The Sentinel by Jeffrey Konvitz

Author:Jeffrey Konvitz
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Fiction, General
ISBN: 9780345304377
Publisher: Random House
Published: 1982-01-02T00:00:00+00:00

Fascinated with what had been a dead memory, she read the article once more, then folded it in half and replaced it in the file.

Chapter XV

The office was tiny, the windows barred. A bulletin board dotted with circulars and notices was attached to the wall. The desk that stood nearby was ancient and worn; the original brown varnish had been worn down to streaks of bare wood. Besides the phone that sat precariously on the edge of the desk, the old broken chair behind it and the coat rack just inside the entrance, there was little else in the room worthy of note.

"Next," demanded Gatz. He was seated behind the desk, concentrating on a projection screen. The omnipresent cigar hung loosely from his mouth.

"Next."'

In his hands he held a long wire hook which he had fashioned from a coat hanger. He edged the hook closer to a cocked mousetrap on his desk, then lashed out and snatched a small clump of cheese from the jaws of the closing trap without catching the wire. He pulled the cheese from the hook, placed it back on its platform and reset the trap for another attempt.

"Go back to the picture of the living room!" he snapped.

The projectionist clicked another slide onto the screen.

"No, before that. That's it." Gatz picked up a series of transcripts and read them silently. "And the one before that," he said as he flipped the pages.

The slides changed.

"Does it look to you like anyone's been living in those rooms?"

The projectionist turned. "No," he declared.

"Interesting," mumbled Gatz. "The place is a mess. Dilapidated. But there's something." He checked his notes. "Magnify that picture."

The projectionist changed lenses, increasing the size.

The closer view provided no new insight. Gatz sat back thinking, twirling the wire hook between the fingers of his right hand. Then he opened a folder on his desk and removed a police transcript. He studied it briefly, having examined it in detail before. He glanced at the projectionist, who sat quietly waiting for another command. "What's your name?" he asked.

"Hogan," the man replied.

"How long you been on the force?" A year.

Gatz studied him carefully. "When I joined they didn't allow long hair and mustaches."

The projectionist nervously fingered the well-barbered growth beneath his nose.

Gatz bit deeply into the cigar. "Last week a woman was brought in claiming she killed her father with a knife. She says she stabbed him in a room in her brownstone after she found him in bed with two naked women and he tried to strangle her. There are no signs of struggle. No body. And we know the father had been dead for three weeks at the time of the alleged homicide. We also know that the woman has a suicidal tendency, having tried to kill herself twice before." He picked up the police transcript and held it out.

"And we've just discovered that seven years ago the woman walked in on her father and two women in her parents' bedroom-an almost identical situation-and he tried to strangle her then.

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