Ax

by Ed McBain

  “A man named Anson Burke.”

  “What did you have on him?”

  “He was president of his company, a firm exporting automobile parts to South America. He came into the office one day and asked if we would prepare his personal income tax return. This was pretty fishy to begin with, because his firm had its own accountants, but he was going outside to have his personal tax figured. Anyway, we took him on. That’s how I found out about the forty grand.”

  “What forty grand?”

  “You know anything about the export business?”

  “Very little.”

  “Well, most of them’ll buy the parts they need for export from various suppliers all around the country. The usual deal is for the supplier to give the exporter a flat discount, usually about fifteen percent.”

  “Yeah, go on.”

  “Well, every now and then, if the exporter brings the supplier an unusually large amount of business, the supplier’ll give an additional discount.”

  “How much more?”

  “Well, in this case it was five percent more. Burke’s firm was probably doing business of eight hundred thousand to a million a year with this one supplier alone. You take five percent of eight hundred thousand, and you’ve got forty grand.”

  “There’s that forty grand again,” Hawes said. “What about it?”

  “That’s how much he got.”

  “Who?”

  “Burke.”

  “From who?”

  “From this supplier in Texas.”

  “For what?”

  “Well, he listed it as a commission, but it was really that additional five percent discount I told you about.”

  “I don’t understand,” Carella said. “Listed it where?”

  “On the information return he gave me for his personal income tax.”

  “He listed forty thousand dollars as a commission from a supplier in Texas, is that it?”

  “That’s right. He was drawing thirty thousand from his company as salary. This was over and above that.”

  “So?”

  “So at least he was smart enough to look for another accountant far away from his regular business accountants.”

  “What do you mean, smart?”

  “Because the forty thousand bucks was paid to him personally. It never went into the firm. He was declaring it on his personal income tax so everything would be nice and legal as far as Uncle Sam was concerned, but he was robbing it from his stockholders.”

  “Go on,” Carella said.

  “Well, I knew I had something good there if I could only get to him. But how? One peep out of me, and he might have gone to Cavanaugh, and the next thing I knew Cavanaugh would call Philadelphia and talk to some of his childhood friends who were now adult hoods, and I’d be fishing in the River Dix, only from the bottom. Then I remembered talking to Lasser once or twice. I knew he was slightly crooked because he used to steal brass fittings and copper tubing, stuff like that from the basement, which he’d later sell to junkyards. Burke’s office was all the way over on the other side of town. He didn’t know Lasser from a hole in the wall.”

  “How’d you set it up?”

  “I contacted Lasser and explained the deal to him. He was interested. Then I called Burke and told him I wanted to work on his tax return one day that week, and would he please bring his records to the office, including all the stuff I would need for that year, like his withholding statements and also the information return about that forty-thousand-dollar commission. He said he would bring it in the next day. I went up that afternoon to work in his private office and told him to keep the stuff in the city rather than taking it back home with him, because I’d have to come back again tomorrow to finish up. He locked it in the top drawer of his desk.”

  “Go on.”

  “Lasser and I broke into his office that night. We were after the information return, but to make it look good, we grabbed a gold pen and pencil and some petty cash and a typewriter and some other junk laying around the office. Burke discovered the theft the next morning. Two weeks later Lasser contacted him.”

  “What did he tell him?”

  “He confessed to being the man who had broken into the office. Burke was ready to call the police, but then Lasser showed him the return. He said he had grabbed it by accident with some of the other stuff in the drawer, and that he didn’t know very much about the exporting business, but he knew the name of the firm was Anson Burke, Incorporated, and here was an information return going to the United States government and listing a payment of forty thousand dollars to Anson Burke personally, rather than to the firm, and this looked kind of fishy to him. Burke told Lasser to go to hell and said he was definitely going to call the police now, at which point Lasser apologized and said maybe he was wrong, maybe everything was clean and aboveboard, in which case Burke wouldn’t mind if Lasser mailed that information return to the company’s board of directors. It was then that Burke saw the light. In fact, it damn near blinded him.”

  “So he paid Lasser whatever he asked for.”

  “Yes.”

  “And that was how much?”

  “Well, Burke had stolen forty grand that year from the company. Lasser and I figured he’d be stealing at least that, if not more, each and every year we kept quiet about it.”

  “Yeah, so?”

  “Lasser asked him for half of it.”

  “Or else.”

  “Yeah. Or else he’d go straight to the board of directors.”

  “So Burke paid.”

  “Yes.”

  “And you and Lasser split twenty grand.”

  “That’s right. Ten grand each.”

  “And you continued to get it each year. That can come to a lot of money,” Carella said. “So it’s entirely possible that Burke finally got fed up with being bled. He went to that basement on South Fifth and killed Lasser in an attempt to free himself of—”

  “No,” Reuhr said.

  “Why not?”

  “The golden eggs stopped coming in 1945.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “No more after 1945,” Reuhr said. “No more money after then.”

  “Burke stopped paying you in 1945? Is that it?”

  Reuhr smiled. “That’s right,” he said.

  “He still might have been sore about what he’d paid out up to that time. He may have finally decided to do something about it.”

  “Uh-uh,” Reuhr said, and there was something maliciously gleeful about his smile now.

  “Why not?” Carella asked.

  “Anson Burke couldn’t have killed Lasser.”

  “Why not?”

  “I just told you. He stopped paying us.”

  “So?”

  “The reason he stopped paying was that he dropped dead of a heart attack in 1945.”

  “What?” Carella said.

  Reuhr nodded gleefully. “Yeah.” Still grinning, he said, “There goes your ball game, huh?”

  January is a lousy month for ball games.

  They didn’t pinch Sigmund Reuhr because they doubted if they had a real case, and besides—to tell the truth—it was too damn much trouble. Reuhr’s victim and Reuhr’s partner were both dead, and for the previous blackmail attempt they had only Cavanaugh’s word, which might be considered hearsay in court without the corroborating evidence of the intended 1937 victim. The possibility of getting that intended victim to incriminate himself by incriminating Reuhr was exceptionally slim, and anyway, the whole mess seemed like very small potatoes when there was a homicide kicking around.

  January is just a lousy month for ball games, that’s all.

  When they got back to the squadroom, Detective Meyer Meyer met them at the slatted wood railing and said, “Where you guys been?”

  “Why?” Carella asked.

  “We got a call a few minutes ago. From Murphy on the beat.”

  “Yeah?”

  “A colored handyman just tried to kill the super of a building.�
�

  “Where?”

  “At 4113 South 5th,” Meyer said. “His name’s Sam Whitson.”

  There were two patrolmen sitting on Sam Whitson’s legs when Carella and Hawes arrived. Another two had pinned down his huge outstretched arms, and yet another cop straddled his chest. The immense Negro gave a sudden lurch into the air, his midsection bucking, as the detectives came closer to where he was pinned to the basement floor. The cop sitting on his chest flew into the air and then grabbed for the lapels of Whitson’s Eisenhower jacket and landed again on his chest with a heavy thud.

  “You son of a bitch,” Whitson said, and a patrolman standing by and watching the others struggling with their prisoner suddenly hit Whitson on the sole of his right foot with his nightstick. At one side of the basement, his head bleeding from a cut across the scalp and forehead, sat John Iverson, the superintendent of the building at 4113 South 5th, next door to 4111 where George Lasser had worked. The buildings were side by side and attached, like two halves of the same embryo. Iverson’s basement was a mirror image of Lasser’s, except for its contents. He sat now on an empty milk crate and nursed his broken head while the patrolmen struggled with Whitson who kept trying to shake them off at regular intervals. The one patrolman who was not engaged in the struggle kept hitting Whitson with his nightstick at regular intervals, too, until finally one of the other cops yelled, “For Christ’s sake, Charlie, will you cut it out? Every time you hit the bastard he jumps in the air.”

  “I’m trying to calm him,” Charlie said, and hit Whitson’s shoe sole again.

  “Lay off,” Carella said, and he walked to where the cops swarmed over the fallen Negro. “Let him up.”

  “He’s pretty dangerous, sir,” one of the policemen said.

  “Let him up,” Carella repeated.

  “Okay, sir,” the spokesman for the patrolmen said, and then they all jumped off Whitson at precisely the same moment, as though by prearranged signal, and backed far away from him as Whitson sprang to his feet with his fists clenched and murder in his eyes.

  “It’s okay, Sam,” Carella said gently.

  “Who says so?” Whitson wanted to know. “I’m goan kill that son of a bitch.”

  “You’re not going to kill anybody, Sam. Sit down and cool off. I want to know what happened here.”

  “Get outa my way,” Whitson said. “This ain’t none of your affair.”

  “Sam, I’m a police officer,” Carella said.

  “I know what you is,” Whitson said.

  “Okay. I got a call saying you tried to kill the super. Is that right?”

  “You goan get another call in jus’ a few minutes,” Whitson said. “It’s goan tell you I did kill the super.”

  Carella, in spite of himself, burst out laughing. The laughter surprised Whitson, who unclenched his fists for a moment and stared at Carella with a dumfounded expression on his face.

  “It ain’t funny,” Whitson said.

  “I know it’s not, Sam,” Carella answered. “Let’s sit down and talk it over.”

  “He came at me with a goddamn ax,” Whitson said, pointing to Iverson.

  For the first time since they had come into that basement, Carella and Hawes were fully aware of Iverson as something more than an innocent assault victim. If Whitson was immense, Iverson was just as large. If Whitson was capable of wreaking havoc, Iverson could easily have caused much the same destruction. He sat on the milk crate with his forehead and scalp bleeding, but the cut did nothing to diminish the feeling of power and strength that emanated from him like the smell of a jungle beast. As Whitson pointed to him, he lifted his eyes, and the detectives suddenly sensed his alert tension, a nervous energy that transmitted itself as surely as did his stench of power, so that they themselves approached him with a wariness they would not ordinarily have exercised on a bleeding man.

  “What does he mean, Iverson?” Carella asked.

  “He’s crazy,” Iverson said.

  “He just said you came at him with an ax.”

  “He’s crazy.”

  “What’s this?” Hawes asked, and he bent to pick up an ax that was lying on the basement floor some ten feet from where Iverson was sitting. “This looks like an ax to me, Iverson.”

  “It is an ax,” Iverson said. “I keep it down here in the basement. I use it for chopping up things.”

  “What’s it doing on the floor?”

  “I must have left it there,” Iverson said.

  “He’s lying,” Whitson said. “When he come at me with that ax, I hit him, and he drop it there on the floor. That’s what it’s doing on the floor there.”

  “What’d you hit him with?”

  “I picked up the rake there. I hit him with that.”

  “Why?”

  “I just told you. He come at me with that ax.”

  “Why’d he do that?”

  ” ‘Cause he a cheap bastard,” Whitson said. “That’s why.”

  Iverson got to his feet and took a step toward Whitson. Carella moved between them and shouted, “Sit down! What does he mean, Iverson?”

  “I don’t know what he means. He’s crazy.”

  “Offering me twenty-five cents,” Whitson said indignantly. “I told him what he could do with his twenty-five cents. Twenty-five cents!”

  “What are you talking about, Whitson?” Hawes asked, and then seemed to discover he was still holding the ax in his hands. He propped it against the wall of the coal bin just as Whitson wheeled toward Iverson again.

  “Now just hold it, goddamn it!” Hawes yelled, and Whitson stopped dead in his tracks. “What’s all this about twenty-five cents?”

  “He offered me twenty-five cents to chop his wood. I told him to shove it up his—”

  “Let me get this straight,” Carella said. “You wanted him to chop wood for you, is that right, Iverson?”

  Iverson nodded and said nothing.

  “And you offered him twenty-five cents?”

  “Twenty-five an hour,” Iverson said. “That’s what I always paid him before.”

  “Yeah, and that’s why I quit choppin’ wood for you, you cheap bastard. That’s why I start workin’ for Mr. Lasser.”

  “But you used to work for Mr. Iverson here, is that it?” Hawes asked.

  “Las’ year, I used to work for him. But he was only paying me twenty-five cents an hour, and Mr. Lasser he offers me fifty cents an hour, so I quits here and goes there. I ain’t no fool.”

  “Is this true, Iverson?”

  “I gave him more work,” Iverson said. “I paid less, but there was more work, more hours.”

  “That was only until Mr. Lasser start getting all your customers,” Whitson said.

  “What do you mean?” Hawes asked.

  “All the people here in this building, they starts going next door for they wood. To Mr. Lasser.”

  They were staring at Iverson now, staring at the huge man with his hands dangling clumsily at his sides, his teeth nibbling at the soft flesh inside his mouth, his eyes wary and alert, a look of animal disarray about him.

  “Is this true, Mr. Iverson?” Carella asked.

  Iverson did not answer.

  “Mr. Iverson, I want to know if this is true,” Carella said.

  “Yes, yes, it’s true,” Iverson said.

  “That all your customers started going to Mr. Lasser for their wood?”

  “Yes, yes,” Iverson said. “That don’t mean nothing. It don’t mean I…”

  Iverson cut himself off. The basement was silent.

  “What doesn’t it mean, Mr. Iverson?”

  “Nothing.”

  “You were about to say something, Mr. Iverson.”

  “I said all I got to say.”

  “Your customers all began going to Mr. Lasser, is that right?”

  “I told you yes! What do you want from me? My head is bleeding. He hit me on the head. Why are you asking me the questions?”

  “How did you feel about that?” Carella asked.
/>
  “About what?”

  “About your wood customers leaving you?”

  “I…look, I…I had nothing to do with it.”

  “With what?”

  “I was angry, yes, but…”

  Again Iverson stopped talking. He stared at Carella and Hawes who were watching him quietly and solemnly. And then, for whatever reasons of his own, perhaps because he felt he could no longer communicate, perhaps because he felt he had walked into a trap and the jaws had closed upon him, his face changed and a decision moved across it as visibly as if it had been stamped there in ink. Without another word he turned swiftly and reached for the ax Hawes had propped against the side of the bin. He lifted the ax easily and effortlessly, so quickly that Carella barely had time to move out of its path as it swung around like a baseball bat aimed at his head.

  “Duck!” Hawes shouted, and Carella immediately threw himself flat on the floor, rolling over onto his left shoulder as Hawes’s shot rang out behind him, reaching for the service revolver in the holster at his hip just as Hawes got off his second shot. He heard someone grunt in pain, and then Iverson was standing over him with a huge blot of blood spreading on the front of his overalls, the ax raised high over his head, the way it must have been raised on that Friday afternoon just before he had finally sunk it into the skull of George Lasser. Carella knew there was no time to raise the pistol. He knew there was no time to scramble away, no time to dodge the blow. The ax was already at its apogee. It would descend in another split instant.

  Whitson threw himself for what seemed the length of the basement, sailing into the air in a flying leap, the entire huge and muscular hulk of him colliding with Iverson’s immense body. Iverson staggered back against the furnace and the ax head crashed against the cast-iron door with a furiously ringing clang and then fell clattering to the cement floor. Iverson pushed himself off the furnace and reached for the ax again, but Whitson had drawn back his right hand, the fist bunched, and then his arm shot out with stunning force, straight and true and unerring, and Iverson’s head snapped back as though his neck were broken, and he collapsed to the floor.

  “You okay?” Hawes asked.

  “I’m okay,” Carella said. “Sam?”

  “I’m fine,” Whitson said.

  “He did it for the wood business,” Hawes said, astonished. “He did it for the lousy two-bit wood business.”