In light of these findings, the Boston criminologist had stated, it was always wise for investigating officers to be guided by the principle of “Occam’s Razor.”
Intrigued by the phrase, Delaney had spent an afternoon in the reading room of the 42nd Street library, tracking down Occam and his “Razor.” Later he told Barbara what he had discovered.
“Occam was a fourteenth century philosopher,” he reported. “His philosophy was ‘nominalism,’ which I don’t understand except that I think he meant there are no universal truths. Anyway, he was famous for his hard-headed approach to problem solving. He believed in shaving away all extraneous details. That’s why they call his axiom ‘Occam’s Razor.’ He said that when there are several possible solutions, the right one is probably the most obvious. In other words, you should eliminate all the unnecessary facts.”
“But you’ve been doing that all your life, Edward.”
“I guess so,” he laughed, “but I call it ‘Cut out the crap.’ Anyway, it’s nice to know a fourteenth century philosopher agrees with me. I wish I knew more about philosophy and could understand it.”
“Does it really bother you that you can’t?”
“Nooo…it doesn’t bother me, but it makes me realize the limitations of my intelligence. I just can’t think in abstractions. You know I tried to learn to play chess three times and finally gave up.”
“Edward, you’re more interested in people than things, or ideas. You have a very good intelligence for people.”
Now, in the hospital room, when Barbara mentioned Occam’s Razor, he knew what she meant and smiled ruefully.
“Well,” he said, rubbing his forehead, “I wonder if old Occam ever tried solving an irrational problem by rational means. I wonder if he wouldn’t begin to doubt the value of logic and deductive reasoning when you’re dealing with-” But then the door to the hospital room swung open, and Dr. Louis Bernardi glided in, olive skin gleaming, his little eyes glittering. A stethoscope was draped about his neck.
He offered Delaney a limp hand, and with the forefinger of his left hand lovingly caressed his ridiculous stripe of a mustache.
“Captain,” he murmured. “And you, dear lady,” he inquired in a louder voice, “how are we feeling today?”
Barbara began to explain that her feet continued to be swollen uncomfortably, how the rash had reappeared on the insides of her thighs, that the attack of nausea had seemed to worsen with the first injection of the antibiotic.
To each complaint Bernardi smiled, said, “Yes, yes,” or “That doesn’t bother me.”
Why should it bother you, Delaney thought angrily. It’s not happening to you, you little prick.
Meanwhile the doctor was taking her pulse, listening to her heart, gently pushing up eyelids to peer into her staring eyes.
“You’re making a fine recovery from surgery,” he assured her. “And they tell me your appetite is improving. I am so very happy, dear lady.”
“When do you think-” Delaney began, but the doctor held up a soft hand.
“Patience,” he said. “You must have patience. And I must have patients. He!”
Delaney turned away in disgust, not understanding how Barbara could trust this simpering popinjay.
Bernardi murmured a few more words, patted Barbara’s hand, smiling his oleaginous smile, then turned to go. He was almost at the door when Delaney saw he was leaving.
“Doctor,” he called, “I want to talk to you a minute.” He said to Barbara, “Be right back, dear.”
In the hall, the door of the room closed, he faced Bernardi and looked at him stonily. “Well?” he demanded.
The doctor spread his hands in that familiar bland gesture that said nothing. “What can I tell you? You can see for yourself. The infection still persists. That damned Proteus. We are working our way through the full spectrum of antibiotics. It takes time.”
“There’s something else.”
“Oh? What is that?”
“Recently my wife has been exhibiting signs of-well, signs of irrationality. She gets a curious stare, she seems suddenly withdrawn, and she says things that don’t make too much sense.”
“What kind of things?”
“Well, a little while ago she wanted some children's hooks. I mean books she owned and read when she was a child. She’s not under sedation, is she?”
“Not now, ho.”
“Pain-killers? Sleeping pills?”
“No. We are trying to avoid any possibility of masking or affecting the strength of the antibiotics. Captain, this does not worry me. Your wife has undergone major surgery. She is under medication. The fever is, admittedly, weakening her. It is understandable that she might have brief periods of-oh, call it wool-gathering. He! I suggest you humor her insofar as that is possible. Her pulse is steady and her heart is strong.”
“As strong as it was?”
Bernardi looked at him without expression. “Captain,” he said softly-and Delaney knew exactly what was coming-“your wife is doing as well as can be expected.”
He nodded, turned, glided away, graceful as a ballet dancer. Delaney was left standing alone, impotent fury hot in his throat, convinced the man knew something, or suspected something, and would not put it into words. He seemed blocked and thwarted on all sides: in his work, in his personal life. What was it he had said to Thomas Handry about a divine order in the universe? Now order seemed slipping away, slyly, and he was defeated by a maniacal killer and unseen beasts feeding on his wife’s flesh.
From the man on the beat to the police commissioner-all cops knew what to expect when the moon was fulclass="underline" sleepwalkers, women who heard voices, men claiming they were being bombarded by electronic beams from a neighbor’s apartment, end-of-the-world nuts, people stumbling naked down the midnight streets, urinating as they ran.
Now Delaney, brooding on war, crime, senseless violence, cruel sickness, brutality, terror, and the slick, honeyed words of a self-satisfied physician, wondered if this was not The Age of the Full Moon, with order gone from the world and irrationality triumphant.
He straightened, set his features into a smile, reentered his wife’s hospital room.
“I suddenly realized why solving the Lombard killing is so important to me,” he told her. “It happened in the Two-five-one Precinct. That’s my world.”
“Occam’s Razor,” she nodded.
Later, he returned home and Mary fixed him a baked ham sandwich and brought that and a bottle of cold beer into his study. He propped the telephone book open on his desk, and as he ate he called second-hand bookstores, asking for original editions of the Honey Bunch books, the illustrated ones.
Everyone he called seemed to know immediately what he wanted: the Grossett amp; Dunlap editions published in the early 1920s. The author was Helen Louise Thomdyke. But no one had any copies. One bookseller took his name and address and promised to try to locate them. Another suggested he try the chic “antique boutiques” on upper Second and Third Avenues, shops that specialized in nostalgic Americana,
Curiously, this ridiculous task seemed to calm him, and by the time he had finished his calls and his lunch, he was determined to get back to work, to work steadily and unquestioningly, just doing.
He went to his book shelves and took down every volume he owned dealing, even in peripheral fashion, with the histories, analyses and detection of mass murderers. The stack he put on the table alongside his club chair was not high; literature on the subject was not extensive. He sat down heavily, put on his thick, horn-rimmed reading glasses, and began to plow through the books, skipping and skimming as much as he could of material that had no application to the Lombard case.
He read about Gille de Raix, Verdoux, Jack the Ripper and in more recent times, Whitman, Speck, Unruh, the Boston strangler, Panzram, Manson, the boy in Chicago who wrote with the victim’s lipstick on her bathroom mirror, “Stop me before I kill more.” It was a sad, sad chronicle of human aberration, and the saddest thing of all was the feeling he got of killer as victim, dupe of his own agonizing lust or chaotic dreams.