Captain Delaney listened to all of them, nodding gravely. Occasionally he spoke in a voice so deliberately low his listeners had to crane forward to hear. He had learned from experience that nothing worked so well as quiet, measured tones to calm anger and bring people, if not to reason then to what was possible and practical.
It was 8:00 p.m. before his outer office had emptied. He rose and forced back his massive shoulders, stretching wide. This kind of work, he had discovered, was a hundred times more wearying than walking a beat or riding a squad. It was the constant, controlled exercise of judgment and will, of convincing, persuading, soothing, dictating and, when necessary, surrendering for a time, to take up the fight another day.
He cleaned up his desk, taking a regretful look at the paperwork that had piled up in one day and must wait for tomorrow. Before leaving, he looked in at lockups and squad rooms, at interrogation rooms and the detectives’ cubbyholes. The 251st Precinct house was almost 90 years old. It was cramped, it creaked, and it smelled like all antique precinct houses in the city. A new building had been promised by three different city administrations. Captain Delaney made do. He took a final look at the Duty Sergeant’s blotter before he walked next door to his home.
Even older than the Precinct house, it had been built originally as a merchant’s townhouse. It had deteriorated over the years until, when Delaney bought it with the inheritance from his father’s estate ($28,000), it had become a rooming house, chopped up into rat-and-roach-infested one-person apartments. But Delaney had satisfied himself that the building was structurally sound, and Barbara’s quick eye had seen the original marble fireplaces and walnut paneling (painted over but capable of being restored), the rooms for the children, the little paved areaway and overgrown garden. So they had bought it, never dreaming he would one day be commanding officer of the Precinct house next door.
Mary had left the hall light burning. There was a note Scotch-taped to the handsome pier glass. She had left slices of cold lamb and potato salad in the refrigerator. There was lentil soup he could heat up if he wanted it, and an apple tart for dessert. It all seemed good to him, but he had to watch his weight. He decided to skip the soup.
First he called the hospital. Barbara sounded sleepy and didn’t make much sense; he wondered if they had given her a sedative. He spoke to her for only a few moments and thought she was relieved when he said good-night.
He went into the kitchen, took off his uniform jacket and gun belt and hung them on the back of a chair. First he mixed a rye highball, his first drink of the day. He sipped it slowly, smoked a cigarette (his third of the day), and wondered why Dr. Ferguson hadn’t returned his calls. Suddenly he realized it might be Ferguson’s day off, in which case he had probably been out playing golf.
Carrying the drink, he went into the study and rummaged through the desk for his address book. He found Ferguson’s home number and dialed. Almost immediately a jaunty voice answered:
“Doctor Ferguson. ”
“Captain Edward X. Delaney here.”
“Hello, Captain Edward X. Delaney there,” the voice laughed. “What the hell’s wrong with you-got a dose of clap from a fifteen-year-old bimbo?”
“No. It’s about my wife. Barbara.”
The tone changed immediately.
“Oh. What’s the problem, Edward?”
“Doctor, would it be possible to see you tonight?”
“Both of you or just you?”
“Just me. She’s in the hospital.”
“I’m sorry to hear that. Edward, you caught me on the way out. They’ve dragged me into an emergency cut-’em-up.” (The doctor’s slang for an autopsy.) “I won’t be home much before midnight. Too late?”
“No. I can be at your home at midnight. Will that be all right?”
“Sure. What’s this all about?”
“I’d rather tell you in person. And there are papers. Documents. Some X-rays.”
“I see. All right, Edward. Be here at twelve.”
“Thank you, doctor.”
He went back into the kitchen to eat his cold lamb and potato salad. It all tasted like straw. He put on his heavy, black-rimmed glasses, and as he ate slowly, he methodically read every paper in Barbara’s medical file, and even held the X-rays up to the overhead light, although they meant nothing to him. There she was, in shadows: the woman who meant everything to him.
He finished eating and reading at the same time. All the doctors seemed to agree. He decided to skip the apple tart and black coffee. But he mixed another rye highball and, in his skivvie shirt, went wandering through the empty house.
It was the first time since World War II he and his wife slept under separate roofs. He was bereft, and in all those darkened rooms he felt her presence and wanted her: sight, voice, smell, laugh, slap of slippered feet, touch…her.
The children were there, too, in the echoing rooms. Cries and shouts, quarrels and stumblings. Eager questions. Wailing tears. Their life had soaked into the old walls. Holiday meals. Triumphs and defeats. The fabric of a family. All silent now, and dark as the shadows on an X-ray film.
He climbed stairs slowly to vacant bedrooms and attic. The house was too big for the two of them: no doubt about it. But still…There was the door jamb where Liza’s growth had been marked with pencil ticks. There was the flight of stairs Eddie had tumbled down and cut his chin and never cried. There was the very spot where one of their many dogs had coughed up his life in bright blood, and Barbara had become hysterical.
It wasn’t much, he supposed. It was neither high tragedy nor low comedy. No great heights or depths. But a steady wearing away of the years. Time evened whatever drama there may have been. Time dimmed the colors; the shouting died. But the golden monochrome, the soft tarnish that was left had meaning for him. He wandered through the dim corridors of his life, thinking deep thoughts and making foolish wishes.
Dr. Sanford Ferguson, a bachelor, was a big man, made bigger by creaseless tweed suits worn with chain-looped vests. He was broad through the shoulders and broad through the chest. He was not corpulent but his thighs were as big around as another man’s waist, and his arms were meaty and strong.
No one doubted his cleverness. At parties he could relate endless jokes that had the company helpless with laughter. He knew many dialects perfectly and, in his cups, could do an admirable soft-shoe clog. He was much in demand as an after-dinner speaker at meetings of professional associations. He was an ineffectual but enthusiastic golfer. He sang a sweet baritone. He could make a souffle. And, unknown to everyone (including his older spinster sister), he kept a mistress: a middle-aged colored lady he loved and by whom he had fathered three sons.
He was also, Delaney knew, an experienced and cynical police surgeon. Violent death did not dismay him, and he was not often fooled by the obvious. In “natural deaths” he sniffed out arsenic. In “accidental deaths” he would pry out the fatal wound in a corpus of splinters.
“Here’s your rye,” he said, handing the highball to Delaney. “Now sit there and keep your mouth shut, and let me read and digest.”
It was after midnight. They were in the living room of Ferguson’s apartment on Murray Hill. The spinster sister had greeted Delaney and then disappeared, presumably to bed. The doctor had mixed a rye highball for his guest and poured a hefty brandy for himself in a water tumbler.
Delaney sat quietly in an armchair pinned with an antimacassar. Dr. Ferguson sat on a spindly chair at a fine Queen Anne lowboy. His bulk threatened to crush chair and table. His wool tie was pulled wide, shirt collar open: wiry hair sprang free.
“That was a nice cut-’em-up tonight,” he remarked, peering at the documents in the file Delaney had handed over. “A truck driver comes home from work. Greenwich Village. He finds his wife, he says, on the kitchen floor. Her head’s in the oven. The room’s full of gas. He opens the window. She’s dead. I can attest to that. She was depressed, the truck driver says. She often threatened suicide, he says. Well…maybe. We’ll see. We’ll see.”