by Ed McBain
“What the hell do you want, cop?” the man asked.
“What’s your name?”
“Bob Fontana.”
“And the girl?”
“Ask her,” Fontana said.
“I will, when she comes around. Meanwhile, suppose you tell me.”
“I forget,” Fontana said, and he shrugged.
“How long have you been holed up in here?”
“I don’t know. What’s today?”
“Monday.”
“Monday? Already?”
“You mind if I let some more air in here?”
“What are you? A fresh-air fiend?”
Hawes went into the bedroom and opened the two windows there. The girl on the bed did not stir. As he rounded the bed, he pulled the slip down over the backs of her legs.
“What’s the matter, cop?” Fontana asked. “You don’t like pussy?”
“How long has she been stoned like that?” Hawes asked.
“How do I know? I can’t even remember her name.”
“Is she alive?” Hawes asked.
“I hope so. She’s breathing, ain’t she?”
Hawes lifted the girl’s wrist and felt for the pulse. “Barely,” he said. “When did you shoot up?”
“I don’t know what you mean by shoot up,” Fontana said.
Hawes picked up a charred tablespoon from the seat of a chair alongside the bed. “What’s this, Fontana?”
“It looks like a spoon to me. Maybe somebody was having some soup.”
“All right, where is it?”
“Where’s what? The soup?”
“The junk, Fontana.”
“Oh, is that what you came in here for?”
“It’s all gone, huh?” Hawes said.
“Well, now, I don’t know. You seem to be asking the questions and answering them all at the same time.”
“Okay,” Hawes said, “let’s take it from the top. How long have you been in this apartment?”
“Since New Year’s Eve.”
“Celebrating, huh? And the girl?”
“The girl is my sister. Don’t bug me,” Fontana said.
“What’s her name?”
“Louise.”
“Louise Fontana?”
“Yeah.”
“Where does she live?”
“Here—where do you think?”
“And you?”
“Here.” Fontana saw Hawes’s look. “Get your mind out of the gutter, cop. I sleep on the couch there.”
“How old is she?”
“Twenty-two.”
“And you?”
“Twenty-six.”
“How long have you been hooked?”
“I don’t know what hooked means. You got something to pin on me, pin it. Otherwise get the hell out.”
“Why? You expecting someone?”
“Yeah, I’m expecting the president. He’s coming here to discuss the Russian situation. He comes here every Monday for lunch.”
“Who’s Georgie?” Hawes said.
“I don’t know. Who’s Georgie?”
“When I knocked on the door, you asked if I was Georgie.”
“Did I?”
“Georgie who?”
“Georgie Jessel. He comes with the president every Monday.”
“Or maybe some other Georgie, huh?” Hawes said. “You mind if I go through some of these drawers?”
“I think you’d better get a search warrant before you go messing up my underwear,” Fontana said.
“Well, that poses a slight dilemma,” Hawes said, “Maybe you can help me with it.”
“Sure, glad to help the law any time,” Fontana said, and rolled his eyes.
“There’s no law against being an addict—you know that, I guess.”
“I don’t even know what an addict is.”
“But there is a law against possessing certain specified amounts of narcotics. Now here’s the dilemma, Fontana. I can’t pinch you unless I can prove possession. Well, I can’t prove possession unless I make a search. And I can’t make a search without a warrant. But if I go downtown for a warrant, by the time I come back you’ll have flushed whatever I was looking for down the toilet. So what do I do?”
“Why don’t you go home and sleep it off?” Fontana said.
“Of course, if I make an illegal search and come up with six pounds of uncut heroin—”
“Fat chance.”
“—why then nobody’s going to worry about whether or not I had a warrant, are they?”
“Who’s gonna worry, anyway? Who you trying to kid, cop? The last time I seen a cop with a search warrant in this neighborhood, it was snowing inside the church in the middle of July. You’re worried about a warrant, don’t make me laugh. You bust down the door, and then suddenly you get legal? Ha!”
“Nobody broke down the door, Fontana.”
“No, you just give me the foot-and-shoulder treatment, that’s all. Listen, I know cops. You’re gonna search the pad, anyway, so what’s the song and dance? Get it over with so I can get back to sleep.”
“You know what, Fontana?”
“What?”
“I think you’re clean.”
“You know it, cop.”
“Otherwise you wouldn’t be so anxious for me to search.”
“Cool. So if you’re done here, why don’t you cut out, huh?”
“Why? Don’t you want me to be here when Georgie arrives?”
“I told you, I’m sleepy. I want to get back to bed.”
“On the couch.”
“Yeah, on the couch,” Fontana said. “She really is my sister, so quit bugging me.”
“What’s her name?”
“Lois.”
“You said Louise last time around.”
“I said Lois.”
“Do you always refer to your sister as pussy?”
“It’s what she is, ain’t it? Being my sister don’t make her better than anybody else. Girls are pussy, and that’s all they are.”
“You’re a sweet guy, Fontana. When did you have a bath last?”
“What are you? A cop or a department of sanitation? If you’re finished, goodbye. I’m sick of this jazz.”
“Suppose I told you Georgie isn’t coming today?”
“No?”
“No. Suppose I told you he isn’t coming ever again?”
“Why not?”
“Guess.”
“That’s the oldest trick in the book, cop. You want me to say, ‘Georgie ain’t coming ‘cause he got busted,’ and then you’ll say, ‘Busted for what?’ Only I ain’t biting, cop.”
“Try this one for size,” Hawes said.
“Yeah?”
“Georgie ain’t coming ‘cause he’s dead.”
Fontana said nothing. He looked at Hawes silently and then wiped a hand over his mouth.
“Yeah,” Hawes said. “Dead as a mackerel.”
“I’m from Missouri,” Fontana said.
“You’ve been in here since New Year’s Eve,” Hawes said. “That was last Tuesday. Georgie got it Friday.”
“When Friday?”
“In the afternoon. Sometime between one and two, near as we can make it.”
“Where?”
“Downstairs in the basement,” Hawes said.
“What the hell was Georgie doing in the basement?” Fontana asked.
Hawes stared at him.
“You didn’t answer me,” Fontana said.
“Georgie Lasser?” Hawes said. “Is that who we’re…?”
Fontana smiled.
“Wrong number, cop,” he answered.
Bob Fontana had been expecting a visit from someone named Georgie when Hawes knocked on the door. It was unfortunate that the Georgie he’d been expecting hadn’t turned out to be the dead Georgie Lasser because that would have meant Lasser was involved with narcotics which could have explained a lot of things. Narcotics is very big-time all over the world, bigger than prostitution and bigger than gambl
ing, in fact probably the biggest of all underworld activities in terms of energy expended and capital realized. If a man is messing around with the dope business, anything can be anticipated—including an ax in the head. It was therefore unfortunate that Bob Fontana was not expecting Georgie Lasser, but some other Georgie instead. If Lasser had been a pusher, the cops might have had a new place to hang their hats. Instead, they were stuck with the same empty pegs.
Anyway, so it shouldn’t be a total loss, Hawes decided to stick around until Georgie Whatever-His-Name-Was showed up. The day was half shot anyway, so he figured he might as well make a narcotics pinch, thereby helping out the much-overworked men in the city’s Narcotics Division. The only trouble was that everyone in the building knew there was fuzz on the third floor, in Bobby the Junkie’s apartment to be exact. Which might have explained why Georgie never showed up that afternoon.
Hawes hung around waiting for Georgie until almost 3:00. He kept asking Fontana what Georgie’s last name was, but Fontana kept telling him to go to hell. Hawes searched the apartment and, as he’d expected, found nothing but a lot of dirty socks. At 2:30, the girl woke up. Hawes asked her what her name was, and she said Betty O’Connor. He asked her how old she was, and she said twenty-two, which meant he couldn’t even get Fontana on a morals charge. At 2:35 the girl asked Hawes if he had a cigarette, and Hawes gave her one and then she asked him if Georgie had arrived yet. Fontana quickly informed the girl that Hawes was a cop. The girl looked Hawes over, figured she was in some kind of trouble, not sure just which kind yet because she had just come back from a long journey over soft white hills on the backs of giant purple swans; but cops meant trouble, and when you’re in trouble you do what your mother taught you to do.
“Would you like to get laid?” she asked Hawes very sweetly.
It was the best offer he’d had all day, that was for sure. But he turned it down, anyway. Instead, he left the apartment, questioned the rest of the people in the building, and got back to his own place at 7:35 that night.
He called Carella to tell him he had found two dusty shelves and a clean one.
Neither Carella nor Hawes so much as thought about the Lasser case until Friday of that week, when Danny Gimp called the office and asked Carella to meet him. Up to that time they had been separately involved in handling a few other pressing matters that had come up.
There was, for example, a man in the precinct who kept making obscene phone calls to various and sundry ladies, explaining just what he would like to do to them, and apparently using language that even the boldest of the ladies refused to repeat to the police. In the short period of time between Tuesday and Friday mornings, Carella listened to the complaints of fourteen women who had been so abused on the telephone. At the same time he answered twenty-two outside squeals, catching in tandem with Hawes who answered twenty-seven. These complaints ranged from simple idiotic things like wife-beating (well, not so idiotic to the wife who was being clobbered, true, but annoying to a detective who had homicide to worry about) to burglary to unlawful assembly to stickups to prostitution (even though there was a Vice Squad) to auto thefts (even though there was an Automobile Squad) to a cat who had climbed a television antenna and refused to come down (the beat cop had tried to remove her and had his face and his right hand clawed) to several other pretty and not-so-pretty happenings.
One of the prettier happenings was a girl who had stripped down to her bra and panties in forty-degree January weather and gone for a swim in the Grover Park Lake. Since the lake fell well within the 87th Precinct territory, and since an ugly crowd had begun threatening the patrolman who tried to arrest the halfnaked girl as she came out of the water, the precinct was called and a detective requested, so Carella got to see a pretty girl shivering in her underwear.
One of the not-so-pretty happenings was a January rumble between two street gangs, rare for January; most gangs save their rumbles for the good old summertime when tempers are hot and body odor is an additional secret weapon. A seventeen-year-old boy was left lying and bleeding beside a lamppost, trying to hold his intestines inside his body, embarrassed because all these people—including the teenage girl who had caused the rumble—were looking at him with his insides exposed. The intern had pulled a sheet up over the boy, but his blood had stained through the sheet almost instantly, and then a yellow pus-like slime had spread out onto the asphalt and Carella had wanted to puke. That was one of the not-so-pretty happenings.
Hawes had witnessed a man dying and had tried to get a dying statement from him, valid in court, but the man kept spitting blood onto his pillow because there were four ice-pick punctures in his chest, and then he sat up straight and stared at Hawes and said “Papa, Papa,” and pulled Hawes close to him in a dying grip, spitting blood onto the shoulders of Hawes’s sports jacket. Hawes washed the blood off in the kitchen of the small apartment and watched the lab boys dusting for prints.
An hour later he questioned a bewildered and frightened jeweler named Morris Seigel who had owned a store on Ainsley Avenue for the past twenty years and who had been held up three times a year like clockwork for fifteen out of those twenty. This time the stickup man had come in at 12:30 in the afternoon and stuffed everything he could find into a big canvas bag he was carrying and then, not liking the way Seigel’s head sat on his shoulders, had pistol-whipped him so that Hawes now spoke to a man whose shattered eyeglasses hung askew on his bleeding face, the tears mingling with the blood on his cheeks.
He had gone out on a squeal involving a man who’d fallen onto the subway tracks at Seventeenth and Harris; he had answered a call from the owner of an ice-cream parlor who claimed that someone had ripped his pay telephone out of the booth and run off with it; he had answered three squeals for missing children and one from a man who shouted hysterically, “My wife’s in bed with another man! My wife’s in bed with another man!”
It had been a busy few days.
On Friday morning, January 10, Danny Gimp called and asked to talk to Steve Carella, who was on his way out to investigate, in order, a call from a literary agency where two typewriters had been stolen, a call from a woman who complained of a peeping Tom, and a call from a supermarket manager who believed someone was dipping into the till.
“I think I may have something,” Danny said.
“Can you meet me right now?” Carella asked.
“I’m still in bed.”
“When then?”
“This afternoon.”
“What time?”
“Four,” Danny said. “The corner of Fiftieth and Warren.”
At 9:27 A.M. Carella left the squadroom to begin answering his squeals, hoping he’d be finished by 4:00 in the afternoon. He said goodbye to Hawes who had decided to visit the Lasser family doctor in New Essex and who was on the phone at the moment arguing with Dave Murchison downstairs about the use of a police sedan.
“Hey,” Carella said. “I said goodbye.”
“Okay, I’ll see you later.”
“Let’s hope Danny comes up with something.”
“Let’s hope,” Hawes said, and he waved at Carella as he walked through the gate in the railing, and then he turned his attention back to the phone and began yelling at Murchison again. Murchison wasn’t buying any, thanks. Hawes told him his own car was in the garage with alignment trouble, but Murchison steadfastly maintained that each of the precinct’s sedans was either in use or about to be used that morning, and he couldn’t let Hawes have one even if Hawes brought in the commissioner personally, or perhaps even the mayor. Hawes told him to go to hell. As he was leaving the precinct on the way to the train station, he pointedly walked past the muster desk without saying a word to Murchison. Murchison, busy with the switchboard, didn’t even notice Hawes going by.
Dr. Ferdinand Matthewson was an old man with a leonine mane of white hair, a long nose, and a gentle voice that issued sibilantly from between pursed lips. He wore a dark black suit and he kept his hands, brown with liver spots, tented in
front of his face as he sat in a big brown leather chair and watched Hawes intently and suspiciously.
“How long has Mrs. Lasser been ill?” Hawes asked.
“Since 1939,” Matthewson said.
“When in 1939?”
“September.”
“How would you describe her present condition?”
“Paranoid schizophrenia.”
“Do you feel Mrs. Lasser should be institutionalized, sir?”
“Definitely not,” Matthewson said.
“Even though she has been schizophrenic since 1939?”
“She is dangerous neither to herself nor society. There is no reason for her to be institutionalized.”
“Has she ever been institutionalized?”
Matthewson hesitated.
“Doctor?”
“Yes, I heard you.”
“Has she ever been institutionalized?”
“Yes.”
“When?”
“In 1939.”
“For how long?”
Again Matthewson hesitated.
“For how long, sir?”
“Three years.”
“Where?”
“I don’t know.”
“You’re her family physician, aren’t you?” “I am.”
“Then where was she institutionalized? Can you tell me that?”
“I want no part of this, sir,” Matthewson said suddenly. “I want no part of what you’re trying to do.”
“I’m trying to investigate a murder,” Hawes said.
“No, sir. You are trying to send an old woman back into an institution, and I will not help you to do that. No, sir. There has been too much misery in the lives of the Lassers. I will not help you to add to it. No, sir.”
“Dr. Matthewson, I assure you I am—”
“Why must you do this?” Matthewson asked. “Why won’t you let a sick old woman live out her days in peace, cared for and protected by someone who loves her?”
“I’m sorry, Dr. Matthewson. I’d like to let everybody live out his days in peace. But somebody just wouldn’t allow George Lasser to do that.”