“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: