Bread (87th Precinct)

by McBain, Ed

  “I’ve been thinking about this guy,” Ollie said.

  “What guy, Ollie?”

  “This guy Oscar Hemmings. The third guy in Diamondback Development.”

  “Oh, yes,” Carella said. “Yes, what about him?”

  “I’ve been thinking if I wait till morning, he’s liable to be not there.”

  “Well,” Carella said, and hesitated. It seemed to him that Ollie had just uttered a choice non sequitur, but he couldn’t be quite certain because he was still half asleep.

  “At his apartment, I mean,” Ollie said. “At the address I have for him.”

  “Yes, there’s always the chance he’ll be out,” Carella said, and looked at the clock again.

  “Unless I go there now,” Ollie said.

  “It’s four o’clock in the morning,” Carella said. “It’s twelve past four.”

  “That’s the idea,” Ollie said. “Nobody’s not home at four in the morning. It’s too late to be out on the town and too early to be getting out of bed. If I go there now, I’m sure to nab him.”

  “Okay,” Carella said. “Fine.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Go there. Go nab him.”

  “You want to come with me?” Ollie said.

  “No,” Carella said.

  “Aw, come on.”

  “No,” Carella said. “Listen, are you crazy or something, waking me up at four o’clock, four-fifteen, whatever the hell it is? What’s the matter with you? You cracked your case, you’ve got your…”

  “Those guys up there bother me.”

  “Why?”

  “Because they’ve got eight hundred thousand dollars in their safety deposit box. Where’d those jigs get money like that if it ain’t dirty money?”

  “I don’t know where, Ollie.”

  “Ain’t you even interested? Harrod worked for them, and Harrod knew Reardon, and Reardon is dead, and Hawes tells me Harrod’s gun killed him. Now ain’t that interesting to you?”

  “It’s interesting. But Harrod’s also dead, and I can’t arrest a dead man for killing another dead man.”

  “Why are all these guys getting knocked off?” Ollie said.

  “The homicides aren’t connected,” Carella said patiently. “You’ve got the punks who killed Harrod, and if Harrod killed Reardon, it was because Reardon knew about an arson in which Harrod may or may not have been…Damn it, Ollie, you’re waking me up! I don’t want to wake up! I want to go back to sleep. Goodnight, Ollie ”

  Carella hung up. Beside him, his wife Teddy lay asleep with one leg twisted in the sheet. She could not, and therefore had not, heard the ringing telephone or the ensuing conversation, and for that he was grateful. He untangled the sheet, and was snuggling up close to her when the phone rang again. He snapped the receiver from its cradle and shouted, “Yes, damn it!”

  “Steve?”

  “Who’s this?”

  “It’s me. Cotton.”

  “What do you want, Cotton?”

  “Did Ollie Weeks just call you?”

  “Yes, Ollie Weeks just called me! And now you’re just calling me! Why don’t you two guys get married and stop bothering me in the middle of the goddamn night? I’m trying to sleep here. I’m trying to get some sleep here. I’m trying…”

  “Steve?”

  “What?”

  “You want to go with him?”

  “No, I don’t want to go with him.”

  “I think we ought to go with him,” Hawes said.

  “You like him so much, you go with him,” Carella said.

  “I don’t like him at all, but I think maybe he’s right,” Hawes said. “I think maybe Diamondback Development has something to do with Roger Grimm’s fires, and I think we’re not going to get anything out of Worthy and Chase right now, but maybe we’ve got a chance to get something out of the third guy if we go up there in the middle of the night and surprise him. I think Ollie’s right.”

  There was silence on the line.

  “Steve?” Hawes said.

  There was more silence.

  “Steve?”

  “Where do you want to meet?” Carella said wearily.

  They met in an all-night diner on Ainsley Avenue at a quarter to five. They sat in a corner booth and quietly discussed their next move. What they were about to do was risky in that they did not have a court order to enter the premises occupied by one Oscar Hemmings at 1137 St. Sebastian, and if Hemmings so chose, he could tell them to run along and go play cops and robbers elsewhere. America was not yet a police state, and the Gestapo could not break down your door in the middle of the night and haul you out of bed. They could question Hemmings, true, because they were seeking information about a crime of which they had knowledge, but they couldn’t question him unless he agreed to being questioned. If he refused, they could tell him they’d be back with a subpoena and he could answer questions before a grand jury, the choice was his, and that might scare him into cooperating. But they didn’t want to go that route with Hemmings, and so they concocted a ruse in the diner, and they hoped the ruse would work. If he bought their story, he might talk to them and reveal something important. If he did not buy it, he was within his rights to slam the door in their faces.

  The ruse they concocted was a good one and a simple one.

  They assumed that Hemmings, being a partner in Diamondback Development, already knew that Charlie Harrod was dead. However, no matter how fast the Diamondback grapevine worked, he probably did not yet know that The Ancient Skulls had been picked up and charged with Harrod’s murder. The several assumptions they had made about Roger Grimm’s warehouse fire were that (a) Reardon had doped the booze the night watchmen later drank, and (b) Reardon had been killed because he might talk about his role in the arson. They knew, in addition, that Reardon had been visited two or three times in the week or so before the fire by two black men—one of whom had been Charlie Harrod; that Reardon had deposited $5,000 into his savings account five days before the fire; and that Elizabeth Benjamin had spent the two nights preceding the fire in Reardon’s apartment, presumably to add a little sexual persuasion to the financial inducement he’d already received. A positive identification of Harrod and Elizabeth would have to be made by Barbara Loomis, who had seen them both. In the meantime, her descriptions seemed to jibe, and so they worked on the assumption that Reardon was the connecting link between Harrod and the warehouse fire.

  What they wanted to know, and this was why they were visiting Hemmings in the early hours of the morning, was why Harrod had been involved in arson. Assuming he had contacted Reardon to engage his services in helping to administer the Mickey, and assuming Reardon had been paid $5,000 for those services, and assuming Elizabeth had been sent to him to sweeten the pot—why had Harrod wanted to burn down Grimm’s warehouse in the first place? What was his motive? Was he working for Diamondback Development or for himself? Worthy and Chase had already said all they would ever say about Charlie Harrod. Good photographer, mother lives alone, girlfriend a bit flashy, blah, blah, blah. Hemmings hadn’t yet told them anything, and now they hoped he would—if their little ruse worked.

  This was the structure upon which they based their plan:

  Hemmings knew that Harrod had been killed.

  Hemmings did not know The Skulls had been charged with Harrod’s murder.

  Worthy and Chase knew both Ollie and Hawes.

  Worthy and Chase had undoubtedly told their partner, Hemmings, about the visit from the two cops, and may have also described them.

  The only cop Worthy, Chase, and Hemmings did not know was Steve Carella.

  This was the scenario they evolved:

  Ollie and Hawes would knock on Hemmings’s door. They would apologize for awakening him so early in the morning, but they had a man with them who, they suspected, had killed Charlie Harrod that afternoon. They would then produce the man, in handcuffs. The man would be rather tall and slender, with brown hair and brown, slanted eyes, an altogether unimpres
sive nebbish, but nobody says you have to look like John Wayne in order to be capable of committing murder. The man in handcuffs would be Steve Carella.

  Ollie and Hawes would tell Hemmings that the man, whose name they decided would be Alphonse Di Bari (over Carella’s objections, since he didn’t think he looked particularly Italian), had claimed he would never have murdered Charlie Harrod, because he was a close friend of his and had, in fact, worked together with him at Diamondback Development. It was essential to the case they had against Di Bari that someone from Diamondback Development either positively identify him as an employee, or else put the lie to rest. Hemmings, of course, would say he had never before seen this Alphonse Di Bari (Carella still objected to the name, this time on the grounds that he didn’t particularly look like an Alphonse). Then the detectives would get sort of chummy with Hemmings and explain how they had tracked Di Bari to his apartment and found the murder weapon there, and Carella (as Di Bari) would protest all along that they had the wrong man, and would beg Hemmings to please tell these guys he legitimately worked for Diamondback Development, that Charlie Harrod had hired him to take photographs of a warehouse belonging to a man named Roger Grimm, please, mister, will you please tell these guys they’re making a mistake?

  Everybody would be watching Hemmings very closely at this point, hoping he would by his manner or by his speech drop something revealing (like perhaps his teeth) the moment the warehouse was mentioned. If he did not react immediately, they would keep hammering at the warehouse story, supposedly enlisting Hemmings’s aid, listening all the while for telltale little clues, actually questioning him while making him believe they were in reality seeking information that would disprove Di Bari’s lie.

  It was not a bad scenario.

  Listen, this was 5:00 in the morning, and they weren’t shooting a picture for Twentieth Century-Fox.

  With Carella in handcuffs (he felt stupid), the detectives went into the building on St. Sebastian Avenue and began climbing the steps to the fourth floor.

  Even at this early hour of the morning, Ollie was no rose garden, but then again, he had never promised anybody he was. Cotton Hawes had a very sensitive nose. He hated firing his pistol senselessly because the stench of cordite almost always made him slightly nauseous. During his naval career this had been a severe handicap, since somebody or other always seemed to be firing a gun at somebody else or other. Ollie did not smell of cordite. It was difficult to place his smell.

  “I thought they renovated this dump,” Ollie said. “It’s a garbage heap, that’s what it is.”

  Yes, Hawes thought, that’s it.

  They stopped outside Hemmings’s door and knocked on it. And knocked on it again. And again, and again, and again. Nobody answered.

  “What now?” Hawes asked.

  “You think he’s in there?” Ollie said.

  “If he is, he’s not letting us know about it.”

  “He should be in there,” Ollie said, frowning. “It’s five o’clock in the morning. Nobody’s not in bed at five o’clock in the morning.”

  “Except me,” Carella said.

  “What do you think?” Ollie said.

  They held a brief consultation in the hallway outside Hemmings’s door, and decided to call off the movie. They removed the handcuffs from Carella’s wrists, and were starting down the steps to the street when Ollie said, “What the hell are we pussyfooting around for?” and went back to the door and kicked it in without another word.

  Carella and Hawes looked at each other. Hawes sighed. Together, they followed Ollie into the apartment.

  “Look at this joint, willya?” Ollie said.

  They were looking at it. They were, in fact, looking at it bugeyed. For whereas 1137 St. Sebastian was a tenement, and whereas the stairway leading up to the fourth floor had been as littered and as noisome as any to be found in the slums, and whereas the chipped and peeling door to Oscar Hemmings’s apartment looked exactly like every other door on the floor, the apartment inside came as a series of surprises.

  The first surprise was a small entrance foyer. You did not ordinarily find entrance foyers in Diamondback. Entrance foyers were for Marie Antoinette. In Diamondback, you stepped immediately into a kitchen. But here was an honest-to-God entrance foyer, with mirrors running around it on all three surrounding walls, optically enlarging the space and reflecting the images of three dumbfounded detectives. Ollie, who was already peeking past the foyer into the rest of the apartment, was thinking it resembled a place he had once seen on a science-fiction television show. Carella and Hawes, who were beside him, weren’t thinking anything at the moment. They just stood there looking like a pair of baggy-pantsed Arabs who had accidentally wandered into a formal reception at the Israeli Embassy.

  To the right of the entrance foyer was a kitchen, sleek with Formica and walnut, brushed chrome, white vinyl tile. The thick pale blue carpet that began in the entrance foyer ran completely through the rest of the apartment. Knee-deep in it, or so it seemed, the detectives waded into the living room, where a lacquered white sectional couch nestled into the right-angle corner of the room, its cushions a deeper blue against drapes the color of the carpet. A huge modern painting, all slashes and streaks, reds, blacks, whites, and varying shades of blue, hung over one section of the couch, illuminated by a pale white sculpted floor lamp operated from a mercury switch at the door. There was a walnut bar lined with glasses unmistakably designed in Scandinavia, glistening against a bottled backdrop of expensive whiskeys and liqueurs. Floor-to-ceiling walnut bookshelves covered the wall opposite one section of the couch, stacked with titles Ollie had meant to read but had never got around to.

  A record turntable, a tape deck, an amplifier and a pair of speakers at either end of the room comprised Hemmings’s stereo system, and one long shelf on the bookcase wall contained at least two hundred long-playing albums and as many tape cartridges. At the far end of the room, serviced through a swinging door that led to the kitchen, was an oval walnut table with four chairs around it. A hanging buffet, waist-high, walnut and black Formica, was on the wall behind the table. A second painting hung just above the buffet, positioned off-center, starkly abstract, repeating the color combinations of the larger painting across the room—red, black, white, and blue.

  The bedroom was spartanly furnished, a low king-sized white lacquered bed with dark blue spread, pale blue carpet growing all around it, pale blue matching drapes at the window, a walnut dresser with a white Formica top, a small, low easy chair upholstered in nubby black, a closet with slatted doors painted white and occupying the entire far wall of the room. The bathroom was entirely white. White tile, white fixtures, white shower curtain, white shag oval rug near the tub, white towels.

  That was it. The apartment had most likely been composed of five rooms before the walls were knocked out and the space redivided. There were now three rooms and a bath, in addition to the small foyer. The renovation had undoubtedly cost Diamondback Development thousands and thousands of dollars.

  “Nice,” Ollie said.

  “Yeah,” Hawes said.

  “Mmm,” Carella said.

  Each man was thinking of his own salary.

  “Let’s check out the closets and drawers,” Hawes said.

  They were starting for the bedroom again when Ollie stopped dead in his tracks. “Somebody’s coming,” he whispered. Neither Hawes nor Carella had heard a thing. They listened now, heard footsteps on the stairs outside, the clatter of high heels approaching the kicked-in entrance door. Ollie had moved swiftly to the left of the door, and was standing against the mirrored wall, pistol drawn. He motioned Carella and Hawes to get out of sight.

  In the hallway outside, they heard a small exclamation of surprise.

  “Get in here,” Ollie snapped.

  A girl stepped into the entrance foyer. She was a tall, attractive redhead, white, perhaps twenty-five years old. She was wearing a long green evening gown and green satin slippers, Cinderella returning from th
e ball at five in the morning to find the place full of burglars, or so it must have seemed to her. “Take anything you want,” she said immediately, “but don’t hurt me.”

  “We’re police officers,” Ollie said, and the girl’s mood and temperament changed at once.

  “Then get the hell out of here,” she said. “You’ve got no right breaking in here.”

  “What’s your name?” Ollie said.

  “What’s yours?” she answered.

  “Detective First Grade Oliver Weeks, 83rd Squad,” he said, and holstered his gun and showed his identification. “I still don’t know your name.”

  “Rosalie Waggener,” she said, and walked past the detectives and into the living room, stepping out of her shoes as she went and padding barefooted to the bar, where she immediately poured herself a brandy snifter full of Courvoisier.

  “You live here, Rosalie?” Carella asked.

  “I live here,” she said wearily, and tilted the snifter to her lips. Her eyes matched the color of the cognac in the glass.

  “Does Oscar Hemmings live here?” Hawes said.

  “No.”

  “The apartment is listed in his name,” Ollie said.

  “Where’s it listed?” the girl asked.

  “In the phone book.”

  “That only means the phone’s listed in his name. The apartment is mine.”

  “Why’d you list the phone in his name?”

  “Because a young girl living alone gets all kinds of phone calls.”

  “Do you get all kinds of phone calls?” Ollie asked.

  His question was transparent to Hawes and Carella—and to the girl as well. A pad like this in the heart of Diamondback spelled only one thing to the cops, and the girl knew exactly what they were thinking. But she chose to ignore the deeper meaning of the question. “I don’t get all kinds of phone calls because the phone is listed in Oscar’s name,” she said simply, and sipped some more cognac.

  “You live here alone?” Ollie asked.

  “I do.”