Free The Fourth Deadly Sin by Lawrence Sanders

no.
    You had to live with that confusion and, if you were lucky, discard the meaningless and zero in on the significant. But how to tell one from the other? False trails and time wasted chasing leads that dribbled away. Meanwhile, Thorsen was sweating to have a murder cleaned up, neat and clean, by the holidays. So his man could be promoted.
    Two sets of unidentified footprints and two blows to the victim’s eyes. Was there any meaning in that? Or in Ellerbee telling his wife he had scheduled a late patient, presumably meaning someone after 6:00 P.m. But he had died at approximately nine o’clock. Would he have waited that long for a late patient? Someone who would arrive, say, at 8:00 P.m.
    No signs of forced entry. So Ellerbee buzzed someone in, someone he was expecting. One person or two? And why leave that street door open when they left?
    “The butler did it,” Delaney said aloud, and then pulled his yellow legal pad toward him, put on his reading glasses, and began making notes on how much he didn’t know. It was a long, depressing list. He stared at it and had an uneasy feeling that he might be missing the obvious.
    He remembered a case he had worked years ago. There had been a string of armed robberies on Amsterdam Avenue; six small stores had been hit in a period of two months. Apparently the same cowboy was pulling all of them-a young punk with a Fu Manchu mustache, waving a nickel-plated pistol.
    One of the six places allegedly robbed at gunpoint was a mom-and-pop grocery storenear78th Street. The owners lived in a rear apartment. The old lady opened the store every morning at 7:30. Her husband, who had a weakness for slivovitz, usually joined her behind the counter a half-hour or hour later.
    On this particular morning, the old man said, his wife had gone into the store to open up as usual. He was dressing when he heard a gunshot, rushed out, and found her lying behind the counter. The cash register was open, he said, and about thirty dollars’ worth of bills and coin were gone.
    The old lady was dead, hit in the chest with what turned out to be a .38 slug. Delaney and his partner, a Detective second grade named Loren Pierce, chalked it up to the Fu Manchu punk with the shiny pistol. They couldn’t stake out every little shop on Amsterdam Avenue, but they haunted the neighborhood, spending a lot of their off-hours walking the streets and eyeballing every guy with a mustache.
    They finally got lucky. The robber tried to rip off a deli, not knowing the owner’s son was on his knees, out of sight behind a pile of cartons, putting stock on the shelves. The son rose up and hit Fu Manchu over the head with a five-pound canned ham. That was the end of that crime wave.
    It turned out the punk was snorting coke and robbing to support a $500-a-day habit. Even more interesting, his nickel-plated weapon was a .22, the barrel so dirty it would have blown his hand off if he had ever fired it.
    Detectives Delaney and Pierce looked at each other and cursed. Then they went back to the mom-and-pop grocery store, but only after they had checked and discovered that Pop had a permit to keep a .38 handgun in the store. They leaned on him and he caved almost immediately.
    “She was always nagging at me,” he complained.
    That was what Delaney meant when he worried about missing the obvious. He and Pierce should have checked immediately to see if the old man had a gun.
    It never hurt to get the simple, evident things out of the way first. It was a mistake to think all criminals were great brains; most of them were stupes.
    He pondered all the known facts in the Ellerbee homicide and couldn’t see anything simple and obvious that he had missed. He thought the case probably hinged on the character of the dead man and his relationship with his patients.
    He reflected awhile and admitted he had an irrational contempt for people who sought aid for emotional problems. He would never do it; he was convinced of that. The death of