Murder on the Aisle

16

Thursday 9:17 A.M.

Harold Ebsen lived in a little stucco house too close to Red Hook to make realtors happy. When Tobin got out of the cab, he told the driver to wait and then he stood inhaling air from the golden winter morning. The block of little houses was occasionally dwarfed by Christmas ornaments that managed to look both cheap and endearing at the same time. Ebsen was not apparently the festive sort. The only decoration on his front door was a single tiny piece of holly, as if somebody had gotten Ebsen down on the ground and threatened to break his arm if he didn’t put up something that said Christmas. A couple of kids who looked like lumbering spacemen in their snowsuits walked past Tobin and gave him the sort of openly suspicious look-over only four-year-olds are capable of. One kid had red stuff on his mouth. The other kid had brown stuff. The kid with red stuff also had green stuff but not on his mouth, rather running from his nose. “It’s that TV guy,” one of them said.

“What TV guy?”

“I don’t know. Just the TV guy.”

“Oh.”

Tobin went up the walk that needed shoveling. If the police didn’t think he was a murderer, he would have enjoyed himself, sunny winter days being one of the few things that invigorated him these days. The foundation of the house had shifted dramatically to the right. Then he noticed that both windows on either side of the front door were painted black. He hadn’t seen that since hippie days. He knocked. Then he knocked again. While he waited he waved to the two kids in snowsuits who were angled out from behind an oak tree watching him and saying things back and forth with breath that shone silver in the daylight. Then he turned around and knocked some more. From the curb he could hear the cab radio playing country/western (Tobin was a Hank Williams fan; he hated groups like Alabama)., He gave the song a few more bars and raised his hand to bring it down on the door once more and then a voice said, “Over here.”

Tobin turned to his left and looked over the edge of the porch railing.

A big man with thick rimless eyeglasses and blackheads the size of meteorites stood glaring at him. This had to be, from Ramano’s description, Ebsen himself. Over his fleshy, hairy chest had been tugged a sleeveless T-shirt two or three sizes too small. Draped over his forearm and hand was a shirt of some kind. He pointed the shirt at Tobin and waved the shirt around a little bit and then all of a sudden Tobin realized what the shirt was hiding. His throat got dry and he was tempted to turn around and yell for the cabbie to call the cops, but then he looked again at Ebsen and thought, This bastard is certifiable. Look at those eyes. The long-lost twin of Richard Speck.

“You ain’t gonna screw me out of it the way he did,” Ebsen said.

“Screw you out of what?”

“Get your ass inside that door.”

Tobin nodded. “This door?”

“That door, you dip.”

Tobin looked back at the cabbie and thought about yelling again and then decided against it. He started to put his hand on the door when, peripherally, he saw something like a miracle.

The two snowsuited kids came up the walk.

“You are too the TV guy, aren’t you?” said the one with brown stuff on his mouth.

“You ain’t neither, are you?” said the one with red and green stuff.

“Yeah. Yeah. I am the TV guy.” When he heard his own voice, he realized he could barely talk. His stomach felt bad and his bowels felt worse. He was scared.

“See, I told you, Lonnie.”

“Just ’cause he says he is don’t mean he is.”

“You kids get out of here,” Ebsen said.

“Hi, Harold, you pissed off or something?” the one with chocolate said. Four years old. And saying “pissed off.” Tobin felt outraged, as if he were a PTA member dealing with swearing among tot-lot attendees. (He’d once known a couple — back in the good-bad old days of the sixties — who’d taught their kid to say “fuck,” and every time he said it, the worst sort of Catholicism came over Tobin and he wanted to steal the kid and hand him over to the nuns.)

“I said, get outta here.”

“All we’re doin’ is playin’.”

“Goddammit, you two. Out.” Ebsen moved around the corner of the house fast enough to have the effect he wanted — they spooked and ran, back to their hiding place behind the elm tree. Ebsen then came up behind Tobin and jammed the shirt against Tobin’s back.

“Now get inside. You hear me?” Ebsen didn’t need a gun to be scary. He was maybe six feet five and two hundred and fifty pounds, and he gave the impression that he probably spent at least some of his time tying cats inside gunnysacks and tossing them in the river.

“You sure you know what you’re doing?”

“What the hell’s that s’posed to mean?”

“I mean,” Tobin said, realizing how naive he sounded, “that doing what you’ve done so far — just waving a gun at me — I mean that’s five-to-ten in Attica.”

“I’m real scared. Don’t I sound real scared?”

“I guess when I think about it you don’t sound very scared after all.”

“Good. Now get inside.”

Tobin’s eyes went back to the kids again. Why couldn’t those dumb little twerps be telepaths and read his mind and then go call the cops?

“Move,” Ebsen said.

Tobin put a hand on the door. Swallowed hard. Turned the doorknob. “Five-to-ten. You really better think it over, Harold. Really.”

“Inside.”

So he went inside. His first impression, with his eyes tearing up and his stomach starting to churn, was that Harold was running a slaughterhouse out of here.

Most of the living room looked pretty normal if your standard was a late-sixties crash pad whose owner skewed to the right. There was a biker poster featuring a fat guy and a fat woman in their best leathers on a Harley that looked bigger than a Buick. There was a Confederate flag. There was a glassed-in collection of knives, any one of which looked formidable enough to disembowel a three-hundred-pound man. There were guns of every kind imaginable — rifles, handguns, shotguns, something that might have been an Uzi. (There were a lot of Uzis in Charles Bronson pictures, and Tobin had seen three Charles Bronson pictures within the last five months, Charlie understandably cashing in on the waning days of his bankability.) There was furniture, too, of course, the sort that looked as if old Harold here might have grabbed the Uzi and hijacked himself a Salvation Army truck — one headed for the dump. There was a couch, torn and faded red, and a green armchair and what appeared to be three bullet holes in one of the arms (just one of the hazards of modern urban living), and a 21-inch Motorola TV set that had been manufactured the year Tobin learned his mass Latin. The place was dusty as a Pharaoh’s tomb and disarrayed as if the bikers on the poster had invited a few hundred of their friends over for a party. But that wasn’t what bothered Tobin. Uh-uh. What bothered Tobin was the table he could see through the archway leading into the small dining room.

“Jesus,” he said.

But Ebsen didn’t seem to notice Tobin’s disgust.

“You were working with him on it, weren’t you?”

“On what?”

“You know damn well what. Now I want my cut of it — just like he agreed — and I want it in cash. You understand?”

“I understand that you want it in cash, Harold. I just don’t understand what ‘it’ is.”

“You son of a bitch.”

“That doesn’t exactly explain a lot.”

“You crummy bastard.”

This time Tobin knew better than to say anything. Harold was one of those guys who should be shot up with elephant guns full of Thorazine every morning. He stood in front of Tobin now shaking from some terrifying psychic rage that his watery blue eyes made all the more frightening. There was spittle dripping from both sides of his mouth and Tobin could see his biceps bulk up to the size of volleyballs. Harold, in his psychosis and dislocation, needed someplace for his fury to light.

Then Tobin heard the squawk and at first he wondered if his fear hadn’t begun to make his mind play tricks.

But the squawk came again and then what was unmistakably a chicken waddled out from the dining room. Then the table in there made sense.

“There you are, you bastard,” Ebsen said to the chicken. Harold seemed to be mad at everybody today, including chickens.

Tobin raised one tiny little finger, as if seeking permission from a nun to go to the bathroom.

“What?” Ebsen snapped.

“That’s a chicken, right?”

“No, it’s a Pekingese.”

“I just mean it’s kind of strange to have a chicken in your house.”

“That’s why I’m mad at him.”

“Why?”

“He’s s’posed to be outside with the rest.”

“The rest of the chickens?”

“Yeah, the rest of the chickens.”

“How come you have chickens?”

“C’mere, you little jerk,” Ebsen said. He was on his knees and putting a hand out the way you would for a puppy. The chicken, scruffy and dirty, just stood and eyed him with chickeny contempt. “You’re gonna pay, you little creep.”

While Ebsen was trying to get the chicken to come close enough to punch out, Tobin of course was starting to look for means of escape. He wasn’t sure if Ebsen had locked the door. If not—

“You move, you’re dead,” Ebsen said. He waggled the Luger at Tobin.

“I’m just standing here. Right here. Plain sight.”

“You better.”

Then he went back to the chicken and Tobin went back to looking with disgust at the table in the dining room. It was one of those drop-leaf jobs. Both leaves had been dropped and the one in view was streaked with blood. It looked like a sacrificial altar. There were feathers and dried puddles of blood all over the floor.

“You kill your own food, huh?”

“Goddamn right, I do. The shit you eat is poisoned. I buy chickens from this farmer and raise them myself in the backyard. Organic.”

“Then you kill them here?”

“Yeah. You mind?”

“You should open a window once in a while.”

“You should shut your mouth once in a while.”

Then he grabbed the chicken. The move was impressive. One moment Ebsen sat there on his knees talking to Tobin, seemingly paying no attention to what the chicken was doing, and then suddenly his hand shot out and he got the chicken by the neck. The chicken wriggled and wiggled and squawked, and feathers tore away from its body and drifted on the strange air let in by the blacked-out windows. “Little son of a bitch,” Ebsen said, standing up again. “I’ll teach you to sneak in the house.”

“I doubt he did it on purpose,” Tobin said, “I mean, he’s only a chicken.” Tobin knew what was coming and felt sorry for the animal.

“This is the third time he did it,” Ebsen said.

“Maybe he just gets cold outside.”

“The other chickens don’t get cold.”

“Maybe he’s different from the other chickens.”

“That’s his problem.”

Ebsen put the chicken up on the table and laid him on his side — the chicken didn’t have a chance against Ebsen’s biceps — and then he picked up an ax.

“I want my money by six tonight, or else I go to the press.”

Ebsen was a confusing guy. Here he was supposed to be killing a chicken but he was talking business instead. “And I know he just got a bundle laid on him before you iced him.” He looked up through his Mount Palomar glasses. “I followed him around a few days. I know what was going on with those reviews.”

“What reviews?”

He stared at Tobin a second and then said, “You really don’t know, huh?”

“No.”

He grinned. “Then you’re dumber than this chicken here.”

Then he let the ax go so hard that the chicken’s head flew in through the archway and landed near Tobin’s feet. The rest of the chicken, still on the table, jerked in death spasms.

“Too bad you can’t stay for some chicken dinner.” Ebsen laughed. “But I’ll bet you’d be too much of a candy ass to eat it. You like to have somebody else kill your food for you.” Then Ebsen put down the hand ax and picked up the Luger again and pointed it directly at Tobin. “His wife knows what’s going on. You go talk to her and you tell her if she doesn’t want it all over the newspapers, she better come through with the dough and I mean today. You understand?”

“I’ll talk to her, if that’s what you mean. But I still don’t understand.”

“Good. Now get the fuck out of here.”

“What was the gun for?”

“I wanted to make my point. Everybody thinks that just because the Army tossed my ass out that I was too dumb to ever get anything going. Well, your partner knew better. He knew better real good.”

“Got ya.”

Tobin was already backpedaling to the door. He knew one thing — it was going to be a while before he had a chicken dinner again.

“Six o’clock,” Ebsen said.

“Six o’clock.”

For effect, just to impress him even a little more, Ebsen took a hunting knife from inside his belt and, as Tobin’s hand touched the doorknob, Ebsen put the knife deep into the belly of the chicken and started ripping downward. “Sure you don’t want to stick around? This is the best part.”

Outside in the golden morning, taking in golden air, the two kids in snowsuits came up. “Is Harold still pissed off?” the green-nosed one said.

“Yeah,” Tobin said, getting into his cab, “I think it’s safe to say that Harold’s still pissed off.”

They shook their heads at each other, then tottered off.