The 1st Deadly Sin by Lawrence Sanders Read Free Book Online

ceremony. The masks were merely the first step in this direction. Too bad your wife couldn’t see it that way.”
    “Yes,” he said. “Too bad.”
    “I must be going,” she said abruptly, and marched into the bedroom to retrieve her cape.
    “I’ll see you home,” he said eagerly.
    “No. That won’t be necessary. I’ll take a cab.”
    “At least let me come down to call a cab for you.”
    “Please don’t.”
    “I want to see you again. May I call you?”
    “Yes.”
    She was out the door and gone almost before he was aware of it. The smell of snuffed candles and old smoke lingered in the room.
    He turned out the lights and sat a long time in darkness, pondering what she had said. Something in him responded to it. He began to glimpse the final picture that might be assembled from the bits and pieces of his thought and behavior that had, until now, puzzled him so. That final picture shocked him, but he was neither frightened nor dismayed.
    Once, late in the previous summer, he had been admiring his naked, newly slender and tanned body in the bedroom mirror. Only the nightlight was on. His flesh was sheened with its dim, rosy glow.
    He noted how strange and somehow exciting the gold chain of his wrist watch looked against his skin. There was something there…A week later he purchased a women’s belt, made of heavy, gold-plated links. He specified a chain adjustable to all sizes, and then had it gift-wrapped for reasons he could not comprehend.
    Now, only hours after he had first met Celia Montfort, after she had slept in his bed, after she had listened to him and spoken to him, he stood naked again before the bedroom mirror, the room illuminated only by the caressing nightlight. About his wrist was the gold chain of his watch, and around his slim waist was the linked belt.
    He stared, fascinated. Chained, he touched himself.

4
    J AVIS- B IRCHAM PUBLICATIONS, Inc. owned the office building, and occupied the top fifteen floors, on 46th Street west of Ninth Avenue. The building had been erected in the late 1930s, and was designed in the massive, pyramidal style of the period, with trim and decoration modeled after that of Rockefeller Center.
    Javis-Bircham published trade magazines, textbooks, and technical journals. When Daniel Blank was hired six years previously, the company was publishing 129 different periodicals relating to the chemical industry, oil and petroleum, engineering, business management, automotive, machine tools, and aviation. In recent years magazines had been added on automation, computer technology, industrial pollution, oceanography, space exploration, and a consumer monthly on research and development. Also, a technical book club had been started, and the corporation was currently exploring the possibilities of short, weekly newsletters in fields covered by its monthly and bi-monthly trade magazines. Javis-Bircham had been listed as number 216 in Fortune Magazine’s most recent list of America’s 500 largest corporations. It had gone public in 1951 and its stock, after a 3-1 split in 1962, showed a 20-fold increase in its Big Board price.
    Daniel Blank had been hired as Assistant Circulation Manager. His previous jobs had been as Subscription Fulfillment Manager and Circulation Manager on consumer periodicals. The three magazines on which he had worked prior to his employment at Javis-Bircham had since died. Blank, who saw what was happening, had survived, in a better job, at a salary he would have considered a hopeless dream ten years ago.
    His first reaction to the circulation set-up at Javis-Bircham was unequivocal. “It’s a fucked-up mess,” he told his wife.
    Blank’s immediate superior was the Circulation Manager, a beefy, genial man named Robert White, called “Bob” by everyone, including secretaries and mailroom boys. This was, Blank thought, a measure of the man.
    White had been at Javis-Bircham for 25 years and had surrounded himself with a staff of more than 50 males and