First Deadly Sin

by Lawrence Sanders

  “Happy New Year,” the sniper said unexpectedly.

  Delaney stared at him. “My God, is it?”

  “Uh-huh. New Year’s Eve.”

  “Well … Happy New Year to you. Forgot all about it.”

  The man was silent. The Captain glanced at the scope-fitted rifle resting on the sandbags.

  “Springfield Oh-three,” Delaney said. “Haven’t seen one in years.”

  “Bought it from Army surplus,” the man said, never taking his eyes from Devil’s Needle.

  “Sure,” the Captain nodded. “Just like I bought my Colt Forty-five.”

  The man made a sound; the Captain hoped it was a laugh,

  “Listen,” Delaney said, “we got a suggestion, in the mail. You think there’s any chance of putting a gas grenade up there?”

  The sniper raised his eyes to the top of Devil’s Needle. “Rifle or mortar?”

  “Either.”

  “Not mortar. Rifle maybe. But it wouldn’t stick. Skitter off or he’d kick it off.”

  “I guess so,” Captain Delaney sighed. “We could clear the area and blanket it with gas, but the wind’s too tricky.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  The Captain strolled away and only glanced once at that cathedral rock. Was he really up there? He had seen the day’s photos—but could he trust them? The uneasiness returned.

  He went back to the cottage, found a heavy envelope of reports a man coming on duty from Chilton had dropped off for him. They were from Sergeant MacDonald, copies of all the interrogations and statements of the people picked up in the continuing investigation. Delaney walked out to the van, got a paper cup of black coffee, brought it back. Then he sat down at his makeshift desk, pulled the gooseneck lamp closer, put on his heavy glasses, began reading the reports slowly.

  He was looking for … what? Some explanation or lead or hint. What had turned Daniel G. Blank into a killer? Where and when did it begin? It was the motive he wanted, he needed. It wasn’t good enough to use words like nut, crazy, insane, homosexual, psychopath. Just labels. There had to be more to it than that. There had to be something that could be comprehended, that might explain why this young man had deliberately murdered five people. And four of them strangers.

  Because, Delaney thought angrily, if there was no explanation for it, then there was no explanation for anything.

  It was almost two in the morning when he pulled on that crazy coat and wandered out again. The compound around the cottage was brilliantly lighted. So was the packed path through the black trees; so was the bleak column of Devil’s Needle. As usual, there were men standing about, heads back, mouths gaping, eyes turned upward. Captain Delaney joined them without shame.

  He opened himself to the crisp night, lightly moaning wind, stars that seemed holes punched in a black curtain beyond which shone a dazzling radiance. The shaft of Devil’s Needle rose shimmering in light, smoothed by the glare. Was he up there? Was he really up there?

  There came to Captain Edward X. Delaney such a compassion that he must close his mouth, bite his lower lip to keep from wailing aloud. Unbidden, unwanted even, he shared that man’s passion, entered into him, knew his suffering. It was an unwelcome bond, but he could not deny it. The crime, the motive, the reason—all seemed unimportant now. What racked him was that lonely man, torn adrift. He wondered if that was why they all gathered here, at all hours, day, and night. Was it to comfort the afflicted as best they might?

  A few days later—was it three? It could have been four—late in the afternoon, the daily envelope of aerial photos was delivered to Captain Delaney. Daniel G. Blank was lying naked on his rock, spread-eagled to the sky. The Captain looked, took a deep breath, turned his gaze away. Then, without looking again, he put the photos back into the envelope. He did not post one outside on the cottage wall.

  Soon after, Major Samuel Barnes called.

  “Delaney?”

  “Yes.”

  “Barnes here. See the photos?”

  “Yes.”

  “I don’t think he can last much longer.”

  “No. Want to go up?”

  “Not immediately. We’ll check by air another day or so. Temperature’s dropping.”

  “I know.”

  “No rush. We’re getting a good press. Those bullhorn appeals are doing it. Everyone says we’re doing all we can.”

  “Yes. All we can.”

  “Sure. But the weather’s turning bad. A front moving in from the Great Lakes. Cloudy, windy, snow. Freezing. If we’re socked in, we’ll look like fools. I say January the sixth. In the morning. No matter what. How do you feel about it?”

  “All right with me. The sooner the better. How do you want to do it: climber or ’copter?”

  “ ’Copter. Agreed?”

  “Yes. That’ll be best.”

  “All right. I’ll start laying it on. I’ll be over tomorrow and we’ll talk. Shit, he’s probably dead right now.”

  “Yes,” Captain Delaney said. “Probably.”

  The world had become a song for Daniel Blank. A song. Soonngg … Everything was singing. Not words, or even a tune. But an endless hum that filled his ears, vibrated so deep inside him that cells and particles of cells jiggled to that pleasant purr.

  There was no thirst, no hunger and, best of all, there was no pain, none at all. For that he was thankful. He stared at a milky sky through filmed eyes almost closed by scratchy lids. The whiteness and the tuneless drone became one: a great oneness that went on forever, stretched him with a dreamy content.

  He was happy he no longer heard his name shouted, happy he no longer saw a helicopter dipping and circling above his rock. But perhaps he had imagined those things; he had imagined so much: Celia Montfort was there once, wearing an African mask. Once he spoke to Tony. Once he saw a hunched, massive silhouette, lumbering away from him, dwindling. And once he embraced a man in a slow-motion dance that faded into milkiness before the ice ax struck, although he saw it raised.

  But even these visions, all visions, disappeared; he was left only with an empty screen. Occasionally discs, whiter than white, floated into view, drifted, then went off, out of sight.

  They were nice to watch, but he was glad when they were gone.

  He had a slowly diminishing apprehension of reality, but before weakness subdued his mind utterly, he felt his perception growing even as his senses faded. It seemed to him he had passed through the feel-taste-touch-smell-hear world and had emerged to this gentle purity with its celestial thrum, a world where everything was true and nothing was false.

  There was, he now recognized with thanksgiving and delight, a logic to life, and this logic was beautiful. It was not the orderly logic of the computer, but was the unpredictable logic of birth, living, death. It was the mortality of one, and the immortality of all. It was all things, animate and inanimate, bound together in a humming whiteness.

  It was an ecstasy to know that oneness, to understand, finally, that he was part of the slime and part of the stars. There was no Daniel Blank, no Devil’s Needle, and never had been. There was only the continuum of life in which men and rocks, slime and stars, appear as seeds, grow a moment, and then are drawn back again into that timeless whole, continually beginning, continually ending.

  He was saddened that he could not bring this final comprehension to others, describe to them the awful majesty of the certitude he had found: a universe of accident and possibility where a drop of water is no less than a moon, a passion no more than a grain of sand. All things are nothing, but all things are all. In his delirium, he could clutch that paradox to his heart, hug it, know it for truth.

  He could feel life ebbing in him—feel it! It oozed away softly, no more than an invisible vapor rising from his wasted flesh, becoming part again of that oneness from whence it came. He died slowly, with love, for he was passing into another form; the process so gentle that he could wonder why men cried out and fought.

  Those discs of white on white appeared again to drift acr
oss his vision. He thought dimly there was a moisture on his face, a momentary tingle; he wondered if he might be weeping with joy.

  It was only snow, but he did not know it. It covered him slowly, soothing the roughened skin, filling out the shrunken hollows of his body, hiding the seized joints and staring eyes.

  Before the snow ended at dawn, he was a gently sculpted mound atop Devil’s Needle. His shroud was white and without stain.

  Late on the night of January 5th, Captain Delaney met with Major Samuel Barnes, Chief Forrest, Captain Sneed, the crew of the State Police helicopter, and the chief radioman. They all crowded into the gate-keeper’s cottage; a uniformed guard was posted outside the door to keep curious reporters away.

  Major Barnes had prepared a schedule, and handed around carbon copies.

  “Before we get down to nuts-and-bolts,” he said rapidly, “the latest weather advisory is this: Snow beginning at midnight, tapering off at dawn. Total accumulation about an inch and a half or two. Temperatures in the low thirties to upper twenties. Then, tomorrow morning, it should clear with temperatures rising to the middle thirties. Around noon, give or take an hour, the shit will really hit the fan, with a dropping barometer, temperature going way down, snow mixed with rain, hail, and sleet, and winds of twenty-five gusting to fifty.

  “Beautiful,” one of the pilots said. “I love it.”

  “So,” Barnes went on, disregarding the interruption, “we have five or six hours to get him down. If we don’t, the weather will murder us, maybe for days. This is a massive storm front moving in. All right, now look at your schedules. Take-off from the Newburgh field at nine ayem. I’ll be aboard the ’copter. The flight down and the final aerial reconnaissance completed by nine-thirty ayem, approximate. Lower a man to the top of Devil’s Needle via cable and horse collar by ten ayem. Captain Delaney, you will be in command of ground operations here. This shack will be home base, radio coded Chilton One. The ’copter will be Chilton Two. The man going down will be Chilton Three. Everyone clear on that? Sneed, have your surgeon here at nine ayem. Forrest, can you bring out a local ambulance with attendants and a body bag?”

  “Sure.”

  “I think Blank is dead, or at least unconscious. But if he’s not, the man going down on the cable will be armed.”

  Captain Delaney looked up. “Who’s Chilton Three?” he asked. “Who’s going down on the cable?”

  The three-man helicopter crew looked at each other. They were all young men, wearing sheepskin jackets over suntan uniforms, their feet in fleece-lined boots.

  Finally the smallest man shrugged. “Shit, I’ll go down,” he said, rabbity face twisted into a tight grin. “I’m the lightest. I’ll get the fucker.”

  “What’s your name?” Delaney asked him.

  “Farber, Robert H.”

  “You heard what the Major said, Farber. Blank is probably dead or unconscious. But there’s no guarantee. He’s already killed five people. If you get down there, and he makes any threatening movement—anything at all—grease him.”

  “Don’t worry, Captain. If he as much as sneezes, he’s a dead fucker.”

  “What will you carry?”

  “What? Oh, you mean guns. My thirty-eight, I guess. Side holster. And I got a carbine.”

  Captain Delaney looked directly at Major Barnes. “I’d feel better if he carried more weight,” he said. He turned back to Farber. “Can you handle a forty-five?” he asked.

  “Sure, Captain. I was in the fuckin’ Marine Corps.”

  “You can borrow mine, Bobby,” one of the other pilots offered.

  “And a shotgun rather than the carbine,” Delaney said. “Loaded with buck.”

  “No problem,” Major Barnes said.

  “You really think I’ll need all that fuckin’ artillery?” Farber asked the Captain.

  “No, I don’t,” Delaney said. “But the man was fast. So fast I can’t tell you. Fast enough to take out one of my best men. But he’s been up there a week now without food or water. If he’s still alive, he won’t be fast anymore. The heavy guns are just insurance. Don’t hesitate to use them if you have to. Is that an order, Major Barnes?”

  “Yes,” Barnes nodded. “That’s an order, Farber.”

  They discussed a few more details: briefing of the press, positioning of still and TV cameramen, parking of the ambulance, selection of men to stand by when Blank was brought down.

  Finally, near midnight, the meeting broke up. Men shook hands, drifted away in silence. Only Delaney and the radioman were left in the cabin. The Captain wanted to call Barbara, but thought it too late; she’d probably be sleeping. He wanted very much to talk to her.

  He spent a few minutes getting his gear together, stuffing reports, schedules, and memos into manila envelopes. If all went well in the morning, he’d be back in Manhattan by noon, leading his little squad of cops home again.

  He hadn’t realized how tired he was, how he longed for his own bed. Some of it was physical weariness: too many hours on his feet, muscles punished, nerves pulled and strained. But he also felt a spiritual exhaustion. This thing with Blank had gone on too long, had done too much to him.

  Now, the last night, he pulled on cap and fur-lined greatcoat, plodded down to Devil’s Needle for a final look. It was colder, no doubt of that, and the smell of snow was in the air. The sentries circling the base of the rock wore rubber ponchos over their sheepskin jackets: the sniper was huddled under a blanket, only the glowing end of a cigarette showing in black shadow. Captain Delaney stood a little apart from the few gawkers still there, still staring upward.

  The gleaming pillar of Devil’s Needle rose above him, probing the night sky, ghostly in the searchlight glare. About it, he thought he heard a faintly ululant wind, no louder than the cry of a distant child. He shivered inside his greatcoat: a chill of despair, a fear of something. It would have been easy, at that moment, to weep, but for what he could not have said.

  It might, he thought dully, be despair for his own sins, for he suddenly knew he had sinned grievously, and the sin was pride. It was surely the most deadly; compared to pride, the other six seemed little more than physical excesses. But pride was a spiritual corruption and, worse, it had no boundaries, no limits, but could consume a man utterly.

  In him, he knew, pride was not merely self-esteem, not just egotism. He knew his shortcomings better than anyone except, perhaps, his wife. His pride went beyond a satisfied self-respect; it was an arrogance, a presumption of moral superiority he brought to events, to people and, he supposed wryly, to God.

  But now his pride was corroded by doubt. As usual, he had made a moral judgment—was that unforgivable for a cop?—and had brought Daniel G. Blank to this lonely death atop a cold rock. But what else could he have done?

  There were, he now acknowledged sadly, several other courses that had been open to him if there had been a human softness in him, a sympathy for others, weaker than he, challenged by forces beyond their strength or control. He could have, for instance, sought a confrontation with Daniel Blank after he had discovered that damning evidence in the illegal search. Perhaps he could have convinced Blank to confess; if he had, Celia Montfort would be alive tonight, and Blank would probably be in an asylum. The story this revealed would have meant the end of Captain Delaney’s career, he supposed, but that no longer seemed of overwhelming importance.

  Or he could have admitted the illegal search and at least attempted to obtain a search warrant. Or he could have resigned the job completely and left Blank’s punishment to a younger, less introspective cop.

  “Punishment.” That was the key word. His damnable pride had driven him to making a moral judgment, and, having made it, he had to be cop, judge, jury. He had to play God; that’s where his arrogance had led him.

  Too many years as a cop. You started on the street, settling family squabbles, a Solomon in uniform; you ended hounding a man to his death because you knew him guilty and wanted him to suffer for his guilt. It was all pride, n
othing but pride. Not the understandable, human pride of doing a difficult job well, but an overweening that led to judging him, then to condemning, then to executing. Who would judge, condemn, and execute Captain Edward X. Delaney?

  Something in his life had gone wrong, he now saw. He was not born with it. It did not come from genes, education, or environment, any more than Blank’s homicidal mania had sprung from genes, education, or environment. But circumstances and chance had conspired to debase him, even as Daniel Blank had been perverted.

  He did not know all things and would never know them; he saw that now. There were trends, currents, tides, accidents of such complexity that only an unthinking fool would say, “I am the master of my fate.” Victim, Delaney thought. We are all victims, one way or another.

  But, surprisingly, he did not feel this to be a gloomy concept, nor an excuse for licentious behavior. We are each dealt a hand at birth and play our cards as cleverly as we can, wasting no time lamenting that we received only one pair instead of a straight flush. The best man plays a successful game with a weak hand—bluffing, perhaps, when, he has to—but staking everything, eventually, on what he’s holding.

  Captain Delaney thought now he had been playing a poor hand. His marriage had been a success, and so had his career. But he knew his failures … he knew. Somewhere along the way humanity had leaked out of him, compassion drained, pity became dry and withered. Whether it was too late to become something other than what he was, he did not know. He might try—but there were circumstance and chance to cope with and, as difficult, the habits and prejudices of more years than he cared to remember.

  Uncertain, shaken, he stared upward at Devil’s Needle, shaft toppling, world tilting beneath his tread. He was anxious and confused, sensing he had lost a certitude, wandered from a faith that, right or wrong, had supported him.

  He felt something on his upturned face: a light, cold tingle of moisture. Tears? Just the first frail snowflakes. He could see them against the light: a fragile lacework. At that moment, almost hearing it, he knew the soul of Daniel Blank had escaped the flesh and gone winging away into the darkness, taking with it Captain Delaney’s pride.