Samuel Holt - The Fourth Dimension is Death

Moffitt’s building was very narrow, probably twenty feet, and three stories high, wedged in among other quaint nineteenth-century brick townhouses, most of them now broken up into tiny apartments, a few converted to nursery schools or doctors’ and dentists’ offices. The ground floor of Moffitt’s place, behind a broad wooden garage door painted brown and apparently non-functional, had been turned into a small theater, with sixty or seventy seats — whatever maximum number would permit non-union productions in here — and the most basic lighting and backstage area. Minimalist experimental theater was the only kind possible here.

One entered the building through a small ornate door next to the garage door. A tiny box office and doorway on the right led to the theater, and a warped steep staircase straight ahead led up to the acting studio and theater’s storage rooms and male and female restrooms on the second floor. Moffitt’s living quarters were one more flight up, at the top.

We met on the second floor, in the studio classroom at the rear of the building. The room was nearly square, the width of the building, with two tall broad windows facing back yards filled with starkly leafless plane trees. The floor was well-oiled old broad planks, one side wall was brick and the other mirrored with black curtains drawn in front of the mirrors, and the furniture consisted of about fifteen metal folding chairs or wooden kitchen chairs, plus three battered wooden tables of various sizes. The front wall, opposite the view, contained a closed door and a large green blackboard on which the word MOTIVATION had been incompletely erased.

Tom Lacroix, anxiously looking at his watch, made the introductions and then went ka-drumming down the stairs, on the way to his waiter job. He’d already given both Pierce and Moffitt a rundown on my alleged background and interest here — the article for Vanity Fair about the interface between success and failure, with the peg of Dale Wormley as having been somehow midway between the two — so I could go straight into it, saying to Pierce, “I understand you and Wormley had a disagreement a while ago.”

He did the aggressive grin of his style of actor and said, “We had a disagreement every time we looked at each other. You’re not gonna put that in Vanity Fair.”

“No, I’m not,” I agreed. “I just want to get the background here, so I can be sure what does go into the piece is accurate. This is the part of the iceberg that stays underwater.”

Moffitt nodded judiciously, as though thinking of giving me a good mark, and said, “We work the same way in the theater. I tell my students, if all you know about the character is what you’re going to show the audience, you aren’t ready to take that part out on stage.”

Pierce, concentrating on me rather than acting lessons at the moment, said, “But I’ll be in the piece, right?”

“I’m not even sure,” I told him, not wanting to go so far as to promise an actor publicity in a non-existent article. “I’m just trying to get a handle on the subject matter at this point,” I explained.

He was wearing, naturally, a black leather jacket with many zippers, and now, from inside it, he drew a manila envelope and handed it to me, saying, “Just in case, here’s my resumé.”

“Fine.” Feeling awkward, but having to go through with the pretense, I put the folder away in my raincoat pocket and said, “Just what was it about Dale Wormley that rubbed you the wrong way?”

He shook his head, with a twisted grin; then, to emphasize the negative, he lifted a hand and shook his upraised thumb back and forth, as though telling me the bridge was out. “The other way around,” he said. “Dale was pissed off all the time. The way you got along with that guy was to back down. I’m not into backing down.”

“Why was he so angry?” I asked. “Because of his career?”

“I never cared enough to ask,” Pierce said, and hooked his thumbs into his jeans pockets, and sat there looking tough.

Moffitt interjected, “Matty’s right about that. Dale was angry all the time. I think it was a true personality trait, not anything specific that happened or that anyone did to him.”

“He was a big guy,” Pierce said. “Like you. So he figured he could get away with stuff.”

“Be a bully, you mean,” I suggested, and Pierce shrugged. He probably was thinking it would sound sissy of him to accuse someone else of being a bully.

Moffitt said, “I’ve often wondered if that kind of aggressive hostile drive isn’t somehow an asset for somebody trying to succeed in a competitive field like acting. I suppose, Mr. Dante, you’ll be getting into that in your piece.”

“Yes, I will,” I agreed. “But what I’m interested in at this point is the background on Wormley himself, his relationships with the people around him.” Turning back to Pierce, I said, “Tom Lacroix kind of led me to believe there was a particular feud between you and Wormley, but you say he acted toward you the way he acted toward everybody, and it was just your refusal to be a doormat that made for any special problem between you.”

“Damn right,” Pierce said. “I know a couple people — you know them, too, Howard — that would just roll over and play dead if Wormley gave them a look. So there there’s no problem, right?”

“Resentment, though, I should think,” I said.

“Well, yeah,” Pierce said, “a couple people were always talking big, they’re gonna do this, gonna do that, but they weren’t , you know?”

“Anyone I ought to talk to?” I asked. “I mean, anybody in par—”

Moffitt, smoothly interrupting, said, “Matty, get the playbook, will you? Let’s take a look at the casts Dale worked with. You know where it is?”

Rising, looking a bit confused, Pierce said, “Sure. I don’t know what you need it for. It’s in one of those drawers under the lightboard, right?”

“That’s right,” Moffitt agreed. “I think Mr. Dante should get a sense of the ambience here, the kind of group Dale was interacting with.”

“Okay,” Pierce said, shrugging. He went away downstairs, his feet thumping more deliberately and heavily than Lacroix’s had, and Moffitt turned to me, smiling amiably as he said, “I’d say you have about one minute, Mr. Holt, to tell me why I shouldn’t tell Matty who you really are.”

Which meant I had about one second to decide on a response. When time is tight, there’s always the truth: “Wormley’s mother,” I said, “is suing me in civil court for violation of her son’s civil rights by killing him. I’ll get less of a fair shake in civil court than in criminal court. The official murder investigation is absolutely inactive. I just met this afternoon with the detective on the case, and there’s nothing doing there.”

Moffitt frowned at me. “So you’re trying to put the blame on Matty?”

“I’m trying to find out where the blame goes,” I told him. “Somebody killed Wormley, and I know it wasn’t me. So who was it?”

Pierce was coming back up the stairs. Moffitt glanced in that direction, then said to me, “Matty didn’t do it, I can tell you that much.”

“And the others in the class? The resentful ones?”

“Follow my lead,” he said, and Pierce arrived, carrying a large black looseleaf notebook.

The next ten minutes were very strange. Moffitt and I were running a scene together, an acting exercise, for an audience of one: Pierce. Our prop was the notebook, a record of all productions and extended scenes done by Moffitt’s classes in the last two and a half years. The scene we were playing was Interview , with Moffitt both performing and directing, and Pierce both audience and unwitting cast member. Because all I had to do now was follow Moffitt’s lead and play my part, because I didn’t have to warp my questions to suit a secret agenda, I actually gave a better performance than before, and was almost sorry to see it end.