The Fourth Deadly Sin Read Online Free Page A

Stuttgart String Ensemble at Carnegie Hall. When Dr. Diane explained the situation, he immediately agreed to taxi to the Ellerbees’ house and try to find Dr. Simon or see if anything was amiss.
    Samuelson stated he arrived at the East 84th Street townhouse at about 1:45 A.m. He asked the cabdriver to wait. It was still raining heavily. He stepped from the cab into a streaming gutter, then hurried across the sidewalk and up the three steps to the front entrance. He found the door ajar.
    “Not wide open,” he told detectives. “Maybe two or three inches.”
    Samuelson was fifty-six, a short, slender man, but not lacking in physical courage. He tramped determinedly up the dimly lighted, carpeted staircase to the offices of Dr. Simon on the third floor. He found the office door wide open.
    Within, he found the battered body.
    He checked first to make certain that Ellerbee was indeed dead. Then, using the phone on the receptionist’s desk, he dialed 911. The call was logged in at 1:54 A.M. All the above facts were included in New York City newspaper reports and on local TV newscasts following the murder.
    Delaney planted himself across the street from Acting Chief Suarez’s house on East 87th, off Lexington Avenue. He squinted at it, knowing exactly how it was laid out; he had grown up in a building much like that one.
    It was a six-story brownstone, with a flight of eight stone steps, called a stoop, leading to the front entrance. Originally, such a building was an old-law tenement with two railroad flats on each floor, running front to back, with almost every room opening onto a long hallway.
    “Cold-water flats,” they were sometimes called. Not because there was no hot water; there was if you had a humane landlord. But the covered bathtub was in a corner of the kitchen, and the toilet was out in the hall, serving the two apartments.
    Not too many brownstones like that left in Manhattan.
    They were being demolished for glass and concrete highrise coops or being purchased at horrendous prices in the process called “gentrification,” and converted into something that would warrant a six-page, four-color spread in Architectural Digest.
    Edward X. Delaney wasn’t certain that was progress-but it sure as hell was change. And if you were against change, you had to mourn for the dear, departed days when all of Manhattan was a cow pasture. Still, he allowed himself a small pang of nostalgia, remembering his boyhood in a building much like the one across the street.
    He saw immediately that the people who lived there were waging a valiant battle against the city’s blight. No graffiti.
    Washed windows and clean curtains. Potted ivy at the top of the stoop (the pots chained to the railing). The plastic garbage cans in the areaway were clean and had lids. All in all, a neat, snug building with an air of modest prosperity.
    Delaney lumbered across the street, thinking it was an offbeat home for an Acting Chief of the NYPD. Most of the Department’s brass lived in Queens, or maybe Staten Island.
    The bell plate was polished and the intercom actually worked. When he pressed the 3-B button alongside the neatly typed name, M.R. suarez, a childish voice piped, “Who is it?”
    Edward X. Delaney here,” he said, leaning forward to speak into the little round grille.
    There was static, the sound of thumps, then the inner door lock buzzed, and he pushed his way in. He tramped up to the third floor.
    The man waiting for him at the opened apartment door was a Don Quixote figure: tall, thin, splintery, with an expression at once shy, deprecatory, rueful.
    “Mr. Delaney?” he said, holding out a bony hand. “I am Michael Ramon Suarez.”
    “Chief,” Delaney said. “Happy to make your acquaintance.
    I appreciate your letting me stop by; I know how busy you must be.”
    “It is an honor to have you visit my home, sir,” Suarez said with formal courtesy. “I hope it is no inconvenience for you. I would have come to you