Ax

2

They did not, as Mrs. Whitson had prophesied, find an ax in the toolshed out back, the only ax anywhere in the vicinity being the one that had been left protruding from the dead Mr. Lasser’s cranium. They did, however, find Whitson’s Eisenhower jacket draped over one of the garbage cans where he had allegedly left it before heading for the toolshed. And they did find a dozen or so rather large logs dumped in the alleyway several feet from the toolshed—all of which seemed to corroborate Whitson’s story. They advised Whitson to go home but not to leave the city as they might want to contact him again at a later time, the later time they had in mind being the time the police laboratory reported on the ax handle attached to the ax blade attached to Mr. Lasser’s head. They were hopeful, you see, that the lab would find some fingerprints on the weapon, thereby enabling them to solve the case before the crime was several hours old.

Some days, though, you can’t make a nickel.

The lab found an awful lot of smeared blood on the wooden ax handle, and a few gray hairs caught on some of the wood splinters, and also some pulp that had spattered out of Lasser’s open skull when the metal blade wedged its way into bone and brain, but, alas, they found no fingerprints. Moreover, although there were some bloody palm prints and thumbprints on the gray basement wall, the laboratory technicians discovered that these prints had been left by Mr. Lasser himself, either as he backed away from his assailant or else as he groped along the wall for support when collapsing to the floor after, most likely, the blow that had severed his jugular. It was the medical examiner’s opinion that Mr. Lasser had been lying on the basement floor already dead for several minutes when the ax was finally sunk and left in his skull, a conjecture that seemed corroborated by the severed jugular and the unusually large amount of blood all over the basement floor, the trickle of which had first attracted young Mickey Ryan to the body. Utilizing a simple logical progression, and beginning with the inescapable position of the ax, embedded as it was in the skull of Mr. Lasser, it necessarily followed that this was the ultimate blow and that it had been preceded by numerous other blows. Neither the lab nor the medical examiner’s office could suggest when the jugular had been severed, but they agreed on the number of ax slashes—they each counted twenty-seven, including the dangling fingers on the left hand—and assumed the slashing of the jugular had been the cause of death, the previous slashes being serious enough to have caused considerable loss of blood over an extended period of time, but none of them being serious enough in themselves to have caused immediate death. It was the blow across the throat then, a blow that must have been delivered with a sweeping sidearm motion, like the swinging of a baseball bat, that had killed George Lasser. The final ax stroke was something of a coup de grâce, the downward swing of the blade into the skull of the man already dead at the assassin’s feet, and then, the final touch, the leaving of the ax in his skull as though the skull were the stump of a tree and the sinking of metal into pulp signaled the end of the working day.

To tell the truth, it was all pretty goddamn gory.

They had learned from the tenants in the building that Mr. Lasser lived somewhere in New Essex, some fifteen minutes outside the city, a fact which was substantiated by a driver’s license found in the old man’s right hip trouser pocket. The license gave his full name as George Nelson Lasser, his address as 1529 Westerfield in New Essex, his sex as male, his weight as 161 pounds, his height as five foot ten inches, and his date of birth as October 15, 1877, which made him eighty-six years old at the time of his death.

There was a bleakness to the January countryside as the detectives drove out of the city and headed for New Essex. The heater in Hawes’s 1961 Oldsmobile convertible was on the blink, and the windows kept fogging with their exhaled breath and then freezing over with a thin film of ice, which they scraped at with gloved hands. The trees lining the road were bare, the landscape sere and withered; it almost seemed as though death had extended itself from that city basement into the surrounding countryside, stilling the land with its hoary breath.

1529 Westerfield was an English Tudor reproduction set some forty feet back from the sidewalk on a New Essex street lined with similar reproductions. Smoke boiled up out of chimney pots, adding a deeper gray to the sky’s monotone. There was a feeling of contained and cloistered warmth on that street, a suburban block locked in potbellied privacy against the wintry day outside, defying intrusion. They parked the convertible at the curb in front of the house and walked up the slate path to the front door. An old wrought-iron bell pull was to the right of the door. Hawes pulled it, and the detectives waited for someone to answer.

There was lunacy in the old woman’s eyes.

She pulled open the door with a suddenness that was startling, and the first thing each man saw about her was her eyes, and the first thought that occurred to each of them separately was that he was looking at a woman who was mad.

“Yes?” the woman asked.

She was an old woman, perhaps seventy-five, perhaps eighty— Carella found it difficult to pinpoint a person’s age once the borderline of real vintage had been crossed. Her hair was white, and her face was wrinkled but full and fleshy, with lopsided eyebrows that added a further dimension of madness to the certainly mad eyes. The eyes themselves were blue. They watched the detectives unblinkingly. There was dark suspicion in those pale-blue eyes, and there was secret mirth, a mirth that echoed humorless laughter in endlessly long and hollow corridors, there was as well a flirtatiousness that seemed ludicrous. There was a sly appraisal peering out of the skull, and in a woman so old, a coquettishness that was almost obscene. The eyes combined all these things in a medley of contradiction that was at once blatant and frightening. The woman was mad; her eyes shouted the fact to the world. The woman was mad, and her madness sent a shudder up the spine.

“Is this the home of George Nelson Lasser?” Carella asked, watching the woman, wanting nothing more than to be back at the precinct where there was order and dimension and sanity.

“This is his home,” the woman replied. “Who are you and what do you want?”

“We’re detectives,” Carella said. He showed her his shield and his identification card. He paused a moment, and then said, “May I ask who I’m talking to, ma’am?”

“Whom, and you may not,” she said.

“What?”

“Whom,” she said.

“Ma’am, I…”

“Your grammar is bad, and your grampa is worse,” the woman said, and began laughing.

“Who is it?” a voice behind her said, and Carella glanced up to see a tall man stepping from the comparative darkness beyond the entrance door into the gloomy arc of light described by the door’s opening. The man was in his early forties, tall and thin, with lightbrown hair that hung haphazardly on his forehead. His eyes were as blue as the madwoman’s, and Carella knew at once that they were mother and son, and then reflected briefly upon the motherson combinations he had met this day, starting with Mickey Ryan who had found a dead man in a basement, and moving through Sam Whitson who chopped wood with an ax, and now into this tall, poised man with an angry scowl on his face, who stood behind and slightly to the right of his demented mother while demanding to know who these men were at the front door.

“Police,” Carella said, and again he flashed the tin and the card.

“What do you want?”

“Who are you, sir?” Carella asked.

“My name is Anthony Lasser. What do you want?”

“Mr. Lasser,” Carella said, “is George Lasser your father?”

“He is.”

“I’m sorry to have to tell you he is dead,” Carella said, and the words sounded stiff and barely sympathetic, and he regretted having had to utter them, but there they were, hanging on the air in awkward nakedness.

“What?” Lasser said.

“Your father is dead,” Carella said. “He was killed sometime this afternoon.”

“How?” Lasser asked. “Was he in an accident of some ki—”

“No, he was murdered,” Carella said.

“Dead for a ducat,” the old woman said, and giggled.

Lasser’s face was troubled now. He glanced first at the woman, who seemed not to have grasped the meaning of Carella’s words at all, and then he looked again at the detectives and said, “Won’t you come in, please?”

“Thank you,” Carella said and he moved past the old woman, who stood rooted in the doorway, staring at something across the street, staring so hard that Carella turned to look over his shoulder. He saw that Hawes was also staring across the street to where a small boy on a tricycle moved rapidly up the driveway to his house, a Tudor reproduction almost identical to the Lasser house.

“The king is dead,” the old woman said. “Long live the king.”

“Won’t you come in with us, ma’am?” Carella asked.

“He rides well, that boy,” the woman answered. “Has a good seat.”

“Do you mean the boy on the bicycle?” Hawes asked.

“My mother often doesn’t make sense,” Lasser said from the gloom beyond the open door’s circle of light. “Won’t you come in, please? Mother, will you join us?”

“That which God hath joined together,” the woman said, “let no man put asunder.”

“Mrs. Lasser,” Carella said, and stepped aside to let her pass. The woman looked at Carella with a combination of malevolence and invitation in her eyes, an anger that threatened dire violence, a sexuality that promised sheer delight. She moved past him and into the house, and he followed her and heard the door closing behind him and then the voices of Hawes and Lasser behind him as they all moved deeper into the entrance foyer.

The house was out of Great Expectations, sired by Dragonwyck, from Wuthering Heights twice removed. There were no actual cobwebs clinging to the ceilings and walls, but there was a feeling of foreboding gloom, a darkness that seemed permanently stained into the wooden beams and plaster, a certain knowledge that Dr. Frankenstein or some damn ghoul was up in the attic working on God knew what foul creation. For a moment Carella had the feeling he had stepped into the wrong horror movie, and he stopped deliberately and waited for Hawes to join him, not because he was frightened—well, the place was a bit eerie, but hell, hadn’t he told young Mickey Ryan there was no such thing as ghosts?—but simply to reassure himself that he was really here, inside this gloomy Tudor cottage, investigating a murder which had taken place many miles away within the confines of the 87th Precinct, where life was real and earnest, and so was death.

“I’ll put on a light,” Lasser said, and he moved to a standing floor lamp behind a huge and ornate couch, snapped on the light, and then stood awkwardly beside the couch and his mother. Mrs. Lasser stood with her hands entwined at her waist, a simpering smile on her lips, as though she were a Southern belle waiting to be asked for a dance at the yearly cotillion.

“Sit down, please,” Lasser said, and Carella searched for a chair and then sat on the couch. Hawes sat in a straight-backed chair which he pulled over from a drop-leaf desk against one wall. Mrs. Lasser stood against that wall, smiling, still waiting to be asked for a dance. Lasser himself sat next to Carella on the couch.

“Can you tell us what happened?” Lasser said.

“Someone killed him with an ax,” Carella said.

“An ax?”

“Yes.”

“Where?”

“In the basement of the building where he works.”

“Why?” Lasser asked.

“Y is a crooked letter,” Mrs. Lasser said, “and A is for ax.”

“Mother, please,” Lasser said. He did not turn to face his mother as he said the words. His eyes did not even flick in her direction. It was as though he had said these same words a thousand times before—”Mother, please”—and said them only unconsciously now, with no need to look at her or to face her, without even the need to know for certain that she had heard him. Still watching Carella, he said, “Do you have any idea who might have done this?”

“None at all,” Carella said. “Yet.”

“I see.”

“If you will, Mr. Lasser, we’d like you to come down to the morgue with us and make a positive identification. Then we’d like to know from you whether or not your father had any—”

“I couldn’t leave my mother alone,” Lasser said.

“We could arrange for a patrolman to stay with her.”

“No, I’m afraid that would be unsatisfactory.”

“I don’t understand, sir.”

“Either my father or I must stay with her at all times,” Lasser said. “And since my father is dead, the burden is now mine.”

“I still don’t understand,” Carella said. “Even when your father was alive, he went to work in the city.”

“That’s right,” Lasser said.

“Don’t you work, Mr. Lasser?”

“I work here,” Lasser said. “At home.”

“Doing what?”

“I illustrate children’s books.”

“I see. Then you were able to stay here at home whenever your father was gone, is that right?”

“Yes, that’s right.”

“And whenever he was here, you were free to go, is that also correct?”

“Well, essentially, yes.”

“What I mean is, well, if you had a book to deliver, or an editorial conference, anything like that. Or a social engagement.”

“Essentially, that’s it, yes.”

“Would you amend it in some way, Mr. Lasser?”

“No.”

“Or correct it?”

“No. Essentially, that’s it.”

“The word ‘essentially’ implies that I haven’t understood the complete picture,” Carella said. “Could you fill me in on it, Mr. Lasser?”

“Well…”

“Yes?”

“Well, I rarely leave the house,” Lasser said.

“What do you mean?”

“To deliver books. I do that by mail. Or for editorial conferences. I do that by phone. Anyway, I illustrate, as I told you, and there’s not very much to discuss once the initial sketches have been submitted and approved.”

“But you do leave the house on social engagements?”

“Well, not very often.”

Carella was silent for a moment. Then he said, “Mr. Lasser, do you ever leave the house?”

“No,” Lasser answered.

“Are you agoraphobic, Mr. Lasser?”

“Am I what?”

“Agoraphobic.”

“I don’t know what that is.”

“Agoraphobia is an abnormal fear of open spaces.”

“I’m not afraid of going outdoors, if that’s what you mean,” Lasser said. “Abnormally or otherwise.”

“When was the last time you went out, can you tell me that?”

“I don’t remember.”

“You spend all of your time here in this house, is that right? With your mother.”

“And with my father, when he was alive.”

“You have your friends come here to see you, is that it?”

“Well, essentially, yes, that’s it.”

“Again we have the ‘essentially,’ Mr. Lasser.”

“Yes, well, the truth is my friends don’t come here very often,” Lasser said.

“How often do they come, Mr. Lasser?” Hawes asked,

“Not very often.”

“How often?”

“Never,” Lasser said. He paused. “As a matter of fact, I don’t have many friends.” He paused again. “My books are my friends.”

“I see,” Carella said. He paused. “Mr. Lasser, would you be willing to identify the corpse from a photograph?”

“I would have no objections.”

“We usually prefer a positive identification from the body…”

“Yes, but that’s impossible, as you can see,” Lasser said. “I must stay here with my mother.”

“Yes. With your permission then, we’ll come back with the police photographs and perhaps you’d be so kind as to…”

“Yes.”

“And at that time,” Carella said, “we’d also like to ask you some questions about your father and his personal relationships with other people.”

“Yes, of course.”

“But we won’t burden you with that now,” Carella said, and he smiled.

“Thank you. I appreciate your consideration.”

“Not at all,” Carella said. He turned to the old woman. “Good afternoon, Mrs. Lasser.”

“God b’ wi’ you, and keep you, and heal your pate,” Mrs. Lasser said.

“Ma’am?” Carella said.

“My mother used to be an actress. Those lines are from Lear.”

“Henry the Fifth,” the old lady corrected. “Fluellen to Ancient Pistol.”

“ ‘Doth fortune play the huswife with me now?’ “ Hawes said suddenly. “ ‘News have I that my Nell is dead i’ th’ spital, Of malady of France; And there my rendezvous is quite cut off.’ ”

“How do you know that?” the old lady asked, turning to Hawes and grinning with delight.

“We did it in high school,” Hawes said.

“Who’d you play?”

“Nobody. I stage-managed.”

“A big man like you,” the old lady said. “You should have been on the stage showing your cock.”

For a moment there was a deep silence in the room. The detectives glanced at each other as though not certain they had heard the old lady’s words. And then Anthony Lasser, without turning to look at her, said, “Mother, please,” and showed the detectives to the door. Behind them, they could hear Mrs. Lasser laughing raucously. The door closed. They stood on the slate walk for a moment. It was late afternoon, and there was a new chill in the air. They lifted the collars of their coats and listened to the sounds of the boy across the street as he pedaled his tricycle on the pavement and fired an imaginary pistol, “P-kuh, p-kuh, p-kuh!”

“Let’s go talk to him,” Carella said.

“Why?”

“I don’t know.” He shrugged. “The old lady was staring at him.”

“The old lady is nuts,” Hawes said.

“Mmm, that’s for sure. What did you think of the son?”

“I don’t know. He could be providing himself with an alibi a mile long.”

“Which is why I was jumping on him.”

“I know.”

“Or, on the other hand, he could be telling the truth.”

“I wish we knew a little more about the old man,” Hawes said.

“All in due time. When we come back with the pictures, we’ll ask our questions.”

“While the corpse grows cold.”

“The corpse is cold,” Carella said.

“So’s the case.”

“What can you do? It’s January,” Carella answered, and they crossed the street.

The boy on the tricycle fired at them as they approached. “P-kuh, p-kuh, p-kuh,” and then braked to a stop, his soles scraping along the pavement. He was perhaps four years old, wearing a red-and-white stocking cap pulled down over his ears. A hank of red hair stuck out of the cap’s front and hung onto his forehead. His nose was running, and his face was streaked with dried mucus where he had repeatedly wiped his nose with the back of his hand.

“Hi,” Carella said.

“Who’re you?” the boy asked.

“Steve Carella. Who’re you?”

“Manny Moscowitz,” the boy said.

“Hi, Manny. This is my partner, Cotton Hawes.”

“Hi,” Manny said, and waved.

“How old are you, Manny?” Hawes asked.

“This many,” the boy said, and held up four fingers.

“Four years old. That’s very good.”

“Five,” Manny said.

“No, that was four.”

“It was five,” Manny insisted.

“Okay, okay,” Hawes said.

“You don’t know how to deal with kids,” Carella said. “You’re five, right, Manny?”

“Right,” Manny said.

“How do you like it around here?”

“Fine.”

“Do you live in this house right here?”

“Yeah.”

“Do you know the old lady across the street?”

“What old lady?”

“The one across the street,” Carella said.

“Which one across the street? There’s lots of old ladies across the street.”

“Well, the one right in the house there,” Carella said.

“Which house?”

“Right there,” Carella said. He did not want to point because he had the certain feeling that Anthony Lasser was watching him from behind his drawn drapes.

“I don’t know which house you mean,” Manny said.

Carella looked across the street at the identical Tudor reproductions, and then he sighed.

“He means, do you know Mrs. Lasser?” Hawes asked, coming to his rescue.

“That’s right,” Carella said. “Do you know Mrs. Lasser?”

“Is she the one in the house across the street?”

“Yes,” Carella said.

“Which house?” Manny asked, and a voice shouted, “Manny! What are you doing there?”

Even before he turned, Carella knew it was another mother. There were days when all you got was mothers, sane or otherwise, and he knew without doubt that this was another mother, and he braced himself and turned just as a woman in a housedress with an open coat thrown over it, her hair in curlers, came marching down the front walk like a chowder society on Pennsylvania Avenue during Easter week.

“What is it?” she said to Carella.

“How do you do, ma’am?” Carella said. “I’m a police detective. We were simply asking your son some questions.”

“What kind of questions?”

“Oh, about the neighborhood in general.”

“Did you just come from the Lasser house across the street?” the woman asked.

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Have you had complaints, is that it?”

“No, no complaints,” Carella said. He paused. “Why do you say that, Mrs. Moscowitz? You are Mrs. Moscowitz?”

“Yes.” She shrugged. “I just thought maybe you’d had some complaints. I thought maybe they were going to put the old lady away.”

“No, not that we know of. Why? Has there been any trouble?”

“Well, you know,” Mrs. Moscowitz said. “You hear stories.”

“What kind of stories?”

“Oh, you know. The husband a janitor someplace in the city, and he goes out every Sunday chopping down trees—God knows where he chops them—and carries them in to sell to his tenants, some funny business there, don’t you think? And the old lady laughing half the night away and crying if her husband doesn’t buy her an ice cream pop in the summer when the Good Humor truck comes around, that’s peculiar, isn’t it? And how about the son, Anthony? Drawing his pictures all day long in that back room overlooking the garden, summer and winter, and never stepping outside the house. I call that strange, mister.”

“He never goes out, you say?”

“Never. He’s a shut-in. He’s a regular shut-in.”

“Who’s a shut-in?” the boy asked.

“Shut up, Manny,” his mother said.

“Anyway, what is a shut-in?” he asked.

“Shut up, Manny,” his mother said.

“You’re sure he never goes out?” Carella asked.

“I’ve never seen him go out. Listen, how do I know what he does when it’s dark? He may sneak out and go to opium dens, who knows? I’m only telling you that I, personally, have never seen him leaving the house.”

“What can you tell us about the old man?” Hawes asked.

“Mr. Lasser?”

“Yes.”

“Well, now there’s another peculiar thing, I mean besides his going out to chop down trees. I mean, this man is eighty-six years old, you follow? That’s not exactly a young teenager. But every Saturday and Sunday, out he goes to chop down his trees.”

“Does he take an ax with him?”

“An ax? No, no, he has one of those saws, what do you call them?”

“A chain saw?” Hawes suggested.

“Yes, that’s right,” Mrs. Moscowitz said. “Even so, even with that saw, cutting down trees is very strenuous work for a man of eighty-six years of age, am I right?”

“Absolutely,” Carella said.

“Certainly, but this isn’t where it ends. Now mind you, there are hearty specimens in the world. I’ve seen men—well, my own father, may he rest in peace, he weighed a hundred eighty pounds, all muscle, God bless him, when he died aged seventy-nine. But Mr. Lasser is not a hearty specimen. Mr. Lasser is a frail old man, but he is always doing very heavy work. Moving big rocks out of his backyard, and pulling up stumps, and painting the house, well, that’s not very heavy work, but still, an old man like him on a ladder, to me it’s very peculiar.”

“In other words, then, you feel the entire family is peculiar, is that right, Mrs. Moscowitz?”

“I wouldn’t say anything against neighbors,” Mrs. Moscowitz said. “Let’s put it this way. Let’s say I consider it odd, well, strange, well, let’s say peculiar, all right? Let’s say I find it peculiar that a nutty old lady like Mrs. Lasser is left in the hands of two other nuts like her husband and her son, okay? Which is why I thought maybe somebody was going to have her put away, is all I’m saying.”

“Who’s nutty?” the boy asked.

“Shut up, Manny,” Mrs. Moscowitz said.

“Mrs. Moscowitz,” Carella said, “can you tell us whether or not you saw Anthony Lasser leaving the house at any time today?”

“No, I did not,” Mrs. Moscowitz said.

“Can you say with certainty that he was inside that house all day long?”

“What?”

“Did you actually see him across the street at any time today?”

“No, I did not.”

“Then he could have been gone, without your knowing it?”

“Well, what do you think I do?” Mrs. Moscowitz asked. “Go peeking over my neighbors’ windowsills?”

“No, of course not.”

“I should hope not,” Mrs. Moscowitz said, offended.

“We were simply trying to—”

“Yes, I understand,” Mrs. Moscowitz said. “Come along, Manny. Say goodbye to the two gentlemen.”

“Goodbye,” Manny said.

“Goodbye,” Carella answered. “Thank you very much, Mrs. Moscowitz.”

Mrs. Moscowitz did not answer. With one hand on the handlebar of her son’s bike, she led bike and child up the walk and into the house, and then slammed the door.

“What did I do?” Carella asked.

“I don’t know how to handle kids, huh?”

“Well…”

“You don’t know how to handle women,” Hawes said.