closed door and a large green blackboard on which the word MOTIVATION had been incompletely erased.
Tom Lacroix, anxiously looking at his watch, made the introductions and then went ka-drumming down the stairs, on the way to his waiter job. He’d already given both Pierce and Moffitt a rundown on my alleged background and interest here—the article for Vanity Fair about the interface between success and failure, with the peg of Dale Wormley as having been somehow midway between the two—so I could go straight into it, saying to Pierce, “I understand you and Wormley had a disagreement a while ago.”
He did the aggressive grin of his style of actor and said, “We had a disagreement every time we looked at each other. You’re not gonna put that in Vanity Fair. ’’
“No, I’m not,” I agreed. “I just want to get the background here, so I can be sure what does go into the piece is accurate. This is the part of the iceberg that stays underwater.”
Moffitt nodded judiciously, as though thinking of giving me a good mark, and said, “We work the same way in the theater. I tell my students, if all you know about the character is what you’re going to show the audience, you aren’t ready to take that part out on stage.”
Pierce, concentrating on me rather than acting lessons at the moment, said, “But I’ll be in the piece, right?”
“I’m not even sure,” I told him, not wanting to go so far as to promise an actor publicity in a non-existent article. “I’m just trying to get a handle on the subject matter at this point,” I explained.
He was wearing, naturally, a black leather jacket with many zippers, and now, from inside it, he drew a manila envelope and handed it to me, saying, “Just in case, here’s my resume.”
“Fine.” Feeling awkward, but having to go through with the pretense, I put the folder away in my raincoat pocket and said, “Just what was it about Dale Wormley that rubbed you the wrong way?”
He shook his head, with a twisted grin; then, to emphasize the negative, he lifted a hand and shook his upraised thumb back and forth, as though telling me the bridge was out. “The other way around,” he said. “Dale was pissed off all the time. The way you got along with that guy was to back down. I’m not into backing down.”
“Why was he so angry?” I asked. “Because of his career?”
“I never cared enough to ask,” Pierce said, and hooked his thumbs into his jeans pockets, and sat there looking tough.
Moffitt interjected, “Matty’s right about that. Dale was angry all the time. I think it was a true personality trait, not anything specific that happened or that anyone did to him.”
“He was a big guy,” Pierce said. “Like you. So he figured he could get away with stuff.”
“Be a bully, you mean,” I suggested, and Pierce shrugged. He probably was thinking it would sound sissy of him to accuse someone else of being a bully.
Moffitt said, “I’ve often wondered if that kind of aggressive hostile drive isn’t somehow an asset for somebody trying to succeed in a competitive field like acting. I suppose, Mr. Dante, you’ll be getting into that in your piece.”
“Yes, I will,” I agreed. “But what I’m interested in at this point is the background on Wormley himself, his relationships with the people around him.” Turning back to Pierce, I said, “Tom Lacroix kind of led me to believe there was a particular feud between you and Wormley, but you say he acted toward you the way he acted toward everybody, and it was just your refusal to be a doormat that made for any special problem between you.”
“Damn right,” Pierce said. “I know a couple people —you know them, too, Howard—that would just roll over and play dead if Wormley gave them a look. So there there’s no problem, right?”
“Resentment, though, I should think,” I said.
“Well, yeah,” Pierce said, “a couple people were always talking big, they’re gonna do this, gonna do that, but they weren't, you know?”
“Anyone I ought to talk to?” I asked. “I mean, anybody in par—”
Moffitt, smoothly interrupting, said, “Matty, get the playbook, will you? Let’s take a look at the casts Dale worked with. You know where it is?”
Rising, looking a bit confused, Pierce said, “Sure. I don’t know what you need it for. It’s in one of those drawers under the lightboard, right?”
“That’s right,” Moffitt agreed. “I think Mr. Dante should get a sense of the ambience here, the kind of group Dale was interacting with.”
“Okay,” Pierce sai
d, shrugging. He went away downstairs, his feet thumping more deliberately and heavily than Lacroix’s had, and Moffitt turned to me, smiling amiably as he said, “I’d say you have about one minute, Mr. Holt, to tell me why I shouldn’t tell Matty who you really are.”
38
Which meant I had about one second to decide on a response. When time is tight, there’s always the truth: “Wormley’s mother,” I said, “is suing me in civil court for violation of her son’s civil rights by killing him. I’ll get less of a fair shake in civil court than in criminal court. The official murder investigation is absolutely inactive. I just met this afternoon with the detective on the case, and there’s nothing doing there.”
Moffitt frowned at me. “So you’re trying to put the blame on Matty?”
“I’m trying to find out where the blame goes, ” I told him. “Somebody killed Wormley, and I know it wasn’t me. So who was it?”
Pierce was coming back up the stairs. Moffitt glanced in that direction, then said to me, “Matty didn’t do it, I can tell you that much.”
“And the others in the class? The resentful ones?”
“Follow my lead,” he said, and Pierce arrived, carrying a large black looseleaf notebook.
The next ten minutes were very strange. Moffitt and I were running a scene together, an acting exercise, for an audience of one: Pierce. Our prop was the notebook, a record of all productions and extended scenes done by Moffitt’s classes in the last two and a half years. The scene we were playing was Interview, with Moffitt both performing and directing, and Pierce both audience and unwitting cast member. Because all I had to do now was follow Moffitt’s lead and play my part, because I didn’t have to warp my questions to suit a secret agenda, I actually gave a better performance than before, and was almost sorry to see it end.
Almost. On the other hand, when Moffitt moved us into end game I went along with a real sense of relief; if Matty Pierce had seen through what was happening here, there would have been another fistfight in Moffitt’s acting studio, no question.
Westlake, Donald E - Sam Holt 04 Page 18