Samuel Holt - The Fourth Dimension is Death

“But he wasn’t a fan,” I said.

The smile turned rueful again, and she said, “No, he wasn’t.” She’d put the maroon folder on the floor beside her chair, and now she stooped to pick it up, glancing at Mort half humorously and half apprehensively as she said, “Can I show the pictures now?”

Feeling uncomfortable, not wanting to see Dale Wormley try to be me, I said, “Why? What’s the point?”

“I want you to see for yourself,” she told me, “he wasn’t just — he was more than that. The part you know.” She drew a paper out of the folder, not quite looking at it as she did so, and extended it toward me.

I recognized it; or, that is, I recognized the kind of thing it was. I used to have such things of my own, in a stack on the shelf in my closet, when I had the studio in Santa Monica, before PACKARD was born. A typewriter-size sheet of heavy paper. On one side is a glossy black-and-white photo of the actor, posed to look what he thinks of as his best. On the reverse, usually on a separate sheet glued or taped in place but sometimes more expensively printed on the back of the photo itself, the actor’s resumé, his list of credits. Which parts in which shows at what theaters on what dates; which movies; which television commercials; maybe which industrial shows. Some resumés include theatrical training history, and all include the name and address and phone number of the agent or “contact” (a word meaning the actor doesn’t yet have an agent), plus an answering service number.

I took this photo reluctantly, and tried to keep my expression blank as I looked at it. Or them, actually; Wormley had chosen, as many actors do, a format meant to show his versatility. Instead of one picture, the glossy side of the resumé was divided into four photos, showing Wormley in four different poses and costumes and settings. In the upper left, he wore a cowboy hat and an open-necked plaid shirt, and he smiled openly and directly at the camera in a howdy-ma’am style. In the upper right, he wore a tux and leaned forward and down to his right a little, smiling kind of suggestively and secretively up toward the camera. In the bottom left, he wore boxing gloves and trunks and stood in classic boxer-photo pose. And in the bottom right, in trenchcoat, winking at the viewer, he was Packard.

Mm. A pretty good Packard, actually. If looking like that were all it took, the job was as much his as anybody’s. Or was I being ridiculously defensive to even think that way?

Julie Kaplan said, with some strain in her voice, trying to convince me, “You see what I mean, that he wasn’t just imitating you. I mean, he was a—”

“Yes, I see that.”

“He was an actor ,” she finished. “Before he ever got mixed up with you.”

Mixed up with me? I turned the sheet over and saw that he’d spent some of his Kwality FoodMarts money having a first-class resumé prepared. The facts of his career were printed on the back of the photo itself. He had a pretty respectable history there, with a number of regional theaters, a few commercials before Kwality FoodMarts, and minor parts in a couple of drive-in type movies (“‘State Trooper’ in BIKERS FROM HELL”). There was probably no more than half here of what Brett Burgess’s resumé could show, but to be honest it was a lot more than mine without PACKARD.

“He was an actor,” Julie Kaplan said. It was important to her that I understand and accept that.

“I see he was.”

“And things were going to get better for him, too,” she told me, sitting up straighter, clenching her hands in her lap. “That’s why I knew we’d get back together. Once he was in that show, he’d stop worrying about you all the time—” said, though unconsciously, as though I were the villain of the piece “—and things could be the way they used to be.”

I looked at her. “Show?”

“Four Square,” she told me. “The new play at Lincoln Center with Rita Colby. It’s going into rehearsal in January.”

Three months from now. I said, “He was cast in it?”

“Not officially, not yet. But he knows Rita Colby, he dated her a few times.”

That surprised me, though on second thought it shouldn’t have. In her early fifties, well-preserved in a gaunt but dramatically attractive way, Rita Colby would be about twenty years older than Dale Wormley; but why not? One of those rarities these days, a true theater star, Rita Colby was the closest thing America had to England’s Maggie Smith. An extremely talented and dedicated performer, she was also maintaining the Broadway mythos of the overwrought grande dame, the Tallulah Bankhead tradition; a tall handsome blond fellow like Dale Wormley would be quite naturally one of the perks of that position. But in my eyes it lessened Wormley, and I wondered how he himself had taken it. I said, “Rita Colby promised him the part?”

“Oh, no,” Julie Kaplan said. “Not like that. Kay did. Dale’s agent. He’s Rita’s agent, too, and he absolutely promised Dale the second male lead in Four Square . Dale told me there was no question at all, he had the part.”

I looked again at the back of the resumé, and saw that the agent listed was Kay Henry Associates, on Third Avenue here in New York. I didn’t know the agency, but there was no particular reason why I should.

“May I see that?” Mort asked, reaching toward the resumé.

I handed it to him and, as he studied it, turning it over and over like an archaeologist with a particularly fine piece of pottery he’d dug up, I said to Julie Kaplan, “I am sorry about what happened.”

“I was just being stupid,” she said, misunderstanding me. “I feel like such—”

“I meant Dale’s death.”

“Oh.” Her eyes brightened again, with unshed tears. “It leaves things so up in the air, you know? We didn’t — finish the argument.”

“I know.”

Seeming satisfied, Mort extended the resumé across his desk toward Julie Kaplan, saying, “Thank you. And Mr. Holt, I’m sure, appreciates your attempt to correct your mistake.”

“That’s right,” I said.

Taking the resumé, putting it in the maroon folder, she told me, “I’m sorry I didn’t get to talk to those cops direct. But at least they’ll get the message.”

“Of course they will.”

With a little smile toward Mort, she said, “And I won’t do anything else, I promise. Not a thing.”

“We both appreciate that,” Mort told her.

She got to her feet, then, and we said our goodbyes, and she left. Closing the door after her, returning to his desk, Mort said, “We can only hope she won’t decide to be helpful after all.”

“Oh, I think you scared her off,” I told him. “You were imitating John Houseman, weren’t you?”

“Was I?” His private smile, directed as usual at his desk, was impossible to read. But then he looked up at me and said, “Now, when the police come to talk to you again, probably later today, it would be best if you didn’t mention this meeting with Miss Kaplan, unless they themselves bring it up.”

“Am I going to see the police again?”

“Oh, yes, I think so,” he said, nodding at a corner of the room. “That’s why I asked to see the pictures. All I know of Dale Wormley is those commercials, where of course he’s trying to look like you. I wanted to know how much similarity there was under normal circumstances.”

I didn’t get it. “Why?”

He looked directly at me, with his quizzical smile. “Has it really not occurred to you?” he asked. “This is carrying modesty to a fault, Sam.”

“What is?”

“Dale Wormley looked very much like you,” he said. “He was murdered in front of your house. It will have occurred to the police by now, though I can see it hasn’t crossed your mind, that Dale Wormley might not have been the intended target at all.”