The Tenth Commandment

by Lawrence Sanders

  She was a thin little thing, still with that look of tremulous vulnerability that had caught my eye in the photos in the Knurr family album and Jesse Karp’s yearbook. She seemed physically frail, or at least fragile, with narrow wrists, a white stalk of a neck, a head that appeared to be pulled backward, chin uptilted, by the weight of her hair.

  She had a luminous quality: pale complexion, big eyes of bluish-green (they looked like agates), and lips sweetly bowed. I saw no wrinkles, no crow’s feet, no furrows—nothing in her face to mark the passage of years. If she had been wounded, it did not show. The smooth brow was serene, the dim smile placid.

  But there was a dissonance about her that disturbed. She seemed removed. The lovely eyes were vacant, or focused on something no one else could see. That half-smile was, I soon realized, her normal expression; it meant nothing.

  I recognized Ophelia, looking for her stream.

  “Mr. Bigg?” she said. Her voice was young, utterly without timbre. A child’s voice.

  “Miss Wiesenfeld,” I said, bowing, “I know this is an intrusion, and I appreciate your willingness to grant me a few moments of your time.”

  “Oh la!” she said with a giggling laugh. “How pretty you do talk. Doesn’t he talk pretty, Harriet?”

  “Yeah,” Mrs. Livingston said heavily. “Pretty. Mr. Bigg, you sit in that armchair there. I sits on the couch here. Honey, you want to rest yourself?”

  “No,” the lady said, “I prefer to remain standing.”

  I seated myself nervously. My armchair was close to the corner of the big davenport where Mrs. Livingston perched, not leaning back but balancing her bulk on the edge. She was ready, I was certain, to lunge for my throat if I dared upset her honey.

  “Miss Wiesenfeld,” I started, “I have no desire to rake up old memories that may cause you pain. If I pose a question you don’t wish to answer, please tell me so, and I will not persist. But this is a matter of some importance. It concerns the Reverend Godfrey Knurr. I represent a legal firm in New York City. One of our clients, a young woman, wishes to bring serious charges against Reverend Knurr. I am making a preliminary investigation in an attempt to discover if Knurr has a past history of the type of, ah, activities of which he is accused.”

  “Pretty,” she murmured. “So pretty. It’s nice to meet someone who speaks in complete sentences. Subject, verb, object. Do all your sentences parse, Mr. Bigg?”

  She said that quite seriously. I laughed.

  “I would like to think so,” I said. “But I’m afraid I can’t make that claim.”

  She began moving across the room in front of me. I saw then that she limped badly, dragging her left leg. Below the hostess gown I could see the foot bound in the stirrup of a metal brace.

  She went close to a bird cage suspended from a brass stand. Within the cage, a yellow canary hopped from perch to perch as she approached.

  “Chickie,” she said softly. “Dear, sweet Chickie. How are you today, Chickie? Will you chirp for our guest? Will you sing a lovely song? How did you find me, Mr. Bigg?”

  The abrupt question startled me.

  “I saw your photograph in the Knurr family album, ma’am. With Godfrey. Mr. Jesse Karp supplied your name. The Reverend Ludwig Stokes provided more information.”

  “You have been busy, Mr. Bigg.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” I said humbly.

  “The busy Mr. Bigg,” she said with her giggling laugh. “Busy Bigg.” She poked a pale finger through the bars of the cage. “Sing for Busy Bigg, Chickie. What is Godfrey accused of?”

  I had determined to use Percy Stilton’s scam. The one that had worked with Bishop Oxman.

  “He is accused of allegedly defrauding a young woman of her life’s savings by promising to double her money.”

  “And promising to marry her?” Sylvia Wiesenfeld asked.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “He is guilty,” she said calmly. “He did exactly that.”

  A low growl came from Mrs. Livingston.

  “I’d like to have him right here,” she said in her furred contralto. “In my hands.”

  “Miss Wiesenfeld,” I said, “may I ask you this: were you married to Godfrey Knurr?”

  “Chickie,” she said to the bird, “why aren’t you chirping? Aren’t you feeling well, Chickie?”

  She left the cage, came back to the long davenport. The housekeeper heaved her bulk and assisted Sylvia to sit in the corner, the left leg extended, covered with the skirt of her long gown. Mrs. Livingston reached out, tenderly smoothed back strands of blonde hair that had fallen about her mistress’ pale face.

  “Oh la!” Miss Wiesenfeld said. “A long time ago. Where are the snows of yesteryear? Reverend Stokes told you that?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “It happened in another world,” she said. “In another time.”

  Her beautiful eyes looked at me, but she was detached, off somewhere.

  “But you were married?” I persisted. “Legally?”

  “Legally,” she said. “A piece of paper. I have it.”

  “How long were you married, Miss Wiesenfeld?”

  She turned those vacant eyes on the enormous black woman.

  “Harriet?” she said.

  “Fourteen months,” Mrs. Livingston said. “Give or take.”

  “And then?” I asked.

  “And then?” she repeated my question, perplexed.

  “Did you separate? Divorce?”

  “Harriet?” she asked again.

  “He cleared out,” Mrs. Livingston told me furiously. “Just took off. With everything of my honey’s he could get his hands on. But her daddy was too smart for him. He left my honey some kind of a fund that cur couldn’t touch.”

  I tried to remember when I had last heard a man called a “cur.” I could not recall ever hearing it.

  “So you are still married to Godfrey Knurr?” I asked softly.

  “Oh no,” Sylvia Wiesenfeld said with her disturbingly childish laugh. “No, no, no. I have a paper. Don’t I, Harriet? So much paper. Paper, paper, paper.”

  I looked beseechingly at Mrs. Livingston.

  “We got us a letter from a lawyer-man in Mexico,” she said disgustedly. “It said Godfrey Knurr had been granted a divorce from his wife Sylvia.”

  I turned to Miss Wiesenfeld in outrage.

  “Surely you went to an attorney, ma’am?” I said. “I don’t know divorce law all that well, but the letter may have been fraudulent. Or Mexican divorces without the consent of both parties might not have been recognized in the state in which you were married. I hope you sought legal advice?”

  She looked at me, eyes rounding.

  “Whatever for?” she asked in astonishment. “I wanted him gone. I wanted him dead. He hurt me.”

  I swallowed.

  “Physically, ma’am?” I said gently.

  “Once,” Mrs. Livingston said in a deadly voice. “I told him he puts hands to her again, I kill him. I told him that. But that’s not what she means when she says he hurt her. He broke my honey’s heart.”

  She was speaking of her mistress as if she was not present. But Miss Wiesenfeld did not object. She just kept smiling emptily, face untroubled, eyes staring into the middle distance.

  “Oh la!” she said. “Broke poor Sylvia’s heart.”

  I was not certain of the depth of her dementia. She seemed to flick in and out, sometimes in the same sentence. She was lucid in speech and controlled in manner, and then suddenly she was gone, flying.

  “Ma’am,” I said, hating myself, “what did Godfrey Knurr do with your money? When you were married?”

  “Ohh,” she said, “bought things. Pretty things.”

  Mrs. Livingston leaned toward me.

  “Women,” she said throatily. “High living. He just pissed it away.”

  That “pissed” shocked me. It was hissed with such venom that I thought Godfrey Knurr fortunate to have escaped the vengeance of Mrs. Harriet Lee Livingston. She would hav
e massacred him.

  “Harriet,” Sylvia said in a petulant, spoiled child’s voice, “I want to get up again.”

  “Sure, honey,” the housekeeper said equably, lurching to her feet. She helped her mistress stand. Miss Wiesenfeld dragged her leg back to the bird cage.

  “Chickie?” she said. “Chirp for me?”

  There were other questions I wanted to ask. I wanted to probe deeper, explore the relationship between Sylvia and Knurr, discover how the marriage had come about, when, and why it had dissolved. But I simply didn’t have the stomach for it.

  It seemed to me that all day I had been poking through the human detritus Godfrey Knurr had left in his wake. I was certain Roscoe Dollworth would have persevered in this investigation, but I lacked the ruthlessness. He had told me never to let my personal feelings interfere with the job, but I couldn’t help it. I liked all these victims, shared their misery, their sad memories, and I had heard just about all I could endure. Probing old wounds was not, really, a noble calling.

  When I departed from the living room, Sylvia Wiesenfeld was still at the bird cage. Her forefinger was reaching through the bars. “Chickie?” she was saying. “Dear, sweet Chickie, sing me a song.”

  I didn’t even thank her or say goodbye.

  Out in the hallway, Mrs. Livingston helped me on with my coat.

  “You going to mash him?” she demanded.

  I stared at her a moment.

  “Will you help?” I asked.

  “Any way I can.”

  “I need that marriage license,” I said. “And the letter from the Mexican lawyer, if you can find it. But the marriage license is most important. I’ll try to get copies made this afternoon and bring the originals back to you. If I can’t get copies made, I want to take the originals to New York with me. I’ll return them; I swear it.”

  “How do I know?” she said mistrustfully.

  “I’ll give you money,” I said. “I’ll leave fifty dollars with you. When I return the license, you return the money.”

  “Money don’t mean nothing,” she said. “You got a pawn that means something to you?”

  I looked down at myself.

  “My wristwatch!” I said. “My aunt and uncle gave it to me when I was graduated from school. It means a lot to me. But it’s a cheap watch. Not worth even fifty dollars.”

  “I’ll take it,” she said. “You bring the marriage license back, or mail it back, and you gets your watch back.”

  I agreed eagerly and slipped the expansion band off my wrist. She dropped the watch into one of her capacious pockets.

  “You wait right here,” she commanded. “Don’t move a step.”

  “I won’t,” I said, and I didn’t as I watched her climb the carpeted steps to the second floor. That was really a leviathan behind.

  She came stepping down in a few minutes, carrying two folded documents. I took a quick look at them. A marriage license issued to Sylvia Wiesenfeld and Godfrey Knurr by the State of Indiana, dated February 6, 1959, and a letter from a Mexican attorney dated fourteen months later, informing Sylvia that a divorce had been granted to Knurr. I refolded both documents, slid them into my inside jacket pocket.

  “You’ll get them back,” I promised once more.

  “I got your watch,” she said, and then grinned again at me: that marvelous, warm, human smile of complicity.

  ‘Thank you for all your help,” I said.

  “I don’t know why,” she said, “but I trusts you. You play me false, don’t never come back here again—I tear you apart.”

  On the early evening New York-bound airliner, a Scotch-and-water in my hand, I relaxed gratefully. The seats on both sides of me were empty, and I could sprawl in comfort. I emulated the passenger across the aisle and removed my shoes.

  I wiggled my stockinged toes, a pleasurable sensation at 33,000 feet, and planned the defeat of Godfrey Knurr.

  It seemed to me that our original assessment of the situation had been correct; in the absence of adequate physical evidence the only hope of bringing the Kipper and Stonehouse cases to satisfactory solutions was to take advantage of the individual weaknesses of the guilty participants. If we had failed so far in trying to “run a game” on them, it was because we did not have sufficient leverage to stir them, set one against the other, find the weakest link and twist that until it snapped.

  By the time we started our descent for LaGuardia Airport in New York, I thought I had worked out a way in which it might be done. It would be a gamble, but not as dangerous as the risks Godfrey Knurr had run.

  Also, it would require that I mislead several people, including Detective Percy Stilton.

  I was sorry for that, but consoled myself by recalling that at our first meeting he had given me valuable tips on how to be a successful liar. Surely he could not object if I followed his advice.

  I arrived home at my apartment in Chelsea shortly after 11:00 P.M. It looked good to me. I was desperately hungry, and longing for a hot shower. But first I wanted to contact Percy Stilton while my resolve was still hot. I had rehearsed my role shamelessly, and knew I must be definite, optimistic, enthusiastic. I must convince him, since as an officer of the law he could add the weight of his position to trickery that would surely flounder if I tried it by myself.

  I called his office, but they told me he was not on duty. I then called his home. No answer. Finally I dialed the number of Maybelle Hawks’ apartment. She answered:

  “Hello?”

  “Miss Hawks?”

  “Yes. Who is this?”

  “Joshua Bigg.”

  A short pause, then:

  “Josh! So good to hear from you. How are you, babe?”

  “Very well, thank you. And you?”

  “Full of beans,” she said. “Literally. We just finished a pot of chili. Perce said you went to Chicago. You calling from there?”

  “No, I’m back in New York. Miss Hawks, I—”

  “Belle,” she said.

  “Belle, I apologize for calling at this hour, but I’m trying to locate Percy. Is he—”

  “Sure,” she said breezily, “his majesty is here. You got something to tell him about those cases?”

  “I certainly do,” I said heartily.

  “I’ll put him on,” she said. “Mind if I listen on the extension?”

  “Not at all,” I said. “It’s good news.”

  “Great,” she said. “Just a minute…”

  There was a banging of phones, voices in the background, then Stilton came on the line.

  “Josh?” he said. “How you doing?”

  “Just fine. Sorry to disturb you.”

  “I’m glad you did. Lousy dinner. Dull broad.”

  “Up yours,” Maybelle Hawks said on the extension.

  “Got some good news for you, Josh. They reopened the Kipper case. Your bosses swung some heavy clout.”

  “Good,” I said happily. “Glad to hear it. Now listen to what I’ve got…”

  I kept my report as short and succinct as I could. I told him Goldie Knurr really was Godfrey’s sister. I gave a brief account of my meeting with Jesse Karp and what he had told me of the boyhood of Godfrey Knurr. I went into more detail in describing the interviews with the Reverend Ludwig Stokes and Sylvia Wiesenfeld. I told Stilton I had returned with the original marriage license. I did not mention the letter from the Mexican attorney.

  They didn’t interrupt my report, except once when I was describing Knurr’s physical abuse of Sylvia Wiesenfeld, which I exaggerated. Maybelle Hawks broke in with a furious “That bastard!”

  When I finished, I waited for Stilton’s questions. They came rapidly.

  “Let’s take it from the top,” he said. “This priest—he’s how old?”

  “About seventy-five. Around there.”

  “And Knurr has been blackmailing him for twenty-five years?”

  “About.”

  “Why didn’t he blow the whistle before this?”

  “Personal shame. A
nd what it would do to his church.”

  “What did Knurr take him for?”

  “I don’t know the exact dollar amount. A lot of money. Plus getting Knurr into the seminary. And performing the marriage ceremony, probably without the bride’s father’s knowledge.”

  “And you say this Stokes is willing to bring charges now?”

  “He says so. He says he’s an old man and wants to make his peace with God.”

  “Uh-huh. What kind of a guy is he? Got all his marbles?”

  “Oh yes,” I said, and found myself crossing my fingers, a childish gesture. “He’s a dignified old gentleman, very scholarly, who lives alone and has plenty of time to think about his past life. He says he wants to atone for his sins.”

  “He may get a chance. All right, now about the wife…The marriage license is legit?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “No record of a divorce, legal separation—nothing like that?”

  “She says no. She’s living on a trust fund her father left her. After the way Knurr treated her, she was glad to get rid of him and assume her maiden name.”

  “He deserted her?”

  “Right,” I said definitely. “She was happy to find out where he is. I don’t think it would take much to convince her to bring charges. The reasons are economic. That trust fund that seemed like a lot of money twenty years ago doesn’t amount to much now. She’s hurting.”

  “And what kind of a woman is she? A whacko?”

  “Oh no,” I protested. “A very mature, intelligent woman.”

  There was silence awhile. Then Detective Stilton said: “What we’ve got are two out-of-state possibles. Charges would have to be brought in Indiana, then we have extradition. If that goes through, we’ve lost him on the homicides.”

  “Correct,” I agreed. “The blackmail and desertion charges are just small ammunition. But the big guns are that marriage license—and his affair with Glynis Stonehouse.”

  He knew at once what I meant.

  “You want to brace Tippi Kipper?” he said.

  “That’s right, Perce. Be absolutely honest with her. Lay out all we’ve got. Show her the marriage license. I think she’ll make a deal.”

  “Mmm,” he said. “Maybe. Belle, what do you think? Will it work?”