“Which ones? Would you remember?”
“No.” “Try.”
“I don’t remember,” Iverson said.
Hawes grunted, barely audibly, and walked back to the workbench. “Was Lasser working on this chair?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” Iverson said. “I guess so. If it’s on his workbench, then I guess he was working on it.”
Hawes looked at the middle shelf again. It had definitely been wiped clean. He pulled his handkerchief from his back pocket, tented it over his hand, and pulled open one of the drawers under the workbench. The drawer was cluttered with old pencils, a straightedge, thumbtacks, a plumber’s snake, a broken stapler, rubber bands, and a dusty package of Chiclets. Hawes closed the drawer. It went halfway into the bench and then refused to move. He shoved at it again, cursed mildly, and then got on his hands and knees and crawled under the bench. He looked up at the drawer. The plumber’s snake had caught on one of the cross supports, snagging the drawer. With one hand on the basement floor, close to the right rear leg of the bench, Hawes reached up and shoved at the snake, coiling it back into the drawer. He slid out from under the bench, dusted off his trousers, and closed the drawer.
“Is there a sink down here?” he asked.
“Over near the washing machine,” Iverson answered.
He walked away from the workbench and over to the sink against the opposite wall. A small covered drain was set into the basement floor in front of the sink. Hawes stopped with his feet on the drain cover, turned on the faucet, and began washing his hands with a bar of laundry soap that was resting in the basin.
“It gets dirty in basements,” Iverson said.
“Yeah,” Hawes answered.
He dried his hands on his handkerchief and then left the basement, walking directly out of the building and to the corner and into a candy store. From a pay phone he called the Police Laboratory and asked to talk to Detective-Lieutenant Sam Grossman.
“Hello?” Grossman said.
“Sam, this is Cotton Hawes. I’m here on South Fifth, just came from the basement. They tell me your boys were down there taking pictures.”
“Yeah, I suppose,” Grossman said.
“Sam, have you got any pictures of the dead man’s workbench?”
“Which one is this, Cotton? Which case?”
“The ax murder. 4111 South 5th.”
“Oh, yeah. Yeah. The workbench, huh? I think we’ve got some. Why?”
“Have you looked them over yet?”
“Only casually. I just got to the office a little while ago. My brother got married last night.”
“Congratulations,” Hawes said.
“Thanks. What about the workbench?”
“Take another look at the pictures,” Hawes said. “I don’t know if it’ll show or not, but there are three shelves over the bench. The middle shelf’s been wiped clean of dust.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
“I’ll take a look,” Grossman said. “If it’s anything, I’ll follow it up.”
“Let us know, will you, Sam?”
“Who’s working this with you?”
“Steve Carella.”
“Okay, I’ll get back to you. Cotton?”
“I’m here.”
“This may take a while.”
“What do you mean?”
“I’ll have to send a man down there, look over the place again, more pictures, maybe tests.”
“Okay, just let us know.”
“Right. Thanks a lot.”
Hawes hung up and walked back to Lasser’s building. He wanted more than ever now to question the tenants in the building. Someone had wiped off that middle shelf, and he wondered who, and he wondered why.
It was unfortunate that he was a cop who looked like a cop. That’s the worst kind of cop you can possibly be when you’re questioning people who dislike cops as a matter of principle. Hawes was six foot two inches tall, and he weighed 190 pounds. He had blue eyes and a square jaw with a cleft chin. His hair was red, except for a streak over his left temple where he had once been knifed and where the hair had curiously grown in white after the wound had healed. He had a straight, unbroken nose and a good mouth with a wide lower lip, but there was a look of arrogance on his face, even when he was in a good mood. He was not in a good mood when he began questioning the tenants in the building, and he was in a worse mood after he had gone through two and a half floors of snotty answers and surly attitudes.
It was now 12:00 noon, and he was hungry, but he wanted to wrap up the third floor before he went to lunch, which would leave him three more floors to tackle in the afternoon. There were four apartments on each floor, and he had already questioned the tenants of 3-A and 3-B, which left 3-C and 3-D and then twelve more tenants on floors four to six inclusive. Some way to spend a Monday. The word had flashed through the building the moment he’d climbed the front stoop and entered the rank-smelling foyer, so everyone in the building knew that fuzz was on the scene, which wasn’t very surprising anyway, considering the fact that old Georgie Lasser had had his head opened for him on Friday afternoon last week. Nobody liked fuzz, especially on Monday, especially in January, so Hawes had his work cut out for him.
He knocked on the door to 3-C and, getting no answer, knocked again. He was about to move on to 3-D when he heard a voice inside the apartment say, “Georgie? Is that you?”
The voice was a young voice, and a weak one, and Hawes at first thought it belonged to someone who was sick, and then a couple of things occurred to him as he backed up to the door again. First, since everyone in the building knew John Law was here, why did that voice inside apartment 3-C ask if he was Georgie? And, second, Georgie who? The only Georgie that Hawes could think of at the moment was a dead man named George Lasser.
He knocked on the door again.
“Georgie?” the voice asked. The voice was still quiet, subdued. Hawes tried to remember where he had heard a similar voice before.
“Yes,” he answered. “It’s Georgie.”
“Just a minute,” the voice said.
He waited.
He heard footsteps approaching the door. Whoever did the walking was barefoot. He heard the rigid bar of a police lock being taken out of its plate screwed into the door, and then a chain being slipped out of its metal track, and then the door’s regular lock being turned, the tumblers falling, the door opening a crack.
“You’re not—” the voice said, but Hawes’s foot was already in the door. Whoever was behind the door tried to slam it shut, but Hawes pushed his shoulder against it at just that moment and the door flew back and inward, and Hawes was inside the apartment.
The apartment was dark. The shades were drawn, and there was the smell of urine and stale cigarette smoke and human perspiration and something else. The man standing before Hawes was in rumpled striped pajamas. A five-day stubble covered his face, and he was badly in need of a haircut. His feet were dirty and there were yellow stains on his fingers and on his teeth. Through the open door behind him, Hawes could see a bedroom and a bed with twisted sheets. A girl was on the bed. She was wearing only a soiled slip, the nylon pulled high up over one scarred thigh.
If nothing else in the apartment spelled junkie, the girl’s thigh did.
“Who the hell are you?” the man asked.
“Police,” Hawes said.
“Prove it.”
“Don’t get smart, sonny boy,” Hawes said, pulling his wallet from his pocket. “From the looks of this, you’re in enough trouble already.”
“Maybe you’re in trouble for unlawful entry,” the man said, looking at Hawes’s shield held up in front of his face. Hawes put the wallet back into his trouser pocket and walked to the kitchen window. He raised the shade and opened the window and, over his shoulder, said, “Have you given up breathing, or what?”