“My mother used to be an actress. Those lines are from Lear.”
“Henry the Fifth,” the old lady corrected. “Fluellen to Ancient Pistol.”
“ ‘Doth fortune play the huswife with me now?’ “ Hawes said suddenly. “ ‘News have I that my Nell is dead i’ th’ spital, Of malady of France; And there my rendezvous is quite cut off.’ ”
“How do you know that?” the old lady asked, turning to Hawes and grinning with delight.
“We did it in high school,” Hawes said.
“Who’d you play?”
“Nobody. I stage-managed.”
“A big man like you,” the old lady said. “You should have been on the stage showing your cock.”
For a moment there was a deep silence in the room. The detectives glanced at each other as though not certain they had heard the old lady’s words. And then Anthony Lasser, without turning to look at her, said, “Mother, please,” and showed the detectives to the door. Behind them, they could hear Mrs. Lasser laughing raucously. The door closed. They stood on the slate walk for a moment. It was late afternoon, and there was a new chill in the air. They lifted the collars of their coats and listened to the sounds of the boy across the street as he pedaled his tricycle on the pavement and fired an imaginary pistol, “P-kuh, p-kuh, p-kuh!”
“Let’s go talk to him,” Carella said.
“Why?”
“I don’t know.” He shrugged. “The old lady was staring at him.”
“The old lady is nuts,” Hawes said.
“Mmm, that’s for sure. What did you think of the son?”
“I don’t know. He could be providing himself with an alibi a mile long.”
“Which is why I was jumping on him.”
“I know.”
“Or, on the other hand, he could be telling the truth.”
“I wish we knew a little more about the old man,” Hawes said.
“All in due time. When we come back with the pictures, we’ll ask our questions.”
“While the corpse grows cold.”
“The corpse is cold,” Carella said.
“So’s the case.”
“What can you do? It’s January,” Carella answered, and they crossed the street.
The boy on the tricycle fired at them as they approached. “P-kuh, p-kuh, p-kuh,” and then braked to a stop, his soles scraping along the pavement. He was perhaps four years old, wearing a red-and-white stocking cap pulled down over his ears. A hank of red hair stuck out of the cap’s front and hung onto his forehead. His nose was running, and his face was streaked with dried mucus where he had repeatedly wiped his nose with the back of his hand.
“Hi,” Carella said.
“Who’re you?” the boy asked.
“Steve Carella. Who’re you?”
“Manny Moscowitz,” the boy said.
“Hi, Manny. This is my partner, Cotton Hawes.”
“Hi,” Manny said, and waved.
“How old are you, Manny?” Hawes asked.
“This many,” the boy said, and held up four fingers.
“Four years old. That’s very good.”
“Five,” Manny said.
“No, that was four.”
“It was five,” Manny insisted.
“Okay, okay,” Hawes said.
“You don’t know how to deal with kids,” Carella said. “You’re five, right, Manny?”
“Right,” Manny said.
“How do you like it around here?”
“Fine.”
“Do you live in this house right here?”
“Yeah.”
“Do you know the old lady across the street?”
“What old lady?”
“The one across the street,” Carella said.
“Which one across the street? There’s lots of old ladies across the street.”
“Well, the one right in the house there,” Carella said.
“Which house?”
“Right there,” Carella said. He did not want to point because he had the certain feeling that Anthony Lasser was watching him from behind his drawn drapes.
“I don’t know which house you mean,” Manny said.
Carella looked across the street at the identical Tudor reproductions, and then he sighed.
“He means, do you know Mrs. Lasser?” Hawes asked, coming to his rescue.
“That’s right,” Carella said. “Do you know Mrs. Lasser?”
“Is she the one in the house across the street?”
“Yes,” Carella said.
“Which house?” Manny asked, and a voice shouted, “Manny! What are you doing there?”
Even before he turned, Carella knew it was another mother. There were days when all you got was mothers, sane or otherwise, and he knew without doubt that this was another mother, and he braced himself and turned just as a woman in a housedress with an open coat thrown over it, her hair in curlers, came marching down the front walk like a chowder society on Pennsylvania Avenue during Easter week.
“What is it?” she said to Carella.
“How do you do, ma’am?” Carella said. “I’m a police detective. We were simply asking your son some questions.”
“What kind of questions?”
“Oh, about the neighborhood in general.”
“Did you just come from the Lasser house across the street?” the woman asked.
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Have you had complaints, is that it?”
“No, no complaints,” Carella said. He paused. “Why do you say that, Mrs. Moscowitz? You are Mrs. Moscowitz?”
“Yes.” She shrugged. “I just thought maybe you’d had some complaints. I thought maybe they were going to put the old lady away.”
“No, not that we know of. Why? Has there been any trouble?”
“Well, you know,” Mrs. Moscowitz said. “You hear stories.”
“What kind of stories?”
“Oh, you know. The husband a janitor someplace in the city, and he goes out every Sunday chopping down trees—God knows where he chops them—and carries them in to sell to his tenants, some funny business there, don’t you think? And the old lady laughing half the night away and crying if her husband doesn’t buy her an ice cream pop in the summer when the Good Humor truck comes around, that’s peculiar, isn’t it? And how about the son, Anthony? Drawing his pictures all day long in that back room overlooking the garden, summer and winter, and never stepping outside the house. I call that strange, mister.”
“He never goes out, you say?”
“Never. He’s a shut-in. He’s a regular shut-in.”
“Who’s a shut-in?” the boy asked.
“Shut up, Manny,” his mother said.
“Anyway, what is a shut-in?” he asked.
“Shut up, Manny,” his mother said.
“You’re sure he never goes out?” Carella asked.
“I’ve never seen him go out. Listen, how do I know what he does when it’s dark? He may sneak out and go to opium dens, who knows? I’m only telling you that I, personally, have never seen him leaving the house.”
“What can you tell us about the old man?” Hawes asked.
“Mr. Lasser?”
“Yes.”
“Well, now there’s another peculiar thing, I mean besides his going out to chop down trees. I mean, this man is eighty-six years old, you follow? That’s not exactly a young teenager. But every Saturday and Sunday, out he goes to chop down his trees.”
“Does he take an ax with him?”
“An ax? No, no, he has one of those saws, what do you call them?”
“A chain saw?” Hawes suggested.
“Yes, that’s right,” Mrs. Moscowitz said. “Even so, even with that saw, cutting down trees is very strenuous work for a man of eighty-six years of age, am I right?”
“Absolutely,” Carella said.
“Certainly, but this isn’t where it ends. Now mind you, there are hearty specimens in the world. I’ve seen men—well, my own father, may he rest in peace, he weighed a hundred eighty pounds, all muscle, God bless him, when he died aged seventy-nine. But Mr. Lasser is not a hearty specimen. Mr. Lasser is a frail old man, but he is always doing very heavy work. Moving big rocks out of his backyard, and pulling up stumps, and painting the house, well, that’s not very heavy work, but still, an old man like him on a ladder, to me it’s very peculiar.”