“Really?” I made myself sound sad at the prospect. “Some women tell me they like it,” I said, and sparkled a bit.
“Some women like beehive hairdos, Ed.” She shook her head, continuing to study me. “You know, without the moustache, and if you did something about your hair—”
“I’m not gonna shave my head!” I exclaimed, doing a big show of mock-fear.
“We’ll get a makeup man on you, don’t you worry,” she told me. “You know, you look like Dale a bit. You don’t have that anger he had, but the features are rather similar. In fact, with just a few changes, you could look like...I’ll tell you who you could look like,” she decided. “Like that television actor Dale did the takeoff on.
Feeling very nervous, I said, “Sam Holt, you mean?”
“That’s the one.”
“Somebody told me he’s the guy that killed Dale Wormley.”
She reared back, frowning at me in astonishment. “For what earthly reason?”
“I guess, because of those supermarket commercials.”
“Because of a parody?” Rita Colby emphatically shook her head. “That’s ridiculous,” she assured me. “Somebody mugged poor Dale because he was out on the street in the middle of the night, when he had no reason to be out there except that anger of his.”
“So it isn’t a murder mystery.”
She thought about that. “Well, it isn’t solved,” she said. “But murders in the street don’t get solved, do they?”
In this case, I thought, that would be very bad news; for me at least. Aloud, I said, “I guess they don’t. It was just something that somebody told me.”
“Rumor,” she said, with contempt. “There was probably something in the National Enquirer.” Then she became brisk, saying, “Well, that’s the whole story of Four Square, anyway. Kay knows how to get in touch with you?”
“Sure.” This was dismissal, but rather than accept it I slouched lower in the chair, my legs stretched out, one arm flung over the chairback. Grinning lazily at Rita Colby, I said, “You know, I think you and I could be really great together, if you get what I mean.”
She was amused by me, but distantly. “I think probably I do,” she said. “Forgive me, I have another appointment.”
“That’s too bad.” I beamed my rays of sunshine into her skeptical eyes. “I thought, we’re nice and cozy here, we might get a little better acquainted.”
She nodded slowly, thinking that over, and then she gave me a level look and said, “I don’t want to hurt your feelings, Ed, but if you’re going to be offered the part of Clint, and if you’re going to take it, we really should understand one another.”
“Well, you’re right about that,” I told her, cheerful as a puppy.
“I’m glad you agree.”
I played dumb, spreading my hands, saying, “So what’s the point?”
“The point is, dear,” she said, her voice very soft, almost sympathetic, “I don’t sleep with the help.”
31
It was after five o’clock when I dragged my slaughtered carcass out of Kay Henry’s crash pad, leaving Rita Colby in sole command of the place and finding the social clusters all gone from the waiting room. Miss Colinville was gone, too, which was a relief. I didn’t think I was up to playing Ed Dante with that girl yet again today, particularly after the disemboweling I’d just received from Rita Colby. What a surgeon that woman would have made!
And if that’s the way she viewed life, what the hell was the link between her and Dale Wormley?
I brooded on that question as I rode down in the elevator and walked across town to the subway entrance for the BMT, reaching the platform just in time to squeeze into a Brooklyn-bound Q train. This was the height of rush hour, so I stood crammed in with a million other people on the whole long ride down into Brooklyn. I got off at Avenue J, and walked the few blocks into Midwood and over to the Youngs’ house, reflecting as I did so that Rita Colby’s attitude toward me didn’t necessarily mean she’d had the same attitude toward Dale Wormley. She’d spoken of him dispassionately enough, but had drawn complete contrasts between him and me, emphasizing his anger. Maybe she’d responded to that anger in some way. Or maybe it was merely that I’d presented her with a character who simply had to be slapped down.
That was Gretchen’s theory, when I recapped my day over dinner. Anita hadn’t felt she could take two evenings in a row away from the restaurant, so it was just Gretchen and Terry and me. And the three kids, of course, but they existed in a parallel universe of their own, next to ours. While the kids pursued their own concerns, I made my report and Gretchen said, “Well, the way you were carrying on, she had to do that.”
“I wasn’t exactly carrying on,” I said.
“Oh, yes, you were.” She shook her head at me, saying, “You don’t know what you look like in that disguise. When you look at yourself in the mirror, you’re just standing there, you’re still yourself. But then when you come out and move around, in character, you have this awful toothy smile all the time, and kind of puppy eyes, and you slouch around like Groucho Marx. Any woman in the world would take one look at you and know the best thing to do is just immediately slap you across the face.”
I laughed, and said, “In that case, I’m glad the women I’m meeting show such restraint.”
Terry said, “What were you going to do if she didn’t slap you down? What if she’d said, ‘Sure, honey, let’s party’? Were you going to go to bed with her?”
“I was counting on Ed to be oafish enough to louse up the opportunity,” I told him, and grinned open-mouthed at him like Ed, and said, with my twang, “Hey, great, baby. Just lemme call my girlfriend first, tell her I’ll be a little late.”
Terry laughed, and choked on his food. “Okay, okay,” he said. “You were safe.”
“Now, then,” I said, “she would have been justified to bring up the nuclear warheads. But she came on like Darth Vader right away.”
“Well,” Gretchen suggested, “what I think happened is, Rita Colby saw how good an actor you are, when you did the Nazi soldier, so she knew she’d want you in the play. But she didn’t want to put up with you being a pest all the time, so she slapped you down hard at the beginning, to get all that out of the way.”
“And very effective she was, too,” I said.
Terry said, “But, the question is, are you getting anywhere? Somebody killed Dale Wormley and the girl, whatsername—”
“Kim Peyser.”
“Right. And tried to pin the blame on you. What makes you think it has something to do with that play?”
“Nothing,” I admitted. “Terry, I’m not necessarily going to go now and scrape up introductions to the playwright and the director and the producers and all these people, and try to find out if somebody had artistic reasons not to want Wormley in the part, and they killed him for the good of the theater.”
“Not necessarily,” Terry echoed.
I said, “I’m just following wherever the circumstances lead me. I talked with Julie Kaplan down in Miami, and really the only two things that were hot and current in Wormley’s life at the end were the lawsuit with me and the part in Four Square, Now, he was a bad-tempered guy, who made enemies pretty easily, and I’m following through on a guy named Matty Pierce he had trouble with in his acting class, but that kind of thing doesn’t very often lead to murder, you know.”