The third Deadly Sin exd-3

by Lawrence Sanders

  "What happened?" she asked. "A war wound?"

  "Oh no," he said, laughing for the first time. He had a nice, sheepish laugh. "A stove caught fire. They'll heal. Eventually."

  "My name's Irene," she said softly.

  He bought them two more rounds of drinks. By that time, she had moved her coat and shoulder bag to her other side, and he was sitting beside her, at her table. She pressed her thigh against his. He drew his leg hastily away. Then it came back.

  The New Orleans Room had filled up, every table taken. Patrons were standing two and three deep at the bar. The jazz trio was playing with more verve, music blasting. The distracted waitresses were scurrying about. Zoe Kohler was reassured; no one would remember her.

  "Noisy in here," Jerry said, looking about fretfully. "We can't rightly talk."

  "Where are you staying, Jerry?" she asked.

  "What?" he said. "Snow again; I don't get your drift."

  She put her lips close to his ear. Close enough to touch. She repeated her question.

  "Why, uh, right here in the hotel," he said, shaken. "The fourteenth floor."

  "Have anything to drink in your room?"

  "I got most of a pint of sippin' whiskey," he said, staring at her. "Bourbon."

  She put her lips to his ear again.

  "Couldn't we have a party?" she whispered. Her tongue darted.

  "I've never done anything like this before," he said hoarsely. "I swear, I never have."

  There was one other couple in the automatic elevator, but they got off on the ninth floor. Jerry and Irene rode the rest of the way alone.

  "Notice they got no thirteenth floor?" he said nervously. "It goes from twelve to fourteen. I guess they figure no one would want a room on the thirteenth. Bad luck. But I'm on the fourteenth which is really the thirteenth. Makes no never-mind to me."

  She put a hand on his arm.

  "You're sweet," she said.

  "No kidding?" he said, pleased.

  Inside his room, the door locked, he insisted on showing her wallet photographs of his wife, his home, his Labrador retriever, named Boots. Zoe looked at what she thought were a dumpy blonde, a naked development house with no landscaping, and a beautiful dog.

  "Jerry, you're a very lucky man," she said, handling the photos by the edges.

  "Don't I know it!"

  "Children?"

  "No," he said shortly. "No children. Not yet."

  She thought he was in his late thirties, maybe forty. No children. That was too bad. But his widow would remarry. Zoe was sure of it; she had that look.

  He rummaged in his open suitcase and came up with an almost full pint bottle of bourbon.

  "Voila!" he said, pronouncing it, "Viola." Zoe didn't know if he was making a joke or not.

  "I think I'll skip," she said. "All that white wine has got me a tiny bit tipsy. But you go right ahead."

  "You're sure?"

  "I'm sure."

  He poured a small shot into a water glass. His hand was trembling; the bottle neck rattled against the rim of the glass.

  "Listen," he said, not looking at her, "I told you I've never done anything like this before, and that's God's own truth. I got to be honest with you; I don't know whether you…"

  He looked at her helplessly.

  She went over to him, held him by the arms, smiled up at him.

  "I know what you're wondering," she said. "You're wondering if I want money and if you should pay me before or after. Isn't that so?"

  He nodded dumbly.

  "Jerry," she said gently, "I'm not a professional, if that's what you think. I just enjoy being here with you. If a man wants to give me a little gift later because he's had such a good time…"

  "Oh sure, Irene," he said swallowing. "I understand."

  "You've got a radio?" she said briskly. "Turn on the radio. Let's get this show on the road."

  He turned on the bedside radio. The station was playing disco.

  "Wow," she said, snapping her fingers, "that's great. Do you like to dance?"

  He took a gulp of bourbon. "I'm not very good at it," he said.

  "Then I'll dance by myself," she said.

  She began to move about the room, dipping, swaying, her hips moving. Her arms were extended overhead, fingers still snapping. She bowed, writhed, twisted, twirled. Her heels caught in the heavy shag rug. A shoulder strap slipped off and hung loose. He sat on the edge of the bed, touching the bourbon to his lips, and watched her with wondering eyes.

  "Too many clothes," she said. In time to the music, she sashayed over to him, turned her back, and motioned. "Open me up," she commanded.

  Obediently, he drew her back zipper down. It hissed. She slid off the remaining strap, let her dress fall, stepped out. She tossed it onto a chair.

  She stood there a moment, facing him, in her heart-flecked lingerie, reddish pantyhose, high heels. They stared at each other. Then the music changed to a tango. She began to swoop and glide about the room.

  "I swear to God," he said, his voice a croak, "this is the damndest thing that ever happened to me. Irene, you are one beautiful lady. I just can't believe it."

  "You better believe it," she said, laughing. "It's true."

  She continued dancing for him until the music ended. An announcer came on, talking about motor oil. Zoe Kohler took off her sandals, wiggled out of her pantyhose. Jerry was staring at the floor.

  "Jerry," she said.

  He raised his head, looked at her.

  "You like?" she said, posing with hands on her waist, weight on one leg. She cocked her head quizzically.

  He nodded. He looked frightened and miserable. She went over to him, stood close, between his legs. She pressed his head between her palms, pulled his face into her soft, scented belly.

  "You get out of all those clothes, honey," she said throatily. "I have to go make wee-wee. Be back in a minute."

  She took her shoulder bag and headed for the bathroom. She glanced back, but he wasn't looking at her. He was staring at the floor again.

  She made her usual preparations, thinking that he was a difficult one. He didn't come on. He was troubled. He had no confidence. That wasn't fair.

  She came out of the bathroom naked, towel draped over her right forearm and hand. "Here I am!" she said gaily.

  He wasn't lying naked under the sheet. He had taken off only his jacket and vest, had loosened his tie and opened his collar. He was still sitting on the edge of the bed, hunched over, elbows on knees. He was turning his glass around and around in his scarred hands. Now it was filled with whiskey, almost to the brim.

  When he heard her voice, he turned to look over his shoulder.

  "Good lord a'mighty," he said with awe.

  She came over to the bed, on the other side. She kneeled behind him. With her left hand, she pulled him gently back until he was leaning against her, pressing her breasts, stomach, thighs.

  "Jerry," she said, "what's wrong?"

  He groaned. "Irene, this is no good. I just can't do it. I'm sorry, but I can't. Listen, I'll give you money. I hate wasting your time like this. But when I think of my little girl waiting at home for me, I just can't…"

  "Shh, shh," she said soothingly. She put the soft palm of her left hand on his brow and drew his head back toward her, between her breasts. "Don't think about that. Don't think about a thing."

  She let the towel fall free. She plunged the point of the knife, blade below his left ear and pulled it savagely to the right, tugging when it caught.

  His body leaped convulsively off the bed. Glass fell. Drink spilled. He went flopping to the floor, limbs flailing.

  That wasn't what surprised her. The shock was the fountain of blood, the giant spurt, the wild gush. It had gone out so far that gobbets had hit the wall and were beginning to drip downward.

  She watched those trickles for a brief moment, fascinated. Then she scrambled across the bed and stood astride him, bent over. He was still threshing, limbs twitching, eyelids fluttering.
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  He was clothed, but it made no difference. She didn't want to see that knobbed thing, that club. She drove the blade through his clothing into his testicles, with the incantation, "There. There. There."

  After a while she straightened up, looked about dully. Nothing had changed. She heard, dimly, traffic sounds from Seventh Avenue. An airliner droned overhead. Someone passed in the outside corridor; a man laughed. Next door, a toilet flushed.

  She looked down at Jerry. He was gone, his life soaked into the carpet. The bedside radio was still playing. Disco again. She went into the bathroom for sheets of toilet paper before she handled the radio knob, stopping the music.

  She was so careful.

  Chapter 4

  Edward X. Delaney found himself obsessed with the puzzle of the two hotel deaths. He tried to turn his mind to other concerns, to keep himself busy. Inevitably, his thoughts returned to the murder of the two men: how it was done, why it was done, who might have done it.

  Sighing, he surrendered to the challenge of the mystery, put his feet on his desk, smoked a cigar, and stared at the far wall.

  Everything in his cop's instinct and experience told him it was the work of a criminal psychopath, a crazy, a nut. It was almost hopeless to try to imagine a motive. But it didn't seem to be greed; nothing had been stolen.

  On impulse, he searched through the pages of an annual diary and appointment book, looking for the section that listed phases of the moon. There was no connection between the full moon and the dates of the slayings. He slammed the desk drawer in disgust.

  The problem was, there was no brilliantly deductive way to approach a case in which a random killer selected victims by chance and murdered for apparently no reason. There was no handle, nowhere to start.

  Because, Delaney told himself, he had nothing better to do, he wrote out dossiers of the two victims, trying to recall everything Sergeant Abner Boone had told him. Then he headed a third sheet: Perpetrator.

  He pored over the known facts about the two victims, trying to find a link, a connection. He found nothing other than what he had mentioned to Boone: they were both middle-aged men, visitors to New York, staying at midtown hotels. That, he knew, meant next to nothing. But in his meticulous way, he made a careful note of it.

  The sheet of paper devoted to the killer had few notations:

  1. Could be male or female.

  2. Wears black nylon wig.

  3. Clever; careful; crafty if not intelligent.

  Just writing all this down gave him a certain satisfaction. It brought a solution no closer, he knew, but it was a start in bringing order and form to a chaotic enigma. It was the only way he knew to apply logic to solving a crime born of abnormal motives and an irrational mentality.

  He was back in his study again, on the morning of March 21st, ruminating about the case.

  He was playing with the idea that perhaps the two victims, George T. Puller and Frederick Wolheim, had, at some time in their business careers, employed the same man, and had fired this man, for whatever reasons.

  Then, years later, the discharged employee, his resentment turned to homicidal fury, had sought out his two former employers and slashed them to death. A fanciful notion, the Chief acknowledged, but not impossible. In fact, not farfetched at all.

  He was still considering this possibility and how it might be checked out when his phone rang. He reached for it absently.

  "Edward X. Delaney here," he said.

  "Chief, this is Boone," the sergeant said. "I thought you'd like to know… I did what you said: took a Crime Scene Unit man back to the room at the Hotel Pierce where Wolheim was chilled. We took measurements on that armchair where the two black nylon hairs were found."

  "And?"

  "Chief, it was approximate. I mean, when you sit in that chair, it has a soft seat cushion that depresses. You understand? So it was tough getting an exact measurement from the back of the head to the tailbone."

  "Of course."

  "Anyway," Boone went on, "we did what we could. Then there was no one in the Lab Services Unit or ME's office who could help. But one of the assistant ME's suggested we call a guy up at the American Museum of Natural History. He's an anthropologist, supposed to be a hotshot on reconstructing skeletons from bone fragments."

  "Good," Delaney said, pleased with Boone's thoroughness. "What did he say?"

  "I gave him the measurement and he called back within an hour. He said his estimate-and he insisted it was only a guess- was that the person who sat in that chair was about five feet five to five feet seven."

  There was silence.

  "Chief?" Boone said. "You still there?"

  "Yes, sergeant," Delaney said slowly, "I'm still here. Five-five to five-seven? That could be a smallish man or a tallish woman."

  "Right," the sergeant said. "But it's something, isn't it, Chief? I mean, it's more than we had before."

  "Of course," Edward X. Delaney said, as heartily as he could. He didn't want to say how frail that clue was; the sergeant would know that. "How are you getting along with Slavin?"

  "Okay," Boone said, lowering his voice. "So far. He's been making us recheck everything we did before he came aboard. I guess I can understand that; he doesn't want to be responsible for anything that happened before he took command."

  "Uh-huh," Delaney said, thinking that Slavin was a fool to waste his men's time in that fashion and to imply doubt of their professional competence.

  "Chief, I'd like to ask you a favor…"

  "Of course. Anything."

  "Could I call you about the investigation?" the sergeant asked, still speaking in a muffled voice. "Every once in a while? To keep you up on what's going on and ask your help on things?"

  That would be Deputy Commissioner Ivar Thorsen's suggestion, the Chief knew. "Sergeant, why don't you call Delaney every day or so? You're friends, aren't you? Keep him up on the progress of the investigation. See if he has any ideas."

  Which meant that Thorsen didn't entirely trust the expertise of Lieutenant Martin Slavin.

  "Call me any time you like, sergeant," Edward X. Delaney said. "I'll be here."

  "Thank you, sir," Boone said gratefully.

  Delaney hung up. On the dossier headed Perpetrator, he added:

  4. Approx. 5-5 to 5-7.

  Then he went into the kitchen and made a sandwich of sliced kielbasa and Jewish coleslaw, on sour rye. Since it was a "wet" sandwich, he ate it standing over the sink.

  There was one person Edward X. Delaney was eager to talk to-but he wasn't sure the old man was still alive. He had been Detective Sergeant Albert Braun, assigned to the office of the District Attorney of New York County. But he had retired about fifteen years ago and Delaney lost track of him.

  Braun had joined the New York Police Department with a law degree at a time when the force was having trouble recruiting qualified high school graduates. During his first five years, he served as a foot patrolman and continued his education with special studies at local universities in criminal law, forensic science and, his particular interest, the psychology of criminal behavior.

  During his early years in the Department, he had won the reputation of being a dependable, if unspectacular, street cop. His nickname during this period of service was "Arf," from Little Orphan Annie's dog. That hound wasn't a bulldog, but Albert Braun was-and that's how he got the canine monicker.

  Delaney remembered that it was said of Braun that if he was assigned to a stakeout in front of a house, and told, "Watch for a male Caucasian, 5-11, 185 pounds, about fifty-five, grayish hair, wearing a plaid sport jacket," you could come back two years later and Arf would look up and say, "He hasn't shown up yet."

  Finally, Albert Braun's background, erudition, and intelligence were recognized. He earned the gold shield of a detective, received rapid promotions, and ended up a sergeant in the Manhattan DA's office where he remained until his retirement.

  Long before that, he was recognized as the Department's top expert in the histo
ry of crime. He possessed a library of more than 2,000 volumes on criminology, and his knowledge of old cases, weapons, and criminal methodology was encyclopedic.

  He had been consulted many times by police departments outside New York City and even by foreign police bureaus and Interpol. In addition, he taught a popular course on investigative techniques to detectives of the NYPD and was a frequent guest lecturer at John Jay College of Criminal Justice.

  Delaney remembered that Braun had never married, and lived somewhere in Elmhurst, in Queens. The Chief consulted his personal telephone directory, a small, battered black book that contained numbers so ancient that instead of a three-digit prefix some bore designations such as Murray Hill-3, Beekman-5, and Butterfield-8.

  He found Albert Braun's number and dialed. He waited while the phone rang seven times. He was about to hang up when a woman came on the line with a breathless "Yes?"

  "Is this the Albert Braun residence?" Delaney asked.

  "Yes, it is."

  He didn't want to ask anything as crude as, "Is the old man still alive?" He tried, "Is Mr. Braun available?"

  "Not at the moment," the woman said. "Who's calling, please?"

  "My name is Edward X. Delaney. I'm an old friend of Mr. Braun. I haven't seen or spoken to him in years. I hope he's in good health?"

  "Not very," the woman said, her voice lowering. "He fell and broke his hip about three years ago and developed pneumonia from that. Then last year he had a stroke. He's recovering from that, somewhat, but he spends most of his time in bed."

  "I'm sorry to hear it."

  "Well, he's doing as well as can be expected. A man of his age."

  "Yes," Delaney said, wanting to ask who she was and what she was doing there. She answered his unspoken question.

  "My name is Martha Kaslove. Mrs. Martha Kaslove," she added firmly. "I've been Mr. Braun's housekeeper since he fell."

  "Well, I'm glad he's not alone," the Chief said. "I had hoped to talk to him, but under the circumstances I won't bother him. I'd appreciate it if you'd tell him I called. The name is Edward X.-"

  "Wait a minute," she said. "You knew him when he was a policeman? Before he retired?"