Second Deadly Sin

by Lawrence Sanders

  “Well …” Delaney sighed, “sometimes people use complete honesty as an excuse for sadism.”

  Jake Dukker looked at him curiously.

  “Right on, Chief,” he said. “There was that, too. In Maitland’s personality. He liked to hurt people. No doubt about it. He called it puncturing their ego-balloons, but there was more to it than that. At least I think there was. He could get vicious. Wouldn’t leave anyone a shred of illusion or self-esteem. Like he did to Belle that night. You can hate someone like that, someone who strips all your pretense away and leaves you naked.”

  The two officers were busy scribbling in their notebooks.

  “You said the Sarazen woman swings a lot of clout,” Delaney said, not looking up. “What did you mean by that?”

  “Well … you know,” Dukker said. “Political influence. She really does know some important people. Knows where the bodies are buried. Also, she’s a powerhouse in the New York art world. She can promote a gallery show for some schlocky little cartoonist. Or get her rich friends to buy some guy’s stuff. Great on publicity and promotion. Throws parties. Knows everyone. She can be valuable to artists. To dealers. To collectors.”

  “You think she knows what’s good?” Delaney asked. “I mean, does she have good taste in art?”

  Jake Dukker burst out laughing.

  “Good taste?” he spluttered. “Belle Sarazen? Come on! She’ll find some kid in the Village with a long schlong, and she’ll bring his stuff to me and say, ‘Isn’t he fan-tas-tic? Isn’t he great?’ And I’ll say, ‘Belle, the kid just hasn’t got it. He’s from stinksville.’ A month later the kid will have a show in a Madison Avenue gallery, and a month after that he’ll be dead, gone, and no one will ever hear of him again. Which is all to the good because he didn’t have anything in the first place. All Belle’s doings. She picked the guy up, gave him a gallery show, and dropped him just as quick. After showing him a few positions even the Kama Sutra doesn’t include. Then she’s on to someone else, and the original guy is back in the Village, eating Twinkies, and wondering what the hell hit him. Art is just one big game to Belle.”

  “But you like her?” Delaney asked, staring at Dukker without expression. “You like Belle Sarazen?”

  “Belle?” Dukker repeated. “Like her? Well … maybe I do. Like goes to like. We’re both a couple of phonies. I could have been … well, what the hell’s the use of talking about it. Belle and me, we know who we are, and what we are.”

  “But Victor Maitland wasn’t a phony?” Abner Boone said softly.

  “No,” Dukker said defiantly. “He was a lot of rotten things, but he wasn’t a phony. The miserable shit. He wasn’t too happy, you know. He was driven, too. He was as greedy as all of us. But for different things.”

  “What things?” Delaney asked.

  “Oh … I don’t know,” Dukker said vaguely. “He was a hell of a painter. Not as good as me. Technically, I mean. But he had something I never had. Or maybe I had it and lost it. I’ll never know. But he was never as good as he wanted to be. Maybe that’s why he worked so hard, so fast. Like someone was driving him.”

  There was silence a few moments while Delaney and Boone flipped through their notebooks. From downstairs they heard voices and the clatter of props and equipment as Dukker’s assistants set up for the next shooting.

  “Mr. Dukker,” Delaney said, “did you ever provide or suggest models for Maitland?”

  “Models? Once or twice. Mostly he found his own. Big, muscular women. Not the type I dig.”

  “Did you suggest anyone to him recently? A very young girl? Puerto Rican or Latin-type?”

  Dukker thought a moment.

  “No,” he shook his head. “No one like that. No one at all in the last six months or so. Maybe a year. Why?”

  Chief Delaney told him of the sketches found in Maitland’s studio. Dukker was interested.

  “Bring them around,” he suggested. “I’d like to see them. Maybe I can identify the girl. I use a lot of models. For photography and illustration. Painting, too, of course. Though I’m doing less and less of that. The big money’s in advertising photography. And I’m beginning to get into film. Commercials. Lots of dinero there.”

  He lurched suddenly to his feet, the maroon beret jerking to the back of his head.

  “Got to get downstairs,” he said briskly. “Okay?”

  The two cops looked at each other. Delaney nodded slightly. They snapped notebooks shut, stood up.

  “Thank you for being so cooperative, Mr. Dukker,” Delaney said. “We appreciate that.”

  “Any time at all,” the artist said, waving, expansive. “You know, you’ve got an interesting face, Chief. Very heavy. I’d like to sketch it some time. Maybe I will—when you come back with those Maitland drawings.”

  Delaney nodded again, not smiling.

  “Can we leave from up here?” Sergeant Boone asked casually. “Or do we have to go downstairs to get out?”

  “Oh no,” Dukker said, “you can leave from here. That door over there. Leads to the fifth-floor landing and elevator.”

  “Just one more thing,” Chief Delaney said. “Belle Sarazen told us you were doing a painting of her. A nude on aluminum foil.”

  “Belle talks too much,” Dukker said crossly. “It’ll get around and everyone will be doing it before I’m finished.”

  “Could we see it?” Delaney asked. “We won’t mention it to anyone.”

  “Sure. I guess so. Why not? Come on—it’s downstairs.”

  They were waiting for Dukker in the studio—the receptionist with a sheaf of messages, the assistants behind their lights, a model perched on a high stool. She was wearing a sleazy flowered kimono, chewing gum, and flipping the pages of Harper’s Bazaar. Behind her, on the stage, the assistants had put together a boudoir scene: a brocaded chaise longue, a tall pier glass on a swivel mount, a dresser covered with cosmetics, a brass bedstead with black satin sheets.

  “Hi, Jake, honey,” she called as Dukker came down the stairs. “Were you serious? Is this really for a deck of playing cards?”

  Dukker didn’t answer. The officers couldn’t see his face. He led them to a stack of paintings leaning against a wall. He flipped through for the one he wanted, slid it out, set it on a nearby easel. They moved close to inspect it.

  He had glued aluminum foil to a Masonite panel, and prepared the surface to take tempera. The background was ebony black, which lightened to a deep, deep Chinese red in the center, a red as glossy as old lacquer ware. Belle Sarazen was posed in the center portion, on hands and knees, on what appeared, dimly, to be a draped bench.

  She had, Delaney thought, almost the position of a hound on point: back arched and rigid, head up and alert, arms stiff, thighs straining forward. The artist had not used skin tones, but had allowed the aluminum foil, unpainted, to delineate the flesh. Modeling and shadows of the body were suggested with quick slashes of violet, the sharp features of the face implied rather than detailed.

  The painting was a startling tour de force. There was no questioning the artist’s skill or the effectiveness of his novel technique. But there was something disquieting in the painting, something chill and spiritless. The woman’s hard-muscled body hinted of corruption.

  That effect, Delaney decided, was deliberately the artist’s, achieved by tightly crumpling the foil. Dukker had then smoothed it out before gluing it to the board. But the skin, the unpainted foil, still bore a fine network of tiny wrinkles, hundreds of them, that gave the appearance of crackle, as if the flesh had been bruised by age, punished by use, damaged by too-frequent handling. He could not understand why Belle Sarazen was so proud of a portrait that seemed to show her a moment before she fell apart, splintered into a dusty pile of sharp-edged fragments.

  “Very nice,” he told Dukker. “Very nice indeed.”

  He and Boone walked slowly back to their parked car. They stared at the sidewalk, brooding …

  “The garage checked, Chief?” Boone asked.
>
  “Yes,” Delaney said. “The only record they had was when he took his car out at seven that evening. But check them again.”

  “Will do,” the sergeant said. “You know, these people worry me.”

  “Worry you?”

  “Yes, sir,” Boone said, frowning. “I’m not used to the type. Most of the stuff I caught up to now involved characters with sheets. Addicts. Double offenders. Professionals. You know? I haven’t had an experience dealing with people like this. I mean, they think.”

  “They also sleep,” Delaney said stonily. “And they eat, they crap, and one of them killed. What I’m trying to say is that one of them is guilty of a very primitive act, as stupid and unthinking as a muscle job by some punk with a skinful of shit. Don’t let the brains worry you. We’ll get him. Or her.”

  “You think the killer fucked up somewhere along the line?”

  “I doubt it,” Delaney said. “I’m just hoping for a chance. An accident. Something they couldn’t possibly foresee and plan for. I know a guy named Evelyn Forrest. He’s the Chief in Chilton, New York, a turnaround in the road up near the Military Academy at West Point. Forrest is Chilton’s one-man police department. Or was. An old cop gone to beer. I hope he’s still alive.

  “Anyway, this Forrest told me about a cute one he caught. This retired professor, his second wife, and his stepdaughter bought an old farmhouse with some land near Chilton. The professor is writing a biography of Thoreau, but he’s got time to make it with the stepdaughter. So he decides to snuff the wife and make it look like an accident. He’s got a perfect situation: On their land they’ve got this small apple orchard, and the local kids and drifters are always sneaking in to swipe apples. Lots of apples. Not off the ground; right off the trees. So this professor buys a twenty-gauge with birdshot, and every time they see or hear someone swiping their apples, they run out yelling they’ll spray the orchard with their shotgun. Far enough away so no one gets hurt. Just to scare the kids.

  “So the professor with the hots for the stepdaughter, he sets up the murder of his wife very carefully. Everything planned. A half-buried rock under one of the apple trees, a rock that anyone could trip over. Takes his wife out there for a stroll late one afternoon. Blows her away when she’s at the rock. He’s wearing gloves. Puts the shotgun in her hands for prints. Runs back to the house. Hides the gloves. Screams on the phone for help. His wife tripped, the shotgun hit the ground and blew, she’s got no chest, and what a horrible, horrible accident it is. This Chief Forrest went out to look around. He thought it smelled, but there was no way he could shake the professor’s story. Until a local farmer brought his scared kid around to Forrest to tell his version. The kid had seen the whole thing. He was up in that tree swiping apples. So much for careful planning …”

  That evening, the girls staying the night with friends for something called a Pillow Party, Monica and Edward X. Delaney had a lonely kitchen dinner. She tried for awhile; then, knowing his moods, she gave up trying to make conversation and said nothing when he excused himself to go into the study and close the door.

  He felt his age: lumpy and ponderous. And somewhat awkward. His clothes were damp and heavy on his skin. His joints creaked. He seemed to be pressing down into his swivel chair, all of him dull and without lift. He had a sudden vision of a young girl leaning on a pink parasol. The tanned skin of her naked back. He shook his massive head, and doggedly began writing out detailed reports of the interviews with Belle Sarazen and Jake Dukker.

  When they were finished, and filed away, he took the three drawings found in Victor Maitland’s studio and fixed them to his wall map of the 251st Precinct, mounted on corkboard. He used pushpins to attach them over the map, then tilted his desk lamp so they were illuminated. He sat behind his desk and stared at the sketches.

  Youth. Vigor. All juice, all bursting. Caught in the hard, quick lines of a frantic artist who wanted it all. Wanted to own it all, and show it. Maitland was driven, Jake Dukker had said. Delaney could believe that. In all these interviews, from all this talk, these words, he was beginning to see most clearly the man who was dead. The painter, the artist, Victor Maitland. That gifted hand moldering now, but not so long ago eager and grasping. A filthy human being he might have been. Malicious, besotted, maybe sadistic. But there was no law that said only saints could be talented.

  The trouble was, Delaney brooded, the trouble was that he was beginning to feel sympathy. Not only for the victim—that was natural enough—but for all the others involved in the murder. One of whom, he was convinced, had plunged the blade. The trouble was that he liked them—liked Mrs. Maitland, Saul Geltman, Belle Sarazen, Jake Dukker. And, he suspected, when he met Maitland’s son, and his mother and sister, he’d like them, too. Feel compassion.

  “They think,” Sergeant Boone had said. But it was more than that. They were spunky, bright, wanting human beings, touching in their hungers and illusions. There was not one he could hate. Not one he could hope would prove to be a killer and deserving of being boxed and nailed.

  His sympathy disturbed him. A cop was not paid to be compassionate. A cop had to see things in black and white. Had to. Explanations and justification were the work of doctors, psychiatrists, sociologists, judges, and juries. They were paid to see the shades of grey, to understand and dole out truth.

  But a cop had to go by Yes or No. Because … well, because there had to be a rock standard, an iron law. A cop went by that and couldn’t allow himself to murmur comfort, pat shoulders, and shake tears from his eyes. This was important, because all those other people—the ruth-givers—they modified the standard, smoothed the rock, melted the law. But if there was no standard at all, if cops surrendered their task, there would be nothing but modifying, smoothing, melting. All sweet reasonableness. Then society would dissolve into a kind of warm mush: no rock, no iron, and who could live in a world like that? Anarchy. Jungle.

  He drew his yellow legal pad to him, put on his heavy reading glasses, began making notes. Things he must do to find the murderer of Victor Maitland.

  It was getting on to midnight when the desk phone rang. The Chief picked it up with his left hand, still scribbling at his notes.

  “Edward X. Delaney here,” he said.

  “Edward, this is Ivar …”

  Deputy Commissioner Thorsen chatted a few moments, asking after the health of Monica and the girls. Then he inquired casually, “How’s Boone making out?”

  “All right,” Delaney said. “I like him.”

  “Glad to hear it. Off the booze, is he?”

  “As far as I know. He’s completely sober when I see him.”

  “Any signs of hangovers?”

  “No. None.” Delaney didn’t appreciate this role; he wasn’t Boone’s keeper, and didn’t relish reporting on the man’s conduct.

  “Any progress, Edward?”

  “On the case? Nothing definite. I’m just learning what went on, and the people involved. It takes time.”

  “I’m not leaning on you, Edward,” Thorsen said hastily. “Take all the time you want. No rush.”

  There was a moment of silence then. Delaney knew what would come next, but refused to give the man any help.

  “Ah … Edward,” Thorsen said hesitantly, “you questioned the Sarazen woman today?”

  “Yes.”

  “She a suspect?”

  “They’re all suspects,” Delaney said coldly.

  “Well, ah, we have a delicate situation there, Edward.”

  “Do we?”

  “The lady has some important friends. And apparently she feels you were a little rough on her.”

  Delaney didn’t reply.

  “Were you rough on her, Edward?”

  “She probably thought so.”

  “Yes, she did. And called a few people to complain. She said …” Thorsen’s voice trailed away.

  “You want me off the case?” Delaney said stonily.

  “Oh God, no,” Thorsen said quickly. “Nothing like that. I ju
st wanted you to be aware of the situation.”

  “I’m aware of it.”

  “And you’ll treat her—”

  “I’ll treat her like everyone else,” Delaney interrupted.

  “My God, Edward, you’re a hard man. I can’t budge you. Listen, if that lady is guilty, I’ll be delighted to see her hung by the heels and skinned alive. I’m not asking you to cover up. I’m just asking that you use a little discretion.”

  “I’ll do things my own way,” Delaney said woodenly. “This is the kind of bullshit that made me retire. I don’t have to take it now.”

  “I know, Edward,” Thorsen sighed. “I know. All right … do it your own way. I’ll handle the flak. Somehow. Anything you need? Cooperation from the Department? Files or background stuff? Maybe another man or two?”

  “Not at the moment, Ivar,” Delaney said, thawing now, grateful. “But thanks for the offer.”

  “Well … keep at it. Give me a call if anything turns up, or if you need anything. Forget what I said—about handling the Sarazen woman with chopsticks.”

  “I already have,” Delaney said.

  “Iron Balls!” Thorsen laughed, and hung up.

  Delaney sat a moment, staring at the dead phone in his hand. Then his eyes rose slowly. Almost against his will, his gaze sought those drawings pinned to the wall. The victim’s final statement. His last words …

  Delaney hung up and, on impulse, looked up at the phone number of Victor Maitland’s Mott Street studio. It was an unlisted number, but had been included in the police reports of the homicide.

  Then he dialed the number. It rang and rang. He listened a long time. But of course there was no answer.

  7

  “DINNER WILL BE AT seven sharp,” Monica Delaney said firmly. “I expect you and Sergeant Boone to be back by then.”

  “We’re just going out of the county, not out of the country,” Chief Delaney said mildly. “We’ll be back long before seven. What are you having?”

  “London broil and new potatoes.”

  “What kind of London broil?” he demanded.