The Fourth Deadly Sin (8 page)

He returned to the study and stared at the stack of Ellerbee file folders.

He had a disturbing bunch that this was going to be a “loose-ends case.”

That’s what he called investigations in which nothing was certain, nothing could be pinned down. A hundred suspects, a hundred alibis, and no one could say yes or no.

You had to live with that confusion and, if you were lucky, discard the meaningless and zero in on the significant. But how to tell one from the other? False trails and time wasted chasing leads that dribbled away. Meanwhile, Thorsen was sweating to have a murder cleaned up, neat and clean, by the holidays. So his man could be promoted.

Two sets of unidentified footprints and two blows to the victim’s eyes. Was there any meaning in that? Or in Ellerbee telling his wife he had scheduled a late patient, presumably meaning someone after 6:00 P.m. But he had died at approximately nine o’clock. Would he have waited that long for a late patient? Someone who would arrive, say, at 8:00 P.m.

No signs of forced entry. So Ellerbee buzzed someone in, someone he was expecting. One person or two? And why leave that street door open when they left?

“The butler did it,” Delaney said aloud, and then pulled his yellow legal pad toward him, put on his reading glasses, and began making notes on how much he didn’t know. It was a long, depressing list. He stared at it and had an uneasy feeling that he might be missing the obvious.

He remembered a case he had worked years ago. There had been a string of armed robberies on Amsterdam Avenue; six small stores had been hit in a period of two months. Apparently the same cowboy was pulling all of them-a young punk with a Fu Manchu mustache, waving a nickel-plated pistol.

One of the six places allegedly robbed at gunpoint was a mom-and-pop grocery storenear78th Street. The owners lived in a rear apartment. The old lady opened the store every morning at 7:30. Her husband, who had a weakness for slivovitz, usually joined her behind the counter a half-hour or hour later.

On this particular morning, the old man said, his wife had gone into the store to open up as usual. He was dressing when he heard a gunshot, rushed out, and found her lying behind the counter. The cash register was open, he said, and about thirty dollars’ worth of bills and coin were gone.

The old lady was dead, hit in the chest with what turned out to be a .38 slug. Delaney and his partner, a Detective second grade named Loren Pierce, chalked it up to the Fu Manchu punk with the shiny pistol. They couldn’t stake out every little shop on Amsterdam Avenue, but they haunted the neighborhood, spending a lot of their off-hours walking the streets and eyeballing every guy with a mustache.

They finally got lucky. The robber tried to rip off a deli, not knowing the owner’s son was on his knees, out of sight behind a pile of cartons, putting stock on the shelves. The son rose up and hit Fu Manchu over the head with a five-pound canned ham. That was the end of that crime wave.

It turned out the punk was snorting coke and robbing to support a $500-a-day habit. Even more interesting, his nickel-plated weapon was a .22, the barrel so dirty it would have blown his hand off if he had ever fired it.

Detectives Delaney and Pierce looked at each other and cursed. Then they went back to the mom-and-pop grocery store, but only after they had checked and discovered that Pop had a permit to keep a .38 handgun in the store. They leaned on him and he caved almost immediately.

“She was always nagging at me,” he complained.

That was what Delaney meant when he worried about missing the obvious. He and Pierce should have checked immediately to see if the old man had a gun.

It never hurt to get the simple, evident things out of the way first. It was a mistake to think all criminals were great brains; most of them were stupes.

He pondered all the known facts in the Ellerbee homicide and couldn’t see anything simple and obvious that he had missed. He thought the case probably hinged on the character of the dead man and his relationship with his patients.

He reflected awhile and admitted he had an irrational contempt for people who sought aid for emotional problems. He would never do it; he was convinced of that. The death of Barbara, his first wife, had left him numb for a long time. But he had hulled his way out of that funk-by himself.

Still, he had no hesitation in seeking help for physical ills.

A virus, a twinge of the liver, a skin lesion that wouldn’t heal-and off he went to consult a physician. So why this disdain for people who took their inner torments to a trained practitioner?

Because, Delaney.supposed, there was an element of fear in his prejudice. Psychologists and psychiatrists were dealing with something you couldn’t see.

There was a mystery there, and dread. It was like taking your brain to a witch doctor.

Still, Delaney knew that if he was going to get anywhere on the Ellerbee case he’d have to cultivate and evince sympathy for those who fled to the witch doctor.

He left the house early, deciding to walk to the Ellerbees’ townhouse to meet Abner Boone. It was a dull day with a cloud cover as rough as an elephant hide. The air smelled of snow, and a hard northwest wind made him grab for his homburg more than once.

On impulse, he stopped in at a First Avenue hardware store. All the clerks were busy, for which he was thankful. He found a display of hammers and picked up a ball peen. He hefted it in his hand, swinging it gently in a downward chop.

So many useful tools made lethal weapons. He wondered which came first. If he had to guess, he’d say weapons evolved into tools.

That shiny round knob could puncture a man’s skull if swung with sufficient force-no doubt about that. A man could do it easily, but then so could a woman if she were strong and determined. He replaced the hammer in the display, having learned absolutely nothing.

Boone was waiting for him across the street from the townhouse. He was huddling in his parka, hands in his pockets, shoulders hunched.

“That wind’s a bitch,” he observed. “My ears feel like tin.”

“I feel the cold in my feet,” Delaney said. “An old cop’s complaint. The feet are the first to go. Did you talk to Suarez?”

“Yes, sir, I did. On the phone. He was tied up with a million other things.”

“I imagine.”

“He sounds like a patient man. Very polite. Said to thank you for keeping in touch, and he’s grateful for what we’ve done so far.”

“What about Parnell?”

“He’ll get him going on the financial reports immediately. I think he was a little embarrassed that he hadn’t thought of it himself.”

“He’s got enough to think about,” Delaney said absently, staring across the street. “That’s the place-the gray stone building?”

“That’s the one, sir.”

“Smaller than I thought it would be. Let’s wander around a little first.”

They walked over to East End Avenue, inspecting buildings on both sides of 84th Street. The block contained a mix of apartment houses with marbled lobbies, crumbling brownstones, a school, smart townhouses, dilapidated tenements, and a few commercial establishments on the avenue corners.

They looked at the East River, turned, and walked back to York.

“Plenty of areaways,” Boone observed. “Open lobbies and vestibules with the outer door unlocked. The perp could have gone into any of them to get out of the rain.”

“Could have,” Delaney agreed. “But then how did he get into the Ellerbees’ building? No signs of forced entry. What I’m wondering about is what the killer did afterward. Walk away in the rain, leaving the front door open?

Or did the killer have a car parked nearby? Or maybe stroll over to York or East End and take a cab? Both avenues are two-way.”

“My God, sir,” the Sergeant said, “you’re not thinking of checking taxi trip-sheets for that night, are you? What a job!”

“We won’t do it right now, but it may become necessary.

Besides, there couldn’t have been so many cabs working that Friday night. It wasn’t just raining; it was a flood. Well, this street isn’t going to tell us anything; let’s go talk to the widow; it’s almost six.”

The outer door of the Ellerbee townhouse was unlocked, leading to a lighted vestibule with mailboxes and a bell plate of polished brass. Boone tried the inner door.

“Locked,” he reported. “This is the inner door Doctor Samuelson found open when he arrived.”

“Fine door,” Delaney said. “Bleached oak with beveled glass. You can ring now, Sergeant.”

Boone pressed the button alongside the neatly printed nameplate: DR. DIANE ELLERBEE. The female voice that answered was unexpectedly loud:

“Who is it?”

“Sergeant Abner Boone, New York Police Department. I spoke to you earlier today.”

The buzzer sounded and they pushed in. They stood a brief moment in the entrance way. Delaney tried the door of the Piedmont Gallery. It was locked.

They looked about curiously. The hall and stairway were heavily carpeted. Illumination came from a small crystal chandelier hung from a high ceiling.

“Very nice,” Delaney said. “And look at that banister.

Someone did a great restoration job. Well, let’s go up. Sergeant, you do the talking.”

“Don’t let me miss anything,” Boone said anxiously.

Delaney grunted.

The woman who greeted them at an opened door on the second floor was tall, stiff. Braided flaxen hair, coiled atop her head, made her appear even taller.

A Valkyrie, was Delaney’s initial reaction.

“May I see your identification, please?” she said crisply.

“Of course,” Boone said, and handed over his case with shield and ID card.

She inspected both closely, returned the folder, then turned to Delaney.

“And who are you?” she demanded.

He was not put off by her loud, assertive voice. In fact, he admired her caution; most people would have accepted Boone’s credentials and not questioned anyone accompanying him.

“Edward X. Delaney, ma’am,” he said in a quiet voice. “I am a civilian consultant assisting the New York Police Department in the investigation of your husband’s death. If you have any questions about my presence here-any doubts at all-I suggest you telephone First Deputy Commissioner Ivar Thorsen or Acting Chief of Detectives Michael Ramon Suarez.

Both will vouch for me. Sergeant Boone and I can wait out here in the hall while you make the call.”

She stared at him fixedly. Then: “No,” she said, “that won’t be necessary; I believe you. It’s just that since -since it happened, I’ve been extra careful,”

“Very wise,” Delaney said.

They stepped into the receptionist’s office, and both men noted that Dr. Diane Ellerbee double-locked and chained the door behind them.

“Ma’am,” Boone said, “is the floor plan of this office the same as-uh, the one upstairs?”

“You haven’t seen it?” she asked, surprised. “Yes, my husband’s and my office are identical. Not in decorations or furnishings, of course, but the layout of the rooms is the same.”

She ushered them into her private office, leaving open the connecting door to the receptionist’s office. She got them seated in two cretonne-covered armchairs with low backs.

“Not too comfortable, are they?” she said-the first time she had smiled: a shadow of a smile. “Deliberately so. I don’t want my young patients nodding off. Those chairs keep them twisting and shifting. I think it’s productive.”

“Doctor Ellerbee,” Boone said solemnly, leaning forward, “I’d like to express the condolences of Mr. Delaney and myself on the tragic death of your husband. From all accounts he was a remarkable man. We sympathize with you on your loss.”

“Thank you,” she said, sitting behind her desk like a queen. “I appreciate your sympathy. I would appreciate even more your finding the person who killed my husband.”

During this exchange, Delaney had been examining the office, trying not to make his inspection too obvious.

The room seemed to him excessively neat, almost to the point of sterility. Walls were painted a cream color, the carpet a light beige. There was one ficus tree (which looked artificial) in a rattan basket. The only wall decorations were two framed enlargements of Rorschach blots that looked as abstract as Japanese calligraphy.

“Both of us,” Boone continued, “have read your statement to the investigating officers several times. We don’t want to ask you to go over it again. But I would like to say that occasionally, after a shocking event like this, witnesses recall additional details days or even months later. If you are able to add anything to your statement, it would help if you’d contact us immediately.”

“I certainly hope it’s not going to take months to find my husband’s killer,” she said sharply.

They looked at her expressionlessly, and she gave a short cough of laughter without mirth.

“I know I’ve been a pain in the ass to the police,” she said.

And so has Henry-my father-in-law, Henry Ellerbee. But I have not been able to restrain my anger. All my professional life I have been counseling patients on how to cope with the injustices of this world. But now that they have struck me, I find it difficult to endure. Perhaps this experience will make me a better therapist. But I must tell you in all honesty that at the moment I feel nothing but rage and a desire for vengeance -emotions I have never felt before and which I seem unable to control.”

“That’s very understandable, ma’am,” Boone said. “Believe me, we’re just as anxious as you to identify the killer.

That’s why we asked for this meeting, hoping we might learn something from you that will aid our investigation. First of all, would it hurt too much to talk about your husband?”

“No,” she said decisively. “I’ll be thinking about Simon and talking about Simon for the rest of my life.”

“What kind of a man was he?”

“A very superior human being. Kind, gentle, with a marvelous sympathy for other people’s unhappiness. I think everyone in the profession who knew him or met him recognized how gifted he was. In addition to that, he had a first-class mind. He could get to the cause of a psychiatric problem so fast that many of his associates called it instinct.”

As she spoke, Delaney, while listening, observed her closely. Ivar Thorsen and Monica had been right: Diane Ellerbee was a regal beauty.