Banking on Death by Emma Lathen

Author:Emma Lathen [Lathen, Emma]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: -
Publisher: Simply Media
Published: 2017-01-15T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter 10

Long Term Liability

Peter Self had become a Captain in the Buffalo Police Force and Acting Head of its Detective Division for a variety of complicated reasons, not unconnected with his wife’s uncle’s role as President of the Buffalo Polish-American Democratic Club. But twenty years on the force had left their mark; he had seen bodies with knives in their backs, bodies with ugly gashes in the throat; he had seen sixteen-year-old girls who had been fished out of Lake Erie; he had seen old women who had been beaten with hammers; he had watched stolidly while pathologists pointed to fragments spread on a table and identified missing wives and lost children; he had seen bodies like that of Robert Schneider, grotesquely protesting as they lay in crusted brownish spots more like leaks from an automobile engine than human blood.

He remained what he had always been—unimaginative, competent and essentially unemotional, but he developed a strong dislike for malefactors, including murderers. Corrective treatment instead of prison for a seventeen-year-old thief hurt him like a blow; opponents of capital punishment he loathed.

Twenty years of seeing victims does not encourage a man to take an enlightened view of the treatment of offenders, so it is fortunate that Peter Self was responsible only for the apprehension of criminals. In this, because he was a patient, careful man who wiped his feet before he entered his home, and emptied the pockets of his jackets before he hung them up, he became remarkably successful. His method was simple and uncomplicated: impervious to demands from City Hall or the Buffalo Courier he went over the ground again and again.

So, after he finished talking to Jeannie Novak, he methodically drove onto the Thruway and when he pulled his sedan off it an hour later, he did not have to drive into downtown Batavia to inquire about 204 Sycamore Street. He drove the five miles to Sycamore Street and pulled up before a shabby white house, parked, opened the gate and walked up the path to the porch. But as he waited for someone to answer the bell he looked around him again; the Christmas wreath still hanging on the door did not suggest holiday cheer. It was a depressing house with peeling paint and sagging porch, in a depressing neighborhood. A sled stood leaning against the garage.

Kathryn Schneider opened the door.

“Come in, Captain Self,” she said. After he had inspected his shoes for snow, he followed her into the small living room. The Christmas tree still stood in the corner and under it a variety of boxes. Pine needles had begun to litter the rug, Self noted, because the tree had been placed in the kind of holder that does not hold water.

“Won’t you sit down,” Kathryn Schneider asked as she pointed to the couch, and herself sat in the straight-backed chair opposite. Sunlight still lit one corner of the room, and the bold colors of the furniture accentuated the woman’s pallor. She was painfully thin with unbecomingly short hair.

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