Fourth Deadly Sin

by Lawrence Sanders

  “Ma’am,” Delaney said softly, “you have just the one copy?”

  “That’s correct. I made no carbon.”

  “You wouldn’t happen to have a copying machine in your office, would you? It would help a great deal if both Sergeant Boone and I had copies. Speed things up.”

  “There’s a copier in my husband’s outer office,” she said, rising. “It’ll just take a minute.”

  “We’ll come along if you don’t mind,” Delaney said, and both men stood up.

  She looked at them. “If you’re thinking about my safety, I thank you—but there’s no need, I assure you. I have lived in this house since Simon died. There are people here during the day, but I’m alone at night. It doesn’t frighten me. I won’t let it frighten me. This is my home.”

  “If you’ll allow us,” Delaney said stubbornly, “we’ll still come along. It’ll give us a chance to see the scene—to see where it happened.”

  “If you wish,” she said tonelessly.

  She took a ring of keys from the desk drawer, then led the way along the hall. She unlocked the door of her husband’s office and turned on the light. The floor of the receptionist’s room was bare boards.

  “I had the carpeting taken up and thrown out,” she said. “It was stained, and I didn’t wish to have it cleaned.”

  “Have you decided what to do with this space, ma’am?” Boone asked.

  “No,” she said shortly. “I haven’t thought about it.”

  She went over to the copier in the corner and switched it on. While she was making a duplicate of her report, they looked about.

  There was little to see. The outer office was identical in size and shape to the one on the second floor. It was aseptically furnished with steel desk, chairs, filing cabinet. There was no indication it had been the scene of murderous frenzy.

  Dr. Ellerbee turned off the copier, handed each of them her two-page report.

  “I wouldn’t care to have this circulated,” she said sternly.

  “It won’t be,” Delaney assured her. “Doctor, would you mind if we took a quick look into your husband’s office?”

  “What for?”

  “Standard operating procedure,” he said. “To try to learn more about your husband. Sometimes seeing where a victim lived and where he worked gives a good indication of the kind of man he was.”

  She shrugged, obviously not believing him, but not caring.

  “Help yourself,” she said, gesturing toward the inner door.

  She sat at the receptionist’s desk while they went into Dr. Simon Ellerbee’s private office. Boone switched on the overhead light.

  A severe, rigorous room, almost austere. No pictures on the white walls. No decorations. No objets d’art, memorabilia, or personal touches. The room was defined by its lacks. Even the black leather patient’s couch was as sterile as a hospital gurney.

  “Cold,” Boone said in a low voice.

  “You wanted a handle on the guy,” Delaney said. “Here’s a piece of it: He was organized, logical, emotionless. Notice how all the straight edges are parallel or at right angles? A very precise, disciplined man. Can you imagine spending maybe twelve hours a day in a cell like this? Let’s go; it gives me the willies.”

  They reclaimed their coats and hats from the sitting room, thanked Dr. Diane Ellerbee for her assistance, and said they’d keep her informed of the progress of the investigation.

  “I warn you,” Delaney said, smiling, “we may call on you for more help.”

  “Of course,” she said. “Anytime.” She seemed tired.

  Out on the street, walking slowly to the car, Boone said, “Ballsy lady. Most women would have gone somewhere else to live or asked a friend to stay awhile after something like that happened.”

  “Mmm,” Delaney said. “She claims she’s not frightened and I believe her. By the way, did you notice how she referred to those patients by their first names? I wonder if all shrinks do that. It reminds me of the way cops talk to suspects to bring them down.”

  “I thought it was just to—you know—to show how sympathetic you are.”

  “Maybe. But using a suspect’s first name diminishes him, robs him of his dignity. It proves that you’re in a position of authority. You call a Mafia chief Tony when he’s used to being called Mr. Anthony Gelesco and it makes him feel like a two-bit punk or a pushcart peddler. Well, all that’s smoke and getting us nowhere. Tomorrow morning check to see if Chief Suarez’s men have talked to any of those six patients. We better start with their whereabouts at the time of the homicide.”

  “Even if Suarez’s guys have talked to them, you’ll still want them double-checked, won’t you, sir?”

  “Of course. As far as I’m concerned, this investigation is just starting. And get hold of Jason Two; see how he’s coming along on the biographies. I’d like him to finish up as soon as possible; we’re going to need his help knocking on doors.”

  Sergeant Boone drove Delaney home. Outside the brownstone, before Delaney got out of the car, Boone said, “What did you think of Doctor Diane’s selections, sir? They all seem like possibles to me.”

  “Could be. You know, when I talked to Doc Walden, he tried to convince me that most people who go to psychotherapists aren’t nuts or crazies or weirdos; they’re just poor unfortunates with king-size emotional hangups. But all these people on Doctor Diane’s list sound like half-decks. Good night, Sergeant.”

  Monica was in the living room, working the Times crossword puzzle. She looked up as Delaney came in, peering at him over the top of her Ben Franklin glasses.

  “How did it go?” she asked.

  “I need something,” he said. “Maybe a tall scotch with a lot of ice and a lot of soda.”

  He mixed the drinks in the kitchen and brought them back to the living room. Monica held her glass up to the light.

  “You have a heavy hand with that scotch bottle, kiddo,” she said. She tried a sip. “But I forgive you. Now tell me—how did it go?”

  Delaney slumped in his high wing chair covered with bottle-green leather worn glassy smooth. He loosened his tie, unbuttoned his collar, and sighed.

  “It went all right. She gave us a list of six possibles.”

  “Then what are you so grumpy about?”

  “Who says I’m grumpy?”

  “I do. You’ve got that squinchy look around the eyes, and you’re gritting your teeth.”

  “I am? Well, it’s not going to work.”

  “What’s not going to work?”

  “The investigation. My investigation. Now we’ve got six people to check out, and I have only Boone and Jason. I can’t do any legwork myself without a tin to flash. So, in effect, there are two men to investigate six suspects. Oh, it could be done if we had all the time in the world, but Thorsen wants this thing cleared up by the end of the year.”

  “Only one answer to that, isn’t there? Ask Ivar for more help.”

  “I don’t know how Chief Suarez would take that. He said he’d cooperate in any way he could, but I have a hunch he still sees me as competition.”

  “Then instead of asking Ivar for more men, ask Suarez. That makes him part of the team, doesn’t it? Gives him a chance to share the success if you find out who killed Simon Ellerbee.”

  He stared at her reflectively. “I knew I married a great beauty,” he said. “Now I realize I also married a great brain.”

  She sniffed. “You’re just finding that out? Why don’t you call Suarez right now.”

  “Too late,” Delaney said. “I’ll wake up that family of his. I’ll get hold of him first thing in the morning. Meanwhile I’ve got a little work to do. Don’t wait up for me; go to bed whenever you like.”

  He rose, lumbered over to her, swooped to kiss her cheek. Then he took his drink into the study. He closed the connecting door to the living room in case Monica wanted to watch the Johnny Carson show.

  He sat at his desk, put on his heavy black-rimmed glasses, and slowly read through Dr. Diane�
��s two-page report. Then he read it again.

  There was more there than she had given them in her oral summary. The six paragraphs described very disturbed people who showed every evidence of being out of control. Any one of them seemed to have the potential for ungovernable violence.

  Delaney sat back and gently tinked the rim of his highball glass against his teeth. He thought about Simon Ellerbee. What was it like, he wondered, to spend your life working with people whose thought processes were so chaotic?

  It was, he supposed, like being in a foreign country where all the natives were hostile, spoke a strange language, and even the geography of their world was terra incognita.

  He imagined that any man who deliberately ventured into the alien land might suffer from bewilderment and disorientation. He’d have to clamp a tight hold on his own feelings to keep from being swept away by disorder.

  Delaney remembered that cold, disciplined office of Dr. Simon Ellerbee. Now he could understand why a psychiatrist would want to work in rigidly geometric surroundings where parallel lines never met and hard edges reminded that arrangement and sequence did exist, and logic was not dead.

  11

  ISAAC KANE HAD BEEN going to the clinic every Wednesday. He was given endless tests. Sometimes, with the permission of his mother, he was handed pills or liquids to swallow. They made him do things with wooden blocks and photographed him on videotape. Then he would spend an hour with Dr. Simon.

  Kane didn’t mind talking to the doctor. He was a nice, quiet man and really seemed interested in what Isaac had to say. In fact, Dr. Simon was about the only one who listened to Isaac; his mother wouldn’t listen, and other people made fun of the way he talked. There was so much Kane wanted to say, and sometimes he couldn’t get it out fast enough. Then he went, “Bub-bub-bub,” and people laughed.

  But Dr. Simon stopped coming to the clinic, so Kane stopped, too. They tried to get him to continue coming in every Wednesday, but he just wouldn’t do it. They kept at him, and finally he had to hit some of them. That did the trick, all right, and they didn’t bother him anymore.

  So now he could spend all his days at the Harriet J. Raskob Community Center on West 79th Street. The clinic had been painted all white—Isaac didn’t like that—but the Center was pink and green and blue and yellow. It was warm in there, and they let him work on his pastel landscapes.

  The head of the Center, Mrs. Freylinghausen, sold some of Kane’s landscapes and gave the money to his mother. But she kept enough to buy him a wonderful box of at least a hundred pastel crayons in all colors and hues, an easel, paper, and panels. When he ran out of supplies, Mrs. Freylinghausen bought him more—Isaac wasn’t very good at shopping—and locked up all his property when the Center closed at 9:00 P.M.

  Most of the people who came to the Center were very old, some in wheelchairs or on walkers. They were as nice to Isaac Kane as Mrs. Freylinghausen. But there were younger people, too, and some of them weren’t so nice. They mimicked Isaac’s “Bub-bub-bub” and they tripped him or pushed his elbow when he was working or tried to steal his chalks. One girl liked to touch him all over.

  Sometimes they got him so mad that he had to hit them. He was strong, and he could really hurt someone if he wanted to.

  One afternoon—Kane didn’t know what day it was—Mrs. Freylinghausen came out of her office with two men and headed for the corner where Isaac had set up his easel under a skylight. Both the men were big. The older wore a black overcoat and the other a dark green parka. Both carried their hats.

  “Isaac,” Mrs. Freylinghausen said, “I’d like you to meet two friends of mine who are interested in your work. This gentleman is Mr. Delaney, and here is Mr. Boone.”

  Isaac shook hands with both of them, leaving their palms smeared with colored chalk. They both smiled and looked nice. Mrs. Freylinghausen moved away.

  “Mr. Kane,” Delaney said, “we just saw some of your landscapes, and we think they’re beautiful.”

  “They’re okay, I guess,” Isaac said modestly. “Sometimes they’re not, you know, what I want. I can’t always get the colors just right.”

  “Have you ever seen Turner’s paintings?” Delaney asked.

  “Turner? No. Who is he?”

  “An English painter. He worked in oil and watercolor. He did a lot of landscapes. The way you handle light reminds me of Turner.”

  “Light!” Isaac Kane cried. “That’s very hard to do.” And then, because he wanted to say so much about light, he began to go “Bub-bub-bub …”

  They waited patiently, not laughing at him, and when he got out what he wanted to say, they nodded understanding.

  “Mr. Kane,” Boone said, “I think we may have a mutual friend. Did you know Doctor Ellerbee?”

  “No, I don’t know him.”

  “Doctor Simon Ellerbee?”

  “Oh, Doctor Simon! Sure, I know him. He stopped coming to the clinic. What happened to him?”

  Boone glanced at Delaney.

  “I’m afraid I have bad news for you, Mr. Kane,” Delaney said. “Doctor Simon is dead. Someone killed him.”

  “Gee, that’s too bad,” Isaac said. “He was a nice man. I liked to talk to him.”

  He turned back to his easel, where a sheet of grainy paper had been pinned to a square of cardboard. He was working on an idyllic farm scene with a windmill, thatched cottage, a running brook. There were plump white clouds in the foreground and, beyond, dark menacing rain clouds. The rendition of shadows and the changing light saved the work from mawkishness.

  “What did you talk to Doctor Simon about?” Delaney asked.

  “Oh … everything,” Isaac said, working with a white chalk to get a little more glitter on the water’s surface. “He asked me a lot of questions.”

  “Mr. Kane,” Boone said, “can you think of anyone who might have wanted to hurt Doctor Simon?”

  He turned to face them. They saw a rudely handsome young man clad in stained denim overalls, a red plaid shirt, tattered running shoes. His brown hair was cut short enough to show pink scalp. Dark eyes revealed nothing, but there was a sweet innocence in his expression.

  “That’s the way some people are,” he said sadly. “They want to hurt you.”

  “Do people hurt you, Mr. Kane?” Delaney asked.

  “Sometimes they try, but I don’t let them. I hit them and then they stop. I don’t like mean people.”

  “But Doctor Simon never hurt you, did he?”

  “Oh, no—he was a nice man! I never—he would—we talked and—” But then there was so much he wanted to say about Dr. Simon that he began to stutter again. They waited, but he had nothing intelligible to add.

  “Well, we’ve got to get going,” Delaney said. “Thank you for giving us so much time.” He looked down at Kane’s ragged running shoes. “I hope you have boots or galoshes,” he said, smiling. “It’s snowing outside.”

  “I don’t care,” Isaac said. “I just live around the corner. I don’t need boots.”

  They all shook hands. Delaney and Boone headed for the doorway. A young girl with disheveled hair was propped up against the wall of the vestibule. She looked at them with glazed eyes and said, “Oink, oink.”

  Out on the sidewalk, Boone said, “She had us pegged.”

  “Stoned out of her skull,” Delaney said grimly.

  They were double-parked on 80th Street. Boone had propped a POLICE OFFICER ON DUTY card inside the windshield, and for once it had worked: He still had his hubcaps. They got in, started the engine, turned on the wheezy heater, sat a few moments, shivering, and watched the wet snow drift down.

  “Poor guy,” Boone observed. “Not much there.”

  “No,” Delaney agreed. “But you never know. He seems to be quick with his fists when he thinks someone is out to hurt him.”

  “How could Simon Ellerbee hurt him?”

  “Maybe he asked one question too many. It’s possible.”

  “What was the business about the boots and galoshes?” Boone s
aid.

  “Those two sets of unidentified tracks on the Ellerbees’ carpet.”

  “Jesus!” the Sergeant said disgustedly. “I forgot all about them.”

  “Well, we still don’t know if Kane owns boots. All he said was that he wasn’t wearing them today. I think we better get back to my place, Sergeant. Chief Suarez said he’d call at noon, and I have a feeling he’s a very prompt man.”

  “You think he’s checking with Thorsen, sir?”

  “Of course. If I was in Suarez’s place I’d say something like this: ‘Deputy, Delaney wants six more detectives. That’s okay with me, but I don’t want to give him any of the people working the case for me. It would hobble what we’re doing. So I’d like to assign six new bodies to Delaney.”

  “You think Thorsen will go for that?”

  “Sure he will. He’s got no choice.”

  With the holiday traffic getting heavier and the snow beginning to pile up, it took them almost a half-hour to get over to the East Side. Boone parked in front of the 251st Precinct house, leaving his ON DUTY card on display. Then they trudged next door to Delaney’s brownstone.

  “How about a sandwich?” Delaney suggested. “We’ve got some cold roast beef, sweet pickle relish, sliced onions. Maybe a little pink horseradish. How does that sound?”

  “Just right,” Boone said. “A hot coffee wouldn’t go bad either.”

  Delaney spread old newspapers on the kitchen table and they ate their lunch hunched over that.

  “Now let’s see …” Delaney said. “You told me that Suarez’s men have checked out four of the names on our list?”

  “That’s right, sir. Just their whereabouts at the time of the homicide. As of this morning, they hadn’t gotten around to Otherton or Gerber.”

  “We’ll have to double-check them all anyway. If we get the six new people, I want to assign one to each possible. But I want to question each of the patients personally. That means you or Jason Two will have to come with me to show your ID.”

  “I talked to Jason. He says he’ll be finished with the biogs by tonight. He’ll call you.”

  “Good. I want you there when he makes his report. We’ll hit Otherton this afternoon. We won’t call her first; just barge in. The other four we’ll have to brace in the evening or over the weekend. Sergeant, can you think of anything we should be doing that we’re not?”