The 1st Deadly Sin (77 page)

“Beautiful. Thank you for your help.”

After Handry left, Delaney kept staring at that inscription: “With all best wishes. Daniel G. Blank.” He rubbed his fingers lightly over the signature. It seemed to bring him closer to the man.

He was still staring at the handwriting, trying to see beyond it, when Detective sergeant Thomas MacDonald came in sideways, slipping his bulk neatly through the hallway door, left partly open by Handry.

The black moved a step into the study, then stopped. “Interrupting you, Captain?”

“No, no. Come on in. What’s up?”

The short, squat detective came over to Delaney’s desk. “You wanted a photo of Roger Kope, the cop who got wasted. Will this do?”

He handed Delaney a crisp white cardboard folder, opening sideways. On the front it said, in gold script, “Holiday Greetings.” Inside, on the left, in the same gold script, it read: “From the Kope family.” On the right side was pasted a color photo of Roger Kope, his wife, three little children. They were posed, grinning self-consciously, before a decorated Christmas tree. The dead detective had his arm about his wife’s shoulders. It wasn’t a good photo: obviously an amateur job taken a year ago and poorly copied. Hie colors were washed out, the face of one of the children was blurred. But they were all there.

“It was all we could get,” MacDonald said tonelessly. “They had about a hundred made up a month ago, but I guess Mrs. Kope won’t send them this year. Will it do?”

“Yes,” Delaney nodded. “Just fine.” Then, as MacDonald turned to go, he said, “Sergeant, a couple of other things…Who’s the best handwriting man in the Department?”

MacDonald thought a moment, his sculpted features calm, carved: a Congo mask or a Picasso sketch. “Handwriting,” he repeated. “That would be Willow, William T., Detective lieutenant. He works out of a broom-closet office downtown.”

“Ever have any dealings with him?”

“About two years ago. It was a forged lottery ticket ring. He’s a nice guy. Prickly, but okay. He sure knows his stuff.”

“Could you get him up here? No rush. Whenever he can make it.”

“I’ll give him a call.”

“Good. The next day or so will be fine.”

“All right, Captain. What’s the other thing?”

“What?”

“You said you had a couple of things.”

“Oh. Yes. Who’s controlling the men on the tap on Danny Boy’s home phone?”

“I am, Captain. Fernandez set it up: technically they’re his boys. But he asked me to take over. He’s got enough on his plate. Besides, these guys are just sitting on their ass. They’ve come up with zilch. Danny Boy makes one or two calls a week, usually to the Princess in the Castle. Maybe to the Mortons. And he gets fewer calls. So far it’s nothing.”

“Uh-huh,” Delaney nodded. “Listen, sergeant, would it be possible to make some clicks or buzzes the next time Danny Boy makes or gets a call?”

MacDonald picked up on it instantly. “So he thinks or knows his phone is tapped?”

“Right.”

“Sure. No sweat; we could do that. Clicks, buzzes, hisses, an echo—something. He’ll get the idea.”

“Fine.”

MacDonald stared at him a long time, putting things together. Finally: “Spooking him, Captain?” he asked softly.

Captain Delaney put out his hands, palms down on his desk blotter, lowered his massive head to stare at them.

“Not spooking,” he said in a gentle voice. “I mean to split him. To crack him open. Wide. Until he’s in pieces and bleeding. And it’s working. I know it is. Sergeant, how do
you
know when you’re close?”

“My mouth goes dry.”

Delaney nodded. “My armpits begin to sweat something awful. Right now they’re dripping like old faucets. I’m going to push this guy right over the edge, right off, and watch him fall.”

MacDonald’s smooth expression didn’t change. “You figure he’ll suicide, Captain?”

“Will he suicide…” Delaney said thoughtfully. Suddenly, that moment, something began that he had been hoping for.
He
was Daniel G. Blank, penetrating deep into the man, smoothing his body with perfumed oils, dribbling on scented powders, wearing silk bikini underwear and a fashionable wig, living in sterile loneliness, fucking a boy-shaped woman, buggering a real boy, and venturing out at night to find loves who would help him to break out, to feel, to discover what he was, and meaning.

“Suicide?” Delaney repeated, so quietly that MacDonald could hardly hear him. “No. Not by gunshot, pills, or defenestration.” He smiled slightly when he pronounced the last word, knowing the sergeant would pick up the mild humor. Defenestration: throwing yourself out a window to smash to jelly on the concrete below. “No, he won’t suicide, no matter how hard the pressure. Not his style. He likes risk. He climbs mountains. He’s at his best when he’s in danger. It’s like champagne.”

“Then what will he do, Captain?”

“I’m going to run,” Delaney said in a strange, pleading voice. “I’ve
got
to run.”

3

T
HE SECOND DAY
after Christmas, Daniel Blank decided the worst thing—the
worst
thing—was committing these irrational acts, and
knowing
they were irrational, and not being able to stop.

For instance, this morning, completely unable to get to work at his usual hour, he sat stiffly in his living room, dressed for a normal day at Javis-Bircham. And between 9:00 and 11:00 a.m., he rose from his chair at least three times to check the locks and bolts on the front door. They were fastened—he
knew
they were fastened—but he had to check. Three times.

Then suddenly he darted through the apartment, flinging open closet doors, thrusting an arm between hanging clothes. No one there. He knew it was wrong to be acting the way he was.

He mixed a drink, a morning drink, thinking it might help. He picked up a knife to slice a wedge of lime, looked at the blade, let it clatter into the sink. No temptation there, none, but he didn’t want the thing in his hand. He might reach up to wipe his eyes and…

What about the sandals? That was odd. He owned a pair of leather strap-sandals, custom-made. He still remembered the shop in Greenwich Village, the cool hands of the young Chinese girl tracing his bare feet on a sheet of white paper. He frequently wore the sandals at night, when he was home alone. The straps were loose enough so that he could slip the sandals onto his feet without unbuckling and buckling. He had been doing it for years. But this morning the straps had been unbuckled, the sandals there beside his bed with straps flapping wide. Who had done that?

And time—what was happening to his sense of time? He thought ten minutes had elapsed, but it turned out to be an hour. He guessed an hour, and it was 20 minutes. What was happening?

And what was happening to his penis? It was his imagination, of course, but it seemed to be shrinking, withdrawing into his scrotum. Ridiculous. And he no longer had his regular bowel movement a half-hour after he awoke. He felt stuffed and blocked.

Other things…Little things…

Going from one room to another and, when he got there, forgetting why he had made the trip.

Hearing a phone ring on a television program and leaping up to answer his own phone.

Finally, when he got to the office, things didn’t go well at all. Not that he couldn’t have handled it; he was thinking logically, he was lucid. But what was the point?

Near noon, Mrs. Cleek came in and found him weeping at his desk, head bent forward, palms gripping his temples. Her eyes blurred immediately with sympathy.

“Mr. Blank,” she said, “what
is
it?”

“I’m sorry,” he gasped, and then, saying the first thing that came into his mind: “A death in the family.”

What caused his tears was this: do mad people know they are mad? That is, do they know they are acting abnormally but cannot help it? That was why he wept.

“Oh,” Mrs. Cleek mourned, “I’m so sorry.”

He got home, finally. He was as proud as a drunk who walks out of a bar without upsetting anything, steadfast, steps slowly through the doorway without brushing the frame, follows a sidewalk seam slowly and carefully homeward, never wavering.

It was early in the evening. Was it 6:00 p.m.? It might be eight. He didn’t want to look at his watch bracelet. He wasn’t sure he could trust it. Perhaps it might not be his own faulty time sense; it might be his wristwatch running wild. Or time itself running wild.

He picked up his phone. There was a curious, empty echo before he got a dial tone. He heard it ring. Someone picked up the phone. Then Blank heard two sharp clicks.

“Mith Montforth rethidenth,” he heard Valenter say.

“This is Daniel Blank. Is Miss Montfort in?”

“Yeth, thir. I’ll call—”

But then Daniel Blank heard a few more soft clicks, a strange hissing on the line. He hung up abruptly. Jesus! He should have known. He left the apartment immediately. What time
was
it? It didn’t matter.

“He’s tapping my phone,” he said to Celia indignantly. “I definitely heard it. Definitely.”

They were in that tainted room at the top of the house; city sounds came faintly. He told her he had followed her advice, had opened his mind to instinct, to all the primitive fears and passions that had come flooding in. He told her how he had been acting, the irrational fits and starts of his daily activities, and he told her about the clicks, hisses, and echo on the phone when he had called her.

“Do you think I’m going mad?” he demanded.

“No,” she said slowly, almost judiciously, “I don’t think so. I think that in the time I have known you, you have been moving from the man you were to the man you are to be. What that is, I don’t believe either of us know for sure. But it’s understandable that this growth be painful, perhaps even frightening. You’re leaving everything familiar behind you and setting out on a journey, a search, a climb, that’s leading…somewhere. Forget for a moment the man who has been following you and the phone call you received. These pains and dislocations have nothing to do with that. Dan, you’re being born again, and you’re feeling all the anguish of birth, being yanked from the safety of a warm womb into a foreign world. The wonder is that you’ve endured it as well as you have.”

As usual, her flood of murmured words soothed and assured him; he felt as relaxed as if she was stroking his brow. She
did
make sense; it
was
true that he had changed since he met her, and was changing. The murders were part of it, of course—she was wrong to deny that—but they were not the cause but just one effect of the monumental upheaval inside him, something hot and bubbling there thrusting to the surface.

They made love slowly then, with more tenderness than passion, more sweetness than joy. In the eerie light of that single orange bulb he leaned close to see her for the first time, microscopically.

Her nipples, under his tongue’s urging, engorged and, peering close, he saw the flattened tops with ravines and gorges, tiny, tiny, a topographic map. And threaded through the small breasts a network of bluish veins, tangled as a silken skein.

Along the line of curved hip sprouted a Lilliputian wheat-field of surprisingly golden hairs, and more at the dimpled small of her back. These tender sprouts tickled dry and dusty on his tongue. The convoluted navel returned his stare in a lascivious wink. Inside, prying, he found a sharp bitterness that tingled.

Far up beneath her long hair, at nape of neck, was swamp dampness and scent of pond lilies. He stared at flesh of leg and groin, so close his eyelashes brushed and she made a small sound. There was hard, shiny skin on her soles, a crumbling softness between her toes. It all became clear to him, and dear, and sad.

They fenced with tongues—thrust, parry, cut—and then he was tasting creamy wax from her ear and in her armpits a sweet liquor that bit and melted on his lips like snow. Behind her knees more blue veins meandered, close to a skin that felt like suede and twitched faintly when he touched.

He spread her buttocks; the rosebud glared at him, withdrawing and expanding—a time-motion film of a flower reacting to light and darkness. He put his erect penis in her soft palm, slowly guided her fingers to stroke, circle, gently probe the opening, their hands clasped so they might share. He touched his lips to her closed eyes, thought he might suck them out and gulp them down like oysters, seasoned with her tears.

“I want you inside me,” she said suddenly, lay on her back, spread her knees wide, guided his cock up into her. She wrapped arms and legs about him and moaned softly, as if they were making love for the first time.

But there was no love. Only a sweetness so sad it was almost unendurable. Even as they fucked he knew it was the sadness of departure; they would never fuck again; both knew it.

She was quickly slick, inside and out; they grappled to hold tight. He spurted with a series of great, painful lunges and, stunned, he continued to make the motions long after he was drained and surfeited. He could not stop his spasm, had no desire to, and felt her come again.

She looked at him through half-opened eyes, glazed; he thought she felt what he did: the defeat of departure. In that moment he knew she had told. She had betrayed him.

But he smiled, smiled, smiled, kissed her closed mouth, went home early. He took a cab because the darkness frightened him.

If it was a day of departure and defeat for Daniel Blank, it was a day of arrival and triumph for Captain Edward X. Delaney. He dared not feel confident, lest he put the Whammy on it, but it did seem to be coming together.

Paper work in the morning: requisitions, reports, vouchers—the whole schmear. Then over to the hospital to sit awhile with Barbara, reading to her from “Honey Bunch: Her First Little Garden.” Then he treated himself to a decent meal in one of those west side French restaurants:
coq au vin
with a half-bottle of a heavy burgundy to help it along. He paid his bill and then, on the way out, stopped at the bar for a Kirsch. He felt good.

It was good; everything was good. He had no sooner returned to his home when Blankenship came in to display Danny Boy’s Time-Habit Pattern. It was very erratic indeed: Arrived at the Factory at 11:30 a.m. Skipped lunch completely. Took a long zigzag walk along the docks. Sat on a wharf for almost an hour—“Just watching the turds float by” according to the man tailing him. Report from Stryker: He had taken Mrs. Cleek to lunch, and she told him she had found Danny Boy weeping in his office, and he had told her there had been a death in the family. Danny Boy returned to the White House at 2:03 p.m.