“So that’s it?” Delaney asked.
“Not all of it,” Boone said, flipping his notebook. “The ME says Ellerbee died about nine P.M. This is where all these people claim they were at that time …
“Doctor Diane Ellerbee was up in Brewster, waiting for her husband to arrive.
“Henry Ellerbee was at a charity dinner at the Plaza Hotel. I confirmed his presence there at nine o’clock.
“Doctor Samuelson was at the Carnegie Hall concert. Confirmed.
“One of the receptionists was home watching television with her mother. Mommy says yes, she was. Who knows?
“The other receptionist says she was shacked up with her boyfriend in his apartment. He says yes, she was. Who knows?
“The super was playing pinochle at his basement social club. The other guys in the game say yeah, he was there.
“The two ladies who run the art gallery were at a private dinner with eight other people of the Medicare set. Their presence is confirmed. Besides, the two of them are so frail I don’t think they could lift a ball peen hammer.
“The top-floor movie producer was at a film festival in the south of France. His presence there is confirmed by news reports and photographs. Scratch him.
“And that’s it.”
Delaney looked admiringly from Boone to Jason and back again. “What the hell does Suarez need me for? You two guys can break this thing on your own. Well, here’s what I’ve got. It isn’t much.”
He gave them a précis of his conversation with the police psychiatrist and told them what Dr. Walden had said about the incidence of attacks on therapists by their patients.
“He guessed about one-quarter to one-third of all psychiatrists have been assaulted. Those percentages look good. After what you’ve just told me, I’m beginning to think Ellerbee’s patient list may be our best bet.”
Then he said that Walden had agreed with Boone’s theory about those hammer blows to the eyes: It could be a symbolic effort to blind the doctor.
“After he was dead?” Jason said.
“Well, Walden thinks most attacks on therapists are made by psychotics. I didn’t tell him about the two sets of unidentified footprints. That could mean there were two psychotics working together, or Ellerbee had two visitors that night at different times. Any ideas?”
Jason and Boone looked at each other, then shook their heads.
“All right,” Delaney said briskly. “Here’s where we go from here. I want to see that townhouse and I want to meet Doctor Diane Ellerbee. Maybe we can do both at the same time. Sergeant, suppose you call her right now. Tell her you’d like to see her as soon as possible, as part of the investigation into her husband’s death. Don’t mention that I’ll be with you.”
Rather than dig through the records in the cartons for Diane Ellerbee’s phone number, Boone looked it up in the Manhattan directory. He identified himself and asked to speak to the doctor. He ended by giving Delaney’s phone number. Then he hung up.
“She’s with a patient,” he reported. “The receptionist said she’ll give the doctor my message and she’ll probably call back as soon as she’s free.”
“We’ll wait,” Delaney said. “It shouldn’t be more than forty-five minutes. Meanwhile, there’s something else I want to know more about. Boone, do you know a dick one named Parnell? I think his first name is Charles.”
“Oh, hell, yes,” the Sergeant said, smiling. “I know him. They call him Daddy Warbucks. He’s still on active duty.”
“That’s the guy,” Delaney said. He turned to Jason. “You’ve got to realize that some detectives make a good career for themselves by specializing. Now this Parnell, he’s a financial whiz. You want a money picture on someone and he can come up with it. He’s got good contacts with banks, stockbrokers, credit agencies, accountants, and for all I know, the IRS. He knows how to read wills, trusts, and reports of probate. He’s just the guy we need to get a rundown on the financial status of the deceased and his widow. Sergeant, tell Chief Suarez everything we’ve done so far—don’t leave anything out—and then ask him to have Daddy Warbucks check out the net worth of the dead guy and Doctor Diane Ellerbee.” He paused a moment, pondering. Then: “And throw in Doctor Julius K. Samuelson for good measure. Let’s find out how fat his bank account is.”
“Will do,” Boone said, making some quick jottings in his notebook.
“Sir,” Jason T. Jason said hesitantly, “would you mind telling me the reason for this?”
“Cui bono,” Delaney said promptly. “Who benefits? In this case, who stands to gain from the death of Simon Ellerbee? I’m not saying money was the motive here, but it might have been. It sure as hell has been in a lot of homicides where the perp turns out to be a member of the family or a beneficiary. It’s something that’s got to be checked out.”
“I’ll get on it right—” Boone started to say, but then the phone rang.
“That may be Doctor Diane,” Delaney said. “You better answer, Sergeant.”
He talked briefly, then hung up and turned to them.
“Six o’clock tonight,” he said. “She’ll be finished with her patients by then.”
“How did she sound?” Delaney asked.
“Furious. Trying to keep her cool. I’m not looking forward to that meeting, sir.”
“Has to be done,” Delaney said stubbornly. “The lady is said to be a real beauty—if that’s any consolation. Well, we’ve got about eight hours. Boone, why don’t you contact Suarez and get Charlie Parnell working on the financial reports. Jason, you take the car and go up to Brewster. The Ellerbees have a married couple who take care of their place. The man does maintenance and works around the grounds. Talk to him. He may have a toolshed or workshop on the premises.”
“Oh-ho,” Jason T. Jason said. “You want to know if he owns a ball peen hammer—right?”
“Right. And if he does, has he still got it? And if he has, you grab it.”
“Oh, yeah,” Jason said.
“And while you’re at it, get a look at the house and grounds. I’d like your take on it.”
“I’m on my way.”
“And so am I,” Boone said, as both officers rose.
“Sergeant, I’ll meet you at the Ellerbees’ townhouse at five-thirty. It’ll give us a chance to look around the neighborhood before we brace the widow.”
“I’ll be there,” Abner Boone promised.
After they left, Delaney returned to his study and looked at the cartons of files with dread. It had to be done, but he didn’t relish the task.
He set to work, dividing the records into separate folders: the victim, Dr. Diane Ellerbee, Dr. Julius Samuelson, the ME’s reports and photographs, the reports, photos, and map of the Crime Scene Unit, statements of everyone questioned. Then he added notes of his conversation with Dr. Murray Walden, and what Sergeant Boone and Jason T. Jason had just told him.
It went faster than he had anticipated, and by 12:30 he had a satisfyingly neat stack of labeled file folders that included all the known facts concerning the murder of Dr. Simon Ellerbee. It was time, he decided, for a sandwich.
He went into the kitchen, opened the refrigerator, and inspected the possibilities. There was a single onion roll in there, hard as a rock, but it could be toasted. And there were a few slices of pork left over from a roast loin. Some German potato salad. Scallions he could slice. Maybe a wee bit of horseradish.
He slapped it all together and ate it leaning over the sink. Monica would have been outraged, but she was gone, doing volunteer work at a local hospital. She kept nagging him about his addiction, and she was right; he was too heavy in the gut. It was hard to convince her that the Earl of Sandwich had been one of civilization’s great benefactors.
He returned to the study and stared at the stack of Ellerbee file folders.
He had a disturbing hunch 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 hundr
ed 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 store near 78th 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 bulled 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 w
hen 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 entranceway. 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.”
Fourth Deadly Sin Page 6