Samuel Holt: The Fourth Dimension is Death

“Yes. As soon as possible.”

“May I ask why?”

“I owe him the most awful apology,” the voice said, fast and urgent. “I want him to know I called the police back, I told them I was crazy before—”

“When you said that Mr. Holt was surely the murderer of your friend?”

“Oh, gosh,” she said, and sounded younger than ever, and penitent, but in a hurried and careless way. “They told him, I guess,” she said, “and he told you.”

“Naturally.”

“The thing is, I want to explain to him...Listen, Mr. Adler, I’ll tell it all to you, okay? But I don’t want to just leave a message or something like that, I want to tell Sam Holt face to face, I want him to know I’m really serious about this, I feel terrible if I made any trouble, and I just want him to understand why I said what I said. But I have to see him himself. I really do.”

Well, I’m an actor, right? I know an entrance cue when I hear one. Besides, I didn’t like eavesdropping from behind a door. So I stepped around it, pulled it open, stepped into the doorway, and said, “Okay, you can tell me then.”

She was in profile to the doorway, facing Mort, her left side toward me. She turned at the sound of my voice, and her eyes widened, her mouth dropped open, she staggered as though she’d been punched. “Oh!” she said, and made a quick erasing kind of gesture with her free hand; then put that hand to her breast and looked faint, but no longer terrified. “Oh, my gosh,” she said, more breathy and weak than ever. “Oh, you do look like him!”

Up till then, I’d always thought of the equation the other way; Dale Wormley looked like me. But this was the girlfriend, or former girlfriend, and when I made my unexpected appearance she reversed the order, and for just a second she’d seen her murdered lover in the doorway. “I’m sorry,” I said, raising a hand, realizing what I’d done to her. Another reversal; she was here to apologize to me.

“Oh, wow,” she said, panting for breath, shaking her head. She looked to be twenty-two or twenty-three, short, barely five feet, dressed in jogging sneakers and jeans and a bulky green jacket. A large floppy black leather shoulderbag hung at her left side, and in her left hand she carried a large maroon folder. She had a small pretty face with very large eyes, but then she also had a lot of heavy brown hair done in complex waves, like a shampoo model on television. The hair was a mistake, meant for a larger and older and more imposing woman, and making her face seem tinier than it was, almost pinched. When she shook her head, the hair moved like a large garment. “That’s really amazing,” she said, gazing at me. “To see you in person—”

Mort looked as though he wasn’t entirely sure I’d done the right thing. His expression troubled, he extended a hand toward Julie Kaplan, saying, “Perhaps we should all go into my office, sit down, discuss—”

She was paying no attention to him. Still looking at me, she said, “It’s even more than in the pictures. Here, let me show you—” And she opened the flap of the maroon folder.

I’ve never seen Mort move so fast. In fact, I didn’t know fast movement was possible to him. But, before Julie Kaplan could reach into that maroon folder, he had lunged forward, knocked it out of her hand, pushed her back against the astonished Myrtie’s desk, and planted one foot firmly on the folder on the floor.

“Ow!” the girl cried, more startled than hurt, and then continued to lean backward against Myrtie’s desk, slightly off-balance, as she stared in disbelief at Mort, who looked more rumpled than usual, and very uncomfortable, but determined. “What—?” she started, and her voice broke, and she tried again: “What was that for?”

“Earlier today, young woman,” Mort told her, his own voice trembling and out of breath, “you accused my client of having murdered your paramour. Now you insist on a face-to-face meeting with my client, which he has for some reason chosen to grant. Your immediate response is to reach inside this parcel you were carrying.”

Staring now as though Mort were a dangerous lunatic, Julie Kaplan cried, “For Christ’s sake, what did you think I was going to do, shoot him?” And as she said that, the most farfetched thing she could think of to say, I could see her realizing that, yes, that was exactly what Mort had thought. She gaped at him, and then at me. To me she said, in a hollow kind of voice, “I wanted to show you the pictures . The pictures on his resumé.”

Mort, with a little grunt, bent and picked up the folder. Opening it, he looked inside, reached in, moved his hand this way and that, then closed the folder again and extended it toward Julie Kaplan. “My apologies for the melodramatic interpretation,” he said, “but I thought it better to be safe than sorry. Stranger things have happened, you know.”

That’s what Feeney said, I thought.

What happened now was, the three of us went into Mort’s office, leaving the connecting door open, and while Mort cleared stacks of documents and junk off another chair Julie Kaplan removed her green jacket, under which she wore a lightweight tan sweater. The three of us sat down, and Mort, smiling at the girl in what he clearly intended to be a reassuring fashion, said, “So you’ve changed your mind about Sam here. May I ask what made the change?”

“Well, I just saw it was crazy,” she told him. “For weeks and weeks, all Dale could talk about was...” She moved her head, glanced at me, shrugged, said, “Well, you know.”

“Me.”

“That’s all he could talk about,” she repeated, “the pressure on him from you, how he couldn’t breathe with you on top of him, how you didn’t leave him room to live, and everything that went wrong in his whole life was somehow Sam Holt’s fault. And I’d say, ‘Dale, he didn’t make you fight with Matty Pierce in class, he didn’t make you punch that man from Paramount Pictures, Sam Holt didn’t make you get drunk and miss performances and get fired from Li’l Abner.’ So then he’d get mad at me and say I was taking Sam Holt’s side, even his own girlfriend had to kowtow to the star and all that, and finally I just said, ‘Listen, Sam Holt doesn’t even know you’re alive, he’s got his own things to think about—’”

I glanced over at Mort and saw him grinning faintly in my direction. I grinned just as faintly back. We were both, I knew, imagining the calmative effect she must have had on Dale Wormley by pointing out to him that his bête noire , Sam Holt, didn’t even know he was alive.

She went on, not noticing our side glance: “That’s finally why I couldn’t take it any more, why I just left, three weeks ago. So then —”

“You and he,” Mort interrupted gently, “have only been apart three weeks?”

“It wasn’t a real separation,” she said, bright-eyed, looking from him to me and back to Mort again. “It was just I couldn’t take his carrying on about, you know, all the time. It was kooky. I think we both know we’re just, I mean we both knew— Oh, my gosh.”

The eyes got brighter as she looked at us, overtaken by her thoughts. She and Wormley had, after all, been involved together emotionally and the fact of his death was still very new to her. The way things like that work, you don’t learn the bad news all at once, you hear it and absorb it just a little bit, and then later on you hear the echo and absorb it some more, and so on, each time getting the news fixed a little more deeply into your brain; as much as you can stand, each time. Like waves breaking over you one after another, until you’re thoroughly soaked. Julie Kaplan was right now feeling the effects of another wave.