Samuel Holt: The Fourth Dimension is Death

Kay Henry himself came on the line half a minute later, saying, “Ed? Any problem?”

“No, sir, Mr. Henry,” I assured him. “I just wanted to be sure everything was set for the audition.”

“Absolutely,” he said. “They’re looking forward to you, Ed. I explained the problem with your lost photo and resumé, so they know if they’re interested I’ll send them the material in a day or two.”

“Good,” I said. “Fine. Thanks a lot, Mr. Henry.”

“Just go in there and knock ‘em dead,” he told me.

“I will,” I promised, and hung up, and told Anita, “She hasn’t complained about me to Henry. What do you suppose that means?”

“It might mean she’s worried,” Anita said, “or it might mean she really doesn’t give a damn about Ed Dante and his dumb ideas.”

“An impregnable woman, eh? Let’s hope not,” I said, and kissed Anita goodbye. We’d agreed I would come back here this evening, after my audition. My last night in exile from my own house would be spent with Anita rather than with the Youngs; something pleasant to look forward to.

I walked up the west side to Midtown Precinct South, and had to wait about fifteen minutes before Sergeant Shanley came out to get me. “Sorry about the delay,” she said. “There’s always thirty things going on here.”

“No problem,” I assured her.

We went back to the same interview room as last time, took the same chairs, and she said, “So what do you have for me today? Been under any more beds?”

“Not exactly,” I told her, and took the printed-out newspaper information from my inside jacket pocket and handed it to her.

She raised an eyebrow at me, but asked no questions, and settled down to read. I watched her, but her face remained expressionless as she went methodically through every sheet, turning each one face down on the battered metal desk when she was finished. At the end, she nodded and looked at me and said, “Filling in that theory of yours, huh?”

“Pretty much,” I agreed.

“Let me see if I can come up with your story for you,” she said. “You already had the idea Dale Wormley was blackmailing somebody, probably with some sort of evidence on a sound tape. Now your idea is, the somebody he was blackmailing is Rita Colby, because there was something funny about her husband’s suicide and Wormley knew about it.”

“Knew about it,” I said, “because Rita Colby used him as her alibi for the time of her husband’s death.”

“So you say.”

“Right after that event,” I told her, pointing at the papers on the desk, “Wormley told his girlfriend Julie Kaplan that things were definitely going to start getting better for him, that he knew he was headed for the big time. And that’s when Rita Colby suddenly insisted he be given a part in her next Broadway play. Sergeant, a minor role in a play is not cast five months in advance, and unless there’s some personal reason involved, it isn’t cast without auditions, and it isn’t cast without consultation with director and playwright.”

“Personal reason involved,” Sergeant Shanley repeated. “Doesn’t that usually mean somebody’s sleeping with somebody?”

“Not this time,” I said.

She grinned a little. “Because Rita Colby wouldn’t roll over for you? That doesn’t prove anything, Mr. Holt, it really doesn’t. Not to insult you or anything, but you know what they say: No accounting for tastes.”

“Her reaction to me doesn’t prove anything,” I agreed, “but it does suggest something. But more important than that, if Wormley had been sleeping with Rita Colby, his regular girlfriend would have known it. That kind of secret you can’t keep. Julie Kaplan is absolutely certain there was nothing going on there, and I believe her.”

“You believe her because it fits the theory,” the Sergeant suggested.

I spread my hands in frustration. “Are you just going to throw the whole theory out the window simply because I’m the one who came up with it?”

“Not at all.” Tapping the sheets of paper on the desk, she said, “I’ll follow through on this, of course I will, but I’ll tell you right now what will happen. Shall I?”

“Sure.”

“I’ll call the police over in Jersey,” she said, “and ask them if there was anything suspicious about Montgomery’s suicide. They’ll say no, of course, because if there’d been anything suspicious they would have acted on their suspicions at the time. But I’ll tell them I have information that suggests the wife might at least have been in the house when her husband died, and not in New York at a banquet the way she claimed, and I’ll ask them to check around and see if they come up with any corroboration of that. They’ll say fine, and they’ll talk to the first people on the scene, and they’ll call me back and say there’s no indication the wife was around. And that will be that.”

“So you’re telling me right now,” I said, “that the whole thing is pointless.”

She leaned toward me, looking concerned. “Mr. Holt,” she said, “I’m not saying you’re wrong about this. What I’m saying is, you’re talking about an event that took place three months ago, and up to this point there hasn’t been the slightest suggestion of anything funny there. You may be right about all this. At this point, my own guess is that it’s even money you are right. But there’s nothing here—” again she patted the papers on the desk “—to give me a handle, to give me something to work with. How could I go to Rita Colby and question her about the night her husband died? That isn’t my case. It isn’t even my jurisdiction. If I catch the interest of somebody on the case over in Jersey, then maybe something might happen. Maybe. But it’s damn unlikely from that end, and impossible from my end.”

“You need a smoking gun, you mean,” I said.

“I need more than smoke,” she told me.

There was nothing to do after that but walk back downtown to Anita’s place. I had two and a half hours before my audition at the O. Henry Theater, about six blocks from Vitto Impero, and I had plenty to brood about.

I knew Sergeant Shanley was right, of course. A theory wasn’t reason enough to start the cops intruding on people’s lives; particularly prominent people like Rita Colby. I could hope some policeman over in New Jersey did have mental reservations about the death of Hanford Montgomery, and that Sergeant Shanley’s call would goose him into following up on his doubts, but, as Shanley had said, that was very unlikely. And there was no real evidential link between the supposed suicide of Hanford Montgomery and the murder a month later of Dale Wormley.

I passed this news — or lack of news — to Anita, and then used her phone to call Terry at his office to find out what he’d learned, if anything, about the marriage between Hanford Montgomery and Rita Colby. “Not much useful, I think,” he said.

“Tell me anyway.”

“Okay. It was a prominent-people wedding, up in Martha’s Vineyard, lots of the well-connected and well-bred and well-heeled in attendance. His former wife, who’d been rich as hell, died of cancer two years before he married Colby. As for Colby, she was divorced twice, once from an actor, once from an Oklahoma oilman.”

“Anything in those?” I asked.

“Whadaya mean, scandal? Cocaine, orgies, all of that?”

“It would be nice.”

“But no,” he told me. “They were just divorces. You know, regular let’s-stop-meeting-like-this divorces.”

“Okay. What about the Montgomery/Colby marriage?”

“Distant,” he said. “Their life-styles were very different, their friends were different. They tended to lead separate lives. That famous banquet wasn’t the first time Colby went out with an escort other than her husband.”