The 1st Deadly Sin (55 page)

He awoke the next morning, and the problem still existed, gnawing at his memory. But now it was closer; it was something Monica had said at their luncheon. He tried to remember their conversation in every detail: she had talked about her geraniums, he had talked about his ivy; she had talked about her children, he had talked about Barbara. Then Varro tried to pick up the check, and he, Delaney, told her about the break-in at the restaurant. But what the hell did all that have to do with the price of eggs in China? He shook his head disgustedly and went in to shave.

He spent the morning tracking down the extortionist, the last man of the six in Monica Gilbert’s file with a record of even mildly violent crime. Delaney finally found him pressing pants in a little tailor shop on Second Avenue. The extortionist was barely five feet tall, at least 55 and 175 lbs., pasty-faced, with trembling hands and watery eyes. What in God’s name did he ever extort? Delaney muttered something about “mistaken identity” and departed as fast as he could, leaving the fat little man in a paroxysm of trembling and watering.

He went directly to the hospital, helped feed Barbara her noon meal, and then read to her for almost an hour from “Honey Bunch: Her First Little Garden.” Strangely, the reading soothed him as much as it did her, and when he returned home he was in a somber but not depressed mood—a mood to work steadily without questioning the why’s or wherefore’s.

He spent an hour on his personal affairs: checks, investments, bank balances, tax estimates, charitable contributions. He cleaned up the month’s accumulated shit, paid what he had to pay, wrote a letter to his accountant, made out a deposit for his savings account and a withdrawal against his checking account for current expenses.

Envelopes were sealed, stamped, and put on the hall table where he’d be sure to see them and pick them up for mailing the next time he went out. Then he returned to the study, drew the long legal pad toward him, and began listing his options.

1.    He could begin personally investigating
every
name in Monica’s card file. He estimated there were about 155.

2.    He could wait for Christopher Langley’s report, and then contact, by mail or phone, every retail outlet for the West German ice ax in the U.S.

3.    He could wait for Calvin Case’s file of everyone in the 251st Precinct who had bought any kind of mountaineering equipment whatsoever from Outside Life and that other store that had supplied a mailing list, and then he could ask Monica to double-check her file to make certain she had a card for every customer.

4.    He could go back to the store that refused to volunteer sales checks and mailing list, and he could lean on them. If that didn’t work, he could ask Thorsen what the chances were for a search warrant.

5.    He could recheck his own investigations of the nine ice ax purchases and the six men in the file with a record of violent crime.

6.    He could finally get to his early idea of determining if there was a magazine for mountain climbers and he could borrow their subscription list; if there was a club or society of mountain climbers and he could borrow their membership list; and if it was possible to check the local library on residents of the 251st Precinct who had withdrawn books on mountaineering.

7.    If it came to it, he would personally check out every goddamn name of every goddamn New Yorker on the goddamn Outside Life mailing list. There were probably about 10,000 goddamn New Yorkers included, and he’d hunt down every goddamn one of them.

But he was just blathering, and he knew it. If he was commanding the 500 detectives in Operation Lombard he could do it, but not by himself in much less than five years. How many murder victims would there be by then? Oh?…probably not more than a thousand or so.

But all this was cheesy thinking. One thing was bothering him, and he knew what it was. When Monica called him to report that one of the ice ax purchasers in Calvin Case’s file hadn’t been included on her Outside Life mailing list, he had laughed it off as “human error.” No one is perfect. People do make mistakes, errors of commission or omission. Quite innocently, of course.

What if Calvin Case, late at night and weary, flipped by the sales check of an ice ax purchaser?

What if Christopher Langley had missed a store in the New York area that sold axes?

What if Monica Gilbert had somehow skipped a record of violent crime on one of the computer reports she noted on her file cards?

And what if he, Captain Edward X. Delaney, had the solution to the whole fucking mess right under his big, beaky nose and couldn’t see it because he was stupid, stupid, stupid?

Human errors. And professionals were just as prone to them as Delaney’s amateurs. That was why Chief Pauley sent different men back to check the same facts, why he repeated interrogations twice, sometimes three times. My God, even computers weren’t perfect. But was there anything he could do about it? No.

So the Captain read over his list of options again and tossed it aside. A lot of shit. He called Monica Gilbert.

“Monica? Edward. Am I disturbing you?”

“Oh no.”

“Do you have a few minutes?”

“Do you want to come over?”

“Oh no. I just want to talk to you. About our lunch yesterday. You said something, and I can’t remember what it was. I have a feeling it’s important, and it’s been nagging at me, and I can’t for the life of me remember it.”

“What was it?”

He broke up: a great blast of raucous laughter. Finally he spluttered, “If I knew, I wouldn’t be calling, would I? What did we talk about?”

She wasn’t offended by his laughter. “Talk about?” she said. “Let’s see…I told you about my window boxes, and you told me about your backyard. And then you spoke about your wife’s illness, and then we talked about my girls. Going out, the manager tried to pick up the check, and you wouldn’t let him. On the way home you told me about the assistant chef who was robbing him.”

“No, no,” he said impatiently. “It must have been something to do with the case. Did we discuss the case while we were eating?”

“Nooo…” she said doubtfully. “After we finished coffee you said we’d come back to my place and you’d go over the cards. Oh yes. You asked if I had finished entering all the reports on the cards, and I said I had.”

“And that’s all?”

“Yes. Edward, what is this—No, wait a minute. I was teasing you. I said something about the records from the computers just showing unsuccessful criminals, because if they were good at their jobs, they wouldn’t have any record, and you laughed and said that was so.”

He was silent a moment.

“Monica,” he said finally.

“Yes, Edward?”

“I love you,” he said, laughing and keeping it light.

' “You mean
that's
what you wanted?”

“That’s
exactly
what I wanted.”

His erratic memory flashed back now, and he recalled talking to Detective Lieutenant Jeri Fernandez on the steps leading up to the second floor of the precinct house. That was when they were breaking up the precinct detective squads.

“What did you get?” Delaney had asked.

“I drew a Safe, Loft, and Truck Division in midtown,” Fernandez had said disgustedly.

Now Delaney called Police Information, identified himself, told the operator what he wanted: the telephone number of the new Safe, Loft and Truck Division in midtown Manhattan. He was shunted twice more—it took almost five minutes—but eventually he got the number and, carefully crossing his fingers, dialed and asked for Lieutenant Fernandez. His luck was in; the detective picked up the phone after eight rings. “Lieutenant Fernandez.”

“Captain Edward X. Delaney here.”

There was a second of silence, then a jubilant, “Captain! Jesus Christ! This is great! How the hell are you, Captain?”

“Just fine, lieutenant. And you?”

“Up to my ears in shit. Captain, this new system just ain’t working. I can tell you. It’s a lot of crap. You think I know what’s going on? I don’ know what’s going on. No one knows what’s going on. We got guys in here from every precinct in town. They set us all down here, and we’re supposed to know all about the garment business. Pilferage, hijacking, fraud, arson, safecracking, the mob—the whole bit. Captain, it’s wicked. I tell you, it’s
wicked
/”

“Take it easy,” Delaney soothed. “Give it a little time. Maybe it’ll work out.”

“Work out my ass,” Fernandez shouted. “Yesterday two of my boys caught a spade taking packages out of the back of a U.S. Mail parcel post truck. Can you imagine that? In broad daylight. It’s parked at Thirty-fourth and Madison, and this nut is calmly dragging out two heavy packages and strolling off with them. The U.S. Mail!”

“Lieutenant,” Delaney said patiently, “the reason I called, I need some help from you.”

“Help?” Fernandez cried. “Jesus Christ, Captain, you name it you got it. You know that. What is it?”

“I remember your telling me, just before the precinct squad was broken up, that you had been working on your open files and sending them to the new detective districts, depending on the nature of the crime.”

“That’s right, Captain. Took us weeks to get cleaned out.”

“Well, what about the garbage? You know—the beef sheets, reports on squeals, tips, diaries, and so forth?”

“All the shit? Most of it was thrung out. What could we do with it? We was sent all over the city, and maybe only one or two guys would be working in the Two-five-one. It was all past history anyway—right? So I told the boys to trash the whole lot and—”

“Well, thanks very much,” Delaney said heavily. “I guess that—”

“—except for the last year,” Fernandez kept talking, ignoring the Captain’s interruption. “I figured the new stuff might mean something to somebody, so we kept the paper that came in the last year, but everything else was thrung out.”

“Oh?” Delaney said, still alive. “What did you do with it?”

“It’s down in the basement of the precinct house. You know when you go down the stairs and the locker room is off to your right and the detention cells on your left? Well, you go past the cells and past the drunk tank, then turn right. There’s this hallway that leads to a flight of stairs and the back door.”

“Yes, I remember that. We always closed off that hallway during inspections.”

“Right. Well, along that hallway is the broom closet where they keep mops and pails and all that shit, and then farther on toward the back door there’s this little storage room with a lot of crap in it. I think it used to be a torture chamber in the old days.”

“Yes,” Delaney laughed. “Probably was.”

“Sure, Captain. The walls are thick and that room’s got no windows, so who could hear the screams? Who knows how many crimes got solved in there—right? Anyways, that’s where we dumped all the garbage files. But just for the last year. That any help?”

“A lot of help. Thank you very much, lieutenant.”

“My pleasure, Captain. Listen, can I ask you a favor now?”

“Of course.”

“It’s a one-word favor: HELP! Captain, you got influence and a good rep. Get me out of here, will you? I’m dying here. I don’t like the spot and I don’t like the guys I’m with. I shuffle papers around all day like some kind of Manchurian idiot, and you think I know what I’m doing? I don’ know my ass from my elbow. I want to get out on the street again. The street I know. Can you work it, Captain?”

“What do you want?”

“Assault-Homicide or Burglary,” Fernandez said promptly. “I’ll even take Narcotics. I know I can’t hope for Vice; I ain’t pretty enough.”

“Well…” Delaney said slowly, “I can’t promise you anything, but let me see what I can do. Maybe I can work something.”

“That’s good enough for me,” Fernandez said cheerfully. “Many thanks, Captain.”

“Thank
you
, lieutenant.”

He hung up and stared at the telephone, thinking of what Fernandez had told him. It was a long shot, of course, but it shouldn’t take more than a day, and it was better than resigning himself to one of those seven options on his list, most of which offered nothing but hard, grinding labor with no guarantees of success.

When Monica Gilbert had repeated her teasing remark about successful criminals having no record, he had to recognize its truth. But Monica wasn’t aware that between a criminal’s complete freedom and formal charges against him existed a halfworld of documentation: of charges dismissed, of arrests never made because of lack of adequate evidence, of suits settled out of court, of complaints dropped because of dollar bribery or physical threats, of trials delayed or rejected simply because of the horrific backlog of court cases and the shortage of personnel.

But most of these judicial abortions had a history, a written record that existed
somewhere.
And part of it was in detectives’ paperwork: the squeals and beef sheets and diaries and records of “Charge dropped,”

“Refused to press charges,”

“Agreed to make restitution,”

“Let off with warning,”—all the circumlocutions to indicate that the over-worked detective, using patient persuasion in most cases, with or without the approval of his superior officer, had kept a case off the court calendar.

Most judicial adjustments were of a minor nature, and a product of the investigating officer’s experience and common sense. Two men in a bar, both liquored up, begin beating on each others’ faces with their fists. The police are called. Each antagonist wants the other arrested on charges of assault. What is the cop to do? If he’s smart, he gives both a tongue-lashing, threatens to arrest both for disturbing the peace, and sends them off in opposite directions. No pain, no strain, no paperwork with formal charges, warrants, time lost in court—an ache in the ass to everyone. And the judge would probably listen incredulously for all of five minutes and then throw both plaintiff and defendant out of his court.

But if the matter is a little more serious than a barroom squabble, if damage has been done to property or someone has suffered obvious injury, then the investigating officer might move more circumspectly. It can still be settled out of court, with the cop acting as judge and jury. It can be settled by voluntary withdrawal of charges, by immediate payment of money to the aggrieved party by the man who has wronged him, by mutual consent of both parties when threatened with more substantial charges by the investigating officer, or by a bribe to the cop.