“Kay Henry clients?” I asked.
Blair’s eyes sparkled with the love of gossip. “Sam? Do you think so?”
“Well, as a matter of fact,” I told her, “there’s a possibility I’ll be finding out for myself, some time later today.”
28
The fellow who’d been in acting class with Dale Wormley, and who Julie had called on my behalf, was named Tom Lacroix, and we’d arranged to meet in his apartment in the East Village at three, so I walked down there after lunch with Brett and Blair. My background and persona — though not the Ed Dante name — were different for Tom Lacroix than for Kay Henry. This time, I was a freelance writer working on an article for Vanity Fair about success and failure in the arts, and the idea was that I wanted to use Dale Wormley’s life and death — the fact that he had become best-known for imitating someone more successful than himself — to illustrate some of the themes of my article. I would also, of course, be mentioning Tom Lacroix himself in the piece, as someone still teetering between those extremes of victory and defeat; but the main subject would be Wormley.
Lacroix lived on East 10th Street off 3rd Avenue, an area that hasn’t been gentrified exactly, but is moderately quiet and relatively safe, with rows of four and five story brick townhouses long ago converted to apartments and more recently converted to hot water and heat. His place was in one of these, on the fourth floor rear of a walkup. I identified myself on the intercom outside the front door, he buzzed me in, and I climbed to find him grinning down at me from the top of the stairs, saying, “I hope you’re in good shape.”
“Reasonably so,” I told him. “But I’m just as glad you’re not on six.”
“Lordy, Lordy, me, too,” he said, and I heard Texas — southwest, anyway — twanging in his voice. He was a rangy, athletic-looking fellow in his mid-twenties, with an amiable, unlined, not very memorable face. He wore jeans and a flannel shirt, and looked like the sort of actor they use to dress the bar set in beer commercials. When I reached the top of the stairs, he gave me a firm bony handshake and ushered me into an apartment approximately the size of a watch pocket. “If you sit there and I sit here,” he said, “our knees won’t bump.”
“Thanks.”
I sat where he suggested, and, true to his appearance, he asked if I’d like a beer. I said I would. “Lone Star,” he offered, “or Dos Equis?”
I laughed and said, “By God, you are from Texas, aren’t you?”
“Gave it away, did I?” He made a drat finger-snapping gesture. “Somehow, I always slip up.”
“Dos Equis,” I told him, and he crossed the room to a kind of bas-relief kitchen — all the necessary appliances in a wide shallow closet. Opening the refrigerator, he said, “I’ve noticed you Easterners tend to like glasses.”
“Not necessarily.”
“Good. Less work for mother.”
He too had chosen Dos Equis. Handing me mine, he sat in the chair facing me — it was true, our knees did not quite touch — and raised his bottle in a toast: “Remember the Alamo.”
I raised mine: “Remember the Maine.”
He thought about that, decided it was acceptable, and said, “Carthage must be destroyed.”
“Fifty-four forty or fight,” I suggested.
“Drink before it gets warm,” he told me.
It was his house, so it was only right that he got to go last. We both drank from our bottles, and then he said, “So you write for Vanity Fair.”
“I’m not on staff,” I told him, “just a freelance. In fact, this’ll be my first piece for them.”
“And it’s about success in the arts?”
“Success and failure in the arts,” I corrected. “Really, about the interface between the two.” For this impersonation, this version of Ed Dante, I’d mussed up the wig a little and thought myself into a sub-Columbo guise; a careless cerebral guy, probably not first-rate at what he does, unaware of any negative impression he might be making with his moustache and his sloppiness. Success and failure, in other words; exemplifying my subject matter.
Lacroix said, “And you think Dale fits in there? The interface between success and failure?”
“Sure.” I gestured with the bottle. “You couldn’t call him a failure, he was making a living at his chosen profession. Not many do.”
His mouth curved in a rueful smile. “You can say that again.”
“But Wormley wasn’t really a success either,” I went on. “The highest he got was a parody of someone else’s success.”
“And that even got him killed,” Lacroix said, “which is about as big a failure as you can get.”
Bewildered, I said, “What do you mean?”
He seemed surprised by my surprise. “Well, Sam Holt killed him, didn’t he?”
Whoops. I had to tread carefully here. Was this the common public view of the situation, or was Lacroix’s opinion an odd one, a distortion caused by his having known Wormley? I said, “Did he? I didn’t think that had been established.”
“Oh, they’ll never get him for it,” Lacroix agreed, airily waving the Dos Equis bottle.
The old powerful-influence idea again. If only it were true. I said, “I’m not sure what the motive would be.”
“Well,” he said, the casual assurance of the uninvolved, “I don’t suppose he meant to do it, do you? There was some sort of funny history of violence between them, you know, and I guess it just got out of hand. You know,” he added, “you oughta talk to Holt, too, see what he thinks of success and failure.”
“I wrote him, as a matter of fact,” I said. “In California. Haven’t heard anything yet.”
“I bet you don’t.”
“Probably not,” I agreed. “I suppose, guilty or innocent, he’ll be keeping a low profile right now.” I brooded, partly real and partly for effect. “You know,” I said, “if Dale Wormley really was killed by Sam Holt, because he was mad at the imitation, that could screw up my whole article. I mean, the magazine might not want to touch it that way, I might have to start all over with a completely different approach.”
“You mean, forget Dale.”
“Yeah, I’m afraid so.”
“And me,” Lacroix said, with another crooked grin. “Story of my life, I’m afraid.” He drank some beer.
I said, “Well, let’s think about it. It’s only the celebrity thing that’s a real problem. You knew Wormley. If Sam Holt didn’t kill him, who else might have?” And I was astonished at how easily it had been possible to come around to ask that question directly.
I was also disappointed by Lacroix’s prompt answer: “Nobody. Or, that is, anybody who knew him might have, but that still comes out, really, to nobody. I mean, Dale was an irritation, a very irritating guy — don’t tell Julie I said that; you know, she had a different attitude toward him — but he wasn’t irritating enough to kill.”
“In what way irritating?”
“Career,” Lacroix said. “Anything at all about acting. He’d walk all over you without thinking twice. Even in class, in an exercise, he’d try to upstage you, steal the scene. People were always yelling at him to cut it out, lighten up, don’t be such an asshole.”
“Too competitive, you mean.”
“Cutthroat,” he said. “Myself, I like competition, I think it’s a good thing, but you can overdo it.”
“Sounds as though a lot of people would hold grudges against somebody like that,” I said.
“Well, sure, anybody might have,” Lacroix agreed, “if he was more successful at it. But he tried so damn hard, he screwed up most of the time. If you’ve got a guy trying to stick his thumb in your eye, but every time he makes a move he steps on his own dick instead, you can’t get really mad at him.”