'He sounds like a dreadful man.'
'Oh, he is a dreadful man-but that doesn't make him a killer.'
She went back to her Christmas cards. A soft cone of light shone down from a green student lamp on the desk. Delaney sat in dimness, staring with love and gratitude at the woman who brightened his life.
He saw her pursed lips as she wrote out her holiday greetings, dark eyes gleaming. Her glossy black hair was gathered in back with a gold barrette.
Strong face, strong woman. He thought of what his life would be like, sitting alone in that shadowed room, without her warm presence, and a small groan escaped him.
'What are you thinking?' she asked, without looking up.
He didn't tell her. Instead, he said, 'Did you ever work a jigsaw puzzle?'
'When I was a kid.'
'Me, too. Remember how you spilled all the pieces out of the box onto a tabletop, hoping none of them was missing.
Then you turned all the pieces picture-side up and looked for the four pieces with two straight edges. Those were the corners of the picture.
After you had those, you put together all the pieces with one straight edge to form the frame. Then you gradually filled in the picture.'
She looked up at him.
'The Ellerbee case is a jigsaw puzzle?'
'Sort of.'
'And you know what the picture is going to be?'
'No,' he said with a tight smile, 'but I see some straight edges.'
Sunday was the best day of the week for Harold Gerber. He didn't have to see anyone; he didn't have to talk to anyone. He bought his Sunday Times on Saturday night, along with a couple of six-packs. The paper, the beer, and two pro football games on TV filled up his Sundays. He never left the house.
Gerber had lost a lot of weight in Vietnam and never put it back on. He had lost a lot of things there, including his appetite. So on Sunday morning he usually had some juice, a piece of toast and two cups of coffee with sugar and cream. That carried him through to evening, when he might heat up a frozen dinner that came in a cardboard box and tasted like the container.
For some reason, on Sundays he never got out the photographs and looked at them again. All those guys- grinning, scowling, laughing, mugging it up for the camera. Some of the photos were autographed, just like Gerber had autographed some of the shots they took of him. A family album…
It fed his fury since he couldn't comprehend it himself, Gerber could appreciate why other people were unable to understand the way he felt and why he did the things he did. Gerber couldn't figure it out, and no one else could either.
Doc Simon was coming close, really beginning to pin it down, but now Ellerbee was dead, and Gerber wasn't about to start all over again with another therapist. He had tried two before he found Ellerbee, but they had turned out to be bullshit artists, and Gerber knew after a few sessions that they weren't going to do him a damned bit of good.
Dr. Simon Ellerbee was different. No bullshit there. He went right in with a sharp scalpel, and all that blood didn't daunt him. He was tearing Harold Gerber apart and putting him back together again. But then Doc Simon got himself scragged and Gerber was alone again, with no one but ghosts for company.
The checks from his parents came regularly, every month, and he was on partial disability, so he wasn't hurting for money. Harold Gerber was just hurting for life, wondering if he was fated to drag his corpse through the world for maybe another fifty years, acting like a goddamn maniac and really wanting the whole fucking globe to blow up-the sooner the better.
That Sunday morning, driving down to Gerber's place in Greenwich Village, Delaney said to Boone, 'I feel guilty about making you work this weekend. Rebecca probably thinks I'm a slave driver.'
'Nah,' Boone said.
'She's used to my working crazy hours. I guess every detective's wife is.'
'Jason volunteered to come along, but weekends are the only chance he gets to spend some time with his sons. That's important, so I told him to stay home today. When the new guys come in, we should all be able to keep reasonable hours.
Did you find out anything about this Gerber?'
'Nothing. Suarez's men hadn't gotten around to him yet.
So all we have is what Doctor Diane put in her report: He's thirty-seven, a Vietnam veteran with a lot of medals and a lot of problems. Gets into fights.'
'Another Ronald Bellsey?'
'Not exactly,' Boone said.
'This Gerber sometimes attacks strangers for no apparent reason. And once he put his fist through a plate- glass window and ended up in St.
Vincent's Emergency where they stitched him up.'
'That's nice,' Delaney said.
'An angry young man.' -Something like that,' Boone agreed.
Harold Gerber lived in a run-down tenement on Seventh Avenue South, around the corner from Carmine Street. The windows of the first two floors were covered with tin, and the stoop was clotted with garbage.
The faigade of the six-story building was chipped, stained with rust, defaced with graffiti.
Inspecting this dump, Delaney and Boone had the same reaction: How could anyone living there afford an uptown shrink?
'Maybe he doesn't pay rent,' Delaney suggested.
'See that empty lot next door? Some developer's assembling a parcel.
Once he gets the remaining tenants out, he'll demolish that wreck and have enough spare feet to put up a luxury highrise.'
'Could be,' Boone said.
'Right now it looks Re a Roach Motel.'
In the littered vestibule they discovered all the mailboxes had been jimmied open. The intercom had been wrenched from the wall to dangle suspended from its wires. The front door had been pried open so often that now it couldn't be closed. The odor of rot and urine was gagging.
'Jesus!' Boone said.
'Let's get in and out of here fast.'
'Have we got an apartment number for him?'
'No. We'll have to bang on doors.'
They cautiously climbed a tilted wooden stairway, the loose banister carved and hacked. More graffiti on the damp plaster walls. The doors on the first two floors were nailed shut. They began knocking on third-floor doors. No answers.
No sounds of habitation.
They got an answer on the fourth floor.
'Go away,' a woman screamed, 'or I'll call the cops.'
'Lady, we are the cops,' Boone shouted back.
'We're looking for Harold Gerber. What apartment?'
'Never heard of him.'
They went up to the fifth, stepping over piles of broken laths and crumbling plaster. They found two more occupied apartments, but no doors were unlocked, and no one knew Harold Gerber-they said.
Finally, on the sixth floor, they banged on the chipped door of the rear apartment.
'Who is it?' a man yelled.
'New York Police Department. We're looking for Harold Gerber.'
'What for?' Delaney and Boone looked at each other.
'It's about Doctor Simon Ellerbee,' Boone said.
'A few questions.'
