Samuel Holt: The Fourth Dimension is Death

After we’d talked about the lawsuit a while, our conversation turned to the idea of me as a murder suspect, which made Mort lower his eyes and smile privately at the papers all over his desk. “The police are doing their job, Sam,” he told the papers. “You know that. You’ve been in their shoes.”

“Not really,” I said.

“You’ve been a police officer,” he insisted, shaking his head at the papers. “You know they’re doing their work by the numbers, the way they should.”

“It feels different,” I said, “when I’m one of the numbers.”

“Of course it does.” Head still down, he glanced up through his eyebrows at me and smiled. “ You know it’s ridiculous to think you might have beaten this fellow with a stick,” he said, “so you quite naturally resent the idea that anyone else might not see how ridiculous it is.”

“In fact,” I said, “I was violent with him twice before. The cops made a point of that.”

“So your resentment,” he said, nodding, looking at the messy desk again, raising his eyebrows as he followed the implications, “is combined with a little bit of nervousness. You did bend this fellow’s thumb the first time you saw him. The second time, the physical violence increased.”

“I knocked him out,” I said. “It escalated.”

“Escalated.” He shook his head slowly and looked away out the window at the gray sky. “One of the more minor bad effects of the Vietnam war,” he said, “though no less annoying for being minor, was the emergence of that word out of the department stores where it belonged and into uses in general speech where it never really quite applies.”

“Sorry,” I said. “I didn’t know that was one of your pet peeves.”

“Neither did I,” he said, looking both surprised and amused. “However, escalation or no, there is, I agree, a progression in the level of violence between you and Wormley. First he pushes you and you bend his thumb. Second he tries to punch you and you knock him out. Third...” And he grinned slyly at me.

“Sure,” I said. “The police could see it that way. Third, I come home tired and probably half drunk, late at night—”

“ Were you half drunk?”

“I had wine with dinner at the Youngs’. I don’t believe I was half drunk, no. But say I was, or just tired and aggravated. And Wormley appears, and attacks me again, and this time I lay him out with a two-by-four.”

“But what then ensues...” he said, and shook his head.

I hadn’t so far thought about that part of it, the events after the death of Wormley, but now I saw what Mort meant. “That’s right,” I said. “Killing him I might have done, but the rest no.”

“It does seem unlikely,” he agreed. “Have you, by the way, ready access to heavy pieces of wood around that place of yours? Any construction or repair work going on, anything of that nature?”

“No,” I said, “not in my house. But there’s always two or three dumpsters around that neighborhood.”

He looked alert. “Dumpsters? Why don’t I know that word?”

“Those are those large open-top metal boxes,” I told him, “that look like a truck without cab or wheels. Construction crews use them for all the debris and trash. I think there’s one on my block right now, down toward Fifth, on the other side of the street.”

“The opposite way from where Wormley was found.”

“Yes. Why?”

“I have no idea,” he said. “But to return to the point, if Wormley did attack you a third time last night, and if you did go to this dumpster — thank you for that word, it makes up for escalate — and if you did take a piece of wood and hit him with it—”

“On the back of the head,” I pointed out. “Three times.”

“I agree,” he said. “You would not, and you would not. Not with his back turned, and not more than once. But even so, you would not have then clumsily hidden the fellow just a few doors away from your own and gone to bed as though nothing had happened.”

“That’s right.”

“What you would have done, Sam,” he went on, smiling now reproachfully at me, “if you had just beaten Dale Wormley to death on your doorstep, you would have gone into your house and made two phone calls, the second one to the police.”

I laughed, despite the grimness of the subject, seeing what he meant. “And the first one would have been to you,” I said.

“Waking me, I assure you,” he told me, “from an extremely pleasant sleep.”

“None of this,” I said, “does me much good when it comes to convincing the police I didn’t kill Dale Wormley.”

He looked surprised. “But you don’t have to,” he said. “That isn’t your job, it’s theirs. They must find the evidence, sift it, come to a conclusion, convince their superiors. At the moment, I imagine you are a name on their suspect list, but not very earnestly, not enough to keep them from looking farther for more names to add.”

“I suppose you’re right.” I felt a bit easier, but not much. Do nothing is always the hardest advice in the world to follow. “But there really is nothing for me to do, is there?”

“Of course not.” He peered through his eyebrows at me again, with that sly amused smile. “Our old friend Packard isn’t thinking of taking a hand, is he?”

“No no,” I assured him, feeling embarrassed, and the intercom buzzer on his phone sounded. “I’ll just wait and let the police work their way through it,” I went on. “And if it ever looks as though there’s something to worry about, the first thing I’ll do is call you. That’s a promise.”

He nodded his approval, and rested his hand on the phone as he said, “But not, if you can possibly avoid it, in the wee hours.”

“Do my best,” I said.

Mort smiled and picked up the phone and said into it, “Yes, Myrtie?” Then he raised an eyebrow at me, and said, “Hmmm.” He considered for a few seconds, then said, “I’ll come out,” and hung up. Then he looked at me. “We have a visitor,” he said.

“We?”

“Julie Kaplan,” Mort said.

“The woman who told the police I was the only one who could possibly have murdered Dale Wormley?”

“Yes,” Mort agreed, getting to his feet. “She is here, and wants to speak with me about you.” Moving toward the closed door of his office, he said, “I’ll leave the door slightly open, so you can hear. You needn’t come out.”

I also stood, and followed him to the door, and stood behind it as he went out, leaving it a few inches open behind himself. I heard Myrtie the secretary say, “Here’s Mr. Adler,” and then Mort’s calm voice saying, “Miss Kaplan?”

“Yes. You’re Sam Holt’s lawyer, aren’t you?” Her voice was young, breathy, the words pushed out in a rush. She sounded brisk, but unsure. As though she weren’t used to being unsure.

“I am indeed,” Mort told her. “How do you happen to know that, if I may ask?”

“Dale’s papers,” she said. “I wanted to find Sam Holt’s address, but he didn’t have it written down anywhere. But I found your name, with the lawsuit papers.”

“Excuse me, Miss Kaplan,” Mort said, “but let me understand something. You have Dale Wormley’s papers? I’m afraid I don’t quite follow that.”

“At his apartment,” she said. “I still have my key.”

“Ah, I see.”

“We used to live together.”

“Yes, so I understand.”

“Anyway,” her quick breathy voice went on, “I have to talk to Sam Holt, but I couldn’t find his address or anything at Dale’s place, so that’s why I’m here.”

“Because you have to speak to Mr. Holt?”