He was still weighing the evidence against himself when the phone rang.
“John Reardon,” he said.
“John, this is Josh down at the lab. I’ve got the findings on the ax. The one in the deer case.”
“Go ahead.”
“Well, there are prints.”
“Whose?”
“Only one set. Traced them to an Andros Pe… Pee…”
“Petrakis?”
“Yeah, that’s it. Petrakis. Somebody didn’t write it down very well on the sheet.”
“Andros Petrakis,” Reardon said. “You’re sure?”
“That’s right. And only one set.”
“Thanks,” Reardon said, and started to hang up.
“There’s one detail,” Josh said. “Damndest thing, I don’t know if it’s important, but the positioning of the prints is kind of unusual.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, this was an ax killing, right?” Josh said.
“Right.”
“Well, where would you expect the prints to be located?”
“On the handle.”
“Right. But the weapon is clean for about two-thirds of the length of the ax handle.”
“What?”
“From the bottom of the handle.”
“Can you give me that again?”
“Ah, hell, if you were here it would be clear in a minute. The ax handle is approximately three feet long from the bottom of the handle to the blade. And from the bottom of the handle to about eight inches from the blade the handle is clean. No prints. But after that, the damn thing is covered with prints. Of this Petrakis guy. His prints. Clear as day. Hell, you could almost see them without dusting.”
“I see,” Reardon said, but he did not know what to make of it.
“The prints begin at about four inches below the blade. And there are a few on the blade itself.”
Reardon was mystified. “Do you know what this means? Do you have any ideas?”
“Nothing for sure. The only thing I can figure out is that maybe he had started to clean up the prints, and then he got scared or something and just took off. Decided to hide the thing and just forget about it, you know?”
“Thanks, Josh,” Reardon said, and placed the receiver back on the cradle. So Petrakis had started to clean it up, he thought, but then had left it there with prints still on it. Maybe he had heard something. Maybe he had heard the same thing Noble had heard. Maybe he had heard the only thing that would make him run, make him panic so much that he would just leave his prints on the ax and hope that it wouldn’t be found. Maybe he had heard the approach of a witness.
Looking at the ax later that afternoon, Reardon got a better idea of what Josh had told him. While Mathesson stood with his hands behind his back, his eyes roaming the lab for something more interesting than a routine weapon, Reardon stared fixedly at the ax. It lay on its side atop a metal table. Most of the handle had indeed been cleaned meticulously of fingerprints. Reardon had rarely seen a weapon so thoroughly scrubbed in part and so completely untouched elsewhere. Killers who used knives, Reardon had noticed, usually did not stop after cleaning the handle but dutifully wiped the blood from the blade as well, even though it could not possibly incriminate them. They did this from habit, Reardon assumed, but the ax used in the killing of the fallow deer presented a paradox that could neither be explained nor altogether dismissed.
He picked up the ax and perused the handle slowly. It was spotless from the base up to about seven or eight inches from the blade. Then spots of blood began to dapple the wood. The blade itself was almost completely sheathed in bloodstains.
Mathesson motioned toward the ax. “Well, that’s it,” he said. “When you’ve got the weapon, you’ve got the killer.”
“Not always.”
“Sometimes,” Mathesson said. He pulled out a pack of cigarettes and offered one to Reardon.
“No, thanks,” Reardon said.
“Oh, right,” Mathesson said. “I forgot. You quit.”
Reardon’s eyes remained riveted on the ax. In the presence of a weapon he became almost reverent, not out of respect for the weapon itself but for the human being, obscure and silent, who had been slaughtered by it.
“Do you watch much TV?” Mathesson asked.
“What?”
“Do you watch much TV?”
“A little.”
“They had a goddamn good show on last night.” Mathesson chuckled. “A real whodunit, you know? First I thought it was the wife, then the lover, then the brother-in-law. Hell, I’d have put the whole goddamn family in the slammer before I’d have fingered the right guy.”
Reardon’s eyes continued to move up and down the ax. Mathesson’s voice was recorded only as passing unintelligible sounds, like street noise.
Finally, Reardon said: “What do you make of that?”
“What?”
“The way the ax is so thoroughly cleaned of prints on part of the handle and covered with them on the rest.”
Mathesson looked at the ax. “Well, the only thing I figure is that the killer got scared, panicked, started running, and threw the ax in the sewer drain on Fifth Avenue. And if the killer is Petrakis, then it stands to reason he might run east up to Fifth Avenue, ’cause he lives on the East Side, East Ninetieth, right?”
“That’s his old address, but remember, he’d been evicted. We don’t know where he was living the night the deer were killed.”
“Oh, yeah,” Mathesson said, “that’s right.” He looked at the ax again. “I’ll admit that a guy who’d clean a weapon as good as this guy did, you could expect him to clean the whole thing, not leave any prints. But who knows what was going through his mind? And remember, John, those prints belong to Petrakis and nobody else. Now, I figure he just plain bolted. Just plain panicked. Forgot everything. Just started running home.”
“If his new address is on the East Side.”
“Right,” Mathesson said. “And another thing. That ax came from a toolshed not far from the deer cage. I just got this from Bannion this morning. I asked Bannion to check and see if it looked like the toolshed had been broken into, and he said no. He said that whoever took that ax had to have had a key to the shed.”
“Who has access to the shed?”
“Noble, Bryant and Petrakis. The regular night crew. I talked to Bryant just before I came over, and Bannion talked to Noble last night. They hadn’t been using the ax. Noble said he saw it in the shed earlier that night when he went to take out something else.”
“So it had to have been in there,” Reardon said, “and whoever took it out had to have had a key.”
“That’s right,” Mathesson said. “Everything’s right for Petrakis.”
“All right,” Reardon said, “what’s your idea of the whole thing, from beginning to end?”
“Well,” Mathesson said, “I figure Petrakis was real upset. His wife dying and all, you know. And on top of his wife dying and this costing him all his money, he gets kicked out of his apartment. So that sets him off, you know? Puts him over the brink, you might say. He’s real agitated by now. Crazy. So he goes to the park, maybe just to walk around at first, who knows? Anyway, he goes to the zoo and on the way he meets Bryant. He’s so mad that the only thing he can talk about is his lousy landlord. Which is none other than your friend and mine, Wallace Van Allen.”
“You think he’d have known who his landlord was?” Reardon asked.
“I don’t know, to be honest with you. Of course, that stuff is in the public record. Anybody has access to it. Anybody can find out who their landlord is.”