“That’s probably best,” Mort said, judiciously, and Myrtie buzzed to say that Sergeant Shanley was on the line.
The sergeant expressed surprise without pleasure at my presence in New York, and when I asked for an appointment she said, “You know, we really don’t have anything new. I’m sorry, but that’s the way it is.”
“That’s all right,” I said. “I do.”
Startled, she said, “New information?”
“No,” I said. “New activity. My activity. Do you have time to see me this afternoon?”
“I think I’d better make time,” she said.
36
I walked over to Midtown Precinct South on West 35th Street, and announced myself to the officer at the desk. He gave me a skeptical look, but phoned Sergeant Shanley and she came right out. When she saw me in my Ed Dante fig she sighed and nodded and said, “Uh huh. You’ve got things to tell me, all right.”
She led me back to a small impersonal office with plain bare walls and a gray metal desk holding nothing but a telephone. There were a couple of slat-backed wooden chairs as well, as uncomfortable as they looked, and there we sat, Sergeant Shanley leaning her elbows on the desk while I described my reaction to Mrs. Wormley’s civil suit and the lack of progress on the murder investigation. Nodding, she said, “You know how it is yourself, Mr. Holt. When there’s no one else to interview, no more physical evidence to study, no informants to come forward, you can only wait for something to happen.”
“A civil case,” I said, “doesn’t have to find me guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.”
“I know that, too,” she said. “I think it’s very rough, and very unfair, what’s happening to you, but there really isn’t anything we can do about it. And to tell the truth, I see Mrs. Wormley’s side, too. She’s just as frustrated about this thing as you are. And she’s more personally involved.”
“Not any more. Not if I’m going to go into civil court and not only be branded a murderer but a murderer who got away with it.”
She thought about that. “Yeah, I guess so,” she decided. “Celebrity can make it a little rougher, can’t it?”
“It can. Sergeant Shanley,” I said, leaning toward her, “I’m not some jerk coming in here trying to do your job better than you. I’m involved, and I can’t just sit on the sidelines and wait for the steamroller to drive on over me.”
“So you’ve come to town to try to see what you can learn,” she said. Then she grinned faintly and gestured at my head, saying, “And you’re wearing the caterpillar and the rug so you won’t be recognized.”
“I feel pretty foolish about it,” I admitted. “But if I go around as Sam Holt I really won’t get anywhere, except to make things worse.”
She nodded. “Have you actually made any contacts yet? Got up like this?”
“Yes,” I said. “In fact, the reason I wanted to talk to you is to tell you what I’ve done so far, and what I plan to do. Because, frankly, it does get kind of tricky sometimes.”
“I guess it might,” she agreed. “Okay, Mr. Holt, tell me what you’ve done.”
So I told her what I’d done, and she nodded, listening, not interrupting; though her eyes did widen a bit when I went under the bed in the Kaplan/Wormley apartment. When I finished, she said, “Well, you’re a lucky man.”
“So far.”
“I’m glad you realize that,” she said. “Mr. Holt, from what you’ve told me, it seems to me you’ve pretty well established that you can’t do yourself any good at all, but you can make a lot of trouble for yourself. You’re very lucky you haven’t fallen into that trouble already.”
“I know I am.”
“But what are you gonna gain?” she wanted to know.
“Well, I’ll tell you what I’ve gained so far,” I answered. “The physical layout of the Kaplan/Wormley apartment tells me the Kim Peyser murder wasn’t mistaken identity. The killer had to know who he was stabbing.”
She nodded. “We’d about come to the same conclusion ourselves.”
“And,” I said, “that means the killer and Kim Peyser knew each other, or there would have been some sign of struggle prior to the stabbing.”
“Which lets you out, of course.”
But there I had to shake my head and tell her, “Well, no, it doesn’t. Part of the up side of being a celebrity is that people think they do know you. If I’d been the person in there when Kim Peyser walked in, she would have known who I was even though we’d never met, and I could have rattled off some song and dance to keep her calm while I reached for the knife.”
Shanley sat back in her chair, folded her arms, and grinned at me. “I should have thought of that myself,” she acknowledged. “Here I went and took you off the list, and now look.”
“Well, you needn’t put me back on the list.”
“I wasn’t going to,” she assured me. “What else have you learned? Anything?”
“The missing tape.”
She frowned, unfolding her arms and resting her hands on her knees. “Now, that,” she said, “is a leap, if you don’t mind my saying so. You find an empty tape box in with the rest of the cassette tapes. Then you find the tape that belongs in it, only it’s in the other room.”
“Hidden,” I pointed out, “or at least buried, under clothing in a dresser drawer.”
“And you jump to the conclusion,” she said, “that some sort of tape — a different tape — had been kept in that tape box, that the killer was in the apartment looking for that different tape when Kim Peyser came in, and that after he killed her he found the tape and took it away.” She shook her head. “That’s a whole bunch of conclusions to jump to.”
“And that isn’t even all of them,” I told her. “I’m jumping to more conclusions than that. But first, what other explanation is there? You don’t just accidentally put a tape in the back of a drawer under all the clothing, and in fact you don’t even carry that tape without its box into the bedroom in the first place, because there’s nothing you can do with it in there except hide it.”
“That isn’t absolutely necessarily true,” she told me, “but all right, I’ll go along with you this far: It looks as though the tape was carried into the bedroom and hidden on purpose.”
“And the box, in its place in the living room, was empty,” I added.
She nodded. “So, if the box was being used to hide something else, and if the killer was looking for that something else, then probably he found it and took it away with him. A lot of ifs.”
“But they make sense,” I insisted. “And what would that something else be? The something else that was hidden in the tape box.” I spread my hands, suggesting the answer was obvious. “Those tape boxes are small, and they have two little plastic projections in them that the tape fits over. You might be able to put two or three cigarettes in one of those boxes, or maybe a folded note, but it seems to me if you’re going to hide something in a tape box, what you’re probably going to hide in there is another tape.”
“And here comes the big final jump to a conclusion,” she said. “Am I right?”
“You can see where I’m going.”
“Sure,” she said. “But tell me anyway.”
“The motive for killing Dale Wormley was blackmail,” I said. “And the hidden tape was the evidence.”
She nodded, but dubiously, and then she said, “Mr. Holt, you make a very neat package there, and that’s what I don’t like about it.”
“The neatness?”