To tell the truth, it was all pretty goddamn gory.
They had learned from the tenants in the building that Mr. Lasser lived somewhere in New Essex, some fifteen minutes outside the city, a fact which was substantiated by a driver’s license found in the old man’s right hip trouser pocket. The license gave his full name as George Nelson Lasser, his address as 1529 Westerfield in New Essex, his sex as male, his weight as 161 pounds, his height as five foot ten inches, and his date of birth as October 15, 1877, which made him eighty-six years old at the time of his death.
There was a bleakness to the January countryside as the detectives drove out of the city and headed for New Essex. The heater in Hawes’s 1961 Oldsmobile convertible was on the blink, and the windows kept fogging with their exhaled breath and then freezing over with a thin film of ice, which they scraped at with gloved hands. The trees lining the road were bare, the landscape sere and withered; it almost seemed as though death had extended itself from that city basement into the surrounding countryside, stilling the land with its hoary breath.
1529 Westerfield was an English Tudor reproduction set some forty feet back from the sidewalk on a New Essex street lined with similar reproductions. Smoke boiled up out of chimney pots, adding a deeper gray to the sky’s monotone. There was a feeling of contained and cloistered warmth on that street, a suburban block locked in potbellied privacy against the wintry day outside, defying intrusion. They parked the convertible at the curb in front of the house and walked up the slate path to the front door. An old wrought-iron bell pull was to the right of the door. Hawes pulled it, and the detectives waited for someone to answer.
There was lunacy in the old woman’s eyes.
She pulled open the door with a suddenness that was startling, and the first thing each man saw about her was her eyes, and the first thought that occurred to each of them separately was that he was looking at a woman who was mad.
“Yes?” the woman asked.
She was an old woman, perhaps seventy-five, perhaps eighty— Carella found it difficult to pinpoint a person’s age once the borderline of real vintage had been crossed. Her hair was white, and her face was wrinkled but full and fleshy, with lopsided eyebrows that added a further dimension of madness to the certainly mad eyes. The eyes themselves were blue. They watched the detectives unblinkingly. There was dark suspicion in those pale-blue eyes, and there was secret mirth, a mirth that echoed humorless laughter in endlessly long and hollow corridors, there was as well a flirtatiousness that seemed ludicrous. There was a sly appraisal peering out of the skull, and in a woman so old, a coquettishness that was almost obscene. The eyes combined all these things in a medley of contradiction that was at once blatant and frightening. The woman was mad; her eyes shouted the fact to the world. The woman was mad, and her madness sent a shudder up the spine.
“Is this the home of George Nelson Lasser?” Carella asked, watching the woman, wanting nothing more than to be back at the precinct where there was order and dimension and sanity.
“This is his home,” the woman replied. “Who are you and what do you want?”
“We’re detectives,” Carella said. He showed her his shield and his identification card. He paused a moment, and then said, “May I ask who I’m talking to, ma’am?”
“Whom, and you may not,” she said.
“What?”
“Whom,” she said.
“Ma’am, I…”
“Your grammar is bad, and your grampa is worse,” the woman said, and began laughing.
“Who is it?” a voice behind her said, and Carella glanced up to see a tall man stepping from the comparative darkness beyond the entrance door into the gloomy arc of light described by the door’s opening. The man was in his early forties, tall and thin, with lightbrown hair that hung haphazardly on his forehead. His eyes were as blue as the madwoman’s, and Carella knew at once that they were mother and son, and then reflected briefly upon the motherson combinations he had met this day, starting with Mickey Ryan who had found a dead man in a basement, and moving through Sam Whitson who chopped wood with an ax, and now into this tall, poised man with an angry scowl on his face, who stood behind and slightly to the right of his demented mother while demanding to know who these men were at the front door.
“Police,” Carella said, and again he flashed the tin and the card.
“What do you want?”
“Who are you, sir?” Carella asked.
“My name is Anthony Lasser. What do you want?”
“Mr. Lasser,” Carella said, “is George Lasser your father?”
“He is.”
“I’m sorry to have to tell you he is dead,” Carella said, and the words sounded stiff and barely sympathetic, and he regretted having had to utter them, but there they were, hanging on the air in awkward nakedness.
“What?” Lasser said.
“Your father is dead,” Carella said. “He was killed sometime this afternoon.”
“How?” Lasser asked. “Was he in an accident of some ki—”
“No, he was murdered,” Carella said.
“Dead for a ducat,” the old woman said, and giggled.
Lasser’s face was troubled now. He glanced first at the woman, who seemed not to have grasped the meaning of Carella’s words at all, and then he looked again at the detectives and said, “Won’t you come in, please?”
“Thank you,” Carella said and he moved past the old woman, who stood rooted in the doorway, staring at something across the street, staring so hard that Carella turned to look over his shoulder. He saw that Hawes was also staring across the street to where a small boy on a tricycle moved rapidly up the driveway to his house, a Tudor reproduction almost identical to the Lasser house.
“The king is dead,” the old woman said. “Long live the king.”
“Won’t you come in with us, ma’am?” Carella asked.