“Yes, we do, too.”
“But I don’t think you can prove any of it.”
“You’re right. We can’t,” Carella said.
“That’s what I thought,” Reuhr said, and smiled.
Carella returned the smile. “We don’t have to, Mr. Reuhr,” he said.
“You don’t, huh?”
“Nope.”
“How come?”
“We’re not interested in something as piddling as blackmail. We’re interested in homicide. We’ve been getting a lot of heat on this, Mr. Reuhr. We’d really like very much to find someone to hang it on.”
“You would, huh?”
“Yes, indeed. Why don’t we play ball with each other?”
“In what way?”
“Mr. Reuhr, we can’t prove that you and Lasser were blackmailing someone together in 1939, that’s true. But we can prove blackmail in 1937 because Mr. Cavanaugh has already told us all about it, and I’m sure he’d repeat it on the witness stand and would also tell us the name of your victim. In other words, Mr. Reuhr, we’ve got you for that little caper, if for nothing else.”
“Mmm,” Reuhr said.
“Make sense?”
“What’s your deal?”
“We don’t think you killed Lasser,” Hawes said.
“How come?”
“We can’t see any reason for it. From what we can see, you and Lasser were friends. He was in on a shakedown deal with you, let you use the basement for your crap games, why should you kill him?”
“Mmm,” Reuhr said.
“Still make sense, Mr. Reuhr?”
“I’m listening,” Reuhr said.
“I think he knows what we’re talking about now,” Carella said, and smiled at Hawes.
“Go on,” Reuhr said.
“Okay. You and Lasser are shaking somebody down. Apparently you’re getting quite a bit of loot from this person because Lasser is able to afford the school and the hospital on his share alone. You start the shakedown in 1939—”
“We started it in 1938,” Reuhr said suddenly.
“Ah,” Carella said. “Thank you. I think he would like to play ball, Cotton.”
“I think so, too,” Hawes said, and grinned.
“You started the shakedown in 1938,” Carella said. “George Lasser was the man who went to your victim and told him what you had on him. George Lasser was the man who demanded payment.” Carella paused. “George Lasser was also the man who got killed with an ax on the third of this month. Get it, Mr. Reuhr?”
“I think so.”
“We want to know what the shakedown was about and who your victim was,” Hawes said.
Reuhr shrugged. “What do I get out of this?” he asked.
“That’s what, Mr. Reuhr.”
“Huh?”
“You get out of this. You get out of what could be a very nasty situation. You get out of it clean and with no further questions. Otherwise, we still need someone to pin a rose on—and it might turn out to be you.”
“Okay,” Reuhr said.
“See?” Carella said to Hawes. “He does know what we’re talking about, after all.”
“The victim?” Hawes asked.
“A man named Anson Burke.”
“What did you have on him?”
“He was president of his company, a firm exporting automobile parts to South America. He came into the office one day and asked if we would prepare his personal income tax return. This was pretty fishy to begin with, because his firm had its own accountants, but he was going outside to have his personal tax figured. Anyway, we took him on. That’s how I found out about the forty grand.”
“What forty grand?”
“You know anything about the export business?”
“Very little.”
“Well, most of them’ll buy the parts they need for export from various suppliers all around the country. The usual deal is for the supplier to give the exporter a flat discount, usually about fifteen percent.”
“Yeah, go on.”
“Well, every now and then, if the exporter brings the supplier an unusually large amount of business, the supplier’ll give an additional discount.”
“How much more?”
“Well, in this case it was five percent more. Burke’s firm was probably doing business of eight hundred thousand to a million a year with this one supplier alone. You take five percent of eight hundred thousand, and you’ve got forty grand.”
“There’s that forty grand again,” Hawes said. “What about it?”
“That’s how much he got.”
“Who?”
“Burke.”
“From who?”
“From this supplier in Texas.”
“For what?”
“Well, he listed it as a commission, but it was really that additional five percent discount I told you about.”
“I don’t understand,” Carella said. “Listed it where?”
“On the information return he gave me for his personal income tax.”
“He listed forty thousand dollars as a commission from a supplier in Texas, is that it?”
“That’s right. He was drawing thirty thousand from his company as salary. This was over and above that.”
“So?”
“So at least he was smart enough to look for another accountant far away from his regular business accountants.”
“What do you mean, smart?”
“Because the forty thousand bucks was paid to him personally. It never went into the firm. He was declaring it on his personal income tax so everything would be nice and legal as far as Uncle Sam was concerned, but he was robbing it from his stockholders.”
“Go on,” Carella said.
“Well, I knew I had something good there if I could only get to him. But how? One peep out of me, and he might have gone to Cavanaugh, and the next thing I knew Cavanaugh would call Philadelphia and talk to some of his childhood friends who were now adult hoods, and I’d be fishing in the River Dix, only from the bottom. Then I remembered talking to Lasser once or twice. I knew he was slightly crooked because he used to steal brass fittings and copper tubing, stuff like that from the basement, which he’d later sell to junkyards. Burke’s office was all the way over on the other side of town. He didn’t know Lasser from a hole in the wall.”
“How’d you set it up?”
“I contacted Lasser and explained the deal to him. He was interested. Then I called Burke and told him I wanted to work on his tax return one day that week, and would he please bring his records to the office, including all the stuff I would need for that year, like his withholding statements and also the information return about that forty-thousand-dollar commission. He said he would bring it in the next day. I went up that afternoon to work in his private office and told him to keep the stuff in the city rather than taking it back home with him, because I’d have to come back again tomorrow to finish up. He locked it in the top drawer of his desk.”
“Go on.”
“Lasser and I broke into his office that night. We were after the information return, but to make it look good, we grabbed a gold pen and pencil and some petty cash and a typewriter and some other junk laying around the office. Burke discovered the theft the next morning. Two weeks later Lasser contacted him.”
“What did he tell him?”
“He confessed to being the man who had broken into the office. Burke was ready to call the police, but then Lasser showed him the return. He said he had grabbed it by accident with some of the other stuff in the drawer, and that he didn’t know very much about the exporting business, but he knew the name of the firm was Anson Burke, Incorporated, and here was an information return going to the United States government and listing a payment of forty thousand dollars to Anson Burke personally, rather than to the firm, and this looked kind of fishy to him. Burke told Lasser to go to hell and said he was definitely going to call the police now, at which point Lasser apologized and said maybe he was wrong, maybe everything was clean and aboveboard, in which case Burke wouldn’t mind if Lasser mailed that information return to the company’s board of directors. It was then that Burke saw the light. In fact, it damn near blinded him.”