by Ed McBain
“You want to tell me where that toolshed is?” Hawes said.
“I already tole you. Out back.”
“How about pinpointing it for me, Whitson?”
“What do you mean?”
“Tell me where it is exactly.”
“Near the clothesline.”
“Where’s that?”
“Near the pole.”
“And where’s that?”
“Out back,” Whitson said.
“Okay, wise guy,” Hawes said. “If that’s the way you—”
“No, hold it a second, Cotton,” Carella said. Listening to Whitson, he had suddenly realized that the man was really trying his best to cooperate. But he happened to look surly and evil, and his size was terrifying, and he wasn’t really very bright. So he stood there like a huge, blinking monster ready to wreak seven kinds of havoc, answering questions as well as he could, and coming across only as a wise guy spoiling for a fight.
“Sam,” Carella said gently, “Mr. Lasser is dead,”
Whitson blinked. “What you mean?” he asked.
“He’s dead. Someone killed him. Now, Sam, you’d better pay close attention to what we ask you, and you’d better tell the truth when you answer, because now that you know someone’s been killed, you also know you can get in a lot of trouble. Okay?”
“I didn’t kill him,” Whitson said.
“No one said you did. We just want to know what you were doing out in the alley in only your shirt in this kind of weather.”
“My job is chopping the wood,” Whitson said.
“What wood?”
“The firewood.”
“Sam, the furnace in this building burns coal.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Then why do you chop firewood?”
“Some of the tenants, they got fireplaces in they apartments. Mr. Lasser brings logs to work with him in his truck, and I splits them up for him, and he gives me fifty cents an hour. Then he sells the firewood to the tenants.”
“Do you work for him every day, Sam?”
“No, sir. I come to work every Wednesday and Friday. But this year, Wednesday is New Year’s Day, and Mr. Lasser he say I shouldn’t come in, so I didn’t come in Wednesday this week. I come in today instead. Friday.”
“Do you always come in at this time?”
“Yes, sir. Three o’clock in the afternoon. Yes, sir, that’s the time I usually comes in.”
“Why so late?”
“Well, I got jobs in other buildings around.”
“Doing what?”
“Helping out the supers.”
“How’d you happen to get this job with Mr. Lasser?” Carella asked.
“I got it for him,” a voice just inside the open foyer door said, and they all turned to find themselves looking at a thin Negro woman with a scowl on her face and fire in her eyes. She was wearing a flowered housedress and a pair of men’s house slippers, but she walked past the patrolman with great dignity and took up a position beside Whitson, her back ramrod-stiff, her head high. Standing beside the huge Whitson, she seemed even more thin and fragile than she really was. But Carella, watching her, suddenly noticed the similarity of her features and Whitson’s, and realized the woman was Whitson’s mother. As if to corroborate his guess, she immediately said, “What have you been doing to my boy?”
“Are you his mother, ma’am?” Hawes asked.
“I am,” she said. She had a clipped manner of speaking, and she held her head cocked to one side as though drawing a bead on the speaker and ready to let him have it right between the eyes if he said anything contrary to her way of thinking. She kept her lips pursed as she watched, her arms folded across her narrow breast, her body balanced exactly the way her son had balanced his earlier, as though expecting a lynch party at the front door almost any time now.
“We were asking him some questions,” Carella said.
“My son didn’t kill Mr. Lasser,” she said, looking Carella directly in the eye.
“No one said he did, Mrs. Whitson,” Carella answered, looking her back in the eye.
“Then what are you questioning him about?”
“Mrs. Whitson, about half an hour ago, at exactly two twentyseven to be exact, actually more than half an hour ago, we received a telephone call from a Mrs. Ryan in this building, who told us her son had seen the building superintendent dead in the basement with an ax sticking out of his skull. We got over here as soon as we could, and located the body down there near one of the coal bins, and then talked to some of the tenants and the boy who’d found the body, and that was when one of our patrolmen found your son wandering around outside in his shirtsleeves.”
“What of it?” Mrs. Whitson snapped.
“Pretty cold to be walking around in his shirtsleeves,” Carella said.
“Cold for who?”
“For anyone.”
“For someone chopping wood?” Mrs. Whitson asked.
“He wasn’t chopping wood, ma’am.”
“He was about to,” Mrs. Whitson said.
“How do you know that?”
“He gets paid for chopping wood, and that’s why he comes here,” Mrs. Whitson said.
“Do you work in this building, too?” Carella asked.
“Yes. I do the floors and windows.”
“And you got this job for your son?”
“Yes. I knew Mr. Lasser needed someone to split those big logs he brings in from the country, and I suggested my son. He’s a good worker.”
“Do you always work outside in your shirtsleeves, Sam?” Carella asked.
“He always does,” Mrs. Whitson answered.
“I asked him,” Carella said.
“Tell him, son.”
“I always does,” Whitson said.
“Were you wearing a coat when you came to work today?” Hawes asked.
“No, sir. I was wearing my Eisenhower jacket.”
“You were in the Army?”
“He fought in the Korean War,” Mrs. Whitson said. “He was wounded twice, and he lost all the toes on his left foot from frostbite.”
“Yes, sir, I was in the Army,” Whitson said softly.
“Where’s your jacket now?”
“I put it on the garbage cans out back.”
“When did you do that?”
“When I headed for the toolshed. You see, Mr. Lasser dumps the logs right out back there in the alley near the shed, and that’s where I chops them up. So what I usually does, I comes right down the alley and I puts my jacket on the garbage cans, and then I goes to the shed to get the ax and begin work. Only today I couldn’t begin work because this policeman he stop me.”
“Then you don’t know whether or not the ax is still in that shed, do you?”
“No, sir.”
“How many axes are in that shed, usually?”
“Just the one, sir.”
Carella turned to the nearest patrolman. “Murray, you want to check out back? See if there’s a jacket on those garbage cans, like he says, and also look in the shed for an ax.”
“You’re not gonna find no ax out there,” Mrs. Whitson said.
“How do you know?”
“Because it’s right down there in the basement, ain’t it? Sticking in Mr. Lasser’s head?”
They did not, as Mrs. Whitson had prophesied, find an ax in the toolshed out back, the only ax anywhere in the vicinity being the one that had been left protruding from the dead Mr. Lasser’s cranium. They did, however, find Whitson’s Eisenhower jacket draped over one of the garbage cans where he had allegedly left it before heading for the toolshed. And they did find a dozen or so rather large logs dumped in the alleyway several feet from the toolshed—all of which seemed to corroborate Whitson’s story. They advised Whitson to go home but not to leave the city as they might want to contact him again at a later time, the later time they had in mind being the time the police laboratory reported on the ax handle attached to the ax blade attached to Mr. Lasser’s head. T
hey were hopeful, you see, that the lab would find some fingerprints on the weapon, thereby enabling them to solve the case before the crime was several hours old.
Some days, though, you can’t make a nickel.
The lab found an awful lot of smeared blood on the wooden ax handle, and a few gray hairs caught on some of the wood splinters, and also some pulp that had spattered out of Lasser’s open skull when the metal blade wedged its way into bone and brain, but, alas, they found no fingerprints. Moreover, although there were some bloody palm prints and thumbprints on the gray basement wall, the laboratory technicians discovered that these prints had been left by Mr. Lasser himself, either as he backed away from his assailant or else as he groped along the wall for support when collapsing to the floor after, most likely, the blow that had severed his jugular. It was the medical examiner’s opinion that Mr. Lasser had been lying on the basement floor already dead for several minutes when the ax was finally sunk and left in his skull, a conjecture that seemed corroborated by the severed jugular and the unusually large amount of blood all over the basement floor, the trickle of which had first attracted young Mickey Ryan to the body. Utilizing a simple logical progression, and beginning with the inescapable position of the ax, embedded as it was in the skull of Mr. Lasser, it necessarily followed that this was the ultimate blow and that it had been preceded by numerous other blows. Neither the lab nor the medical examiner’s office could suggest when the jugular had been severed, but they agreed on the number of ax slashes—they each counted twenty-seven, including the dangling fingers on the left hand—and assumed the slashing of the jugular had been the cause of death, the previous slashes being serious enough to have caused considerable loss of blood over an extended period of time, but none of them being serious enough in themselves to have caused immediate death. It was the blow across the throat then, a blow that must have been delivered with a sweeping sidearm motion, like the swinging of a baseball bat, that had killed George Lasser. The final ax stroke was something of a coup de grace, the downward swing of the blade into the skull of the man already dead at the assassin’s feet, and then, the final touch, the leaving of the ax in his skull as though the skull were the stump of a tree and the sinking of metal into pulp signaled the end of the working day.
To tell the truth, it was all pretty goddamn gory.
They had learned from the tenants in the building that Mr. Lasser lived somewhere in New Essex, some fifteen minutes outside the city, a fact which was substantiated by a driver’s license found in the old man’s right hip trouser pocket. The license gave his full name as George Nelson Lasser, his address as 1529 Westerfield in New Essex, his sex as male, his weight as 161 pounds, his height as five foot ten inches, and his date of birth as October 15, 1877, which made him eighty-six years old at the time of his death.
There was a bleakness to the January countryside as the detectives drove out of the city and headed for New Essex. The heater in Hawes’s 1961 Oldsmobile convertible was on the blink, and the windows kept fogging with their exhaled breath and then freezing over with a thin film of ice, which they scraped at with gloved hands. The trees lining the road were bare, the landscape sere and withered; it almost seemed as though death had extended itself from that city basement into the surrounding countryside, stilling the land with its hoary breath.
1529 Westerfield was an English Tudor reproduction set some forty feet back from the sidewalk on a New Essex street lined with similar reproductions. Smoke boiled up out of chimney pots, adding a deeper gray to the sky’s monotone. There was a feeling of contained and cloistered warmth on that street, a suburban block locked in potbellied privacy against the wintry day outside, defying intrusion. They parked the convertible at the curb in front of the house and walked up the slate path to the front door. An old wrought-iron bell pull was to the right of the door. Hawes pulled it, and the detectives waited for someone to answer.
There was lunacy in the old woman’s eyes.
She pulled open the door with a suddenness that was startling, and the first thing each man saw about her was her eyes, and the first thought that occurred to each of them separately was that he was looking at a woman who was mad.
“Yes?” the woman asked.
She was an old woman, perhaps seventy-five, perhaps eighty— Carella found it difficult to pinpoint a person’s age once the borderline of real vintage had been crossed. Her hair was white, and her face was wrinkled but full and fleshy, with lopsided eyebrows that added a further dimension of madness to the certainly mad eyes. The eyes themselves were blue. They watched the detectives unblinkingly. There was dark suspicion in those pale-blue eyes, and there was secret mirth, a mirth that echoed humorless laughter in endlessly long and hollow corridors, there was as well a flirtatiousness that seemed ludicrous. There was a sly appraisal peering out of the skull, and in a woman so old, a coquettishness that was almost obscene. The eyes combined all these things in a medley of contradiction that was at once blatant and frightening. The woman was mad; her eyes shouted the fact to the world. The woman was mad, and her madness sent a shudder up the spine.
“Is this the home of George Nelson Lasser?” Carella asked, watching the woman, wanting nothing more than to be back at the precinct where there was order and dimension and sanity.
“This is his home,” the woman replied. “Who are you and what do you want?”
“We’re detectives,” Carella said. He showed her his shield and his identification card. He paused a moment, and then said, “May I ask who I’m talking to, ma’am?”
“Whom, and you may not,” she said.
“What?”
“Whom,” she said.
“Ma’am, I…”
“Your grammar is bad, and your grampa is worse,” the woman said, and began laughing.
“Who is it?” a voice behind her said, and Carella glanced up to see a tall man stepping from the comparative darkness beyond the entrance door into the gloomy arc of light described by the door’s opening. The man was in his early forties, tall and thin, with lightbrown hair that hung haphazardly on his forehead. His eyes were as blue as the madwoman’s, and Carella knew at once that they were mother and son, and then reflected briefly upon the motherson combinations he had met this day, starting with Mickey Ryan who had found a dead man in a basement, and moving through Sam Whitson who chopped wood with an ax, and now into this tall, poised man with an angry scowl on his face, who stood behind and slightly to the right of his demented mother while demanding to know who these men were at the front door.
“Police,” Carella said, and again he flashed the tin and the card.
“What do you want?”
“Who are you, sir?” Carella asked.
“My name is Anthony Lasser. What do you want?”
“Mr. Lasser,” Carella said, “is George Lasser your father?”
“He is.”
“I’m sorry to have to tell you he is dead,” Carella said, and the words sounded stiff and barely sympathetic, and he regretted having had to utter them, but there they were, hanging on the air in awkward nakedness.
“What?” Lasser said.
“Your father is dead,” Carella said. “He was killed sometime this afternoon.”
“How?” Lasser asked. “Was he in an accident of some ki—”
“No, he was murdered,” Carella said.
“Dead for a ducat,” the old woman said, and giggled.
Lasser’s face was troubled now. He glanced first at the woman, who seemed not to have grasped the meaning of Carella’s words at all, and then he looked again at the detectives and said, “Won’t you come in, please?”
“Thank you,” Carella said and he moved past the old woman, who stood rooted in the doorway, staring at something across the street, staring so hard that Carella turned to look over his shoulder. He saw that Hawes was also staring across the street to where a small boy on a tricycle moved rapidly up the driveway to his house, a Tudor reproduction almost identical to the Lasser house.
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“The king is dead,” the old woman said. “Long live the king.”
“Won’t you come in with us, ma’am?” Carella asked.
“He rides well, that boy,” the woman answered. “Has a good seat.”
“Do you mean the boy on the bicycle?” Hawes asked.
“My mother often doesn’t make sense,” Lasser said from the gloom beyond the open door’s circle of light. “Won’t you come in, please? Mother, will you join us?”
“That which God hath joined together,” the woman said, “let no man put asunder.”
“Mrs. Lasser,” Carella said, and stepped aside to let her pass. The woman looked at Carella with a combination of malevolence and invitation in her eyes, an anger that threatened dire violence, a sexuality that promised sheer delight. She moved past him and into the house, and he followed her and heard the door closing behind him and then the voices of Hawes and Lasser behind him as they all moved deeper into the entrance foyer.
The house was out of Great Expectations, sired by Dragonwyck, from Wuthering Heights twice removed. There were no actual cobwebs clinging to the ceilings and walls, but there was a feeling of foreboding gloom, a darkness that seemed permanently stained into the wooden beams and plaster, a certain knowledge that Dr. Frankenstein or some damn ghoul was up in the attic working on God knew what foul creation. For a moment Carella had the feeling he had stepped into the wrong horror movie, and he stopped deliberately and waited for Hawes to join him, not because he was frightened—well, the place was a bit eerie, but hell, hadn’t he told young Mickey Ryan there was no such thing as ghosts?—but simply to reassure himself that he was really here, inside this gloomy Tudor cottage, investigating a murder which had taken place many miles away within the confines of the 87th Precinct, where life was real and earnest, and so was death.
“I’ll put on a light,” Lasser said, and he moved to a standing floor lamp behind a huge and ornate couch, snapped on the light, and then stood awkwardly beside the couch and his mother. Mrs. Lasser stood with her hands entwined at her waist, a simpering smile on her lips, as though she were a Southern belle waiting to be asked for a dance at the yearly cotillion.