The 1st Deadly Sin (32 page)

“Occam was a fourteenth century philosopher,” he reported. “His philosophy was ‘nominalism,’ which I don’t understand except that I think he meant there are no universal truths. Anyway, he was famous for his hard-headed approach to problem solving. He believed in shaving away all extraneous details. That’s why they call his axiom ‘Occam’s Razor.’ He said that when there are several possible solutions, the right one is probably the most obvious. In other words, you should eliminate all the unnecessary facts.”

“But you’ve been doing that all your life, Edward.”

“I guess so,” he laughed, “but I call it ‘Cut out the crap.’ Anyway, it’s nice to know a fourteenth century philosopher agrees with me. I wish I knew more about philosophy and could understand it.”

“Does it really bother you that you can’t?”

“Nooo…it doesn’t bother me, but it makes me realize the limitations of my intelligence. I just can’t think in abstractions. You know I tried to learn to play chess three times and finally gave up.”

“Edward, you’re more interested in people than things, or ideas. You have a very good intelligence for people.”

Now, in the hospital room, when Barbara mentioned Occam’s Razor, he knew what she meant and smiled ruefully.

“Well,” he said, rubbing his forehead, “I wonder if old Occam ever tried solving an irrational problem by rational means. I wonder if he wouldn’t begin to doubt the value of logic and deductive reasoning when you’re dealing with—” But then the door to the hospital room swung open, and Dr. Louis Bernardi glided in, olive skin gleaming, his little eyes glittering. A stethoscope was draped about his neck.

He offered Delaney a limp hand, and with the forefinger of his left hand lovingly caressed his ridiculous stripe of a mustache.

“Captain,” he murmured. “And you, dear lady,” he inquired in a louder voice, “how are we feeling today?”

Barbara began to explain that her feet continued to be swollen uncomfortably, how the rash had reappeared on the insides of her thighs, that the attack of nausea had seemed to worsen with the first injection of the antibiotic.

To each complaint Bernardi smiled, said, “Yes, yes,” or “That doesn’t bother me.”

Why should it bother you, Delaney thought angrily. It’s not happening to you, you little prick.

Meanwhile the doctor was taking her pulse, listening to her heart, gently pushing up eyelids to peer into her staring eyes.

“You’re making a fine recovery from surgery,” he assured her. “And they tell me your appetite is improving. I am so very happy, dear lady.”

“When do you think—” Delaney began, but the doctor held up a soft hand.

“Patience,” he said. “You must have patience. And I must have patients. He!”

Delaney turned away in disgust, not understanding how Barbara could trust this simpering popinjay.

Bernardi murmured a few more words, patted Barbara’s hand, smiling his oleaginous smile, then turned to go. He was almost at the door when Delaney saw he was leaving.

“Doctor,” he called, “I want to talk to you a minute.” He said to Barbara, “Be right back, dear.”

In the hall, the door of the room closed, he faced Bernardi and looked at him stonily. “Well?” he demanded.

The doctor spread his hands in that familiar bland gesture that said nothing. “What can I tell you? You can see for yourself. The infection still persists. That damned Proteus. We are working our way through the full spectrum of antibiotics. It takes time.”

“There’s something else.”

“Oh? What is that?”

“Recently my wife has been exhibiting signs of—well, signs of irrationality. She gets a curious stare, she seems suddenly withdrawn, and she says things that don’t make too much sense.”

“What kind of things?”

“Well, a little while ago she wanted some children's hooks. I mean books she owned and read when she was a child. She’s not under sedation, is she?”

“Not now, ho.”

“Pain-killers ? Sleeping pills?”

“No. We are trying to avoid any possibility of masking or affecting the strength of the antibiotics. Captain, this does not worry me. Your wife has undergone major surgery. She is under medication. The fever is, admittedly, weakening her. It is understandable that she might have brief periods of—oh, call it wool-gathering. He! I suggest you humor her insofar as that is possible. Her pulse is steady and her heart is strong.”

“As strong as it was?”

Bernardi looked at him without expression. “Captain,” he said softly—and Delaney knew exactly what was coming—“your wife is doing as well as can be expected.”

He nodded, turned, glided away, graceful as a ballet dancer. Delaney was left standing alone, impotent fury hot in his throat, convinced the man knew something, or suspected something, and would not put it into words. He seemed blocked and thwarted on all sides: in his work, in his personal life. What was it he had said to Thomas Handry about a divine order in the universe? Now order seemed slipping away, slyly, and he was defeated by a maniacal killer and unseen beasts feeding on his wife’s flesh.

From the man on the beat to the police commissioner—all cops knew what to expect when the moon was full: sleepwalkers, women who heard voices, men claiming they were being bombarded by electronic beams from a neighbor’s apartment, end-of-the-world nuts, people stumbling naked down the midnight streets, urinating as they ran.

Now Delaney, brooding on war, crime, senseless violence, cruel sickness, brutality, terror, and the slick, honeyed words of a self-satisfied physician, wondered if this was not The Age of the Full Moon, with order gone from the world and irrationality triumphant.

He straightened, set his features into a smile, reentered his wife’s hospital room.

“I suddenly realized why solving the Lombard killing is so important to me,” he told her. “It happened in the Two-five-one Precinct. That’s my world.”

“Occam’s Razor,” she nodded.

Later, he returned home and Mary fixed him a baked ham sandwich and brought that and a bottle of cold beer into his study. He propped the telephone book open on his desk, and as he ate he called second-hand bookstores, asking for original editions of the Honey Bunch books, the illustrated ones.

Everyone he called seemed to know immediately what he wanted: the Grossett & Dunlap editions published in the early 1920s. The author was Helen Louise Thomdyke. But no one had any copies. One bookseller took his name and address and promised to try to locate them. Another suggested he try the chic “antique boutiques” on upper Second and Third Avenues, shops that specialized in nostalgic Americana,

Curiously, this ridiculous task seemed to calm him, and by the time he had finished his calls and his lunch, he was determined to get back to work, to work steadily and unquestioningly, just doing.

He went to his book shelves and took down every volume he owned dealing, even in peripheral fashion, with the histories, analyses and detection of mass murderers. The stack he put on the table alongside his club chair was not high; literature on the subject was not extensive. He sat down heavily, put on his thick, horn-rimmed reading glasses, and began to plow through the books, skipping and skimming as much as he could of material that had no application to the Lombard case.

He read about Gille de Raix, Verdoux, Jack the Ripper and in more recent times, Whitman, Speck, Unruh, the Boston strangler, Panzram, Manson, the boy in Chicago who wrote with the victim’s lipstick on her bathroom mirror, “Stop me before I kill more.” It was a sad, sad chronicle of human aberration, and the saddest thing of all was the feeling he got of killer as victim, dupe of his own agonizing lust or chaotic dreams.

But there was no pattern—at least none he could discern. Each mass killer, of tens, hundreds, reputedly thousands, was an individual and had apparently acted from unique motives. If there was any pattern it existed solely in each man: the
modus operandi
remained identical, the weapon the same. And in almost every case, the period between killings became progressively shorter. The killer was caught up in a crescendo: more! more! faster! faster!

One other odd fact: the mass killer was invariably male.

There were a few isolated cases of women who had killed several times; the Ohio Pig Woman was one, the Beck-Fernandez case involved another. But the few female mass murderers seemed motivated by desire for financial gain. The males were driven by wild longings, insane furies, mad passions.

The light faded; he switched on the reading lamp. Mary stopped by to say good-night, and he followed her into the hall to double-lock and chain the front door behind her. He returned to his reading, still trying to find a pattern, a repeated cause-effect, searching for the percentages.

It was almost five in the evening when the front doorbell chimed. He put aside the article he was reading—a fascinating analysis of Hitler as a criminal rather than a political leader—and went out into the hallway again. He switched on the stoop light, peered out the etched glass panel alongside the door. Christopher Langley was standing there, a neat white shopping bag in one hand. Delaney unlocked the door.

“Captain!” Langley cried anxiously. “I hope I’m not disturbing you? But I didn’t want to call, and since it was on my way home, I thought I’d take the chance and—”

“You’re not disturbing me. Come in, come in.”

“Gee, what a marvelous house!”

“Old, but comfortable.”

They went into the lighted study.

“Captain, I’ve got—”

“Wait, just a minute. Please, let me get you a drink. Anything?”

“Sherry?”

“At the moment, I’m sorry to say, no. But I have some dry vermouth. Will that do?”

“Oh, that’s jim-dandy. No ice. Just a small glass, please.” Delaney went over to his modest liquor cabinet, poured Langley a glass of vermouth, took a rye for himself. He handed Langley his wine, got him settled in the leather club chair. He retreated a few steps out of the circle of light cast by the reading lamp and stood in the gloom.

“Your health, sir.”

“And yours. And your wife’s.”

“Thank you.”

They both sipped.

“Well,” Delaney said, “how did you make out?”

“Oh, Captain, I was a fool,
such
a fool! I didn’t do the obvious thing, the thing I should have done in the first place.”

“I know,” Delaney smiled, thinking of Occam’s Razor again. “I’ve done that many times. What happened?”

“Well, as I told you at the hospital, I had gone through the Yellow Pages and made a list of hobby shops in the midtown area, places that might sell a rock hound’s hammer with a tapered pick. The Widow Zimmerman and I had lunch—I had stuffed sole: marvelous—and then we started walking around. We covered six different stores, and none of them carried rock hammers. Some of them didn’t even know what I was talking about. I could tell Myra was getting tired, so I put her in a cab and sent her home. She is preparing dinner for me tonight. By the by, she’s an awful cook. I thought I’d try a few more stores before calling it a day. The next one on my list was Abercrombie & Fitch. And of course they carried a rock hound’s hammer. It was so obvious! It’s the largest store of its kind in the city, and I should have tried them first. That’s why I say I was a fool. Anyway, here it is.”

He leaned over, pulled the tool from his white shopping bag, handed it to Captain Delaney.

The hammer was still in its vacuum-packed plastic coating, and the cardboard backing stated it was a “prospector’s ax recommended for rock collectors and archeologists.” Like the bricklayers’ hammer, it had a wood handle and steel head. One side of the head was a square hammer. The other side was a pick, about four inches long. It started out as a square, then tapered to a sharp point. The tool came complete with a leather holster, enabling it to be worn on a belt. The whole thing was about as long as a hatchet: a one-handed implement.

“Notice the taper of the pick,” Langley pointed out. “It comes to a sharp point, but still the pick itself does not curve downward. The upper surface curves, but the lower surface is almost horizontal, at right angles to the handle. And, of course, it has a wooden handle. But still, it’s closer to what we’re looking for—don’t you think?”

“No doubt about it,” Delaney said definitely. “If that pick had a downward curve, I’d say this is it. May I take off the plastic covering?”

“Of course.”

“You’re spending a lot of money.”

“Nonsense.”

Delaney stripped off the clear plastic covering and hefted the ax in his hand.

“This is almost it,” he nodded. “A tapered spike coming to a sharp point. About an inch across at the base of the pick. And with enough weight to crush a man’s skull. Easily. Maybe this really is it. I’d like to show it to the police surgeon who did the Lombard autopsy.”

“No, no,” Christopher Langley protested. “I haven't told you the whole story. That’s why I stopped by tonight. I bought this in the camping department, and I was on my way out to the elevators. I passed through a section where they sell skiing and mountain climbing gear. You know, rucksacks and crampons and pitons and things like that. And there, hanging on the wall, was something very interesting. It was an implement I’ve never seen before. It was about three feet long, a two-handed tool. I ruled it out immediately as our weapon: too cumbersome to conceal. And the handle was wood. At the butt end was a sharp steel spike, about three inches long, fitted into the handle. But it was the head that interested me. It was apparently chrome-plated steel. On one side was a kind of miniature mattock coming to a sharp cutting edge, a chisel edge. And the other side was exactly what we’re looking for! It was a spike, a pick, about four or five inches long. It started out from the head as a square, about an inch on each side. Then it was formed into a triangle with a sharp edge on top and the base an inch across. Then the whole thing tapered, and as it thinned, it curved downward. Captain,
the whole pick curved downward
, top and bottom! It came to a sharp point, so sharp in fact that the tip was covered with a little rubber sleeve to prevent damage when the implement wasn’t being used. I removed the rubber protector, and the underside of the tip had four little saw teeth. It’s serrated, for cutting. I finally got a clerk and asked him what this amazing tool was called. He said it’s an ice ax, I asked him what it was used for, and he—”