Transgressions

by Ed McBain

  Tal walked around the house one more time. He glanced at the calendar stuck to the refrigerator with two magnets in the shape of lobsters. Newport Rhode Island was written in white across the bright red tails. In the calendar box for yesterday there was a note to take the car in to have the oil changed. Two days before that Sy’d had a hair appointment.

  Today’s box was empty. And there was nothing in any of the future dates for the rest of April. Tal looked through the remaining months. No notations. He made a circuit of the first floor, finding nothing out of the ordinary.

  Except, someone might suggest, maybe the troubled spirits left behind by two people alive that morning and now no longer so.

  Tal Simms, mathematician, empirical scientist, statistician, couldn’t accept any such presence. But he hardly needed to, in order to feel a churning disquiet. The stains of dark blood that had spoiled the reassuring comfort of this homey place were as chilling as any ghost could be.

  ∞

  When he was studying math at Cornell ten years earlier Talbot Simms dreamed of being a John Nash, a Pierre de Fermat, a Euler, a Bernoulli. By the time he hit grad school and looked around him, at the other students who wanted to be the same, he realized two things: one, that his love of the beauty of mathematics was no less than it had ever been but, two, he was utterly sick of academics.

  What was the point? he wondered. Writing articles that a handful of people would read? Becoming a professor? He could have done so easily thanks to his virtually perfect test scores and grades but to him that life was like a Mobius strip—the twisted ribbon with a single surface that never ends. Teaching more teachers to teach . . .

  No, he wanted a practical use for his skills and so he dropped out of graduate school. At the time there was a huge demand for statisticians and analysts on Wall Street, and Tal joined up. In theory the job seemed a perfect fit—numbers, numbers and more numbers, and a practical use for them. But he soon found something else: Wall Street mathematics was a fishy math. Tal felt pressured to skew his statistical analysis of certain companies to help his bank sell financial products to the clients. To Tal, 3 was no more nor less than 3. Yet his bosses sometimes wanted 3 to appear to be 2.9999 or 3.12111. There was nothing illegal about this—all the qualifications were disclosed to customers. But statistics, to Tal, helped us understand life; they weren’t smoke screens to let predators sneak up on the unwary. Numbers were pure. And the glorious compensation he received didn’t take the shame out of his prostitution.

  On the very day he was going to quit, though, the FBI arrived in Tal’s office—not for anything he or the bank had done—but to serve a warrant to examine the accounts of a client who’d been indicted in a stock scam. It turned out the agent looking over the figures was a mathematician and accountant. He and Tal had some fascinating discussions while the man pored over the records, armed with handcuffs, a large automatic pistol, and a Texas Instruments calculator.

  Here at last was a logical outlet for his love of numbers. He’d always been interested in police work. As a slight, reclusive only child he’d read not only books on logarithms and trigonometry and Einstein’s theories but murder mysteries as well, Agatha Christie and A. Conan Doyle. His analytical mind would often spot the surprise villain early in the story. After he’d met with the agent, he called the Bureau’s personnel department. He was disappointed to learn that there was a federal government hiring freeze in effect. But, undeterred, he called the NYPD and other police departments in the metro area—including Westbrook County, where he’d lived with his family for several years before his widower father got a job teaching math at UCLA.

  Westbrook, it turned out, needed someone to take over their financial crimes investigations. The only problem, the head of county personnel admitted, was that the officer would also have to be in charge of gathering and compiling statistics. But, to Tal Simms, numbers were numbers and he had no problem with the piggy-backed assignments.

  One month later, Tal kissed Wall Street good-bye and moved into a tiny though pristine Tudor house in Bedford Plains, the county seat.

  There was one other glitch, however, which the Westbrook County personnel office had neglected to mention, probably because it was so obvious: To be a member of the sheriff’s department financial crimes unit he had to become a cop.

  The four-month training was rough. Oh, the academic part about criminal law and procedure went fine. The challenge was the physical curriculum at the academy, which was a little like army basic training. Tal Simms, who was five-foot-nine and had hovered around 153 pounds since high school, had fiercely avoided all sports except volleyball, tennis, and the rifle team, none of which had buffed him up for the Suspect Takedown and Restraint course. Still, he got through it all and graduated in the top 1.4 percent of his class. The swearing-in ceremony was attended by a dozen friends from local colleges and Wall Street, as well as his father, who’d flown in from the Midwest where he was a professor of advanced mathematics at the University of Chicago. The stern man was unable to fathom why his son had taken this route but, having largely abandoned the boy for the world of numbers in his early years, Simms senior had forfeited all rights to nudge Tal’s career in one direction or another.

  As soon as he started work Tal learned that financial crimes were rare in Westbrook. Or, more accurately, they tended to be adjunct to federal prosecutions and Tal found himself sidelined as an investigator. He was, however, in great demand as a statistician.

  Finding and analyzing data are more vital than the public thinks. Certainly crime statistics determine budget and staff hiring strategies. But, more than that, statistics can diagnose a community’s ills. If the national monthly average for murders of teenagers by other teenagers in neighborhoods with a mean income of $26,000 annual is .03, and Kendall Heights in southern Westbrook was home to 1.1 such killings per month, why? And what could be done to fix the problem?

  Hence, the infamous questionnaire.

  Now, 6:30 P.M., armed with the one he’d just completed, Tal returned to his office from the Benson house. He inputted the information from the form into his database and placed the questionnaire itself into his to-be-filed basket. He stared at the information on the screen for a moment then began to log off. But he changed his mind and went online to the Internet and searched some databases. Then he read the brief official report on the Bensons’ suicides.

  He jumped when someone walked into his office. “Hey, Boss.” Shellee blinked. “Thought you were gone.”

  “Just wanted to finish up a few things here.”

  “I’ve got that stuff you wanted.”

  He glanced at it. The title was, “Supplemental reports. SEC case 04-5432.”

  “Thanks,” he said absently, staring at his printouts.

  “Sure.” She eyed him carefully. “You need anything else?”

  “No, go on home. . . . ‘Night.” When she turned away, though, he glanced at the computer screen once more and said, “Wait, Shell. You ever work in Crime Scene?”

  “Never did. Bill watches that TV show. It’s icky.”

  “You know what I’d have to do to get Crime Scene to look over the house?”

  “House?”

  “Where the suicide happened. The Benson house in Greeley.”

  “The—”

  “Suicides. I want Crime Scene to check it out. All they did was test for gunshot residue and take some pictures. I want a complete search. But I don’t know what to do.”

  “Something funny about it?”

  He explained, “Just looked up a few things. The incident profile was out of range. I think something weird was going on there.”

  “I’ll make a call. Ingrid’s still down there, I think.”

  She returned to her desk and Tal rocked back in his chair.

  The low April sun shot bars of ruddy light into his office, hitting the large, blank wall and leaving a geometric pattern on the white paint. The image put in mind the blood on the walls and couch and carpet of the
Bensons’ house. He pictured too the shaky lettering of their note.

  Together forever. . .

  Shellee appeared in the doorway. “Sorry, Boss. They said it’s too late to twenty-one-twenty-four it.”

  “To?—”

  “That’s what they said. They said you need to declare a twenty-one-twenty-four to get Crime Scene in. But you can’t do it now.”

  “Oh. Why?”

  “Something about it being too contaminated now. You have to do it right away or get some special order from the sheriff himself. Anyway, that’s what they told me, Boss.”

  Even though Shellee worked for three other detectives Tal was the only one who received this title—a true endearment, coming from her. She was formal, or chill, with the other cops in direct proportion to the number of times they asked her to fetch coffee or snuck peeks at her ample breasts.

  Outside, a voice from the Real Crimes side of the room called out, “Hey, Bear, you get your questionnaire done?” A chortle followed.

  Greg LaTour called back, “Naw, I’m taking mine home. Had front-row Knicks tickets but I figured, fuck, it’d be more fun to fill out paperwork all night.”

  More laughter.

  Shellee’s face hardened into a furious mask. She started to turn but Tal motioned her to stop.

  “Hey, guys, tone it down.” The voice was Captain Dempsey’s. “He’ll hear you.”

  “Naw,” LaTour called, “Einstein left already. He’s probably home humping his calculator. Who’s up for Sal’s?”

  “I’m for that, Bear.”

  “Let’s do it. . . .”

  Laughter and receding footsteps.

  Shellee muttered, “It just frosts me when they talk like that. They’re like kids in the schoolyard.”

  True, they were, Tal thought. Math whizzes know a lot about bullies on playgrounds.

  But he said, “It’s okay.”

  “No, Boss, it’s not okay.”

  “They live in a different world,” Tal said. “I understand.”

  “Understand how people can be cruel like that? Well, I surely don’t.”

  “You know that thirty-four percent of homicide detectives suffer from depression? Sixty-four percent get divorced. Twenty-eight percent are substance abusers.”

  “You’re using those numbers to excuse ‘em, Boss. Don’t do it. Don’t let ’em get away with it.” She slung her purse over her shoulder and started down the hall, calling “Have a nice weekend, Boss. See you Monday.”

  “And,” Tal continued, “six point three percent kill themselves before retirement.” Though he doubted she could hear.

  The residents of Hamilton, New York, were educated, pleasant, reserved and active in politics and the arts. In business too; they’d chosen to live here because the enclave was the closest exclusive Westbrook community to Manhattan. Industrious bankers and lawyers could be at their desks easily by eight o’clock in the morning.

  The cul-de-sac of Montgomery Way, one of the nicest streets in Hamilton, was in fact home to two bankers and one lawyer, as well as one retired couple. These older residents, at number 205, had lived in their house for twenty-four years. It was a six thousand-square-foot stone Tudor with leaded-glass windows and a shale roof, surrounded by five acres of clever landscaping.

  Samuel Ellicott Whitley had attended law school while his wife worked in the advertising department of Gimbel’s, the department store near the harrowing intersection of Broadway, Sixth Avenue, and Thirty-Fourth Street. He’d finished school in ’57 and joined Brown, Lathrop & Soames on Broad Street. The week after he was named partner, Elizabeth gave birth to a daughter, and after a brief hiatus, resumed classes at Columbia’s graduate business school. She later took a job at one of the country’s largest cosmetics companies and rose to be a senior vice president.

  But the lives of law and business were behind the Whitleys now and they’d moved into the life of retirement as gracefully and comfortably as she stepped into her Dior gowns and he into his Tripler’s tux.

  Tonight, a cool, beautiful April Sunday, Elizabeth hung up the phone after a conversation with her daughter, Sandra, and piled the dinner dishes in the sink. She poured herself another vodka and tonic. She stepped outside onto the back patio, looking out over the azure dusk crowning the hemlocks and pine. She stretched and sipped her drink, feeling tipsy and completely content.

  She wondered what Sam was up to. Just after they’d finished dinner he’d said that he’d had to pick up something. Normally she would have gone with him. She worried because of his illness. Afraid not only that his undependable heart would give out but that he might faint at the wheel or drive off the road because of the medication. But he’d insisted that she stay home; he was only going a few miles.

  Taking a long sip of her drink, she cocked her head, hearing an automobile engine and the hiss of tires on the asphalt. She looked toward the driveway. But she couldn’t see anything. Was it Sam? The car, though, had not come up the main drive but had turned off the road at the service entrance and eased through the side yard, out of sight of the house. She squinted but with the foliage and the dim light of dusk she couldn’t see who it was.

  Logic told her she should be concerned. But Elizabeth was comfortable sitting here with her glass in hand, under a deep blue evening sky. Feeling the touch of cashmere on her skin, happy, warm . . . No, life was perfect. What could there possibly be to worry about?

  Three nights of the week—or as Tal would sometimes phrase it, 42.8751 percent of his evenings—he’d go out. Maybe on a date, maybe to have drinks and dinner with friends, maybe to his regular poker game (the others in the quintet enjoyed his company, though they’d learned it could be disastrous to play with a man who could remember cards photographically and calculate the odds of drawing to a full house like a computer).

  The remaining 57.1249 percent of his nights he’d stay home and lose himself in the world of mathematics.

  This Sunday, nearly 7:00 P.M., Tal was in his small library, which was packed with books but was as ordered and neat as his office at work. He’d spent the weekend running errands, cleaning the house, washing the car, making the obligatory—and ever awkward—call to his father in Chicago, dining with a couple up the road who’d made good their threat to set him up with a cousin (e-mail addresses had been unenthusiastically exchanged over empty mousse dishes). Now, classical music playing on the radio, Tal had put the rest of the world aside and was working on a proof.

  This is the gold ring that mathematicians constantly seek. One might have a brilliant insight about numbers but without completing the proof—the formal argument that verifies the premise—that insight remains merely a theorem; it’s pure speculation.

  The proof that had obsessed him for months involved perfect numbers. These are positive numbers whose divisors (excluding the number itself) add up to that number. The number 6, for instance, is perfect because it’s divisible only by 1, 2, and 3 (not counting 6), and 1, 2, and 3 also add up to 6.

  The questions Tal had been trying to answer: How many even perfect numbers are there? And, more intriguing, are there any odd perfect numbers? In the entire history of mathematics no one has been able to offer a proof that an odd perfect number exists (or that it can’t exist).

  Perfect numbers have always intrigued mathematicians—theologians too. St. Augustine felt that God intentionally chose a perfect number of days—six—to create the world. Rabbis attach great mystical significance to the number 28, the days in the moon’s cycle. Tal didn’t consider perfect numbers in such a spiritual or philosophical way. For him they were simply a curious mathematical construct. But this didn’t minimize their importance to him; proving theorems about perfect numbers (or any other mathematical enigmas) might lead other insights about math and science . . . and perhaps life in general.

  He now hunched over his pages of neat calculations, wondering if the odd perfect number was merely a myth or if it was real and waiting to be discovered, hiding somewhere in the dim dista
nce of numbers approaching infinity.

  Something about this thought troubled him and he leaned back in his chair. It took a moment to realize why. Thinking of infinity reminded him of the suicide note Don and Sy Benson had left.

  Together forever. . .

  He pictured the room where they’d died, the blood, the chilling sight of the grim how-to guide they’d bought. Making the Final Journey.

  Tal stood and paced. Something definitely wasn’t right. For the first time in years he decided to return to the office on a Sunday night. He wanted to look up some background on suicides of this sort.

  A half hour later he was walking past the surprised desk sergeant who had to think for a moment or two before he recognized him.

  “Officer. . .”

  “Detective Simms.”

  “Right. Yessir.”

  Ten minutes later he was in his office, tapping on the keyboard, perusing information about suicides in Westbrook County. At first irritated that the curious events of today had taken him away from his mathematical evening, he soon found himself lost in a very different world of numbers—those that defined the loss of life by one’s own hand in Westbrook County.

  Sam Whitley emerged from the kitchen with a bottle of old Armagnac and joined his wife in the den.

  It had been her husband arriving fifteen minutes ago, after all, driving up the back driveway for reasons he still hadn’t explained.

  Elizabeth now pulled her cashmere sweater around her shoulders and lit a vanilla-scented candle, which sat on the table in front of her. She glanced at the bottle in his hand and laughed.

  “What?” her husband asked.

  “I was reading some of the printouts your doctor gave you.”

  He nodded.

  “And it said that some wine is good for you.”

  “I read that too.” He wiped dust off the bottle, examined the label.