04 The Fourth Dimension is Death by Samuel Holt

Author:Samuel Holt [Holt, Samuel]
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

25

The reason the hotel’s sign wouldn’t be flashing all night in my window was that it was broken; which was all right with me. No one was on the desk when I arrived, and no one appeared to have been in my room while I was gone; which is to say, it was still the same mess my friends and I had left it. I reordered the place as much as necessary, wedged a chair under the doorknob to discourage visitors, took a long hot (though rusty) shower, and slept easily. In the morning, I drove the Plymouth over the causeway and through Miami out to the airport, where I left it at a meter and took my flight to New York, arriving in midafternoon.

Terry Young recognized me instantly as I came down the umbilical and into the terminal with the rest of the passengers. Approaching, grinning, hand out to shaken, he said, “Who are you supposed to be? The teenage wolfman?”

“I’m supposed,” I told him, “to be nobody you know.”

“Or want to. Got any more luggage?”

“No, just what I’m carrying,” I said. “And I’ve just learned the stews aren’t as easygoing about carry-on luggage in coach.”

“Oh, my God,” he said, rearing back to gaze upon me in mock awe. “It isn’t teenage wolfman, it’s The Prince And The Pauper.”

Terry always makes me laugh. He’s a burly Irishman with a fine brain distorted by years of observing the City of New York for the daily press. Rather than be embittered by his experiences, though, he’s managed mostly to be amused by them, which has probably saved his sanity.

Now, in Terry’s station wagon, salted with evidences of his children—everything from candy bar wrappers on the floor to a basketball rolling around the storage compartment—he drove me across Queens and Brooklyn toward his house and filled me in on the situation here in re the Dale Wormley murder investigation. Which didn’t take long, because in effect there wasn’t any Dale Wormley murder investigation. Nothing had changed since I’d talked with him from California, and nothing was likely to change. At least not on the official side.

“But it’s all different now, right?” he asked me, taking his eyes from the Belt Parkway long enough to give me an ironic look. “Here comes Packard for real.”

“I know, Terry, I know. I feel stupid about it, but what else is there? That lawsuit isn’t going away.”

“I realize that, Sam,” he said, relenting. “I was just giving your leg a little tweak, that’s all.”

Terry and his wife Gretchen live in the Midwood section of Brooklyn, just east of Flatbush Avenue. A few blocks away are big chunky apartment buildings in beige brick, but the area around the Youngs is mostly, like their own place, sprawling one-family houses on large lots. When we arrived, Terry had to wait while I got out of the car to move a tricycle before he could park in the driveway, and then we went inside for a warm greeting from Gretchen,

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