Westlake, Donald E - Sam Holt 04

by The Fourth Dimension is Death (v1. 1)

  Had he wanted Rita Colby to sleep with the help? She would have refused, I could tell that much from our one meeting. And this would explain why she’d appeared to be so close with Wormley but had stayed so coldly distant from Ed Dante.

  Terry and I talked this over, he wanting me to take these newspaper clippings to Sergeant Shanley, but me convinced it wasn’t going to be enough to get the investigation active again. “I feel as though I should talk with Rita Colby,” I said, “because something in here doesn’t quite fit, which is what Shanley warned me about. But I don’t know how to get in touch with her. I doubt Kay Henry would give me her phone number.” “Then why not look it up in the book?” Terry asked me, reaching for the stack of phone books on the corner of his desk, over against the wall.

  “Are you kidding?” I asked him. “Rita Colby isn’t going to be listed in the phone book.”

  Pulling the Manhattan directory out of the pile, opening it on top of his terminal keyboard, Terry said, “You’d be surprised who’s in the phone book. If you know how to look.” And, as he said that last, he was reaching for his pencil and small square pad of notepa- per. “No reason for Hanford Montgomery not to list himself,” he said.

  “He’s there?” I was astonished.

  “Montgomery, H. Architect. East 58th Street, over by the river. Sound about right?”

  A wealthy neighborhood. “Sounds perfect,” I said. He scribbled the address and number, tore off that sheet of the notepad, and handed it to me, saying, “Let Ed Dante give her a call. The worst thing she can do is tell him to go fuck himself.”

  “I can’t think of anything else she might do, but I’ll give it a try,” I said, and reached for the phone on Terry’s desk, but it rang just as I was about to touch it. So I pulled my hand back, and Terry answered, with a brisk, “Young.” Then he smiled and said, “Hi, baby,” so it was Gretchen. And then he nodded and said, “Yeah, he’s here. Hold on.” Extending the phone toward me, he said, “A message.”

  “For Dante?” I took the phone: “Hi, Gretchen.”

  “Your new agent called,” Gretchen’s voice said. “Kay Henry. He wants you to call him, some time today.”

  “Will do,” I said. “Thanks, Gretchen.” I hung up, and took from my wallet the slip of paper with Henry’s number on it while explaining the message to Terry, saying, “I’ll call him first, then try Colby.”

  Grinning, Terry said, “Maybe he’s got you a job.”

  “More than my regular agent’s doing,” I said, punched out the number, and recognized the British accent of Miss Colinville when she answered. With my toothiest grin, I said, “Hi, honey, this is Ed Dante.” (Terry gave me a repelled look.)

  “Oh, is it,” said that icy voice.

  “Kay called me,” I told her, knowing Ed Dante would presume to be on a first-name basis with her boss, and knowing also that Miss Colinville would hate that. “I’m calling him back,” I explained, “but I could sit and talk with you all day.”

  “One moment,” she said, and made a very loud clicking sound in my ear, and then left me on Hold for a good long time as a punishment. I gave one of Ed Dante’s goofiest grins to Terry, who tried to look disgusted but then just gave up and laughed.

  Another click, less ear-jarring, and Kay Henry’s voice said, “Ed?”

  “Hi, Mr. Henry,” I said, because only with the receptionist would Dante dare to call Henry by his first name.

  “Morning, Ed,” said his cheerful confiding voice. “Did they find your luggage yet?”

  “Not yet,” I told him. “I called Eastern this morning, they said maybe tomorrow. You know the way they are.”

  “Well, we’ll struggle along. I don’t suppose you’ve heard of the O. Henry Theater.”

  “No, I haven’t.”

  “It’s still under construction, down in the Village,” he said. “They’re opening with a limited run over the holidays, and I’ve talked to them about you for one of the parts. It’s only three weeks, and scale, but it gets you back to work and still leaves you free for Four Square, if that should happen.”

  And makes it possible to be certain Ed Dante’s really off the sauce, I thought. I said, “Thanks a lot, Mr. Henry, that sounds just perfect.”

  “I thought so, too,” he agreed, “but it’s up to you to make them want you.”

  “Oh, I know that.”

  “You’re scheduled at six-thirty,” he told me, “at the theater, the O. Henry Theater on Charles Street. You’ll recognize it, it’s a construction site, an old storage building going condo. You’ll see Mr. Cardiff, he’s the house manager.”

  I scribbled the information on another sheet of Terry’s notepad, thanked Henry some more, with great effusiveness, and at last hung up, to face Terry’s sardonic smile. “The first step to stardom,” he said.

  “Well, I’ve been looking for a job.”

  “Will you go?”

  “I guess I’ll have to,” I said. “I mean, if this charade is still going on then; which I hope it isn’t. But if it is, I’ll want to keep my access to Kay Henry alive.”

  “And to Rita Colby through him,” Terry suggested. “Let’s see if she’s home,” I said, and reached for the phone, which did not ring, so I picked it up and tapped in Rita Colby’s number, and it was answered on the third ring by someone who sounded so like Miss Colinville I thought for one confused instant I’d called the wrong number. “Good morning,” she said, and when my bewilderment kept me silent for an extra second she said, more emphatically, “Good morning.” “Oh, good morning,” I said, realizing this had to be another secretary; Rita Colby’s, if I’d dialed right. “Rita Colby, please.”

  “May I tell Miss Colby who’s calling?”

  “Ed Dante,” I said.

  “One moment,” she said, exactly like Miss Colinville, and put me on Hold, exactly like Miss Colinville, but without the extra-loud click. Terry watched me, and I waited, and the wr-Miss Colinville came back to say, “Miss Colby would like to know the subject of the call.”

  “Tell her,” I said, “the Theater Project banquet last September.”

  “One moment.”

  Terry said, “Playing hardball, aren’t you?”

  “Well, what am I going to say I want to talk to her about? Acting methods? We aren’t buddies, Terry, I can’t just be making a social call. So let’s shake the tree, and see what happens.”

  “Don’t stand under it,” he advised.

  I nodded, and heard a click, and the secretary’s voice came back, saying, “Miss Colby thanks you for your interest, but has nothing to say on that subject. Thank you.”

  I opened my mouth, but the click came first, and then dead air. So I hung up, saying, “And so much for that.”

  “So,” Terry said, “now she knows you know.”

  I frowned at him. “That’s the problem,” I said. “She knows I know what?”

  He laughed; more heartily than I thought necessary. “Too bad you can’t ask her,” he said.

  42

  TTerry volunteered to look further into the Montgomery/Colby marriage, see if anybody on the gossip side of the news business had anything juicy to add substance to our story. I phoned Sergeant Shanley, but she wouldn’t be available till mid-afternoon, so I called Anita and arranged to spend some time with her. Then I finally left Terry to get on with the work he was paid for, and I walked across town and downtown into the West Village, thinking that what I’d found—if in fact I’d found anything at all—wasn’t the simple solution I’d been looking for but a brand new complication; not the end of something, but more like the beginning.

  I got to Vitto Impero a little too early for lunch, so Anita and I spent some time upstairs in her apartment over the restaurant, and I gave her a recap of my adventures in the last two days, since we’d been together down in Brooklyn at the Youngs’ house. When I finished, she said, “I don’t see why you made that phone call to Rita Colby.”

  “Well,” I said, “the idea that the death of her husband ha
s something to do with the death of Dale Wormley makes a kind of sense, but there’s great gaps in it. It’s a brand new idea and I wanted to be able to talk about it, think about it. I just wanted the chance to have a conversation with Rita Colby and see what happened. But then, when the secretary asked me what my subject was, I drew a blank. All I could think was, okay, let’s drop a depth charge and see what happens.”

  “What happens is,” Anita told me, “Rita Colby now knows you aren’t just the simple ignorant actor you said you were. If she’s guilty, she knows you’re on the trail. You gave her information, and didn’t get anything back.”

  “Well, I did get something back,” I said. “If there was nothing at all in the idea that there was something wrong with the story, if Rita Colby and Dale Wormley were just innocently at that banquet together when just coincidentally her husband was killing himself an hour’s drive away in New Jersey, why wouldn’t she have come to the phone, even if just to ask me what I’m talking about? The immediate refusal to talk is the smoke that tells me there has to be a fire around there somewhere.”

  “But haven’t you used up Ed Dante now?”

  “Well, I guess I have with Rita Colby,” I admitted. “But will she tell Kay Henry? I don’t see why she would, at least not right away.”

  “To get rid of you,” Anita suggested. “She calls Henry and tells him you’re being a pest and she doesn’t want you around his office any more.”

  “Possible,” I said. “So what I’ll do is, this afternoon I’ll call the Henry office and see if my audition at the O. Henry Theater is still on.”

  “Would you go, if it was?”

  “Sure.” I grinned at her, saying, “That’s a real acting challenge there. I have to go and be good enough to be considered, good enough so they don’t call Henry and say, ‘Don’t send us any more amateur clowns like that one, okay?’ But at the same time, I have to be not quite good enough to get hired.”

  “You plan to enjoy yourself,” Anita accused me.

  “In my secret heart,” I admitted, “I’m enjoying this. Anita, for the last couple of days in New York, I’ve been acting. Win, lose or draw, learn something or learn nothing, this is the first time in years I’ve been able to actually use my muscles, do what I know how to do.”

  Anita gave me a sympathetic look and shook her head: “Poor boy. What are you going to do with yourself when you have to stop playing Ed Dante?”

  “Which will be very soon, in any case,” I told her. “I figure, by tomorrow night I’ll have used it up. I’ll move back into 10th Street and let whatever happens happen.”

  “Why tomorrow night?”

  “Okay,” I said. “Later today, Ed has his audition. He fails, but not by much.”

  “Lots of fun,” Anita said.

  “But also necessary,” I reminded her. “Because then, I’m justified tomorrow morning in going back to see Kay Henry. I start by talking about the audition, and if I’m any good at all I get the conversation moved around to Rita Colby and her dead husband, and does she happen to have any guy in her life right now, and with any luck I get to find out what Henry thinks of it all.” Grinning, I said, “Wouldn’t it be nice, for instance, if she phoned him the evening of the banquet and asked him to arrange an escort for her to the dinner?”

  “He’d have to know the truth, then,” Anita said.

  “He’d have to suspect, sure,” I agreed, “which I’d look very hard for. But remember, Rita Colby’s almost the entire support of that agency. It would take a lot for him to permit a negative thought about her to cross his brain.”

  “He has every reason to protect her, then,” Anita said. She pointed at me, and added, “From you.”

  “I’ll try to be subtle,” I promised.

  “As subtle as you were with Rita Colby?”

  I laughed. “Even subtler than that,” I said.

  43

  Anita and I had lunch together at the table in the back near the kitchen, surrounded by lawyers from downtown and executives from midtown and local people from the Village. This is the table where we’d had dinner with Julie Kaplan nearly six weeks ago, when I thought my troubles with the Dale Wormley killing were coming to an end. Now, six weeks later, it seemed to me they were just barely beginning.

  Downstairs, we didn’t talk about any of that, but about less troubling subjects. Anita picked at her food, as usual, but I had a good appetite for some reason, and Angela the waitress smiled in approval as I cleared every plate she gave me. I would have liked some white wine to go with the tortellini and the sole, but there was too much to be done this afternoon, so I contented myself with a bottle of San Pellegrino water, and several cups of espresso.

  After lunch, there was still plenty of time before my meeting with Sergeant Shanley, so I went back upstairs and used Anita’s phone to call Kay Henry’s office, telling the chilly Miss Colinville, “Hi, hon, it’s Ed Dante again. Just wanted to be sure my audition was still on for this afternoon.”

  “And what audition would that be?” she demanded, but then, before I could answer, she said, “Oh, never mind, just hold on one moment.” And I got the phone away from my ear just in time to avoid the full impact of her punitive click.

  Kay Henry himself came on the line half a minute later, saying, “Ed? Any problem?”

  “No, sir, Mr. Henry,” I assured him. “I just wanted to be sure everything was set for the audition.” “Absolutely,” he said. “They’re looking forward to you, Ed. I explained the problem with your lost photo and resume, so they know if they’re interested I’ll send them the material in a day or two.”

  “Good,” I said. “Fine. Thanks a lot, Mr. Henry.”

  “Just go in there and knock ’em dead,” he told me.

  “I will,” I promised, and hung up, and told Anita, “She hasn’t complained about me to Henry. What do you suppose that means?”

  “It might mean she’s worried,” Anita said, “or it might mean she really doesn’t give a damn about Ed Dante and his dumb ideas.”

  “An impregnable woman, eh? Let’s hope not,” I said, and kissed Anita goodbye. We’d agreed I would come back here this evening, after my audition. My last night in exile from my own house would be spent with Anita rather than with the Youngs; something pleasant to look forward to.

  I walked up the west side to Midtown Precinct South, and had to wait about fifteen minutes before Sergeant Shanley came out to get me.

  “Sorry about the delay,” she said. “There’s always thirty things going on here.”

  “No problem,” I assured her.

  We went back to the same interview room as last time, took the same chairs, and she said, “So what do you have for me today? Been under any more beds?”

  “Not exactly,” I told her, and took the printed-out newspaper information from my inside jacket pocket and handed it to her.

  She raised an eyebrow at me, but asked no questions, and settled down to read. I watched her, but her face remained expressionless as she went methodically through every sheet, turning each one face down on the battered metal desk when she was finished. At the end, she nodded and looked at me and said, “Filling in that theory of yours, huh?”

  “Pretty much,” I agreed.

  “Let me see if I can come up with your story for you,” she said. “You already had the idea Dale Wormley was blackmailing somebody, probably with some sort of evidence on a sound tape. Now your idea is, the somebody he was blackmailing is Rita Colby, because there was something funny about her husband’s suicide and Wormley knew about it.”

  “Knew about it,” I said, “because Rita Colby used him as her alibi for the time of her husband’s death.”

  “So you say.”

  “Right after that event,” I told her, pointing at the papers on the desk, “Wormley told his girlfriend Julie Kaplan that things were definitely going to start getting better for him, that he knew he was headed for the big time. And that’s when Rita Colby suddenly insisted he be given a part in
her next Broadway play. Sergeant, a minor role in a play is not cast five months in advance, and unless there’s some personal reason involved, it isn’t cast without auditions, and it isn’t cast without consultation with director and playwright.”

  “Personal reason involved,” Sergeant Shanley repeated. “Doesn’t that usually mean somebody’s sleeping with somebody?”

  “Not this time,” I said.

  She grinned a little. “Because Rita Colby wouldn’t roll over for you? That doesn’t prove anything, Mr. Holt, it really doesn’t. Not to insult you or anything, but you know what they say: No accounting for tastes.”

  “Her reaction to me doesn’t prove anything,” I agreed, “but it does suggest something. But more important than that, if Wormley had been sleeping with Rita Colby, his regular girlfriend would have known it. That kind of secret you can’t keep. Julie Kaplan is absolutely certain there was nothing going on there, and I believe her.”

  “You believe her because it fits the theory,” the Sergeant suggested.

  I spread my hands in frustration. “Are you just going to throw the whole theory out the window simply because I’m the one who came up with it?”

  “Not at all.” Tapping the sheets of paper on the desk, she said, “I’ll follow through on this, of course I will, but I’ll tell you right now what will happen. Shall I?”

  “Sure.”

  “I’ll call the police over in Jersey,” she said, “and ask them if there was anything suspicious about Montgomery’s suicide. They’ll say no, of course, because if there’d been anything suspicious they would have acted on their suspicions at the time. But I’ll tell them I have information that suggests the wife might at least have been in the house when her husband died, and not in New York at a banquet the way she claimed, and I’ll ask them to check around and see if they come up with any corroboration of that. They’ll say fine, and they’ll talk to the first people on the scene, and they’ll call me back and say there’s no indication the wife was around. And that will be that.”