“So you’re telling me right now,” I said, “that the whole thing is pointless.”
She leaned toward me, looking concerned. “Mr. Holt,” she said, “I’m not saying you’re wrong about this. What I’m saying is, you’re talking about an event that took place three months ago, and up to this point there hasn’t been the slightest suggestion of anything funny there. You may be right about all this. At this point, my own guess is that it’s even money you are right. But there’s nothing here—” again she patted the papers on the desk “—to give me a handle, to give me something to work with. How could I go to Rita Colby and question her about the night her husband died? That isn’t my case. It isn’t even my jurisdiction. If I catch the interest of somebody on the case over in Jersey, then maybe something might happen. Maybe. But it’s damn unlikely from that end, and impossible from my end.”
“You need a smoking gun, you mean,” I said.
“I need more than smoke,” she told me.
44
There was nothing to do after that but walk back downtown to Anita’s place. I had two and a half hours before my audition at the O. Henry Theater, about six blocks from Vitto Impero, and I had plenty to brood about.
I knew Sergeant Shanley was right, of course. A theory wasn’t reason enough to start the cops intruding on people’s lives; particularly prominent people like Rita Colby. I could hope some policeman over in New Jersey did have mental reservations about the death of Hanford Montgomery, and that Sergeant Shanley’s call would goose him into following up on his doubts, but, as Shanley had said, that was very unlikely. And there was no real evidential link between the supposed suicide of Hanford Montgomery and the murder a month later of Dale Wormley.
I passed this news—or lack of news—to Anita, and then used her phone to call Terry at his office to find out what he’d learned, if anything, about the marriage between Hanford Montgomery and Rita Colby. “Not much useful, I think,” he said.
“Tell me anyway.”
“Okay. It was a prominent-people wedding, up in Martha’s Vineyard, lots of the well-connected and well-bred and well-heeled in attendance. His former wife, who’d been rich as hell, died of cancer two years before he married Colby. As for Colby, she was divorced twice, once from an actor, once from an Oklahoma oilman.”
“Anything in those?” I asked.
“Whadaya mean, scandal? Cocaine, orgies, all of that?”
“It would be nice.”
“But no,” he told me. “They were just divorces. You know, regular let’s-stop-meeting-like-this divorces.”
“Okay. What about the Montgomery/Colby marriage?”
“Distant,” he said. “Their life-styles were very different, their friends were different. They tended to lead separate lives. That famous banquet wasn’t the first time Colby went out with an escort other than her husband.”
“Then why’d they get married, for God’s sake?”
“There isn’t a couple I can think of,” Terry said thoughtfully, “about whom that question couldn’t be asked. They got married, that’s why. If there was trouble between them in the marriage, they kept it quiet.”
“Hmmmm,” I said, because that wasn’t what I’d wanted to hear.
“Also,” he said, “while we’re on the subject of bad news, Montgomery was depressed about his health. His first wife’s cancer death apparently got to him in a big way, brought a tendency toward hypochondria into full flower.”
“Hmmmm,” I said again. “What did his note say?”
“Well, now,” Terry said, “there we have a little something for your team. There was no note.”
“That’s unusual, Terry,” I said.
“I know that,” he agreed. “Most suicides leave a note. Particularly well-off literate intelligent suicides who want to make it clear it’s depression or health reasons and they’re not blaming their loved ones. I know that.”
“So what have we here?” I asked.
“Probably, just a member of the minority,” Terry told me. “It is not entirely unheard of for suicides to go out with no final message, it’s just less common than the other way.”
“Okay, okay,” I said. “How did Montgomery do the deed?”
“Gun,” Terry said. “His own, registered to him, a little revolver such as is found in a drawer in most master bedrooms in that county. Fired twice, the first time at a mirror in the bedroom. Second time, he shot himself in the ear.”
“The ear? Isn’t that unusual?”
“Not really,” he said. “Suicides do understand that the concept is to get the bullet in touch with the brain. Some of them put the gun in their mouth, some put it in their ear. Not many shoot themselves in the eye.”
“Goddamit, Terry,” I said, “this is sounding more and more like suicide.”
He laughed, but sympathetically. “I was thinking the same thing myself,” he said.
“There’s nothing else for my team? Just the lack of a note?”
“Sorry, pal.”
I thanked him for his efforts, and told him I’d be staying here with Anita tonight, and then we hung up, and I had even more than before to brood about.
Was I on the wrong trail entirely? Was I haring off after Rita Colby and her deceased husband, when in fact none of that had anything at all to do with Dale Wormley’s death? Had Wormley been given the part in Four Square, and had he been so sure things would be going well for him from then on, simply because Rita Colby liked him, because he’d been sympathetic at the time of her loss or something like that?
And did that mean Dale Wormley’s murderer had come out of some other quadrant of his life? Howard Moffitt and his acting class, for instance? Or the Kwality FoodMart commercials? Or some corner of his experience I hadn’t even come across yet?
How much longer could Ed Dante keep stumbling around New York with his dumb grin and his dumb moustache and his dumb hair, without getting exposed as a phony and without making trouble for Sam Holt? And what was Ed Dante accomplishing anyway? Nothing that I could see.
Well, I was discouraged, and I had good reason to be, but how could I stop? I had to keep trying because there was no alternative. Ed Dante had to keep shambling forward because he hadn’t finished his job yet; even though it was looking very much as though he never would finish it.
But Ed Dante wasn’t done yet. There was still hope, I hoped. And so, for now, Ed Dante had to get himself back in gear and get out there and fail an audition.
45
In recent years, the West Village has been undergoing a great deal of gentrification, the old warehouses and factory lofts and garages in the blocks near the Hudson River converting to condominiums, their ground floors filling with new delis and dry cleaners, and here and there, because this is Greenwich Village, new small theaters. The O. Henry Theater was one of these, in a building that had until just a few years ago been the home base of a moving and storage company; now gone to New Jersey, probably. Now the building, also renamed O. Henry, its old bricks freshly cleaned and pointed, its new name on the new canopy in front of its new glass-doored entrance, was nearing the end of its conversion: Occupancy February said the sign by the entrance, which also indicated, with an arrow, the direction to the sales office.
All of that was closed now, at six-thirty in the evening, after dark, and in fact at first it seemed to me that everything was shut down for the night here. But then I saw the worklight down at the far corner of the building closest to the river—visible at the end of the street, white pinpoints of light skipping nervously atop the black water—and I walked down there to find another entrance, closed with a temporary door in a sheet of plywood nailed to the frame, but with the theater sign already fixed in place above: O. Henry Theater, it said, in black letters on a white glass background, and with a black silhouette of head-and- shoulders that I suppose was meant to be William Sydney Porter himself.
I tried the temporary door, but it was locked, with a prominent padlock; nor did I see any light withi
n. Had Kay Henry gotten his audition times confused? I was starting to turn away when a maroon Mercedes pulled to a stop at the curb and Henry himself got out, grinning at me and saying, “Ed! Right on time. Good man.” Then he frowned past me at the entrance and said, “Where’s Cardiff?”
“I have no idea,” I told him. “I just got here myself.”
Looking irritated behind his smooth exterior, Henry went over to the padlocked door, rattled the lock, and knocked briskly on the door. When nothing happened, he said, “Well, we’ll wait for them inside,” and withdrew a bunch of keys from his pocket.
Surprised, I said, “You have a key to this place?”
“The truth is,” he said, grinning in satisfaction as he looked through the keys for the right one, “I’m one of the owners of the building. Rita, and I, and a dozen other people.” Turning his broad happy grin toward me, he said, “I was the one who named the place. Did you think it was a coincidence?”
“Well, that’s pretty good,” I said, with Ed Dante’s gawkishness. “Your own theater, and named after you.”
“Not quite,” he said, though still grinning. “A different first letter. Ah, here it is.” And he bent over the padlock with the right key.
The temporary door opened to an unfinished lobby, its pseudo-marble floor covered with heavy sheets of mover’s paper, its walls Sheetrocked but not yet painted. “Go on in,” Henry told me, holding the door open with his foot as he fiddled the key back out of the padlock.
So I went past him and on inside, looking around. Light-spill from outside gave some illumination to the interior, or at least to this lobby.
From behind me, Henry said, “See the lightswitches over there? By the doorway to the auditorium.”
“I see them,” I said, moving carefully through the semi-darkness toward a row of half a dozen lightswitches without their switchplates.
“Turn on the two on the left.”
“Okay.” I did so, and brought up recessed lighting in bas relief pots on both sides of the lobby. I stood looking around at the place, the simple modern two- window box office to one side, as Henry closed the temporary door, which had another hasp lock on the inside, matching the one without. Moving smoothly, unhurriedly, Henry fixed that hasp into place and closed the padlock over it, saying, “There. Now we’ll have privacy.” Then, turning to me, his smile glinting as he took a small pistol from his pocket, he said, “We’ll want privacy for this discussion, Ed. Should I go on calling you Ed, by the way?” And the pistol pointed unwaveringly at my face.
46
How stupid of me. That was all I could think at first, how stupid I’d been. Evening auditions are fairly common in off-Broadway theater, but in a theater as incomplete as this? And if the building isn’t going to be ready for occupancy until February, how is the theater going to do a production, however limited, over the holidays? And how could I still have believed in the audition when there was no one present at all except the smiling Kay Henry, who just happened to be an owner of the building?
I’d walked right into this spider’s parlor, as big and dumb as life, concentrating on my own performance and paying no attention at all to Henry’s.
“I take it,” he was saying, moving toward me from the relocked door, “Ed Dante isn’t your real name.”
So he didn’t actually know who I was; could that be a help at all? “Sure it is, Mr. Henry,” I said, playing the goofy Ed to the bitter end. “What’s going on?”
“My very question to you,” he said, and the barrel of the pistol angled downward, away from my face. “We’re alone in this building,” he pointed out. “You’re going to tell me who you are and what you’re up to. No question, you will tell me. If you take too long to answer my questions, I’ll start shooting you. Not to kill, not to begin with. Just to hurt and to maim. For instance, my first shot will go into your left knee.”
He extended his arm, sighting along it and along the pistol barrel, and I slapped off the lights I’d just switched on, spun away to the side as the pistol made a nasty crack sound, like a whip being snapped rather than a gun going off, and I leaped through the entrance into the dark auditorium, with no idea whether I’d been hit or not.
I stumbled over seating in the dark—plush, fortunately—and fell between rows as the lights behind me came back on. I scrambled away along the curving row, out of sight from the doorway just in time, because Henry’s voice sounded back there, still calm, amused, saying, “Don’t be stupid, Ed, or whoever you are. I can guarantee you there’s no way out except the door we came in. And I won’t let you near that door, Ed. I’m armed, and you aren’t. All we need is to have a discussion, Ed. Nobody needs to be hurt. You’ll answer questions, I’ll be satisfied, we’ll both go home.”
I crawled like a snake under seats, hoping not to disturb the upraised seats or make any noise that would tell him where I was. Fortunately, he covered any sounds I might make by going on talking: “Ed, your story about the lost luggage never did play, you know that? It was just a way to explain why you didn’t have photos and resume, isn’t that right? And when I checked into the career you described to me, the whole thing was just a fairy-tale, a pack of fibs from beginning to end. I called Equity, and they don’t have an Ed Dante. Ed, Ed, how did you expect to get away with it?”
I no longer knew. At the extreme right side of the theater, I risked raising my head slightly, looking up across the rows of seats, and saw him there, just inside the lobby doorway, perched casually on a seatback, one foot up on the armrest, hand with the gun dangling over his knee. He continued to smile, calm and confident, as he chatted amiably at the theater and his quick eyes kept scanning, scanning.
I ducked back down. What to do? His voice moved over me, without apparent direction, showing how well-designed the acoustics were in here. A nice theater to work in, probably.
But not to die in.
“You’re a good actor, Ed, you really are, that Nazi soldier you did was very impressive. No fooling. When this nonsense is all over, maybe we could talk about a career. A career change for you, Ed. What do you say?”
Flight was impossible. Someway or other, I had to counterattack.
“After we talked this morning, Ed, after I told you about the audition here, you called Rita, didn’t you? Said you wanted to talk about the Theater Project dinner. You upset Rita a great deal, Ed, and I just can’t permit that. If you want to talk about the Theater Project dinner, you can talk about it with me. Let’s do that, Ed. What do you want to ask?”
He wasn’t moving. His knowledge of this theater, this building, was such that he didn’t have to move, he could just stay there by the only working exit—there’d be others, beyond the stage, mandated by the fire laws, but they’d be solidly locked now—and he could talk calmly and keep watching, and sooner or later the stalemate would end.
“My guess, Ed, is that you’re a private detective. Did Mrs. Wormley hire you? What do you think you’re investigating, Ed? Can’t you even tell me that much?” If I moved across the row two down from where he waited, I could get very close to him without being seen. If I could then distract him, stall him, delay him somehow for just a couple of seconds, until I got within arm’s reach, there was a chance.
“Ed, I’m losing my patience here. Quit hiding like a child. Come out and let’s talk this over. How much do you get paid, in your business? Is it worth all this, Ed?” Ed Dante was finished now. I pulled off the wig and moustache, stripped out of the raincoat, left them behind on the floor, started crawling.
“You were spying on me, Ed. Think about it. You don’t have that much goodwill to spend with me. But I want to make things all right. Just stand up like a man, Ed, and tell me what you want to know.”
The lighting was soft; dim enough for my purposes? I could only hope so. And hope I remembered the voice, the mannerisms. I fixed my face in an expression of aggressive grievance and rose to my feet, two yards from Henry, glaring at him. “It’s Dale, Kay,” I said. “Why did you kill me?�
�
47
“You should be dead, you know,” Sergeant Shanley said.
The hospital bed was not at all comfortable, the sheets constantly bunching and creasing beneath me. Shifting yet again to a slightly different position, feeling the twinges in my side and my shoulder and my arm, I said, “I know, Sergeant, I know. But I figured I was dead anyway. I had to take the chance.”
“Lucky,” she said, and shook her head.
Well, that was true enough. When I’d risen up directly in front of Kay Henry, doing my Dale Wormley imitation—full circle: this had begun with Wormley imitating me—the look of horror in his eyes had lasted only a second, he was recovering even as I lunged at him, and he managed to shoot me three times before I knocked him down and pounded his head onto the pseudo-marble floor. The shock and the speed had thrown him off balance just enough to keep me alive, though, the three shots all off-target to the left, one cracking and ricocheting off a rib on my left side, one punching into my left shoulder and doing some cartilage and muscle damage there, and one slicing through the flesh of my left arm, just below the elbow. I was bleeding like a fountain and only semi-conscious when I searched Henry for his keys, struggled to find the right one, unlocked that goddam padlock and went reeling out into the night on Charles Street looking for help. A cab that didn’t want to stop for me changed its mind when I draped myself on its hood, and now, three days later, here I was in the hospital, my food being sent in by Anita from Vitto Impero and Sergeant Shanley here to tell me the story.
“Your theory turned out to be pretty good up to a point,” she said. “The key to the thing was blackmail and a tape recording. But Rita Colby wasn’t a murderer, and she wasn’t the one being blackmailed, and Hanford Montgomery really did commit suicide.”
Laughing, even though it hurt my rib, I said, “But the rest I got okay, huh?”
Westlake, Donald E - Sam Holt 04 Page 21