Samuel Holt - The Fourth Dimension is Death

“Not,” Mort told me, “if she were to find you lying about under her bed. But certainly it would be a help if she were to find you standing in an ordinary fashion in the living room, Julie Kaplan’s keys in your hand.”

“All right,” I said. “I’ll call Sergeant Shanley right after lunch.”

“Speaking of which,” he said, bracing both hands on the edge of the desk preparatory to rising, then pausing to look up at me with a slightly pained expression and to say, “Is it your intention to wear all that excess hair at lunch?”

“Absolutely,” I told him. “From what I heard of Mrs. Wormley’s conversation with her lawyer—”

“And that went over the line,” he pointed out. “Eavesdropping on a conversation between your court adversary and her attorney is absolutely and totally improper.”

“I won’t do it again,” I promised. “But from what I heard the last time, they have private detectives looking for me, here in the city. I really don’t want to go anywhere in public as Sam Holt.”

“I accept that, unfortunately,” he said, and got to his feet, adding, “Not the face I would prefer across the lunch table, but we will survive. After you.”

After lunch, we went back up to Mort’s office, where Myrtie told me Gretchen Young had called and wanted me to get back to her at home. So I did, and Gretchen said Blair Knox, Brett’s agent, was trying to get in touch with me. Delaying Sergeant Shanley, I called Blair and she came on the line to say, “Well, Kay Henry is definitely interested in you.”

“Talent will out,” I said.

“Do you think that’s true? Anyway, he called this morning to discuss you. He went through that resumé you gave him item by item, wanting to know how you’d handled each part and what sort of reviews you’d got, and how you’d related with the rest of the cast and the director and all that.”

“Wow.”

Laughing a bit shakily, she said, “I had no idea, Sam, what you were going to put me through.”

“Neither did I,” I told her. “I’m really sorry, Blair. I thought at the most he’d just call to see what your opinion of Ed Dante was.”

“Oh, he wanted that, too,” she said. “But he was very interested in the career. I think I held my end up.”

“I’m sure you did.”

“In any case,” she said, “he seemed satisfied when he hung up. But I thought you should know, he’s out there, tracking you down.”

This investigation better not take much longer, I thought, my little construction is an extremely temporary affair. Living inside a house of cards. “Thanks for the warning,” I told Blair, and tried calling Sergeant Shanley, to be told she was out of the office but was expected back within half an hour. I left my name and Mort’s number, and then Mort and I retired to his office to discuss the lawsuit against Kwality Food-Marts that had gotten me into all this mess in the first place.

What it came down to at this point was that the lawsuit was going to die of inertia — or perhaps had already died of inertia — and all that was left to discuss was how to bury it. Court costs was the name of the game by now; Kwality FoodMarts had no intention of finding another Packard lookalike to do more commercials, the earlier commercials with Dale Wormley had finished their run and would never be seen again in this world, so Kwality had no interest now but to defend their right to have arrogated my appearance and the Packard persona in the first place. If we would accept a consent from them not to offend any more in the future (which they didn’t intend to do anyway), with no acknowledgment of wrongdoing on their part in the past, we could all go home and forget about it.

And right here was where the alliance on my side of the issue fell apart. So far as Mort was concerned, it made no economic sense for me to go on paying for a lawsuit on an issue that had become moot. So far as the syndicators who were my co-copyright owners and co-suers were concerned, however, the point here was to make Kwality FoodMarts hurt sufficiently badly that other potential infringers — both of PACKARD and of other shows these syndicators controlled — wouldn’t dare take the field against them.

So Mort’s principal dealings now were not with Kwality’s attorneys but with our own partners’ attorneys, with Mort trying to get them to agree to pick up one hundred per cent of continuing costs of the litigation from this stage forward. “If they win,” Mort pointed out, “they’ll be reimbursed out of the settlement. If they lose, you didn’t want to be a party to it anyway, so it’s improper for you to share in the burden of expense.”

“Whatever you say, Mort,” I said.

“That’s probably best,” Mort said, judiciously, and Myrtie buzzed to say that Sergeant Shanley was on the line.

The sergeant expressed surprise without pleasure at my presence in New York, and when I asked for an appointment she said, “You know, we really don’t have anything new. I’m sorry, but that’s the way it is.”

“That’s all right,” I said. “I do.”

Startled, she said, “New information?”

“No,” I said. “New activity. My activity. Do you have time to see me this afternoon?”

“I think I’d better make time,” she said.

I walked over to Midtown Precinct South on West 35th Street, and announced myself to the officer at the desk. He gave me a skeptical look, but phoned Sergeant Shanley and she came right out. When she saw me in my Ed Dante fig she sighed and nodded and said, “Uh huh. You’ve got things to tell me, all right.”

She led me back to a small impersonal office with plain bare walls and a gray metal desk holding nothing but a telephone. There were a couple of slat-backed wooden chairs as well, as uncomfortable as they looked, and there we sat, Sergeant Shanley leaning her elbows on the desk while I described my reaction to Mrs. Wormley’s civil suit and the lack of progress on the murder investigation. Nodding, she said, “You know how it is yourself, Mr. Holt. When there’s no one else to interview, no more physical evidence to study, no informants to come forward, you can only wait for something to happen.”

“A civil case,” I said, “doesn’t have to find me guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.”

“I know that, too,” she said. “I think it’s very rough, and very unfair, what’s happening to you, but there really isn’t anything we can do about it. And to tell the truth, I see Mrs. Wormley’s side, too. She’s just as frustrated about this thing as you are. And she’s more personally involved.”

“Not any more. Not if I’m going to go into civil court and not only be branded a murderer but a murderer who got away with it .”

She thought about that. “Yeah, I guess so,” she decided. “Celebrity can make it a little rougher, can’t it?”

“It can. Sergeant Shanley,” I said, leaning toward her, “I’m not some jerk coming in here trying to do your job better than you. I’m involved , and I can’t just sit on the sidelines and wait for the steamroller to drive on over me.”

“So you’ve come to town to try to see what you can learn,” she said. Then she grinned faintly and gestured at my head, saying, “And you’re wearing the caterpillar and the rug so you won’t be recognized.”

“I feel pretty foolish about it,” I admitted. “But if I go around as Sam Holt I really won’t get anywhere, except to make things worse.”

She nodded. “Have you actually made any contacts yet? Got up like this?”

“Yes,” I said. “In fact, the reason I wanted to talk to you is to tell you what I’ve done so far, and what I plan to do. Because, frankly, it does get kind of tricky sometimes.”