And while I’d been under there, waiting, I’d had another thought, another way of looking at the Kim Peyser murder, induced by my own current experience. One of the questions I’d been asking myself about her murderer was: Why here? Why did he kill Kim Peyser in Dale Wormley’s apartment (and Julie Kaplan’s)? And the idea that had now come to me was: What if he were here first, as I had been here first when Mrs. Wormley arrived? What if she had surprised him, as Mrs. Wormley had almost surprised me? And what if, like me, he’d been here because he was searching for something? (Unlike me, he would probably have known what he was searching for.)
Let’s look at it from that angle. Let’s say the murderer killed Wormley in the first place because Wormley was some sort of threat to him. But with Wormley dead the threat still continued in some way, and the killer had to come here to look for it, whatever it was; the thing that continued the threat after Wormley was dead. And while he was here, Kim Peyser came in, and Kim Peyser knew him.
The story hung together this way, better than all the theories about Kim Peyser having been killed in error. In the first place, the error theory required him always to be behind her, not seeing her face; and that couldn’t be for very long. Now, looking at the layout of this apartment, the only scenario I could come up with that made that idea workable at all would be if the killer had been in the bedroom when Kim Peyser entered the apartment, that he already had the knife for some reason, and that when she came into the apartment the first thing she did was turn away from both bedroom and living room and enter the kitchen. That version seemed to me improbable, for a number of reasons.
So let’s say he’s here to search the place, not to kill anybody, and Kim Peyser walks in, surprising him. There was no sign of struggle before the killing, so she knew the guy. He gave her some reason or excuse for his being here, something that would seem plausible for the moment but would break down later; so she wasn’t suspicious right then, but he didn’t dare let her leave.
One of them, let’s say, suggested a cup of coffee. So they went into the kitchen together. He opened drawers, making a show of being unfamiliar with the kitchen, and when he found the knife he simply turned and used it.
The next question, the big question after that, is: Did he then go back to searching the apartment, with Kim Peyser dead in the kitchen, or did he leave, spooked by what had happened? And, in either case, did he find whatever it was he was looking for?
I was making a lot of assumptions here, but it seemed to me these assumptions had a feeling of coherence I hadn’t found up till now in all the various ways that had been tried of looking at these two murders. And they seemed to me to be coherent enough to make just one more assumption worth making: That it would probably pay me to search this apartment.
I knew I had time. From the way Mrs. Wormley had talked on the phone, she’d be gone at least an hour, possibly more. So I started in the kitchen, and I gave the place as complete a toss as I could without actual carpentry; that is, without removing molding strips and window frames and such. I did unscrew switchplates and disassemble lamps, but mostly it was a matter of simply moving everything in the apartment, from the largest to the smallest. That’s the essence of a search right there; you touch everything, lift everything, move everything, study everything, and at the end you put it all back the way you found it. The work was hot and dusty, and before I was half-finished I was down to socks and shorts; if Mrs. Wormley had come back then, we both would have gotten a hell of a surprise.
And I did find something. Or, that is, I found an anomaly that suggested there had been something to find. The kitchen had contained nothing of interest, and the only oddity in the living room was that one of the audio cassette boxes was empty. It was supposed to contain the original cast recording of the musical Grease. I looked in the cassette player, but it wasn’t there, so I went on, and in the bedroom I found the Grease tape in the top dresser drawer, under Dale Wormley’s socks and underwear.
Why? I put the tape back where I’d found it — leave everything where you found it — and thought about that anomaly while finishing my search, coming across nothing else of interest and ending in the bathroom, where I washed and cleaned myself up, and where the medicine chest seemed to have been taken over mostly by Mrs. Wormley’s nostrums. (All of the bottles and boxes contained, as best as I could tell, only what they were supposed to.)
When I was finished with everything, and back into my clothes, the tape of Grease was the only oddity I’d found. And it seemed to me that putting the tape of Grease in that drawer had not been an innocent act. It wasn’t a mistake or carelessness, there being no natural reason to have moved the tape from one room to the next in the first place, since it could only be played on the machine in the living room. Which meant it had been hidden there. And the only reason I could think of for hiding that tape was because the box it had come in was being used for something else, and Dale Wormley hadn’t wanted to draw attention to the box by leaving its tape lying around.
What had Wormley concealed in that box? Another tape? Probably so. And if that’s what the killer had been looking for, he’d found it.
Which made my new set of assumptions look better than ever.
34
Before I left the Wormley apartment I phoned Tom Lacroix, this being the time he’d suggested I do so, and he said both the acting teacher, Howard Moffitt, and Matty Pierce, the guy Dale had fought with in class, had agreed to meet with me at five this afternoon, following the class. Lacroix sounded surprised that Pierce had agreed without having to be urged; he said, “I didn’t even have to tell him your speak-ill-of-the-dead-anonymously offer.”
“Then I’m really looking forward to what he has to say. Thanks for setting it up.”
“No problem.”
“Will you be there?”
“Just to introduce you,” he said. “Then I have to go to work. I’m a waiter, at the moment.”
“Waiting for a show,” I said.
“Oh, you know it.”
He gave me the address, I promised to see him there at five, and then I left the Wormley apartment at last, and walked across and downtown toward the Graybar Building, since I had a twelve-thirty lunch appointment with Mort Adler.
Myrtie, Mort’s receptionist/secretary, didn’t recognize me at first and gave me an extremely dubious look when I walked into the office; this wasn’t the sort of client she wanted for the firm. “It’s okay, Myrtie,” I told her, grinning (like myself, not like Ed Dante), “down inside here I’m Sam Holt.”
“Oh, my God,” she said. “Whatever you’ve done, undo it.”
I promised her the transformation was merely temporary, and she buzzed Mort to tell him I was here, adding, “And you will not believe it.”
Whether he believed it or not, Mort was certainly amused by it. “Come in, come in,” he said, chuckling to himself, looking down at various pieces of baseboard as he reached up to pat me on the shoulder like a basketball coach with a star center who just booted the ball into the stands.
We sat together in his office, and I explained what I was doing and why, feeling only moderately foolish in the telling. He sighed a long sigh when I mentioned hiding under the bed while Mrs. Wormley walked around the Kaplan/Wormley apartment, but he said nothing one way or the other until I was finished, and then he glanced at me briefly from under his eyebrows and said, “Would you care for advice?”