Samuel Holt - The Fourth Dimension is Death

“The point is, dear,” she said, her voice very soft, almost sympathetic, “I don’t sleep with the help.”

It was after five o’clock when I dragged my slaughtered carcass out of Kay Henry’s crash pad, leaving Rita Colby in sole command of the place and finding the social clusters all gone from the waiting room. Miss Colinville was gone, too, which was a relief. I didn’t think I was up to playing Ed Dante with that girl yet again today, particularly after the disemboweling I’d just received from Rita Colby. What a surgeon that woman would have made!

And if that’s the way she viewed life, what the hell was the link between her and Dale Wormley?

I brooded on that question as I rode down in the elevator and walked across town to the subway entrance for the BMT, reaching the platform just in time to squeeze into a Brooklyn-bound Q train. This was the height of rush hour, so I stood crammed in with a million other people on the whole long ride down into Brooklyn. I got off at Avenue J, and walked the few blocks into Midwood and over to the Youngs’ house, reflecting as I did so that Rita Colby’s attitude toward me didn’t necessarily mean she’d had the same attitude toward Dale Wormley. She’d spoken of him dispassionately enough, but had drawn complete contrasts between him and me, emphasizing his anger. Maybe she’d responded to that anger in some way. Or maybe it was merely that I’d presented her with a character who simply had to be slapped down.

That was Gretchen’s theory, when I recapped my day over dinner. Anita hadn’t felt she could take two evenings in a row away from the restaurant, so it was just Gretchen and Terry and me. And the three kids, of course, but they existed in a parallel universe of their own, next to ours. While the kids pursued their own concerns, I made my report and Gretchen said, “Well, the way you were carrying on, she had to do that.”

“I wasn’t exactly carrying on,” I said.

“Oh, yes, you were.” She shook her head at me, saying, “You don’t know what you look like in that disguise. When you look at yourself in the mirror, you’re just standing there, you’re still yourself. But then when you come out and move around, in character, you have this awful toothy smile all the time, and kind of puppy eyes, and you slouch around like Groucho Marx. Any woman in the world would take one look at you and know the best thing to do is just immediately slap you across the face.”

I laughed, and said, “In that case, I’m glad the women I’m meeting show such restraint.”

Terry said, “What were you going to do if she didn’t slap you down? What if she’d said, ‘Sure, honey, let’s party’? Were you going to go to bed with her?”

“I was counting on Ed to be oafish enough to louse up the opportunity,” I told him, and grinned open-mouthed at him like Ed, and said, with my twang, “Hey, great, baby. Just lemme call my girlfriend first, tell her I’ll be a little late.”

Terry laughed, and choked on his food. “Okay, okay,” he said. “You were safe.”

“Now, then ,” I said, “she would have been justified to bring up the nuclear warheads. But she came on like Darth Vader right away .”

“Well,” Gretchen suggested, “what I think happened is, Rita Colby saw how good an actor you are, when you did the Nazi soldier, so she knew she’d want you in the play. But she didn’t want to put up with you being a pest all the time, so she slapped you down hard at the beginning, to get all that out of the way.”

“And very effective she was, too,” I said.

Terry said, “But, the question is, are you getting anywhere? Somebody killed Dale Wormley and the girl, whatsername—”

“Kim Peyser.”

“Right. And tried to pin the blame on you. What makes you think it has something to do with that play?”

“Nothing,” I admitted. “Terry, I’m not necessarily going to go now and scrape up introductions to the playwright and the director and the producers and all these people, and try to find out if somebody had artistic reasons not to want Wormley in the part, and they killed him for the good of the theater.”

“Not necessarily,” Terry echoed.

I said, “I’m just following wherever the circumstances lead me. I talked with Julie Kaplan down in Miami, and really the only two things that were hot and current in Wormley’s life at the end were the lawsuit with me and the part in Four Square , Now, he was a bad-tempered guy, who made enemies pretty easily, and I’m following through on a guy named Matty Pierce he had trouble with in his acting class, but that kind of thing doesn’t very often lead to murder, you know.”

“What about the commercials?” Terry asked me. “The ones you were suing him for. What about the supermarket company, the ad agency, all the people involved with that stuff?”

“No conflicts and nothing current,” I said. “He shot those commercials almost a year ago, and had just about nothing to do with any of those people since, except minor things connected with the lawsuit.”

Terry said, “Well, you know, it doesn’t have to be something current in his life. People have been known to hold grudges.”

“So far,” I said, “I haven’t found anything like that. Julie gave me the keys to Wormley’s apartment; it’s still hers, too, I guess. I’ll go there tomorrow and see what I can find. The thing is, Terry,” I said, “I’ve been asking myself the same kind of question. What am I accomplishing? Am I just spinning my wheels? Is Packard going through the motions, playing the part only because it’s better to do that than just sit at home and do nothing? I don’t know. Maybe that’s the truth. For now, all I can do is follow a very cold trail, and see where it leads me.”

My cash was running low — when all you can spend is cash, it does tend to run low pretty rapidly — so I’d arranged for Robinson to transfer a couple thousand to Terry Young’s checking account. Next morning, we started the day with Terry taking out five hundred for me from his bank. “By God, it’s nice to have a healthy-looking balance for a change,” he commented, when he came back out to the car. (I’d waited in it, parked by a fire hydrant on Flatbush Avenue, down the block from the bank.) “Even when it’s not real.” And he handed me my cash.

“Thanks, Terry,” I said, stuffing the money away. Twenty-five twenties make a thick wad, but I’d discovered that anything over a twenty dollar bill attracts attention and suspicion. No matter how much inflation pushes the cost of things up, people still notice a fifty.

Again we drove into Manhattan together, Terry dropping me off downtown and me then taking a cab up to 497 West End; just below 86th Street. The name slot beside the bell for apartment 4-E read Wormley Kaplan in careful black-ink lettering on a bit of white cardboard; Julie’s work, I guessed. I rang the bell next to the card, just in case the police still had someone there — though that was extremely unlikely, six weeks after the event on a very dead case — and when there was no answer I used one of Julie’s keys to let myself into the building. After a slow ride up to the fourth floor in the elevator, I used her other key to enter the apartment.

It was two long narrow rooms next to one another, with a small kitchen carved out at the front of the first, next to the entry door, and a bathroom in the equivalent position of the second. At the far end of both rooms were large double-hung windows overlooking a featureless central court; just the stone building walls around a rectangle the size of a large car, with concrete four stories down and a glimpse of sky seven stories up.