Ax

by Ed McBain

  “Well, if it isn’t himself,” she said, “and knocking on doors in his own house.”

  “My dear young lady…” Carella started.

  “Young lady, is it? My but he’s in a good mood.”

  “My, but he’s in a good mood,” April echoed from her bed.

  “My dear young lady,” Carella said to Fanny, “if a person expects children to knock on his door before entering, he must set the proper example by knocking on their door before entering. Right, Mark?”

  “Right, Pop,” Mark said,

  “April?”

  “Right, right,” April said, and giggled.

  “Now don’t get them all excited before bedtime,” Fanny warned.

  Fanny, who was in her fifties, red-haired and buxom, as Irish as Mrs. Flanagan’s underdrawers, turned from Mark’s bed with a mock scowl on her face, kissed April perfunctorily, and said, “I’ll leave you kiddies now to your horrid old man who will tell you tales of criminal deduction.”

  “One day,” Carella said to the air, “Fanny will marry someone and leave us, and all the humor will go out of our lives, and our house will be gloomy and sad.”

  “Fat chance,” Fanny said, and grinned and went out of the room. She poked her head back around the doorjamb immediately and said, “Dinner in five minutes. Make it snappy, Sherlock.”

  “Who’s Sherlock?” Mark asked.

  “A cop,” Carella answered.

  “Better than you?” Mark asked.

  April scrambled out of her bed, peeked at the open door to make sure Fanny wasn’t coming back again, and then crawled into Carella’s lap where he was sitting on the edge of Mark’s bed. “There’s no cop better than Daddy,” she told her brother. “Isn’t that right, Daddy?”

  Carella, not wishing to destroy a father image, modestly said, “That’s right, honey. I’m the best cop in the world.”

  “Sure he is,” April said.

  “I didn’t say he wasn’t,” Mark answered. “She’s always twisting it, Pop.”

  “Don’t call him Pop,” April said. “His name is Daddy.”

  “His name is Steve, smarthead,” Mark said.

  “If you two are going to argue,” Carella said, “I’ll just leave.”

  “She busted two of my models today,” Mark said.

  “Why’d you do that, April?” Carella asked.

  “Because he said I was a smarthead wetpants.”

  “She is.”

  “I didn’t wet my pants all week,” April said.

  “You wet them last night,” Mark corrected.

  “I don’t think that’s any of your concern, Mark,” Carella said. “What your sister does…”

  “Sure, Pop,” Mark said. “All I’m saying is she’s a smarthead wetpants.”

  “And I don’t like that kind of language,” Carella said.

  “What language?”

  “Wetpants, he means,” April said.

  “Why? What’s wrong with that, Pop?”

  “He only calls you Pop because he thinks that’s tough,” April said. “He’s always trying to be a tough guy, Daddy.”

  “I am not. Anyway, there’s nothing wrong with being tough. Pop’s tough, isn’t he?”

  “No,” April answered. “He’s very nice and sweet,” and she put her head against his chest and smiled. He looked down at her face, the dark black hair and brown eyes that were Teddy’s, the widow’s peak clearly defined even at the age of five, and then glanced at his son, amazed again by their absolute similarity and yet their total difference. There was no question that they were twins and therefore something more than simply brother and sister—their coloring was identical, the shapes of their faces, even the expressions they wore. But somehow April had managed to inherit—thank God—the beauty that was Teddy’s, and Mark had retained this beauty only as a subtle undercoating to a facade that was more closely patterned after his father’s.

  “What’d you do today?” Mark asked, and Carella smiled and said, “Oh, the same old thing.”

  “Tell us, Daddy,” April said.

  “No, you tell me what you did instead.”

  “I busted two of Mark’s models,” April said, and giggled.

  “See, Pop? What’d I tell you?”

  “Dinner!” Fanny called from the kitchen.

  Carella rose with April in his arms and then swung her out to plop her onto her own bed. He pulled the blanket to her chin and said, “January night, sleep tight,” and kissed her on the forehead.

  “What’s that, Daddy?” April said.

  “What’s what, honey?”

  “January night, sleep tight.”

  “I just made it up,” Carella said.

  He went to Mark’s bed, and Mark said, “Make up another one.”

  “All’s warm, all’s dark,” Carella said. “Sleep tight, dear Mark.”

  “That’s nice,” Mark said, smiling.

  “You didn’t make one with my name in it,” April said.

  “Because I couldn’t think of anything that rhymes with April,” Carella answered.

  “You thought of something that could rhyme with Mark.”

  “Well, Mark is easy, honey. April is very difficult to find a rhyme for.”

  “Will you find one for it?”

  “I’ll try, honey.”

  “Will you promise?” April asked.

  “Yes, I promise,” he said. He kissed Mark and pulled the blanket to his chin.

  “No, just under my nose,” Mark said.

  “Okay. Here we go.” He pulled the blanket higher.

  “Just under my nose, too, Daddy,” April said.

  He tugged on her blanket, kissed her again, put out the light, and went into the kitchen.

  “What rhymes with April?” he asked Fanny.

  “Don’t bother me with your riddles,” Fanny said. “Go sit down before your soup gets cold.”

  During dinner, he told Teddy about the old man they had found in the basement. She watched his mouth as he spoke, stopping him every so often to ask a question, but for the most part simply watching him intently and trying to understand everything he said, listening carefully for details. She knew her husband very well, and she knew that this was not the last she would hear of the old man who had been slain with an ax. She knew there were husbands who left their work in the office, and she knew that her own husband had vowed a hundred times or more never to bring the sometimes filthy details of police work into his home. But each time his resolve would last a week, ten days, two weeks at the most, and suddenly he would begin talking about a particularly disturbing case, and always she would listen carefully. She listened because he was her husband, and she was his wife, and if he’d happened to be in the peanut industry, she would have listened to facts and figures about peanut oil and peanut butter.

  Her husband’s line of work was criminal detection.

  So she listened to him as he talked about an eighty-six-year-old man who had been found in the basement of a building with an ax in his head, and she listened as he told her of all the mother-son combinations he had met that day, listened as he told her of the demented Mrs. Lasser and her son who never left the house, told her of the positive identification from a police photograph, told her of the way Mrs. Lasser had begun laughing hysterically when she looked at the glossy identification photo of her dead husband, the ax still protruding from his skull, told her what Anthony Lasser had said about his father’s friends, a group of Spanish-American War veterans who called themselves The Happy Kids. She listened with her eyes and her entire face. She asked questions with her silent lips and her rapidly moving hands.

  Later, when the meal was finished, and the dishes were done, and the twins were sound asleep, and Fanny had left the house for the night, they went into their bedroom and stopped talking.

  January 4 was a Saturday, but police departments do not know Saturday from Tuesday, nor for that matter Christmas from St. Swithin’s Day. Carella met Hawes at 8:30 in the morning, and together
they drove again to New Essex where they hoped to talk to some of the members of the late George Nelson Lasser’s club, the group of Spanish-American War veterans who were known as The Happy Kids. The day was as bleak and foreboding as the day before had been. Carella was driving one of the squad’s battered sedans, and Hawes seemed only half-awake on the seat beside him.

  “Get in late last night?” Carella asked.

  “No, not too late. We went to a movie.”

  “What’d you see?”

  “The Locusts,” Hawes said.

  “Oh, yeah? How was it?”

  “Well, it made me kind of itchy,” Hawes said. “It’s about these locusts that start an uprising, you know. Against the human race.”

  “Why do they do that?”

  “Well, that’s a good question,” Hawes said. “In fact, the hero is asked that question about six or seven times in the picture, but all he can say each time is ‘I wish I knew.’ I’ll tell you the truth, Steve, I wish I knew, too. All those locusts crawling all over everybody without any reason. It was very scary.”

  “They just decide to kill humans, is that it?”

  “Yeah. Well, there’s a story besides. I mean, it isn’t all about locusts killing people. There’s a love story, too. Sort of.”

  “What was the love story about?”

  “Well, it’s sort of about this girl who gives the hero two crickets in a cage. For his hearth, you see. You know, crickets on the hearth.”

  “Yeah,” Carella said.

  “Yeah, they make a pun about it, in fact. Instead of ‘hearth,’ they say ‘heart.’ Crickets on the heart.”

  “That’s pretty funny,” Carella said.

  “Yeah,” Hawes said. “So she follows this guy all the way to Kweichow Province—”

  “To where?”

  “Kweichow Province. That’s in Communist China.”

  “Oh, I see.”

  “Yeah, she follows him there with the crickets in the cage, which he wanted as a gift for his aging Chinese nanny. She’s very old—she’s played by this woman who usually plays old Russian ladies, I forget her name. Anyway, that’s why he wants these crickets—it’s a little complicated.”

  “Yeah,” Carella said.

  “Christine thought it was the crickets who were the ringleaders.”

  “Of the locusts?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Maybe so,” Carella said.

  “You think so? How could crickets communicate with locusts?”

  “I’m not sure. How do they communicate with each other?”

  “They rub their front legs together, I think.”

  “Maybe it’s the same with locusts.”

  “I don’t think the crickets had anything to do with it,” Hawes said. “I think they were just a plot device. To get her to China.”

  “Why’d they have to get her to China?”

  “Well, hell, that’s where all the locusts are, Steve. Also, it gave them a chance to ring in a very pretty Chinese girl—what’s her name? You know her, she’s in all the things where they need a Chinese girl. She turns out to be an old girlfriend of the hero’s. She’s teaching in a Catholic mission which the locusts attack near the end of the picture. They eat the priest.”

  “What?”

  “Yeah,” Hawes said.

  “That sounds like some picture.”

  “Yeah, it was. They didn’t show him being eaten, of course. But the locusts were all over him, chewing.”

  “Yeah,” Carella said.

  “Yeah. They had some nice close-ups.”

  “Who was the girl?”

  “Some new girl, I forget her name.”

  “And the hero?”

  “Oh, he’s been around on television. I forget his name, too.” Hawes hesitated. “Actually, the locusts were the stars of the picture.”

  “Yeah,” Carella said.

  “Yeah. They had one scene where there must have been eight million locusts hopping all over everybody. I wonder how they got that scene.”

  “There probably was a locust trainer,” Carella said.

  “Oh, sure.”

  “I saw a picture called The Ants once,” Carella said.

  “How was it?”

  “Pretty good. It sounds a little like The Locusts, though there wasn’t the girl bringing any crickets in a cage.”

  “No, huh?”

  “No. There was a girl, but she was a newspaper reporter investigating this nuclear reactor that blows up out in the country someplace. That’s what makes the ants get so big.”

  “Oh, they were bigger than normal ants, you mean?”

  “Sure.”

  “Oh, well these locusts were their normal size. I mean, there wasn’t any funny stuff with nuclear reactors or anything like that.”

  “No, these were big ants,” Carella said.

  “The Ants, huh? That was the name of the picture?”

  “Yeah, The Ants.”

  “This one was called The Locusts,” Hawes said.

  “The Locusts.”

  “Yeah.”

  They drove in silence into the heart of town. They had been told the day before that The Happy Kids met in a vacant store on East Bond—Lasser could not remember the address. They searched the street now for the store, which they had also been told was unmarked. They found what seemed to be an empty store in the middle of the 300 block, curtained across its door and its wide plateglass windows. Carella parked the car across the street, pulled down the sun visor to which was affixed a handlettered sign advising the New Essex police that this antiquated heap was driven by a city detective on a duty call, and then joined Hawes who came around the car and fell into step beside him.

  They tried to see over the curtains on the front windows but found that they were hung on rods above their line of vision. Hawes went to the front door and tried it. It was locked.

  “What do we do?” he asked. “I don’t see a bell, do you?”

  “No. Why don’t you rap on the glass?”

  “I’m afraid I’ll wake up all the Gypsies,” Hawes said.

  “Try it.”

  Hawes rapped on the glass. He looked at Carella, waiting. He rapped again. He took the door handle and shook the door. “Anybody in there?” he shouted.

  “Don’t take it off the hinges,” a voice said.

  “Ah-ha,” Carella said.

  “Who is it?” the voice behind the door asked.

  “Police,” Hawes said.

  “What do you want?” the voice asked.

  “We want to talk to The Happy Kids,” Hawes said.

  “Just a minute,” the voice answered.

  They waited. In a few moments, the door opened. The man standing in the door frame was perhaps ninety years old, give or take a few centuries. He leaned on his cane and peered out at the detectives malevolently, wheezing air into his sunken chest, his mouth twitching, his eyes blinking.

  “Let’s see it,” he snapped.

  “See what, sir?” Carella said.

  “Your identification.”

  Carella opened his wallet to his shield. The old man studied it and then said, “You’re not New Essex police?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Didn’t think so,” the old man said. “What is it you want?”

  “George Lasser was murdered yesterday,” Carella said. “We understand he belonged to—”

  “What? What did you say?”

  “I said George Lasser—”

  “Mister, don’t joke with an old man.”

  “We’re not joking, sir,” Carella said. “Mr. Lasser was murdered yesterday afternoon.”

  The old man in the door digested this silently for several moments, then nodded his head, and then sighed, and then said, “My name is Peter Maily. Come in.”

  The store was furnished much as Carella had imagined it would be. There was a huge black potbellied stove against one wall, and over it some regimental flags and a group picture of some battle-weary soldiers taken just outside E
l Canay. A dilapidated couch was against the wall opposite the stove, and several stuffed and decaying easy chairs were scattered around the room. A television set was going in one corner, watched by two gloomy old men who barely glanced up as Hawes and Carella came into the room. If Peter Maily and these other two were The Happy Kids, they seemed to dispense a particular brand of somnolent gloom that was uniquely and exclusively their own. If ever there was a club that seemed singularly unclubby, this was it. Carella was certain that a smile on these premises would mean immediate expulsion from the group.

  “You are The Happy Kids?” he asked Maily.

  “Oh, yes, we’re The Happy Kids, all right,” Maily said. “What’s left of us.”

  “And you did know George Lasser?”

  “With us when we took Siboney and, later on, El Canay,” Maily said. “Picture’s up there on the wall, with the rest of us.” He turned to the men watching the television set and said, “Georgie’s dead, fellers. Got it yesterday.”

  A bald-headed old man wearing a checked weskit turned away from the set and said, “How, Peter?”

  Maily turned to Carella. “How?” he asked.

  “Someone hit him with an ax.”

  “Who?” the man in the checked weskit asked.

  “We don’t know.”

  The other man at the television set, straining to hear the conversation, cupped his hand behind his ear and said, “What is it, Frank?”

  The man in the checked weskit said, “Georgie’s dead. Got killed with an ax. They don’t know who done it, Fred.”

  “Georgie’s dead, did you say?”

  “Yep, got killed with an ax.”

  The other man nodded.

  “We were wondering if you could tell us what you know about Mr. Lasser?” Carella said. “Anything that might help us to find his murderer.”

  “Be happy to,” the man named Frank said, and the interrogation began.

  The man who had opened the door, Peter Maily, seemed to be president of the group, which now consisted of three members, himself and the two who’d been watching the television set. The two television watchers were called Frank Ostereich and Fred Wye. Ostereich was secretary of the group, and Wye was treasurer—all chiefs and no Indians, it seemed. There had, however, been twenty-three Indians back in April 1898. Or, to be more exact, there had been twenty-three youngsters who were all in their late teens or early twenties, and they were members of a New Essex social and athletic club called The Happy Kids. It being 1898, there was no juvenile delinquency and therefore the term “social and athletic club” was not a euphemism for “bopping gang.” These happy kids actually had a baseball team and a volleyball team and a rented store—this same store they now rented on East Bond Street—in which they held dances every Friday night and sometimes necked with girls on weekday nights in the back room.