Ed McBain - Ax

“Nobody broke down the door, Fontana.”

“No, you just give me the foot-and-shoulder treatment, that’s all. Listen, I know cops. You’re gonna search the pad, anyway, so what’s the song and dance? Get it over with so I can get back to sleep.”

“You know what, Fontana?”

“What?”

“I think you’re clean.”

“You know it, cop.”

“Otherwise you wouldn’t be so anxious for me to search.”

“Cool. So if you’re done here, why don’t you cut out, huh?”

“Why? Don’t you want me to be here when Georgie arrives?”

“I told you, I’m sleepy. I want to get back to bed.”

“On the couch.”

“Yeah, on the couch,” Fontana said. “She really is my sister, so quit bugging me.”

“What’s her name?”

“Lois.”

“You said Louise last time around.”

“I said Lois.”

“Do you always refer to your sister as pussy?”

“It’s what she is, ain’t it? Being my sister don’t make her better than anybody else. Girls are pussy, and that’s all they are.”

“You’re a sweet guy, Fontana. When did you have a bath last?”

“What are you? A cop or a department of sanitation? If you’re finished, goodbye. I’m sick of this jazz.”

“Suppose I told you Georgie isn’t coming today?”

“No?”

“No. Suppose I told you he isn’t coming ever again?”

“Why not?”

“Guess.”

“That’s the oldest trick in the book, cop. You want me to say, ‘Georgie ain’t coming ‘cause he got busted,’ and then you’ll say, ‘Busted for what?’ Only I ain’t biting, cop.”

“Try this one for size,” Hawes said.

“Yeah?”

“Georgie ain’t coming ‘cause he’s dead.”

Fontana said nothing. He looked at Hawes silently and then wiped a hand over his mouth.

“Yeah,” Hawes said. “Dead as a mackerel.”

“I’m from Missouri,” Fontana said.

“You’ve been in here since New Year’s Eve,” Hawes said. “That was last Tuesday. Georgie got it Friday.”

“When Friday?”

“In the afternoon. Sometime between one and two, near as we can make it.”

“Where?”

“Downstairs in the basement,” Hawes said.

“What the hell was Georgie doing in the basement?” Fontana asked.

Hawes stared at him.

“You didn’t answer me,” Fontana said.

“Georgie Lasser?” Hawes said. “Is that who we’re...?”

Fontana smiled.

“Wrong number, cop,” he answered.

Bob Fontana had been expecting a visit from someone named Georgie when Hawes knocked on the door. It was unfortunate that the Georgie he’d been expecting hadn’t turned out to be the dead Georgie Lasser because that would have meant Lasser was involved with narcotics which could have explained a lot of things. Narcotics is very big-time all over the world, bigger than prostitution and bigger than gambling, in fact probably the biggest of all underworld activities in terms of energy expended and capital realized. If a man is messing around with the dope business, anything can be anticipated—including an ax in the head. It was therefore unfortunate that Bob Fontana was not expecting Georgie Lasser, but some other Georgie instead. If Lasser had been a pusher, the cops might have had a new place to hang their hats. Instead, they were stuck with the same empty pegs.

Anyway, so it shouldn’t be a total loss, Hawes decided to stick around until Georgie Whatever-His-Name-Was showed up. The day was half shot anyway, so he figured he might as well make a narcotics pinch, thereby helping out the much-overworked men in the city’s Narcotics Division. The only trouble was that everyone in the building knew there was fuzz on the third floor, in Bobby the Junkie’s apartment to be exact. Which might have explained why Georgie never showed up that afternoon.

Hawes hung around waiting for Georgie until almost 3:00. He kept asking Fontana what Georgie’s last name was, but Fontana kept telling him to go to hell. Hawes searched the apartment and, as he’d expected, found nothing but a lot of dirty socks. At 2:30, the girl woke up. Hawes asked her what her name was, and she said Betty O’Connor. He asked her how old she was, and she said twenty-two, which meant he couldn’t even get Fontana on a morals charge. At 2:35 the girl asked Hawes if he had a cigarette, and Hawes gave her one and then she asked him if Georgie had arrived yet. Fontana quickly informed the girl that Hawes was a cop. The girl looked Hawes over, figured she was in some kind of trouble, not sure just which kind yet because she had just come back from a long journey over soft white hills on the backs of giant purple swans; but cops meant trouble, and when you’re in trouble you do what your mother taught you to do.

“Would you like to get laid?” she asked Hawes very sweetly.

It was the best offer he’d had all day, that was for sure. But he turned it down, anyway. Instead, he left the apartment, questioned the rest of the people in the building, and got back to his own place at 7:35 that night.

He called Carella to tell him he had found two dusty shelves and a clean one.

Neither Carella nor Hawes so much as thought about the Lasser case until Friday of that week, when Danny Gimp called the office and asked Carella to meet him. Up to that time they had been separately involved in handling a few other pressing matters that had come up.

There was, for example, a man in the precinct who kept making obscene phone calls to various and sundry ladies, explaining just what he would like to do to them, and apparently using language that even the boldest of the ladies refused to repeat to the police. In the short period of time between Tuesday and Friday mornings, Carella listened to the complaints of fourteen women who had been so abused on the telephone. At the same time he answered twenty-two outside squeals, catching in tandem with Hawes who answered twenty-seven. These complaints ranged from simple idiotic things like wife-beating (well, not so idiotic to the wife who was being clobbered, true, but annoying to a detective who had homicide to worry about) to burglary to unlawful assembly to stickups to prostitution (even though there was a Vice Squad) to auto thefts (even though there was an Automobile Squad) to a cat who had climbed a television antenna and refused to come down (the beat cop had tried to remove her and had his face and his right hand clawed) to several other pretty and not-so-pretty happenings.

One of the prettier happenings was a girl who had stripped down to her bra and panties in forty-degree January weather and gone for a swim in the Grover Park Lake. Since the lake fell well within the 87th Precinct territory, and since an ugly crowd had begun threatening the patrolman who tried to arrest the halfnaked girl as she came out of the water, the precinct was called and a detective requested, so Carella got to see a pretty girl shivering in her underwear.

One of the not-so-pretty happenings was a January rumble between two street gangs, rare for January; most gangs save their rumbles for the good old summertime when tempers are hot and body odor is an additional secret weapon. A seventeen-year-old boy was left lying and bleeding beside a lamppost, trying to hold his intestines inside his body, embarrassed because all these people—including the teenage girl who had caused the rumble—were looking at him with his insides exposed. The intern had pulled a sheet up over the boy, but his blood had stained through the sheet almost instantly, and then a yellow pus-like slime had spread out onto the asphalt and Carella had wanted to puke. That was one of the not-so-pretty happenings.

Hawes had witnessed a man dying and had tried to get a dying statement from him, valid in court, but the man kept spitting blood onto his pillow because there were four ice-pick punctures in his chest, and then he sat up straight and stared at Hawes and said “Papa, Papa,” and pulled Hawes close to him in a dying grip, spitting blood onto the shoulders of Hawes’s sports jacket. Hawes washed the blood off in the kitchen of the small apartment and watched the lab boys dusting for prints.