Samuel Holt - The Fourth Dimension is Death

“I guess it might,” she agreed. “Okay, Mr. Holt, tell me what you’ve done.”

So I told her what I’d done, and she nodded, listening, not interrupting; though her eyes did widen a bit when I went under the bed in the Kaplan/Wormley apartment. When I finished, she said, “Well, you’re a lucky man.”

“So far.”

“I’m glad you realize that,” she said. “Mr. Holt, from what you’ve told me, it seems to me you’ve pretty well established that you can’t do yourself any good at all, but you can make a lot of trouble for yourself. You’re very lucky you haven’t fallen into that trouble already.”

“I know I am.”

“But what are you gonna gain? ” she wanted to know.

“Well, I’ll tell you what I’ve gained so far,” I answered. “The physical layout of the Kaplan/Wormley apartment tells me the Kim Peyser murder wasn’t mistaken identity. The killer had to know who he was stabbing.”

She nodded. “We’d about come to the same conclusion ourselves.”

“And,” I said, “that means the killer and Kim Peyser knew each other, or there would have been some sign of struggle prior to the stabbing.”

“Which lets you out, of course.”

But there I had to shake my head and tell her, “Well, no, it doesn’t. Part of the up side of being a celebrity is that people think they do know you. If I’d been the person in there when Kim Peyser walked in, she would have known who I was even though we’d never met, and I could have rattled off some song and dance to keep her calm while I reached for the knife.”

Shanley sat back in her chair, folded her arms, and grinned at me. “I should have thought of that myself,” she acknowledged. “Here I went and took you off the list, and now look.”

“Well, you needn’t put me back on the list.”

“I wasn’t going to,” she assured me. “What else have you learned? Anything?”

“The missing tape.”

She frowned, unfolding her arms and resting her hands on her knees. “Now, that,” she said, “is a leap, if you don’t mind my saying so. You find an empty tape box in with the rest of the cassette tapes. Then you find the tape that belongs in it, only it’s in the other room.”

“Hidden,” I pointed out, “or at least buried, under clothing in a dresser drawer.”

“And you jump to the conclusion,” she said, “that some sort of tape — a different tape — had been kept in that tape box, that the killer was in the apartment looking for that different tape when Kim Peyser came in, and that after he killed her he found the tape and took it away.” She shook her head. “That’s a whole bunch of conclusions to jump to.”

“And that isn’t even all of them,” I told her. “I’m jumping to more conclusions than that. But first, what other explanation is there? You don’t just accidentally put a tape in the back of a drawer under all the clothing, and in fact you don’t even carry that tape without its box into the bedroom in the first place, because there’s nothing you can do with it in there except hide it.”

“That isn’t absolutely necessarily true,” she told me, “but all right, I’ll go along with you this far: It looks as though the tape was carried into the bedroom and hidden on purpose.”

“And the box, in its place in the living room, was empty,” I added.

She nodded. “So, if the box was being used to hide something else, and if the killer was looking for that something else, then probably he found it and took it away with him. A lot of ifs.”

“But they make sense,” I insisted. “And what would that something else be? The something else that was hidden in the tape box.” I spread my hands, suggesting the answer was obvious. “Those tape boxes are small, and they have two little plastic projections in them that the tape fits over. You might be able to put two or three cigarettes in one of those boxes, or maybe a folded note, but it seems to me if you’re going to hide something in a tape box, what you’re probably going to hide in there is another tape.”

“And here comes the big final jump to a conclusion,” she said. “Am I right?”

“You can see where I’m going.”

“Sure,” she said. “But tell me anyway.”

“The motive for killing Dale Wormley was blackmail,” I said. “And the hidden tape was the evidence.”

She nodded, but dubiously, and then she said, “Mr. Holt, you make a very neat package there, and that’s what I don’t like about it.”

“The neatness?”

“That’s right. I’ve seen this kind of thing happen a lot,” she told me. “I’ve seen it happen in this building. A fella gets a theory about a case, all the evidence he has so far dovetails in nice and neat, and the fella decides that is what happened. Then, when some other evidence comes along that doesn’t fit into that package so neatly, the fella refuses to see it, refuses to admit that evidence even exists. Your kind of package there, it isn’t a way to close a case so much as it’s a way to close a mind.”

“I’ll remember that,” I said, impressed by her. “You may be right, and I thank you for saying it.”

She grinned: “But you still like your theory.”

“Oh, I like it, but not enough to make a fool out of myself,” I assured her. “Not if I can help it. I really do appreciate the warning, Sergeant. I still think the hidden tape is meaningful, but I’ll remember that I can’t be sure about it, not yet.”

“That’ll do,” she said, and got to her feet. The interview was over. “I can’t tell you to stop what you’re doing,” she admitted, as I also stood up, “but I can tell you, if anybody makes a complaint against you, don’t hope for any help from over here. The department doesn’t like free-lancers. If they get a chance, they’ll land on you with both feet.”

“I’ll be careful,” I promised.

“More careful than you’ve been,” she suggested.

Matty Pierce, the acting student who’d had the fistfight with Dale Wormley, had that indefinable look of the actor who plays tough guys. It’s all layers of pose and posture, veneer over veneer, with no apparent reality beneath at all. These guys, with thick gleaming black hair, chunky bodies, overly bright eyes as though they’d had a plastic surgery eye-tuck at the age of ten, cocky smile, slightly lumpy “rugged” good looks, are palpably different from actual street toughs. There’s no anger in them, for one thing (though there is arrogance), and none of the defensiveness of the real punk. These are guys who’ve never had their bluff called. They get a lot of work in teen movies, riding motorcycles.

Tom Lacroix introduced me to Pierce and to Howard Moffitt, their acting teacher, at five that afternoon in the narrow old building on Bethune Street in the West Village — not far from Anita and Vitto Impero — where Moffitt’s class and theater were located. Moffitt, a stooped and craggy tall man of about sixty, reminded me of three or four other acting teachers I’ve met in my career, people who are theoretically fine actors, who not only know how it’s done but — much rarer — know how to communicate their knowledge, but nevertheless their credits in actual performances and productions are amazingly skimpy. Whenever one of these people takes a small part in a movie or a play, talked into it by some old student who’s made good, you see what the problem is: There they are, in the corner of the screen or the stage, acting . You can see them do it. Their strength as teachers is their weakness as performers: they don’t know how to not show you how it’s done.