Samuel Holt: The Fourth Dimension is Death

Mort, frowning thoughtfully at the papers on his desk, seated well forward with one arm behind him, elbow up, hand clasped on chair-arm, said, “Let me see if I can guess what happened. Dale Wormley’s attitude toward Sam Holt seemed to you obsessive and unreal—”

“That’s right,” she said, still very bright-eyed.

Mort nodded. He kept watching the desk. I knew he felt uncomfortable around high emotion, and this was his delicate way of keeping the temperature in the room bearable. “When the police came to you this morning,” he said, “and told you what had happened, your immediate thought was, ‘I was wrong, and Dale was right.’ You thought he must have been telling you about a real danger, and you’d ignored him, and if you’d paid more attention and been — I think we say ‘supportive’ these days — if you’d been all that, nothing bad would have happened to him.”

“That’s the first thing I told the cops,” she agreed, nodding, leaning toward Mort as though he were the physician with the diagnosis that would save her. “When they told me, right away I said, ‘Dale was right! I should have listened to him!’”

“And so,” Mort said, nodding slowly, seeming to read his words off the strewn papers on his desk, “having been converted to Dale’s belief, you immediately passed it on to the police as your own.”

“I did! That’s exactly what I did!” She was bobbing up and down on her chair now, and she turned from Mort to me to say, “And I really believed it, I wasn’t trying to just make trouble or anything like that. I believed it!”

“May I ask,” Mort said, peering almost surreptitiously at her through his eyebrows, “what changed your mind?”

“Kim,” she said.

He actually raised his head to look at her directly. “Kim?” he echoed.

“My roommate,” she explained. “See, when I left Dale I just moved in with this friend of mine, Kim Peyser.”

“A young woman,” suggested Mort.

“Yes, sure,” she said, and flashed a brief sunny smile, and said, “Dale and I aren’t, weren’t— You know, we weren’t through , neither of us thought we were, well, you know. So Kim had room, and I moved in with her, cause it would just be for a while.”

“Yes, of course.”

“So when the police came and told me,” she said, and shook her head at the memory, making that heavy garment of her hair lift and move in a slow wave around her face, “when they were going,” she explained, “they said I shouldn’t be alone for a while, so I called Kim at work and she — Kim works with one of those phone-survey places, you know? Call you up and ask you what toothpaste you use and all that. So it’s kind of loose, you can come and go kind of when you want. So she came home, and I told her everything, and right away she said, ‘Julie, you gotta be nuts. Sam Holt didn’t kill Dale.’ And right up till then I was believing it, believing the whole thing, I really was.” Turning to me — as the injured party, I suppose — appealing directly to me, she said, “And the second Kim said that, it just fell apart. I mean, I knew you didn’t do it.”

“Thank you,” I said.

“No, I mean it,” she said, utterly serious and determined to make me understand. “It was like being with your friends and you get high,” she said earnestly, “and you all talk about how the human race really came from another planet and all that, and everybody in the room really and truly believes it. And then you come down and you say, ‘Oh, wow, that was weird.’ You know what I mean?”

I had to grin and nod and say, “Yes, I do.”

“Well,” she said, “that’s exactly what it was like. I told Kim the story, and she said, ‘Julie, you gotta be nuts,’ and that second I saw she was right, and it was crazy to think you were gonna go out and kill Dale. I mean, somebody who sues somebody is not somebody who goes out and kills somebody, it’s like a whole other mindset, you know?”

Mort laughed. “Very cogent,” he said. “Very well reasoned, Miss Kaplan.”

“So I called the police,” she told the both of us, “right away, and of course I couldn’t get to the same people that talked to me before. It was a man and a woman and—”

“Feeney and LaMarca,” I said.

She gave me a stricken look, reminded of her guilt. “They went right to you, didn’t they? Right after me, they went to you.”

“Of course,” I said.

“Well, I left a message for them,” she said, nodding to show her determination, her heavy hair nodding after her. “I told them I was crazy before, I explained the whole thing, but it was just a message , you know? Not like really talking to them or anything like that. I mean, who knows when they’ll see it or what they’ll think. So I just wandered around the apartment, and I said to myself, ‘Julie, you’ve got to do more, you’ve got to fix this up somehow.’ So that’s when I decided the thing to do was find you and tell you what happened and explain how I was crazy, and tell you I’m ready to do anything I can to fix it up again. I’ll talk to those cops, I’ll do whatever you say.”

“I appreciate that,” I said, though I couldn’t see much she could do to repair any damage she might have made.

“However,” Mort said slowly, thoughtfully, and now his chin had sunk again, it was the desktop that absorbed his attention once more as he said, “At this point, Miss Kaplan, I’m afraid, by far the best thing you could do for Mr. Holt is nothing.”

She leaned forward to stare at him, frowning, intense. “Nothing? But I want to—”

“You have made your statement to the police,” Mort explained, not looking up. “They will now evaluate it, along with other statements from other concerned individuals, and along with whatever physical evidence they may obtain, and eventually they will decide the proper weight to give your statement. Now, however, if you approach them and say, ‘I wish to retract my statement, I wish to make a quite different, in fact reversed, statement,’ they will want to know what changed your mind. In the course of your interview with them, they will ask you if Mr. Holt has talked to you, and you will have to say yes, that you talked not only with Mr. Holt but also with his attorney.”

Looking shocked, she said, “But that isn’t—”

“You are going to say,” he interrupted her, “that I am making the wrong inference. But I have made no inference, it’s simply implicit in the statement of the facts. So the best thing you can do, Miss Kaplan, is not volunteer to state those facts.”

She sat back, almost withdrawing within that cloak of hair as though into another room, to think about what he’d said. From the way her mouth moved, she was chewing the inside of her cheek. Then she shook her head — her hair heaved slowly after — and looked ruefully in my direction, saying, “I really loused up, didn’t I?”

Why did I want to reassure her? After all, she was the one who’d wronged me. And yet I did; I said, “The police don’t jump to conclusions, you know.”

“I guess not.” Then she brightened, saying, “I guess you’d know that for sure, wouldn’t you? I mean, you used to be a cop and all.”

“That’s right,” I agreed, surprised she knew that bit of my biography.

She must have seen the surprise in my face; she grinned back at it, saying, “I know a lot about you, Mr. Holt. Not through my own fault. Dale knew everything there was to know. He did scrapbooks. You were like his hobby.”

The idea made me uncomfortable. I said, “I was?”

“He knew all kinds of things,” she assured me, “stuff I bet you forgot yourself. He knew more than your biggest fan would know.”