You had to hand it to Corey, Carella thought. His face did not change, he did not bat an eyelash. He simply sat opposite Carella and looked at him serenely for several moments and then said, “4111?”
“Mmm.”
“South Fifth?”
“Mmm,” Carella said.
“Don’t think I know the game you’re referring to, Steve.” Corey looked sincerely interested. “Is it a card game?”
“Nope. Craps,” Carella said.
“I’ll have to look into it. That’s on my beat, you know.”
“Yes, I know. Sit down, Ralph. We’re not finished yet.”
“I thought—”
“Yes, sit down.” Carella smiled again. “Ralph, the man who was cutting the game wound up with an ax in his head. Name’s George Lasser, the super of the building. Do you know him, Ralph?”
“Sure, I do.”
“I think there may be a connection between the game and the murder, Ralph.”
“You do?”
“Yeah. That makes it a big-time game, doesn’t it? That makes it a game involved in homicide.”
“I suppose it does. If there’s a connection between the two.”
“Ralph, if there’s a connection between the two, and if it turns out that somebody on the force deliberately withheld information about that game in the basement of 4111 where a man got murdered, that can be pretty serious, Ralph.”
“I suppose it can.”
“Did you know about the game, Ralph?”
“No.”
“Ralph?”
“Yeah?”
“We’re going to find out.”
“Steve?”
“Yeah?”
“I’ve been a cop too long. Never shit a shitter, huh?” Corey smiled. “The guy who was running the game is dead. If I was cutting that game, Steve, and I’m only saying if— if I was cutting that game, the only guy who’d know about it besides me would be the guy who was running the game, right? And he’s dead, Steve. He got killed with an ax, Steve. So who are you trying to con?”
“I don’t like you, Corey,” Carella said.
“I know that.”
“I haven’t liked you from the minute I first saw you.”
“I know that, too.”
“If you’re connected with this…”
“I’m not.”
“If you’re connected with this, Corey, if you’re making my job tougher, if you’re hindering this case…”
“I don’t know anything about your crap game,” Corey said.
“If you do, and if I find out that you do, I’m going to put your ass through the wringer, Corey. You’re never going to look the same again.”
“Thanks for the warning,” Corey said.
“Now get the hell out of here.”
“Big detective,” Corey said, and he went out of the squadroom.
He was smiling.
But he was worried.
The tenants of a building in a slum area do not much give a damn about whether or not cops solve the cases they are working on. As a matter of fact, if one were to take a poll of any tenement building at any given time of the year, one would probably discover that 99 percent of the tenants would like it if every cop in the world immediately dropped dead. Well, perhaps not in April. In April, the air is mild and the breezes are balmy, and brotherly love prevails, even toward cops. In April, it is possible that the tenants might only express the desire for every cop in the city to get hit by a bus—maimed, but not killed.
It was January.
Cotton Hawes had his hands full.
To begin with, the man would not let him into the basement.
He had never seen the man before. He was a giant of a man, perhaps sixty years old, with a European accent Hawes could not accurately place. He stood at the top of the steps leading to the basement and wanted to know just what the hell Hawes wanted, and there seemed to be about him a perfection of parts: the immense head with its thatch of unruly, sandy-colored hair; the bulbous nose and large blue eyes and strong mouth and jaw; the thick neck and wide shoulders and chest, the muscular arms and huge hands—even the blue turtlenecked sweater under the brass-buttoned blue coveralls, all seemed of a piece, as though this man had been sculpted by someone with an excellent eye for proportion.
“I’m a police officer,” Hawes said. “I want to have another look at that basement.”
“Let me see your badge,” the man said.
“Who are you?” Hawes asked.
“My name’s John Iverson. I’m superintendent of the building next door, 4113.”
“Well, what are you doing here, if you’re the super over there?”
“Mr. Gottlieb—he’s the landlord—he asked me if I could help out for a few days. Until he found somebody to take George’s job.”
“Help out doing what?”
“Tend the furnace, get the garbage cans out in the morning. Same as I do next door.” Iverson paused. “Let me see your badge.”
Hawes showed Iverson his shield and then said, “I’m going to be in the building most of the day, Mr. Iverson, part of the time here in the basement and part of the time questioning the tenants.”
“Okay,” Iverson said, as though he were granting Hawes permission to remain. Hawes made no comment. Instead, he went down to the basement. Iverson followed him down the steps.
“Time to check the heat,” he said almost cheerfully and then went over to the black cast-iron furnace sitting in one corner of the basement. He glanced at a gauge, picked up a shovel standing against the wall of the coal bin, and lifted open the furnace door with the blade of the shovel. He threw a dozen shovelfuls of coal into the furnace, slammed the door shut with the shovel, put the shovel back against the wall, and then leaned against the wall himself. Hawes stared at him across the length of the basement room.
“If you’ve got something else to do,” he said, “don’t let me hold you up.”
“I got nothing to do,” Iverson said.
“I thought maybe you wanted to go back next door and check the furnace there.”
“I done that before I come here,” Iverson said.
“I see. Well…” Hawes shrugged. “What’s this back here?” he asked.
“George’s workbench.”
“What kind of work did he do?”
“Oh, odds and ends,” Iverson said.
Hawes studied the bench. A broken chair was on its top and alongside that a partially completed rung that would have replaced the broken one. There were three shelves hanging on the basement wall over the bench, all dust-covered, all crammed full of jars and tin cans containing nails, screws, and assorted hardware. Hawes looked at the shelves again. They were not, as he had first thought, all dust-covered. The middle one, in fact, had been wiped clean of dust.
“Anybody been down here since Friday?” he asked Iverson.
“No, I don’t think so. They wouldn’t let anyone come down. They were taking pictures, you know.”
“Who was?”
“The police.”
“I see,” Hawes said. “Well, was anyone down here this morning?”
“Not from the police, no.”
“Anyone from the building?”
“Tenants come down here all the time,” Iverson said. “There’s a washing machine down here, same as in my building next door.”
“Where’s that? The washing machine.”
“Over there. No, behind you.”
Hawes turned and saw the machine standing against one wall, its door open. He walked over toward it.
“Then anyone could have come down here this morning, is that right?” he asked. “To use the machine?”
“That’s right,” Iverson said.
“Did you see anyone come down?”
“Sure, I seen lots of tenants down here.”