I ducked back down. What to do? His voice moved over me, without apparent direction, showing how well-designed the acoustics were in here. A nice theater to work in, probably.
But not to die in.
“You’re a good actor, Ed, you really are, that Nazi soldier you did was very impressive. No fooling. When this nonsense is all over, maybe we could talk about a career. A career change for you, Ed. What do you say?”
Flight was impossible. Someway or other, I had to counterattack.
“After we talked this morning, Ed, after I told you about the audition here, you called Rita, didn’t you? Said you wanted to talk about the Theater Project dinner. You upset Rita a great deal, Ed, and I just can’t permit that. If you want to talk about the Theater Project dinner, you can talk about it with me. Let’s do that, Ed. What do you want to ask?”
He wasn’t moving. His knowledge of this theater, this building, was such that he didn’t have to move, he could just stay there by the only working exit — there’d be others, beyond the stage, mandated by the fire laws, but they’d be solidly locked now — and he could talk calmly and keep watching, and sooner or later the stalemate would end.
“My guess, Ed, is that you’re a private detective. Did Mrs. Wormley hire you? What do you think you’re investigating, Ed? Can’t you even tell me that much?”
If I moved across the row two down from where he waited, I could get very close to him without being seen. If I could then distract him, stall him, delay him somehow for just a couple of seconds, until I got within arm’s reach, there was a chance.
“Ed, I’m losing my patience here. Quit hiding like a child. Come out and let’s talk this over. How much do you get paid, in your business? Is it worth all this, Ed?”
Ed Dante was finished now. I pulled off the wig and moustache, stripped out of the raincoat, left them behind on the floor, started crawling.
“You were spying on me, Ed. Think about it. You don’t have that much goodwill to spend with me. But I want to make things all right. Just stand up like a man, Ed, and tell me what you want to know.”
The lighting was soft; dim enough for my purposes? I could only hope so. And hope I remembered the voice, the mannerisms. I fixed my face in an expression of aggressive grievance and rose to my feet, two yards from Henry, glaring at him. “It’s Dale, Kay,” I said. “Why did you kill me?”
47
“You should be dead, you know,” Sergeant Shanley said.
The hospital bed was not at all comfortable, the sheets constantly bunching and creasing beneath me. Shifting yet again to a slightly different position, feeling the twinges in my side and my shoulder and my arm, I said, “I know, Sergeant, I know. But I figured I was dead anyway. I had to take the chance.”
“Lucky,” she said, and shook her head.
Well, that was true enough. When I’d risen up directly in front of Kay Henry, doing my Dale Wormley imitation — full circle: this had begun with Wormley imitating me — the look of horror in his eyes had lasted only a second, he was recovering even as I lunged at him, and he managed to shoot me three times before I knocked him down and pounded his head onto the pseudo-marble floor. The shock and the speed had thrown him off balance just enough to keep me alive, though, the three shots all off-target to the left, one cracking and ricocheting off a rib on my left side, one punching into my left shoulder and doing some cartilage and muscle damage there, and one slicing through the flesh of my left arm, just below the elbow. I was bleeding like a fountain and only semi-conscious when I searched Henry for his keys, struggled to find the right one, unlocked that goddam padlock and went reeling out into the night on Charles Street looking for help. A cab that didn’t want to stop for me changed its mind when I draped myself on its hood, and now, three days later, here I was in the hospital, my food being sent in by Anita from Vitto Impero and Sergeant Shanley here to tell me the story.
“Your theory turned out to be pretty good up to a point,” she said. “The key to the thing was blackmail and a tape recording. But Rita Colby wasn’t a murderer, and she wasn’t the one being blackmailed, and Hanford Montgomery really did commit suicide.”
Laughing, even though it hurt my rib, I said, “But the rest I got okay, huh?”
“Colby’s made a statement,” the Sergeant said. “She and her husband were supposed to go to that banquet together. There’d been trouble in the marriage, he was jealous, thought she was playing around. They’d kept it pretty quiet, but it mixed in with Montgomery’s depression and his health problems, and that’s when he did himself in.”
“Without leaving a note.”
“Well, yes, he did,” she said. “The tape. He made a cassette tape of why he was killing himself, blaming his wife, listing people he thought she’d been sleeping with, all of that.”
“Ow. That’s nasty.”
“Colby insists none of it was true, it was just her husband’s depression and paranoia. Anyway, when she told him it was time to get ready for the banquet, he pulled the gun and made her listen to the tape. When she tried to leave the bedroom, he shot the mirror to let her know he was serious. They listened to the tape, and she started to deny it all, and he blew his brains out.”
“In front of her?”
“Yeah. She was rattled—”
“Well, she would be,” I said.
“Anybody would be,” Shanley agreed. “She phoned Kay Henry. He was always the one she turned to. He said come to town, bring the tape, you don’t know anything, he’d get somebody to go to the banquet with her and claim they’d been there for an hour already. Then Henry called Dale Wormley, told him what was going on, and sent him to the Waldorf to meet Colby. They did their public act together, with her going to the ladies’ room to break down every once in a while, and he stole the tape out of her purse. She didn’t realize until the next day. She called Henry again, he said he’d take care of it, and then he said he’d taken care of it, the tape was destroyed. In fact, Wormley was keeping it, and telling Henry the price was stardom.”
“Rita Colby was Kay Henry’s entire career and livelihood,” I said.
“So Henry went along with Wormley as best he could,” Shanley said, “but Wormley just kept pushing and pressing.”
“That’s what he’d do, all right.”
“Wormley wanted more and more, he got to be impossible, and finally Henry felt he didn’t have any choice. He followed Wormley, looking for his chance, and killed him. And he moved the body to that vestibule to give himself time to get home before it was discovered and he was notified.”
“Then,” I said, “he went looking for the tape.”
“And found it, too. But unfortunately Kim Peyser walked in while he was there.”
My rib gave me a bad twinge, and I lay back, grimacing. Sounding worried, Sergeant Shanley said, “Are you all right?”
“Well, no,” I said.
“Let me leave you alone now,” she said, getting to her feet. “We can talk some more tomorrow.”
“One thing,” I said, holding my left side with my right hand. “What about Mrs. Wormley?”
“Gone,” the Sergeant said. “Home to Iowa, I guess. The Kaplan girl came back from Florida yesterday and threw her out.”
That made me laugh again, and that made me hurt again. There was a fuzzy grayness at the periphery of my vision, trying to flow in. “I’m sorry,” I said. “This thing is getting to me.”
“I’m off,” she said, and moved toward the door. “You want me to call the nurse?”
“No,” I said. “I think I’ll just pass out for a while.”
And I did.