Samuel Holt: The Fourth Dimension is Death

I heard it. It threw me off, I floundered, I filled my mouth with chlorinated water, found my footing, stood up with wavelets at my chest, coughed, and called up at that grid, “What?” Even though I’d heard.

“The police. Detectives, to be precise,” he said precisely. “They wish to speak to you.”

“Tell them to give me five minutes,” I called, clambering out of the pool. I padded down to my robe flung over the back of the bench at one end of the pool, shrugged into it, and hurried upstairs.

It took more than five minutes. I had to shower off the chlorine, then dress. I moved as quickly as I could, but still it was probably a quarter of an hour before I reached the living room and found the two detectives seated there, chatting together, drinking coffee that Robinson must have offered. Robinson himself was not present.

Why had I expected them both to be men? I guess the ingrown assumptions don’t change. Anyway, one was male, the other female, both probably in their late thirties. The man was short, chunky, with thinning brown hair and a blobby lumpy face, like something made of Play-Doh. The woman was an inch or so taller than he, big-boned rather than fat, with straight black Vampira hair and a long horsy face. The man wore a brown jacket, checked shirt, dark blue bow tie and gray slacks, while the woman was dressed in a severely cut dark blue suit, plain white blouse, dark hose and sensible shoes. All in all, he looked like a high school math teacher and she looked like the woman who interviews you when you plan to adopt a child. They both got to their feet when I came in, giving me expressionless looks. I said, “Sorry to hold you up.”

“No problem,” said the man, and the woman said, “We understand you were swimming.”

“Exercise,” I explained. Swimming indoors in one’s own house in Manhattan in October would be the depth of decadence if it didn’t have a morally correct purpose behind it.

“So your man said,” the woman agreed, smiling faintly to let me know she accepted the morally correct purpose as an adequate excuse.

The man said, “I’m Detective Feeney and this is Detective LaMarca.”

“How do you do? Sit down, sit down, drink your coffee.”

They sat down, and so did I. They didn’t say anything about how good the coffee was, so I could then tell them it was Robinson’s pride and joy, and thus ease us forward through the civilities. In fact, they didn’t go on with the chitchat at all. Detective Feeney said, “Do you know a man named Dale Wormley?”

This was four days after the incident in the Lucille Lortel theater, and my first reaction was surprise it had taken Wormley so long to try to make trouble out of it. Then my second reaction was surprise they’d send two detectives to my house over such a thing. And then my third reaction was disbelief; this was something else, some further annoyance from Wormley. Little I knew. I said, “I know who he is, yes.”

Detective LaMarca laced her fingers in her lap, frowning at me slightly. “You know who he is? Does that mean you know him, or you don’t know him?”

“We’re not pals,” I told her. “I’ve met him twice. He’s on the other side of a lawsuit I’m party to.”

“Kwality commercials,” said Feeney.

“That’s right.”

“You met him twice,” LaMarca said. “The first time was here?”

“Not in the house. Out on the sidewalk.”

“Would you tell us about it?”

Maybe that was the point where I should have asked them to tell me about it, to ask what their interest was and why they were here, but I felt they’d prefer to run this interview in their own way at their own pace, so I simply told them the story of Dale Wormley accosting me on the street, Kendall bringing in the cops, and that being the end of it. “I don’t know if the beat guys made a report,” I finished.

“They did,” Feeney told me.

LaMarca said, “Wormley complained you twisted his arm or something. Is that what happened?”

“Not exactly,” I said. “He kept shoving me, putting his hand on my chest and shoving, so I put a come-along hold on his thumb to make him stop. As soon as he calmed down a little, I let him go.”

“You bent his thumb, you mean,” Feeney said.

“That’s right.”

LaMarca said, “Tell us about the other time you saw him.”

“Is that why you’re here?” I asked her, though I still didn’t believe it.

“We’ll get to that,” she said. “Let’s just take it in order, the way things happened.”

“Okay,” I said, and described round two. At the end, I said, “There were a lot of other people there. They can verify that he swung at me three times before I finally did something about it.”

LaMarca said, “You knocked Wormley out?”

“I think he was groggy, or unconscious, something like that,” I said. “He went down, and a couple of people there carried him out. He was gone when I left the theater.”

Feeney said, grinning at me, “Just as well by you, huh?”

“I wasn’t in any hurry to see him again,” I agreed.

LaMarca leaned forward, hooking her laced fingers over her skirted knee. She said, “The first time, you saw Dale Wormley here and he shoved you and you bent his thumb. The second time, you saw him at the theater, and he swung at you and you knocked him out. And the next time you saw him?”

“There was no next time,” I said.

She looked faintly surprised. “You just let it go at that?”

“Let what go? He was the one with the problem. As far as I’m concerned, the company that syndicates PACKARD is suing the company that hired Wormley to do a putdown parody of the Packard character. It’s between them.”

“‘Putdown parody,’” LaMarca repeated. “You’ve seen these commercials?”

“Sure. I had to for the suit.”

“And you don’t like them.”

“They’re smarmy,” I told her. “They make Packard out to be a bully and a blowhard. There’s probably better ways to sell light bulbs and toilet paper.”

“So you have to take it personally,” LaMarca pointed out, being calm and reasonable. “It’s you he’s insulting, isn’t it?”

“I could feel that way sometimes,” I agreed, “but of course it isn’t. I’m not really Packard, after all. I’m not a criminologist with a midwestern university.”

“Solving crimes,” Feeney said, grinning at me, man to man. “Being brilliant.”

“Which is, of course, easy to make fun of,” I told him. “When the show was on the air we were made fun of several times. Mad Magazine did a spoof, Saturday Night Live took off on us three or four times. Stuff like that.”

“And it didn’t bother you,” LaMarca said. “That’s the point you’re trying to make, isn’t it?”

“Look,” I said. “If Wormley’s made some sort of complaint against me—”

“He never did,” Feeney told me. “From the way he acted with the beat cops here, that first incident here, he figured the law would just automatically be on your side because you’re a celebrity.”

“It doesn’t work that way,” I said.

“We know that,” LaMarca said, and then she said, “Does anyone live in this house besides you and the man who let us in?”

“No,” I said, wondering what this abrupt change of subject was all about. “Why?”

Instead of LaMarca answering the question, Feeney asked one of his own: “Were you out last night, Mr. Holt?”

It was the first time either of them had called me by name; as though now they were getting down to it, whatever it was. I said, “Dinner with friends in Brooklyn.”

“Excuse my asking this,” Feeney said, with his friendly grin, “but you came home alone?”