Third Deadly Sin

by Lawrence Sanders

  “Maybe Abner will catch the killer.”

  “Maybe,” he said doubtfully. “With a lucky break. But I don’t think he’ll do it on the basis of what he’s got now. It’s just too thin. Also, he’s got another problem: they’re bringing in Lieutenant Martin Slavin to take command of the investigation. Slavin is a little prick. An ambitious conniver who always covers his ass by going strictly by the book. Boone will have his hands full with him.”

  “Why are they bringing in someone over Boone? Hasn’t Abner been doing a good job?”

  “I know the sergeant’s work,” the Chief said, taking a sip of brandy. “He’s a good, thorough detective. I believe that he’s done all that could be done. But they’ve got—what did he tell me?—about twenty-five men working on this thing now, so I guess they feel they need higher rank in command. But I do assure you, Slavin’s not going to break this thing. Unless there’s another homicide and the killer slips up.”

  “You think there will be another one, Edward?”

  He sighed, looked down at his brandy glass. Then he stood, began to pace back and forth past the foot of her bed. She followed him with her eyes.

  “I practically guarantee it,” he said. “It has all the earmarks of a psychopathic repeater. The worst, absolutely the worst kind of homicides to solve. Random killings. Apparently without motive. No connection except chance between victim and killer.”

  “They don’t know each other?”

  “Right. The coming together is accidental. Up to that time they’ve been strangers.”

  Then he explained things to her that he didn’t have to explain to Sergeant Boone.

  “Monica, when I got my detective’s shield, many, many years ago, about seventy-five percent of all homicides in New York were committed by relatives, friends, acquaintances, or associates of the victims.

  “The other homicides, called ‘stranger murders,’ were committed by killers who didn’t know their victims. They might have been felony homicides, committed during a burglary or robbery, or snipings, or—worst of all—just random killing for the pleasure of killing. There’s a German word for it that I don’t remember, but it means death lust, murder for enjoyment.

  “Anyway, in those days, when three-quarters of all homicides were committed by killers who knew their victims, we had a high solution rate. We zeroed in first on the husband, wife, lover, whoever would inherit, a partner who wanted the whole pie, and so forth.

  “But in the last ten years, the percentage of stranger murders has been increasing and the solution rate has been declining. I’ve never seen a statistical correlation, but I’d bet the two opposing curves are almost identical, percentage-wise; as stranger murders increase, the solution rate decreases.

  “Because stranger murders are bitches to break. You’ve got nothing to go on, nowhere to start.”

  “You did,” she said somberly. “You found Bernard’s killer.”

  “I didn’t say it couldn’t be done. I just said it’s very difficult. A lot tougher than a crime of passion or a murder that follows a family fight.”

  “So you think there’s a chance they’ll catch him—the hotel killer?”

  He stopped suddenly, turned to face her.

  “Him?” he said. “After what I told you, you think the murderer is a man?”

  She nodded.

  “Why?” he asked her curiously.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I just can’t conceive of a woman doing things like that.”

  “A short-bladed knife is a woman’s weapon,” he told her. “And the victims obviously weren’t expecting an attack. And the killer seems to have been naked at the time of the assault.”

  “But why?” she cried. “Why would a woman do a thing like that?”

  “Monica, crazies have a logic all their own. It’s not our logic. What they do seems perfectly reasonable and justifiable to them. To us, it’s monstrous and obscene. But to them, it makes sense. Their sense.”

  He came over to sit on the edge of her bed again. They sipped their brandies. He took up her free hand, clasped it in his big paw.

  “I happen to agree with you,” he said. “At this point, knowing only what Sergeant Boone told me, I don’t think it’s a woman either. But you’re going by your instinct and prejudices; I’m going by percentages. There have been many cases of random killings: Son of Sam, Speck, Heirens, Jack the Ripper, the Boston Strangler, the Yorkshire Ripper, Black Dahlia, the Hillside Strangler—all male killers. There have been multiple murders by women—Martha Beck in the Lonely Hearts Case, for instance. But the motive for women is almost always greed. What I’m talking about are random killings with no apparent motive. Only by men, as far as I know.”

  “Could it be a man wearing a long black wig? Dressed like a woman?”

  “Could be,” he said. “There’s so much in this case that has no connection with anything in my experience. It’s like someone came down from outer space and offed those salesmen.”

  “The poor wives,” she said sadly. “And children.”

  “Yes,” he said. He finished his brandy. “The whole thing is a puzzle. A can of worms. I know how Boone feels. So many contradictions. So many loose ends. Finish your drink.”

  Obediently, she drained the last of her brandy, handed him the empty snifter. He took the two glasses into the bathroom, rinsed them, set them in the sink to drain. He turned off the bathroom light. He came back to Monica’s bedside to swoop and kiss her cheek.

  “Sleep well, dear,” he said.

  “After that?” she said. “Thanks a lot.”

  “You wanted to hear,” he reminded her. “Besides, the brandy will help.”

  He got into his own bed, turned off the bedside lamp.

  “Get a good night’s sleep,” Monica muttered drowsily. “I love you.”

  “I love you,” he said, and pulled sheet and blanket up to his chin.

  He went through all the permutations and combinations in his mind: man, woman, prostitute, homosexual, transvestite. Even, he considered wildly, a transsexual. That would be something new.

  He lay awake, wide-eyed, listening. He knew the moment Monica was asleep. She turned onto her side, her breathing slowed, became deeper, each exhalation accompanied by a slight whistle. It didn’t annoy him any more than his own grunts and groans disturbed her.

  He was awake a long time, going over Boone’s account again and again. Not once did he pause to wonder why the investigation interested him, why it obsessed him. He was retired; it was really none of his business.

  If his concern had been questioned, he would have replied stolidly: “Well … two human beings have been killed. That’s not right.”

  He turned to peer at the bedside clock. Almost 2:30 A.M. But he couldn’t let it go till tomorrow; he had to do it now.

  He slid cautiously out of bed, figuring to get his robe and slippers from the closet. He was halfway across the darkened room when:

  “What’s wrong?” came Monica’s startled voice.

  “I’m sorry I woke you up,” he said.

  “Well, I am up,” she said crossly. “Where are you going?”

  “Uh, I thought I’d go downstairs. There’s a call I want to make.”

  “Abner Boone,” she said instantly. “You never give up, do you?”

  He said nothing.

  “Well, you might as well call from here,” she said. “But you’ll wake him up, too.”

  “No, I won’t,” Delaney said with certainty. “He won’t be sleeping.”

  He sat on the edge of his bed, switched on the lamp. They both blinked in the sudden light. He picked up the phone.

  “What’s their number?” he asked.

  She gave it to him. He dialed.

  “Yes?” Boone said, picking up after the first ring. His voice was clogged, throaty.

  “Edward X. Delaney here. I hope I didn’t wake you, sergeant.”

  “No, Chief. I thought I’d pass out, but I can’t get to sleep. My brain is churning.
”

  “Rebecca?”

  “No, sir. She’d sleep through an earthquake.”

  “Sergeant, did you check into the backgrounds of the victims? The personal stuff?”

  “Yes, sir. Sent a man out to Denver and Akron. If you’re wondering about their homosexual records, it’s nil. For both of them. No sheets, no hints, no gossip. Apparently both men were straight.”

  “Yes,” Delaney said, “I should have known you’d look into that. One more thing …”

  Boone waited.

  “You said that after the second homicide, the Crime Scene Unit found two black hairs on the back of an armchair?”

  “That’s correct, sir. And one on the pillow. All three were black nylon.”

  “It’s the two they found on the armchair that interest me. Did they take photographs?”

  “Oh, hell yes. Hundreds of them. And made sketches. To help the cartographer.”

  “Did they photograph those two hairs on the armchair before they picked them up?”

  “I’m sure they did, Chief. With a ruler alongside to show size and position.”

  “Good,” Delaney said. “Now what you do is this: Get that photograph of the exact position of the two hairs on the armchair. Take a man with you from the Lab Services Unit or the Medical Examiner’s office. Go back to the murder scene and find that armchair. Measure carefully from the point where the hairs were found to the seat of the chair. Got that? Assuming the hairs came from the killer, you’ll get a measurement from the back of his head to the base of his spine. From that, the technicians should be able to give you the approximate height of the killer. It won’t be exact, of course; it’ll be a rough approximation. But it’ll be something.”

  There was silence a moment. Then:

  “Goddamn it!” Boone exploded. “Why didn’t I think of that?”

  “You can’t think of everything,” Delaney said.

  “I’m supposed to,” Boone said bitterly. “That’s what they’re paying me for. Thank you, sir.”

  “Good luck, sergeant.”

  When he hung up, he saw Monica looking at him with wonderment.

  “You’re something, you are,” she said.

  “I just wanted to. help him out.”

  “Oh sure.”

  “I really am sorry I woke you up,” he said.

  “Well,” she said, “so it shouldn’t be a total loss …”

  She reached for him.

  3

  ZOE KOHLER HAD READ the autobiography of a playwright who had suffered from mental illness. He had been confined for several years.

  He said it was not true that the insane thought themselves sane. He said that frequently the mad knew themselves to be mad. Either they were unable to fight their affliction, or had no desire to. Because, he wrote, there were pleasures and beauties in madness.

  The phrase “pleasures and beauties” stuck in her mind; she thought of it often. The pleasures of madness. The beauties of madness.

  On the afternoon after her second adventure (that was what Zoe Kohler called them: “adventures”), Everett Pinckney came into her office at the Hotel Granger. He parked his lank form on the edge of her desk. He leaned toward her; she smelled the whiskey.

  “There’s been another one,” he said in a low voice.

  She looked at him, then shook her head.

  “I don’t understand, Mr. Pinckney.”

  “Another murder. A stabbing. This one at the Pierce. Just like that one at the Grand Park last month. You read about that?”

  She nodded.

  “This one was practically identical,” he said. “Same killer.”

  “How awful,” she said, her face twisting with distaste.

  “It looks like another Son of Sam,” he said with some relish.

  She sighed. “I suppose the newspapers will have a field day.”

  “They’re trying to keep the connection out of the papers. For the time being. Not good news for the hotel business. But it’s got to come out, sooner or later.”

  “I suppose so,” she said.

  “They’ll catch him,” he said, getting off her desk. “It’s just a question of time. How are you feeling today?”

  “Much better, thank you.”

  “Glad to hear it.”

  She watched him shamble from her office.

  “Him,” he had said. “They’ll catch him.” They thought it was a man; that was comforting. But what Pinckney had said about the newspapers—that was exciting.

  She looked up the telephone number of The New York Times. It was an easy number to remember. She stopped at the first working phone booth she could find on her way home that night.

  She tried to speak in a deep, masculine voice, and told the Times operator that she wanted to talk to someone about the murder at the Hotel Pierce. There was a clicking as her call was transferred. She waited patiently.

  “City desk,” a man said. “Gardner.”

  “This is about that murder last night at the Hotel Pierce,” she said, trying to growl it out.

  “Yes?”

  “It’s exactly like the one last month at the Grand Park Hotel. The same person did both of them.”

  There was silence for a second or two. Then:

  “Could you give me your name and—”

  She hung up, smiling.

  She recalled, as precisely as she could, her actions of the previous night after she had waved goodbye to Ernest Mittle outside her apartment house door. She concentrated on the areas of risk.

  When she had exited again, the doorman had hardly given her a glance. He would not remember the black-seamed hose, the high-heeled shoes. The cabdriver would never remember the woman he had driven to 72nd Street and Central Park West. And even if he did, what had that to do with a midnight murder at the Hotel Pierce?

  No one in the ladies’ room of the Filmore had seen her don wig and apply makeup. She had left from the hotel exit; the bartender could not have noted the transformation. The driver of the taxi that had taken her to a corner three blocks from the Pierce had hardly looked at her. They had exchanged no conversation.

  The cocktail lounge, El Khatar, had been thronged, and there had been women more flamboyantly dressed than she. There had been another couple in the crowded elevator who had gotten off on the 30th floor. But they had turned away in the opposite direction, talking and laughing. Zoe Kohler didn’t think she and Fred had been noticed.

  Within the room, she had been careful about what she touched. After he was gone (she did not use the word “dead”; he was just gone), she was surprised to see that she was blood-splattered only from the elbows down.

  She had stared at the blood a long time. Her hands and forearms dripping the bright, viscid fluid. She sniffed it. It had an odor. Not hers, but it did smell.

  Then she had gone into the bathroom to wash the crimson stains away. Rinsing and rinsing with water as hot as she could endure. And then letting the hot water run steadily to cleanse the sink and drain while she dried her arms and hands. She went back to the bedroom to dress, not glancing at what lay on the bed.

  Then, returning to the bathroom, she had turned off the water and used the damp towel to wipe the faucet handles, the inside doorknob and later, the white plastic card Fred had tossed atop the bureau near the outside door.

  Before she left, she had removed her wig and makeup, scrubbing her face with the towel. Wig and towel went into her shoulder bag. She took a final look around and decided there was nothing she should have done that she had not.

  The descending elevator was crowded and no one had looked at her: a pale-faced, mousy-haired woman wearing a loose-fitting trenchcoat buttoned up to the chin. Of course no one looked at her; she was Zoe Kohler again, the invisible woman.

  She had walked over to Fifth Avenue and taken a cab downtown to 38th Street and Fifth. She walked from that corner to her apartment house. She felt no fear alone on the street. Her life could have ended at that moment and it would have been worthwhile. T
hat was how she felt.

  Locked and chained inside her own apartment, she had showered (the third time that day). She replaced all her secret things in their secret places. She pushed the damp towel deep into the plastic bag in her garbage can, to be thrown into the incinerator in the morning.

  She hadn’t been aware of her menstrual cramps for hours and hours. But now she began to feel the familiar pains, gripping with increasing intensity. She inserted a tampon and swallowed a Midol, two Anacin, a vitamin B-complex capsule, a vitamin C tablet, and ate half a container of blueberry yogurt.

  Just before she got into bed, she shook a Pulvule 304 from her jar of prescription Tuinal and gulped it down.

  She slept like a baby.

  During the month that followed, Zoe Kohler had the sense of her ordered life whirling apart. She was conscious of an accelerated passage of time. Days flashed, and even weeks seemed condensed, so that Fridays succeeded Mondays, and it was an effort to recall what had happened between.

  Increasingly, the past intruded on the present. She found herself thinking more and more of her marriage, her husband, mother, father, her girlhood. She spent one evening trying to remember the names of friends who had attended her 13th birthday party, and writing them down.

  The party had been a disaster. Partly because several invited guests had not shown up, nor bothered to phone apologies. And partly because her periods had started on that day. She had begun to bleed, and was terrified. She thought it would never stop, and saw herself as an emptied sack of wrinkled white skin.

  Ernest Mittle phoned her at home a week after their meeting. She hadn’t expected him to call, as he had promised—men never did—and it took her a moment to bring him to mind.

  “I hope I’m not disturbing you,” he said.

  “Oh no,” she said. “No.”

  “How are you, Zoe?”

  “Very well, thank you. And you?”

  “Just fine,” he said in his light, boyish voice. “I was hoping that if you didn’t have any plans for tomorrow night, we might have dinner and see a movie, or something.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said quickly. “I do have plans.”

  He said he was disappointed and would try again. They chatted awkwardly for a few minutes and then hung up. She stared at the dead, black phone.