Ax

8

On Tuesday morning Cotton Hawes went downtown to 1107 Ganning Street where the accounting firm called Cavanaugh and Post maintained its offices. Sigmund Reuhr had told the detectives he’d once been an accountant with that firm, and Hawes went there in an attempt to learn a little more about the respectably retired, sixty-five-year-old man who attended crap games in slum basements and who lied about them later.

Uptown, in a slum basement, one cop missed death by four inches and another cop missed staying alive by four inches.

The person Hawes spoke to in the firm of Cavanaugh and Post was none other than Mr. Cavanaugh himself, who was a portly gentleman with a handlebar mustache and a florid complexion. Sitting opposite him, Hawes found it difficult to accept Cavanaugh as an American businessman who had been born in Philadelphia and raised on that city’s brotherly South Side. Cavanaugh resembled a colonel of English cavalry, and Hawes fully expected him to yell “Charge!” at any moment and then push on to storm the Turkish bastions.

“You want to know about Siggie, huh?” Cavanaugh said. “Why? Is he in some kinda trouble?”

“None at all,” Hawes said. “This is a routine check.”

“What does that mean?”

“What does what mean?” Hawes said.

“A routine check. What do you mean by ‘routine check’?”

“We’re investigating a murder,” Hawes said flatly.

“You think Siggie killed somebody?”

“No, that’s not what we think. But certain aspects of our information don’t seem to jibe, Mr. Cavanaugh. We have reason to believe Mr. Reuhr is lying to us, which is why we felt we should look into his background somewhat more extensively.”

“You talk nice,” Cavanaugh said appreciatively.

Hawes, embarrassed, said, “Thank you.”

“No, I mean it. Where I was raised, if you talked that way you got your head busted. So I talk this way. I got one of the biggest accounting firms in this city, and I sound like a bum, don’t I?”

“No, sir.”

“Then what do I sound like?”

“Well, I don’t know.”

“A bum, right?”

“No, sir.”

“Okay, we won’t argue. Anyway, you talk nice. I like a guy who talks nice. What do you want to know about Siggie?”

“How long did he work here?”

“From 1930 until just last year when he retired.”

“Was he honest?” Hawes asked.

“Right away he hits the bull’s-eye,” Cavanaugh said.

“What do you mean?”

“Though I wouldn’t say he was dishonest,” Cavanaugh said. “Not exactly, anyway.”

“Then what?”

“Siggie likes the horses.”

“A gambler, huh?”

“Mmmm, a gambler like nobody’s business. Horses, cards, dice, football games, prize fights—you name it, Siggie’s got a bet on it.”

“Did this affect his work in any way?”

“Well…” Cavanaugh said, and then shrugged.

“Was he in debt?”

“Once that I know of.”

“When?”

“1937.” Again Cavanaugh shrugged. “Listen, almost everybody in this city was in debt in 1937.”

“Was this a gambling debt?”

“Yeah. He was in a poker game and he lost three thousand dollars.”

“That’s a lot of money,” Hawes said.

“Even today it’s a lot of money,” Cavanaugh said. “In 1937 it was a hell of a lot of money.”

“What happened?”

“The guys who were in the game with him took his IOU. He had something like sixty days to meet the bill. You’ve got to understand that these were tough customers. I’m not trying to excuse what Siggie done. I’m only trying to explain that he was in a tight jam.”

“What’d he do? Dip into the company till?”

“Hell, no. What gave you that idea?”

“I thought that’s where you were leading.”

“No.”

“Then what happened, Mr. Cavanaugh?”

“He tried to shake down a client.”

“Reuhr did?”

“Yeah. He was working on the books for one of our clients and he tipped to a sort of a swindle. What it was, the company was doing some price-fixing, and he threatened to report it unless they paid him off.”

“That’s blackmail, Mr. Cavanaugh.”

“Well, not exactly.”

“Yes, exactly. What happened?”

“The client called me. I told them to forget about it, and then I had a long talk with Siggie. I ended up lending him the three grand, but I also got a promise from him that he’d never pull anything like that again.” Cavanaugh paused. “Look, can I level with you?”

“Sure.”

“Off the record? I know you’re a cop, but you’re not a T-man, so let’s talk straight for just a minute, okay?”

“Go ahead,” Hawes said.

“You didn’t say it was off the record yet.”

“If I say it, will that make it binding?”

Cavanaugh grinned. “Well, at least we’d have a verbal agreement.”

“Verbal agreements aren’t worth the paper they’re written on,” Hawes said. “Samuel Goldwyn, circa 1940.”

“Huh?” Cavanaugh asked.

“Go ahead,” Hawes said. “Off the record.”

“Okay. In our business, in accounting, there’s a lot we see and a lot we forget we ever saw, you know what I mean? You’d be surprised how many cockeyed books in this city suddenly become balanced when it gets near tax time. My point is, I can’t afford to have some creep in the organization who goes around finding things in my clients’ books and then tries to shake them down. Word like that gets around very fast, you know. So I talked to Siggie like a brother. Siggie, I said, you’re a young man—he was a young man at that time, this was back in 1937, you know—Siggie, you’re a young man, and you’ve got a future with this company. Now, I know you like the nags, Siggie—still talking to him like a brother—and I know you sometimes get in over your head with gambling debts and this causes you to do crazy things. But, Siggie, I was born and raised on Philadelphia’s South Side, and that’s a very rough neighborhood, Siggie, just as rough as any of these guys you get into card games with. I’m going to lend you the three grand to pay off your friends, Siggie—still talking like a brother— but I’m going to start deducting ten bucks a week from your paycheck until the three grand is paid back, you understand? More important, though, Siggie, I learned a few tricks when I was a kid living in Philadelphia, and Siggie, if you ever try to shake down any more of my clients, Siggie, you are going to end up in the River Harb with a base made of solid concrete. Nothing is worse for the accounting business than some creep who has a long nose, Siggie, so cut it out, Siggie. This is a fair warning.”

“Did he cut it out?”

“Damn right, he did.”

“How do you know?”

“Look, I know my clients. If anybody from this firm was trying a shakedown, bang, the telephone would ring the next second. No, no. Siggie kept his nose clean from then on. Never another complaint from nobody.”

“That’s a little odd, isn’t it?”

“Odd? How?”

“Well, unless he kept winning from then on.”

“No, he still lost every now and then. Listen, there ain’t a gambler alive who wins all the time.”

“Then how’d he meet his debts?”

“I don’t know.”

“Mmm,” Hawes said.

“Was there gambling involved in this murder?” Cavanaugh asked.

“Sort of.”

“Well,” Cavanaugh said, “there’s a lot of things I wouldn’t put past Siggie Reuhr, but murder ain’t one of them. How was the guy killed?”

“With an ax.”

“Blood, you mean?”

“What?”

“Was there lots of blood around?”

“Yes.”

“Then forget Siggie. If it was poison, well, maybe. That’s more Siggie’s speed. But an ax? Blood? Siggie would faint dead on the spot if he got a little cut on his finger from the edge of a ledger. No, sir. If someone got killed with an ax, it wasn’t Siggie Reuhr who killed him.”

One of the cops who visited the basement at 4111 South 5th that Tuesday morning was Steve Carella.

In the summertime a city street is a very public place. Most of the citizens are outdoors trying to catch a breath of fresh air, windows are wide open, sounds are magnified, there is a commerce between street and building that does not exist in the winter. Even the melting tar in the gutters seems to echo this pattern of merger, this blending anonymity that is truly the worst thing about slum dwelling; the person who lives in a tenement is denied many of the pleasures of life and most of its luxuries; he has never known complete privacy, the biggest luxury of them all, but in the summertime he is denied even a semblance of privacy.

Things are a little better in January.

There is privacy inherent in a heavy winter coat pulled up around the back of your neck, there is privacy in your pockets, deep and snug and warm with the heat of your hands. There is privacy in the vestibule of a building with a hissing radiator. There is privacy under the big dining room table that you bought when you first came from Puerto Rico. There is privacy somehow in the contained heat of a kitchen alive with cooking aromas. There is privacy in a hurried sidewalk conversation with someone you know, the words brisk and to the point, vapor pluming from swiftly moving lips, talk fast, honey, it’s goddamn cold out here.

Mrs. Whitson, the colored woman who did the windows and floors at 4111 South 5th, whose son, Sam Whitson, had chopped firewood for the late George Lasser at that same address, was standing on the sidewalk having a private, hurried conversation with an elderly man in blue overalls when Carella came down the street. Carella could not hear what they were saying, but he knew that Mrs. Whitson had recognized him because she gave a slight jerk of her head in his direction and the man she was talking to turned and looked at Carella and then went back to the conversation. As Carella approached, Mrs. Whitson said, “Hello, there. You’re the detective, aren’t you?”

“Yes, Mrs. Whitson,” Carella said.

“Well, well, he remembers my name,” she said, again with that defiant thrust of jaw and chin, that challenging look in her eyes that said nobody was going to stop her from going to any damn school she wanted to.

“I never forget a lady’s name, Mrs. Whitson,” Carella said, and for a second only the fire left her eyes, for a second only she was simply a skinny, hard-working woman who’d had an honest compliment paid her by a good-looking young man.

“Thank you,” she said. Her eyes locked with Carella’s.

He smiled and said, “You’re welcome.”

“I was just talking to Mr. Iverson,” she said. Her eyes did not leave Carella’s face. A brooding suspicion had suddenly come into those eyes, almost against the old lady’s will, almost through force of habit—you’ve kicked my goddamn people around for a hundred years, my grandfather was a slave who got beaten regularly with a cat-o’-nine-tails, and now you call me a lady and come buttering me up. Who are you after now? My son? What are you going to take from me next, my son Sam, who never harmed a butterfly? “Do you know Mr. Iverson?”

“I don’t think so,” Carella said. “How do you do? I’m Detective Carella.”

“How do you do?” Iverson said, and he extended his hand.

“Mr. Iverson is the super of the building next door,” Mrs. Whitson said. “I was just talking to him about some work for Sam.”

“Mrs. Whitson thought maybe he could chop wood for me again now,” Iverson said.

“Did he used to chop wood for you?” Carella asked.

“Oh, sure, even before Lasser had the idea. I got tenants with fireplaces, too, you know.”

“Some fireplaces in these buildings,” Mrs. Whitson said. “They’re these old things, they fill the room up with smoke the minute they’re lit.”

“They keep the rooms warm, though,” Iverson said.

“Sure. But if you don’t die of the cold around here, you die from the smoke.”

She burst out laughing, and both Carella and Iverson laughed with her.

“Well, send him around to see me,” Iverson said when the laughter had subsided. “Maybe we work something out like before.”

“I’ll send him,” Mrs. Whitson said, and waved to him as he walked away. As soon as he was out of earshot, she lifted her face to Carella’s and looked directly into his eyes and asked, “You after my son?”

“No, Mrs. Whitson.”

“Don’t lie to me.”

“I’m not lying to you. I don’t think your son had anything to do with the murder of George Lasser.”

Mrs. Whitson kept staring at Carella. Then she gave a quick simple nod and said, “Okay.”

“Okay,” Carella said.

“Then why you here?”

“I wanted to look at the basement again.”

“If you gonna look at it,” Mrs. Whitson said, “you better do it before we both freeze to death out here.” She smiled. “You know the way?”

“I know the way,” he said.

The man named Kaplowitz met him just outside the door to the basement.

“My name is Kaplowitz,” he said. “Who are you, and what do you want here?”

“My name is Carella,” Carella answered, showing his shield. “I want to go down to the basement and look around.”

Kaplowitz shook his head. “Impossible.”

“Why?”

“I just hosed the basement an hour ago.” Kaplowitz shook his head. “Dirty basements I seen. Believe me, dirty basements I seen plenty in my day. But a dirty basement like this? Never! Never in my whole life. Two days I’m working on this job now, two days since Mr. Gottlieb hired me. Two days I go down that basement, I live in that basement practically. I look around it, I say, ‘Kaplowitz, this is some dirty basement.’ Two days I stand it. But this morning, no more can I stand it. ‘Kaplowitz,’ I say, ‘are you a janitor or a schlub?’ I’m a janitor, that’s what I am. Kaplowitz the Janitor! And such a dirty basement I can’t stand. So I took out all the stuff from the tenants—it shouldn’t get wet—and I put over the coal some tarpaulin—it shouldn’t get wet—and then I connected the hose and pisssshhhhhhhh, all over the floor! I cleaned everything, everything! Under, over, on, up, down, everything! Pissshhhh behind the garbage cans, pissshhhh under the workbench, pissshhhh near the furnace, pissshhhh behind the wash machine and the sink, pissshhhh down the drain, everything cleaned up by Kaplowitz the Janitor! So you can’t go downstairs now.”

“Why not? If it’s all clean…”

“It’s still wet,” Kaplowitz said, “You want I should get footprints on the floor?”

“Did you spread newspapers?” Carella asked, smiling.

“Haha, very funny,” Kaplowitz said. “Newspapers I only spread on Shabbas.”

“How long will it take to dry?” Carella asked.

“Look, mister,” Kaplowitz said, “don’t rush it, huh? For a hundred years this basement wasn’t washed down. So it finally got cleaned. Let it take its time drying, okay? Give it a break, huh? Be a nice man—go take a walk around the block a few times. When you come back the basement will be nice and clean, you’ll hardly recognize it.”

“Okay,” Carella said. “Ten minutes.”

“Fifteen.”

“Ten,” Carella said.

“What are you doing? Bargaining with me? You think because you say ten the floor will listen and dry in ten? Fifteen minutes, okay? Everything will be nice and dry. You can go downstairs and get it all dirty again, okay?”

“Fifteen minutes,” Carella said, and he went out of the building and to the candy store on the corner where he had a cup of coffee. He called the squadroom to ask if there had been any messages, and Bert Kling told him Hawes had called to say he was going directly to Cavanaugh and Post from his house. Carella thanked him and then went back to the building. Kaplowitz was nowhere in sight. He went to the rear of the ground floor, opened the door, and paused at the top of the basement steps.

The basement was silent except for the enclosed roar of the furnace and the occasional clatter of overhead pipes. He came down the steps into darkness—there seemed to be a light burning farther back in the basement, but it did not help to illuminate the steps. He groped for the hanging string on the overhead light bulb and pulled at it. The bulb swung as he released the string, back and forth on its electric wire, casting huge arcs of light on the gray basement wall and the workbench, darkness again, light, darkness, until finally the bulb hung almost motionless, casting a wide circle on the gray concrete floor and the workbench beyond, with darkness beyond that. The next pool of light was farther back in the basement, cast by a second hanging bulb over the sink and drain.

The smell of disinfectant was in his nostrils; Kaplowitz had done a good job.

He moved toward the workbench near the coal bin and felt the sudden sharp wind on his face and thought at first that someone had left a window open. He stepped out of the circle of light, walking into darkness toward the source of the draft. He stepped into the second pool of light near the washing machine and the sink and the drain set in the concrete floor, and then beyond that into darkness again. There seemed to be natural light coming from somewhere at the far end of the basement. He walked toward the light, surprised to find an outside door. He had thought the only entrance was the one behind the steps on the ground floor, inside the building. But as he approached the glass-paneled door at the far end of the building, he realized that it led to a short flight of steps and then into the alleyway at the end of which was the toolshed. George Lasser had kept his ax in that toolshed.

The door was open.

Carella closed the door and wondered if the wind had blown it open. There was no lock on the door, and it closed into the jamb loosely; it was entirely possible that the wind had blown it open. He moved away from the door and began walking back toward the workbench. For a brief and frightening moment he thought he saw something move in the shadows and his hand went automatically toward his holster. He stopped walking, his hand hovering over the pistol butt. He heard nothing; he saw nothing. He waited for perhaps another thirty seconds and then walked back toward the circle of light near the workbench.

The man in the shadows was holding a monkey wrench in his right hand. He watched Carella and he waited.

Carella studied the workbench, noting everything Grossman had pointed out, noting the spot on the shelf where the Maxwell House Coffee can had been resting before the lab boys confiscated it, and then backing away. On impulse, and because cops like to look under things as well as on top of them, Carella dropped to his knees and looked under the workbench, but if anything had ever been on the floor under the bench, Kaplowitz’s hose had washed it away. Carella got to his feet again; the knees of his trousers weren’t even faintly dusty.

The man waited in the shadows near the sink.

Carella turned and began walking toward the sink.

The man’s grip on the heavy monkey wrench tightened. He had grabbed the wrench from behind the sink where it was kept for plumbing emergencies. He had grabbed the wrench only seconds after he’d replaced the cover on the drain in the floor, and he had replaced the cover only seconds after he’d heard the basement door opening and the footsteps approaching. He had moved too quickly. The cover was not resting squarely on the drain. If someone tripped over it…

Carella kept walking toward the sink.

His foot came within four inches of kicking the metal drain cover. If his foot had connected, he would have become aware of the cover and most probably would have bent to examine it, and he would then have had his head crushed in with a monkey wrench. But his foot missed the drain cover by four inches, and he kicked nothing and did not stoop to examine anything, and therefore had nothing come down on his skull. He looked into the sink and then went to the washing machine and opened the door and looked in, expecting to find God knew what, and then sighed and put his hands on his hips. He sighed again.

The man in the shadows waited.

Carella shrugged and then walked to the basement steps. He climbed the steps, turned off the light when he was on the second step from the top, opened the door, went out of the basement, and closed the door behind him.

The man did not move from the shadows near the sink.

He waited.

He decided to count to a hundred before he came out. He would count to a hundred, yes, and then lift the cover from the drain again, and then reach into it. He knew exactly where it was caught—there on the flat part before the cement dipped into the hole that carried the water away. He would count to a hundred, just to make sure that cop wasn’t coming back. He had thought he was gone that first time, too, when he’d seen him leaving the building. This time he would make sure.

He had reached fifty-seven, counting slowly, when the door at the top of the staircase opened and the second policeman entered the basement.

The second policeman was in uniform.

The second policeman was a man named Ralph Corey, and he had his own reasons for coming down to the basement this morning, and he had no idea that four inches were going to cost him his life. Corey had been waiting for the opportunity to get down here ever since Carella had spoken to him a week ago Monday, but there was always somebody down here, either the lab boys or the goddamn police photographers, or newspaper reporters, or what had you. Corey was very anxious to get down here because George Lasser had given him $25 every time there was going to be a crap game in the basement of the building, ten of which Corey passed on to the patrolmen, and fifteen of which he kept for himself. But after his talk with Carella, Corey had remembered a peculiar habit of George Lasser’s, and it was this habit that had caused his anxiety about getting down to the basement. He remembered talking to Lasser once near the workbench in the basement on the afternoon of one of the crap games, remembered that Lasser had been jotting down some figures in a small black book as Corey had come down the basement steps. As it turned out, Lasser was simply tallying his wood-business receipts, and Corey had put the entire thing out of his mind until that Monday a week ago when Carella started turning the screws. It was then that Corey remembered those figures written in that little black book, all in Lasser’s clean, meticulous hand, one under the other in a neat column:

And it was then that Corey began wondering whether neat, meticulous, methodical George Lasser who wrote down all these chintzy little log receipts, two bucks, a half a buck, six bucks, whether George Lasser didn’t also keep a record of expenditures, especially when they came in $25 lumps every time there was a crap game. And he began wondering whether there was a place in that black book where it said, in Lasser’s meticulous little hand:

…and so on.

Corey groped along the wall for a light switch, found none, and decided there must be a hanging light with a pull cord. He swung his arms over his head, hitting the bulb with his hand, steadying it, finding the cord, and turning on the light.

The basement was still.

He had seen Lasser making entries in that book at his workbench. That was where he headed now.

He had been a cop for too long a time not to know that there was something very peculiar in this basement. Something warned him of this peculiarity almost at once; something caused the hackles to rise on the back of his neck, and he did not know what the something was until he approached the workbench. One glance told him that a can, or a container of some kind, had been removed from the neatly lined-up cans and jars on the middle shelf, and he wondered if that can—or whatever it had been—was the one in which George Lasser had kept his little black book. The hackles on the back of his neck continued to stand out like a porcupine’s quills. Ralph Corey was smelling danger, he was smelling death, and he thought he was smelling only possible suspension from the force. He thought the strong odor in his nostrils was the odor of that goddamn Jew Grossman down at the lab who would by now be pawing over that black book and its notations of payments to somebody named Corey. It wouldn’t take that wop Carella long to put two and two together from that.

Corey backed away from the bench. His mouth was suddenly dry. From the corner of his eye he spotted the sink in the farther circle of light, turned, and walked rapidly toward it. As he approached the sink, the toe of his shoe caught the edge of the drain cover, and he nearly stumbled.

“What the hell…” he said aloud, and then looked down to see what it was he’d tripped over. Through the metal bars of the drain he could see something lying on the flat section of the concrete well. It caught the light and glittered. For an instant Corey thought it was money. He had spent half his life on the police force taking money, and this sure as hell looked like more money. If he had reached for this as speedily as he had reached for rakeoffs throughout the course of his career, if he had begun to stoop a moment sooner, his head would have been four inches lower by the time the monkey wrench lashed out. But it took him just a moment to react to the glittering metal caught on the flat portion of the drain, and he was just beginning to bend for it when the wrench moved out of the shadows. The wrench moved swiftly, soundlessly, and powerfully. It cracked Corey’s skull wide open and lodged itself in the pulpy brain matter that had two minutes before been concerning itself with possible suspension from the force.

The man who had wielded the wrench pulled it from Corey’s open skull and walked with it toward the trash barrel near the coal bin, dripping blood as he walked. He fished a newspaper from the barrel and wiped the head of the wrench clean of blood. There was no blood on the handle, but he was certain he had left some fingerprints there. He reversed the position of the wrench, holding the jaws with one sheet of newspaper and wiping the bloodless handle clean with another sheet. He looked down and saw that some blood had dripped onto his shoes when he carried the wrench to the barrel, so he took another clean sheet of newspaper and wiped off the few droplets and then carried all of the soiled newspapers to the furnace door, which he opened. He threw the papers inside and waited for them to catch fire before he closed the furnace door.

He threw the cleaned wrench into the trash barrel and walked back to the sink. Stooping, he lifted the drain cover and picked up the object that had cost Ralph Corey his life.

The object was a brass button.

Well, now a cop was dead.

Before this only a janitor was dead.

But now a cop was dead.

There was a big difference.

In order to understand what it is like when a cop gets killed, you must first realize that only two kinds of people kill cops: maniacs and dopes. A maniac is not responsible for anything he does, and a dope is too dumb to know what he is doing. Anybody in his right mind does not go around killing cops. Anybody who can add two and two does not go around killing cops. It is not done. It is crazy and it is stupid. Besides, it is useless. If you kill one cop, there is always some other cop who will take his place, so what’s the use? All it does is get everybody all riled up, and it puts the heat on for no good reason, especially in January when you should be under the covers with some nice warm broad, dreaming about going down to Miami. Who needs a dead cop in January to stink up the place and get everybody excited?

Live cops are bad enough.

Dead cops are the world’s worst.

There wasn’t a single cop in the 87th Precinct who liked, admired, respected, or trusted the dead cop who had once been Sergeant Ralph Corey.

That didn’t matter.

The way most of them figured it, somebody had been inconsiderate enough to shove a monkey wrench into Corey’s head when probably all he was doing was a little investigating into the murder of that janitor a while back. If a poor, hard-working civil servant couldn’t go down into a basement to do a little investigation on his own time, they figured, without getting his head bashed in, well, this goddamn city was sure coming to a pretty pass. If you allowed everybody in this goddamn city to go around bashing in a cop’s head whenever he got the urge to, they figured, just whenever he got the goddamn urge to go bashing some cop’s head in, well, things were sure getting pretty dangerous for civil servants. And if you just sat back and allowed this goddamn city to fall to pieces that way, people picking up monkey wrenches on every street corner and letting the nearest traffic cop have it right in the eye, well, boy, that was some state of affairs. You just couldn’t let hordes of people run wild in the streets, waving monkey wrenches over their heads and slaughtering anything in a blue uniform; you simply couldn’t let that happen because chaos would ensue. No, sir, you couldn’t have chaos.

That’s the way most of the cops of the 87th figured it.

Also, it was a little scary. Who the hell wants a job where you can get killed?

So almost every cop in the precinct, and hundreds of others throughout the city, filled with righteous indignation, justifiable anger, and a little honest fear, began a personal manhunt for a cop killer. Carella and Hawes didn’t know just how this legion of vengeance-seeking men in blue were going to proceed with their search, since hardly any of them knew the facts of the case and only a few of them connected Corey’s murder with the murder of George Lasser some ten days before. The detectives supposed that since a cop had been killed, the man who’d murdered him was technically a cop killer. But they rather imagined that Corey’s death was simply an extension of the earlier murder and had nothing whatever to do with the fact that he was a cop. This being the case, they couldn’t understand what all the goddamn shouting was about. They had been doggedly walking the ass off this homicide since January 3, and all of a sudden everyone was getting excited because a crooked cop stopped a monkey wrench.

The only thing that bothered them about Corey’s death was the Why of it.

If he had stumbled upon something in that basement, what was it?

Or, discounting the possibility that he had discovered something about the case that was threatening to the killer, what other reason could there have been for his murder? Had he arranged a meeting with someone in that basement? Had he known who the killer was? Was he angling for another payoff, this time one involving homicide?

“There are only two things you can’t fix in this city,” someone had told Carella a long time ago, “and those two things are homicide and narcotics.”

Carella wondered about that now. If a cop will look the other way when a crap game is in progress, if he will look the other way when a citizen from downtown is upstairs banging a prostitute, if he will look the other way when someone passes a traffic light, if he will look the other way often enough, and always for a price—what will stop him from looking the other way, for a price, when a homicide has been committed?

Had Corey been ready to look the other way?

Was his price too high?

Did the murderer figure there was a simpler way to buy Corey’s silence? Forever? With no possibility of his returning with another demand?

The possibility existed.

Unfortunately there were only two people who could tell them whether or not the possibility was a valid one. The first of those people was Ralph Corey, and he was dead. The second was the killer, and they hadn’t the faintest idea who he might be.

Wednesday passed.

So did Thursday, somehow.

On Friday they buried Sergeant Ralph Corey.

Carella’s grandmother had always called Friday “a hoodoo jinx of a day.” She had not been referring to Friday the thirteenth or to any Friday in particular. She was, instead, convinced that all Fridays were very bad for human beings, and it was best to avoid them at all costs whenever possible. On Friday, January 17, the improbable happened.

On Friday, January 17, Anthony Lasser walked into the squadroom of his own volition and confessed to the murder of his father, George Lasser.