Samuel Holt: The Fourth Dimension is Death

“And if there’s nothing left to do?”

I put my hand up to rub my brow — still itchy from the wig I’d been wearing all day — as Gretchen came into the living room, having dealt with bedtime for the kids. Frowning from Terry to me, she said, “How can there be nothing left to do? Someone killed that man, didn’t they?”

“And the girl,” I said.

“Then they can’t just disappear,” Gretchen insisted, sitting on the sofa beside Terry and looking at me with concern. “There has to be a reason, after all. And you have to be able to find that reason.”

“You’d think so,” I said.

Terry said, “All right, now, wait a minute. Are you telling us nothing happened today? I thought you had people to see, an apartment to toss. You got nothing out of all that at all?”

“Not enough,” I said.

“It’s time for the actor,” Terry decided, “to turn this over to a pro, somebody who knows what he’s doing.”

“The police,” I said, “are as stymied as I am. I talked to them today.”

“I don’t mean the police,” he said. “I mean me. A reporter. Somebody who knows evidence when he falls over it.”

“Well, I wish you’d fall over some on my account,” I said.

“Let’s try.” He settled more comfortably on the couch and said, “When we parted this morning, you were on your way to Wormley’s apartment. Tell me about it.”

So I told them about it, and about Mrs. Wormley, and about my meeting with Mort, and my meeting with Sergeant Shanley, and the oddball encounter with Pierce and Moffitt, and at the end Terry said, “I don’t see anything in that acting class. I think Moffitt was right about that.”

“So do I.”

“So you don’t exactly forget that scene,” he said, “but you set it to one side. You also think about Mrs. Wormley.”

I frowned at him. “ What do I think about Mrs. Wormley?”

“Whether or not she had a motive.”

“To kill her son? ”

“It has happened, in this old world, once or twice,” Terry assured me. “In fact, more people are killed by family and friends than by strangers.”

“But— What reason would she have?”

“I asked you first,” he said.

Gretchen said, “Would it be so she could sue you?”

Terry answered her, shaking his head, saying, “Too long range. Too many factors would have to fall out just right. I was thinking maybe she felt neglected, or maybe money was tight and she took out an insurance policy on him, something like that.”

I said, “The chief characteristic of Mrs. Wormley that I’ve been able to learn is that she lived her life through her son, that his career was the most important thing in her life.”

“That could change,” Terry said, unruffled, “but okay. We’ll set her aside, too, along with the acting class. Actually, what I most like is that missing audiotape.”

“You mean, my blackmail theory?”

“Yes. It gives us a motive for murder beyond this general one that Wormley was a pain in the ass.”

I said, “But that’s a trail that just leads out into the blue. I don’t know who was being blackmailed, or what the subject was. Or, you know, remembering what Sergeant Shanley said, I can’t be really absolutely sure anybody was being blackmailed at all.”

“I tell you what we’ll do,” Terry said. “Tomorrow morning, come on in to the office with me. We’ll put the computer to work on it.”

“How do we go about doing that?”

“If Wormley was blackmailing somebody,” he said, “it had to be somebody he knew, right?”

“Right.”

“And you have a pretty good list of the people he knew, including those cast lists from the acting class.”

“That’s right.”

“So tomorrow,” Terry said, “we’ll run names through the computer, see if anybody has done anything newsworthy. Maybe the subject of the blackmail has already had some sort of public airing.”

I frowned. “Like what? I don’t see where you’re going.”

“Well,” he said, “like, what if the place wherever Matty Pierce works was robbed six months ago and it might have been an inside job?”

I was dubious, and saw no reason to hide it. “Do you really think we’re going to get anywhere that way? Isn’t that just spinning our wheels?”

Gretchen said, “Terry’s a bulldog, Sam, that’s why he’s so good at his job.”

Grinning, patting Gretchen’s thigh, Terry said, “That’s how I finally wore you down.”

“Yes, you did,” she agreed, and said to me, “Terry knows how to just keep worrying at things. When you think there’s nothing more you can possibly do, he thinks of six things.”

“One will do,” I said.

Terry doesn’t have his own office at the News, but his space in the large main editorial room has a wall on his right, the back of a tall broad bookcase separating him from the aisle ahead of him, and a large two-sided cork bulletin board on wheels between his area and the desk of the guy behind him. To his left is editorial, loud and busy and seething with motion; but he likes that atmosphere, he enjoys the idea that it’s getting into his prose.

Terry’s space, besides his desk, contains a square metal wastebasket and two chairs. The wall and bulletin board and bookcase are covered with taped-up headlines, photos, cartoons, election buttons, correspondence, and all sorts of miscellaneous junk, in some places two and three levels deep. On the desk are his manual portable typewriter, on which he still writes first drafts, as well as the screen and keyboard to his computer terminal. If he feels like printing something out, the printer — shared by several other people — is on a table about thirty feet away.

We arrived a little before ten in the morning, carrying coffee from a deli downstairs. Terry exchanged words with a few other people, I did my gawky Ed Dante number (being back in the wig and moustache), and then he settled himself down at his desk and I produced my list of names. Terry switched on the computer, and began to ask questions.

We’d decided to be completists, and to go through everybody we knew Wormley knew, no matter how remote the connection. The writer and director and agency producer of the Kwality FoodMarts commercials, for instance, and Miss Colinville the receptionist from Kay Henry’s office, and all of Wormley’s fellow students at Howard Moffitt’s class. Even so, I knew our net might not be cast widely enough. What if the killer were someone who’d been mad at Wormley since high school, and had finally caught up? Only my conviction that Kim Peyser had to have known the killer — or she wouldn’t have let herself be killed so easily — kept me from fretting those possibilities too much.

Running the names through the computer took forever, and the first time through we didn’t come up with anything at all that seemed useful. But then Terry said, “Let’s try it the other way around. Let’s see if Wormley himself was ever newsworthy, before his obit.” And he tapped in the green letters DALE WORMLEY, and up came the morgue on that name: every mention in a review, every story about his murder, and then the notation: “Hanford Montgomery, with wife at time of suicide.”

“Ho ho,” Terry said. “What have we here?”

“We’ve seen that name before,” I said. “Going through here, connected with somebody else. Hanford Montgomery.”

So Terry brought up that name, and it turned out Hanford Montgomery was a wealthy architect from a rich New England banking family. He’d gotten ink several times for important governmental commissions his firm had received, and a couple of times for industry awards, and then once, nearly three months ago, on September 16th, when he’d shot himself dead at his weekend house near Short Hills, New Jersey; a very wealthy and socially significant neighborhood. Friends were quoted as saying Montgomery had been depressed about his health for some time. But the kicker was Hanford Montgomery’s wife.