Samuel Holt - The Fourth Dimension is Death

I knew I had time. From the way Mrs. Wormley had talked on the phone, she’d be gone at least an hour, possibly more. So I started in the kitchen, and I gave the place as complete a toss as I could without actual carpentry; that is, without removing molding strips and window frames and such. I did unscrew switchplates and disassemble lamps, but mostly it was a matter of simply moving everything in the apartment, from the largest to the smallest. That’s the essence of a search right there; you touch everything, lift everything, move everything, study everything, and at the end you put it all back the way you found it. The work was hot and dusty, and before I was half-finished I was down to socks and shorts; if Mrs. Wormley had come back then, we both would have gotten a hell of a surprise.

And I did find something. Or, that is, I found an anomaly that suggested there had been something to find. The kitchen had contained nothing of interest, and the only oddity in the living room was that one of the audio cassette boxes was empty. It was supposed to contain the original cast recording of the musical Grease . I looked in the cassette player, but it wasn’t there, so I went on, and in the bedroom I found the Grease tape in the top dresser drawer, under Dale Wormley’s socks and underwear.

Why? I put the tape back where I’d found it — leave everything where you found it — and thought about that anomaly while finishing my search, coming across nothing else of interest and ending in the bathroom, where I washed and cleaned myself up, and where the medicine chest seemed to have been taken over mostly by Mrs. Wormley’s nostrums. (All of the bottles and boxes contained, as best as I could tell, only what they were supposed to.)

When I was finished with everything, and back into my clothes, the tape of Grease was the only oddity I’d found. And it seemed to me that putting the tape of Grease in that drawer had not been an innocent act. It wasn’t a mistake or carelessness, there being no natural reason to have moved the tape from one room to the next in the first place, since it could only be played on the machine in the living room. Which meant it had been hidden there. And the only reason I could think of for hiding that tape was because the box it had come in was being used for something else, and Dale Wormley hadn’t wanted to draw attention to the box by leaving its tape lying around.

What had Wormley concealed in that box? Another tape? Probably so. And if that’s what the killer had been looking for, he’d found it.

Which made my new set of assumptions look better than ever.

Before I left the Wormley apartment I phoned Tom Lacroix, this being the time he’d suggested I do so, and he said both the acting teacher, Howard Moffitt, and Matty Pierce, the guy Dale had fought with in class, had agreed to meet with me at five this afternoon, following the class. Lacroix sounded surprised that Pierce had agreed without having to be urged; he said, “I didn’t even have to tell him your speak-ill-of-the-dead-anonymously offer.”

“Then I’m really looking forward to what he has to say. Thanks for setting it up.”

“No problem.”

“Will you be there?”

“Just to introduce you,” he said. “Then I have to go to work. I’m a waiter, at the moment.”

“Waiting for a show,” I said.

“Oh, you know it.”

He gave me the address, I promised to see him there at five, and then I left the Wormley apartment at last, and walked across and downtown toward the Graybar Building, since I had a twelve-thirty lunch appointment with Mort Adler.

Myrtie, Mort’s receptionist/secretary, didn’t recognize me at first and gave me an extremely dubious look when I walked into the office; this wasn’t the sort of client she wanted for the firm. “It’s okay, Myrtie,” I told her, grinning (like myself, not like Ed Dante), “down inside here I’m Sam Holt.”

“Oh, my God,” she said. “Whatever you’ve done, undo it.”

I promised her the transformation was merely temporary, and she buzzed Mort to tell him I was here, adding, “And you will not believe it.”

Whether he believed it or not, Mort was certainly amused by it. “Come in, come in,” he said, chuckling to himself, looking down at various pieces of baseboard as he reached up to pat me on the shoulder like a basketball coach with a star center who just booted the ball into the stands.

We sat together in his office, and I explained what I was doing and why, feeling only moderately foolish in the telling. He sighed a long sigh when I mentioned hiding under the bed while Mrs. Wormley walked around the Kaplan/Wormley apartment, but he said nothing one way or the other until I was finished, and then he glanced at me briefly from under his eyebrows and said, “Would you care for advice?”

“I think I can imagine the advice,” I told him. “It would consist mostly of the word don’t .”

“Not entirely.” Leaning back in his chair, frowning at his desk as though he’d just noticed how sloppy it was, he said, “You do have some background in this sort of thing, of course. And I understand your frustration at the moment. But you see the danger.”

“With Mrs. Wormley, you mean.”

“Well, that primarily,” he agreed, “though not exclusively. But let’s take that situation in the apartment, yes. Technically, you had more right to be there than she did, since you had the tenant’s keys and the tenant’s permission to enter, but the instant you slid under that bed — an instant I would pay a considerable amount to have seen, by the way — you placed yourself irrevocably in the wrong.”

“I know I did. The alternative...” I shrugged. “The alternative was to introduce myself, as somebody or other, to Mrs. Wormley.”

“The alternative,” he agreed, “was equally unhappy, once you were there . And you can’t be certain you won’t find yourself in other difficult situations, while this goes on. So now let me get to my advice.”

“Sure.”

He leaned even farther back, twisting around to look out his window at the air rights over Grand Central, enclosed by gray dull slabs of plate glass and stone. “You have a good working relationship with the police officer who took over the Wormley case,” he suggested.

“Sergeant Shanley,” I said. “Yes, I do. A lot better than Feeney and LaMarca.”

Turning back to me, smiling at his desk drawers, he said, “Of whom we hope to hear no more.”

“Amen.”

“I strongly urge you, Sam,” he said, “to telephone to Sergeant Shanley, meet with her at the earliest opportunity, and tell her precisely what you’re doing and what you’ve already done.”

I said, “Ask her okay, you mean?”

“Not at all,” he said. “If she’s any good, she won’t give you an okay. Partly because she shouldn’t, and partly because she can’t.”

“What if she tells me to stop?”

Smiling faintly, Mort shook his head. “Nor can she do that,” he told me. “She can tell you not to break the law, of course, but she can’t tell you not to go around asking people questions. She can’t even tell you not to wear a ridiculous moustache or call yourself by made-up names. What she can do is tell you to stay within the law; which of course you will agree to do.”

“Of course.”

“And then,” he said, “if another delicate situation arises, you won’t have to crawl under any beds. You can merely stand your ground and announce that the police officer in charge of the Wormley homicide investigation is aware of your activities.”

“I see,” I said. “It could take the heat off, you mean, in a situation with someone like Mrs. Wormley.”