Ax

by Ed McBain

  “What do you mean?”

  “Though I wouldn’t say he was dishonest,” Cavanaugh said. “Not exactly, anyway.”

  “Then what?”

  “Siggie likes the horses.”

  “A gambler, huh?”

  “Mmmm, a gambler like nobody’s business. Horses, cards, dice, football games, prize fights—you name it, Siggie’s got a bet on it.”

  “Did this affect his work in any way?”

  “Well…” Cavanaugh said, and then shrugged.

  “Was he in debt?”

  “Once that I know of.”

  “When?”

  “1937.” Again Cavanaugh shrugged. “Listen, almost everybody in this city was in debt in 1937.”

  “Was this a gambling debt?”

  “Yeah. He was in a poker game and he lost three thousand dollars.”

  “That’s a lot of money,” Hawes said.

  “Even today it’s a lot of money,” Cavanaugh said. “In 1937 it was a hell of a lot of money.”

  “What happened?”

  “The guys who were in the game with him took his IOU. He had something like sixty days to meet the bill. You’ve got to understand that these were tough customers. I’m not trying to excuse what Siggie done. I’m only trying to explain that he was in a tight jam.”

  “What’d he do? Dip into the company till?”

  “Hell, no. What gave you that idea?”

  “I thought that’s where you were leading.”

  “No.”

  “Then what happened, Mr. Cavanaugh?”

  “He tried to shake down a client.”

  “Reuhr did?”

  “Yeah. He was working on the books for one of our clients and he tipped to a sort of a swindle. What it was, the company was doing some price-fixing, and he threatened to report it unless they paid him off.”

  “That’s blackmail, Mr. Cavanaugh.”

  “Well, not exactly.”

  “Yes, exactly. What happened?”

  “The client called me. I told them to forget about it, and then I had a long talk with Siggie. I ended up lending him the three grand, but I also got a promise from him that he’d never pull anything like that again.” Cavanaugh paused. “Look, can I level with you?”

  “Sure.”

  “Off the record? I know you’re a cop, but you’re not a T-man, so let’s talk straight for just a minute, okay?”

  “Go ahead,” Hawes said.

  “You didn’t say it was off the record yet.”

  “If I say it, will that make it binding?”

  Cavanaugh grinned. “Well, at least we’d have a verbal agreement.”

  “Verbal agreements aren’t worth the paper they’re written on,” Hawes said. “Samuel Goldwyn, circa 1940.”

  “Huh?” Cavanaugh asked.

  “Go ahead,” Hawes said. “Off the record.”

  “Okay. In our business, in accounting, there’s a lot we see and a lot we forget we ever saw, you know what I mean? You’d be surprised how many cockeyed books in this city suddenly become balanced when it gets near tax time. My point is, I can’t afford to have some creep in the organization who goes around finding things in my clients’ books and then tries to shake them down. Word like that gets around very fast, you know. So I talked to Siggie like a brother. Siggie, I said, you’re a young man—he was a young man at that time, this was back in 1937, you know—Siggie, you’re a young man, and you’ve got a future with this company. Now, I know you like the nags, Siggie—still talking to him like a brother—and I know you sometimes get in over your head with gambling debts and this causes you to do crazy things. But, Siggie, I was born and raised on Philadelphia’s South Side, and that’s a very rough neighborhood, Siggie, just as rough as any of these guys you get into card games with. I’m going to lend you the three grand to pay off your friends, Siggie—still talking like a brother— but I’m going to start deducting ten bucks a week from your paycheck until the three grand is paid back, you understand? More important, though, Siggie, I learned a few tricks when I was a kid living in Philadelphia, and Siggie, if you ever try to shake down any more of my clients, Siggie, you are going to end up in the River Harb with a base made of solid concrete. Nothing is worse for the accounting business than some creep who has a long nose, Siggie, so cut it out, Siggie. This is a fair warning.”

  “Did he cut it out?”

  “Damn right, he did.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Look, I know my clients. If anybody from this firm was trying a shakedown, bang, the telephone would ring the next second. No, no. Siggie kept his nose clean from then on. Never another complaint from nobody.”

  “That’s a little odd, isn’t it?”

  “Odd? How?”

  “Well, unless he kept winning from then on.”

  “No, he still lost every now and then. Listen, there ain’t a gambler alive who wins all the time.”

  “Then how’d he meet his debts?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Mmm,” Hawes said.

  “Was there gambling involved in this murder?” Cavanaugh asked.

  “Sort of.”

  “Well,” Cavanaugh said, “there’s a lot of things I wouldn’t put past Siggie Reuhr, but murder ain’t one of them. How was the guy killed?”

  “With an ax.”

  “Blood, you mean?”

  “What?”

  “Was there lots of blood around?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then forget Siggie. If it was poison, well, maybe. That’s more Siggie’s speed. But an ax? Blood? Siggie would faint dead on the spot if he got a little cut on his finger from the edge of a ledger. No, sir. If someone got killed with an ax, it wasn’t Siggie Reuhr who killed him.”

  One of the cops who visited the basement at 4111 South 5th that Tuesday morning was Steve Carella.

  In the summertime a city street is a very public place. Most of the citizens are outdoors trying to catch a breath of fresh air, windows are wide open, sounds are magnified, there is a commerce between street and building that does not exist in the winter. Even the melting tar in the gutters seems to echo this pattern of merger, this blending anonymity that is truly the worst thing about slum dwelling; the person who lives in a tenement is denied many of the pleasures of life and most of its luxuries; he has never known complete privacy, the biggest luxury of them all, but in the summertime he is denied even a semblance of privacy.

  Things are a little better in January.

  There is privacy inherent in a heavy winter coat pulled up around the back of your neck, there is privacy in your pockets, deep and snug and warm with the heat of your hands. There is privacy in the vestibule of a building with a hissing radiator. There is privacy under the big dining room table that you bought when you first came from Puerto Rico. There is privacy somehow in the contained heat of a kitchen alive with cooking aromas. There is privacy in a hurried sidewalk conversation with someone you know, the words brisk and to the point, vapor pluming from swiftly moving lips, talk fast, honey, it’s goddamn cold out here.

  Mrs. Whitson, the colored woman who did the windows and floors at 4111 South 5th, whose son, Sam Whitson, had chopped firewood for the late George Lasser at that same address, was standing on the sidewalk having a private, hurried conversation with an elderly man in blue overalls when Carella came down the street. Carella could not hear what they were saying, but he knew that Mrs. Whitson had recognized him because she gave a slight jerk of her head in his direction and the man she was talking to turned and looked at Carella and then went back to the conversation. As Carella approached, Mrs. Whitson said, “Hello, there. You’re the detective, aren’t you?”

  “Yes, Mrs. Whitson,” Carella said.

  “Well, well, he remembers my name,” she said, again with that defiant thrust of jaw and chin, that challenging look in her eyes that said nobody was going to stop her from going to any damn school she wanted to.

  “I never forget a lady’s name, Mrs.
Whitson,” Carella said, and for a second only the fire left her eyes, for a second only she was simply a skinny, hard-working woman who’d had an honest compliment paid her by a good-looking young man.

  “Thank you,” she said. Her eyes locked with Carella’s.

  He smiled and said, “You’re welcome.”

  “I was just talking to Mr. Iverson,” she said. Her eyes did not leave Carella’s face. A brooding suspicion had suddenly come into those eyes, almost against the old lady’s will, almost through force of habit—you’ve kicked my goddamn people around for a hundred years, my grandfather was a slave who got beaten regularly with a cat-o’-nine-tails, and now you call me a lady and come buttering me up. Who are you after now? My son? What are you going to take from me next, my son Sam, who never harmed a butterfly? “Do you know Mr. Iverson?”

  “I don’t think so,” Carella said. “How do you do? I’m Detective Carella.”

  “How do you do?” Iverson said, and he extended his hand.

  “Mr. Iverson is the super of the building next door,” Mrs. Whitson said. “I was just talking to him about some work for Sam.”

  “Mrs. Whitson thought maybe he could chop wood for me again now,” Iverson said.

  “Did he used to chop wood for you?” Carella asked.

  “Oh, sure, even before Lasser had the idea. I got tenants with fireplaces, too, you know.”

  “Some fireplaces in these buildings,” Mrs. Whitson said. “They’re these old things, they fill the room up with smoke the minute they’re lit.”

  “They keep the rooms warm, though,” Iverson said.

  “Sure. But if you don’t die of the cold around here, you die from the smoke.”

  She burst out laughing, and both Carella and Iverson laughed with her.

  “Well, send him around to see me,” Iverson said when the laughter had subsided. “Maybe we work something out like before.”

  “I’ll send him,” Mrs. Whitson said, and waved to him as he walked away. As soon as he was out of earshot, she lifted her face to Carella’s and looked directly into his eyes and asked, “You after my son?”

  “No, Mrs. Whitson.”

  “Don’t lie to me.”

  “I’m not lying to you. I don’t think your son had anything to do with the murder of George Lasser.”

  Mrs. Whitson kept staring at Carella. Then she gave a quick simple nod and said, “Okay.”

  “Okay,” Carella said.

  “Then why you here?”

  “I wanted to look at the basement again.”

  “If you gonna look at it,” Mrs. Whitson said, “you better do it before we both freeze to death out here.” She smiled. “You know the way?”

  “I know the way,” he said.

  The man named Kaplowitz met him just outside the door to the basement.

  “My name is Kaplowitz,” he said. “Who are you, and what do you want here?”

  “My name is Carella,” Carella answered, showing his shield. “I want to go down to the basement and look around.”

  Kaplowitz shook his head. “Impossible.”

  “Why?”

  “I just hosed the basement an hour ago.” Kaplowitz shook his head. “Dirty basements I seen. Believe me, dirty basements I seen plenty in my day. But a dirty basement like this? Never! Never in my whole life. Two days I’m working on this job now, two days since Mr. Gottlieb hired me. Two days I go down that basement, I live in that basement practically. I look around it, I say, ‘Kaplowitz, this is some dirty basement.’ Two days I stand it. But this morning, no more can I stand it. ‘Kaplowitz,’ I say, ‘are you a janitor or a schlub?’ I’m a janitor, that’s what I am. Kaplowitz the Janitor! And such a dirty basement I can’t stand. So I took out all the stuff from the tenants—it shouldn’t get wet—and I put over the coal some tarpaulin—it shouldn’t get wet—and then I connected the hose and pisssshhhhhhhh, all over the floor! I cleaned everything, everything! Under, over, on, up, down, everything! Pissshhhh behind the garbage cans, pissshhhh under the workbench, pissshhhh near the furnace, pissshhhh behind the wash machine and the sink, pissshhhh down the drain, everything cleaned up by Kaplowitz the Janitor! So you can’t go downstairs now.”

  “Why not? If it’s all clean…”

  “It’s still wet,” Kaplowitz said, “You want I should get footprints on the floor?”

  “Did you spread newspapers?” Carella asked, smiling.

  “Haha, very funny,” Kaplowitz said. “Newspapers I only spread on Shabbas.”

  “How long will it take to dry?” Carella asked.

  “Look, mister,” Kaplowitz said, “don’t rush it, huh? For a hundred years this basement wasn’t washed down. So it finally got cleaned. Let it take its time drying, okay? Give it a break, huh? Be a nice man—go take a walk around the block a few times. When you come back the basement will be nice and clean, you’ll hardly recognize it.”

  “Okay,” Carella said. “Ten minutes.”

  “Fifteen.”

  “Ten,” Carella said.

  “What are you doing? Bargaining with me? You think because you say ten the floor will listen and dry in ten? Fifteen minutes, okay? Everything will be nice and dry. You can go downstairs and get it all dirty again, okay?”

  “Fifteen minutes,” Carella said, and he went out of the building and to the candy store on the corner where he had a cup of coffee. He called the squadroom to ask if there had been any messages, and Bert Kling told him Hawes had called to say he was going directly to Cavanaugh and Post from his house. Carella thanked him and then went back to the building. Kaplowitz was nowhere in sight. He went to the rear of the ground floor, opened the door, and paused at the top of the basement steps.

  The basement was silent except for the enclosed roar of the furnace and the occasional clatter of overhead pipes. He came down the steps into darkness—there seemed to be a light burning farther back in the basement, but it did not help to illuminate the steps. He groped for the hanging string on the overhead light bulb and pulled at it. The bulb swung as he released the string, back and forth on its electric wire, casting huge arcs of light on the gray basement wall and the workbench, darkness again, light, darkness, until finally the bulb hung almost motionless, casting a wide circle on the gray concrete floor and the workbench beyond, with darkness beyond that. The next pool of light was farther back in the basement, cast by a second hanging bulb over the sink and drain.

  The smell of disinfectant was in his nostrils; Kaplowitz had done a good job.

  He moved toward the workbench near the coal bin and felt the sudden sharp wind on his face and thought at first that someone had left a window open. He stepped out of the circle of light, walking into darkness toward the source of the draft. He stepped into the second pool of light near the washing machine and the sink and the drain set in the concrete floor, and then beyond that into darkness again. There seemed to be natural light coming from somewhere at the far end of the basement. He walked toward the light, surprised to find an outside door. He had thought the only entrance was the one behind the steps on the ground floor, inside the building. But as he approached the glass-paneled door at the far end of the building, he realized that it led to a short flight of steps and then into the alleyway at the end of which was the toolshed. George Lasser had kept his ax in that toolshed.

  The door was open.

  Carella closed the door and wondered if the wind had blown it open. There was no lock on the door, and it closed into the jamb loosely; it was entirely possible that the wind had blown it open. He moved away from the door and began walking back toward the workbench. For a brief and frightening moment he thought he saw something move in the shadows and his hand went automatically toward his holster. He stopped walking, his hand hovering over the pistol butt. He heard nothing; he saw nothing. He waited for perhaps another thirty seconds and then walked back toward the circle of light near the workbench.

  The man in the shadows was holding a monkey wrench in his right hand. He watched Carella
and he waited.

  Carella studied the workbench, noting everything Grossman had pointed out, noting the spot on the shelf where the Maxwell House Coffee can had been resting before the lab boys confiscated it, and then backing away. On impulse, and because cops like to look under things as well as on top of them, Carella dropped to his knees and looked under the workbench, but if anything had ever been on the floor under the bench, Kaplowitz’s hose had washed it away. Carella got to his feet again; the knees of his trousers weren’t even faintly dusty.

  The man waited in the shadows near the sink.

  Carella turned and began walking toward the sink.

  The man’s grip on the heavy monkey wrench tightened. He had grabbed the wrench from behind the sink where it was kept for plumbing emergencies. He had grabbed the wrench only seconds after he’d replaced the cover on the drain in the floor, and he had replaced the cover only seconds after he’d heard the basement door opening and the footsteps approaching. He had moved too quickly. The cover was not resting squarely on the drain. If someone tripped over it…

  Carella kept walking toward the sink.

  His foot came within four inches of kicking the metal drain cover. If his foot had connected, he would have become aware of the cover and most probably would have bent to examine it, and he would then have had his head crushed in with a monkey wrench. But his foot missed the drain cover by four inches, and he kicked nothing and did not stoop to examine anything, and therefore had nothing come down on his skull. He looked into the sink and then went to the washing machine and opened the door and looked in, expecting to find God knew what, and then sighed and put his hands on his hips. He sighed again.

  The man in the shadows waited.

  Carella shrugged and then walked to the basement steps. He climbed the steps, turned off the light when he was on the second step from the top, opened the door, went out of the basement, and closed the door behind him.

  The man did not move from the shadows near the sink.

  He waited.

  He decided to count to a hundred before he came out. He would count to a hundred, yes, and then lift the cover from the drain again, and then reach into it. He knew exactly where it was caught—there on the flat part before the cement dipped into the hole that carried the water away. He would count to a hundred, just to make sure that cop wasn’t coming back. He had thought he was gone that first time, too, when he’d seen him leaving the building. This time he would make sure.