by Ed McBain
Well, in 1898, when the United States of America was suffering heavy economic losses in Cuba due to revolutions and guerrilla warfare and garrisoned Spanish towns, when the United States was simultaneously beginning to feel its oats in the Western Hemisphere and recognizing the importance of Cuba to Central America where a canal was being planned, two things happened: William Randolph Hearst published a letter from a Spanish minister in Washington, DC, written to a friend in Cuba and expressing contempt for President McKinley; and the United States battleship Maine was sunk in Havana harbor. Well, you know how it is with Cuba; one thing always leads to another. It wasn’t until April 24 that Spain officially declared war, at which time the American Congress replied by stating the two countries had been at war since April 21.
The Happy Kids enlisted as a group under W.R. Shafter and were part of the 17,000 US troops who landed in Cuba and began a march on Santiago. Considering the fact that there had been twenty-three boys in the social and athletic club, considering also how badly trained and poorly equipped the troops were, it was something of a miracle that The Happy Kids all survived the heavy fighting at Siboney and El Canay. None of the group was killed and only one man was wounded, a boy named Billy Winslow who took a Spanish slug in his calf. The bullet embedded in his leg enabled him in later years to predict accurately the kind of weather that could be expected on any given day in New Essex and the surrounding towns. This stunt made him very popular with the ladies and earned the respect and admiration of a girl named Janice Terrill, one of the prettiest girls in town, who— it was reputed—allowed young Billy to remove her petticoat and assorted sundry undergarments in the back room of the store one rainy afternoon he had predicted. They were married six months later.
As a matter of fact, of the twenty-three Happy Kids who survived the invasion of Cuba and the march through Siboney and El Canay, twenty were married by the turn of the century, and the remaining three—including George Nelson Lasser—were married shortly thereafter.
“What kind of a soldier was he?” Carella asked.
“Georgie? Same as the rest of us. Inexperienced, young, full of pepper. We’re lucky we all didn’t get our brains blown out.”
“What rank did he hold?”
“Private, first class.”
“Did he come right back to New Essex after he was discharged?”
“Yes.”
“What did he do?”
“Odd jobs. I guess he was trying to make up his mind. He always was an ambitious fellow, Georgie. I guess that was why he married Estelle. That was in 1904. January it was, matter of fact. That’s funny, isn’t it?”
“How do you mean?” Hawes asked.
“Well,” Maily said, “he was married in January 1904, and here it is January again, sixty years later, and, well, he’s been killed. That’s pretty funny.”
“Peter don’t mean funny to laugh at,” Ostereich said, “He means strange.”
“Yes, that’s right,” Maily said. “I mean strange.”
“What did George Lasser’s ambition have to do with marrying the woman he did?” Carella asked.
“Estelle? Well, she was an actress, you know.”
“What was her full name?”
“Estelle Valentine,” Wye said. “I think that was her stage name, though. Isn’t that right, Peter?”
“That’s right,” Maily said. “Matter of fact, I don’t think I ever knew her real name.”
“A Russian name,” Ostereich said. “She’s a Russian, I think.”
“Have you ever met her?” Wye asked.
“Yes,” Carella said.
“Then you know she’s crazy, huh?”
“She seemed…well…” Carella shrugged.
“Oh, she’s nutty as a fruitcake, all right,” Ostereich said.
“All actresses are nutty,” Maily said.
“Yes, but she wasn’t even a good actress,” Wye said. “Good ones may have a right to be a little nuts, though I’m not even sure of that. But bad ones? No right at all.”
“I still don’t see what marrying her had to do with ambition,” Carella said.
“Well, she must have seemed pretty important to Georgie. He met her when she came here to New Essex in Captain Jinks of the Horse Marines, do you know that one?”
“No,” Carella said.
“Probably before your time,” Maily said. “Ethel Barrymore played it in 1901. Well, Estelle Valentine wasn’t no Ethel Barrymore, believe me, but she came to New Essex anyway in a road company—must have opened here around Christmas of 1903, I guess, over at the New Essex Playhouse. It’s a movie theater now. Everything changes. Georgie fell in love with her right off. She was a pretty little thing. I got to admit that. They got married…well, almost immediately.”
“Sixty years ago,” Carella said.
“Yes, that’s right.”
“The son seems to be in his forties,” Carella said.
“Tony Lasser? Yes, that’s right. He came late. Neither of the two wanted children. Estelle always talked about going back to the stage and Georgie always had his big plans. Tony came as something of a surprise. They were neither of them exactly grassy green when he was born. You ask me, that’s what finally sent Estelle off her rocker.”
“There’s something I don’t understand,” Carella said.
“What’s that?”
“George Lasser was a janitor.”
“That’s right,” Maily said.
“These ambitions you keep talking about, these plans of his…”
“Oh, don’t think Estelle didn’t throw that up to him all the time,” Ostereich said. “You know, the old baloney. I gave up my career for you, and what did I get in return? A janitor!”
“Georgie always had things going for him, though,” Wye said. “In the Army he always had something to sell, either chickens he’d picked up in the farmhouses, or souvenir pistols, or flags—always something. Once even a string of whores he rounded up someplace.” Wye chuckled with the memory.
“Well, even when we got back here to town,” Ostereich said, “how about that? The dances he used to run over at the Republican Club, and the boat ride he dreamed up. Georgie was always trying to think up ways to make a buck. Very ambitious, he was.”
“But then he became a janitor, right?” Carella said. “He forgot all about his ambitions, is that it?”
“Actually, he was more than just a janitor,” Maily said.
“Yes? What was he?” Carella asked.
“Well, what I mean to say is that he still had other little things going for him.”
“Like what?”
“Like the wood. He used to go out cutting trees here in the woods and carry them into the city in his truck. Then he got some colored fellow to chop them up for him, and he sold them to the tenants in his building. Turned a pretty penny that way.”
“What else did he have going for him?” Carella asked.
“Well…” Maily said.
“Yes?”
“Well, just the wood, that’s all,” Maily said, and he glanced at the other men.
“Sir, what else did George Lasser have going for him?”
“Nothing,” Maily said.
“You said he was an ambitious man.”
“Yes, because of the wood,” Maily said. “Because of his selling the wood. That was very ambitious. After all, he was an old man. Not every man his age would—”
“Sir,” Carella said, “if I heard you correctly, you told us that George Lasser was more than just a janitor and you said he had other little things going for him. You said things, sir. Plural. Now what else did he have going for him besides the wood business?”
“Well, being the super of the building is all I meant. I meant that and the wood business.”
“I think you’re lying, sir,” Carella said, and the store went silent. Carella waited.
“We’re old men,” Maily said at last.
“I know that, sir.”
“We’re old men waiting to
die. We came through a war together long ago, and back to New Essex together, and we went to each other’s weddings, and when we began to have kids, we went to baptisms and communions and bar mitzvahs, and we even went to the weddings of the kids and are halfway to seeing their kids grown up and married, too. We’re old men, Mr. Carella.”
“Yes, sir, I know that. I want to know about George Lasser.”
“What we go to now, Mr. Carella, is funerals. That’s what we go to now. No more weddings. Only funerals. Twenty-three of us in the beginning. The Happy Kids. And now there are three of us left, and all we go to is funerals.”
“Georgie Lasser didn’t have an enemy in the world,” Ostereich said.
“He shouldn’t have died like that,” Wye said. “Not that way.”
“Leave him be,” Maily said to Carella. “He’s dead. Let us bury him the way we buried all the others. Let him rest in peace.”
“I’m waiting, Mr. Maily,” Carella said.
Maily sighed. He glanced at Ostereich. Ostereich gave a small nod, and Maily sighed again.
“George Lasser used to run a crap game in the basement of his building,” he said.
Danny Gimp was a stool pigeon, and as an informer, he felt that the American aversion to rats was part of a conspiracy begun in elementary school and designed to deprive him of a profession at which he was a master. He had often thought of hiring a press agent or a public relations man to construct a more acceptable public image of himself, but he had the good sense to know the aversion was too deeply ingrained in the American spirit to be changed by a mere manipulator of images. He could not understand why people felt it was wrong to tell tales about other people. Nor could he understand why a largely law-abiding citizenry had adopted as one of its hidebound codes a precept that had originated in—and was strongly encouraged and enforced by—the underworld. He only knew that if a person saw someone doing something wrong, he was reluctant to go to the authorities with his information. And whereas Danny knew that part of his reluctance was caused by fear of reprisal, he further knew that most of the reluctance was caused by the code: Thou Shalt Not Tell.
Why not?
He enjoyed telling.
He was a gossip supreme, his ears keenly attuned to every stray piece of information that wafted his way on the unsuspecting air. His mind was a complex of compartments and cubbyholes, each storing kernels of seemingly worthless information which, when evaluated, added up to a meaningful fund of knowledge. He was an expert at sifting and sorting, collating and cataloging, all tricks he had learned as a boy when a bout with polio had caused him to be bedridden for the better part of a year. When you can’t leave the bedroom, you begin to think of ways to amuse yourself. Danny Gimp, considering his talent for amusing himself, might have become a banker and the mastermind behind an international cartel if he hadn’t been born and raised on Culver Avenue, which was not one of the city’s garden spots. Having been born on Culver Avenue, and giving the devil his due, he also might have become an international jewel thief or—what is more likely—a pimp. He became neither. He became, instead, a stool pigeon.
His real name was Danny Nelson, but no one ever called him that. Even mail addressed to Danny Gimp was delivered to him by his faithful mailman, who thought Danny was a World War I veteran who had been wounded in the Ardennes, rather than a stool pigeon. As a matter of fact, there were very few people who knew that Danny Gimp was a stool pigeon, it being a necessity in the profession to keep one’s activities quiet, lest one discover one night that several hired guns were after one, objective, homicide. Being chased by gangland torpedoes, very old-hat terminology for guns, is not entertaining even if you do not limp slightly. When you do limp, it is difficult to run very fast, so Danny decided it was best to avoid any friction between himself and either oldhat torpedoes or fashionable guns, thereby eliminating foot races through the city streets.
Danny told everybody he was a burglar.
This made him socially acceptable, and it also encouraged other assorted thieves to open their hearts to him. Every time they opened their hearts, Danny opened the voluminous filing cabinets inside his skull and began collecting information, dropping bits and pieces into place here and there, making no attempt to evaluate, sorting and filing as he went along, hoping all of it would make better sense later.
A twenty-two-year-old hood might tell Danny that he needed a new right rear tire for a latemodel Oldsmobile, does Danny know a good fence? Danny does indeed know a fence—not a good one, actually; actually he has done time in at least three state prisons, so how good can he be?—and while he is asking the man about a tire for his young friend, the fence casually mentions that a fur warehouse on Tenth Street was knocked over on Tuesday night, with the night watchman taking a slug in the forehead, unfortunately killing the old man. Danny clucks sympathetically, and the next day he sees his young friend’s wife—who used to be a hooker but who has graduated to the big time since she now has a husband who can keep her in heroin—and lo and behold, the wife is swathed in what appears to be 400 yards of natural let-out ranch mink. Danny has never known the precise meaning of “let-out mink,” but he suspects that this particular mink was let out of that warehouse on Tenth Street by none other than his young friend who now needs a new right rear tire for his latemodel Oldsmobile. He reads in the newspaper the next day that the night watchman must have got off a few shots at a retreating person or thing before his untimely demise, his service revolver having been found with only two bullets in it. When Danny sees his young friend he asks him how come he needs a new right rear tire. His friend says, “I picked up a nail on the parkway.” Danny looks at his friend and wonders why he doesn’t simply go to a garage and have them repair the tire, if all he picked up in it was a nail? There is the possibility, however, that the nail has really done big damage to the wheel, making it necessary to replace it. Danny is willing to give his friend the benefit of the doubt; after all, if replacement really is necessary, he knows his friend would automatically go to a fence for the merchandise.
Fences are the best discount houses in the city. They sell anything you might need, from Westinghouse portable television sets to Smith & Wesson portable .38 revolvers, and at very good prices indeed. Even square citizens in bad neighborhoods utilize the services of a fence, so why shouldn’t a cheap hood like Danny’s young friend, in dire need of a new tire, go to a fence—even if there isn’t anything suspicious about why he happens to need a new tire?
A good stoolie never jumps to conclusions.
He collects, he sifts, he collates, he waits.
A week later Danny runs across a fellow who has just come in from Chicago where he has been for several days. The fellow is carrying a very big bundle. That night Danny sees the Chicago fellow and also his young hood friend riding around in the Oldsmobile together, the right rear tire replaced by now. The next day Danny’s young hood friend is sporting a very big bundle, and the hood’s wife is on a heroin-buying jag that will keep her stocked until China runs out of poppy flowers.
What Danny reports to the police is that he believes his young hood friend broke into the warehouse with his Chicago pal, was shot at by the night watchman, who put a hole in their right rear tire and who received a hole in his forehead in return. He further tells the police that he believes the furs were dumped in Chicago and that the two thieves only recently split the cash received for the loot.
For his services Danny gets ten bucks from the detective to whom he divulges this. The ten bucks comes out of a fund loosely described as “Petty Cash.” Neither the detective nor Danny report this exchange on their income tax.
It was not at all surprising that very few people knew Danny was a stool pigeon since he could very easily have passed for a burglar or a mugger or a check passer, or any one of a number of criminal types, all of whom looked exactly the way Danny looked, which is to say they all looked like normal everyday human beings who were honest citizens. Except they happened to be crooks.
Danny didn’t happen to be a crook. He was as honest as the day is long. He only said he was a crook.
He had, in fact, spent five years in a prison in California when he got convicted in a criminal case out there back in 1938. It was this prison stay which convinced everyone that Danny Gimp was indeed a practicing burglar, especially since he told everyone he’d been serving a five and dime on a Burglary One conviction out there. This happened to be true. But actually he’d only gone to Los Angeles for his health.
He had been bothered with a persistent cold and an accompanying low fever for perhaps two months when his family physician suggested that he go out to California to get some sun and some rest, away from his normal city pursuits. Danny had just helped the bulls of the 71st to crack a particularly difficult whorehouse setup, and the bulls (in tandem with some Vice Squad cops) were grateful to the tune of 500 bucks for his assistance, mainly because five of them received promotions out of the crackdown. Danny, flush with his $500, running this low fever and coughing all the time, went out to Los Angeles.
Ah, land of glamour and mystery. Ah, city of sun and stars. Ah, cultural citadel!
He got arrested four days after he arrived.
The way he got arrested was very peculiar, since he had no idea he was committing a crime at the time. He met a fellow in a bar on La Brea and they began drinking and telling jokes, and the man asked Danny what line of work he was in and Danny said, “Communications.” The man thought this very interesting because he himself was in a line of work he described as “Redistribution,” and they had a few more drinks and it was then that the man asked Danny to accompany him to his house where he wanted to pick up some more money so they could continue their fun and revelry, drinking and talking shop and laughing it up in good old LA.