Bread (87th Precinct)

by McBain, Ed

  “Yes?” Carella said.

  “They won’t be able to tell you anything,” Reardon said. “The other cop already talked to them.”

  “Have any idea what they said?”

  “Me? How would I know?”

  “I thought they were friends of yours.”

  “Well, they relieve me every night, but that’s about it.”

  “What’ve you got here?” Carella asked. “Three shifts?”

  “Just two,” Reardon said. “Eight in the morning till eight at night, and vice versa.”

  “Those are long shifts,” Carella said.

  Reardon shrugged. “It ain’t a hard job,” he said. “And most of the time, nothing happens.”

  Carella treated himself to a long, leisurely lunch at a French restaurant on Meredith Street, wishing that his wife were there to share the meal with him. There is perhaps nothing more lonely than eating a French meal all by yourself, unless it’s eating Chinese food alone, but then the Chinese are experts at torture. Carella rarely longed for Teddy’s company while coping with the minute-by-minute aggravations of police work, but here and now, relieved of routine for just a little while, he wished she were there to talk to him.

  Contrary to the opinion of some male show-business pigs who surmised that being married to a beautiful deaf-mute guaranteed a lifetime of submissive silence, Teddy was the most talkative woman Carella knew. She talked with her face, she talked with her hands, she talked with her eyes, she even “talked” when he was talking, her lips unconsciously mouthing the words his own lips formed as she watched and read the words. They talked together about everything and anything. He suspected that the day they stopped talking would be the day they stopped loving each other. Even their fights (and her silent raging anger was frightening to behold, those eyes flashing, those fingers shooting sparks of molten fury) were a form of talking, and he cherished them as he cherished Teddy herself. He ate his Duck Bigarade in silence, alone, and then drove to Stiller Avenue for his 3:00 appointment with Lockhart and Barnes.

  Clearview, in Calm’s Point, was a section of the city variously labeled “heterogeneous,” “fragmented,” or “alienated,” depending on who was doing the labeling. Carella saw it for exactly what it was: a festering slum in which white men, black men, and Puerto Ricans lived elbows-to-buttocks in abject poverty. Perhaps Mr. Agnew, who had seen one slum and therefore seen them all, had never had to work in one. Carella worked in a great many different slums as part of his everyday routine, and since he was not a milkman or a letter carrier or a Bible salesman, but was instead a police officer, his job sometimes got a bit difficult. If there is one thing the residents of a slum can detect immediately, it is the smell of a cop. Slum dwellers do not like policemen. Being a cop (and naturally being a bit defensive about judgments made on the basis of whether or not a man is carrying a police shield), Carella could nonetheless recognize the fact that slum dwellers, both criminal and honest, had very good reasons for looking upon the Law with a dubious and distrustful eye.

  Many of the cops Carella knew were non-discriminating. This did not mean they were unprejudiced. In fact, they were sometimes too overly democratic when it came to deciding exactly which citizen was in possession of a glassine bag of heroin lying on a sawdust-covered floor. If you were a black or a tan slum dweller, and a white cop entered the joint, the odds were six-to-five that he suspected all non-whites of using narcotics, and you could only pray to God that a nearby junkie (of whatever color) would not panic and dispose of his dope by dropping it at your feet. You also realized that, God forbid, you might just possibly bear a slight resemblance to a man who’d held up a liquor store or mugged an old lady in the park (white cops sometimes finding it difficult to distinguish one black man or one Puerto Rican from another) and end up at the old station house being advised of your rights and subjected to a strictly by-the-book interrogation that would crack Jesus Christ himself.

  If you happened to be white, you were in even worse trouble. In the city for which Carella worked, most of the cops were white. They naturally resented all criminals (and slum dwellers were often automatically equated with criminals), but they especially resented white criminals, who were expected to know better than to run around making the life of a white cop difficult. The best thing a slum dweller could do when he smelled a cop approaching was get the hell out fast. Which is exactly what everybody in the bar did the moment Carella walked in. This did not surprise him; it had happened too often before. But it did leave him feeling somewhat weary, and resigned, and angry, and self-pitying, and sorrowful. In short, it left him feeling human—like the slum dwellers who had fled at his approach.

  A white man and a black man were sitting together in a booth near the jukebox. With the exception of the bartender and a hooker in hot pants (who wasn’t worried about a bust, probably because her pimp had a fix in with the cop on the beat), they were the only two people who didn’t immediately down their drinks and disappear. Carella figured them to be Lockhart and Barnes. He went over to the booth, introduced himself, and ordered a fresh round of drinks for them. Aside from their coloration, Lockhart and Barnes were similar in almost every other respect. Each man was in his early seventies, each was going bald, each had the veined nose and rheumy eyes of the habitual drinker, each had work-worn hands, each had a face furrowed with deep wrinkles and stamped indelibly with weariness and defeat, the permanent stigmata of a lifetime of grinding poverty and meaningless labor. Carella told them he was investigating the Grimm case and wanted to know everything they could remember about the night of the fire. Lockhart, the white man, looked at Barnes.

  “Yes?” Carella said.

  “Well, there’s not much to tell,” Lockhart said.

  “Nothing to tell, in fact,” Barnes said.

  “As I understand it, you were both drugged.”

  “That’s right,” Lockhart said.

  “That’s right,” Barnes said.

  “Want to tell me about that?”

  “Well, there’s not much to tell,” Lockhart said again.

  “Nothing to tell, in fact,” Barnes said.

  “We just passed out, that’s all.”

  “What time was that?”

  “Little after ten, must’ve been. Isn’t that right, Lenny?”

  “That’s right,” Barnes said.

  “And you both got to work at eight, is that right?”

  “Eight on the dot. Always try to relieve Frank right on time,” Lockhart said. “It’s a long enough day without having to wait for your relief.”

  “Anybody come to the factory between eight and ten?”

  “Not a soul,” Barnes said.

  “None of those coffee-and-sandwich wagons, nothing like that?”

  “Nothing,” Lockhart said. “We make our own coffee. We got a little hot plate in the room just off the entrance door there. Near where the wall phone is hanging.”

  “And did you make coffee last Wednesday night?”

  “We did.”

  “Who made it?”

  “Me,” Lockhart said.

  “What time was that?”

  “Well, we had a cup must’ve been about nine. Wasn’t it about nine, Lenny?”

  “Yeah, must’ve been about nine,” Barnes said, and nodded.

  “Did you have another cup along about ten?”

  “No, just that one cup,” Lockhart said.

  “Just that one cup,” Barnes said.

  “Then what?”

  “Well, I went back outside again,” Lockhart said, “and Lenny here went inside to make the rounds. Takes a good hour to go through the whole place, you know. There’s four floors to the building.”

  “So you had a cup of coffee at about nine, and then you went your separate ways, and you didn’t see each other again until after the fire. Is that about it?”

  “Well, we saw each other again,” Barnes said, and glanced at Lockhart.

  “When was that?”

  “When I finished my
rounds, I came down and chatted awhile with Jim here.”

  “What time was that?”

  “Well, like Jim said, it takes about an hour to go through the building, so I guess it was about ten or a little before.”

  “But you didn’t have another cup of coffee at that time?”

  “No, no,” Lockhart said.

  “No,” Barnes said, and shook his head.

  “What did you have?” Carella asked.

  “Nothing,” Lockhart said.

  “Nothing,” Barnes said.

  “A shot of whiskey, maybe?”

  “Oh, no,” Lockhart said.

  “Ain’t allowed to drink on the job,” Barnes said.

  “But you do enjoy a little drink every now and then, don’t you?”

  “Oh, sure,” Lockhart said. “Everybody enjoys a little drink every now and then.”

  “But not on the job.”

  “No, never on the job.”

  “Well, it’s a mystery to me,” Carella said. “Chloral hydrate works very fast, you see…”

  “Yeah, it’s a mystery to us, too,” Lockhart said.

  “Yeah,” Barnes said.

  “If you both passed out at ten o’clock…”

  “Well, ten or a little after.”

  “Are you sure you didn’t have another cup of coffee? Try to remember.”

  “Well, maybe we did,” Lockhart said.

  “Yeah, maybe,” Barnes said.

  “Be easy to forget a second cup of coffee,” Carella said.

  “I think we must’ve had a second cup. What do you think, Lenny?”

  “I think so. I think we must’ve.”

  “But nobody came to the warehouse, you said.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Then who put the knockout drops in your coffee?”

  “Well, we don’t know who could’ve done it,” Lockhart said.

  “That’s the mystery,” Barnes said.

  “Unless you did it yourselves,” Carella said.

  “What?” Lockhart said.

  “Why would we do that?” Barnes said.

  “Maybe somebody paid you to do it.”

  “No, no,” Lockhart said.

  “Nobody gave us a penny,” Barnes said.

  “Then why’d you do it?”

  “Well, we didn’t do it,” Lockhart said.

  “That’s right,” Barnes said.

  “Then who did it?” Carella asked. “Who else could have done it? You were alone in the warehouse, it had to be one or both of you. I can’t see any other explanation, can you?”

  “Well, no, unless…”

  “Yes?”

  “Well, it might’ve been something else. Besides the coffee.”

  “Like what?”

  “I don’t know,” Lockhart said, and shrugged.

  “He means, like something else we didn’t realize,” Barnes said.

  “Something you drank, do you mean?”

  “Well, maybe.”

  “But you just told me you didn’t drink anything but the coffee.”

  “We’re not allowed to drink on the job,” Barnes said.

  “No one’s suggesting you ever get drunk on the job,” Carella said.

  “No, we never get drunk,” Lockhart said.

  “But you do have a little nip every now and then, is that it?”

  “Well, it gets chilly in the night sometimes.”

  “Just to take the chill off,” Barnes said.

  “You really didn’t have a second cup of coffee, did you?”

  “Well, no,” Lockhart said.

  “No,” Barnes said.

  “What did you have? A shot of whiskey?”

  “Look, we don’t want to get in trouble,” Lockhart said.

  “Did you have a shot of whiskey? Yes or no?”

  “Yes,” Lockhart said.

  “Yes,” Barnes said.

  “Where’d you get the whiskey?”

  “We keep a bottle in the cabinet over the hot plate. In the little room near the wall phone.”

  “Keep it in the same place all the time?”

  “Yes.”

  “Who else knows about that bottle?”

  Lockhart looked at Barnes.

  “Who else?” Carella said. “Does Frank Reardon know where you keep that bottle?”

  “Yes,” Lockhart said. “Frank knows where we keep it.”

  “Yes,” Barnes said.

  There’s nothing simpler to solve than an inside job, and this was shaping up as just that. Frank Reardon knew that the two nighttime shleppers hit the bottle, and he knew just where they stashed it. All he had to do was dose the booze, and then let nature take its course. Since one of the watchmen worked outside, any observer would know the minute the Mickey took effect.

  Carella drove back over the Calm’s Point Bridge, eager now to confront Reardon with the facts, accuse him of doctoring the sauce, and find out why he’d done it and whether or not he was working with anyone else. He parked the Chevy at the curb outside the warehouse and walked swiftly to the gate in the cyclone fence. The gate was unlocked, and so was the side entrance door to the building.

  Frank Reardon lay just inside that door, two bullet holes in his face.

  Carella eased the door shut behind him and drew his pistol. He did not know if Reardon’s killer was still in the warehouse. He had been shot twice in his lifetime as a cop, both times unexpectedly, once by a punk pusher in Grover Park and again by a person known only as the Deaf Man. He had not particularly enjoyed either experience, since getting shot in reality is hardly ever like getting shot on television. He had no desire now to emulate Reardon’s present condition; he stood stock-still, and listened.

  A water tap was dripping someplace.

  A fly buzzed around one of the sticky open holes in Reardon’s face.

  On the street outside, a truck ground into lower gear and labored up the hill from the river.

  Carella listened and waited.

  Three minutes passed. Five.

  Cautiously, he stepped over Reardon’s body, flattened himself against the wall, and edged his way past the telephone. The door to the adjacent small room was partially open. He could see a hot plate on a counter and above that a hanging wall cabinet. He shoved the door wide and allowed his gun hand to precede him into the room. It was empty. He came back up the corridor, stepped over Reardon’s body again, and looked into the main storage area. Sodden ashes and charcoal, scorched metal tables, broken hanging light fixtures, nothing else. He kept the gun in his hand, went to the entrance door, and threw the slip bolt with his elbow. Ignoring Reardon for the moment, he went back to the small room in which Lockhart and Barnes had brewed their coffee and tippled their sauce. In the cabinet, he found a fifth of cheap whiskey. He put the gun down momentarily, wrapped part of his handkerchief around the neck of the bottle, a corner of it around the screw top, and twisted off the cap. Chloral hydrate has a slightly aromatic odor and a bitter taste, but all he could smell was alcohol fumes, and he wasn’t about to take a swig of whatever was in that bottle. He screwed the cap back onto the bottle, put the handkerchief back into his pocket, and the .38 back into its holster. He tagged the bottle for later transmittal to the lab, and debated whether or not he should call Andy Parker and suggest that not only had he missed the probable cause of the fire, but he had also overlooked a bottle that most likely contained a sizable quantity of CC13CH0.H20. He went out into the hallway again.

  Reardon was still lying on the floor, and Reardon was still dead.

  The first bullet had taken him in the right cheek, the second one just below his nose, in the upper lip. The hole in the cheek was neat and small, the one below the nose somewhat messier because the bullet had torn away part of the lip, shattering teeth and gum ridge with the force of its entry. Carella didn’t know any medical examiner who would risk his reputation by estimating the size of the bullet from the diameter of the hole left in the skin; bullets of different calibers often left entrance
wounds of only slightly varying sizes. Nor did the size of the entrance wound always indicate from what distance the gun was fired; some small-caliber contact wounds, in fact, looked exactly like long-range shots. But there were powder grains embedded in Reardon’s cheek and around his mouth, whereas there were no flame burns anywhere on his face. Carella guessed he’d been shot from fairly close up, but beyond the range of flame.

  His initial supposition was that Reardon had opened the door on his killer and been surprised by a quick and deadly fusillade. But that didn’t explain the unlocked gate in the cyclone fence. That gate had been padlocked when Carella visited the warehouse earlier today, and Reardon had opened it from the inside with a key from his belt ring. He had locked the gate again before leading Carella to the warehouse, and when the visit was over, he had walked back to the gate, unlocked it, let Carella out, and immediately locked it behind him again. So how had the killer got inside the fence? He would not have risked climbing it in broad daylight. The only answer was that Reardon had let him in. Which meant one of two things: either Reardon had known him and trusted him, or else the killer had presented himself as someone with good and valid reasons for being let inside.

  Just inside the entrance door, Carella found two spent 9-mm cartridge cases, and left them right where they were for the moment. He went to the wall phone and dialed the precinct. He told Lieutenant Byrnes that he’d left Frank Reardon at approximately 1:30 that afternoon, and had returned to the warehouse not ten minutes ago to find him dead. The lieutenant advised Carella to stay there until the Homicide boys, the man from the ME’s office, the lab technicians, and the police photographer arrived, which Carella would have done anyway. He asked if Hawes was back from Logan yet, and the lieutenant switched him over to the squadroom outside.

  “Get anything up at Grimm’s house?” Carella asked.

  “Just one thing that may or may not be important,” Hawes said. “There were no lights on until just before the fire.”