by McBain, Ed
“You mind if I talk to those watchmen again?” Carella asked.
“Be my guest,” Parker said. “I’m on vacation. I done all I could before I left, and I don’t intend to do anything else till I get back.” He rose, walked to the wall telephone, ripped a piece of paper from the pad beneath it, and began scribbling on it. “Here’re their names,” he said. “Have fun.”
“Thanks,” Carella said, and got up, and started for the door.
Belatedly and reluctantly, Parker said, “While you’re here, you want a bottle of beer?”
“I’m not allowed to drink on duty,” Carella said, and walked out.
The Art Department of Blake, Fields, and Henderson occupied the entire fourteenth floor of 933 Wilson Avenue. George Aronowitz was a short, stubby man in his early forties, totally bald, with a walrus mustache that compensated for the lack of hair on his head. His office was starkly decorated in white—white walls, white furniture, white lighting fixtures—the better to exhibit the various posters, magazine ads, photographs, and bits and pieces of artwork he’d either done himself, commissioned, or admired. All of these were tacked to the walls with pushpins, so that he resembled a stout deity sitting in a stained-glass window or a mosaic niche. He shook Hawes’s hand briefly, folded his stubby fingers across his chest, leaned back in his swivel chair, and said, “Shoot.”
“I want to know all about the fire last night.”
“I saw the flames at a little after eleven. I called the Fire Department and they came right over.” Aronowitz shrugged. “That’s about it.”
“Hear anything before that?”
“Like what?”
“Any unusual sounds outside? Dog barking, car driving in, ash can being knocked over, glass breaking? Anything out of the ordinary?”
“Let me think,” Aronowitz said. “There’re always dogs barking in that neighborhood, so that wouldn’t have been out of the ordinary. Everybody around there keeps a dog. I hate dogs. Rotten, filthy animals, bite you on the ass for no reason at all.”
“I take it you don’t keep a dog.”
“I wouldn’t keep a dog if it could talk six languages and read and write Sanskrit. I hate dogs. Grimm doesn’t have a dog, either.”
“Well, were there dogs barking last night?”
“There are always dogs barking,” Aronowitz said. “Damn things won’t shut up. One of them barks at a moth or something, and next thing you know, some other hound is yapping at him from over the hill, and he gets answered by another stupid mutt, and they keep going all night long, barking at nothing. It’s a miracle anybody gets any sleep around there. And it’s supposed to be an exclusive neighborhood! If I had my way, I’d poison every dog in the United States of America. Then I’d have them stuffed and put on wheels, and anybody who’s a dog lover could buy himself a stuffed one and wheel him around the house, and he wouldn’t bark all night long. God, I hate dogs!”
“Did you, ah, hear anything besides dogs barking last night?”
“Who can hear anything with all those mutts howling?” Aronowitz asked. He was becoming very agitated.
Hawes thought he had best change the subject before Aronowitz began frothing at the mouth. “Let’s try to work out a timetable, okay? Maybe that’ll help us.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, for example, what time did you get home last night?”
“Six-thirty,” Aronowitz said.
“Did you pass the Grimm house?”
“Sure. He’s right next door, I pass the house every day.”
“Everything seem all right at that time?”
“Everything seemed fine.”
“Nobody lurking around or anything?”
“Nobody. Well, wait a minute, the gardener was watering the lawn at the Franklin house across the way. But he’s their regular gardener, he’s there maybe three, four times a week. I wouldn’t consider that lurking, would you? You should see the dog they’ve got, a big Great Dane who comes bounding out of the driveway like a lion, he could tear out your throat in one gulp. God, what a monster!”
“What’d you do then? After you got home?”
“I changed my clothes, and I had a couple of martinis before dinner.”
“Are you married, Mr. Aronowitz?”
“Fourteen years to the same woman. She hates dogs, too.”
“Did she hear anything unusual last night?”
“No. At least, she didn’t mention anything.”
“Okay, you had dinner at…what time?”
“About seven-thirty, eight o’clock.”
“Then what?”
“We went outside and sat on the terrace, and had some brandy and listened to some music.”
“Until what time?”
“Ten o’clock.”
“No strange sounds outside?”
“None.”
“What’d you do then?”
“Well,” Aronowitz said, and shrugged.
“Yes?”
“Well…this is sort of personal.” He hesitated, looked down at his folded hands, and shyly said, “We made love.”
“Okay,” Hawes said.
“We didn’t hear anything while we were making love,” Aronowitz said.
“Okay,” Hawes said.
“Afterwards, we went upstairs. I was getting ready for bed when I happened to look out the window. Grimm’s lights were still on, and the place was in flames.”
“In other words, between the time you got home and the time you went upstairs to bed, nothing unusual happened.”
“Well, yes,” Aronowitz said.
“What?” Hawes said, leaning forward.
“We made love on the terrace. That’s unusual. We usually do it upstairs in the bedroom.”
“Yes, but aside from that…”
“Nothing.”
“Mr. Aronowitz, did you happen to glance over at the Grimm house any time before you noticed the fire?”
“I guess so. We were on the terrace, and the terrace faces Grimm’s house, so I guess we looked at it occasionally. Why?”
“This was after dinner, am I correct? You were on the terrace until about ten o’clock…”
“Well, even later,” Aronowitz said. “We were listening to music until ten o’clock, but after that…”
“Yes, I understand. What I’m trying to find out is whether there were any lights showing in the Grimm house?”
“Lights? You mean…”
“At any time during the night, did you notice lights in the Grimm house?”
“Well…no. I guess not. I think the house was dark.”
“But the lights were on when you noticed the fire.”
“Yes,” Aronowitz said, and frowned.
“Thank you,” Hawes said.
“I don’t get it,” Aronowitz said. “Why would anybody turn on the lights if he was about to set a fire?”
Except in cases of pyromania, where the perpetrator acts without conscious motive, there are very real reasons for arson, and every cop in the world knows them by heart.
Parker had checked out Grimm’s competitors in the brisk wooden-goods trade, and expressed the opinion that none of them had sufficient motive for committing a crime as heavy as arson. Well, even if Carella respected Parker’s judgment (which he didn’t), he’d have been unwilling to accept such a sweeping acquittal. Competition was possibly the strongest motive for arson, and Carella wasn’t about to dismiss Grimm’s business rivals as suspects until he’d checked them out thoroughly himself. Nor was he willing to dismiss insurance fraud (First Comic: “Hello, Sam, I hear you had a big fire in your store last night.” Second Comic: “Shhh, that’s tomorrow night!”) or the destruction of books and records as alternate motives, even though Parker seemed convinced that Grimm was clean. As for extortion, intimidation, or revenge, those possibilities would also depend on what they could learn about Mr. Roger Grimm. For all Carella knew, Grimm may have been hobnobbing with all sorts of criminal types who’d finally decided to m
ake things hot for him. Or maybe there were a dozen people Grimm had screwed in the past, all of whom might have been capable of setting the torch to his house, his warehouse, and also the brim of his straw hat. Carella would have to wait and see.
The remaining possible motive was that someone had set the warehouse fire in order to conceal a crime. (Have you left jimmy marks on the windows and fingerprints all over the wall safe? So what? Just bum down the joint as you’re leaving.) Curious reasoning, admittedly, since Burglary/One was punishable by a maximum of thirty and a minimum of ten, whereas Arsons/One, Two, and Three were punishable respectively by forty, twenty-five, and fifteen—but who can fathom the intricate workings of the criminal mind? And whereas the warehouse fire had probably succeeded in obliterating any evidence of theft, it was highly improbable that anyone would steal an indeterminate amount of wooden animals and then set fire to the remainder of the stock to conceal such petty pilfering. Moreover, if someone had committed a crime at the warehouse and then committed arson to conceal the crime, it was ridiculous to believe he would later burn down Grimm’s house as a cover for the initial cover. Such an elaborate smoke screen was for the comic books.
Which left pyromania.
When Carella first learned about the warehouse fire, he’d thought it might have been set by a firebug, despite the fact that two night watchmen had been drugged—pyromaniacs will rarely go to such limits. But the minute he learned of the second fire, Carella knew for certain they were not dealing with a nut. In all his experience with pyromaniacs, he had never met a single one with any real motive for setting a fire. Most of them had done it for kicks, not always but often sexually oriented. They liked to watch the flames, they liked to hear the fire engines, they liked the excitement of the crowds, they liked the tumult and the frenzy. They ranged in age from ten to a hundred and ten, they were usually loners, male or female, intellectual or half-wit, corporation executive or short-order cook. Two of the pyros he’d arrested were male alcoholics. Another was a hysterical, pregnant woman. Still another said she’d set a fire only because she was suffering menstrual cramps. All of them had picked their fire sites at random, usually because the building looked “safe”—vacant, abandoned, or in a lonely, unpatrolled neighborhood.
Most firebugs were very sad people. Carella had known only one funny firebug during all his years as a cop, and he supposed that one couldn’t have been considered a true pyromaniac at all. He was, in fact, a man Carella had locked up for Armed Robbery. When the man was released from Castleview, he called Carella at the squadroom and told him to come over to his place right away, without his gun, or else he was going to set fire to his own kid brother. His kid brother happened to be thirty-six years old, a man who himself had been in and out of jail since the time he was fifteen. His barbecue, if carried out as threatened, would have caused very little grief up at the old squadroom. So Carella told his Castleview friend to go ahead and set fire to his brother, and hung up. Naturally, the man didn’t do it. But there were many nuts in the city for which Carella worked, and not all of them were in the Police Department, and he was sure that none of them had set Grimm’s fires.
Grimm’s warehouse was on Clinton Street and Avenue L, adjacent to the waterfront docks on the River Harb. The building was made of red brick, four stories high, with a padlocked cyclone fence running completely around it. A man in his sixties, wearing a watchman’s uniform, pistol holstered at his side, was standing inside the gate as Carella pulled up in his Chevy sedan. Carella showed him his police shield, and the man took a key from a ring on his belt and unlocked the gate for him.
“You with the 87th Squad?” he asked.
“Yes,” Carella said.
“Because they’ve already been here, you know.”
“Yes, I know that,” Carella said. “I’m Detective Carella, who are you?”
“Frank Reardon,” he said.
“Do you know the men who were on duty the night of the fire, Mr. Reardon?”
“Yep. Jim Lockhart and Lenny Barnes. I know them.”
“Have you seen them since?”
“See them every night. They relieve me every night at eight o’clock on the dot.”
“They mention anything about what happened?”
“Only that somebody doped them up. Wha’d you want to look at first, Mr. Carella?”
“The basement.”
Reardon locked the gate behind them, and then led Carella across a cobblestoned courtyard to a metal fire door on the side of the building. He unlocked the door with a key from the ring on his belt, and they went inside. After the bright sunlight outdoors, the small hallway they entered seemed much dimmer than it really was. Carella followed Reardon down a dark flight of stairs that terminated abruptly in a basement still flooded with water from the broken main. Half a dozen drowned rats were floating near the furnace. The shattered pipe was one of those huge, near-indestructible cast-iron jobs. It seemed evident to Carella that the arsonist had used an explosive charge on it. It also seemed evident that he had not set his fire in the basement of the building, it being difficult for fires to burn underwater.
“Want to take a little swim?” Reardon asked, and cackled unexpectedly.
“Let’s take a look upstairs, okay?”
“Nothing to see up there,” Reardon said. “Fire done a pretty good job.”
The fire had indeed done a pretty good job, nor was it difficult to understand how $500,000 worth of miniature wooden rabbits, puppy dogs, and pussycats had provided excellent tinder for a blaze of monumental proportions. The mess underfoot was a combination of waterlogged ashes and charcoal, with here and there a recognizable head, tail, or paw. The crates had probably been piled on metal tables, the scorched and twisted remnants of which had been shoved aside or thrown over by the firemen in their efforts to quench the flames. Hanging light fixtures with metal shades, their bulbs shattered by the heat, were spaced evenly across the high ceiling of the room. One of these fixtures caught Carella’s attention because a fire-frayed length of electrical wire was dangling from its bulb socket. He pulled a table over and climbed onto it. The length of wire was an extension cord equipped with a fitting that screwed into the socket ordinarily occupied by the bulb. The hanging wire had been burned short by the fire, but it was reasonable to assume it had once been long enough to reach from the fixture down to one of the tables.
Carella frowned.
He frowned because Andy Parker was supposed to be a cop, and cops are supposed to know that most criminal fires are not started with matches; since the whole idea of arson is to be far away from the place when it bursts into flame, such instant ignition is impractical and dangerous. Parker had mentioned that he’d conducted a thorough search for wicks, fuses, mechanical devices, traces of chemicals—anything that would have caused delayed ignition. But he had not noticed the hanging extension cord, and the only thing Carella could assume was that Parker had been too intent on his vacation to spot what could easily have been a primitive but highly effective incendiary device. He had investigated too many arsons in the past (and he was sure Parker had as well) where the fires had been started by wrapping an electric light bulb in wool, rayon, or chiffon, and then suspending it over a pile of highly inflammable material such as movie film, cotton, excelsior, or simple wood shavings.
With Reardon at his elbow, Carella, still frowning, walked across the room to the light switch near the entrance door. The toggle was in the oN position. This meant that the arsonist, working with a flashlight in the dark, could have screwed in his extension cord, hung his light bulb over the prepared nest of combustibles, walked to the door, turned on the light switch, and left the building—secure that he’d have a merry conflagration in a short period of time.
“Anybody dust this light switch?” he asked Reardon.
“What?”
“Did any of the lab technicians examine this switch for fingerprints?”
“Gee, I don’t know,” Reardon said. “Why?”
&n
bsp; Carella reached into his inside jacket pocket and pulled out a sheaf of evidence tags. From his side pocket, and musing on the fact that a cop in the field is a walking stationery store, he removed a small roll of Scotch tape. He yanked one of the evidence tags from under the rubber band holding the stack together and then Scotch-taped it, top and bottom, over the light switch. “Somebody’ll be here later,” he told Reardon. “Leave this just the way it is.”
“Okay,” Reardon said. He looked puzzled.
“Mind if I use your phone?”
“On the wall outside,” Reardon said. “Near the clock.”
Carella went out into the corridor. Scribbled onto the wall in pencil alongside the phone were the names and numbers of Reardon’s counterparts, Lockhart and Barnes. Carella dialed the Police Laboratory downtown on High Street and spoke to a lab assistant named Jeff Warren, telling him what he thought and requesting that somebody come to the warehouse to dust the switch. Warren told him they were up to their asses at the moment with a pile of dirty clothes from a suspected murderer’s apartment, going through it all for laundry and dry-cleaning marks, and he doubted anybody could get up there before morning. Carella told him to do the best he could, hung up, and fished in his pocket for another dime. He found only three quarters, and asked Reardon if he had any change. Reardon gave him two dimes and a nickel, and Carella dialed Lockhart’s number from the penciled scrawl on the warehouse wall.
Lockhart sounded sleepy when he answered the phone. Carella belatedly remembered that he was dealing with a night watchman and instantly apologized for having awakened him. Lockhart said he hadn’t been asleep and asked what Carella wanted. Carella told him he was investigating the Grimm fire and would appreciate talking to him and Barnes if the three of them could get together sometime later in the afternoon. They agreed on 3:00, and Lockhart said he would call Barnes to tell him about the meeting. Carella thanked him and hung up. Reardon was still at his elbow.
