“Cute gimmick,” Delaney said.
“First time I’ve been on TV,” Jason said, grinning. “Should I do a buck-and-wing or something?”
Boone spoke softly to Bellsey on the intercom, then held up his shield before the camera’s eye.
“Apartment 2407,” he reported to the others. “He said to come up, but he didn’t sound too happy about it.”
In the elevator, Delaney said to Jason, “Don’t be bashful about chiming in when We question this guy. Let’s overwhelm him with muscle.”
The door of Apartment 2407 was jerked open by a stocky, red-faced man wearing a rugged sport jacket and whipcord slacks. Behind him, a smallish, graying woman stood in the foyer archway, hands clasped, peering at them timidly.
“I suppose this is about Ellerbee,” Bellsey burst out angrily. “I already talked to the cops about that.”
“We know you did, Mr. Bellsey,” Boone said. “That was just a preliminary questioning. Unfortunately, you’re involved in a murder investigation, and we—”
“What do you mean I’m involved?” Bellsey demanded, his voice rising. “Jesus Christ, I was just one of his patients! I don’t know a damned thing about how he got killed.”
“Mr. Bellsey,” Delaney said stonily, “are you going to keep us standing out here in the hallway while you shout at us and the neighbors get an earful?”
“Screw the neighbors! I don’t see why I have to be harassed like this.”
Jason T. Jason shoved his big bulk forward. “No one’s harassing you,” he said quietly. “Just a few questions and we’ll be out of your hair.”
Bellsey looked up at the big cop. “Shit!” he said disgustedly. “Well, come on in then. I want you to know you’re interrupting our dinner.” He turned to the woman.
“Lorna, you get back to the kitchen; this has nothing to do with you.”
The woman scurried away.
“Your wife?” Delaney asked as the three men entered the apartment.
“Yeah,” Bellsey said. “Leave her out of this.”
He didn’t offer to take their coats and made no effort to get them seated. So they all remained standing in a tight little group.
“I’m Sergeant Boone and these men are Delaney and Jason. Your full name is Ronald J. Bellsey?”
“That’s right. The J. is for James in case you’re interested.”
“When was the last time you saw Doctor Ellerbee?”
“On Thursday afternoon, the day before he was killed. Don’t tell me you didn’t get that from his appointment book. Or is that expecting too much brains from cops?”
“Be nice, Mr. Bellsey,” Delaney said softly. “You get snotty with us and you’ll be answering our questions at the precinct house and waiting a long, long time for your dinner. Is that what you want?”
He glowered at them.
Bellsey was heavy through the shoulders and chest. His neck was short and thick, supporting a squarish head topped with an ill-fitting toupee. He stood leaning belligerently forward, pugnacious jaw thrust out, hands balled into fists.
“Mr. Bellsey,” Boone said, “you claim you were home on the night Ellerbee was killed.”
“That’s right.”
“All night?”
“Yeah. I got home around seven and didn’t go out of the house until Saturday. Ask my wife; she’ll tell you.”
“Did you have any visitors Friday evening? See any neighbors? Make or receive any phone calls?”
“No.”
“Do you have a police record, Mr. Bellsey?” Delaney asked. “We’ll check, of course, but it would be smart if you told us first.”
Bellsey opened his mouth to speak, then shut it with a click of teeth. He hesitated, then tried again.
“I was never really arrested,” he said grudgingly. “Not formally, I mean. But I got into trouble a few times. I don’t know what’s on my record.”
“What kind of trouble?” Jason asked.
“Fights. I was defending myself.”
“How many times?”
“Once. Or twice.”
“Or maybe more?”
“Maybe. I don’t remember.”
“Ever get in a fight with Doctor Ellerbee?” Boone asked. “Ever attack him?”
“Shit, no! He was my doctor. A decent guy. I liked him.”
“How long had you been seeing him?”
“About two years.”
“You own a car?” Delaney asked suddenly.
Bellsey looked at him, puzzled. “Sure.”
“What kind?”
“Last year’s Cadillac.”
“Where do you keep it?”
“In the basement. We have an underground garage.”
“You ever do any repairs on it yourself?”
“Sometimes. Minor stuff.”
“You own tools?”
“Some.”
“Where do you keep those?”
“In the trunk of the car.”
Delaney glanced at Boone.
“Mr. Bellsey,” the Sergeant said, “did Ellerbee ever mention to you that he had been attacked or threatened by a patient?”
“No.”
“Did you know any of his other patients?”
“No.”
“Did you notice any change recently in his manner or personality?”
“No, he was just the same.”
“What’s ‘the same’?” Jason asked. “What kind of a man was he?”
“Calm, cool, and collected. Never blew his stack. Never raised his voice. A real put-together guy. I cursed him out once, and he never held it against me.”
“Why did you curse him out?”
“I don’t remember.”
“When you went out shopping today,” Boone said, “what did you wear?”
“What did I wear?” Bellsey said, bewildered. “I wore a rainhat and a lined trenchcoat.”
“Galoshes? Boots?”
“No. A pair of rubbers.”
“You work for a wholesale butcher?” Delaney said.
“That’s right.”
“What do you do—slice salami?”
“Christ, no! I’m the manager. Production manager.”
“You oversee the butchers, loaders, drivers—is that it?”
“Yes.”
“You must deal with some rough guys.”
“They think they are,” Bellsey said grimly. “But they shape up or ship out.”
“You ever do any boxing?” Jason Two asked.
“Some. When I was in the navy. Middleweight.”
“Never professionally?”
“No.”
“You keep in shape?”
“I sure do,” Bellsey boasted. “Jog five miles twice a week. Lift iron. Go to a health club once a week for a three-hour workout on the machines. What the hell has all this got to do with Ellerbee’s murder?”
“Just asking,” Jason said equably.
“You’re wasting my time,” Bellsey said. “Anything else?”
“I think that’s all,” Delaney said. “For now. Have a nice dinner, Mr. Bellsey.”
There were other people in the elevator; they didn’t talk. But when they got into Jason’s car, Sergeant Boone said, “A real sweetheart. How did you pick up on the boxing, Jase?”
“He looks like a pug. The way he stands and moves.”
“We’ll have to get into the trunk of that Cadillac,” Delaney said. “The ball peen. And let’s try to talk to the wife when he’s not around.”
“You think he could be it?” Boone asked.
“Our best bet yet,” Delaney said. “A guy with a sheet, a short fuse, and he’s a brawler. I think we better take a very close look at Mr. Bellsey.”
That night, after dinner, he wanted to write out reports of the questioning of L. Vincent Symington and Ronald J. Bellsey. But Monica said firmly that she had to make a start on addressing Christmas cards, so he deferred to her wishes.
She sat in his swivel chair behind his desk in the study. As s
he worked, adding a short personal note to each card, he slumped in one of the worn club chairs, nursing a small Rémy. He told her about Symington and Bellsey.
When he finished, she said definitely, “It was Bellsey. He’s the one who did it.”
Delaney laughed softly. “Why do you say that?”
“He sounds like a dreadful man.”
“Oh, he is a dreadful man—but that doesn’t make him a killer.”
She went back to her Christmas cards. A soft cone of light shone down from a green student lamp on the desk. Delaney sat in dimness, staring with love and gratitude at the woman who brightened his life.
He saw her pursed lips as she wrote out her holiday greetings, dark eyes gleaming. Her glossy black hair was gathered in back with a gold barrette. Strong face, strong woman. He thought of what his life would be like, sitting alone in that shadowed room, without her warm presence, and a small groan escaped him.
“What are you thinking?” she asked, without looking up.
He didn’t tell her. Instead, he said, “Did you ever work a jigsaw puzzle?”
“When I was a kid.”
“Me, too. Remember how you spilled all the pieces out of the box onto a tabletop, hoping none of them was missing. Then you turned all the pieces picture-side up and looked for the four pieces with two straight edges. Those were the corners of the picture. After you had those, you put together all the pieces with one straight edge to form the frame. Then you gradually filled in the picture.”
She looked up at him. “The Ellerbee case is a jigsaw puzzle?”
“Sort of.”
“And you know what the picture is going to be?”
“No,” he said with a tight smile, “but I see some straight edges.”
13
SUNDAY WAS THE BEST day of the week for Harold Gerber. He didn’t have to see anyone; he didn’t have to talk to anyone. He bought his Sunday Times on Saturday night, along with a couple of six-packs. The paper, the beer, and two pro football games on TV filled up his Sundays. He never left the house.
Gerber had lost a lot of weight in Vietnam and never put it back on. He had lost a lot of things there, including his appetite. So on Sunday morning he usually had some juice, a piece of toast and two cups of coffee with sugar and cream. That carried him through to evening, when he might heat up a frozen dinner that came in a cardboard box and tasted like the container.
For some reason, on Sundays he never got out the photographs and looked at them again. All those guys—grinning, scowling, laughing, mugging it up for the camera. Some of the photos were autographed, just like Gerber had autographed some of the shots they took of him. A family album … It fed his fury.
Since he couldn’t comprehend it himself, Gerber could appreciate why other people were unable to understand the way he felt and why he did the things he did. Gerber couldn’t figure it out, and no one else could either.
Doc Simon was coming close, really beginning to pin it down, but now Ellerbee was dead, and Gerber wasn’t about to start all over again with another therapist. He had tried two before he found Ellerbee, but they had turned out to be bullshit artists, and Gerber knew after a few sessions that they weren’t going to do him a damned bit of good.
Dr. Simon Ellerbee was different. No bullshit there. He went right in with a sharp scalpel, and all that blood didn’t daunt him. He was tearing Harold Gerber apart and putting him back together again. But then Doc Simon got himself scragged and Gerber was alone again, with no one but ghosts for company.
The checks from his parents came regularly, every month, and he was on partial disability, so he wasn’t hurting for money. Harold Gerber was just hurting for life, wondering if he was fated to drag his corpse through the world for maybe another fifty years, acting like a goddamn maniac and really wanting the whole fucking globe to blow up—the sooner the better.
That Sunday morning, driving down to Gerber’s place in Greenwich Village, Delaney said to Boone, “I feel guilty about making you work this weekend. Rebecca probably thinks I’m a slave driver.”
“Nah,” Boone said. “She’s used to my working crazy hours. I guess every detective’s wife is.”
“Jason volunteered to come along, but weekends are the only chance he gets to spend some time with his sons. That’s important, so I told him to stay home today. When the new guys come in, we should all be able to keep reasonable hours. Did you find out anything about this Gerber?”
“Nothing. Suarez’s men hadn’t gotten around to him yet. So all we have is what Doctor Diane put in her report: He’s thirty-seven, a Vietnam veteran with a lot of medals and a lot of problems. Gets into fights.”
“Another Ronald Bellsey?”
“Not exactly,” Boone said. “This Gerber sometimes attacks strangers for no apparent reason. And once he put his fist through a plate-glass window and ended up in St. Vincent’s Emergency where they stitched him up.”
“That’s nice,” Delaney said. “An angry young man.”
“Something like that,” Boone agreed.
Harold Gerber lived in a run-down tenement on Seventh Avenue South, around the corner from Carmine Street. The windows of the first two floors were covered with tin, and the stoop was clotted with garbage. The façade of the six-story building was chipped, stained with rust, defaced with graffiti.
Inspecting this dump, Delaney and Boone had the same reaction: How could anyone living there afford an uptown shrink?
“Maybe he doesn’t pay rent,” Delaney suggested. “See that empty lot next door? Some developer’s assembling a parcel. Once he gets the remaining tenants out, he’ll demolish that wreck and have enough spare feet to put up a luxury high-rise.”
“Could be,” Boone said. “Right now it looks like a Roach Motel.”
In the littered vestibule they discovered all the mailboxes had been jimmied open. The intercom had been wrenched from the wall to dangle suspended from its wires. The front door had been pried open so often that now it couldn’t be closed. The odor of rot and urine was gagging.
“Jesus!” Boone said. “Let’s get in and out of here fast.”
“Have we got an apartment number for him?”
“No. We’ll have to bang on doors.”
They cautiously climbed a tilted wooden stairway, the loose banister carved and hacked. More graffiti on the damp plaster walls. The doors on the first two floors were nailed shut. They began knocking on third-floor doors. No answers. No sounds of habitation.
They got an answer on the fourth floor.
“Go away,” a woman screamed, “or I’ll call the cops.”
“Lady, we are the cops,” Boone shouted back. “We’re looking for Harold Gerber. What apartment?”
“Never heard of him.”
They went up to the fifth, stepping over piles of broken laths and crumbling plaster. They found two more occupied apartments, but no doors were unlocked, and no one knew Harold Gerber—they said.
Finally, on the sixth floor, they banged on the chipped door of the rear apartment.
“Who is it?” a man yelled.
“New York Police Department. We’re looking for Harold Gerber.”
“What for?”
Delaney and Boone looked at each other.
“It’s about Doctor Simon Ellerbee,” Boone said. “A few questions.”
They heard the sounds of bolts sliding back. The door was opened on a thick chain. They saw a slice of a man clad in a turtleneck sweater and plaid mackinaw.
“ID?” he said in a hoarse voice.
The Sergeant held up his shield. The chain was slipped, the door was opened.
“Welcome to the Taj Mahal,” the man said. “Keep your coats on if you don’t want to freeze your ass off.”
They stepped in and looked around.
It was a slough, and obviously the occupant had done nothing to make it even marginally livable. Clothing and possessions were piled helter-skelter on the cot, a single rickety bureau, on the floor. The scummy sink was
piled with unwashed dishes, the two-burner stove thick with grease. It was so cold that the inside of the window was coated with a skim of ice.
“The toilet’s in the hall,” the man said, grinning. “But I wouldn’t recommend it.”
“Harold Gerber?” Boone asked.
“Yeah.”
“May we sit down, please?” Delaney asked. “I’m worn out from that climb. My name is Delaney and this is Sergeant Abner Boone.”
“Sergeant …” Gerber said in his gravelly voice. “I was a sergeant once. Then I got busted.”
He threw clothing off the cot, removed a six-pack from one spindly chair, and lifted a small black-and-white TV set from another.
“We still got electricity and water,” he said, “but no heat. The fucking landlord is freezing us out. Take it easy when you sit down; the legs are loose.”
They gingerly eased onto the chairs. Gerber sat on the cot.
“You think I did it?” he said with a cracked grin.
“Did what?” Boone said.
“Fragged Doc Ellerbee.”
“Did you?” Delaney asked.
“Shit, no. But I could have.”
“Why?” Boone said. “Why would you want to kill him?”
“Who needs a reason? You like my home?”
“It’s a shithouse,” Delaney told him.
Gerber laughed. “Yeah, just the way I want it. When they tear this joint down, I’m going to look for another place just like it. A buddy of mine—he lives in Idaho—came back from Nam and tried to pick up his life. He gave it six months and couldn’t hack it. So he took off all his clothes, every stitch, and walked bare-ass naked into the woods without a thing—no weapons, no watch, no matches—absolutely nothing. Well, Manhattan is my woods. I like living like this.”
“What happened to him?” Delaney said. “Your buddy.”
“A ranger came across him a couple of years later. He was wearing clothes and moccasins made out of animal skins. His hair and beard were long and matted. He had built himself a lean-to and planted some wild stuff he found growing in the woods that he could eat. Made a bow and arrows. Set traps. Had plenty of meat. He was doing great. Never saw anyone, never talked to anyone. I wish I had the balls to do something like that.”
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