Ax
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I did it for the wood business, Iverson said.
I did it because he stole the wood business from me. The wood business was my idea. Before I became super in 4113, the fireplaces was all boarded up and plastered up. It was me who made the fireplaces work, give the tenants heat. It was me who first thought up the idea of the wood business.
George stole the business from me.
First he starts bringing in big logs from the country where he lives, him and his crazy wife. Then he steals the handyman away from me. He offers him 50C/ an hour to chop up the logs—sure he’s going to take it, who wouldn’t? I don’t mind when he sells the wood to his own tenants. That’s his building, he can do what he wants. But then he starts selling to my tenants, and that I don’t like.
When I go down the basement next door the beginning of the year to tell him about it, I didn’t mean to kill him. He’s sitting there counting his money, putting it in a coffee can, writing down his sales in a black book, putting that in the coffee can, too. When I tell him he has to leave my tenants alone, he starts to laugh. So I went out back to the toolshed and then I came down the basement again with the ax. When he sees the ax, he starts laughing again, so I hit him with it. He comes at me, and he grabs for my clothes, but I keep hitting him, and finally I hit him across the throat. I know he is dead from that one, but I keep hitting him anyway, and he falls down, and I put the ax in his head and leave it there.
I emptied the money from the coffee can—there was $7.50, it rightfully belonged to me. I also took the black book because half the tenants in it, they belong to me.
I wiped off the shelf and also the coffee can. I didn’t want to leave no fingerprints. Then I filled the coffee can with things from the other cans, so no one would know there’d been money in it.
I killed that policeman, too.
I went down there to look for my button. George ripped one of the buttons from my overalls when we were fighting down there, and I knew if somebody found the button, I would be in trouble. So I kept going down to look for it, and the day I found it there was that cop down there, too. He saw the button, so I had to kill him. That was all there was to it. I would have killed the handyman today, too, but he was too strong for me.
I never killed anybody before George in my life.
He shouldn’t have stolen the wood business from me.
On his way home that night, Steve Carella stopped into the bookstore called The Bookends in Riverhead. It was close to 7:00, and they were getting ready to close the shop, but he found Allie the Shark Spedino sitting behind his cash register and watching the few remaining customers in the store.
“Uh-oh,” Spedino said. “Trouble.”
“No trouble,” Carella answered.
“Then what brings the law here?” Spedino asked.
“Three things.”
“Like?”
“Like one, we found the killer. You can stop worrying.”
“Who was worrying?” Spedino said. “I don’t know what you thought, but I knew I didn’t do it.”
“Number two, no more crap games in our precinct, Spedino.”
“What crap games? I haven’t been to a crap game in—”
“Spedino, don’t snow me. We know you were there. I’m telling you no more crap games or I go straight to your wife. Okay?”
“Okay, okay.” Spedino shook his head. “Boy.”
“And number three, I’d like to buy a rhyming dictionary.”
“A what?”
“A rhyming dictionary,” Carella said.
“What for?”
“I promised somebody I’d find a rhyme.”
“Okay,” Spedino said, and he shook his head again. “Boy.”
Carella left the shop with the dictionary under his arm. Night had come upon the city suddenly, and the streets were dark and bitter cold. He walked to where he had parked his car, and then he sniffed deeply of the brittle air and opened the car door and slid onto the seat.
For a moment he sat looking through the windshield at the city, locked in upon itself, the barren January streets, the flickering neon, the black sky behind the silent buildings. For a moment— only for a moment—the city overwhelmed him and he sat in almost stunned silence and thought of the poor goddamn janitor in a slum building who’d killed another man for what amounted to a few dollars a week.
He hunched his shoulders against the cold. He started the engine and turned on the heater, and slowly edged the car out into traffic.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Photograph (c) Dragica Hunter>
Ed McBain was one of the many pen names of the successful and prolific crime fiction author Evan Hunter (1926-2005). Born Salvatore Lambino in New York, McBain served aboard a destroyer in the US Navy during World War II and then earned a degree from Hunter College in English and psychology. After a short stint teaching in a high school, McBain went to work for a literary agency in New York, working with authors such as Arthur C. Clarke and P.G. Wodehouse, all the while working on his own writing on nights and weekends. He had his first breakthrough in 1954 with the novel The Blackboard Jungle, which was published under his newly legal name Evan Hunter and based on his time teaching in the Bronx. Perhaps his most popular work, the 87th Precinct series (released mainly under the name Ed McBain) is one of the longest running crime series ever published, debuting in 1956 with Cop Hater and featuring over fifty novels. The series is set in a fictional locale called Isola and features a wide cast of detectives including the prevalent Detective Steve Carella.
McBain was also known as a screenwriter. Most famously he adapted a short story from Daphne Du Maurier into the screenplay for Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds (1963). In addition to writing for the silver screen, he wrote for many television series, including Columbo and the NBC series 87th Precinct (1961-1962), based on his popular novels.
McBain was awarded the Grand Master Award for lifetime achievement in 1986 by the Mystery Writers of America and was the first American to receive the Cartier Diamond Dagger award from the Crime Writers Association of Great Britain. He passed away in 2005 in his home in Connecticut after a battle with larynx cancer.
Table of Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
ABOUT THE AUTHOR