Samuel Holt: The Fourth Dimension is Death

Rita Colby.

It was the third marriage for her, second for him. They’d been married four years. At the time of her husband’s suicide, theater and film star Rita Colby had been attending the annual Theater Project scholarship fund banquet at the Waldorf-Astoria. Her escort had been the rising New York actor Dale Wormley.

“There it is,” Terry said. “This is the thing you’ve been looking for.”

I looked over his shoulder at the green letters on the black background. “It is, isn’t it? September 16th; just after that is when Wormley told Julie Kaplan that good things were going to start happening for him.”

“And Rita Colby,” Terry added, “insisted on hiring the guy for her next play.”

“You know,” I said, “I’ve been to that Theater Project dinner, and it’s just a mob scene, one of those places where everybody goes just to stay in touch with everybody else. A long cocktail party first, and then when you go on into the banquet room everybody tablehops all the way through dinner. Nobody can ever know for sure who’s where when.”

“Let’s get all of this,” Terry said, and hit the button to print out Hanford Montgomery’s obit and the brief news item on his suicide and the somewhat longer entertainment page piece on the Theater Project banquet. He went away to the printer, came back with the sheets of paper, and handed them to me. “You’re on your way,” he said.

But was I? And if so, where to? I was as convinced as Terry that this was the thread I was looking for, but I wasn’t one hundred per cent sure where that thread was supposed to lead me.

Was Rita Colby the killer? Did she have the strength to beat Dale Wormley to death with a piece of wood and then drag his body down the block and up a stoop and into a vestibule? I just had trouble imagining it.

On the other hand, I could see her having the coolness to dispatch Kim Peyser, and of course it was possible she’d murdered her husband and arranged it to look like suicide and then quickly called on a fellow Kay Henry client to accompany her to the banquet; no one there would know at exactly what time anybody had arrived.

Then, knowing just what crime he’d been the beard for, Wormley would have demanded the kind of payment in return that Rita Colby could provide; a boost for his career. But he’d gone too far, he’d pushed too hard, as of course he would have done, being who he was.

Had he wanted Rita Colby to sleep with the help? She would have refused, I could tell that much from our one meeting. And this would explain why she’d appeared to be so close with Wormley but had stayed so coldly distant from Ed Dante.

Terry and I talked this over, he wanting me to take these newspaper clippings to Sergeant Shanley, but me convinced it wasn’t going to be enough to get the investigation active again. “I feel as though I should talk with Rita Colby,” I said, “because something in here doesn’t quite fit, which is what Shanley warned me about. But I don’t know how to get in touch with her. I doubt Kay Henry would give me her phone number.”

“Then why not look it up in the book?” Terry asked me, reaching for the stack of phone books on the corner of his desk, over against the wall.

“Are you kidding?” I asked him. “Rita Colby isn’t going to be listed in the phone book.”

Pulling the Manhattan directory out of the pile, opening it on top of his terminal keyboard, Terry said, “You’d be surprised who’s in the phone book. If you know how to look.” And, as he said that last, he was reaching for his pencil and small square pad of notepaper. “No reason for Hanford Montgomery not to list himself,” he said.

“He’s there?” I was astonished.

“Montgomery, H. Architect. East 58th Street, over by the river. Sound about right?”

A wealthy neighborhood. “Sounds perfect,” I said.

He scribbled the address and number, tore off that sheet of the notepad, and handed it to me, saying, “Let Ed Dante give her a call. The worst thing she can do is tell him to go fuck himself.”

“I can’t think of anything else she might do, but I’ll give it a try,” I said, and reached for the phone on Terry’s desk, but it rang just as I was about to touch it. So I pulled my hand back, and Terry answered, with a brisk, “Young.” Then he smiled and said, “Hi, baby,” so it was Gretchen. And then he nodded and said, “Yeah, he’s here. Hold on.” Extending the phone toward me, he said, “A message.”

“For Dante?” I took the phone: “Hi, Gretchen.”

“Your new agent called,” Gretchen’s voice said. “Kay Henry. He wants you to call him, some time today.”

“Will do,” I said. “Thanks, Gretchen.” I hung up, and took from my wallet the slip of paper with Henry’s number on it while explaining the message to Terry, saying, “I’ll call him first, then try Colby.”

Grinning, Terry said, “Maybe he’s got you a job.”

“More than my regular agent’s doing,” I said, punched out the number, and recognized the British accent of Miss Colinville when she answered. With my toothiest grin, I said, “Hi, honey, this is Ed Dante.” (Terry gave me a repelled look.)

“Oh, is it,” said that icy voice.

“Kay called me,” I told her, knowing Ed Dante would presume to be on a first-name basis with her boss, and knowing also that Miss Colinville would hate that. “I’m calling him back,” I explained, “but I could sit and talk with you all day.”

“ One moment,” she said, and made a very loud clicking sound in my ear, and then left me on Hold for a good long time as a punishment. I gave one of Ed Dante’s goofiest grins to Terry, who tried to look disgusted but then just gave up and laughed.

Another click, less ear-jarring, and Kay Henry’s voice said, “Ed?”

“ Hi, Mr. Henry,” I said, because only with the receptionist would Dante dare to call Henry by his first name.

“Morning, Ed,” said his cheerful confiding voice. “Did they find your luggage yet?”

“Not yet,” I told him. “I called Eastern this morning, they said maybe tomorrow. You know the way they are.”

“Well, we’ll struggle along. I don’t suppose you’ve heard of the O. Henry Theater.”

“No, I haven’t.”

“It’s still under construction, down in the Village,” he said. “They’re opening with a limited run over the holidays, and I’ve talked to them about you for one of the parts. It’s only three weeks, and scale, but it gets you back to work and still leaves you free for Four Square , if that should happen.”

And makes it possible to be certain Ed Dante’s really off the sauce, I thought. I said, “Thanks a lot, Mr. Henry, that sounds just perfect.”

“I thought so, too,” he agreed, “but it’s up to you to make them want you.”

“Oh, I know that.”

“You’re scheduled at six-thirty,” he told me, “at the theater, the O. Henry Theater on Charles Street. You’ll recognize it, it’s a construction site, an old storage building going condo. You’ll see Mr. Cardiff, he’s the house manager.”

I scribbled the information on another sheet of Terry’s notepad, thanked Henry some more, with great effusiveness, and at last hung up, to face Terry’s sardonic smile. “The first step to stardom,” he said.

“Well, I’ve been looking for a job.”

“Will you go?”

“I guess I’ll have to,” I said. “I mean, if this charade is still going on then; which I hope it isn’t. But if it is, I’ll want to keep my access to Kay Henry alive.”

“And to Rita Colby through him,” Terry suggested.

“Let’s see if she’s home,” I said, and reached for the phone, which did not ring, so I picked it up and tapped in Rita Colby’s number, and it was answered on the third ring by someone who sounded so like Miss Colinville I thought for one confused instant I’d called the wrong number. “Good morning,” she said, and when my bewilderment kept me silent for an extra second she said, more emphatically, “ Good morning.”