Greater Sins

by Paul Sundeson

February 1962

“Got it,” my partner Frank said. “She's coming out.”

I switched off the car radio, cutting off the new Peggy Lee song. “Let's hear what your toy can do.”

Frank Whitney grinned. He loved gadgets. He removed his earphones, flicked off his FM receiver, and punched buttons on the miniature Mayfair tape recorder beside him on the back seat of my '61 Olds.

A sleek Buick Electra 225 purred out of the driveway to Dr. Carmadelle's house and clinic, and swung toward New Orleans . Apparently the good doctor catered to the carriage trade. I wrote the license down on a pad I kept on the dash. No need to follow her. Our DMV contact could run the plate in the morning.

Frank punched another key. A calm male voice filled the car.

“. . . understand that if there are any problems, you can't mention my name?”

“Of course. Do you know what my regular doctor did? He gave me a pamphlet on birth control. Talk about too little too late --!” The woman paused. “Is there . . . any danger?”

“None at all. An hour, an overnight stay, and everything'll be fine. Now you know what you're supposed to do? The address . . .”

“Yes, I have it.”

“And the time?”

“Oh, God, yes.” Her voice broke. “Thank you, Doctor. It's such a relief. This baby . . . I just can't.” She began to cry, and Frank stopped the tape.

I grinned. “That's all we need.”

“We can't use a tape in court,” Frank said. He rewound the tape, removed it from the machine, and slid it into an envelope.

“No, but it confirms Leydon's suspicions. It may not even come to a court.”

“I hope not.” Frank settled his fedora back on his narrow skull, climbed into the front seat, shook two Chesterfields from a crumpled pack, and passed one to me. We lit up from the dash lighter.

“What's bugging you?” I said.

“The whole thing stinks, Gil, that's all.”

“It's the law. Even doctors have to follow it.”

“Not that. Though I think it's a lousy law.”

I was silent. We'd had this out before.

I grew up old-style Catholic. Aborting an unborn child was not only illegal, it was murder -- no ifs, ands, or buts. Frank, however, was damn near an atheist. So we didn't talk about it.

“It stinks,” Frank said, “because you know Leydon doesn't care about it being illegal, not for a second.”

The private investigation business isn't always pleasant. Some clients you like, even respect. And then there are the Dr. Richard Leydons.

“This man Carmadelle is a disgrace to the profession,” Leydon had said last Wednesday in our office on Canal Street . He was a thin dry figure with white hair and a reedy voice. His dark suit had cost more than the sales tax on my car when it was new. Not that I'd bought it new.

“He's performing . . .” He lowered his voice, as if God were listening. “. . . illegal operations.”

What my wife Letty calls my jackass factor was energetic that morning. “Illegal operations?” I said. “Is he removing kidneys without permission?”

Leydon flushed. No sense of humor, either. “You know what I mean. He's an abortionist . These women go to him to cover up the results of their adulteries, or for convenience. It's illegal, and I want proof I can take to the police.”

It sounded like a nasty job. But Leydon's money was as green as anybody's. And Letty had her eye on an air conditioner at Sears, and Frank's wife Meg was talking about visiting Arizona this summer. So . . .

Our target lived in the western exurbs. River Ridge had been growing for fifteen years, since the end of the war and the beginning of the housing boom. God only knew why people wanted to live way out in the sticks, but they did.

We found Carmadelle was having rooms repainted in his home and clinic off Jefferson Highway . I bribed the paint crew foreman to let me come in with them so I could plant Frank's new FM transmitter bug on the doctor's consulting room phone. It allowed us to hear both sides of phone calls and conversations in the room.

Its signal was good for a quarter mile. Parked in an empty lot just up the street, we got everything nice and clear.

“He's cutting into Leydon's practice,” Frank said now as we rolled along the two-lane road back toward New Orleans . “Women go to Carmadelle for the abortion, and come back to him instead of Leydon. Leydon's just using us as a club to beat this guy out of business.”

“I don't like that part of it any better than you do. But the guy's a criminal. And Leydon's the client.”

In the dimness of the car, I sensed Frank looking at me.

“Lousy law,” he said, and was silent for the rest of the drive.

* * *

“We gave you everything," Roger Parkman told his daughter. "And you ruin it by getting knocked up by some dumb mechanic!”

Stocky, about forty, he wore khakis and a dark tie over a white dress shirt with the sleeves rolled up. His forearms were thick and strong. He was, he'd told me, a project supervisor at the Michoud missile plant.

Sarah Parkman sat lifelessly, head down, letting her father's words hammer at her.

“Where you got these beatnik ideas at your age, I'll never know," Mrs. Parkman whined. "College. What nonsense."

"You are going to get married, young lady," Roger snapped, "and that's the end of it."

My stomach hurt. I wished Frank had won the coin toss.

Friday had dawned cold and rainy again, nothing new for New Orleans in February. Our answering service had a call from a Roger Parkman, asking one of us to come out to his home. I won the coin toss with Frank, and while he went off to weasel the address of Carmadelle's patient out of our DMV contact, I drove east to a new subdivision near Lakefront Airport .

The Parkmans' brick ranch sported a gigantic picture window and a two-year-old Pontiac under its carport.

Mrs. Parkman was a pale sickly woman with chestnut hair frozen into what Letty tells me is a "flip" hairdo. From time to time she coughed into a lace hankie, then smiled apologetically at me. "My lungs, Mr. Barntree. The doctor says I'll be fine, if I don't have any stress."

She glared at her daughter. "I try. God knows I try. And now she's skipping school, her grades are falling, she's running around with a wild crowd —"

"Better than around here," Sarah muttered. A slim girl, she wore her dark hair like a lot of women these days: short and with bangs, like Jackie Kennedy. That was okay. All the men with any hair at all were aping Jackie's husband, going bareheaded and making the hat companies nervous.

"And just what does that mean?" Roger demanded.

Sarah lifted her head and gave him a thin, bitter smile. It sat oddly on her pleasant round face.

For some reason, Roger backed down. “It's okay, Kitten. We're doing what's best for you. You see that, right?”

Sarah looked away.

I gave her a reassuring smile. Frank says younger people confide in me because I remind them of their favorite uncles. “Miss Parkman, this boy Carl . . .”

“Carl Etter.” Her voice was tentative, as if she expected me to contradict her.

“Carl's disappeared, am I right? Okay. How did you meet?”

“Back in November at my friend Marcy's wedding.”

Carl was eighteen to her sixteen. They'd started dating, and things had gotten increasingly serious, until last week.

“She came to me, worried because she was --“ Mrs. Parkman colored “-- you know, late. The doctor's test came back, and she's pregnant. Disgraceful!"

“Carl was floored when I told him,” Sarah said. “He said he had to have some time to think, that he'd call me in a day or two. But he didn't. My friend takes messages for me at my part-time job. And when I call his landlady, it's her phone, well, she's kind of deaf, I'm not sure she understands.”

“Old bat,” Roger said. “I went over there trying to find him. Goddamn nerve. Slammed the door in my face.”

“Can you find this boy?” Mrs. Parkman said.

“Anybody can be found, with enough time and money,” I said. “That aside, you know there's no law to force him to marry your daughter. Statutory rape, sure, but --”

“You just find him,” Roger Parkman said. “He'll make an honest woman out of Sarah, or else.”

Wonderful. Barntree and Whitney, Licensed Investigators. Shotgun Weddings Arranged on Request.

Not that I disagreed. When I was a boy, you knew not to fool around until you were married. If you got the girl pregnant, you married her. That was all there was to it. As for girls, a girl stayed a virgin, or she got married. Or she “visited an aunt” -- the euphemism for going to a home for unwed mothers, having the baby, and giving it up for adoption.

Compared to that, marriage wasn't so bad, right?

I flipped my notebook open to a new page and went to work.

* * *

"He was a buddy of my husband's," Sarah's friend Marcy told me on the phone. "I didn't know him or where he worked. Sam could tell you, but the Army's sent him to someplace called Vietnam . Wherever that is."

I didn't know where it was either. But if he'd just been deployed, Sam wouldn't be back stateside until Sarah Parkman's baby was babbling its first words. No help there.

Carl Etter's address was a shotgun house on Clouet Street , in the area downriver from the French Quarter known as the Ninth Ward. His landlady, Mrs. Tribbiani, lived in the other side of the duplex. She was almost deaf.

"What? Carl? Too late, mister. He's done moved out. I knocked on the door three days ago, no answer, and went in. Cleaned everything out. All paid up on the rent, though."

I slipped her a fin to let me inspect Carl's half of the duplex. Inside, I saw what I'd expected: shabby cheap furniture, TV trays, a stove and refrigerator with chipped enamel. No phone. Old Hot Rod and Motor Trend magazines were stacked in one corner of the bedroom.

"Some mechanic," Mrs. Tribbiani said. She'd come along, probably to make sure I wouldn't steal the TV trays. "He was always tinkering with that noisy foreign car of his.

"What kind of car? Mister, my eyes ain't so good any more. And I don't know one damn car from another. Last time I saw him he said something about the fuel pump being shot. Naw, I dunno where he worked. Didn't care, as long as he paid the rent. You want the place? No? Well, good day to ya, then."

I sat in my Olds and thought. According to Sarah, Carl had driven a rusty old Chevy borrowed from a friend.

A noisy foreign car? Not a lot of foreign cars around. They were expensive, and not many mechanics worked on them. Except . . .

At a corner drugstore, I checked the Yellow Pages in the phone booth and made some notes before heading across town.

* * *

"Fuel pump for a Volkswagen?" The owner of Airline Foreign Car Parts & Service (“We Treat VWs”) wiped his hands on a greasy rag. It was the fourth shop I'd hit that afternoon. "Yeah, we get those a lot."

Outside the garage, Friday afternoon traffic whizzed north on U.S. 61 and south into the city. Inside, Volkswagen Bugs stood in various states of repair.

"We're almost the only place that works on 'em. Not everybody likes those rattly little air-cooled engines. Yeah, I remember him. New fuel pump; three, four days ago. Shame about the accident."

"Accident?"

"Right up there. See where Clearview meets the highway? I heard the crash. He'd just left here when a big bastard of a Lincoln Continental ran the light and hit him broadside. Smashed that little Bug flat. Other guy walked away, but they had to scrape the kid out to get him in the ambulance. They took him, maybe Touro? I think it was Touro. Makes you think how you can go just like that, huh?"

* * *

"Are you a relative, sir?"

"I'm his uncle." It was the third hospital I'd called, and I had my routine down.

"Just a moment, please."

The supermarket phone booth smelled of cigars, and not good Cubans, either. I cracked the door of the booth for a little air. Presently the nurse was back.

“Sir? I'm afraid Mr. Etter passed away early this morning from his injuries. He never regained consciousness. My condolences, sir.”

I hung up as she was asking what arrangements the family wished to make.

* * *

“Carl's address was in his wallet,” I told the Parkmans. “But when the Jefferson Parish Sheriff's Office called Mrs. Tribbiani, she thought they were selling something and hung up. I told the deputy they should have followed up. 'No next of kin,' is what he said. 'Who's gonna complain?' So there it is. I'm sorry."

"Jesus Christ almighty," Roger said. He banged a big fist down on the arm of his chair.

"I can give you the name of a social worker," I said. "Her sister runs a good maternity home in Mississippi ."

Sarah sat to one side, gazing at the flickering black-and-white Saturday morning cartoons on their Admiral TV. Now and then she shot a frightened glance at her parents.

"And nobody will know, right?" Mrs. Parkman asked.

"Don't be stupid, Marge," Roger said, and she flinched. "They'll know. And they'll all be snickering behind our backs."

"Oh, God. Sarah, what have you done? How will I face everybody?"

Mrs. Parkman began to cry. Her husband went to her and helped her rise. She moved stiffly, like a much older woman. His arm supporting her, they went out.

"Notice who gets all the attention," Sarah said quietly.

"Sorry about your boyfriend."

Sarah shrugged. "I didn't love him, and I didn't want to marry him, but he was nice." She looked up at me. "It's not right. I can't have this baby," she said.

Later I would remember her phrasing and emphasis. I should have followed up, but my job was done and I just wanted to get away from there. "The home is the best thing. Your child will have a much better life that way."

"You don't understand." She leaned forward sharply. "You must know a doctor, Mr. Barntree. One who can -- take care of it."

". . . No."

"I've got some money saved from my part-time job. I can pay. Whatever it costs."

"Even if I did, Sarah, it's illegal. And it's a sin."

Sarah nodded. The tension went out of her. She smiled.

"Some sins are greater than others," she said.

As I drove back to the office, Roger's check in my pocket, I realized why her smile bothered me. It had not been a smile of pleasure.

It had been the smile of someone who has at last made a tough decision, and is relieved she no longer has to wrestle with it.

* * *

Saturday nights during the winter, Letty and I usually have Frank and Meg over for bridge. It's kind of a family thing. Meg is Letty's half-sister, which I guess makes Frank my half-brother-in-law.

"I read in Look ," Meg said during our second rubber, "that someday TV sets'll have remote control boxes. You'll just sit in your chair and press a button to change the channel or adjust the picture."

We laughed, and Letty said, "Right. And someday we'll have little phones we can carry in our pockets, too."

The phone rang. I set down my cards and crossed the den to the instrument. "Hello?"

"Barntree?" Roger Parkman sounded hoarse. In the background I heard men's voices. Not a party sound. "Marge and I --" He hesitated. "Can you come over? Now? I don't know who else to ask."

"Mr. Parkman? What's wrong?"

"Oh, my God." Roger's voice cracked. "It's Sarah. She's . . . she took an overdose. She's dead."

* * *

"Marge and I went out about five to dinner and then a movie," Roger told Sergeant Howard. "Sarah didn't want to go. Wanted some time to herself, she said. We got back about ten-thirty. Marge knocked on her door, and when there wasn't any answer, she went in. I heard her scream and I ran in, and saw Sarah on her bed. She wasn't breathing." Roger raised a face full of pain.

"So what'd you do?"

"I know some first aid. I worked on her, trying to get her breathing again, until the ambulance came, but . . ." Roger shut his eyes.

The Parkman living room felt stuffy and cold. My sinuses ached. It was well after midnight.

Any sudden death, even an obvious suicide, has to be investigated to rule out homicide. We'd skidded up in Frank's Mercury to find a Sergeant Howard from the Moss Street station had caught the squeal. He was new since our NOPD days, young, burly, and suspicious of us. Once he learned we knew his captain, he relaxed an inch.

"Why you two?" he asked. The coroner's meat wagon had already whisked little Sarah off to the autopsy room downtown. The radio squawked inside his unmarked Ford Galaxie. Up and down the block, neighbors in robes and dungarees gawked and chattered.

No reason to hold anything back. I told him why Roger had hired us. "I guess he needed a friendly face," I finished. "His family is all gone, and his wife's family all live in Alabama . He doesn't have anybody here."

Howard sighed.

“Knocked up, huh? There's your motive, right there. No note, so we wondered. Autopsy'll tell us for sure, but right now it looks like the girl swallowed all of her mother's sleeping pills and added booze for good measure. She was dead long before they got home. Yeah, go ahead in. You know not to touch anything.”

Roger looked dazed, as though he'd just gone a round with Sonny Liston. I introduced Frank, but the name clearly didn't register; he was moving like a zombie. “Marge collapsed,” he told us, his eyes red-rimmed as if he'd been crying. “I called her doctor; he's in there with her now.”

So we waited with him while the crime photographer finished his shots, and the Parkmans' doctor spoke with Roger and left, and Howard took Roger back over his story.

I felt lousy. I should have known.

When I'd been with the cops, my first partner's wife had left him, taking the kids. On the last day, instead of moody and depressed, he'd been relaxed, almost cheerful. That night he shot himself with his service revolver. His sudden serenity had been because he was no longer wondering whether to kill himself; he'd made up his mind. Like Sarah.

It did little good to tell myself that her parents wouldn't have listened. I should have known, dammit!

At last Howard flipped his notebook shut, expressed his condolences, nodded to us, and lumbered out. Except for our breathing, the house was still, as if reminding us that three people once lived here, and now there were only two.

Roger spoke slowly. “God, I just can't imagine it. I held her in my arms an hour after she was born. And now -- All because of this . . . She knew we wanted what was best for her, didn't she?”

“I'm sure she did,” Frank said gently.

Roger scrubbed his face with his hands. “If only . . . I knew why. Why she . . . Maybe the note'll explain it.”

Frank and I glanced at each other. “What note,” I said.

Roger frowned. “Sarah left a note. They'll let us have it back, right? After the investigation?”

Frank said, “She didn't leave a note, Mr. Parkman. The sergeant told us.”

“God, maybe I'm losing my mind.” Roger rubbed his temples. “But when I ran in, I saw it. A piece of paper under the lamp on her nightstand. I was trying to get Sarah . . . and then Marge fainted, and I was busy calling her doctor and the police. When I looked for it, before the police came, I didn't see it. Maybe I just imagined it.”

“No,” Marge Parkman said. “You didn't.”

We started. It was as if the house itself had spoken.

She stood in the hall doorway, hands thrust into the pockets of a blue flannel robe, pink mules on her feet. Her eyes glittered in her pale face. I suspected she didn't even know Frank and I were there.

“The doctor wanted to give me a shot." Her voice was quiet. "But I said no. I wanted my head clear for this."

“Marge, hon, maybe you'd better . . ."

"Did you really think I didn't know ? Did you think that once Sarah was gone, your little secret would be safe?"

Her left hand came out of its pocket with a folded sheet of notepaper. Roger's gaze locked on it. His jaw worked.

"I knew," Mrs. Parkman said harshly. "Years ago. She was just a little girl, still playing with her dolls. She was so scared. But you promised to stop, and you did. And I told myself it was all right. But then, while I was at my sister's two months ago --"

"Marge!" Roger pushed himself to his feet and took a step toward her. "It wasn't like that."

"You changed her," Mrs. Parkman said. "She was a good girl, and you changed her. You destroyed her."

"Dammit, Marge." Roger's face was hardening plaster. "What was I supposed to do, with you and your damn morals, your excuses? 'I'm sick, I can't, not tonight.' I didn't want her turning out cold like you."

From her right-hand pocket, Mrs. Parkman took a blue-steel revolver. She trained it steadily on Roger's chest.

Frank and I didn't move. The gun looked like a .38. At this range, the bullet would punch a hole the size of a fist through her target.

"Bastard," Mrs. Parkman said. "I knew you'd say that."

She shot him. He staggered back, red blossoming on his chest, and she shot him again and he dropped. She managed to squeeze off a third shot into him before Frank, who was closer, grabbed the gun. She crumpled, gasping, to the floor.

Sarah's suicide note fluttered from Mrs. Parkman's hand. I snatched it.

Mom,

You said it was all over, that whatever made Daddy do it had stopped. But it didn't. Was it something I did that made him want to come into my room? He said I liked it, but it scared me, every time. When I was little he tried to convince me it didn't happen. But I knew.

I let Carl think the baby was his. But then he was killed, and I was all alone again.

This is the best thing for everybody.

Sarah

* * *

"God damn ," Frank said again. He took another hit from the half-pint of Seagram's V.O. he kept in the glove compartment, then rolled down his window and spat. "I can't get the taste out of my mouth."

The dash clock read 3:47. We were parked at the foot of Canal Street , by the river and the Dock Board building. A cool wind blew in, smelling of muddy water and wet wharf pilings.

Sergeant Howard had returned, none too happy to be cleaning up the Parkmans' mess. An ambulance hustled Parkman down to Charity Hospital , where, we heard later, he died on the operating table. A dry-eyed Mrs. Parkman went quietly, to be charged with Murder Two.

"I should have guessed," I said. "There was something funny about how Roger would yell at his daughter, then back off and treat her like a pet."

"Afraid she'd blurt out their secret."

"And then she said, 'It's not right, I can't have this baby.' I thought she meant any baby, but she was emphasizing 'this,' because -- And I missed it."

Frank shook his head. His arms were folded tightly across his narrow chest. "How could you know? Nobody ever talks about it. Sure, you hear whispers; sick jokes. But . . ."

I took the bottle and sipped. It was late and I was tired, but I was at that high white stage where I felt I couldn't get drunk, no matter how much I drank.

"Poor kid," Frank said. "If she'd only had a choice. But they forced her down this corridor where all the doors were shut and locked. So she took the only way left open."

For a long moment I looked at him. Something shifted in my mind. "Some sins are greater than others," I said.

"What?"

"Nothing. You got the evidence we collected for Leydon?"

"Tapes and the report in the trunk. Why?"

Plucking the keys from the ignition, I got out, opened the trunk, lifted out his satchel, and shut the trunk.

Frank jumped out and held up a hand. "Gil? What the hell you doing? That's two weeks' work right there."

I stared at him. Then, slowly, he nodded and stepped back.

I walked down toward the river and out onto the wharf. Wind tugged at my hat. To my left the dark cliff of a freighter blocked the city lights downriver.

For a time I stood, considering. Then I rested the satchel on a piling, unfastened it, stepped to the edge of the wharf, and upended the bag. All the little building blocks of our case against Dr. Carmadelle fell out and down, envelopes, photos, tapes, and splashed in the Mississippi and were gone.

I walked back up to where Frank, smiling, leaned against his car. "You crazy son of a bitch. What am I supposed to tell our client?"

"Tell him," I said, "I'm propping open a door. Come on. Breakfast. And I'm buying."