Bread (87th Precinct)

by McBain, Ed

  “That may tie in with what I found here.”

  “You think it’s the old electric-bulb gimmick?”

  “Could be,” Carella said. “I’ve also got a bottle that may or may not have chloral hydrate in it, a pair of spent 9-mm cartridge cases…”

  “Oh-oh,” Hawes said.

  “Right. We’ve got a homicide, Cotton.”

  “Who?”

  “Frank Reardon, day watchman here at the warehouse.”

  “Any idea why?”

  “Probably to shut him up. It’s my guess he doctored the booze the night watchmen would be drinking. Do me a favor and run a routine check on him, will you?”

  “Right. When’re you coming back here?”

  “The loot’s contacting the clean-up boys now,” Carella said. “Knowing them, I’ll be here at least another hour. One more thing you can do while I’m gone.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Run a check on Roger Grimm, too. If this was an inside job…”

  “Got you.”

  “I’ll see you later. Few things I’ve got to tag and bag before the mob arrives.”

  “Take your time. It’s very quiet up here right now.”

  It was not quiet when Carella got back to the squadroom at a quarter to six. Detectives Meyer and Brown had already come in to relieve the skeleton team, and they were busy in the corner of the room, yelling at a young man who sat with his right wrist handcuffed to a leg of the metal desk. Hawes was sitting at his own desk, oblivious of the noisy confrontation going on behind him. He looked up when Carella came through the gate.

  “I’ve been waiting for you,” he said.

  “So do you want a lawyer or don’t you?” Brown shouted.

  “I don’t know,” the young man said. “Tell me my rights again.”

  “Jeee-sus Christ!” Brown exploded.

  “Took a little longer than I expected,” Carella said.

  “As usual,” Hawes said. “Who’d Homicide send over? Monoghan and Monroe?”

  “They’re on vacation. These were two new guys, never saw them before. What’d you get from the IS?”

  Meyer Meyer, hitching up his trousers, walked over to Hawes’s desk. He was a burly man with china-blue eyes and a bald pate, which he mopped now with his handkerchief as he sat on the edge of the desk. “Explained his rights four times,” he said. He held up his right hand like an Indian war bonnet. “Four goddamn times, can you imagine it? He still can’t make up his mind.”

  “Screw him,” Hawes said. “Don’t tell him his rights.”

  “Yeah, sure,” Meyer said.

  “What’d he do?” Carella asked.

  “Smash-and-grab. A jewelry store on Culver Avenue. Caught him with six wristwatches in his pocket.”

  “So what’s with the rights? You’ve got him cold. Book him and ship him out.”

  “No, we want to ask him some questions,” Meyer said.

  “What about?”

  “He was carrying two decks of heroin. We’d like to know how he got them.”

  “Same way as anybody else,” Hawes said. “From his friendly neighborhood pusher.”

  “Where’ve you been?” Meyer said.

  “On vacation,” Hawes said.

  “That explains it.”

  “Explains what?”

  “Why you don’t know what’s going on.”

  “I hate mysteries,” Hawes said. “You want to tell me what’s going on, or you want to go back and explain that kid’s rights to him?”

  “Brown’s doing that,” Meyer said, glancing over his shoulder. “For the fifth time. I’d better go see if he’s making any progress there,” he said, and walked back to where Brown was patiently explaining Miranda-Escobedo to the addict, who kept looking up at him solemnly.

  “So what’d you get from the IS?” Carella asked Hawes.

  “Nothing on Reardon, clean as a whistle.”

  “What about Roger Grimm?”

  “He took a fall six years ago.”

  “What for?”

  “Forgery/Three. He was working for an import-export house at the time, sold close to a hundred thousand dollars’ worth of phony stock certificates before he got caught. Seventy-five thousand was recovered, stashed away in a bank.”

  “What about the rest?”

  “Spent it. Bought himself a new Cadillac, was living high on the hog at a hotel downtown on Jefferson.”

  “Was he convicted?”

  “Oh, sure. Sentenced to three years, and a two-thousand-dollar fine. Served a year and a half at Castleview, and was released on parole…Let me see,” Hawes said, and consulted his notes. “Four years ago, this June,”

  “How about since?”

  “Nothing. Honest as the day is long.”

  “Except that all of a sudden he has two fires.”

  “Yeah, well, anybody can have a fire, Steve.”

  “Anybody can sell phony stock certificates, too.”

  “So where do we go from here?”

  “I’ve got Reardon’s address from his driver’s license. I’d like to hit his apartment tomorrow morning, see what we can turn up there.”

  “Okay. Shall we go together, or what?”

  “What’s tomorrow?”

  “Friday. The sixteenth.”

  “You take it alone, Cotton. I want to get a search warrant before the weekend, and the way the courts are jammed, I’m liable to be there all day.”

  “What do you plan to do? Shake down Grimm’s office?”

  “Yeah, the Bailey Street place, where he keeps his books. That seems like the next logical step, don’t you think?”

  “Sounds good to me,” Hawes said.

  “So let’s go home.”

  “Half-a-day today?” Meyer called from where he and Brown were still explaining Miranda-Escobedo to the kid.

  “So what do you say, sonny?” Brown asked. “You want to talk to us or not?” He was standing in his shirtsleeves near the chair in which the addict sat, his sleeves rolled up over powerful forearms, a huge black man who dwarfed the kid sitting in the chair with his wrist handcuffed to the desk.

  “What if I tell you about the scag?” the kid said. “Will you forget about the wristwatches?”

  “Now, sonny,” Brown said, “you’re asking us to make deals only the DA can make.”

  “But you want to know about those two decks, don’t you?”

  “We’re mildly interested,” Brown said, “let me put it that way. We got you dead to rights on the burglary…”

  “The robbery, you mean.”

  “No, the burglary,” Brown said.

  “I thought a burglary was when you went into somebody’s apartment and ripped it off.”

  “Sonny, I don’t have time to give you a lecture on the Penal Law. You want the charge to read robbery, well be happy to oblige. You also got a rape or a homicide you want to tell us about, why, we’ll just be tickled to death to listen. But Third-Degree Burglary is what we got you on, and that’s what we’re going to book you for. If that’s okay with you.”

  “Okay, fine,” the kid said.

  “Now, if you want to cooperate with us,” Brown said, “and I’m not making any promises because that’s expressly forbidden by Miranda-Escobedo…but if you want to cooperate with us and talk about how you got that heroin, why maybe we can later whisper in the DA’s ear that you were helpful, though I’m not making any promises.”

  The kid looked up at Brown. He was a skinny kid with a longish nose and pale blue eyes and hollow cheeks. He was wearing dungarees and a striped, short-sleeved polo shirt. The hit marks of his addiction ran up the length of his arm, following the veins like an army of marauding ants.

  “What do you say?” Brown asked. “You’re wasting our time here. If you want to talk to us, speak now or forever hold your peace. The sergeant downstairs is waiting to write your name in the book.”

  “Well, I don’t see no harm talking to you,” the kid said. “Provided…”

 
; “Never mind ‘provided,’ “ Meyer said. “He just told you we can’t make any promises.”

  “Well, I realize that,” the kid said, offended.

  “Well, fine,” Meyer said. “So shit or get off the pot, will you?”

  “I said I’d talk to you”

  “Okay, so talk.”

  “What do you want to know?” the kid asked.

  “How about starting with your name?” Brown said.

  “Samuel Rosenstein.”

  “You Jewish?” Meyer said.

  “Yes,” the kid said defensively. “What of it?”

  “You stupid son of a bitch,” Meyer said, “why’re you shooting that poison into your body?”

  “What’s it to you?” the kid said.

  “Dumb bastard,” Meyer said, and walked away.

  “All right, Sammy,” Brown said, “how’d you get those two decks you were carrying?”

  “If you think I’m going to tell you the name of my connection, we can quit talking right this minute.”

  “I didn’t ask you who, and I didn’t ask you where. I asked you how.”

  “I don’t follow,” Sammy said.

  “Now, Sammy,” Brown said, “you and I both know that two weeks ago there was the biggest narcotics bust we’ve ever had in this city…”

  “Oh, is that it?” Sammy said.

  “Is what it?”

  “Is that why it’s so tough to score?”

  “Don’t you read the papers?” Brown asked.

  “I ain’t got time to read the papers. I just been noticing the stuff is scarce, that’s all.”

  “It’s scarce because the 5th Squad busted a dope factory and confiscated two hundred kilograms waiting to be cut and packaged.”

  “How much is that?”

  “More than four hundred pounds.”

  “Wow!” Sammy said. “Four hundred pounds of scag! That could keep me straight for a year.”

  “You and every other junkie in this city. You know how much that’s worth pure?”

  “How much?”

  “Forty-four million dollars.”

  “That’s before they cut it, huh?”

  “That’s right. Before they put it on the street for suckers like you to buy.”

  “I didn’t ask to be a junkie,” Sammy said.

  “No? Did somebody force it on you?”

  “Society,” Sammy said.

  “Bullshit,” Brown said. “Tell me how you got those two decks.”

  “I don’t think I want to talk to you anymore,” Sammy said.

  “Okay, are we finished then? Meyer, the kid’s ready for booking.”

  “Okay,” Meyer said, and walked over.

  “I been saving it,” Sammy said suddenly.

  “How’s that?”

  “I been a junkie for almost three years now. I know there’s good times and bad, and I always keep a little hid away. That was the last of it, those two decks. You think I’d’ve busted a store window if I wasn’t desperate? Prices are skyrocketing, it’s like a regular junk inflation. Listen, don’t you think I know we’re in for a couple of bad weeks here?”

  “Couple of bad months is more like it,” Meyer said.

  “Months?” Sammy said, and fell silent, and looked up at the two detectives. “Months?” he said again, and blinked his eyes. “That can’t be. I mean…what’s a person supposed to do if he can’t…? I mean, what’s gonna happen to me?”

  “You’re going to break your habit, Sammy,” Brown said. “In jail. Cold turkey.”

  “What’ll they give me for the burglary?” Sammy asked. His voice was quite low now; he seemed drained of all energy.

  “Ten years,” Brown said.

  “Is this a first offense?” Meyer asked.

  “Yeah. I usually…I usually get money from my parents, you know? I mean, enough to get me through the week. I don’t have to steal, they help me out, you know? But the prices are so high, and the junk is so lousy…I mean, you’re paying twice as much for half the quality, it’s terrible, I mean it. I know guys who’re shooting all kinds of shit in their arms. It’s a bad scene, I got to tell you.”

  “How old are you, Sammy?” Meyer asked.

  “Me? I’ll be twenty on the sixth of September.”

  Meyer shook his head and walked away. Brown unlocked the handcuff and led Sammy out of the squadroom, to where he would be booked for Third-Degree Burglary at the muster desk downstairs. He had told them nothing new.

  “So now what?” Meyer said to Carella. “Now we book him on the smash-and-grab, and he’ll be convicted, of course, and what did we accomplish? We sent another addict to prison. That’s like sending diabetics to prison.” He shook his head again and, almost to himself, said, “A nice Jewish boy.”

  Frank Reardon had lived in an eight-story building on Avenue J, across the street from a huge multilevel parking lot. On Friday morning the electric company was tearing up the street outside in an attempt to get at some underground cables, and cars were stalled all up and down the avenue as Hawes rang the bell to the superintendent’s apartment. The apartment was on street level, at the far end of a narrow alley on the left-hand side of the building. Even here, insulated from the street outside, Hawes could hear the insistent stutter of the pneumatic drills, the impatient honking of horns, the shouts of the motorists, the angry retorts of the men tearing up the street. He rang the bell again, unable to hear anything over the din and wondered if it was working.

  The door opened suddenly. The woman standing there in the shaded doorway to the apartment was perhaps forty-five years old, a blond slattern wearing only a soiled pink slip and fluffy pink house slippers. She looked up at Hawes out of pale, cool green eyes, flicked an ash from her cigarette, and said, “Yeah?”

  “Detective Hawes,” he said, “87th Squad. I’m looking for the super.”

  “I’m his wife,” the woman said. She dragged on her cigarette, let out a stream of smoke, studied Hawes again, and said, “Mind showing me your badge?”

  Hawes took out his wallet and opened it to where his shield was pinned to the leather opposite a Lucite-encased identification card. “Is your husband home?” he asked.

  “He’s downtown picking up some hardware,” the woman said. “What can I do for you?”

  “I’m investigating a homicide,” Hawes said. “I’d like to take a look at Frank Reardon’s apartment.”

  “He kill somebody?” the woman asked.

  “The other way around.”

  “Figures,” she said knowingly. “Let me put something on, and get the key.”

  She went back into the apartment without closing the door. Hawes waited outside in the cool alleyway. The forecasters had predicted a high of ninety-four degrees, a humidity reading of 81 percent, and an unsatisfactory air-pollution level. On the street outside, the motorists were honking and yelling, and the drills were yammering. Through the open doorway, Hawes saw the woman pull the slip over her head. She had been naked under the garment, and she moved silently across the room now, her body flashing white as she receded deeper into the dimness. When she came back to the doorway, her hair was combed and she had put on fresh lipstick, a short green cotton smock, and white sandals.

  “Ready?” she said.

  He followed her out of the alley into the sudden blinding heat of the day, and then to the front door of the building and up the stairs to the third floor. The woman said nothing. The hallways and the steps were scrupulously clean and smelled of Lysol. At 10:00 in the morning the building was silent. The woman stopped outside an apartment marked with the brass numerals 34. As she unlocked the door, she said, “How’d he get killed?”

  “Someone shot him,” Hawes said.

  “Figures,” the woman said, and opened the door, and led him into the apartment.

  “He live here alone?” Hawes asked.

  “All alone,” the woman said.

  There were three rooms in the apartment: a kitchen, a living room, and a bedroom. Except for some dir
ty dishes in the sink and a bed that had been hastily made, the apartment was neat and clean. Hawes raised the shades on both living-room windows, and sunlight streamed into the room “What’d you say your name was?” the woman asked.

  “Detective Hawes.”

  “I’m Barbara Loomis,” she said.

  The living room was sparsely and inexpensively furnished: a couch, an easy chair, a standing floor lamp, a television set. An imitation oil painting of a shepherd and a dog in a pastoral landscape hung over the couch. An ashtray with several cigar butts in it was on the coffee table.

  Barbara sat in one of the easy chairs and crossed her legs. “Where’d you get that white streak in your hair?” she asked.

  “I was stabbed by a building superintendent,” Hawes said.

  “Really?” Barbara said, and laughed unexpectedly. “You just can’t trust supers,” she said, still laughing. “Nor their wives, either,” she added, and looked at Hawes.

  “Did Reardon smoke cigars?” he asked.

  “I don’t know what he smoked,” Barbara said. “I still don’t see why it’s white.”

  “They had to shave the hair to get at the wound. It grew back white.”

  “It’s cute,” Barbara said.

  Hawes went out of the living room and into the bedroom. Barbara stayed in the easy chair, watching him through the doorframe. There was a bed, a dresser, an end table with a lamp on it, and a straight-backed chair over which was draped a striped sports shirt. A package of Camel cigarettes and a matchbook advertising an art school were in the pocket of the shirt. The bed was covered with a white chenille spread. Hawes pulled back the spread and looked at the pillows. There were lipstick stains on one of them. He went to what he assumed was the closet, and opened the door. Four suits, a sports jacket, and two pairs of slacks were hanging on the wooden bar. A pair of brown shoes and a pair of black shoes were on the floor. A blue woolen bathrobe was hanging on the door hook. On the shelf above the bar, there was a blue peaked cap and a gray fedora. Hawes closed the door and went to the dresser. Opening the top drawer, he asked, “How long was Reardon living here?”

  “Moved in about a year ago,” Barbara said.

  “What kind of a tenant was he?”

  “Quiet, for the most part. Brought women in every now and then, but who cared about that? Man’s entitled to a little comfort every now and then, don’t you think?”