Ax

by Ed McBain

  He had reached fifty-seven, counting slowly, when the door at the top of the staircase opened and the second policeman entered the basement.

  The second policeman was in uniform.

  The second policeman was a man named Ralph Corey, and he had his own reasons for coming down to the basement this morning, and he had no idea that four inches were going to cost him his life. Corey had been waiting for the opportunity to get down here ever since Carella had spoken to him a week ago Monday, but there was always somebody down here, either the lab boys or the goddamn police photographers, or newspaper reporters, or what had you. Corey was very anxious to get down here because George Lasser had given him $25 every time there was going to be a crap game in the basement of the building, ten of which Corey passed on to the patrolmen, and fifteen of which he kept for himself. But after his talk with Carella, Corey had remembered a peculiar habit of George Lasser’s, and it was this habit that had caused his anxiety about getting down to the basement. He remembered talking to Lasser once near the workbench in the basement on the afternoon of one of the crap games, remembered that Lasser had been jotting down some figures in a small black book as Corey had come down the basement steps. As it turned out, Lasser was simply tallying his wood-business receipts, and Corey had put the entire thing out of his mind until that Monday a week ago when Carella started turning the screws. It was then that Corey remembered those figures written in that little black book, all in Lasser’s clean, meticulous hand, one under the other in a neat column:

  And it was then that Corey began wondering whether neat, meticulous, methodical George Lasser who wrote down all these chintzy little log receipts, two bucks, a half a buck, six bucks, whether George Lasser didn’t also keep a record of expenditures, especially when they came in $25 lumps every time there was a crap game. And he began wondering whether there was a place in that black book where it said, in Lasser’s meticulous little hand:

  …and so on.

  Corey groped along the wall for a light switch, found none, and decided there must be a hanging light with a pull cord. He swung his arms over his head, hitting the bulb with his hand, steadying it, finding the cord, and turning on the light.

  The basement was still.

  He had seen Lasser making entries in that book at his workbench. That was where he headed now.

  He had been a cop for too long a time not to know that there was something very peculiar in this basement. Something warned him of this peculiarity almost at once; something caused the hackles to rise on the back of his neck, and he did not know what the something was until he approached the workbench. One glance told him that a can, or a container of some kind, had been removed from the neatly lined-up cans and jars on the middle shelf, and he wondered if that can—or whatever it had been—was the one in which George Lasser had kept his little black book. The hackles on the back of his neck continued to stand out like a porcupine’s quills. Ralph Corey was smelling danger, he was smelling death, and he thought he was smelling only possible suspension from the force. He thought the strong odor in his nostrils was the odor of that goddamn Jew Grossman down at the lab who would by now be pawing over that black book and its notations of payments to somebody named Corey. It wouldn’t take that wop Carella long to put two and two together from that.

  Corey backed away from the bench. His mouth was suddenly dry. From the corner of his eye he spotted the sink in the farther circle of light, turned, and walked rapidly toward it. As he approached the sink, the toe of his shoe caught the edge of the drain cover, and he nearly stumbled.

  “What the hell…” he said aloud, and then looked down to see what it was he’d tripped over. Through the metal bars of the drain he could see something lying on the flat section of the concrete well. It caught the light and glittered. For an instant Corey thought it was money. He had spent half his life on the police force taking money, and this sure as hell looked like more money. If he had reached for this as speedily as he had reached for rakeoffs throughout the course of his career, if he had begun to stoop a moment sooner, his head would have been four inches lower by the time the monkey wrench lashed out. But it took him just a moment to react to the glittering metal caught on the flat portion of the drain, and he was just beginning to bend for it when the wrench moved out of the shadows. The wrench moved swiftly, soundlessly, and powerfully. It cracked Corey’s skull wide open and lodged itself in the pulpy brain matter that had two minutes before been concerning itself with possible suspension from the force.

  The man who had wielded the wrench pulled it from Corey’s open skull and walked with it toward the trash barrel near the coal bin, dripping blood as he walked. He fished a newspaper from the barrel and wiped the head of the wrench clean of blood. There was no blood on the handle, but he was certain he had left some fingerprints there. He reversed the position of the wrench, holding the jaws with one sheet of newspaper and wiping the bloodless handle clean with another sheet. He looked down and saw that some blood had dripped onto his shoes when he carried the wrench to the barrel, so he took another clean sheet of newspaper and wiped off the few droplets and then carried all of the soiled newspapers to the furnace door, which he opened. He threw the papers inside and waited for them to catch fire before he closed the furnace door.

  He threw the cleaned wrench into the trash barrel and walked back to the sink. Stooping, he lifted the drain cover and picked up the object that had cost Ralph Corey his life.

  The object was a brass button.

  Well, now a cop was dead.

  Before this only a janitor was dead.

  But now a cop was dead.

  There was a big difference.

  In order to understand what it is like when a cop gets killed, you must first realize that only two kinds of people kill cops: maniacs and dopes. A maniac is not responsible for anything he does, and a dope is too dumb to know what he is doing. Anybody in his right mind does not go around killing cops. Anybody who can add two and two does not go around killing cops. It is not done. It is crazy and it is stupid. Besides, it is useless. If you kill one cop, there is always some other cop who will take his place, so what’s the use? All it does is get everybody all riled up, and it puts the heat on for no good reason, especially in January when you should be under the covers with some nice warm broad, dreaming about going down to Miami. Who needs a dead cop in January to stink up the place and get everybody excited?

  Live cops are bad enough.

  Dead cops are the world’s worst.

  There wasn’t a single cop in the 87th Precinct who liked, admired, respected, or trusted the dead cop who had once been Sergeant Ralph Corey.

  That didn’t matter.

  The way most of them figured it, somebody had been inconsiderate enough to shove a monkey wrench into Corey’s head when probably all he was doing was a little investigating into the murder of that janitor a while back. If a poor, hard-working civil servant couldn’t go down into a basement to do a little investigation on his own time, they figured, without getting his head bashed in, well, this goddamn city was sure coming to a pretty pass. If you allowed everybody in this goddamn city to go around bashing in a cop’s head whenever he got the urge to, they figured, just whenever he got the goddamn urge to go bashing some cop’s head in, well, things were sure getting pretty dangerous for civil servants. And if you just sat back and allowed this goddamn city to fall to pieces that way, people picking up monkey wrenches on every street corner and letting the nearest traffic cop have it right in the eye, well, boy, that was some state of affairs. You just couldn’t let hordes of people run wild in the streets, waving monkey wrenches over their heads and slaughtering anything in a blue uniform; you simply couldn’t let that happen because chaos would ensue. No, sir, you couldn’t have chaos.

  That’s the way most of the cops of the 87th figured it.

  Also, it was a little scary. Who the hell wants a job where you can get killed?

  So almost every cop in the precinct, and hundreds of o
thers throughout the city, filled with righteous indignation, justifiable anger, and a little honest fear, began a personal manhunt for a cop killer. Carella and Hawes didn’t know just how this legion of vengeance-seeking men in blue were going to proceed with their search, since hardly any of them knew the facts of the case and only a few of them connected Corey’s murder with the murder of George Lasser some ten days before. The detectives supposed that since a cop had been killed, the man who’d murdered him was technically a cop killer. But they rather imagined that Corey’s death was simply an extension of the earlier murder and had nothing whatever to do with the fact that he was a cop. This being the case, they couldn’t understand what all the goddamn shouting was about. They had been doggedly walking the ass off this homicide since January 3, and all of a sudden everyone was getting excited because a crooked cop stopped a monkey wrench.

  The only thing that bothered them about Corey’s death was the Why of it.

  If he had stumbled upon something in that basement, what was it?

  Or, discounting the possibility that he had discovered something about the case that was threatening to the killer, what other reason could there have been for his murder? Had he arranged a meeting with someone in that basement? Had he known who the killer was? Was he angling for another payoff, this time one involving homicide?

  “There are only two things you can’t fix in this city,” someone had told Carella a long time ago, “and those two things are homicide and narcotics.”

  Carella wondered about that now. If a cop will look the other way when a crap game is in progress, if he will look the other way when a citizen from downtown is upstairs banging a prostitute, if he will look the other way when someone passes a traffic light, if he will look the other way often enough, and always for a price—what will stop him from looking the other way, for a price, when a homicide has been committed?

  Had Corey been ready to look the other way?

  Was his price too high?

  Did the murderer figure there was a simpler way to buy Corey’s silence? Forever? With no possibility of his returning with another demand?

  The possibility existed.

  Unfortunately there were only two people who could tell them whether or not the possibility was a valid one. The first of those people was Ralph Corey, and he was dead. The second was the killer, and they hadn’t the faintest idea who he might be.

  Wednesday passed.

  So did Thursday, somehow.

  On Friday they buried Sergeant Ralph Corey.

  Carella’s grandmother had always called Friday “a hoodoo jinx of a day.” She had not been referring to Friday the thirteenth or to any Friday in particular. She was, instead, convinced that all Fridays were very bad for human beings, and it was best to avoid them at all costs whenever possible. On Friday, January 17, the improbable happened.

  On Friday, January 17, Anthony Lasser walked into the squadroom of his own volition and confessed to the murder of his father, George Lasser.

  Questioning Tony Lasser was an ordeal neither Hawes nor Carella ever hoped to go through again in their lives, but it was an ordeal that had to be met; the man was, after all, confessing to a murder.

  They interrogated him in the squadroom, sitting near the grilled windows with a January wind rattling the panes, the windows themselves rimed, the squadroom clanging with the sound of radiators. Lasser sat trembling in the chair before them. The police stenographer had a bad cold, and besides, he was bored, so he kept his eyes glued to his pad without looking up at Lasser who shivered and swallowed and seemed ready to pass out at any moment. The police stenographer sniffed.

  “Why’d you kill him?” Carella said.

  “I don’t know,” Lasser said.

  “You must have had a reason.”

  “Yes. Yes, I did.”

  “What was it?”

  “I didn’t like him,” Lasser said, and he shivered again.

  “Do you want to tell us what happened, exactly?” Hawes asked.

  “What do you want to know?”

  “When’d you get the idea to do this?”

  “Last week some…some time.”

  “Last week?” Hawes asked.

  “No, no, did I say last week?”

  “That’s what you said.”

  “I meant the week I did it.”

  “When was that, Mr. Lasser?”

  “Before that Friday.”

  “Which Friday?”

  “The…the third, it was. Friday the third.”

  “Go on, Mr. Lasser.”

  “That was when I got the idea to kill him. That week.”

  “Around New Year’s Eve, would you say?”

  “Before then.”

  “When? Christmas?”

  “Between Christmas and New Year’s.”

  “All right, Mr. Lasser, go ahead. You got the idea, then what?”

  “I left the house on Friday, just after lunch.”

  “But we thought you never left the house, Mr. Lasser.”

  Lasser shivered uncontrollably for several moments, his teeth chattering, his hands trembling. He caught hold of himself with great effort and said, “I…I…don’t usually. This time I…I did. To k-k-k-kill him.”

  “How’d you plan to kill him, Mr. Lasser?”

  “What?”

  “How were you going to kill your father?”

  “With the ax.”

  “You brought it with you, is that it?”

  “No, I…I…f-f-f-found it when I got there. In the basement.”

  “The ax was in the basement?”

  “Yes.”

  “Where in the basement?”

  “Near the…furnace.”

  “It wasn’t outside in the toolshed?”

  “No.”

  “You knew there’d be an ax there, is that it?”

  “What?”

  “Had you ever been to that basement before, Mr. Lasser?”

  “No.”

  “Then how’d you know there’d be an ax there?”

  “What?”

  “Mr. Lasser, how did you know there was going to be an ax in that basement?”

  “Well, I…I didn’t.”

  “Then how did you expect to kill your father?”

  “I d-d-didn’t think it out that clearly.”

  “You were just going to figure it out when you got there, is that right?”

  “That’s right,” Lasser said.

  “Are you getting this, Phil?” Carella asked the stenographer.

  “Yop,” the stenographer said, without looking up.

  “Go ahead, Mr. Lasser,” Hawes said.

  “Wh-wh-what do you want me to tell you?”

  “What’d you do after you killed him?”

  “I…I…I…I…” He could not get past the single word. He swallowed and tried again, “I…I…I…” But he was shaking violently now, and the word was lodged in his throat. His face had gone pale, and Carella was sure he would either faint or vomit within the next few moments. Painfully he watched Lasser and wished he could help him.

  “Mr. Lasser,” he said, “can I get you some coffee? Would you like something hot to drink?”

  “N-n-no,” Lasser said.

  “Mr. Lasser, on the day you killed your father, did you react in this way?”

  “W-wh-wha…?”

  “When you left the house, I mean.”

  “No, I wa-wa-was all right.”

  “Mr. Lasser…” Carella started.

  “Mr. Lasser,” Hawes interrupted, “why are you lying to us?”

  Lasser looked up suddenly and blinked and then shivered.

  “Why are you telling us you killed your father when you didn’t?” Carella said.

  “I did!”

  “No, sir.”

  “I did! Wh-what’s the matter with you? C-c-c-ca…?”

  “Take it easy, Mr. Lasser.”

  “Can’t you see I’m t-t-telling the truth?”

  “Mr. Lasser, the man who
swung that ax was powerful and deadly and accurate. You’re having trouble just staying in that chair. Now…”

  “I did it,” Lasser said, and then shivered. “B-believe me. I d-d-d-did it.”

  “No, Mr. Lasser,”

  “Yes.”

  “No. Why are you here?”

  “Because I k-k-k-k-k…”

  He could not say the word. They waited in painful silence while he struggled with it, and finally a shiver rattled his body and he spat out the word as though it were some loathsome creature that had been squatting malevolently on his tongue. “Killed!” he shouted. “I killed my father!”

  “In that case, Mr. Lasser,” Carella said, “you won’t mind if we check your fingerprints against one we found in the basement, will you?”

  Lasser was silent.

  “Will you, Mr. Lasser?”

  He did not answer.

  “Mr. Lasser,” Hawes said gently, “why did you leave your house today?”

  Lasser suddenly began sobbing. The police stenographer looked up, puzzled, and Carella signaled for him to leave. The stenographer hesitated. Carella touched his elbow and coaxed him out of the chair.

  “Don’t you want me to take this down?” the stenographer asked.

  “No,” Carella said. “We’ll call you if we need you.”

  “Okay,” the stenographer said, and he went out of the squadroom, but he was still puzzled. In the straight-backed chair near the frost-whitened windows, Tony Lasser shivered and sobbed.

  “What happened, Mr. Lasser?” Carella asked.

  Lasser shook his head.

  “Something must have happened to bring you here, sir.”

  Again Lasser shook his head.

  “Won’t you please tell us?” Hawes said softly, and Lasser reached for his handkerchief with trembling fingers and blew his nose, and then, shivering, stuttering, sobbing, told them what had happened.