Delaney nodded. “If you happen to see him, I’d appreciate it if you’d give him my best. The name is Delaney. Edward X. Delaney.”
“I’ll remember,” the cop said, staring at him curiously.
The Chief walked down the hallway. Boone came forward to meet him.
“Sorry I’m late,” Delaney said. “I couldn’t get a cab.”
“I’m glad you’re late,” the sergeant said. “You missed a mob scene. Reporters, TV crews, a guy from the Mayor’s office, the DA’s sergeant, Deputy Commissioner Thorsen, Chief Bradley, Inspector Jack Turrell—you know him?—Lieutenant Slavin, and so on and so on. We had everyone here but the Secretary of State.”
“You didn’t let them inside?”
“You kidding? Of course not. Besides, none of them wanted to look at a stiff so early in the morning. Spoil their breakfast. They just wanted to get their pictures taken at the scene of the crime and make a statement that might get on the evening news.”
“Did you tell Slavin I was coming over?”
“No, sir, but I mentioned it to Thorsen. He said, ‘Good.’ So if Slavin comes back and gives us any flak, I’ll tell him to take it up with Thorsen. We’ll pull rank on him.”
“Fine,” Delaney said, smiling.
He looked around the corridor. There were two ambulance men with a folding, wheeled stretcher and body bag, waiting to take the corpse away. There were two newspaper photographers, laden with equipment. The four men were sitting on the hallway floor, playing cards.
The Chief looked inside the opened door. The usual hotel room. There were two men in there. One was vacuuming the rug. The other was dusting the bedside radio for prints.
“The Crime Scene Unit,” Boone explained. “They’ll be finished soon. The guy with the vacuum cleaner is Lou Gorki. The tall guy with glasses is Tommy Callahan. The same team that worked the Puller and Wolheim kills. They’re sore.”
“Sore?”
“Their professional pride is hurt because they haven’t come up with anything solid. They want this guy so bad they can taste it. This time they rigged up that little canister vacuum cleaner with clear plastic bags. They vacuumed the bathroom, took the bag out and labeled it. Did the same thing to the bed. Then the furniture. Now Lou’s doing the rug.”
“Good idea,” Delaney said. “What have you got on the victim?”
Sergeant Abner Boone took out his notebook, began to flip pages …
“Like Puller and Wolheim,” he said. “With some differences. The clunk is Jerome Ashley, male Caucasian, thirty-nine, and—”
“Wait a minute,” Delaney said. “He’s thirty-nine? You’re sure?”
Boone nodded. “Got it off his driver’s license. Why?”
“I was hoping there might be a pattern—overweight men in their late fifties.”
“Not this guy. He’s thirty-nine, skinny as a rail, and tops six-one, at least. He’s from Little Rock, Arkansas, and works for a fast-food chain. He came to town for a national sales meeting.”
“Held where?”
“Right here at the Coolidge. He had an early breakfast date with a couple of pals. When he didn’t show up and they got no answer on the phone, they came looking. They had a porter open the door and found him.”
“No sign of forced entry?”
“None. Look for yourself.”
“Sergeant, if you say there’s no sign, then there’s no sign. A struggle?”
“Doesn’t look like it. But some things are different from Puller and Wolheim. He wasn’t naked in bed. He had taken off his suit jacket, but that’s all. He’s on the floor, alongside the bed. His glasses fell off. His drink spilled. The way I figure it, he was sitting on the edge of the bed, relaxed, having a drink. The killer comes up behind him, maybe pulls his head back, slices his throat. He falls forward onto the floor. That’s what it looks like. There’s blood on the wall near the bed.”
“Stab wounds in the genitals?”
“Plenty of those. Right through his pants. The guy’s a mess.”
The Crime Scene Unit men moved toward the door carrying their kit bags, cameras, the vacuum cleaner.
“He’s all yours,” Callahan said to Boone. “Lots of luck.”
“Lou Gorki, Tommy Callahan,” the sergeant said, introducing them. “This is Edward X. Delaney.”
“Chief!” Gorki said, thrusting out his hand. “This is great! I was with you on Operation Lombard, with Lieutenant Jeri Fernandez.”
Delaney looked at him closely, shaking his hand.
“Sure you were,” he said. “You were in that Con Ed van, digging the street hole.”
“Oh, that fucking hole!” Gorki said, laughing, happy that Delaney remembered him. “I thought we’d be down to China before that perp broke.”
“See anything of Fernandez lately?” Delaney asked.
“He fell into something sweet,” Gorki said. “He’s up in Spanish Harlem, doing community relations.”
“Who did he pay?” Delaney said, and they all laughed. The Chief turned to Callahan. “What have we got here?” he asked.
The two CSU men knew better than to question why he was present. He was Boone’s responsibility.
“Bupkes is what we’ve got,” Callahan said. “Nothing really hot. The usual collections of latents and smears. We even dusted the stiff for prints. It’s a new, very iffy technique. Might work on a strangulation. We came up with nil.”
“Any black nylon hairs?” Boone said. “Or any other color?”
“Didn’t see any,” Callahan said. “But they may turn up in the vacuum bags.”
“One interesting thing,” Gorki said. “Not earth-shaking, but interesting. Want to take a look?”
The two technicians led the way to the corpse alongside the bed. It was uncovered, lying on its side. But the upper torso was twisted, face turned upward. The throat slash gaped like a giant mouth, toothed with dangling veins, arteries, ganglia, muscle, stuff. Unbroken spectacles and water tumbler lay nearby.
To the Chief, the tableau had the frozen, murky look of a 19th century still life in an ornate frame. One of those dark, heavily varnished paintings that showed dead ducks and hares, bloody and limp, fruit on the table, and a bottle and half-filled glass of wine. A brass title plate affixed to the frame: AFTER THE HUNT.
He surveyed the scene. It appeared to him that the murder had happened the way Boone had described it: the killer had come up behind the victim and slashed. A dead man had then fallen from the edge of the bed.
He bent to examine darkened stains in the rug.
“You don’t have to be careful,” Callahan said. “We got samples of blood from the stiff, the rug, the wall.”
“Chances are it’s all his,” Gorki said disgustedly.
“What’s this stain?” Delaney asked. He got down on his hands and knees, sniffed at a brownish crust on the shag rug.
“Whiskey,” he said. “Smells like bourbon.”
“Right,” Gorki said admiringly. “That’s what we thought. Where his drink spilled …”
Delaney looked up at Boone.
“I’ve got thirty men going through the hotel right now,” the sergeant said. “It’s brutal. People are checking in and out. Mostly out. Nobody knows a thing. The bartenders and waitresses in the cocktail lounges don’t come on till five tonight. Then we’ll ask them about bourbon drinkers.”
“Here’s what we wanted to show you,” Gorki said. “You’ll have to get down close to see it. This lousy shag rug fucked us up, but we got shots of everything that shows.”
The other three men got down on their hands and knees. The four of them clustered around a spot on the rug where Gorki was pointing.
“See that?” he said. “A footprint. Not distinct, but good enough. The shag breaks it up. Tommy and I figure the perp stood over the stiff to shove the knife in his balls. He stepped in the guy’s blood and didn’t realize it. Then he went toward the bathroom. The footprints get fainter as he moved, more blood coming off his feet onto the
rug.”
On their hands and knees, the four of them moved awkwardly toward the bathroom, bending far over, faces close to the rug. They followed the spoor.
“See how the prints are getting fainter?” Callahan said. “But still, enough to get a rough measurement. The foot is about eight-and-a-half to nine inches long.”
“Shit,” Delaney said. “That could be a man or a woman.”
They looked at him in surprise.
“Well … yeah,” Gorki said. “But we’re looking for a guy—right?”
Delaney didn’t answer. He bent low again over the stained rug. He could just barely make out the imprint of a heel, the outside of the foot, a cluster of toes. A bare foot.
“The size of the footprint isn’t so important,” Callahan said. “It’s the distance between prints. The stride. Get it? We measured the distance between footprints. That gives us the length of the killer’s step. The Lab Services guys have a chart that shows average height based on length of stride. So we’ll be able to double-check that professor up at the museum to see if the perp really is five-five to five-seven.”
“Nice,” Delaney said. “Very nice. Any stains on the tiles in the bathroom?”
“Nothing usable,” Gorki said, “but we took some shots just in case. Nothing in the sink, tub, or toilet drains.”
The four men were still kneeling on the rug, their heads raised to talk to each other, when they became conscious of someone looming over them.
“What the fuck’s going on here?” an angry voice demanded.
The four men lumbered to their feet. They brushed off their knees. The Chief stared at the man glowering at him. Lieutenant Martin Slavin looked like a bookkeeper who had flunked the CPA exam.
“Delaney!” he said explosively. “What the hell are you doing here? You got no right to be here.”
“That’s right,” Delaney said levelly. He started for the door. “So I’ll be on my way.”
“Wait a sec,” Slavin said, putting out a hand. His voice was high-pitched, strained, almost whiny. “Wait just one goddamned sec. Now that you’re here …What did you find out?”
Delaney stared at him.
Slavin was a cramped little man with nervous eyes and a profile as sharp as a hatchet. Bony shoulders pushed out his ill-fitting uniform jacket. His cap was too big for his narrow skull; it practically rested on his ears.
Appearances are deceiving? Bullshit, Edward X. Delaney thought. In Slavin’s case, appearances were an accurate tipoff to the man’s character and personality.
“I didn’t find out anything,” Delaney said. “Nothing these men can’t tell you.”
“You’ll have our report tomorrow, lieutenant,” Lou Gorki said sweetly.
“Maybe later than that,” Tommy Callahan put in. “Lab Services have a lot of tests to run.”
Slavin glared at them, back and forth. Then he turned his wrath on Delaney again.
“You got no right to be here,” he repeated furiously. “This is my case. You’re no better than a fucking civilian.”
“Deputy Commissioner Thorsen gave his okay,” Sergeant Boone said quietly.
The four men looked at the lieutenant with expressionless eyes.
“We’ll see about that!” Slavin almost screamed. “We’ll goddamned well see about that!”
He turned, rushed from the room.
“He’ll never have hemorrhoids,” Lou Gorki remarked. “He’s such a perfect asshole.”
Sergeant Boone walked Delaney slowly back to the elevators.
“I’ll let you know what the lab men come up with,” he said. “If you think of anything we’ve missed, please let me know. I’d appreciate it.”
“Of course,” Delaney said, wondering if he should tell Boone about the phoned tip to the Times and deciding against it. Handry had admitted that in confidence. “Sergeant, I hope I didn’t get you in any trouble with Slavin.”
“With a rabbi like Thorsen?” Boone said, grinning. “I’ll survive.”
“Sure you will,” Edward X. Delaney said.
He decided to walk home. Over to Sixth Avenue, through Central Park, out at 72nd Street, and up Fifth Avenue. A nice stroll. He stopped in the hotel lobby to buy a Montecristo.
A soft morning in early April. A warming sun burning through a pearly haze. In the park, a few patches of dirty snow melting in the shadows. The smell of green earth thawing, ready to burst. Everything was coming alive.
He strode along sturdily, topcoat open and flapping against his legs. Hard homburg set squarely. Cigar clenched in his teeth. Joggers passed him. Cyclists whizzed by. Traffic whirled around the winding roads. He savored it all—and thought of Jerome Ashley and his giant mouth.
It was smart, Delaney figured, for a detective to go by the percentages. Every cop in the world did it, whether he was aware of it or not. If you had three suspects in a burglary, and one of them was an ex-con, you leaned on the lag, even if you knew shit-all about recidivist percentages.
“It just makes common fucking sense,” an old cop had remarked to Delaney.
So it did, so it did. But the percentages, the numbers, the patterns, experience—all were useful up to a point. Then you caught something new, something different, and you were flying blind; no instruments to guide you. What was it the early pilots had said? You fly by the seat of your pants.
Edward X. Delaney wasn’t ready yet to jettison percentages. If he was handling the Hotel Ripper case, he’d probably be doing exactly what Slavin was doing right now: looking for a male killer and rounding up every homosexual with a rap sheet.
But there were things that didn’t fit and couldn’t be ignored just because they belonged to no known pattern.
Delaney stopped at a Third Avenue deli, bought a few things, carried his purchases home. Monica was absent at one of her meetings or lectures or symposiums or colloquies. He was happy she was active in something that interested her. He was just as happy he had the house to himself.
He had bought black bread, the square kind from the frozen food section. A quarter-pound of smoked sable, because sturgeon was too expensive. A bunch of scallions. He made two sandwiches carefully: sable plus scallion greens plus a few drops of fresh lemon juice.
He carried the sandwiches and a cold bottle of Heineken into the study. He sat down behind his desk, put on his reading glasses. As he ate and drank, he made out a dossier on the third victim, Jerome Ashley, trying to remember everything Sergeant Boone had told him and everything he himself had observed.
Finished with sandwiches and beer, he read over the completed dossier, checking to see if he had omitted anything. Then he looked up the number of the Hotel Coolidge and called.
He told the operator that he was trying to locate Sergeant Abner Boone, who was in the hotel investigating the crime on the 14th floor. He asked her to try to find Boone and have him call back. He left his name and number.
He started comparing the dossiers of the three victims, still hoping to spot a common denominator, a connection. They were men from out of town, staying in Manhattan hotels: that was all he could find.
The phone rang about fifteen minutes later.
“Chief, it’s Boone. You called me?”
“On the backs of the stiffs hands,” Delaney said. “Scars.”
“I saw them, Chief. The assistant ME said they looked like burn scars. Maybe a month or so old. Mean anything?”
“Probably not, but you can never tell. Was he married?”
“Yes. No children.”
“His wife should know how he got those scars. Can you check it out?”
“Will do.”
After Boone hung up, Edward X. Delaney started a fresh sheet of paper, listing the things that bothered him, that just didn’t fit:
1. A short-bladed knife, probably a jackknife.
2. No signs of struggles.
3. Two victims with no records of homosexuality found naked in bed.
4. Hairs from a wig.
5. Estimated height fr
om five-five to five-seven.
6. Phoned tip that could have been made by a man or woman.
He reread this list again and again, making up his mind. He thought he was probably wrong. He hoped he was wrong. He called Thomas Handry at the Times.
“Edward X. Delaney here.”
“There’s been another one, Chief.”
“So I heard. When I spoke to you a few weeks ago, you said you’d be interested in doing some research for me. Still feel that way?”
Handry was silent a moment. Then …
“Has this got anything to do with the Hotel Ripper?” he asked.
“Sort of,” Delaney said.
“Okay,” Handry said. “I’m your man.”
5
ZOE KOHLER RETURNED HOME after her adventure with Jerry. She slid gratefully into a hot tub, putting her head back. She thought she could feel her entrails’ warm, unkink, become lax and flaccid. All of her thawed; she floated defenseless in amniotic fluid.
When the tub cooled, she sat up, prepared to lather herself with her imported soap. She saw with shock that the water about her knees and ankles was stained, tinged a light pink. Thinking her period had started, she touched herself tenderly, examined her fingers. There was no soil.
She lifted one ankle to the other knee, bent forward to inspect her foot. Between her toes she found clots of dried blood, now dissolving away. There were spots of blood beneath the toes of the other foot as well.
She sat motionless, trying to understand. Her feet were not wounded, nor her ankles cut. Then she knew. It was Jerry’s blood. She had stepped into it after he—after he was gone. The blood between her toes was his stigmata, the taint of his guilt.
She scrubbed furiously with brush and washcloth. Then she rinsed again and again under the shower, making certain no stain remained on her skin. Later, she sat on the toilet lid and sprayed cologne on her ankles, feet, between her toes. “Out, damned spot!” She remembered that.
She dried, powdered, inserted a tampon, clenching her teeth. Not against the pain; there was no pain. But the act itself was abhorrent to her: a vile penetration that destroyed her dignity. That little string hanging outside: the fuse of a bomb.
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