You had to live with that confusion and, if you were lucky, discard the meaningless and zero in on the significant. But how to tell one from the other? False trails and time wasted chasing leads that dribbled away.
Meanwhile, Thorsen was sweating to have a murder cleaned up, neat and clean, by the holidays. So his man could be promoted.
Two sets of unidentified footprints and two blows to the victim's eyes.
Was there any meaning in that? Or in Ellerbee telling his wife he had scheduled a late patient, presumably meaning someone after 6:00 P.m. But he had died at approximately nine o'clock. Would he have waited that long for a late patient? Someone who would arrive, say, at 8:00 P.m.
No signs of forced entry. So Ellerbee buzzed someone in, someone he was expecting. One person or two? And why leave that street door open when they left?
"The butler did it," Delaney said aloud, and then pulled his yellow legal pad toward him, put on his reading glasses, and began making notes on how much he didn't know. It was a long, depressing list. He stared at it and had an uneasy feeling that he might be missing the obvious.
He remembered a case he had worked years ago. There had been a string of armed robberies on Amsterdam Avenue; six small stores had been hit in a period of two months. Apparently the same cowboy was pulling all of them-a young punk with a Fu Manchu mustache, waving a nickel-plated pistol.
One of the six places allegedly robbed at gunpoint was a mom-and-pop grocery storenear78th Street. The owners lived in a rear apartment. The old lady opened the store every morning at 7:30. Her husband, who had a weakness for slivovitz, usually joined her behind the counter a half-hour or hour later.
On this particular morning, the old man said, his wife had gone into the store to open up as usual. He was dressing when he heard a gunshot, rushed out, and found her lying behind the counter. The cash register was open, he said, and about thirty dollars' worth of bills and coin were gone.
The old lady was dead, hit in the chest with what turned out to be a.38 slug. Delaney and his partner, a Detective second grade named Loren Pierce, chalked it up to the Fu Manchu punk with the shiny pistol. They couldn't stake out every little shop on Amsterdam Avenue, but they haunted the neighborhood, spending a lot of their off-hours walking the streets and eyeballing every guy with a mustache.
They finally got lucky. The robber tried to rip off a deli, not knowing the owner's son was on his knees, out of sight behind a pile of cartons, putting stock on the shelves. The son rose up and hit Fu Manchu over the head with a five-pound canned ham. That was the end of that crime wave.
It turned out the punk was snorting coke and robbing to support a $500-a-day habit. Even more interesting, his nickel-plated weapon was a .22, the barrel so dirty it would have blown his hand off if he had ever fired it.
Detectives Delaney and Pierce looked at each other and cursed. Then they went back to the mom-and-pop grocery store, but only after they had checked and discovered that Pop had a permit to keep a.38 handgun in the store. They leaned on him and he caved almost immediately.
"She was always nagging at me," he complained.
That was what Delaney meant when he worried about missing the obvious.
He and Pierce should have checked immediately to see if the old man had a gun.
It never hurt to get the simple, evident things out of the way first. It was a mistake to think all criminals were great brains; most of them were stupes.
He pondered all the known facts in the Ellerbee homicide and couldn't see anything simple and obvious that he had missed. He thought the case probably hinged on the character of the dead man and his relationship with his patients.
He reflected awhile and admitted he had an irrational contempt for people who sought aid for emotional problems. He would never do it; he was convinced of that. The death of Barbara, his first wife, had left him numb for a long time. But he had hulled his way out of that funk-by himself.
Still, he had no hesitation in seeking help for physical ills.
A virus, a twinge of the liver, a skin lesion that wouldn't heal-and off he went to consult a physician. So why this disdain for people who took their inner torments to a trained practitioner?
Because, Delaney.supposed, there was an element of fear in his prejudice. Psychologists and psychiatrists were dealing with something you couldn't see.
There was a mystery there, and dread. It was like taking your brain to a witch doctor.
Still, Delaney knew that if he was going to get anywhere on the Ellerbee case he'd have to cultivate and evince sympathy for those who fled to the witch doctor.
He left the house early, deciding to walk to the Ellerbees' townhouse to meet Abner Boone. It was a dull day with a cloud cover as rough as an elephant hide. The air smelled of snow, and a hard northwest wind made him grab for his homburg more than once.
On impulse, he stopped in at a First Avenue hardware store. All the clerks were busy, for which he was thankful. He found a display of hammers and picked up a ball peen. He hefted it in his hand, swinging it gently in a downward chop.
So many useful tools made lethal weapons. He wondered which came first.
If he had to guess, he'd say weapons evolved into tools.
That shiny round knob could puncture a man's skull if swung with sufficient force-no doubt about that. A man could do it easily, but then so could a woman if she were strong and determined. He replaced the hammer in the display, having learned absolutely nothing.
Boone was waiting for him across the street from the townhouse. He was huddling in his parka, hands in his pockets, shoulders hunched.
"That wind's a bitch," he observed. "My ears feel like tin."
"I feel the cold in my feet," Delaney said. "An old cop's complaint. The feet are the first to go. Did you talk to Suarez?"
"Yes, sir, I did. On the phone. He was tied up with a million other things."
"I imagine."
"He sounds like a patient man. Very polite. Said to thank you for keeping in touch, and he's grateful for what we've done so far."
"What about Parnell?"
"He'll get him going on the financial reports immediately. I think he was a little embarrassed that he hadn't thought of it himself."
"He's got enough to think about," Delaney said absently, staring across the street. "That's the place-the gray stone building?"
"That's the one, sir."
"Smaller than I thought it would be. Let's wander around a little first."
They walked over to East End Avenue, inspecting buildings on both sides of 84th Street. The block contained a mix of apartment houses with marbled lobbies, crumbling brownstones, a school, smart townhouses, dilapidated tenements, and a few commercial establishments on the avenue corners.
They looked at the East River, turned, and walked back to York.
"Plenty of areaways," Boone observed. "Open lobbies and vestibules with the outer door unlocked. The perp could have gone into any of them to get out of the rain."
"Could have," Delaney agreed. "But then how did he get into the Ellerbees' building? No signs of forced entry. What I'm wondering about is what the killer did afterward. Walk away in the rain, leaving the front door open?
Or did the killer have a car parked nearby? Or maybe stroll over to York or East End and take a cab? Both avenues are two-way."
"My God, sir," the Sergeant said, "you're not thinking of checking taxi trip-sheets for that night, are you? What a job!"
"We won't do it right now, but it may become necessary.
Besides, there couldn't have been so many cabs working that Friday night. It wasn't just raining; it was a flood. Well, this street isn't going to tell us anything; let's go talk to the widow; it's almost six."
The outer door of the Ellerbee townhouse was unlocked, leading to a lighted vestibule with mailboxes and a bell plate of polished brass.
Boone tried the inner door.
"Locked," he reported. "This is the inner door Doctor Samuelson found open when he arrived."