"Yes, sir. Nothing new to report."
"Keep at it. There's one blueberry muffin left; who wants it?" I'll take it," Jason Two said promptly.
"I could OD on those little beauties."
After they were gone, Delaney sat at the kitchen table and finished his lukewarm coffee, too keyed-up to go back to bed.
He reflected on the latest developments and decided he had very little sympathy for Detective Timothy Hogan. You paid for your stupidity in this world one way or another.
He rinsed out the cups and saucers, set them in the rack to dry, cleaned up the kitchen. He took Calazo's report on Isaac into the study and put on his glasses. He read slowly and with enjoyment. Calazo had a pungent style of writing that avoided the usual Department gibberish.
When he finished, Delaney put the report aside and lighted a cigar. He pondered not so much the facts Calazo had recounted but what he had implied.
The detective (covering his ass) had said there was a possibility he was wrong, but he believed Isaac Kane innocent of the murder of Dr. Simon Ellerbee. He was saying, in effect, that there were no perfect solutions, only judgments.
Edward X. Delaney knew that mind set well; it was his own. In the detection of crime, nothing cohered. It was an open-ended pursuit with definite answers left to faith. There was a religious element to detection: Rational investigation went only so far. Then came the giant step to belief for which there was no proof.
Which meant, of course, that the detective had to live with doubt and anxiety. If you couldn't do that, Delaney thought not for the first time you really should be in another line of business.
Detective Helen Venable was having a particularly severe attack of doubt and anxiety. She was uncertain of her own ability to establish the truth or falsity of Joan Yesell's alleged alibi without seeking the advice of her more experienced male colleagues.
She was nervous about her failure to report Mrs. Blanche Yesell's possible absence from her apartment on the murder night. She was worried that there were inquiries she should be making that she was not. And she fretted that an entire week had to pass before she could confirm or deny the existence of the stupid bridge club.
But her strongest doubt was a growing disbelief in Joan's guilt. That soft, feeling, quiet woman, so overwhelmed by the hard, brutal, raucous world of Manhattan, was incapable of crushing the skull of a man she professed to admire. Or so Detective Venable thought.
She met with Joan every day, spoke to her frequently on the phone, went out with her Monday night for a spaghetti dinner and to a movie on Thursday afternoon. The closer their relationship became, the more Helen was convinced of the woman's innocence.
Joan was almost physically sickened by the filth and ugliness of city streets. She was horrified and depressed by violence in any form. She could not endure the thought of cruelty to animals. The sight of a dead sparrow made her weep. She never objected to Helen's squad room profanity, but the detective could see her wince.
"Kiddo," Venable told her, "you're too good for this world.
Angels finish last."
"I don't think I'm an angel," Joan said slowly.
"Far from it. I do awful, stupid things, like everyone else. Sometimes I get so furious with Mama that I could scream. You think I'm goody-goody, but I'm not."
"Compared to me," Helen said, "you're a saint."
Frequently, during that week, the detective brought the talk around to Dr. Simon Ellerbee. Joan seemed iilling, almost eager, to speak of him.
"He meant so much to me," she said.
"He was the only therapist I ever went to, and I knew right from the start that he would help me. I could see he'd never be shocked or offended by anything I'd tell him. He'd just listen in that nice, sympathetic way of his. I'd never hold back from him because I knew I could trust him. I think he was the first man-the first person-I really and truly trusted. We were so close. I had the feeling that things that hurt me hurt him, too. I suppose psychiatrists are like that to all their patients, but Doctor Simon made me feel like someone special."
"Sounds like quite a guy," Venable said.
"Oh, he was. I'm going to tell you something, but you must promise never to tell anyone. Promise?"
"Of course."
"Well, sometimes I used to daydream about Doctor Simon's wife dying.
Like in a plane crash-you know? Quick and painless. Then he and I would get married. I imagined what it would be like seeing him every day, living with him, spending,the rest of my life with him."
"Sounds to me like you were in love with him, honey."
"I suppose I was," Yesell said sorrowfully.
"I guess all his patients were. You call me a saint; he was the real saint."
Another time she herself brought up the subject of the murder: "Are. the police getting anywhere?" she asked Venable.
"On who killed Doctor Simon?"
"It's slow going," the detective admitted.
"No good leads that I know of, but a lot of people are working on it.
We'll get the perp." :"Perp?"
"Perpetrator. The one who did it."
"Oh. Well, I hope you do. It was an awful, awful thing."
They talked about the apartment they might one day share.
They talked about their mothers, about clothes, and foods they liked or hated. They recalled incidents from their girlhood, giggled about boys they had known, traded opinions on TV stars and novelists.
It was not a rare occurrence, this closeness between detective and suspect.
For did they not need each other? Even a murderer might find the obsession of his pursuer as important to himself as it was to the hunter. It gave meaning to their existence.
"Gotta work late on Friday night, dear," Venable told her target.
"Reports and shit like that. I'll call you on Saturday and maybe we can have dinner or something."
"I'd like that," Joan said with her timid smile.
"I really look forward to seeing you and talking to you on the phone."
"Me, too," Helen said, troubled because she was telling the truth.
On Friday night at seven o'clock, Helen was slouched down in her Honda, parked two doors away from the Yesells' brownstone. She could watch the entrance in her rearview mirror, and kept herself alert with a little transistor radio turned to a hard-rock station.
She sat there for more than an hour, never taking her eyes from the doorway. It was almost 8:15 when Blanche Yesell came out, bundled up in a bulky fur coat that looked like a bearskin. There was no mistaking her; she was hatless and that beehive hairdo seemed to soar higher than ever.
Venable slid from the car and followed at a distance. It didn't last long; Mrs. Yesell scurried westward and darted into a brownstone one door from the corner. The detective quickened her pace, but by the time she got there, the subject had disappeared from vestibule and lobby, with no indication of which apartment she had entered.
Helen stood on the sidewalk, staring up, flummoxed. If Calazo had been faced with the problem, he probably would have rung every bell in the joint, demanding, "Is Mrs. Blanche Yesell there?" And within an hour, he'd have statements from the other bridge club members and know if Mrs.
Yesell was or was not at home on the murder night and could or could not testify as to her daughter's presence.
But such direct action did not occur to Helen. She pondered how she might identify and question the bridge club members without alerting the Yesells that Joan's alibi was being investigated.
She went back to the Honda and sat there a long time, feeling angry and ineffective because she couldn't think of a clever scam. Finally, taking a deep breath, she decided she better write a complete report on Mrs.
Yesell's Friday night bridge club and dump the whole thing in Sergeant Boone's lap.
It was a personal failure, she acknowledged, and it infurated her. But the fear of committing a world-class boo-boo and being bounced down to uniformed duty again was enough to convince her to go by the book. It turned out to be a smart decision.