The Sixth Commandment

by Lawrence Sanders

  “All right,” I said to Mrs. Cynthia, “Gerald Thorndecker was killed by two bullets, one fired by his son. What about the mother?”

  “Her name was Grace. She died of breast cancer when Telford was just a child. I think he was three. Or four. His father raised him.”

  “Money?”

  “Not much,” she said regretfully. “Gerald was foolish that way. He squandered. He had a standard of living and was determined to maintain it. He inherited a good income, but it goes fast when nothing new is coming in.”

  “What did he do? Did he have a job or profession?”

  “Gerald Thorndecker,” she said severely, “was a poet.”

  “A poet? Oh my God. I can understand why the money went. Was he published?”

  “Privately. By himself.” Then she added softly, “I still have his books.”

  “Was he any good?” I asked.

  “No,” she said. “His genius was for living.”

  “Telford was an only child.”

  “How did you know?”

  “He looks like an only child. He acts like an only child. Mrs. Cynthia, just let me recap a moment to see if I’ve got this straight. Dr. Thorndecker is an only child. His mother dies when he’s three or four. He’s brought up by his father, a failed poet rapidly squandering his inheritance. The father is killed accidently when the boy is thirteen.”

  “Or fourteen,” she said.

  “Or fourteen,” I agreed. “Around there. Now, what happened to the boy? Who took him in?”

  “An aunt. His father’s sister.”

  “She put him through medical school?”

  “Oh no,” Mrs. Cynthia said. “She was poor as a church mouse. Telford never would have made it without his father’s insurance. That’s all he had. The insurance saw him through medical school and his post-graduate work.”

  “Wow,” I said.

  “Wow?” she said.

  “He wanted to be a doctor all along?” I asked.

  “Oh yes. For as long as I can remember. Since he was just a little boy.”

  “Mrs. Cynthia, I thank you,” I said. “Sorry to take up so much of your time.”

  “That’s quite all right, Samuel,” she said. “I hope what I’ve told you may be of some help in your inquiry. If you see Dr. Thorndecker, please give him my love. He may remember me.”

  “How could he forget you?” I said gallantly.

  She made a humphing sound, but I knew she was pleased. She really was a grand old dame, and I loved her and didn’t want to hurt her. Which is why I didn’t make a snide comment about the extraordinary coincidence of two violent deaths in the life of Dr. Telford Thorndecker, both of which he might possibly have caused, and from both of which he had profited handsomely. But maybe it wasn’t an extraordinary coincidence; maybe it was just a plain coincidence, and I was seeing contrivance where only accident existed.

  I walked slowly back to the Inn. One good thing about Coburn: you didn’t have to look about fearfully for traffic when you crossed the street.

  Stacy Besant and Mrs. Cynthia had given me a lot to think about. Now I knew much more; my plate was full. A full plate, hell; my platter was overflowing. The investigation was slowly becoming two: the history, character, personality, and ambitions of Dr. Telford Gordon Thorndecker; and the strange events that had taken place in and around Crittenden during the past month. That the two would eventually come together, merge, and make some kind of goofy sense, I had no doubt. But meanwhile I didn’t know what the hell to do next.

  What I did was to go back across Main Street to Sandy’s Liquors and Fine Wines. I bought a fifth of a twelve-year-old Scotch. It came all gussied up in a flashy box. Carrying that in a brown paper sack, I returned to the Coburn Inn. I looked around for Sam Livingston, but he was nowhere to be seen. The lobby was enjoying its early afternoon siesta. Even Millie Goodfellow was somnolent, filing slowly at her talons behind the cigar counter.

  I walked down the stairway into the basement, pushed through a fire door, and wandered along a cement corridor lined with steam and water pipes. I found a door with a neat sign that read: SAMUEL LIVINGSTON. PLEASE KNOCK BEFORE ENTERING. I knocked, but I didn’t enter; I waited.

  He came to the door wearing his usual shiny, black alpaca jacket and little skullcap. He also had on half-glasses and was carrying a closed paperback novel, a forefinger marking his place. I took the bottle of Scotch from the sack and thrust it at him.

  “Greeks bearing gifts,” I said. “Beware.”

  His basalt face warmed in a slow smile.

  “For me?” he said. “Now I take that kindly of you. Come in, get comfy, and we’ll sample a taste of this fine sippin’ whiskey.”

  He had a snug little place down there. One low-ceilinged room with kitchenette, and a small bathroom. Everything neat as a pin. A sleeping sofa, two overstuffed armchairs, a table with ice cream parlor chairs. A chest of drawers. No TV set, but a big bookcase of paperbacks. I took a quick look. Barbara Cartland. Frank Yerby. Daphne du Maurier. Elsie Lee. Like that. Romantic novels. Gothics. Edwardians. Regencies. Women with long, glittering, low-cut gowns. Men with mustaches, wearing open, ruffled shirts and carrying swords. Castles in dark mountains with one light burning in a high window. Well … what the hell; I read H. Rider Haggard.

  He had me sit in one of the soft armchairs, and he brought us each a small glass of the Scotch.

  “We don’t want to hurt this with water,” he said.

  “Straight is fine,” I agreed.

  He lowered himself slowly into the other armchair, lifted his glass to me, then took a small sip. His eyes closed.

  “Yes,” he breathed. “Oh my yes.” He opened his eyes, passed the glass back and forth under his nose, inhaling with pleasure. “How you finding Coburn, Sam? Slow and quiet enough for you?”

  “You’d think so,” I said, “judging from the surface. But I’m getting the feeling that underneath, things might be faster and noisier.”

  “Could be,” he said noncommittally. “I hear you been doing some digging?”

  “Just talking to people,” I said. “I figured you might be able to help me.”

  “How might I do that?”

  “Well, you’ve lived here a long time, haven’t you?”

  “Thirty years,” he said. “And I figure to live out the rest of it right here. So you, being a smart man, won’t expect me to bad-mouth any of the people I got to live with.”

  “Of course not,” I said. “It’s just that I’ve picked up some conflicting opinions, and I thought you could straighten me out.”

  He stared at me over the rim of his glass. It was a dried apple of a face: lines and creases and a crinkly network of wrinkles. Black and gleaming. The teeth were big and yellow. His ears stuck out like flags, and his eyes had seen everything.

  “Tell you what,” he said. “Supposin’ you asks your questions. If I want to answer, I will. If I don’t, I won’t. If I don’t know, I’ll tell you so.”

  “Fair enough,” I said. “My first question is about Al Coburn. You know him?”

  “Sure, I know him. Everyone in town knows Al Coburn. His people started this place.”

  “You think he’s a nut?”

  He showed me that keyboard of teeth.

  “Mr. Coburn?” he said. “A nut? Nah. Sly as a fox, that man. Good brain on him.”

  “Okay,” I said. “That was my take, too. Art Merchant?”

  “The banker man? He’s just a banker. What do you expect?”

  “You think that newspaper, the Sentinel, is making money?”

  He took a sip of his drink, then looked at me reflectively.

  “Just,” he said.

  “You think they’ve got loans from the bank?”

  “Now how would I know a thing like that?”

  “Sam,” I said, “I got the feeling that there’s not much going on in Coburn that you don’t know about.”

  “Agatha Binder could have some notes at the bank,” he acknowledged.
“Most business folks in Coburn do.”

  “You know the Thorndeckers?”

  “I’ve seen them,” he said cautiously.

  “To speak to?”

  “Only Miz Mary. We’re friends.”

  “Constable Goodfellow? You know him?”

  “Oh sure.”

  I threw my curve.

  “Anything between him and Dr. Thorndecker’s wife?”

  The curtain came down.

  “I wouldn’t know,” he said.

  “Ever hear any gossip about what’s going on at the Crittenden Research Laboratory?”

  “I never believe in gossip.”

  “But you listen to it?”

  “Some.”

  “Ever hear about a man named Petersen? Chester K. Petersen?”

  “Petersen? Can’t say that I have.”

  “Scoggins? Ernie Scoggins?”

  “Oh my yes, I knew Ernie Scoggins. He sat right where you’re sitting many’s a time. Stop by here to chew the fat. Bring me a jug sometimes. Sometimes he was broke, and I’d make him a little something to eat. Nice, cheerful man. Always joking.”

  “They say he just took off,” I said.

  “So they say,” he nodded.

  “Do you think he did?” I asked him.

  He thought a long moment. Finally …

  “I don’t know what happened to Ernie Scoggins,” he said.

  “What do you think happened?”

  “I just don’t know.”

  “When was the last time you saw him?”

  “Couple of days before he disappeared.”

  “He came here?”

  “That’s right.”

  “When? What time of day?”

  “In the evening. When he got off work.”

  “Anything unusual about him?”

  “Like what?”

  “What was his mood? Was he in a good mood?”

  “Yeah, he was in a good mood. Said he was going to get some money pretty soon, and him and me would go up to Albany and have a steak dinner and see the sights.”

  “Did you tell Constable Goodfellow this?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “He didn’t ask.”

  “Did Scoggins tell you how much money he’d be getting?”

  “No.”

  “But could you guess from what he said how much it’d be? A lot of money?”

  “Anything over a five-dollar bill would be a lot of money to Ernie Scoggins.”

  “Did he tell you where the money would be coming from?”

  “No, and I didn’t ask.”

  “Could you make a guess where it was coming from?”

  “I just don’t know.”

  I went along like that, with his “I don’t know’s” getting more frequent. I couldn’t blame him. As he said, he had to survive in Coburn; I was going home one blessed day. I knew he wouldn’t reveal the town’s secrets—until thumbscrews come back in fashion.

  I ran out of questions, and accepted another small Scotch. Then we just sat there sipping, talking of this and that. I discovered he had a deadpan sense of humor so subtle, so hidden, that you could easily miss it if you weren’t watching for it. For instance:

  “Are you a church-going man?” I asked him.

  “I certainly am,” he said. “Every Saturday—that’s my afternoon off here—I sweep and dust the Episcopalian Church.”

  Said with no smile, no lifted eyebrow, no irony, no bitterness. Apparently just an ingenuous statement of fact. Ingenuous, my ass! This gaffer was deep. He was laughing, or weeping, far down inside himself. If you caught it, fine. If it went over your head, that was also fine. He didn’t give a damn.

  But he could say profound things, too.

  “What do you think of Millie Goodfellow?” I inquired.

  He said: “She’s lonely with too many men.”

  I asked him if he was the only black in town. He said no, there were two families, a total of nine men, women, and children. The men farmed, the women worked as domestics, the kids went to a good school.

  “They doin’ all right,” Sam Livingston said. “I don’t mess with them much.”

  “Why is that?”

  “I don’t mess with anyone much.”

  “No family of your own, Sam?”

  “No,” he said. “They all gone.”

  Whether that meant they were dead or had deserted Coburn, I didn’t know, and didn’t ask.

  “Sam,” I said, “you say you and Mary Thorndecker are friends. How is that? I mean, does she visit you here? What opportunity do you have to talk to her?”

  “Oh …” he said vaguely. “Here and there.”

  I stared at him, remembering what Agatha Binder had said about Mary Thorndecker going to an evangelist church about five miles south of Coburn. A fundamentalist church. The Reverend Peter Koukla had said something similar.

  “Your church?” I asked Livingston. “You and Mary Thorndecker go to the same church? A born-again place about five miles south of here?”

  The glaze came down over his ocherous eyes again.

  “Sam,” he said, “you do get around.”

  “I’d like to visit that church,” I said. “How do I get there?”

  “Like you said: five miles south. Take the river route, then make a left. You’ll see the signs.”

  “You drive there?”

  “No,” he said, “I don’t drive. Miz Mary, she stops by for me.”

  “When are services?” I asked. “Sunday?”

  “Sunday, and every other night in the week. Every night at eight.”

  “I think I’ll go,” I said. “Good minister?”

  “Puts on a good show,” he said, grinning. “A joy to hear.”

  The Scotch was making me drowsy. I thanked him for his hospitality, and stood up to leave. He thanked me for the whiskey, and offered to take me up in the elevator. It came down into the basement, alongside his little apartment, and he could hear the bell from inside his room. I told him I’d walk up, the exercise would do me good.

  I started down the cement corridor. He was still standing at his open door. A small, wizened figure, a frail antique. I had walked perhaps five steps when he called my name. I stopped, turned around. He didn’t say anything more.

  “What is it, Sam?” I asked him.

  “It’s worse than you think,” he said, moved inside his room, and closed the door.

  I stood there, surrounded by cement and iron, trying to decipher: “It’s worse than you think.” What did he mean by that? Coburn? The Thorndecker investigation? Or maybe life itself?

  I just didn’t know.

  Not then I didn’t.

  I trudged slowly up the stairway to Room 3-F. I was pondering the sad fate of Ernie Scoggins. Thought he was coming into some money, did he? The hopeful slob. As Al Coburn had said, he just didn’t have much above the eyebrows. After what Sam Livingston had told me, this was the scenario I put together:

  Scoggins had seen something or heard something. Or both. Probably on his job at Crittenden Hall. If Constable Ronnie and Julie Thorndecker really did have the hots for each other, maybe Scoggins walked in on them while they were rubbing the bacon. Somewhere. In the woods. In the stall of that big bay gelding. In the back seat of Goodfellow’s cruiser. Anywhere.

  So Scoggins, having watched plenty of Kojak, Baretta, and Police Woman, thinks he knows just how to profit from this unexpected opportunity, the poor sod. He tries a little cut-rate blackmail (which in Coburn, N.Y., would be on the order of $9.95). If they don’t pay up, Scoggins threatens to report their hanky-panky to Dr. Thorndecker. Who knows—maybe he’s got some hard evidence: a tape recording, photograph, love letter—something like that.

  But the lovers, realizing like all blackmail victims that the first demand is just a down payment, decided that Ernie Scoggins had to be scrubbed. I figured Goodfellow did it himself, driving his cruiser; he had the balls for it. And the Constable working alone would explain why S
coggins’s car hadn’t been taken away, and why Goodfellow had said nothing about the blood-stained rug when he “investigated” Scoggins’s disappearance. It would also explain what was in that letter left with Al Coburn: the hard evidence of Julie and Ronnie putting horns on the head of the august Dr. Telford Gordon Thorndecker—photograph, love letter, tape recording, whatever.

  That scenario sounded good to me. I could buy it.

  And tomorrow, I reflected sourly, I would solve the riddle of Chester K. Petersen’s death and burial, on Saturday I would discover what was meant by that note: “Thorndecker kills,” and on Sunday I would rest.

  Ordinarily I keep a case notebook during an investigation, filling it with observations, bits of dialogue, suggestions for further inquiries. The notebook is a big help when it comes time to write my final report.

  But after the tossing of my room at the Coburn Inn, I hadn’t put anything on paper. I kept it all in my pointy little head. It was a mess up there. Nothing seemed neat.

  I couldn’t get a handle on what the hell was going on. Or even know positively that anything was going on.

  I sprawled on the hard bed, boots off, hands clasped behind my head. I tried to find a thread, an element, a theme that might pull it all together. I had been flummoxed like this on other investigations, and had devised a trick that sometimes worked for me.

  What I did was try my damndest to stop thinking about the case. I mean, try to ignore who did what, who said what, and the things I had seen, done, guessed. Just wash the whole shmear out of my consciousness and leave myself open to emotions, sensations, instincts. It was an attempt to get down to a very primitive level. Reasoning was out; feeling was in.

  When I tried to determine what I felt about the Thorndecker inquiry, what my subjective reactions were, I came up with an odd one: I suddenly realized how much this case was dominated by the conflicts of youth and age, the problems of senescence, the puzzles of natural and perverse death.

  Start with the Thorndecker application. That was for a grant to investigate and, hopefully, isolate and manipulate the X Factor in mammalian cells that causes aging and the end of life.