“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 She gets a curious stare, she seems suddenly withdrawn, and she says things that don’t make too much sense.”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 full: 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.
But there was no pattern-at least none he could discern. Each mass killer, of tens, hundreds, reputedly thousands, was an individual and had apparently acted from unique motives. If there was any pattern it existed solely in each man: the
One other odd fact: the mass killer was invariably male.
There were a few isolated cases of women who had killed several times; the Ohio Pig Woman was one, the Beck-Fernandez case involved another. But the few female mass murderers seemed motivated by desire for financial gain. The males were driven by wild longings, insane furies, mad passions.
The light faded; he switched on the reading lamp. Mary stopped by to say good-night, and he followed her into the hall to double-lock and chain the front door behind her. He returned to his reading, still trying to find a pattern, a repeated cause-effect, searching for the percentages.
It was almost five in the evening when the front doorbell chimed. He put aside the article he was reading-a fascinating analysis of Hitler as a criminal rather than a political leader-and went out into the hallway again. He switched on the stoop light, peered out the etched glass panel alongside the door. Christopher Langley was standing there, a neat white shopping bag in one hand. Delaney unlocked the door.
“Captain!” Langley cried anxiously. “I hope I’m not disturbing you? But I didn’t want to call, and since it was on my way home, I thought I’d take the chance and-”
“You’re not disturbing me. Come in, come in.”
“Gee, what a marvelous house!”
“Old, but comfortable.”
They went into the lighted study.
“Captain, I’ve got-”
“Wait, just a minute. Please, let me get you a drink. Anything?”
“Sherry?”
“At the moment, I’m sorry to say, no. But I have some dry vermouth. Will that do?”
“Oh, that’s jim-dandy. No ice. Just a small glass, please.” Delaney went over to his modest liquor cabinet,
