Delaney returned to the fence blocking off East River Drive, crossed the street, and started down the sidewalk where the body had been found, heading in the direction the victim had been walking.
Now I am Frank Lombard, soon to be dead. I have just had dinner with my mother, I have come out of her apartment house at midnight, I am in a hurry to get home to Brooklyn. I walk quickly, and I look about constantly. I even look down into the bush-surrounded entrances to the brownstones. I am acutely aware of the incidence of street assaults, and I make certain no one is lurking, waiting to bash me on the head or mug me.
I look up ahead. There is a man coming toward me from York Avenue. In the shadowless glare of the new street lights I can see that the man is well-dressed, carrying a coat over his arm. He too is hurrying, anxious to get home. I can understand that. As he approaches, our eyes lock. We both nod and smile reassuringly. “It’s all right,” the smile says. “We’re both well-dressed. We look okay. We’re not muggers.” I draw aside a little to give the man room to pass. The next instant I am dead.
Delaney stopped at the chalked outline on the sidewalk. It began to seem real to him. It explained why Lombard apparently made no move to defend himself, didn’t have time to make a move. The Captain walked slowly down to York Avenue. He turned, started back toward the river.
Now I am the killer, carrying a coat across my arm. Under the coat, hidden, I am grasping the handle of a hammer. I am walking quickly, with purposeful strides. Ahead of me, in the orange glare, I see the man I am to kill. I walk toward him briskly. As I come up, I nod, smile, and move to pass him. Now he is looking straight ahead. I pass, lift the hammer free, whirl, raise it high and strike. He goes down, sprawling forward. I cover the hammer again, walk quickly back to York Avenue again and escape.
Captain Delaney paused again at the chalked diagram. Yes, it could have happened that way. If the killer had nerve and resolution-and luck, of course. Always luck. No one looking out a window. No one else on the street at that hour. No cab suddenly coming down from York, its headlights picking him up the instant he struck. But assuming the killer’s luck, it all-ah, Jesus! The wallet! He had forgotten that damned wallet completely!
The wallet was the folding type, the kind a man customarily carries in a hip pocket. Indeed, Delaney had noted it had acquired a slight curve, taking its shape from the buttock. He carried the same type of wallet himself, and it began to curve after several months of use.
Lombard had been wearing a three-quarter “car coat” fastened in front with wooden toggles. In back, the coat and suit jacket beneath it had been pulled up high enough to expose his hip pockets. Now why had the killer paused long enough to frisk his victim for his wallet and then leave it open beside the body, even though it was stuffed with money? Every moment he tarried, every second, the killer was in deadly peril. Yet he took the time to search the corpse and remove the wallet. And then he left it open beside the body.
Why didn’t he take the money-or the entire wallet? Not because he was frightened away by someone’s appearance at a window or on the street. A man with nerve enough to approach his victim from the front would have nerve enough to take his loot, even if emperiled. A man can run just as fast with a wallet as without it. No, he just didn’t want the money. What did he want? To check the identification of his victim-or did he take something from the wallet, something they didn’t know about yet?
Delaney went back to York Avenue, turned, started back, and ran through it again.
Now I am the killer, carrying a coat across my arm. Under the coat…
Delaney knew as well as any man in the Department what the chances were of solving this particular homicide. He knew that in 1971 New York City had more murders than American combat deaths in Vietnam during the same period. In New York, almost five victims a day were shot, knifed, strangled, bludgeoned, set on fire or thrown from roofs. In such a horrific bloodbath, what was one more?
But if that became the general attitude, the accepted attitude, society’s attitude-“What’s one more?”-then the murder of Frank Lombard was an incident of no significance. When plague strikes, who cares enough to mourn a single soul?
When Captain Edward X. Delaney explained to the newspaperman why he had become a cop, he said what he thought: that he believed there was an eternal harmony in the universe, in all things animate and inanimate, and that crime was a dissonance in the chiming of the spheres. That is what Delaney thought.
But now, playing his victim-killer game in the first raw attempt to understand what had happened and to begin a possible solution of this crime, he was sadly aware that he had a deeper motive, more felt than thought. He had never spoken of it to anyone, not even Barbara, although he suspected she guessed.
It was perhaps due to his Catholic nurture that he sought to set the world aright. He wanted to be God’s surrogate on earth. It was, he knew, a shameful want. He recognized the sin. It was pride.
2
What was it? He could not decipher its form or meaning. A frail thing there under white sheet and blue blanket, thin arms arranged outside. Heavy eyelids more stuck than shut, cheek bones poking, pale lips drawn back in a death’s head grin, a body so frail it seemed even the blanket pressed it flat. And tubes, bandages, steel and plastic-new organs these-jars and drainage bags. He looked frantically for signs of life, stared, stared, saw finally a slow wearied rise and fall of breast no plumper than a boy’s. He thought of the body of Frank Lombard and wondered, Where is the connection? Then realized he saw both through mist, his eyes damped and heavy.
“She’s under heavy sedation,” the nurse whispered, “but she’s coming along just fine. Dr. Bernardi is waiting for you in the Surgeons’ Lounge.”
He searched for something he could kiss, a naked patch of skin free of tubes, needles, straps, bandages. All he wanted was to make a signal, just a signal. He bent to kiss her hair, but it was wire beneath his lips.
“I mentioned it,” Bernardi said, inspecting his fingernails. Then he looked up at Delaney accusingly, daring him to deny it. “You’ll remember I mentioned Proteus infection.”
The Captain sat stolidly, craving sleep like an addict. They were at opposite sides of the card table in the Surgeons’ Lounge. Cards were scattered across the surface, most of them face down but a queen of hearts showing, and a nine of spades.
“Proteus infection,” Delaney repeated heavily. “How do you know?”
“That’s what the lab tells us.”
“And you think your lab is more knowledgeable than you and your associates who diagnosed my wife’s illness as kidney stones?”
Again the opaque film coated the doctor’s glistening eyes.
His body stiffened, and he made a gesture Delaney had never seen him use before: he put the tip of his right forefinger in his right ear with the thumb stuck up in the air, exactly like a man blowing his brains out.
“Captain,” he purred in his unctuous voice, “I assure you-”
“All right, all right,” Delaney waved the apology away. “Let’s not waste time. What is Proteus infection?”
Bernardi brightened, as he always did at an opportunity to display his erudition. Now he made his usual gesture of placing his index fingers together and pressing them against pouting lips.