He scribbled the address and number, tore off that sheet of the notepad, and handed it to me, saying, “Let Ed Dante give her a call. The worst thing she can do is tell him to go fuck himself.”
“I can’t think of anything else she might do, but I’ll give it a try,” I said, and reached for the phone on Terry’s desk, but it rang just as I was about to touch it. So I pulled my hand back, and Terry answered, with a brisk, “Young.” Then he smiled and said, “Hi, baby,” so it was Gretchen. And then he nodded and said, “Yeah, he’s here. Hold on.” Extending the phone toward me, he said, “A message.”
“For Dante?” I took the phone: “Hi, Gretchen.”
“Your new agent called,” Gretchen’s voice said. “Kay Henry. He wants you to call him, some time today.”
“Will do,” I said. “Thanks, Gretchen.” I hung up, and took from my wallet the slip of paper with Henry’s number on it while explaining the message to Terry, saying, “I’ll call him first, then try Colby.”
Grinning, Terry said, “Maybe he’s got you a job.”
“More than my regular agent’s doing,” I said, punched out the number, and recognized the British accent of Miss Colinville when she answered. With my toothiest grin, I said, “Hi, honey, this is Ed Dante.” (Terry gave me a repelled look.)
“Oh, is it,” said that icy voice.
“Kay called me,” I told her, knowing Ed Dante would presume to be on a first-name basis with her boss, and knowing also that Miss Colinville would hate that. “I’m calling him back,” I explained, “but I could sit and talk with you all day.”
“One moment,” she said, and made a very loud clicking sound in my ear, and then left me on Hold for a good long time as a punishment. I gave one of Ed Dante’s goofiest grins to Terry, who tried to look disgusted but then just gave up and laughed.
Another click, less ear-jarring, and Kay Henry’s voice said, “Ed?”
“Hi, Mr. Henry,” I said, because only with the receptionist would Dante dare to call Henry by his first name.
“Morning, Ed,” said his cheerful confiding voice. “Did they find your luggage yet?”
“Not yet,” I told him. “I called Eastern this morning, they said maybe tomorrow. You know the way they are.”
“Well, we’ll struggle along. I don’t suppose you’ve heard of the O. Henry Theater.”
“No, I haven’t.”
“It’s still under construction, down in the Village,” he said. “They’re opening with a limited run over the holidays, and I’ve talked to them about you for one of the parts. It’s only three weeks, and scale, but it gets you back to work and still leaves you free for Four Square, if that should happen.”
And makes it possible to be certain Ed Dante’s really off the sauce, I thought. I said, “Thanks a lot, Mr. Henry, that sounds just perfect.”
“I thought so, too,” he agreed, “but it’s up to you to make them want you.”
“Oh, I know that.”
“You’re scheduled at six-thirty,” he told me, “at the theater, the O. Henry Theater on Charles Street. You’ll recognize it, it’s a construction site, an old storage building going condo. You’ll see Mr. Cardiff, he’s the house manager.”
I scribbled the information on another sheet of Terry’s notepad, thanked Henry some more, with great effusiveness, and at last hung up, to face Terry’s sardonic smile. “The first step to stardom,” he said.
“Well, I’ve been looking for a job.”
“Will you go?”
“I guess I’ll have to,” I said. “I mean, if this charade is still going on then; which I hope it isn’t. But if it is, I’ll want to keep my access to Kay Henry alive.”
“And to Rita Colby through him,” Terry suggested.
“Let’s see if she’s home,” I said, and reached for the phone, which did not ring, so I picked it up and tapped in Rita Colby’s number, and it was answered on the third ring by someone who sounded so like Miss Colinville I thought for one confused instant I’d called the wrong number. “Good morning,” she said, and when my bewilderment kept me silent for an extra second she said, more emphatically, “Good morning.”
“Oh, good morning,” I said, realizing this had to be another secretary; Rita Colby’s, if I’d dialed right. “Rita Colby, please.”
“May I tell Miss Colby who’s calling?”
“Ed Dante,” I said.
“One moment,” she said, exactly like Miss Colinville, and put me on Hold, exactly like Miss Colinville, but without the extra-loud click. Terry watched me, and I waited, and the ur-Miss Colinville came back to say, “Miss Colby would like to know the subject of the call.”
“Tell her,” I said, “the Theater Project banquet last September.”
“One moment.”
Terry said, “Playing hardball, aren’t you?”
“Well, what am I going to say I want to talk to her about? Acting methods? We aren’t buddies, Terry, I can’t just be making a social call. So let’s shake the tree, and see what happens.”
“Don’t stand under it,” he advised.
I nodded, and heard a click, and the secretary’s voice came back, saying, “Miss Colby thanks you for your interest, but has nothing to say on that subject. Thank you.”
I opened my mouth, but the click came first, and then dead air. So I hung up, saying, “And so much for that.”
“So,” Terry said, “now she knows you know.”
I frowned at him. “That’s the problem,” I said. “She knows I know what?”
He laughed; more heartily than I thought necessary. “Too bad you can’t ask her,” he said.
42
Terry volunteered to look further into the Montgomery/Colby marriage, see if anybody on the gossip side of the news business had anything juicy to add substance to our story. I phoned Sergeant Shanley, but she wouldn’t be available till mid-afternoon, so I called Anita and arranged to spend some time with her. Then I finally left Terry to get on with the work he was paid for, and I walked across town and downtown into the West Village, thinking that what I’d found — if in fact I’d found anything at all — wasn’t the simple solution I’d been looking for but a brand new complication; not the end of something, but more like the beginning.
I got to Vitto Impero a little too early for lunch, so Anita and I spent some time upstairs in her apartment over the restaurant, and I gave her a recap of my adventures in the last two days, since we’d been together down in Brooklyn at the Youngs’ house. When I finished, she said, “I don’t see why you made that phone call to Rita Colby.”
“Well,” I said, “the idea that the death of her husband has something to do with the death of Dale Wormley makes a kind of sense, but there’s great gaps in it. It’s a brand new idea and I wanted to be able to talk about it, think about it. I just wanted the chance to have a conversation with Rita Colby and see what happened. But then, when the secretary asked me what my subject was, I drew a blank. All I could think was, okay, let’s drop a depth charge and see what happens.”
“What happens is,” Anita told me, “Rita Colby now knows you aren’t just the simple ignorant actor you said you were. If she’s guilty, she knows you’re on the trail. You gave her information, and didn’t get anything back.”
“Well, I did get something back,” I said. “If there was nothing at all in the idea that there was something wrong with the story, if Rita Colby and Dale Wormley were just innocently at that banquet together when just coincidentally her husband was killing himself an hour’s drive away in New Jersey, why wouldn’t she have come to the phone, even if just to ask me what I’m talking about? The immediate refusal to talk is the smoke that tells me there has to be a fire around there somewhere.”