Samuel Holt: The Fourth Dimension is Death

“Oh, good morning,” I said, realizing this had to be another secretary; Rita Colby’s, if I’d dialed right. “Rita Colby, please.”

“May I tell Miss Colby who’s calling?”

“Ed Dante,” I said.

“ One moment,” she said, exactly like Miss Colinville, and put me on Hold, exactly like Miss Colinville, but without the extra-loud click. Terry watched me, and I waited, and the ur -Miss Colinville came back to say, “Miss Colby would like to know the subject of the call.”

“Tell her,” I said, “the Theater Project banquet last September.”

“ One moment.”

Terry said, “Playing hardball, aren’t you?”

“Well, what am I going to say I want to talk to her about? Acting methods? We aren’t buddies, Terry, I can’t just be making a social call. So let’s shake the tree, and see what happens.”

“Don’t stand under it,” he advised.

I nodded, and heard a click, and the secretary’s voice came back, saying, “Miss Colby thanks you for your interest, but has nothing to say on that subject. Thank you.”

I opened my mouth, but the click came first, and then dead air. So I hung up, saying, “And so much for that.”

“So,” Terry said, “now she knows you know.”

I frowned at him. “That’s the problem,” I said. “She knows I know what? ”

He laughed; more heartily than I thought necessary. “Too bad you can’t ask her,” he said.

Terry volunteered to look further into the Montgomery/Colby marriage, see if anybody on the gossip side of the news business had anything juicy to add substance to our story. I phoned Sergeant Shanley, but she wouldn’t be available till mid-afternoon, so I called Anita and arranged to spend some time with her. Then I finally left Terry to get on with the work he was paid for, and I walked across town and downtown into the West Village, thinking that what I’d found — if in fact I’d found anything at all — wasn’t the simple solution I’d been looking for but a brand new complication; not the end of something, but more like the beginning.

I got to Vitto Impero a little too early for lunch, so Anita and I spent some time upstairs in her apartment over the restaurant, and I gave her a recap of my adventures in the last two days, since we’d been together down in Brooklyn at the Youngs’ house. When I finished, she said, “I don’t see why you made that phone call to Rita Colby.”

“Well,” I said, “the idea that the death of her husband has something to do with the death of Dale Wormley makes a kind of sense, but there’s great gaps in it. It’s a brand new idea and I wanted to be able to talk about it, think about it. I just wanted the chance to have a conversation with Rita Colby and see what happened. But then, when the secretary asked me what my subject was, I drew a blank. All I could think was, okay, let’s drop a depth charge and see what happens.”

“What happens is,” Anita told me, “Rita Colby now knows you aren’t just the simple ignorant actor you said you were. If she’s guilty, she knows you’re on the trail. You gave her information, and didn’t get anything back.”

“Well, I did get something back,” I said. “If there was nothing at all in the idea that there was something wrong with the story, if Rita Colby and Dale Wormley were just innocently at that banquet together when just coincidentally her husband was killing himself an hour’s drive away in New Jersey, why wouldn’t she have come to the phone, even if just to ask me what I’m talking about? The immediate refusal to talk is the smoke that tells me there has to be a fire around there somewhere.”

“But haven’t you used up Ed Dante now?”

“Well, I guess I have with Rita Colby,” I admitted. “But will she tell Kay Henry? I don’t see why she would, at least not right away.”

“To get rid of you,” Anita suggested. “She calls Henry and tells him you’re being a pest and she doesn’t want you around his office any more.”

“Possible,” I said. “So what I’ll do is, this afternoon I’ll call the Henry office and see if my audition at the O. Henry Theater is still on.”

“Would you go, if it was?”

“Sure.” I grinned at her, saying, “That’s a real acting challenge there. I have to go and be good enough to be considered, good enough so they don’t call Henry and say, ‘Don’t send us any more amateur clowns like that one, okay?’ But at the same time, I have to be not quite good enough to get hired.”

“You plan to enjoy yourself,” Anita accused me.

“In my secret heart,” I admitted, “I’m enjoying this. Anita, for the last couple of days in New York, I’ve been acting . Win, lose or draw, learn something or learn nothing, this is the first time in years I’ve been able to actually use my muscles, do what I know how to do.”

Anita gave me a sympathetic look and shook her head: “Poor boy. What are you going to do with yourself when you have to stop playing Ed Dante?”

“Which will be very soon, in any case,” I told her. “I figure, by tomorrow night I’ll have used it up. I’ll move back into 10th Street and let whatever happens happen.”

“Why tomorrow night?”

“Okay,” I said. “Later today, Ed has his audition. He fails, but not by much.”

“Lots of fun,” Anita said.

“But also necessary,” I reminded her. “Because then , I’m justified tomorrow morning in going back to see Kay Henry. I start by talking about the audition, and if I’m any good at all I get the conversation moved around to Rita Colby and her dead husband, and does she happen to have any guy in her life right now, and with any luck I get to find out what Henry thinks of it all.” Grinning, I said, “Wouldn’t it be nice, for instance, if she phoned him the evening of the banquet and asked him to arrange an escort for her to the dinner?”

“He’d have to know the truth, then,” Anita said.

“He’d have to suspect, sure,” I agreed, “which I’d look very hard for. But remember, Rita Colby’s almost the entire support of that agency. It would take a lot for him to permit a negative thought about her to cross his brain.”

“He has every reason to protect her, then,” Anita said. She pointed at me, and added, “From you.”

“I’ll try to be subtle,” I promised.

“As subtle as you were with Rita Colby?”

I laughed. “Even subtler than that,” I said.

Anita and I had lunch together at the table in the back near the kitchen, surrounded by lawyers from downtown and executives from midtown and local people from the Village. This is the table where we’d had dinner with Julie Kaplan nearly six weeks ago, when I thought my troubles with the Dale Wormley killing were coming to an end. Now, six weeks later, it seemed to me they were just barely beginning.

Downstairs, we didn’t talk about any of that, but about less troubling subjects. Anita picked at her food, as usual, but I had a good appetite for some reason, and Angela the waitress smiled in approval as I cleared every plate she gave me. I would have liked some white wine to go with the tortellini and the sole, but there was too much to be done this afternoon, so I contented myself with a bottle of San Pellegrino water, and several cups of espresso.

After lunch, there was still plenty of time before my meeting with Sergeant Shanley, so I went back upstairs and used Anita’s phone to call Kay Henry’s office, telling the chilly Miss Colinville, “Hi, hon, it’s Ed Dante again. Just wanted to be sure my audition was still on for this afternoon.”

“And what audition would that be?” she demanded, but then, before I could answer, she said, “Oh, never mind, just hold on one moment.” And I got the phone away from my ear just in time to avoid the full impact of her punitive click.