“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.
40
Terry doesn’t have his own office at the News, but his space in the large main editorial room has a wall on his right, the back of a tall broad bookcase separating him from the aisle ahead of him, and a large two-sided cork bulletin board on wheels between his area and the desk of the guy behind him. To his left is editorial, loud and busy and seething with motion; but he likes that atmosphere, he enjoys the idea that it’s getting into his prose.
Terry’s space, besides his desk, contains a square metal wastebasket and two chairs. The wall and bulletin board and bookcase are covered with taped-up headlines, photos, cartoons, election buttons, correspondence, and all sorts of miscellaneous junk, in some places two and three levels deep. On the desk are his manual portable typewriter, on which he still writes first drafts, as well as the screen and keyboard to his computer terminal. If he feels like printing something out, the printer — shared by several other people — is on a table about thirty feet away.
We arrived a little before ten in the morning, carrying coffee from a deli downstairs. Terry exchanged words with a few other people, I did my gawky Ed Dante number (being back in the wig and moustache), and then he settled himself down at his desk and I produced my list of names. Terry switched on the computer, and began to ask questions.
We’d decided to be completists, and to go through everybody we knew Wormley knew, no matter how remote the connection. The writer and director and agency producer of the Kwality FoodMarts commercials, for instance, and Miss Colinville the receptionist from Kay Henry’s office, and all of Wormley’s fellow students at Howard Moffitt’s class. Even so, I knew our net might not be cast widely enough. What if the killer were someone who’d been mad at Wormley since high school, and had finally caught up? Only my conviction that Kim Peyser had to have known the killer — or she wouldn’t have let herself be killed so easily — kept me from fretting those possibilities too much.
Running the names through the computer took forever, and the first time through we didn’t come up with anything at all that seemed useful. But then Terry said, “Let’s try it the other way around. Let’s see if Wormley himself was ever newsworthy, before his obit.” And he tapped in the green letters DALE WORMLEY, and up came the morgue on that name: every mention in a review, every story about his murder, and then the notation: “Hanford Montgomery, with wife at time of suicide.”
“Ho ho,” Terry said. “What have we here?”
“We’ve seen that name before,” I said. “Going through here, connected with somebody else. Hanford Montgomery.”
So Terry brought up that name, and it turned out Hanford Montgomery was a wealthy architect from a rich New England banking family. He’d gotten ink several times for important governmental commissions his firm had received, and a couple of times for industry awards, and then once, nearly three months ago, on September 16th, when he’d shot himself dead at his weekend house near Short Hills, New Jersey; a very wealthy and socially significant neighborhood. Friends were quoted as saying Montgomery had been depressed about his health for some time. But the kicker was Hanford Montgomery’s wife.
Rita Colby.
It was the third marriage for her, second for him. They’d been married four years. At the time of her husband’s suicide, theater and film star Rita Colby had been attending the annual Theater Project scholarship fund banquet at the Waldorf-Astoria. Her escort had been the rising New York actor Dale Wormley.
“There it is,” Terry said. “This is the thing you’ve been looking for.”
I looked over his shoulder at the green letters on the black background. “It is, isn’t it? September 16th; just after that is when Wormley told Julie Kaplan that good things were going to start happening for him.”
“And Rita Colby,” Terry added, “insisted on hiring the guy for her next play.”
“You know,” I said, “I’ve been to that Theater Project dinner, and it’s just a mob scene, one of those places where everybody goes just to stay in touch with everybody else. A long cocktail party first, and then when you go on into the banquet room everybody tablehops all the way through dinner. Nobody can ever know for sure who’s where when.”
“Let’s get all of this,” Terry said, and hit the button to print out Hanford Montgomery’s obit and the brief news item on his suicide and the somewhat longer entertainment page piece on the Theater Project banquet. He went away to the printer, came back with the sheets of paper, and handed them to me. “You’re on your way,” he said.
41
But was I? And if so, where to? I was as convinced as Terry that this was the thread I was looking for, but I wasn’t one hundred per cent sure where that thread was supposed to lead me.
Was Rita Colby the killer? Did she have the strength to beat Dale Wormley to death with a piece of wood and then drag his body down the block and up a stoop and into a vestibule? I just had trouble imagining it.
On the other hand, I could see her having the coolness to dispatch Kim Peyser, and of course it was possible she’d murdered her husband and arranged it to look like suicide and then quickly called on a fellow Kay Henry client to accompany her to the banquet; no one there would know at exactly what time anybody had arrived.
Then, knowing just what crime he’d been the beard for, Wormley would have demanded the kind of payment in return that Rita Colby could provide; a boost for his career. But he’d gone too far, he’d pushed too hard, as of course he would have done, being who he was.
Had he wanted Rita Colby to sleep with the help? She would have refused, I could tell that much from our one meeting. And this would explain why she’d appeared to be so close with Wormley but had stayed so coldly distant from Ed Dante.
Terry and I talked this over, he wanting me to take these newspaper clippings to Sergeant Shanley, but me convinced it wasn’t going to be enough to get the investigation active again. “I feel as though I should talk with Rita Colby,” I said, “because something in here doesn’t quite fit, which is what Shanley warned me about. But I don’t know how to get in touch with her. I doubt Kay Henry would give me her phone number.”
“Then why not look it up in the book?” Terry asked me, reaching for the stack of phone books on the corner of his desk, over against the wall.
“Are you kidding?” I asked him. “Rita Colby isn’t going to be listed in the phone book.”
Pulling the Manhattan directory out of the pile, opening it on top of his terminal keyboard, Terry said, “You’d be surprised who’s in the phone book. If you know how to look.” And, as he said that last, he was reaching for his pencil and small square pad of notepaper. “No reason for Hanford Montgomery not to list himself,” he said.
“He’s there?” I was astonished.
“Montgomery, H. Architect. East 58th Street, over by the river. Sound about right?”
A wealthy neighborhood. “Sounds perfect,” I said.