Samuel Holt: The Fourth Dimension is Death

“Yes.” Anita had been working at her restaurant, of course, so I’d been alone at dinner at my friend Terry Young’s house. Anita and I play our relationship casual, avoiding heavy plans, avoiding the requirements of habit. We wind up spending about half the nights together, at her place or mine; unfortunately, as I was now beginning to realize, last night had not been one of them.

“And at about what time did you get home, Mr. Holt?”

“I got home at about one o’clock in the morning, Detective Feeney,” I said, feeling more comfortable about pressuring a male, “and I would really like to know why you want to know.”

LaMarca said, “Did you see Dale Wormley on your way home?”

I felt unfriendly toward her, and allowed it to show. “I’ve already said,” I pointed out, “that I haven’t seen Wormley since the incident in the theater. That does include last night. So if he’s decided to make trouble by claiming I—”

“Dale Wormley isn’t claiming anything, Mr. Holt,” Feeney told me. Then he grinned, almost boyishly, and sat back, shaking his head. “We probably should have mentioned this at the beginning,” he said. “We aren’t from the precinct.”

“Oh, no?”

“No.” Feeney’s smile was utterly untrustworthy. “We’re from Homicide,” he said.

Shortly after six-thirty on that morning, three hours or so before Detectives Feeney and LaMarca came to talk to me, a neighbor of mine whom I don’t know — I know none of my neighbors, in fact — a young woman named Crissy Ladbroke who is a stock analyst with a firm down in the financial district, left her floor-through second-story apartment in a converted brick brownstone essentially similar to mine and five doors away toward Sixth Avenue, and went downstairs for her usual pre-breakfast jog through the neighborhood. When she opened the inner door, however, she found a man crumpled on the floor in the tiny vestibule. Her initial impression that the man was a sleeping drunk lasted only a second or two, until she realized that the odd shape of his head was not a trick of early morning shadows but a result of it having been crushed by a blow with something very hard. Terrified, disgusted, she retreated back into the building and up to her apartment, where she dialed 911 and didn’t emerge again until the first police arrived.

The man was Dale Wormley. According to the Medical Examiner’s office’s preliminary report, he had most likely died some time between midnight and three in the morning. The back of his head had been struck three times by a piece of wood, probably a two-by-four, minute shreds of which were now mixed with Wormley’s flesh and blood and bone. For a number of reasons, it seemed unlikely that he had been killed where he had been found. There wasn’t much room in that small vestibule, for instance, to swing a two-by-four, and no blood had been seen on the floor or walls. (Potential bloodstains, now being analyzed, had subsequently been found in the street in front of my house, near the curb, between two parked cars.)

Wormley’s wallet, containing driver’s license and credit cards and a moderate amount of money, was still in his pocket. There was no apparent violence to him other than the blows to the back of the head. His clothing had not been disarranged.

By seven-thirty, the police had reached Wormley’s home, a studio apartment in a large building on West End Avenue in the eighties, where he had recently been living alone. Searching the apartment, they had found a letter he had written to me but never sent, dated the day after our encounter in the Lucille Lortel theater, in which he complained bitterly that I was depriving him of his “right to live,” a phrase that appeared four times in the three page rambling hand-written letter. They had also found the name and current phone number of his former girlfriend, Julie Kaplan.

At first, Julie Kaplan was merely shocked and stunned by the news, but she then told the police that Wormley had had no enemies other than me. She told them that Dale had felt his life was totally bound up with mine, that he and I formed some sort of binary star in which I was the one with all the light and sustenance, and he was the “dark star,” in his usual phrase for it, made dark by the fact of my existence. She said that his brooding about me, his obsessive belief that I was keeping him from his rightful destiny, was the principal reason she had left him, a few months ago.

Of course, now that I had murdered Dale Wormley, as Julie Kaplan explained to the police, she saw things in a different light and realized Dale must have been psychic to some degree, must have had a premonition of how it would all end. Of course Sam Holt must have been the one who’d killed Dale, she explained, because there was no one else with any reason. Wormley’s crowding me, pestering me, pressuring me, imitating me, had inevitably led to this result. What other explanation could there be?

After they’d finished talking with Julie Kaplan, Detectives Feeney and LaMarca came to me, and after that period of preliminary nonsense they described to me this situation and what Julie Kaplan had said, and then they asked if they would have to go get a court order before I would let them search the house. “For a two-by-four?” I asked.

“Stranger things have happened,” Feeney said, grinning cheerfully.

“I can’t think of any,” I told him. “Do you really and truly believe I went out last night and bludgeoned Dale Wormley to death, for being a pest?”

He looked as though he wanted to say stranger things have happened again, but he contented himself with an amiable smile while his partner LaMarca said, “Mr. Holt, up till now we don’t believe anything. We’re just taking this step by step, and you’re the next step.”

Feeney said, with his meaningless grin, “There’s gonna be lots more to learn about Wormley before we’re done. Other people with motives, maybe. An obsessive character like that, maybe you weren’t the first one he leaned on. Or maybe Julie Kaplan did it herself, tried to shift suspicion over onto you.”

“Or the Senator from Nebraska,” LaMarca said.

I frowned at her. “The Senator from Nebraska?”

Feeney’s grin turned into an actual laugh, and he said, “That’s a little catch phrase of Marie’s. Means you never know, when you start, work your way into your victim’s life, where the road’s gonna take you. First thing you know, the victim knew the Senator from Nebraska.”

“Went to school with him,” LaMarca explained, “or in the army with him. Sat beside him on a plane once.”

“This time,” I said, “I get the feeling I’m the Senator from Nebraska.”

Laughing again, Feeney said, “See how much progress already.”

LaMarca unlaced her fingers to gesture at the room, saying, “About having a little look through the house. Any problems?”

“Not at all,” I told her, suddenly weary with it. Why had Dale Wormley yoked himself to me like this? “Search to your hearts’ content,” I told them both.

And I wouldn’t have been a bit surprised if they’d found a bloodstained two-by-four somewhere in the house; it felt like that all of a sudden. However, they didn’t.

The suit was still alive. Dale Wormley’s death really meant nothing at all in that regard, since the television commercials still existed and Kwality FoodMarts would have no particular reason to stop running them; except an order from a judge. But Wormley’s death would delay things, confuse things, which is one of the reasons I spent most of the morning in Morton Adler’s office high in the Graybar Building next to Grand Central.

A rumpled man with a neat round balding head, Mort’s usual manner is one of shy amusement, as though he doesn’t particularly see why everybody else wants to make such a fuss. His office, with its large windows overlooking the remaining air-rights in midtown Manhattan, is probably large enough, but is so cluttered and messy as to look small. Stacks of papers and books mound messily everywhere, most of them crowned by some recent copy of the New York Times , quarter-folded with the crossword puzzle on top, completed in neat black inked letters.