On the other hand, what he was claiming for his class was certainly true of office politics. No matter how mad somebody makes you at work, you don’t spend your time being mad at that person on your day off. So I nodded, and got to my feet, and said, “Okay, Mr. Moffitt, point taken. Unless I find something else, while I’m rooting around, I’ll think of all this as a dead end.”
“That’s what it is,” he assured me.
We walked toward the head of the stairs together, and I said, “Thank you for not just simply exposing me to Pierce. He probably wouldn’t have been amused.”
“Not very,” Moffitt agreed, with a smile. Then he said, “Shall I take that resumé of Matty’s off your hands? You don’t actually have a purpose for it, do you?”
“No, I don’t.” Giving it to him, I said, “You’re the first person who’s seen through me. What did it?”
“This is what I teach, Mr. Holt,” he said, as though the answer were obvious. “I spend half my life evaluating performances. You did the part well enough, the stooped head to distract from your height, the insecure smile, the vague hand gestures, but the dialogue was off.”
“That’s been a problem all along,” I agreed.
“You just weren’t asking the right questions,” he said. “You weren’t interested in the right subjects. When I began to sense there was something wrong, I suggested a topic that you’d have to be interested in, if you were actually who you claimed, and you refused to be detoured away from what you really wanted to know.”
“I noticed you do that,” I said.
“Then I looked you over more carefully,” he told me, “and I saw the hair was wrong. And that moustache is pasted on, isn’t it?”
“It is.”
“It’s excellent,” Moffitt said, “but the hair somehow doesn’t match your head, not well enough. I don’t know how to explain it better than that, it’s very subtle.”
“It’s passed till now.”
“I’m sure it has,” Moffitt agreed, “but I think I’m the first person who began to doubt you and then began to study you. And then, when I realized you were in disguise, I knew that had to mean it was because we would recognize you in your own self, and of course that meant you had to be the celebrity connected with poor Dale’s death. Then I could see it was you.”
“You gave me a bad moment,” I said, “I have to admit that.”
“If you don’t mind,” he said, “I’d like to make up for it with some good advice. May I?”
“Acting advice?”
“Of course,” he said. “And the advice is, don’t be in too much of a hurry to ask your real questions. Match the dialogue to the part. Be patient, take an interest in things you’re not really interested in. Everything you want to know will come out eventually.”
“Will it?”
“If you’re very good,” he said.
39
That evening, I was more discouraged than I realized. I knew I didn’t feel like discussing my day, but I hadn’t been aware just how silent and withdrawn I’d become until, after dinner with the Young family, Terry turned to me in the living room and abruptly said, “Well, Sam? Gonna quit?”
I blinked at him. The remark uncomfortably paralleled my own thoughts, except that instead of thinking of myself as on the verge of quitting I’d seen it the other way; the leads and trails had petered out, had quit me. What was I going to do tomorrow, what string should I follow? There was none that I could see. But I answered Terry’s question by saying, “I can’t quit. Not if there’s anything left to do.”
“And if there’s nothing left to do?”
I put my hand up to rub my brow — still itchy from the wig I’d been wearing all day — as Gretchen came into the living room, having dealt with bedtime for the kids. Frowning from Terry to me, she said, “How can there be nothing left to do? Someone killed that man, didn’t they?”
“And the girl,” I said.
“Then they can’t just disappear,” Gretchen insisted, sitting on the sofa beside Terry and looking at me with concern. “There has to be a reason, after all. And you have to be able to find that reason.”
“You’d think so,” I said.
Terry said, “All right, now, wait a minute. Are you telling us nothing happened today? I thought you had people to see, an apartment to toss. You got nothing out of all that at all?”
“Not enough,” I said.
“It’s time for the actor,” Terry decided, “to turn this over to a pro, somebody who knows what he’s doing.”
“The police,” I said, “are as stymied as I am. I talked to them today.”
“I don’t mean the police,” he said. “I mean me. A reporter. Somebody who knows evidence when he falls over it.”
“Well, I wish you’d fall over some on my account,” I said.
“Let’s try.” He settled more comfortably on the couch and said, “When we parted this morning, you were on your way to Wormley’s apartment. Tell me about it.”
So I told them about it, and about Mrs. Wormley, and about my meeting with Mort, and my meeting with Sergeant Shanley, and the oddball encounter with Pierce and Moffitt, and at the end Terry said, “I don’t see anything in that acting class. I think Moffitt was right about that.”
“So do I.”
“So you don’t exactly forget that scene,” he said, “but you set it to one side. You also think about Mrs. Wormley.”
I frowned at him. “What do I think about Mrs. Wormley?”
“Whether or not she had a motive.”
“To kill her son?”
“It has happened, in this old world, once or twice,” Terry assured me. “In fact, more people are killed by family and friends than by strangers.”
“But— What reason would she have?”
“I asked you first,” he said.
Gretchen said, “Would it be so she could sue you?”
Terry answered her, shaking his head, saying, “Too long range. Too many factors would have to fall out just right. I was thinking maybe she felt neglected, or maybe money was tight and she took out an insurance policy on him, something like that.”
I said, “The chief characteristic of Mrs. Wormley that I’ve been able to learn is that she lived her life through her son, that his career was the most important thing in her life.”
“That could change,” Terry said, unruffled, “but okay. We’ll set her aside, too, along with the acting class. Actually, what I most like is that missing audiotape.”
“You mean, my blackmail theory?”
“Yes. It gives us a motive for murder beyond this general one that Wormley was a pain in the ass.”
I said, “But that’s a trail that just leads out into the blue. I don’t know who was being blackmailed, or what the subject was. Or, you know, remembering what Sergeant Shanley said, I can’t be really absolutely sure anybody was being blackmailed at all.”
“I tell you what we’ll do,” Terry said. “Tomorrow morning, come on in to the office with me. We’ll put the computer to work on it.”
“How do we go about doing that?”
“If Wormley was blackmailing somebody,” he said, “it had to be somebody he knew, right?”
“Right.”
“And you have a pretty good list of the people he knew, including those cast lists from the acting class.”
“That’s right.”
“So tomorrow,” Terry said, “we’ll run names through the computer, see if anybody has done anything newsworthy. Maybe the subject of the blackmail has already had some sort of public airing.”
I frowned. “Like what? I don’t see where you’re going.”
“Well,” he said, “like, what if the place wherever Matty Pierce works was robbed six months ago and it might have been an inside job?”
I was dubious, and saw no reason to hide it. “Do you really think we’re going to get anywhere that way? Isn’t that just spinning our wheels?”
Gretchen said, “Terry’s a bulldog, Sam, that’s why he’s so good at his job.”
Grinning, patting Gretchen’s thigh, Terry said, “That’s how I finally wore you down.”
“Yes, you did,” she agreed, and said to me, “Terry knows how to just keep worrying at things. When you think there’s nothing more you can possibly do, he thinks of six things.”
“One will do,” I said.