“But haven’t you used up Ed Dante now?”
“Well, I guess I have with Rita Colby,” I admitted. “But will she tell Kay Henry? I don’t see why she would, at least not right away.”
“To get rid of you,” Anita suggested. “She calls Henry and tells him you’re being a pest and she doesn’t want you around his office any more.”
“Possible,” I said. “So what I’ll do is, this afternoon I’ll call the Henry office and see if my audition at the O. Henry Theater is still on.”
“Would you go, if it was?”
“Sure.” I grinned at her, saying, “That’s a real acting challenge there. I have to go and be good enough to be considered, good enough so they don’t call Henry and say, ‘Don’t send us any more amateur clowns like that one, okay?’ But at the same time, I have to be not quite good enough to get hired.”
“You plan to enjoy yourself,” Anita accused me.
“In my secret heart,” I admitted, “I’m enjoying this. Anita, for the last couple of days in New York, I’ve been acting. Win, lose or draw, learn something or learn nothing, this is the first time in years I’ve been able to actually use my muscles, do what I know how to do.”
Anita gave me a sympathetic look and shook her head: “Poor boy. What are you going to do with yourself when you have to stop playing Ed Dante?”
“Which will be very soon, in any case,” I told her. “I figure, by tomorrow night I’ll have used it up. I’ll move back into 10th Street and let whatever happens happen.”
“Why tomorrow night?”
“Okay,” I said. “Later today, Ed has his audition. He fails, but not by much.”
“Lots of fun,” Anita said.
“But also necessary,” I reminded her. “Because then, I’m justified tomorrow morning in going back to see Kay Henry. I start by talking about the audition, and if I’m any good at all I get the conversation moved around to Rita Colby and her dead husband, and does she happen to have any guy in her life right now, and with any luck I get to find out what Henry thinks of it all.” Grinning, I said, “Wouldn’t it be nice, for instance, if she phoned him the evening of the banquet and asked him to arrange an escort for her to the dinner?”
“He’d have to know the truth, then,” Anita said.
“He’d have to suspect, sure,” I agreed, “which I’d look very hard for. But remember, Rita Colby’s almost the entire support of that agency. It would take a lot for him to permit a negative thought about her to cross his brain.”
“He has every reason to protect her, then,” Anita said. She pointed at me, and added, “From you.”
“I’ll try to be subtle,” I promised.
“As subtle as you were with Rita Colby?”
I laughed. “Even subtler than that,” I said.
43
Anita and I had lunch together at the table in the back near the kitchen, surrounded by lawyers from downtown and executives from midtown and local people from the Village. This is the table where we’d had dinner with Julie Kaplan nearly six weeks ago, when I thought my troubles with the Dale Wormley killing were coming to an end. Now, six weeks later, it seemed to me they were just barely beginning.
Downstairs, we didn’t talk about any of that, but about less troubling subjects. Anita picked at her food, as usual, but I had a good appetite for some reason, and Angela the waitress smiled in approval as I cleared every plate she gave me. I would have liked some white wine to go with the tortellini and the sole, but there was too much to be done this afternoon, so I contented myself with a bottle of San Pellegrino water, and several cups of espresso.
After lunch, there was still plenty of time before my meeting with Sergeant Shanley, so I went back upstairs and used Anita’s phone to call Kay Henry’s office, telling the chilly Miss Colinville, “Hi, hon, it’s Ed Dante again. Just wanted to be sure my audition was still on for this afternoon.”
“And what audition would that be?” she demanded, but then, before I could answer, she said, “Oh, never mind, just hold on one moment.” And I got the phone away from my ear just in time to avoid the full impact of her punitive click.
Kay Henry himself came on the line half a minute later, saying, “Ed? Any problem?”
“No, sir, Mr. Henry,” I assured him. “I just wanted to be sure everything was set for the audition.”
“Absolutely,” he said. “They’re looking forward to you, Ed. I explained the problem with your lost photo and resumé, so they know if they’re interested I’ll send them the material in a day or two.”
“Good,” I said. “Fine. Thanks a lot, Mr. Henry.”
“Just go in there and knock ‘em dead,” he told me.
“I will,” I promised, and hung up, and told Anita, “She hasn’t complained about me to Henry. What do you suppose that means?”
“It might mean she’s worried,” Anita said, “or it might mean she really doesn’t give a damn about Ed Dante and his dumb ideas.”
“An impregnable woman, eh? Let’s hope not,” I said, and kissed Anita goodbye. We’d agreed I would come back here this evening, after my audition. My last night in exile from my own house would be spent with Anita rather than with the Youngs; something pleasant to look forward to.
I walked up the west side to Midtown Precinct South, and had to wait about fifteen minutes before Sergeant Shanley came out to get me. “Sorry about the delay,” she said. “There’s always thirty things going on here.”
“No problem,” I assured her.
We went back to the same interview room as last time, took the same chairs, and she said, “So what do you have for me today? Been under any more beds?”
“Not exactly,” I told her, and took the printed-out newspaper information from my inside jacket pocket and handed it to her.
She raised an eyebrow at me, but asked no questions, and settled down to read. I watched her, but her face remained expressionless as she went methodically through every sheet, turning each one face down on the battered metal desk when she was finished. At the end, she nodded and looked at me and said, “Filling in that theory of yours, huh?”
“Pretty much,” I agreed.
“Let me see if I can come up with your story for you,” she said. “You already had the idea Dale Wormley was blackmailing somebody, probably with some sort of evidence on a sound tape. Now your idea is, the somebody he was blackmailing is Rita Colby, because there was something funny about her husband’s suicide and Wormley knew about it.”
“Knew about it,” I said, “because Rita Colby used him as her alibi for the time of her husband’s death.”
“So you say.”
“Right after that event,” I told her, pointing at the papers on the desk, “Wormley told his girlfriend Julie Kaplan that things were definitely going to start getting better for him, that he knew he was headed for the big time. And that’s when Rita Colby suddenly insisted he be given a part in her next Broadway play. Sergeant, a minor role in a play is not cast five months in advance, and unless there’s some personal reason involved, it isn’t cast without auditions, and it isn’t cast without consultation with director and playwright.”
“Personal reason involved,” Sergeant Shanley repeated. “Doesn’t that usually mean somebody’s sleeping with somebody?”
“Not this time,” I said.
She grinned a little. “Because Rita Colby wouldn’t roll over for you? That doesn’t prove anything, Mr. Holt, it really doesn’t. Not to insult you or anything, but you know what they say: No accounting for tastes.”