Ed McBain - Ax

“How do you mean?” Hawes asked.

“Well,” Maily said, “he was married in January 1904, and here it is January again, sixty years later, and, well, he’s been killed. That’s pretty funny.”

“Peter don’t mean funny to laugh at,” Ostereich said, “He means strange.”

“Yes, that’s right,” Maily said. “I mean strange.”

“What did George Lasser’s ambition have to do with marrying the woman he did?” Carella asked.

“Estelle? Well, she was an actress, you know.”

“What was her full name?”

“Estelle Valentine,” Wye said. “I think that was her stage name, though. Isn’t that right, Peter?”

“That’s right,” Maily said. “Matter of fact, I don’t think I ever knew her real name.”

“A Russian name,” Ostereich said. “She’s a Russian, I think.”

“Have you ever met her?” Wye asked.

“Yes,” Carella said.

“Then you know she’s crazy, huh?”

“She seemed…well…” Carella shrugged.

“Oh, she’s nutty as a fruitcake, all right,” Ostereich said.

“All actresses are nutty,” Maily said.

“Yes, but she wasn’t even a good actress,” Wye said. “Good ones may have a right to be a little nuts, though I’m not even sure of that. But bad ones? No right at all.”

“I still don’t see what marrying her had to do with ambition,” Carella said.

“Well, she must have seemed pretty important to Georgie. He met her when she came here to New Essex in Captain Jinks of the Horse Marines, do you know that one?”

“No,” Carella said.

“Probably before your time,” Maily said. “Ethel Barrymore played it in 1901. Well, Estelle Valentine wasn’t no Ethel Barrymore, believe me, but she came to New Essex anyway in a road company—must have opened here around Christmas of 1903, I guess, over at the New Essex Playhouse. It’s a movie theater now. Everything changes. Georgie fell in love with her right off. She was a pretty little thing. I got to admit that. They got married…well, almost immediately.”

“Sixty years ago,” Carella said.

“Yes, that’s right.”

“The son seems to be in his forties,” Carella said.

“Tony Lasser? Yes, that’s right. He came late. Neither of the two wanted children. Estelle always talked about going back to the stage and Georgie always had his big plans. Tony came as something of a surprise. They were neither of them exactly grassy green when he was born. You ask me, that’s what finally sent Estelle off her rocker.”

“There’s something I don’t understand,” Carella said.

“What’s that?”

“George Lasser was a janitor.”

“That’s right,” Maily said.

“These ambitions you keep talking about, these plans of his…”

“Oh, don’t think Estelle didn’t throw that up to him all the time,” Ostereich said. “You know, the old baloney. I gave up my career for you, and what did I get in return? A janitor!”

“Georgie always had things going for him, though,” Wye said. “In the Army he always had something to sell, either chickens he’d picked up in the farmhouses, or souvenir pistols, or flags—always something. Once even a string of whores he rounded up someplace.” Wye chuckled with the memory.

“Well, even when we got back here to town,” Ostereich said, “how about that? The dances he used to run over at the Republican Club, and the boat ride he dreamed up. Georgie was always trying to think up ways to make a buck. Very ambitious, he was.”

“But then he became a janitor, right?” Carella said. “He forgot all about his ambitions, is that it?”

“Actually, he was more than just a janitor,” Maily said.

“Yes? What was he?” Carella asked.

“Well, what I mean to say is that he still had other little things going for him.”

“Like what?”

“Like the wood. He used to go out cutting trees here in the woods and carry them into the city in his truck. Then he got some colored fellow to chop them up for him, and he sold them to the tenants in his building. Turned a pretty penny that way.”

“What else did he have going for him?” Carella asked.

“Well…” Maily said.

“Yes?”

“Well, just the wood, that’s all,” Maily said, and he glanced at the other men.

“Sir, what else did George Lasser have going for him?”

“Nothing,” Maily said.

“You said he was an ambitious man.”

“Yes, because of the wood,” Maily said. “Because of his selling the wood. That was very ambitious. After all, he was an old man. Not every man his age would—”

“Sir,” Carella said, “if I heard you correctly, you told us that George Lasser was more than just a janitor and you said he had other little things going for him. You said things, sir. Plural. Now what else did he have going for him besides the wood business?”

“Well, being the super of the building is all I meant. I meant that and the wood business.”

“I think you’re lying, sir,” Carella said, and the store went silent. Carella waited.

“We’re old men,” Maily said at last.

“I know that, sir.”

“We’re old men waiting to die. We came through a war together long ago, and back to New Essex together, and we went to each other’s weddings, and when we began to have kids, we went to baptisms and communions and bar mitzvahs, and we even went to the weddings of the kids and are halfway to seeing their kids grown up and married, too. We’re old men, Mr. Carella.”

“Yes, sir, I know that. I want to know about George Lasser.”

“What we go to now, Mr. Carella, is funerals. That’s what we go to now. No more weddings. Only funerals. Twenty-three of us in the beginning. The Happy Kids. And now there are three of us left, and all we go to is funerals.”

“Georgie Lasser didn’t have an enemy in the world,” Ostereich said.

“He shouldn’t have died like that,” Wye said. “Not that way.”

“Leave him be,” Maily said to Carella. “He’s dead. Let us bury him the way we buried all the others. Let him rest in peace.”

“I’m waiting, Mr. Maily,” Carella said.

Maily sighed. He glanced at Ostereich. Ostereich gave a small nod, and Maily sighed again.

“George Lasser used to run a crap game in the basement of his building,” he said.

Danny Gimp was a stool pigeon, and as an informer, he felt that the American aversion to rats was part of a conspiracy begun in elementary school and designed to deprive him of a profession at which he was a master. He had often thought of hiring a press agent or a public relations man to construct a more acceptable public image of himself, but he had the good sense to know the aversion was too deeply ingrained in the American spirit to be changed by a mere manipulator of images. He could not understand why people felt it was wrong to tell tales about other people. Nor could he understand why a largely law-abiding citizenry had adopted as one of its hidebound codes a precept that had originated in—and was strongly encouraged and enforced by—the underworld. He only knew that if a person saw someone doing something wrong, he was reluctant to go to the authorities with his information. And whereas Danny knew that part of his reluctance was caused by fear of reprisal, he further knew that most of the reluctance was caused by the code: Thou Shalt Not Tell.

Why not?

He enjoyed telling.

He was a gossip supreme, his ears keenly attuned to every stray piece of information that wafted his way on the unsuspecting air. His mind was a complex of compartments and cubbyholes, each storing kernels of seemingly worthless information which, when evaluated, added up to a meaningful fund of knowledge. He was an expert at sifting and sorting, collating and cataloging, all tricks he had learned as a boy when a bout with polio had caused him to be bedridden for the better part of a year. When you can’t leave the bedroom, you begin to think of ways to amuse yourself. Danny Gimp, considering his talent for amusing himself, might have become a banker and the mastermind behind an international cartel if he hadn’t been born and raised on Culver Avenue, which was not one of the city’s garden spots. Having been born on Culver Avenue, and giving the devil his due, he also might have become an international jewel thief or—what is more likely—a pimp. He became neither. He became, instead, a stool pigeon.