The Sandler Inquiry Part 4

She shook the snow from it and pulled a wool hat from her head, letting her brown hair fall to her shoulders. She clomped up the wooden stairs to her second-floor apartment, leaving wet tracks from her heavy boots on the worn carpeting in the stairway.

Five minutes later she was alone in her warm cozy apartment.

Her wet outer clothes were drying above an old bathroom. tub.

India tea was brewing in the small kitchen and a Mozart piano concerto was playing softly on a KLH system. She listened to the music as she made herself comfortable. On the walls of the apartment were numerous pastel-shaded prints, mostly nineteenth- and twentieth-century European impressionists.

She wasn't a bad artist herself. Had her past and childhood not been a factor, she might have been torn between pursuing either an academic career or a career as a painter. She had her father's gifted hands, she told herself. Gifted at creation, gifted in destruction.

She shuddered at the thought of him. The source of her greatest joy, the creation of art on a blank canvas, was also the root of her deepest fear. She could never exhibit her work, at least not under current conditions. She'd had several invitations to stage private showings.

But why bother? Her own name would turn into a death sentence.

She walked to the bedroom. The cla.s.sical music from the next room was faint but still audible. She stood for a moment before the large bedroom window. The snow outside was still falling beautifully and lay untouched on the quiet street. It was illuminated by the soft light of the streetlamp.

She sighed. Snow. And she'd have to travel, anyway.

From a closet she withdrew a single suitcase. Within twenty-four hours she'd be gone, missing the last two weeks of the semester. Her professors, she hoped, would understand. If she fared well she'd be back within a few weeks, able then to see her thesis through to its conclusion.

But meanwhile, there was unfinished family business. Victoria Sandler was dead.

Leslie began to pack.

Chapter 3

Why did a man take off his wedding ring and slip it into his jacket? If there were two reasons, neither Sha.s.sad nor Hearn could think of the second one. No matter. The presence of the ring and its location in the victim's pocket indicated that there had been at least one extra woman in his life. Within the band was engraved: K.FM. R.

-6-12-72.

The report from the Medical Examiner arrived at the Nineteenth Precinct toward three that afternoon. Sha.s.sad was the first to glance through it. The report confirmed what he and Hearn had already surmised. The Seventy-third Street victim had had s.e.xual intercourse less than an hour before he'd been transformed from a live man into a butchered corpse.

"The p.e.n.i.s" said Sha.s.sad philosophically as he handed the report 'nd's tragic flaw. If this guy had kept his p.r.i.c.k in to Hearn, 'is his pants, or at least home where it belonged, he'd probably be alive today."

"Probably," mumbled Hearn, reading the report.

"So' said Sha.s.sad aloud and ruminatively, 'he's s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g around till three in the morning. Then he gets up, gets dressed, goes down to the street, and meets a reception committee." Sha.s.sad paused.

"Why did he leave? Is he going to come sneaking home at an hour like that?"

"Maybe he's divorced," offered Hearn.

"If he's divorced why does he carry the ring at all?"

"Habit?" shrugged Hearn.

"Habits are for nuns. I say he was still married Neither man was satisfied. But it was essential that they toss ideas back and forth like tennis b.a.l.l.s, keeping it up until something made sense. Knowing each other so well for so many years, they'd refined this Socratic method of crime detection to a fine art.

"Why is he leaving at three A.M.?" mused Hearn, leaning back in his chair.

"Maybe his girl friend's husband arrived home unexpectedly."

"Or," said Sha.s.sad, a man familiar with the delights of the flesh, maybe he didn't pay for the entire night." I They held that thought for a moment. It was three twenty, almost twelve hours exactly after the slaying. Their telephone rang.

At Bradford, Mehr & Company, an investment firm at 440 Madison Avenue, one of the junior account executives had not appeared that morning for work. At first, since the man came in from the suburbs, his office believed him snarled in the trains which, with luck, bring commuters in and out of the city each morning. But when Mark Ryder had not yet appeared by noon, a secretary called his home.

His wife answered the telephone and was immediately alarmed.

No, she said, her husband had not been home last night, either.

She explained that he'd called her late the previous afternoon and maintained that he'd be having a late business conference and then had stacks of paper work to catch up on . So, he'd explained to her, he'd chosen to stay overnight in Manhattan at his university club.

Did she mind terribly?

One call to the club indicated that he'd never registered there.

One glance around the office revealed that he'd never arrived for work on the morning of the twentieth, not even a fast in and out.

So one hour later, at one o'clock, the Missing Persons section of the New York City Police Department was notified. They were given a description of the man by a very, very upset wife named Kyle.

The call went through the proper channels, through hospital lists, through precinct reports, and through the city morgue. Eventually lab a.s.sistant Gary Dedmarsh, whom on prior cases Sha.s.sad had dealt with, thought the description sounded familiar.

Dedmarsh checked the recentarrivals, then telephoned the Fourth Detective Zone headquarters to learn who was a.s.signed to the case.

Several more minutes pa.s.sed. Then at three twenty, Dedmar h, a gangly pale twenty-two-year-old, telephoned Sha.s.sad and Hearn's desk.

Mr. Shay-sod?" Dedmarsh asked, p.r.o.nouncing it as if it were the infield turf where the New York Mets play.

"Guess what I got in the freezer. A gorgeous red-haired teenage prost.i.tute. Came in last night. Strangled. Not a mark on her."

Sha.s.sad already knew Gary. A 'weird kid" as Sha.s.sad termed him.

"What's the real reason you're calling, Gary?" Sha.s.sad asked with impatience. Gary sounded particularly gleeful today and would whistle faint tunes when he wasn't speaking.

"A missing person named Mark Ryder," Dedmarsh said.

"He sounds like the guy you sent me last night" Sha.s.sad considered the initials within the gold band. He listened to the Missing Persons description as Dedmarsh falteringly read it over the telephone.

"Indeed, it does " Sha.s.sad said. The Seventy-third Street corpse had rea.s.sumed its real name.

Thomas Daniels sat in the lone cleared area in the charred ruins of his offices. The entire suite stank of smoke and obviously would for weeks to come. Ashes and soot were everywhere; much of the carpeting was still wet. The arson investigation was going nowhere.

What Thomas had left was a free desk, telephone service which had been restored, and a vivid memory of a day six years earlier, the day he'd joined his father's firm. Age twenty-seven, an iconoclastic young lawyer with an affinity for civil-liberties cases.

His father's son? It would hardly have seemed so at first. The father, the arch conservative criminal attorney, and the son, a hard eyed idealist, had had to come to an understanding before they'd join each other. The younger Daniels could handle as many freedom-of-speech or civil-rights cases as he'd handle of tax law or divorce. The son would defend none of the racketeers or white-collar frauds whom the father seemed not only to relish, but also acquit with astonis.h.i.+ng frequency.

"Tom," William Ward Daniels would often postulate while his son was in the midst of a civil-liberties case, "sometimes I think there's too much freedom in this country."

"How can you say that?" the son would implore, taking the bait.

"How, in light of the people you defend?"