He nodded, turned, glided away, graceful as a ballet dancer. Delaney was left standing alone, impotent fury hot in his throat, convinced the man knew something, or suspected something, and would not put it into words. He seemed blocked and thwarted on all sides: in his work, in his personal life! What was it he had said to Thomas Handry about a divine order in the universe? Now order seemed slipping away, slyly, and he was defeated by a maniacal killer and unseen beasts feeding on his wife’s flesh.
From the man on the beat to the police commissioner—all cops knew what to expect when the moon was full: sleepwalkers, women who heard voices, men claiming they were being bombarded by electronic beams from a neighbor’s apartment, end-of-the-world nuts, people stumbling naked down the midnight streets, urinating as they ran.
Now Delaney, brooding on war, crime, senseless violence, cruel sickness, brutality, terror, and the slick, honeyed words of a self-satisfied physician, wondered if this was not The Age of the Full Moon, with order gone, from the world and irrationality triumphant.
He straightened, set his features into a smile, reentered his wife’s hospital room.
“I suddenly realized why solving the Lombard killing is so important to me,” he told her. “It happened in the Two-five-one Precinct. That’s my world.”
“Occam’s Razor,” she nodded.
Later, he returned home and Mary fixed him a baked ham sandwich and brought that and a bottle of cold beer into his study. He propped the telephone book open on his desk, and as he ate he called second-hand bookstores, asking for original editions of the Honey Bunch books, the illustrated ones.
Everyone he called seemed to know immediately what he wanted: the Grossett & Dunlap editions published in the early 1920s. The author was Helen Louise Thorndyke. But no one had any copies. One bookseller took his name and address and promised to try to locate them. Another suggested he try the chic “antique boutiques” on upper Second and Third Avenues, shops that specialized in nostalgic Americana.
Curiously, this ridiculous task seemed to calm him, and by the time he had finished his calls and his lunch, he was determined to get back to work, to work steadily and unquestioningly, just doing.
He went to his book shelves and took down every volume he owned dealing, even in peripheral fashion, with the histories, analyses and detection of mass murderers. The stack he put on the table alongside his club chair was not high; literature on the subject was not extensive. He sat down heavily, put on his thick, horn-rimmed reading glasses, and began to plow through the books, skipping and skimming as much as he could of material that had no application to the Lombard case.
He read about Gille de Raix, Verdoux, Jack the Ripper and in more recent times, Whitman, Speck, Unruh, the Boston strangler, Panzram, Manson, the boy in Chicago who wrote with the victim’s lipstick on her bathroom mirror, “Stop me before I kill more.” It was a sad, sad chronicle of human aberration, and the saddest thing of all was the feeling he got of killer as victim, dupe of his own agonizing lust or chaotic dreams.
But there was no pattern—at least none he could discern. Each mass killer, of tens, hundreds, reputedly thousands, was an individual and had apparently acted from unique motives. If there was any pattern it existed solely in each man: the modus operandi remained identical, the weapon the same. And in almost every case, the period between killings became progressively shorter. The killer was caught up in a crescendo: more! more! faster! faster!
One other odd fact: the mass killer was invariably male. There were a few isolated cases of women who had killed several times; the Ohio Pig Woman was one, the Beck-Fernandez case involved another. But the few female mass murderers seemed motivated by desire for financial gain. The males were driven by wild longings, insane furies, mad passions.
The light faded; he switched on the reading lamp. Mary stopped by to say good-night, and he followed her into the hall to double-lock and chain the front door behind her. He returned to his reading, still trying to find a pattern, a repeated cause-effect, searching for the percentages.
It was almost five in the evening when the front doorbell chimed. He put aside the article he was reading—a fascinating analysis of Hitler as a criminal rather than a political leader—and went out into the hallway again. He switched on the stoop light, peered out the etched glass panel alongside the door. Christopher Langley was standing there, a neat white shopping bag in one hand. Delaney unlocked the door.
“Captain!” Langley cried anxiously. “I hope I’m not disturbing you? But I didn’t want to call, and since it was on my way home, I thought I’d take the chance and—”
“You’re not disturbing me. Come in, come in.”
“Gee, what a marvelous house!”
“Old, but comfortable.”
They went into the lighted study.
“Captain, I’ve got—”
“Wait, just a minute. Please, let me get you a drink. Anything?”
“Sherry?”
“At the moment, I’m sorry to say, no. But I have some dry vermouth. Will that do?”
“Oh, that’s jim-dandy. No ice. Just a small glass, please.”
Delaney went over to his modest liquor cabinet, poured Langley a glass of vermouth, took a rye for himself. He handed Langley his wine, got him settled in the leather club chair. He retreated a few steps out of the circle of light cast by the reading lamp and stood in the gloom.
“Your health, sir.”
“And yours. And your wife’s.”
“Thank you.”
They both sipped.
“Well,” Delaney said, “how did you make out?”
“Oh, Captain, I was a fool, such a fool! I didn’t do the obvious thing, the thing I should have done in the first place.”
“I know,” Delaney smiled, thinking of Occam’s Razor again. “I’ve done that many times. What happened?”
“Well, as I told you at the hospital, I had gone through the Yellow Pages and made a list of hobby shops in the midtown area, places that might sell a rock hound’s hammer with a tapered pick. The Widow Zimmerman and I had lunch—I had stuffed sole: marvelous—and then we started walking around. We covered six different stores, and none of them carried rock hammers. Some of them didn’t even know what I was talking about. I could tell Myra was getting tired, so I put her in a cab and sent her home. She is preparing dinner for me tonight. By the by, she’s an awful cook. I thought I’d try a few more stores before calling it a day. The next one on my list was Abercrombie & Fitch. And of course they carried a rock hound’s hammer. It was so obvious! It’s the largest store of its kind in the city, and I should have tried them first. That’s why I say I was a fool. Anyway, here it is.”
He leaned over, pulled the tool from his white shopping bag, handed it to Captain Delaney.
The hammer was still in its vacuum-packed plastic coating, and the cardboard backing stated it was a “prospector’s ax recommended for rock collectors and archeologists.” Like the bricklayers’ hammer, it had a wood handle and steel head. One side of the head was a square hammer. The other side was a pick, about four inches long. It started out as a square, then tapered to a sharp point. The tool came complete with a leather holster, enabling it to be worn on a belt. The whole thing was about as long as a hatchet: a one-handed implement.
“Notice the taper of the pick,” Langley pointed out. “It comes to a sharp point, but still the pick itself does not curve downward. The upper surface curves, but the lower surface is almost horizontal, at right angles to the handle. And, of course, it has a wooden handle. But still, it’s closer to what we’re looking for—don’t you think?”
“No doubt about it,” Delaney said definitely. “If that pick had a downward curve, I’d say this is it. May I take off the plastic covering?”
“Of course.”
“You’re spending a lot of money.”
“Nonsense.”
Delaney stripped off the clear plastic covering and hefted the ax in his hand.
“This i
s almost it,” he nodded. “A tapered spike coming to a sharp point. About an inch across at the base of the pick. And with enough weight to crush a man’s skull. Easily. Maybe this really is it. I’d like to show it to the police surgeon who did the Lombard autopsy.”
“No, no,” Christopher Langley protested. “I haven’t told you the whole story. That’s why I stopped by tonight. I bought this in the camping department, and I was on my way out to the elevators. I passed through a section where they sell skiing and mountain climbing gear. You know, rucksacks and crampons and pitons and things like that. And there, hanging on the wall, was something very interesting. It was an implement I’ve never seen before. It was about three feet long, a two-handed tool. I ruled it out immediately as our weapon: too cumbersome to conceal. And the handle was wood. At the butt end was a sharp steel spike, about three inches long, fitted into the handle. But it was the head that interested me. It was apparently chrome-plated steel. On one side was a kind of miniature mattock coming to a sharp cutting edge, a chisel edge. And the other side was exactly what we’re looking for! It was a spike, a pick, about four or five inches long. It started out from the head as a square, about an inch on each side. Then it was formed into a triangle with a sharp edge on top and the base an inch across. Then the whole thing tapered, and as it thinned, it curved downward. Captain, the whole pick curved downward, top and bottom! It came to a sharp point, so sharp in fact that the tip was covered with a little rubber sleeve to prevent damage when the implement wasn’t being used. I removed the rubber protector, and the underside of the tip had four little saw teeth. It’s serrated, for cutting. I finally got a clerk and asked him what this amazing tool was called. He said it’s an ice ax. I asked him what it was used for, and he—”
“What?” Delaney cried. “What did you say?”
“I asked the clerk what it was used—”
“No, no,” the Captain said impatiently. “What did the clerk say it was called?”
“It’s an ice ax.”
“Jesus Christ,” Delaney breathed. “Leon Trotsky. Mexico City. Nineteen-forty.”
“What? Captain, I don’t understand.”
“Leon Trotsky. He was a refuge from Stalin’s Russia—or perhaps he escaped or was deported; I don’t remember exactly; I’ll have to look it up. Trotsky and Lenin and Stalin were equals at one time. Then Lenin died. Then Stalin wanted to be Numero Uno. So Trotsky got out of Russia, somehow, and made his way to Mexico City. They caught up with him in nineteen-forty. At least it was said the assassin was an agent of the Russian Secret Police. I don’t recall the details. But he killed Trotsky with an ice ax.”
“Surely you don’t think there’s any connection between that and Frank Lombard’s death?”
“Oh no. I doubt that very much. I’ll look into it, of course, but I don’t think there’s anything there.”
“But you think Lombard may have been killed with an ice ax?”
“Let me freshen your drink,” Delaney said. He went over to the liquor cabinet, came back with new drinks for both of them. “Mr. Langley, I don’t know whether being a detective is a job, a career, a profession, a talent or an art. There are some things I do know. One, you can’t teach a man to be a good detective, anymore than you can teach him to be an Olympic miler or a great artist. And two, no matter how much talent and drive a man starts out with, he can never become a good detective without experience. The more years, the better. After you’ve been at it awhile, you begin to see the patterns. People repeat, in motives, weapons, methods of entrance and escape, alibis. You keep finding the same things happening over and over again; forced windows, kitchen knives, slashed screens, tire irons, jammed locks, rat poison—the lot. It all becomes familiar. Well, what bugged me about the Lombard killing, nothing familiar in it. Nothing! The first reaction, of course, going by percentages, was that it had been committed by a relative or acquaintance, someone known to Lombard. Negative. The next possibility was that it was an attempted robbery, a felony-homicide. Negative. His money hadn’t even been touched. And worst of all, we couldn’t even identify the weapon. But now you walk in here and say, ‘Ice ax.’ Magic words! Click! Trotsky was killed with an ice ax. Suddenly I’ve got something familiar. A murder weapon that’s been used before. It’s hard to explain, I know, Mr. Langley, but I feel better about this than I’ve felt since it started. I think we’re moving now. Thanks to you.”
The man glowed.
“But I’m sorry,” Delaney said. “I interrupted you. You were telling me what the clerk at Abercrombie & Fitch said when you asked him what the ice ax was used for. What did he say?”
“What?” Langley asked again, somewhat dazed. “Oh. Well, he said it was used in mountain climbing. You could use it like a cane, leaning on the head. The spike on the butt of the handle bites into crusty snow or ice, if you’re hiking across a glacier, for instance. He said you could get this ice ax with different ends on the butt—a spike, the way I saw it, or with a little wheel, like a ski pole, for soft snow, and so forth. So then I asked him if there was a shorter ice ax available, a one-handed tool, but with the head shaped the same way. He was very vague; he wasn’t sure. But he thought there was such an implement, and he thought the whole thing might be made of steel. Think of that, Captain! A one-handed tool, all steel, with a spike that curves downward and tapers to a sharp point as it curves. How does that strike you?”
“Excellent!” Captain Delaney crowed. “Just excellent! It’s now a familiar weapon, used in a previous homicide, and I feel very good about it. Mr. Langley, you’ve done wonders.”
“Oh,” the old man smiled, “it was mostly luck. Really.”
“You make your own luck,” Delaney assured him. “And my luck. Our luck. You followed through. Did the clerk tell you where you can buy a one-handed ice ax?”
“Well … no. But he did say there were several stores in New York that specialized in camping and mountain climbing equipment—axes, hatchets, crampons, special rucksacks, nylon rope and things of that sort. The stores must be listed somewhere. Probably in the Yellow Pages. Captain, can I stick with this?”
Delaney took two quick steps forward, clapped the little man on both arms.
“Can you?” he declaimed. “Can you? I should think you can! You’re doing just fine. You try to pin down that one-handed, all-steel ice ax, who sells them, who buys them. Meanwhile, I want to dig into the Trotsky murder, maybe get a photo of the weapon. And I want to get more information on mountain climbers. Mr. Langley, we’re moving. We’re really doing now! I’ll call you or you call me. The hell with security. I just feel—I know—we’re heading in the right direction. Instinct? Maybe. Logic has nothing to do with it. It just feels right.”
He got Langley out of there, finally, bubbling with enthusiasm and plans of how he intended to trace the ice ax. Delaney nodded, smiled, agreeing to everything Langley said until he could, with decency, usher him out, lock the front door, and come back into the study. He paced up and down in front of his desk, hands shoved into hip pockets, chin on chest.
Then he grabbed up the telephone directory, looked up the number, and dialed Thomas Handry’s newspaper. The switchboard operator gave him the City Room where they told him Handry had left for the day. He asked for Handry’s home phone number, but they wouldn’t give it to him.
“Is it an unlisted number?” he asked.
“Yes, it is.”
“This is Captain Edward X. Delaney, New York Police Department,” the Captain said in his most pontifical tones. “I’m calling on official business. I can get Handry’s phone number from the telephone company, if you insist. It would save time if you gave it to me. If you want to check on me, call your man at Centre Street. Who is he—Slawson?”
“Slawson died last year.”
“I’m sorry to hear that. He was a good reporter.”
“Yes. Just a minute, Captain.”
The man came back and read off Handry’s home phone number. Delaney thanked him, hung up, waited a
few seconds, then lifted the receiver again and dialed. No answer. He waited ten minutes and called again. Still no answer.
There wasn’t much in the refrigerator: half of that same baked ham he had had for lunch and some salad stuff. He sliced two thick slices of ham, then sliced a tomato and cucumber. He smeared mustard on the ham, and salad dressing on the rest. He ate it quickly, crunching on a hard roll. He glanced several times at his watch as he ate, anxious to get back to the hospital.
He slid plate and cutlery into the sink, rinsed his hands, and went back into his study to call Handry again. This time he got through.
“Hello?”
“Thomas Handry?”
“Yes.”
“Captain Edward X. Delaney here.”
“Oh. Hello, Captain. How are you?”
“Well, thank you. And you?”
“Fine. I heard you’re on leave of absence.”
“Yes, that’s true.”
“I understand your wife is ill. Sorry to hear that. I hope she’s feeling better.”
“Yes. Thank you. Handry, I want a favor from you.”
“What is it, Captain?”
“First of all, I want some information on the murder of Leon Trotsky in Mexico City in nineteen-forty. I thought you might be able to get it from your morgue.”
“Trotsky in Mexico City in nineteen-forty? Jesus, Captain, that was before I was born.”
“I know.”
“What do you want?”
“Nothing heavy. Just what the newspapers of the time reported. How he was killed, who killed him, the weapon used. If there was a photograph of the weapon published, and you could get a photostat, that would help.”
“What’s this all about?”
“The second thing,” Delaney went on, ignoring the question, “is that I’d like the name and address of the best mountain climber in New York—the top man, or most experienced, or most skillful. I thought you might be able to get it from your Sports Desk.”
“Probably. Will you please tell me what the hell this is all about?”
First Deadly Sin Page 26
