First Deadly Sin

by Lawrence Sanders

  He was assigned as partner to Detective first-grade Alberto Di Lucca. Big Al was a jowly, pot-bellied, wine-swilling pasta fiend, and had introduced Delaney to the glories of Italian cooking. He had also taught him a lot of tricks of the trade.

  In July of that year, there was a ripoff of a wholesale warehouse on Elizabeth Street. Four masked men, armed, forced their way in, tied up the night watchman, and drove off in a huge semitrailer loaded with imported olive oil. This, to Di Lucca, a man who worshipped spaghetti al’ olio, was sacrilege.

  “Now what you got to know,” Di Lucca told Delaney, “is that we got a lot of bad boys in this precinct. But generally they go outside the neighborhood for their fun and games. It’s like an unwritten law: you don’t shit in the living room. Howsomever, in this case I think it was locals.”

  “How do you figure?” Delaney asked.

  “Now take the watchman. Outsiders would have blasted him, cold-cocked him, or treated him rough. But no, this old man is asked politely to lie down on a pile of burlap bags, he’s tied up, and a piece of tape put gently across his mouth. And before the goniffs leave, they ask him is he comfortable? Can he breathe okay? They did everything but serve him breakfast in bed. I figure he knew them, and they knew him. Maybe he fingered the job. He’s got a lot of relatives, a lot of young, hot-blooded nephews. One of them, Anthony Scorese, isn’t nice. He runs with three pals: Vito Gervase, Robert Scheinfelt—a Wop, but you’d never know it from that name, right?—and a punk named Giuseppe something. I don’t know his last name, but they call him Kid Stick. I think those four desperadoes pulled this job. Let’s ask around and see if they’re spending.”

  So Di Lucca and Delaney asked around, and sure enough the Fearsome Four had been spending. Not a lot, but enough to indicate they had come into sudden wealth: good wine and Strega with their meals, blonde broads from uptown, new alligator shoes.

  “Now we’re going to break them,” Di Lucca told Delaney. “They swore undying allegiance to each other. On their mothers’ graves. They’ll die before they talk. They swore. Now watch this. I’m going to break these stupidos. I’ll talk Italian to them, but later I’ll tell you what they said.”

  Di Lucca questioned each of the suspects alone. He’d ask Anthony Scorese, for instance, where he was at the time of the heist. “In bed,” Scorese said, then laughed. “I got a witness. This broad, she’ll tell you.”

  “In bed with a broad?” Di Lucca said. He smiled enigmatically. “That ain’t what Vito Gervase says.”

  He let it go at that, and moved to Gervase.

  “I was out in Jersey at my uncle’s place.”

  “So?” Di Lucca said softly. “That ain’t what Scheinfelt says.”

  And so forth, over a period of two weeks. He worked on them, asking more questions, playing one against the other. They thought they knew what Di Lucca was doing, but they couldn’t be sure. They began staring at each other. Then Di Lucca concentrated on Kid Stick, telling him that because of his youth, he’d probably get nothing more than probation if he cooperated. The Kid began to weaken, but it was Robert Scheinfelt who cracked first and made a deal.

  “And that’s how you do it,” Di Lucca told Delaney. “Honor among thieves? My ass! They’d turn in their twin for a suspended sentence.”

  Now, staring at the street on the map, the street where Victor Maitland had been knifed to death, Delaney remembered Detective Alberto Di Lucca and wished he was still around with his house-by-house knowledge of the neighborhood. But Big Al had retired a long time ago, had returned to Naples, and had probably suffocated his heart with just one more helping of costoletta di maiale alla napoletana.

  Delaney sighed, turned out the study lamp, started his security check. He wasn’t depressed by what he had read, but he wasn’t elated, either. The investigation of Maitland’s murder had been a good one, he acknowledged. Thorough. Energetic. Imaginative. A lot of bells had been rung. A lot of pavements pounded. A lot of people questioned. A lot of records had been dug up and reviewed. It all added up to zero, to zip, to zilch. A cipher case.

  The body had been discovered by Saul Geltman, owner of Geltman Galleries on Madison Avenue, and Victor Maitland’s exclusive agent. Maitland had promised to be at the Galleries at three o’clock Friday afternoon to work with Geltman and an interior designer on plans for a new exhibition of Maitland’s work. When he hadn’t shown up by four, Geltman had called the Mott Street studio. No answer. He had then called Maitland’s home on East 58th Street. He spoke to Alma Maitland, the artist’s wife. She didn’t know Maitland’s whereabouts, but said he had mentioned he was meeting Geltman at the Galleries at three that afternoon.

  Neither wife nor agent was particularly concerned about Maitland’s absence. It was not the first time he had failed to keep an appointment. Apparently, he was a chronic liar, broke promises carelessly, often disappeared for a day or two at a time. When working in the Mott Street studio, he frequently took the phone off the hook or simply didn’t answer calls. He slept there occasionally.

  Saul Geltman stated that he continued trying to reach Maitland at his home and the studio all day Saturday, with no success. He also called a few acquaintances of Maitland’s. None knew where the artist was. Finally, by noon on Sunday, Geltman was becoming worried. He cabbed down to the studio. The door was closed but unlocked. There were roaches in the blood. Geltman promptly vomited, then called 911, the police emergency number, from the studio phone.

  A two-man precinct squad car was first to respond. They put in the call reporting an apparent homicide; police machinery began to grind. Within an hour, the tenement building was roped off. Upstairs, the fifth-floor studio was crowded with officers from the precinct, detectives from the homicide unit covering that area, a doctor from the Medical Examiner’s office, lab technicians, photographers, the district attorney’s man, and Sergeant Abner Boone and two men from his special commando homicide squad.

  The autopsy report stated laconically that Victor Maitland had died of “exsanguination resulting from multiple stab wounds.” In other words, the man had bled to death; internal cavities were full, and he was lying in a coagulated pool. The weapon was described as “a knife, a single-edged weapon approximately five or six inches in length, tapering to a fine point.” Analysis of stomach contents revealed ingestion of a moderate amount of whiskey just prior to death, which occurred, the ME’s surgeons estimated, between 10:00 A.M. and 3:00 P.M. on Friday. They refused to be more precise.

  A double investigation was begun. On the assumption that the artist was killed by a thief, a mugger, one team of detectives began searching the files for similar attacks, began questioning neighbors and nearby shopkeepers, copied down license-plate numbers of parked cars in the vicinity, later to question their owners. Catch basins, sewers, garbage cans, and litter baskets in a ten-block area were searched for the weapon. Snitches were queried, police and court records were reviewed for recent releases of knife-wielding smash-and-grab experts.

  A second team, working on the assumption that Victor Maitland had opened his locked door to someone he knew and was dirked by that someone, began looking into the painter’s private life and personal affairs, questioning anyone they could find who knew Maitland and might, conceivably, have closed him out. Eventually, they concentrated their efforts on seven people.

  Before limiting their inquiries to this group, detectives questioned a depressingly long list of artists, models, art dealers, art critics, prostitutes, drinking companions, and a few distant relatives, none of whom seemed particularly distressed by the sudden blanking of Victor Maitland, and made little effort to hide their indifference. Depending on the education and/or social status of the acquaintance questioned, the dead man was described as everything from “an offensive and disagreeable individual” to “a piece of shit.”

  But after a heavy investigation that lasted almost six weeks, after the expenditure of thousands of man-hours of slogging work, the Department was no closer to the solution of the crime
than they had been when Saul Geltman made his call to 911. Everything was gone over three times. New detectives were brought in for a fresh look at the evidence collected. Researchers went back to Maitland’s two-year hitch in the army, even to his school days, looking for a possible motive.

  Nothing.

  One of the homicide dicks summed up the feelings of all of them:

  “What the hell,” he said wearily. “Why don’t we say the son of a bitch stabbed himself in the back, and forget about it?”

  Monica Delaney devoted every Thursday to volunteer work at a local hospital. Before leaving the house, she delivered a written list of instructions to Chief Delaney: a timetable detailing when he was to put the roast in the oven, at what temperature, when he was to put the potatoes in the stove-top baker, when he was to take the Sara Lee chocolate cake from the freezer. He inspected the list solemnly, his glasses sliding down his nose.

  “And I’ll try to get the windows done,” he told her.

  She laughed, and stuck out her tongue at him.

  He went into the study, sat down at his desk. He left the door open. He was alone in the house; he wanted to hear every unfamiliar and unexpected creak and thump.

  He took a new manila file folder from a desk drawer. He had intended to write on the tab: “Killing of Victor Maitland.” But he paused. Perhaps he should write: “Murder of Victor Maitland.” There was a difference, he felt, between a murder and a killing. It went beyond the legal definition of First Degree: “With malice aforethought …”

  Delaney tried to analyze his feeling, and decided that the difference he saw between the two was in the deliberation of the act. The soldier in war usually killed, he didn’t murder. But an assassination was a murder, not a killing. Unless the assassin was hired. A fine line there that involved not only deliberation but passion. Cold passion.

  If Victor Maitland had been offed because he resisted a thief, that would be a killing. If he had been stabbed to death by someone known to him, someone who had pondered and planned, for whatever reason, it would be a murder. Delaney shook his head ruefully. This decision was to color his whole approach to the case, he knew. He was hardly into it, and already he was faced with the very basic question that had flummoxed the Department. Finally, taking a deep breath, he wrote on the folder tab: “Murder of Victor Maitland,” and let it go at that.

  Inside the folder he placed two pages of notes and questions he had jotted down while reviewing the Department’s records. Then he drew the legal pad to him and began listing the things he planned to do in his private investigation. He wrote them down in no particular order, just as they occurred to him.

  When the list was as complete as he could make it, when he ran out of ideas, he began putting the items in the proper sequence. As important as the ideas themselves. He struggled with it, juggling, trying to construct the most logical order. That completed, he added the final sequence to the manila folder. It pleased him. This was his paper. Up to now, the Maitland case had consisted solely of other men’s paper. The phone rang while he was preparing additional file folders, labeled VICTIM, AGENT, WIFE, MISTRESS, etc.

  “Edward X. Delaney here,” he said.

  “Chief, this is Detective Sergeant Abner Boone.”

  There was a pause, each waiting for the other to speak again. Finally …

  “Yes, sergeant,” Delaney said. “Thorsen said you’d call. When can we get together?”

  “Whenever you say, sir.”

  The voice was slightly twangy, not quite steady. There was no slur, but the agitation was there, controlled but there.

  Delaney’s first impulse was to invite the man for dinner. With a standing rib roast and baked potatoes, there’d be plenty of food. But he had second thoughts. It would be wiser if his initial meeting with Boone was one-on-one. Then he could evaluate the man. Before introducing him to the family.

  “Would this evening at nine inconvenience you, sergeant?” he asked. “At my home? Do you have anything planned?”

  “No, sir. Nothing planned. Nine will be fine. I have your address.”

  “Good. See you then.”

  Delaney hung up and went to his file cabinet for the stacks of official reports and signed statements. He began to divide these into his new folders: VICTIM, AGENT, WIFE, MISTRESS …

  He had a sandwich and a glass of milk at noon, went for a short walk along the streets of Two-five-one Precinct, smoking a cigar. He returned home in the early afternoon and continued his filing chores. This was donkey work, but most police work was. In fact, he found a curious satisfaction in this task of “putting things in order.”

  That’s what a cop’s job was all about, wasn’t it? To restore and maintain order in a disordered world. Not only in society, but in the individual as well. Even in the cop himself. That was the reason for the multitude of forms, the constantly increasing mass of regulations. That was the reason for the formalistic, and sometimes ridiculous officialese. A cop never nabbed a crook. Not in a filed report or court testimony he didn’t. He apprehended a suspect, or took a perpetrator into custody.

  “Officer, when did you first encounter the accused?”

  “I approached the defendant at nine-fifteen on the morning of April two, of this year, as he was exiting the premises of Boog’s Tavern, located on Lexington Avenue and Ninetieth Street, City of New York, Borough of Manhattan. I identified myself as an officer of the law. I thereupon recited to this person his legal rights, as required, and placed him under arrest, charging him with the criminal act specified. I then accompanied the accused to the Two-five-one Precinct house, where he was duly incarcerated.”

  A touching search for precision in a lunatic world …

  So Chief Edward X. Delaney worked away at his files, trying to create order from the murder of Victor Maitland.

  The dinner was fine, the roast of beef blood-rare, the way Delaney liked it. Monica and the girls took their slices from the well-done ends; he liked his from the dripping middle. They had a California jug burgundy; Mary and Sylvia were each allowed one glass, cut half-and-half with water.

  The girls went upstairs to their homework. Delaney helped Monica clear the table, put leftovers away, stack the dishwasher. Then they took second cups of coffee into the living room. He began telling her about the Maitland murder. He had learned a long time ago, when Barbara was alive, that it helped him to verbalize a case to an attentive listener. Even if the listener could offer no constructive suggestions, sometimes the questions—untrained, ingenuous—opened new paths of inquiry, or forced Delaney to re-examine his own thinking.

  Monica listened intently, her eyes squinching with pain as he described what had happened to Victor Maitland. Remembering what had happened to her first husband, Bernard Gilbert …

  “Edward,” she said, when he had finished, “it could have been a robber, couldn’t it?”

  “A burglar.”

  “A burglar, a mugger … whatever.”

  “Could have been,” he acknowledged. “What about the unlocked door? No sign of forced entry.”

  “Maybe he just forgot to lock the door.”

  “Maybe. But he had been ripped off twice before. And he hated interruptions while he was painting. His wife and his agent both say he was paranoiac about it. He always locked up.”

  “Like you,” she said.

  “Yes,” he smiled. “Like me. Also, he was stabbed several times. Someone spent a lot of time on that. A chance mugger might stab him once, or twice, but he probably wouldn’t stand over him plunging the knife again and again. Once Maitland was down and obviously incapable of resistance, a thief would go to work stripping the place. All right, maybe the thief killed him so Maitland couldn’t identify him later from mug shots. But if Maitland saw him, then he should have been facing him and the wounds would be in the front. Follow? I’m just going by percentages. Maitland’s wallet was taken, true, but it could have been an attempt to make it look like a heist. There was an expensive portable radio that wasn’t
touched, and a box of snappers in plain view on a dresser top.”

  “What are snappers?”

  “Ampules of amyl nitrite. You break them and sniff. Supposed to increase your sexual power. Want me to try them?”

  “No, thanks, dear. I don’t think I could take it.”

  “God bless you,” he said. “Anyway, snappers—sometimes they’re called poppers—are used legitimately to treat heart disorders. By prescription only. But of course they’re sold on the street. Maitland had no record of heart trouble, and his doctor never prescribed amyl nitrite for him. The detectives on the case made a half-assed effort to find out where Maitland was buying, but came up with a big, fat naught. It’s one of the things I want to go into more thoroughly.”

  “You think there’s a drug angle?”

  “Oh no. The PM said no evidence of habituation. No, I don’t think drugs had any great importance in this. The snappers are just a loose end. But they might lead to something that leads to something. I don’t like loose ends.”

  “You said the autopsy report said he had been drinking.”

  “Moderately, that morning. But I think he hit it pretty hard; his liver was enlarged. There was a half-empty bottle of whiskey in the studio, on a crate where he had been sketching. The bottle was dusted, but all they got were Maitland’s prints, smudges, and a few partials of someone else. Not enough for a make. Ditto for a glass that was on the sink. It had held whiskey, the same brand that was in the bottle. Which tells us exactly nothing.”

  “Maybe the killer had a drink after—after he did what he did.”

  “Maybe,” Delaney said dubiously, “but I doubt it. The bottle was at one end of the studio, the sink at the other. If the murderer had had a drink, bottle and glass would probably be close together. You said,’—after he did what he did.’ He. How about a woman? Female killers frequently use knives. At least, more often than they do guns. Percentages again.”