“Her reaction to me doesn’t prove anything,” I agreed, “but it does suggest something. But more important than that, if Wormley had been sleeping with Rita Colby, his regular girlfriend would have known it. That kind of secret you can’t keep. Julie Kaplan is absolutely certain there was nothing going on there, and I believe her.”
“You believe her because it fits the theory,” the Sergeant suggested.
I spread my hands in frustration. “Are you just going to throw the whole theory out the window simply because I’m the one who came up with it?”
“Not at all.” Tapping the sheets of paper on the desk, she said, “I’ll follow through on this, of course I will, but I’ll tell you right now what will happen. Shall I?”
“Sure.”
“I’ll call the police over in Jersey,” she said, “and ask them if there was anything suspicious about Montgomery’s suicide. They’ll say no, of course, because if there’d been anything suspicious they would have acted on their suspicions at the time. But I’ll tell them I have information that suggests the wife might at least have been in the house when her husband died, and not in New York at a banquet the way she claimed, and I’ll ask them to check around and see if they come up with any corroboration of that. They’ll say fine, and they’ll talk to the first people on the scene, and they’ll call me back and say there’s no indication the wife was around. And that will be that.”
“So you’re telling me right now,” I said, “that the whole thing is pointless.”
She leaned toward me, looking concerned. “Mr. Holt,” she said, “I’m not saying you’re wrong about this. What I’m saying is, you’re talking about an event that took place three months ago, and up to this point there hasn’t been the slightest suggestion of anything funny there. You may be right about all this. At this point, my own guess is that it’s even money you are right. But there’s nothing here—” again she patted the papers on the desk “—to give me a handle, to give me something to work with. How could I go to Rita Colby and question her about the night her husband died? That isn’t my case. It isn’t even my jurisdiction. If I catch the interest of somebody on the case over in Jersey, then maybe something might happen. Maybe. But it’s damn unlikely from that end, and impossible from my end.”
“You need a smoking gun, you mean,” I said.
“I need more than smoke,” she told me.
44
There was nothing to do after that but walk back downtown to Anita’s place. I had two and a half hours before my audition at the O. Henry Theater, about six blocks from Vitto Impero, and I had plenty to brood about.
I knew Sergeant Shanley was right, of course. A theory wasn’t reason enough to start the cops intruding on people’s lives; particularly prominent people like Rita Colby. I could hope some policeman over in New Jersey did have mental reservations about the death of Hanford Montgomery, and that Sergeant Shanley’s call would goose him into following up on his doubts, but, as Shanley had said, that was very unlikely. And there was no real evidential link between the supposed suicide of Hanford Montgomery and the murder a month later of Dale Wormley.
I passed this news — or lack of news — to Anita, and then used her phone to call Terry at his office to find out what he’d learned, if anything, about the marriage between Hanford Montgomery and Rita Colby. “Not much useful, I think,” he said.
“Tell me anyway.”
“Okay. It was a prominent-people wedding, up in Martha’s Vineyard, lots of the well-connected and well-bred and well-heeled in attendance. His former wife, who’d been rich as hell, died of cancer two years before he married Colby. As for Colby, she was divorced twice, once from an actor, once from an Oklahoma oilman.”
“Anything in those?” I asked.
“Whadaya mean, scandal? Cocaine, orgies, all of that?”
“It would be nice.”
“But no,” he told me. “They were just divorces. You know, regular let’s-stop-meeting-like-this divorces.”
“Okay. What about the Montgomery/Colby marriage?”
“Distant,” he said. “Their life-styles were very different, their friends were different. They tended to lead separate lives. That famous banquet wasn’t the first time Colby went out with an escort other than her husband.”
“Then why’d they get married, for God’s sake?”
“There isn’t a couple I can think of,” Terry said thoughtfully, “about whom that question couldn’t be asked. They got married, that’s why. If there was trouble between them in the marriage, they kept it quiet.”
“Hmmmm,” I said, because that wasn’t what I’d wanted to hear.
“Also,” he said, “while we’re on the subject of bad news, Montgomery was depressed about his health. His first wife’s cancer death apparently got to him in a big way, brought a tendency toward hypochondria into full flower.”
“Hmmmm,” I said again. “What did his note say?”
“Well, now,” Terry said, “there we have a little something for your team. There was no note.”
“That’s unusual, Terry,” I said.
“I know that,” he agreed. “Most suicides leave a note. Particularly well-off literate intelligent suicides who want to make it clear it’s depression or health reasons and they’re not blaming their loved ones. I know that.”
“So what have we here?” I asked.
“Probably, just a member of the minority,” Terry told me. “It is not entirely unheard of for suicides to go out with no final message, it’s just less common than the other way.”
“Okay, okay,” I said. “How did Montgomery do the deed?”
“Gun,” Terry said. “His own, registered to him, a little revolver such as is found in a drawer in most master bedrooms in that county. Fired twice, the first time at a mirror in the bedroom. Second time, he shot himself in the ear.”
“The ear? Isn’t that unusual?”
“Not really,” he said. “Suicides do understand that the concept is to get the bullet in touch with the brain. Some of them put the gun in their mouth, some put it in their ear. Not many shoot themselves in the eye.”
“Goddamit, Terry,” I said, “this is sounding more and more like suicide.”
He laughed, but sympathetically. “I was thinking the same thing myself,” he said.
“There’s nothing else for my team? Just the lack of a note?”
“Sorry, pal.”
I thanked him for his efforts, and told him I’d be staying here with Anita tonight, and then we hung up, and I had even more than before to brood about.
Was I on the wrong trail entirely? Was I haring off after Rita Colby and her deceased husband, when in fact none of that had anything at all to do with Dale Wormley’s death? Had Wormley been given the part in Four Square, and had he been so sure things would be going well for him from then on, simply because Rita Colby liked him, because he’d been sympathetic at the time of her loss or something like that?
And did that mean Dale Wormley’s murderer had come out of some other quadrant of his life? Howard Moffitt and his acting class, for instance? Or the Kwality FoodMart commercials? Or some corner of his experience I hadn’t even come across yet?
How much longer could Ed Dante keep stumbling around New York with his dumb grin and his dumb moustache and his dumb hair, without getting exposed as a phony and without making trouble for Sam Holt? And what was Ed Dante accomplishing anyway? Nothing that I could see.
Well, I was discouraged, and I had good reason to be, but how could I stop? I had to keep trying because there was no alternative. Ed Dante had to keep shambling forward because he hadn’t finished his job yet; even though it was looking very much as though he never would finish it.