The 1st Deadly Sin (47 page)

He went through the now familiar drill: washing and sterilizing the ice ax, then oiling the exposed steel. He put it away with his other climbing gear in the front hall closet. The policeman’s badge represented a problem. He had tucked Lombard’s driver’s license and Gilbert’s ID card under a stack of handkerchiefs in his top dresser drawer. It was extremely unlikely the cleaning woman, or anyone else, would uncover them. But still…

He wandered through the apartment, looking for a better hiding place. His first idea was to tape the identification to the backs of three of the larger mirrors on the living room wall. But the tape might dry, the gifts fall free, and then…

He finally came back to his bedroom dresser. He pulled the top drawer out and placed it on his bed. There was a shallow recess under the drawer, between the bottom and the runners. All the identification fitted easily into a large white envelope, and this he taped to the bottom of the drawer. If the tape dried, and the envelope dropped, it could only drop into the second drawer. And, while taped, it was a position where he could easily check its security every day, if he wanted to. Or open the envelope flap and look at his gifts.

Then he was home free—weapon cleansed, evidence hidden, all done that reason told him should be done. He even saved the ticket stub for the neighborhood movie. Now was the time for reflection and dreaming, for pondering significance and meaning.

He bathed slowly, scrubbing, then rubbing scented oil onto his wet skin. He stood on the bathroom mat, staring at himself in the full-length mirror, unaccountably, he began to make the gyrations of a strip-tease dancer: hands clasped behind his head, knees slightly bent, pelvis pumping in and out, hips grinding. He became excited by his own mirror image. He became erect, not fully but sufficiently to add to his pleasure. So there he stood, pumping his turgid shaft at the mirror.

Was he mad? he wondered. And, laughing, thought he might very well be.

4

T
HE FOLLOWING MORNING
he was having breakfast—a small glass of apple juice, a bowl of organic cereal with skim milk, a cup of black coffee—when the nine o’clock news came on the kitchen radio and a toneless voice announced the murder of Detective third grade Roger Kope on East 75th Street the previous midnight. Kope had been promoted from uniformed patrolman only two weeks previously. He left a widow and three small children. Deputy Commissioner Broughton, in charge of the investigation, stated several important leads were being followed up, and he hoped to make an important statement on the case shortly.

Daniel Blank put his emptied dishes into the sink, ran hot water into them, went off to work.

When he left his office in the evening, he purchased the afternoon
Post,
but hardly glanced at the headline: “Killer Loose on East Side.” He carried the paper home with him and collected his mail at the lobby desk. He opened envelopes in the elevator: two bills, a magazine subscription offer, and the winter catalogue from Outside Life.

He fixed himself a vodka on the rocks with a squeeze of lime, turned on the television set and sat in the living room, sipping his drink, leafing through the catalogue, waiting for the evening news.

The coverage of Kope’s murder was disappointingly brief. There was a shot of the scene of the crime, a shot of the ambulance moving away, and then the TV reporter said the details of. the death of Detective Kope were very similar to those in the murder of Frank Lombard and Bernard Gilbert, and police believed all three killings were the work of one man. “The investigation is continuing.”

Later that evening Blank walked over to Second Avenue to buy the early morning editions of the
News
and the
Times.
“Mad Killer Strikes Again,” the
News’
headline screamed. The
Times
had a one-column story low on the front page: “Detective Slain on East Side.” He brought the papers home, added them to the afternoon
Post
and settled down with a kind of bored dread to read everything that had been printed on Kope’s death.

The most detailed, the most accurate report, Blank acknowledged, appeared under the byline “Thomas Handry.” Handry, quoting “a high police official who asked that his name not be used,” stated unequivocally that the three murders were committed by the same man, and that the weapon used was “an ax-like tool with an elongated spike.” The other papers identified the weapon as “a small pick or something similar.”

Handry also quoted his anonymous informant in explaining how a police decoy, an experienced officer, could be struck down from behind without apparently being aware of the approach of his attacker or making any effort to defend himself. “It is suggested,” Handry wrote, “the assailant approached from the front, presenting an innocent, smiling appearance to his victim, then, at the moment of passing, turned and struck him down. It is believed by the usually reliable source that the killer carried his weapon concealed under a folded newspaper or under his coat. Although Gilbert died from a frontal attack, the method used in Kope’s murder closely parallels that in the Lombard killing.”

Handry’s report ended by stating that his informant feared there would be additional attacks unless the killer was caught. Another paper spoke of an unprecedented assignment of detectives to the case, and the third paper stated that a curfew in the 251st Precinct was under consideration.

Blank tossed the papers aside. It was disquieting, he admitted, that the term “ax-like tool” had been used in Handry’s report. He had to assume the police knew exactly what the weapon was, but were not releasing the information. He did not believe they could trace the purchase of an ice ax to him; his ax was five years old, and hundreds were sold annually all over the world. But it did indicate he would be wise not to underestimate the challenge he faced, and he wondered what kind of a man this Deputy Commissioner Broughton was who was trying so hard to take him by the neck. Or, if not Broughton, who Handry’s anonymous “high police official” was. That business of approaching from the front, then whirling to strike—who had guessed
that?
There were probably other things known or guessed, and not released to the newspapers—but
what?”

Blank went over his procedures carefully and could find only two obvious weak links. One was his continued possession of the victims’ identification. But, after pondering, he realized that if it ever came to a police search of his apartment, they would already have sufficient evidence to tie him to the murders, and the identification would merely be the final confirmation.

The other problem was more serious: Celia Montfort’s knowledge of what he had done.

5

E
ROTICA, THE SEX
boutique owned by Florence and Samuel Morton was located on upper Madison Avenue, between a gourmet food shop and a 100-year-old store that sold saddles and polo mallets. Erotica’s storefront had been designed by a pop-art enthusiast and consisted of hundreds of polished automobile hubcaps which served as distorting mirrors of the street scene and passing pedestrians.

“It boggles the mind,” Flo nodded.

“It blows the brain,” Sam nodded.

Between them, they had come up with this absolutely marvy idea for decorating their one window for the Christmas shopping season. They had, at great expense, commissioned a display house to create a naked Santa Claus. He had the requisite tasseled red cap and white beard, but otherwise his plump and roseate body was nude except for a small, black patent leather bikini equipped with a plastic codpiece, an item of masculine attire Erotica was attempting to revive in New York, with limited success.

The naked Santa was displayed in the Madison Avenue window for one day. Then Lieutenant Marty Dorfman, Acting Commander of the 251st Precinct, paid a personal visit to Erotica and politely asked the owners to remove the display, citing a number of complaints he had received from local churches, merchants, and outraged citizens. So the bikini-clad Saint Nicholas was moved to the back of the store, the window filled with miscellaneous erotic Christmas gifts, and Flo and Sam decided to inaugurate the extended-hours shopping season with an open house; free Swedish glug for old and new customers and a dazzling buffet that included such exotic items as fried grasshoppers and chocolate-covered ants.

Daniel Blank and Celia Montfort were specifically invited to this feast and asked to return to the Mortons’ apartment later for food and drink of a more substantial nature. They accepted.

The air was overheated—and scented. Two antique Byzantine censers hung suspended in corners; from their pierced shells drifted fumes of musky incense called “Orgasm,” one of Erotica’s best sellers. Customers checked their coats and hats with a dark, exquisite, sullen Japanese girl clad in diaphanous Arabian Nights pajamas beneath which she wore no brassiere—only sheer panties imprinted with small reproductions of Mickey Mouse. Incredibly, her pubic hair was blond.

Celia and Daniel stood to one side, observing the hectic scene, sipping small cups of spiced, steaming glug. The store was crowded with loud-voiced, flush-faced customers, most of them young, all wearing the kinky, trendy fashions of the day. They weren’t clothed; they were costumed. Their laughter was shrill, their movements jerky as they pushed through the store, examining phallic candles, volumes of Aubrey Beardsley prints, leather brassieres, jockstraps fashioned in the shape of a clutching hand.

“They’re so excited,” Daniel Blank said. “The whole world’s excited.”

Celia looked up at him and smiled faintly. Her long black hair, parted in the middle, framed her witch’s face. As usual, she was wearing no makeup, though her eyes seemed shadowed with a bone-deep weariness.

“What are you thinking?” she asked him, and he realized once again how ideas, abstract ideas, aroused her.

“About the world,” he said, looking around the frantic room. “The ruttish world. About people today. How stimulated they all are.”

“Sexually stimulated?”

“That, of course. But in other ways. Politically. Spiritually, I guess. Violence. The new. The terrible hunger for the new, the different, the ‘in thing.’ And what’s in is out in weeks, days. In sex, art, politics, everything. It all seems to be going faster and faster. It wasn’t always like this, was it?”

“No,” she said, “it wasn’t.”

“The in thing,” he repeated. “Why do they call it ‘in’? Penetration?”

Now she looked at him curiously. “Are you drunk?” she asked.

He was surprised. “On two paper cups of Swedish glug?

No,” he laughed, “I am not drunk.”

He touched her cheek with warm fingers. She grabbed his hand, turned her head to kiss his fingertips, then slid his thumb into her wet mouth, tongued it, drew it softly out. He looked swiftly about the room; no one was staring.

“I wish you were my sister,” he said in a low voice.

She was silent a moment, then asked, “Why did you say that?”

“I don’t know. I didn’t think about it. I just said it.”

“Are you tired of sex?” she asked shrewdly.

“What? Oh no. No. Not exactly. It’s just…” He waved at the crowded room. “It’s just that they’re not going to find it this way.”

“Find what?”

“Oh…you know. The answer.”

The evening had that chopped, chaotic tempo that now infected all his hours: life speeding in disconnected scenes, a sharply cut film, images and distortions in an accelerating frenzy: faces, places, bodies, speech and ideas swimming up to the lens, enlarging, then dwindling away, fading. It was difficult to concentrate on any one experience; it was best simply to open himself to sensation, to let it all engulf him.

“Something’s happening to me,” he told her. “I see these people here, and on the street, and at work, and I can’t believe I belong with them. The same race, I mean. They seem to me dogs, or animals in a zoo. Or perhaps I am. But I can’t relate. But if they are human, I am not. And if I am, they are not. I just don’t recognize them. I’m apart from them.”

“You
are
apart from them,” she said softly. “You’ve done something so meaningful that it sets you apart.”

“Oh yes,” he said, laughing happily. “I have, haven’t I? If they only knew…”

“How does it feel?” she asked him. “I mean…knowing? Satisfaction? Pleasure?”

“That, of course,” he nodded, feeling an itch of joy at talking of these things in a crowded, noisy room (he was naked but no one could see). “But mostly a feeling of—of gratification that I’ve been able to accomplish so much.”

“Oh yes, Dan,” she breathed, putting a hand on his arm.

“Am I mad?” he asked. “I’ve been wondering.”

“Is it important?”

“No. Not really.”

“Look at these people,” she gestured. “Are they sane?”

“No,” he said. “Well…maybe. But whether they’re sane or mad, I’m different from them.”

“Of course you are.”

“And different from you,” he added, smiling.

She shivered, a bit, and moved closer to him.

“Do we have to go to the Mortons?” she murmured.

“We don’t have to. I think we should.”

“We could go to your place. Or my place. Our place.”

“Let’s go to the Mortons,” he said, smiling again and feeling it on his face.

They waited until Flo and Sam were ready to leave. Then they all shared a big cab back to the Mortons’ apartment. Flo and Sam gabbled away in loud voices. Daniel Blank sat on the monkey seat, smiled and smiled.

Blanche had prepared a roast duckling garnished with peach halves. And there were small roasted potatoes and a tossed salad of romaine and Italian water cress. She brought the duckling in on a carving board to show it around for their approval before returning it to the kitchen to quarter it.

It looked delicious, they agreed, with its black, crusty skin and gleaming peach juice. And yet, when Daniel Blank’s full plate was put before him, he sat a moment and stared; the food offended him.

He could not say why, but it happened frequently of late. He would go into a familiar restaurant, alone or with Celia, order a dish that he had had before, that he knew he liked, and then, when the food was put before him, he had no appetite and could scarcely toy with it.