Second Deadly Sin

by Lawrence Sanders

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t know … It just seems so—so awful.”

  “Man or woman, it was just awful. All those stabs indicate hot blood, fury, or just an absolute need to make certain the man was dead. The strange thing is that whoever did it didn’t kill him after all. Not right then. After a dozen stab wounds, he was still alive. He finally bled to death.”

  “Oh Edward …”

  “I’m sorry,” he said quickly, reaching out to touch her. “It upsets you. I shouldn’t have started talking about it. I won’t discuss it with you again.”

  “Oh no,” she protested. “I want to hear about it. It’s interesting. Fascinating, in a horrible kind of way. No, talk to me about it, Edward. Maybe I can help.”

  “You can, just by listening.”

  The doorbell chimed, and she rose to answer it.

  “I still don’t think it was a woman,” she said firmly.

  He smiled after her. He didn’t think it was a woman either, but not for her reasons. He didn’t think so because the PM had mentioned that several of the knife blows had been delivered with such force that the blade had penetrated completely, and the killer’s knuckles had bruised the surrounding flesh. That indicated powerful thrusts, masculine power. Still, it might have been an extremely strong woman. Or an extremely enraged woman …

  Chief Delaney’s memory had been accurate: Detective Sergeant Abner Boone was a tall, thin, shambling man, with floppy gestures, and a way of tilting his head to one side when he spoke. His hair was more gingery than sandy. His skin was pale and freckled. He was, Delaney guessed, somewhere between thirty and thirty-five; it was difficult to judge. He had the kind of face that would change very little in sixty years. Then, suddenly, he would be an old man.

  There was an awkward, farmerish quality in his manner, in the way he bowed slightly over Monica’s hand and murmured shyly, “Pleased, ma’am.” His grip was firm enough and dry enough when he shook Delaney’s hand, but when he was seated in one of the cracked-leather club chairs in the study, he didn’t seem to know what to do with his hands—or feet either, for that matter. He kept crossing and recrossing his ankles, and he finally thrust his hands into the pockets of his worn tweed jacket. To hide a tremor, Delaney guessed.

  “Would you like something?” the Chief asked. “We have some rare roast beef. How about a sandwich?”

  “No, thank you, sir,” Boone said faintly. “Nothing to eat. But I’d appreciate coffee. Black, please.”

  “I’ll get a thermos,” Delaney said.

  When he went into the kitchen, Monica was emptying the dishwasher, putting things away on the shelves.

  “What do you think?” he asked her in a low voice.

  “I like him,” she said promptly. “He seems so innocent.”

  “Innocent!”

  “Well, kind of boyish. Very polite. Is he married?”

  He stared at her.

  “I’ll find out,” he said. “If not, you can alert Rebecca. Matchmaker!”

  “Why not?” she giggled. “Don’t you want the whole world to be as happy as we are?”

  “They couldn’t endure it,” he assured her.

  Back in the study, he poured steaming coffee for both of them. Boone picked up his cup from the tray with both hands. Now the tremor was obvious.

  “I suppose Deputy Commissioner Thorsen told you what the deal is?” Delaney started.

  “Just that I’ll be working under you on a continuing investigation of the Maitland thing. He said it’s okay to use my own car; he’ll cover me on expenses.”

  “Right,” Delaney nodded. “What kind of car?”

  “Four-door black Pontiac.”

  “Good. As long as it isn’t one of those little sporty jobs. I like to stretch my legs.”

  “It’s not very sporty,” Boone smiled wanly. “Six years old. But pretty good condition.”

  “Fine. Now—” Delaney paused. “What do I call you? Boone? Abner? Ab? What did the men call you?”

  “Mostly they called me Daniel.”

  Delaney laughed.

  “Should have known,” he said. “Well, I prefer sergeant, if it’s all right with you?”

  Boone nodded gratefully.

  “I’ll try to work regular hours,” Delaney said. “But you may have to put in weekends. Better warn your wife.”

  “I’m not married,” the sergeant said.

  “Oh?”

  “Divorced.”

  “Ah. Live alone?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, I’ll want your address and phone number before you leave. How much time did you put in on the Maitland case?”

  “My squad was in on it from the start,” Boone said. “I got there right after the body was found. Then we were in on questioning the family, friends, acquaintances, and so forth.”

  “What was your take? Someone he knew?”

  “Had to be. He was a big, hefty guy. And mean. He could have put up a fight. But he turned his back on someone he knew.”

  “No signs of a struggle?”

  “None. The studio was a mess. I mean all cluttered. But the agent said it was always like that. It was the way Maitland lived. But no signs of a fight. No chairs knocked over or anything broken. Nothing like that. He turned his back, bought it, and went down. That simple.”

  “Woman?” Delaney asked.

  “Don’t think so, sir. But possible.”

  Delaney thought a moment.

  “Your squad check the snappers?”

  Boone was confused, twisting his fingers.

  “Uh—ah—I really don’t know about the snappers, Chief. I got taken off the case. Thorsen tell you? About my trouble?”

  “He told me,” Delaney said grimly. “He also told me that if you fuck up once more, you’re out.”

  Boone nodded miserably.

  “When did it start?” Delaney asked. “The divorce?”

  “No,” Boone said. “Before that. The divorce was one of the results, not the cause.”

  “A lot of cops crawl into a bottle,” Delaney said. “Pressures. The filth.”

  “The pressures I could take,” Boone said, raising his head. “I took them for almost ten years. The filth got to me. What people do. To each other. To themselves. I was handling it—the disgust, I mean—then I caught a sex case. Two beautiful little girls. Sisters. Cut. Burned. Everything. It pushed me over the edge. No excuse. Just an explanation. The only choice was to get hard or to get drunk. I had to sleep.”

  “You’re not a religious man?”

  “No,” Boone said. “I was a Baptist originally, but I don’t work at it.”

  “Well, sergeant,” Edward X. Delaney said coldly, “don’t expect any sympathy from me. Or advice. You’re a grown man; it’s your choice. If you can’t hack it, I’ll have to tell Thorsen to give me someone else.”

  “I know that, sir.”

  “As long as you know it. Let’s get back to the case … I’ve read the file, but I’ll have some questions on your personal reactions as we go along. For instance, what’s your take on Maitland?”

  “Everyone says he was the greatest painter in the country, but an A-Number-One shit. Some evidence he beat his wife. His son hated him. Still does, I guess. Humiliated his agent in public. Always getting into brawls. I mean breaking up bars and restaurants. A mean drunk. Got beaten up himself several times. Things like insulting a woman who was with a guy bigger than Maitland. Crazy things. Like he wanted to be kicked to hell and gone. A hard guy to figure. I guess he had talent to burn, but he was one miserable human being.”

  “Miserable?” Delaney picked up on that. “You mean he himself was miserable, like sad, or he was a poor excuse for a human being?”

  Boone pondered a moment.

  “Both ways, I’d guess,” he said finally. “A very complex guy. Before I got taken off the case, I bought a book of his paintings and went to see the ones in the Geltman Galleries and in the museums. I figured if I could get a handle on the gu
y, maybe it would help me find who offed him, and why.”

  Delaney looked at him with surprised admiration.

  “Good idea,” he said. “Learn anything?”

  “No, sir. Nothing. Maybe it was me. I don’t know much about painting.”

  “You still have that book? Of Maitland’s paintings?”

  “Sure. It’s around somewhere.”

  “Can I borrow it?”

  “Of course.”

  “Thank you. Tomorrow’s Friday. The PM says he was knocked on Friday, between ten and three in the afternoon. Can you pick me up tomorrow morning around nine? I want to go down to that Mott Street studio and look around. And the neighborhood. We’ll be there from ten to three, when it happened.”

  Abner Boone looked at him intently.

  “Anything special, Chief?” he asked.

  Delaney shook his head.

  “Not a whisper,” he said. “Just noodling. But we got to start somewhere.”

  He saw the sergeant brighten and straighten when he said “we.”

  Both men stood up. Then Boone hesitated.

  “Chief, did they send you the inventory of Maitland’s personal effects from the ME’s office?”

  “Yes, I got it.”

  “Spot anything unusual?”

  “Nooo,” Delaney said. “Did I miss something?”

  “Not something that was on the list,” Boone said. “Something that wasn’t.” Suddenly, unexpectedly, he blushed. His pale face reddened; the freckles disappeared. “The guy wasn’t wearing any underwear.”

  Delaney looked at him, startled.

  “You’re sure?”

  Boone nodded. “I checked it out with the guys who stripped the corpse at the morgue. No underwear.”

  “Odd. What do you make of it?”

  “Nothing,” Boone said. “I had a session with a Department shrink—I guess Thorsen told you about that—and just for the hell of it I asked him what about a guy who didn’t wear underwear. He gave me the usual bullshit answer: it might be significant, and it might not.”

  Delaney nodded and said, “That’s the trouble. In a case like this, it’s a temptation to see all facts as of equal significance. They’re not. But crossing off the meaningless stuff takes just as much time as tracking down what’s important. Well, we’ve got plenty of time. The Department really doesn’t expect a break on this. See you in the morning, sergeant.”

  Boone nodded, and they shook hands again. The sergeant seemed a little more cheerful, or a little less beaten. He left his address and phone number. Delaney saw him out, locked and chained the door behind him.

  Monica was motionless in bed, but stirred when Delaney began undressing.

  “Well?” she asked.

  “Divorced,” he reported.

  “That’s nice,” she said drowsily. “I’ll call Rebecca in the morning.”

  4

  THEY PARKED ON HOUSTON Street and got out of the car.

  “Aren’t you going to show an ‘Officer on Duty’ card?” Delaney asked.

  “Don’t think I better, Chief,” Abner Boone said. “The last time I displayed it, they stole my hubcaps.”

  Delaney smiled, then looked around slowly. He told Boone of the tour of duty he had served in this precinct twenty years ago.

  “It was all Italian then,” he said. “But I guess it’s changed.”

  Boone nodded. “Some blacks. Lots of Puerto Ricans. But mostly Chinese moving up across Canal Street. Mulberry Street is still Italian though. Good restaurants.”

  “I remember,” Delaney said. “I could eat those cannoli like there was no tomorrow.”

  They sauntered over to Mott Street, then turned south. The Chief looked up at the red-brick tenements.

  “It hasn’t changed all that much,” he said. “The first day I was down here I got hit by airmail. You know what that is?”

  “Sure,” Boone grinned. “Flying garbage. They throw it out the windows into the street.”

  When he grinned, the boyishness Monica had noted became more evident. He had big, horsey teeth, but they didn’t seem out of place in his long, smooth face. His eyes were pale blue, small and watchful. He walked in a kind of springy, loose-limbed lope, all the more youthful in contrast to Delaney’s heavy, splay-footed trundle.

  It was a warm, hazy May morning, beginning to heat up. But there was a dark cloud bank hovering over New Jersey; the air smelled of rain.

  “Do you remember the weather for that Friday?” Delaney asked. “When Maitland died?”

  “Clear, bright, but about ten degrees colder than it is now. It rained on Saturday. When we got there on Sunday, it was grey and overcast. Clammy.”

  Delaney stopped at Prince Street and looked around.

  “Lots of traffic,” he said. “Lots of activity.”

  “One of the problems,” Boone said. “So busy that no one saw nothing. The precinct had Italian- and Spanish-speaking cops do the door-to-doors. No one offered anything. I don’t think they were covering; they honestly didn’t see. Probably one guy in and out in five minutes. Who’s to notice?”

  “No screams? No thumps or crash when Maitland fell?”

  “There are ten apartments in his building. Everyone was at work or out shopping except for a deaf old lady on the third floor, a guy who works nights sleeping on the second, and the super and his wife in the basement. None of them heard anything, didn’t see anything. They say.”

  “No lock on the outside door of the house?”

  “Supposed to be, but it had been jimmied so many times, the super gave up trying to fix it. Anyone could have walked right up those stairs.”

  “What’s the break-in rate on the street?”

  Boone flipped a palm back and forth.

  “About average, sir. Not the best, not the worst.”

  They crossed Prince Street, walking slowly, looking about.

  “Why did he have his studio down here?” Delaney wondered. “He could have afforded something better than this, couldn’t he? He had money.”

  “Oh, he had plenty of money,” Boone nodded. “No doubt about that. And spent it as fast as he made it, according to his wife. We asked his agent the same thing—why he worked down here. The answers weren’t logical, but I guess they make sense considering the kind of man he was. This was where he lived and worked when he first came to New York and was just getting started. This was where he did the first paintings that sold. He was superstitious and thought the place brought him luck. So he kept it as a studio after he got married and moved uptown. Also, it was off the beaten track. The guy was a loner. He hated the usual art-colony bullshit of Greenwich Village. He got sore when the galleries spread to SoHo, and more and more artists began taking lofts across Lafayette south of Houston, and even on the Bowery. He told his agent the shitheads were surrounding him, and if it got any worse, he’d have to find some place the art-fuckers hadn’t discovered yet. That’s Maitland’s phrase: ‘Art-fuckers.’ Here, this is the house, Chief.”

  It was a grimy red-brick building exactly like dozens of others on the street. A stoop of nine grey stone steps leading up to an outer door. The first-floor apartments on either side had rusted iron grilles over their dusty windows.

  “I know the layout,” Delaney said. “And this wasn’t in the file; I’ve seen hundreds of tenements like this. Two apartments on each floor. Railroad flats running front to back. The super’s apartment in the basement. He can enter through that door in the areaway under the steps, but he usually keeps it locked and goes in through the hallway and down a flight of backstairs to the basement. In addition to his apartment, the cellar’s got the boiler, heater, fuse boxes, and so forth. Storage space. And a back door that opens out into a little paved courtyard. Maitland’s studio on the fifth floor was one big room—the whole floor. Sink and tub, but toilet in a little closet on the top stairway landing. How’s that?”

  “You got it, sir,” Boone said admiringly. “The door in the basement, the one to the backyard, is kept
locked. It’s got iron bars with a chain and a padlock on it. It wasn’t touched. Our guy didn’t get out that way. Besides, the super and his wife were in their apartment. They said they’d have heard someone in the basement. They didn’t.”

  “Let’s go,” Delaney said.

  They trudged up the steps. The outer door was not only unlocked but unlatched; it swung open a few inches. Delaney paused to look at the names on the mailboxes.

  “Mostly Italians,” he noted. “One Spanish. One Chinese. One ‘Smith’ that could be anything.”

  The inner door was also unlocked, the handle missing.

  “He said he’d replace it,” Boone said.

  “Maybe he did,” Delaney said mildly. “Maybe someone busted the new one.”

  There were two short flights of stairs between floors. They went up slowly. They were on the third-floor landing when one of the doors jerked open to the length of its chain, and an angry woman poked her face out at them. She had a head of bright red hair wound around beer-can curlers. She was wearing a wrapper of hellish design she kept clutched to her scrawny neck.

  “I seen you staring at the house,” she accused them. “Watcha want? I’ll call the cops.”

  “We are the cops, ma’am,” Boone said softly. He showed the woman his ID. “Nothing to fret about. Just taking another look upstairs.”

  “You catch him yet?” the woman demanded.

  “Not yet.”

  “Shit!” the woman said disgustedly, and slammed her door shut. They heard the sound of locks being turned and bolts being closed. They continued their climb.

  “Where was she when we needed her?” Delaney growled.

  They paused on the top landing, both of them breathing heavily. Delaney looked into the WC. Nothing but a stained toilet. The tank was up near the ceiling, flushed by pulling a wooden handle attached to a tarnished brass chain. There was one small window of frosted glass, cracked.

  “Unheated,” Delaney remarked. “In winter, a place like this could make it a pleasure to be constipated.”

  Boone looked at him, startled by the Chief’s levity. They moved over to stand before the door of Victor Maitland’s studio. There was a shiny new hasp and padlock. There was also a sign tacked to the door: THESE PREMISES HAVE BEEN SEALED BY THE INTERNAL REVENUE SERVICE, AN AGENCY OF THE U.S. GOVERNMENT. In smaller type, the sign detailed what an interloper might expect in the way of imprisonment, a fine, or both.