But finally Moffitt said, “Matty, I know you have to get to work, and I’d like to discuss this theme of Mr. Dante’s from my point of view. For a teacher in this profession, his ideas might be very interesting.” With an innocent gaze in my direction, he added, “If you have time?”
“Sure,” I said. “The more I learn, the better.”
“That’s undoubtedly true,” Moffitt agreed.
Pierce had been growing increasingly restless, in fact, as the conversation had moved farther away from himself, and was very happy to leave. “Don’t lose the picture and resume, now,” he told me, shaking my hand, squeezing harder than necessary. “You’ll be able to say you knew me when.”
“I’m looking forward to it,” I told him.
Pierce went hammering back down the stairs, and Moffitt and I waited till we heard the front door slam behind him. Then Moffitt smiled at me and said, “Please excuse my stretching that. I admit it was an elitist impulse.”
“It was?”
“I don’t expect a television actor to have much by way of technique,” he explained.
Was he trying to get a rise out of me, push me off-balance a bit and see what happened? I said, “Acting is acting, isn’t it?”
“Oh, absolutely not,” he said, eyes widening; I’d touched on some bugbear of his, obviously. But then he waved the matter away, saying, “In any event, it was pleasant to have my prejudices confounded. What are you working at these days?”
“I’m between jobs,” I said, that being the standard face-saving answer from an actor who isn’t working at anything at the moment.
I expected Moffitt to recognize that and respect it, and he did, with a faint smile, saying, “You should work. Exercises can only go so far.”
“If that civil court endorses the idea I’m an unconvicted murderer,” I said, “I’ll never work again.” He raised a surprised eyebrow: “Not even as the notorious Sam Holt? Wouldn’t there be some publicity value in that?”
I shuddered. “That would be worse.”
“All of my prejudices are in ruins,” he said.
Looking at his ascetic and satisfied face, I decided I didn’t have to like him. “Not all, I think,” I said.
Surprised, he laughed and said, “My God, I’m still responding to your Mr. Dante, who wasn’t that intelligent. All right, Mr. Holt, forgive me. Let’s get down to cases. The fact is, whatever it was in Dale’s life that led someone to kill him, it would not have derived from this class, or the people he dealt with here.”
I said, “Are you sure you aren’t just defending your turf?”
“Oh, yes,” he said. “You see, the raison d'etre of this class is its artificiality, its separation from real life. I have had my successes, Mr. Holt; there are former students of mine who have gone on to some fame and accomplishment in this profession.”
“I’m aware of that.”
“But they, I must admit, are the exceptions,” he went on, and shrugged, saying, “Which must be true, in any of the arts. The students come, they learn what they can about the art and about themselves, and then they go on, into the world, toward the narrow end of the funnel. Very few will make it, which most of them know. But it’s impossible ahead of time to be sure which ones will succeed. So they all, when they come here, have the potential, but that’s all. In their real lives, they work as waiters or carpenters or cabdrivers or receptionists or sales clerks. Here, they are stars in embryo. A great deal of passion is released in our classes, passion being, as you know, one of the tools of our trade. But none of them would carry that passion home, would mingle this world with the world of driving a taxi. Sometimes romances start in here, particularly after we do intense love scenes—” he smiled, and shook his head “—but they never last. Never. The passion in here never survives in the air outside.”
Was that true? Moffitt, it seemed to me, was suggesting some sort of romantic Shangri-La specialness about this building, his class, himself; but wasn’t what he was describing actually the kind of office politics that exists everywhere that people work closely together with some element of competition in it?
On the other hand, what he was claiming for his class was certainly true of office politics. No matter how mad somebody makes you at work, you don’t spend your time being mad at that person on your day off. So I nodded, and got to my feet, and said, “Okay, Mr. Moffitt, point taken. Unless I find something else, while I’m rooting around, I’ll think of all this as a dead end.”
“That’s what it is,” he assured me.
We walked toward the head of the stairs together, and I said, “Thank you for not just simply exposing me to Pierce. He probably wouldn’t have been amused.”
“Not very,” Moffitt agreed, with a smile. Then he said, “Shall I take that resume of Matty’s off your hands? You don’t actually have a purpose for it, do you?”
“No, I don’t.” Giving it to him, I said, “You’re the first person who’s seen through me. What did it?”
“This is what I teach, Mr. Holt,” he said, as though the answer were obvious. “I spend half my life evaluating performances. You did the part well enough, the stooped head to distract from your height, the insecure smile, the vague hand gestures, but the dialogue was off.”
“That’s been a problem all along,” I agreed.
“You just weren’t asking the right questions,” he said. “You weren’t interested in the right subjects. When I began to sense there was something wrong, I suggested a topic that you’d have to be interested in, if you were actually who you claimed, and you refused to be detoured away from what you really wanted to know.”
“I noticed you do that,” I said.
“Then I looked you over more carefully,” he told me, “and I saw the hair was wrong. And that moustache is pasted on, isn’t it?”
“It is.”
“It’s excellent,” Moffitt said, “but the hair somehow doesn’t match your head, not well enough. I don’t know how to explain it better than that, it’s very subtle.”
“It’s passed till now.”
“I’m sure it has,” Moffitt agreed, “but I think I’m the first person who began to doubt you and then began to study you. And then, when I realized you were in disguise, I knew that had to mean it was because we would recognize you in your own self, and of course that meant you had to be the celebrity connected with poor Dale’s death. Then I could see it was you.”
“You gave me a bad moment,” I said, “I have to admit that.”
“If you don’t mind,” he said, “I’d like to make up for it with some good advice. May I?”
“Acting advice?”
“Of course,” he said. “And the advice is, don’t be in too much of a hurry to ask your real questions. Match the dialogue to the part. Be patient, take an interest in things you’re not really interested in. Everything you want to know will come out eventually.”
“Will it?”
“If you’re very good,” he said.
39
That evening, I was more discouraged than I realized. I knew I didn’t feel like discussing my day, but I hadn’t been aware just how silent and withdrawn I’d become until, after dinner with the Young family, Terry turned to me in the living room and abruptly said, “Well, Sam? Gonna quit?”
I blinked at him. The remark uncomfortably paralleled my own thoughts, except that instead of thinking of myself as on the verge of quitting I’d seen it the other way; the leads and trails had petered out, had quit me. What was I going to do tomorrow, what string should I follow? There was none that I could see. But I answered Terry’s question by saying, “I can’t quit. Not if there’s anything left to do.”
“And if there’s nothing left to do?”
I put my hand up to rub my brow—still itchy from the wig I’d been wearing all day—as Gretchen came into the living room, having dealt with bedtime for the kids. Frowning from Terry to me, she said, “How can there be nothing left to do? Someone killed that man, didn’t they?”
“And the girl,” I said.
“Then they can’t just disappear,” Gretchen insisted, sitting on the sofa beside Terry and looking at me with concern. “There has to be a reason, after all. And you have to be able to find that reason.”
“You’d think so,” I said.
Terry said, “All right, now, wait a minute. Are you telling us nothing happened today? I thought you had people to see, an apartment to toss. You got nothing out of all that at all?”
“Not enough,” I said.
“It’s time for the actor,” Terry decided, “to turn this over to a pro, somebody who knows what he’s doing.”
“The police,” I said, “are as stymied as I am. I talked to them today.”
“I don’t mean the police,” he said. “I mean me. A reporter. Somebody who knows evidence when he falls over it.”
“Well, I wish you’d fall over some on my account,” I said.
“Let’s try.” He settled more comfortably on the couch and said, “When we parted this morning, you were on your way to Wormley’s apartment. Tell me about it.”
So I told them about it, and about Mrs. Wormley, and about my meeting with Mort, and my meeting with Sergeant Shanley, and the oddball encounter with Pierce and Moffitt, and at the end Terry said, “I don’t see anything in that acting class. I think Moffitt was right about that.”
“So do I.”
“So you don’t exactly forget that scene,” he said, “but you set it to one side. You also think about Mrs. Wormley.”
I frowned at him. “What do I think about Mrs. Wormley?”
“Whether or not she had a motive.”
“To kill her son?”
“It has happened, in this old world, once or twice,” Terry assured me. “In fact, more people are killed by family and friends than by strangers.”
“But— What reason would she have?”
“I asked you first,” he said.
Gretchen said, “Would it be so she could sue you?” Terry answered her, shaking his head, saying, “Too long range. Too many factors would have to fall out just right. I was thinking maybe she felt neglected, or maybe money was tight and she took out an insurance policy on him, something like that.”
I said, “The chief characteristic of Mrs. Wormley that I’ve been able to learn is that she lived her life through her son, that his career was the most important thing in her life.”
“That could change,” Terry said, unruffled, “but okay. We’ll set her aside, too, along with the acting class. Actually, what I most like is that missing audiotape.”
“You mean, my blackmail theory?”
“Yes. It gives us a motive for murder beyond this general one that Wormley was a pain in the ass.”
I said, “But that’s a trail that just leads out into the blue. I don’t know who was being blackmailed, or what the subject was. Or, you know, remembering what Sergeant Shanley said, I can’t be really absolutely sure anybody was being blackmailed at all.”
“I tell you what we’ll do,” Terry said. “Tomorrow morning, come on into the office with me. We’ll put the computer to work on it.”
“How do we go about doing that?”
“If Wormley was blackmailing somebody,” he said, “it had to be somebody he knew, right?”
“Right.”
“And you have a pretty good list of the people he knew, including those cast lists from the acting class.”
“That’s right.”
“So tomorrow,” Terry said, “we’ll run names through the computer, see if anybody has done anything newsworthy. Maybe the subject of the blackmail has already had some sort of public airing.”
I frowned. “Like what? I don’t see where you’re going.”
“Well,” he said, “like, what if the place wherever Matty Pierce works was robbed six months ago and it might have been an inside job?”
I was dubious, and saw no reason to hide it. “Do you really think we’re going to get anywhere that way? Isn’t that just spinning our wheels?”
Gretchen said, “Terry’s a bulldog, Sam, that’s why he’s so good at his job.”
Grinning, patting Gretchen’s thigh, Terry said, “That’s how I finally wore you down.”
“Yes, you did,” she agreed, and said to me, “Terry knows how to just keep worrying at things. When you think there’s nothing more you can possibly do, he thinks of six things.”
“One will do,” I said.
40
Terry doesn’t have his own office at the News, but his space in the large main editorial room has a wall on his right, the back of a tall broad bookcase separating him from the aisle ahead of him, and a large two-sided cork bulletin board on wheels between his area and the desk of the guy behind him. To his left is editorial, loud and busy and seething with motion; but he likes that atmosphere, he enjoys the idea that it’s getting into his prose.
Terry’s space, besides his desk, contains a square metal wastebasket and two chairs. The wall and bulletin board and bookcase are covered with taped-up headlines, photos, cartoons, election buttons, correspondence, and all sorts of miscellaneous junk, in some places two and three levels deep. On the desk are his manual portable typewriter, on which he still writes first drafts, as well as the screen and keyboard to his computer terminal. If he feels like printing something out, the printer—shared by several other people—is on a table about thirty feet away.
We arrived a little before ten in the morning, carrying coffee from a deli downstairs. Terry exchanged words with a few other people, I did my gawky Ed Dante number (being back in the wig and moustache), and then he settled himself down at his desk and I produced my list of names. Terry switched on the computer, and began to ask questions.
We’d decided to be completists, and to go through everybody we knew Wormley knew, no matter how remote the connection. The writer and director and agency producer of the Kwality FoodMarts commercials, for instance, and Miss Colinville the receptionist from Kay Henry’s office, and all of Wormley’s fellow students at Howard Moffitt’s class. Even so, I knew our net might not be cast widely enough. What if the killer were someone who’d been mad at Wormley since high school, and had finally caught up? Only my conviction that Kim Peyser had to have known the killer—or she wouldn’t have let herself be killed so easily—kept me from fretting those possibilities too much.
Running the names through the computer took forever, and the first time through we didn’t come up with anything at all that seemed useful. But then Terry said, “Let’s try it the other way around. Let’s see if Wormley himself was ever newsworthy, before his obit.” And he tapped in the green letters dale wormley, and up came the morgue on that name: every mention in a review, every story about his murder, and then the notation: “Hanford Montgomery, with wife at time of suicide.”
“Ho ho,” Terry said. “What have we here?”
“We’ve seen that name before,” I said. “Going through here, connected with somebody else. Hanford Montgomery.”
So Terry brought up that name, and it turned out Hanford Montgomery was a wealthy architect from a rich New England banking family. He’d gotten ink several times for important governmental commissions his firm had received, and a couple of times for industry awards, and then once, nearly three months ago, on September 16th, when he’d shot himself dead at his weekend house near Short Hills, New Jersey; a very wealthy and socially significant neighborhood. Friends were quoted as saying Montgomery had been depressed about his health for some time. But the kicker was Hanford Montgomery’s wife.
Rita Colby.
It was the third marriage for her, second for him. They’d been married four years. At the time of her husband’s suicide, theater and film star Rita Colby had been attending the annual Theater Project scholarship fund banquet at the Waldorf-Astoria. Her escort had been the rising New York actor Dale Wormley.
“There it is,” Terry said. “This is the thing you’ve been looking for.”
I look
ed over his shoulder at the green letters on the black background. “It is, isn’t it? September 16th; just after that is when Wormley told Julie Kaplan that good things were going to start happening for him.”
“And Rita Colby,” Terry added, “insisted on hiring the guy for her next play.”
“You know,” I said, “I’ve been to that Theater Project dinner, and it’s just a mob scene, one of those places where everybody goes just to stay in touch with everybody else. A long cocktail party first, and then when you go on into the banquet room everybody tablehops all the way through dinner. Nobody can ever know for sure who’s where when.”
“Let’s get all of this,” Terry said, and hit the button to print out Hanford Montgomery’s obit and the brief news item on his suicide and the somewhat longer entertainment page piece on the Theater Project banquet. He went away to the printer, came back with the sheets of paper, and handed them to me. “You’re on your way,” he said.
41
But was I? And if so, where to? I was as convinced as Terry that this was the thread I was looking for, but I wasn’t one hundred per cent sure where that thread was supposed to lead me.
Was Rita Colby the killer? Did she have the strength to beat Dale Wormley to death with a piece of wood and then drag his body down the block and up a stoop and into a vestibule? I just had trouble imagining it.
On the other hand, I could see her having the coolness to dispatch Kim Peyser, and of course it was possible she’d murdered her husband and arranged it to look like suicide and then quickly called on a fellow Kay Henry client to accompany her to the banquet; no one there would know at exactly what time anybody had arrived.
Then, knowing just what crime he’d been the beard for, Wormley would have demanded the kind of payment in return that Rita Colby could provide; a boost for his career. But he’d gone too far, he’d pushed too hard, as of course he would have done, being who he was.
Westlake, Donald E - Sam Holt 04 Page 19