Bread (87th Precinct)

by McBain, Ed

  “Does Charlie Harrod live here?” he asked.

  “He lives here.”

  “Who’re you?”

  “A friend.”

  “What kind of friend?”

  “A girl kind of friend.”

  “What’s your name?”

  “Elizabeth.”

  “Elizabeth what?”

  “Benjamin. You really got a blade in your coat?”

  “Sure.”

  “Let me see it.”

  Hawes reached into his jacket pocket and removed from it a single-edged razor blade with a thin protective cardboard shield over the cutting edge. He did not tell Elizabeth that the blade was a working tool rather than a weapon; in the course of an investigation, he frequently had to open cartons or cut twine or slit the clothing of a bleeding victim.

  “You’re really something else,” Elizabeth said, and shook her head.

  “Is that water running for a reason?” Hawes asked.

  “Yeah, I’m thirsty, that’s the reason,” Elizabeth said. She took a glass from the drain board on the sink, filled it to the brim, and began drinking. But she did not turn off the faucet.

  “Why don’t we go in the other room?” Hawes said.

  “What for?”

  “More comfortable in there.”

  “I’m comfortable right here. You don’t like the accommodations, you’re free to leave.”

  “Let’s talk about Charlie Harrod.”

  “I told you before, there’s nothing to talk about.”

  “Where does he work?”

  “Haven’t the faintest.”

  “Does he work?”

  “I suppose so. You’ll have to ask him yourself.”

  “Where can I find him?”

  “Haven’t the faintest.”

  “You mind if I turn off that water? I’m having trouble hearing you.”

  “If I don’t let it run, it won’t be cold,” Elizabeth said. “Anyway, it’s quiet water, we can hear each other fine.”

  “Who else can hear us, Elizabeth?”

  The question startled her. He had suspected the apartment was bugged from the moment she refused to turn off the tap or go into the other room. She had not moved from her position near the sink, which could mean that the bug was somewhere in the wall cabinet, probably under the wooden trim, and the sound of running water would overwhelm the sensitive mike and obliterate any other sound in the room. But if the apartment was bugged, who was bugging it? And if she knew the location of the bug, why hadn’t she simply ripped it out?

  “Ain’t nobody here but the two of us,” she said, regaining her composure. “Who else could hear us?”

  “Walls have ears these days,” Hawes said, and walked to the sink, and turned off the tap.

  Elizabeth immediately moved to the other side of the room, away from the sink and facing the open window. When she spoke, her voice was directed toward the fire escape. “I’ve got things to do,” she said. “If you’re finished here, I’d like to get dressed.”

  “Mind if I look around a little?”

  “For that, you do need a warrant, mister.”

  “I can get one, you know.”

  “For what? Charlie do something against the law?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Then go get your warrant, man. I sure wouldn’t want no criminal to be escaping justice.”

  “Know a man named Frank Reardon?” Hawes asked, and again the question startled Elizabeth. Facing the open window, her back to him, her arms folded, he saw the slight involuntary hunching of her shoulders, as though someone had suddenly put an ice cube to the base of her neck.

  “Frank who?” she said to the fire escape.

  “Reardon.”

  “Don’t know him,” Elizabeth said.

  “Ever wear earrings?” he asked her.

  “Sure.”

  “Perfume?”

  “Sure.”

  “Ever go downtown, Elizabeth? Like in the neighborhood of Avenue J and Allen?”

  “Never.”

  “Across the street from the big garage?”

  “Never.”

  “Happen to be there last Monday and Tuesday night?”

  “Never been there.”

  “What do you do for a living?” Hawes asked.

  “I’m unemployed.”

  “How old are you?”

  “Twenty-four.”

  “Ever work?”

  “I used to be a waitress.”

  “When was that?”

  “Few years ago.”

  “Haven’t worked since?”

  “Nope.”

  “How do you support yourself?”

  “I got friends,” Elizabeth said.

  “Like Charlie Harrod?”

  “Charlie’s a friend, yes.”

  “Frank Reardon’s dead,” Hawes said, and watched the back of her neck.

  This time she was ready. Without missing a beat, she said, “I don’t know any Frank Reardon, but of course I’m sorry to hear he’s dead.”

  “Tell Charlie when you see him, will you? He might be interested.”

  “I’ll tell him, but I doubt he’ll be interested.”

  Hawes turned toward the cabinet hanging over the sink. “This is Detective Cotton Hawes, 87th Squad,” he said, “investigating arson and homicide, concluding the questioning of Elizabeth Benjamin at exactly”—he looked at his watch—”eleven twenty-three A.M. on Friday, August sixteen.” He turned to Elizabeth. “Make it easier for them,” he said.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Elizabeth said.

  “Tell Charlie I’m looking for him,” Hawes said.

  He unlocked the door, went out into the hallway, and closed the door behind him. Immediately he put his ear to the wood and listened. He heard nothing at first, and then he heard the water tap running, and then nothing again. He did not hear Elizabeth dialing the telephone, but that’s exactly what she must have done, because the next thing he heard was her voice saying, “Charlie, this is Liz. We just had a visit from the fuzz.” Silence. In that moment of silence, Hawes tried to understand what was happening. If they knew about the bug over the sink, they undoubtedly knew the phone would be tapped as well. Yet Elizabeth felt free enough on the instrument to tell Charlie they had just had a visit from the police. Had they unscrewed the mouthpiece and removed the mike? “When will you be leaving there?” Elizabeth asked, and then said, “Wait for me downstairs. I’ll be over in ten minutes.” Hawes heard her replacing the receiver on its cradle. He moved away from the door and went swiftly down the steps to the street.

  She had changed into her street clothes, a short blue skirt, a red-ribbed jersey top without a bra, high-heeled navy-blue patent-leather pumps, dangling earrings, and a red-leather sling bag. She stepped high and fast, and he had trouble keeping up with her. If she wasn’t a hooker, he would eat his shield and his service revolver.

  The streets of Diamondback were teeming with a populace driven outdoors by the heat; however hot it was on the sidewalk, it was hotter inside the tenements. There is no relief in the slums. In the summer you are hot, and in the winter you are cold. Summer or winter, spring or fall, you are infested with roaches and plagued with rats, and you are reminded constantly that you are an animal because you are forced to live like one. If Clearview across the river had been euphemistically named, Diamondback was a true and apt label for an area as deadly as a coiled rattlesnake.

  Hawes walked on the opposite side of the street, following Elizabeth at a discreet distance, never losing sight of her. He walked past pimps in fancy dude threads, and he walked past men who were cabdrivers and letter carriers and sanitation employees; he walked past junkies sitting on the front stoops of boarded tenements and staring vacantly into space, nodding with their dreams of an America realized only in dope fantasies; he walked past candy stores taking numbers bets, and past women rushing home with grocery bags before heading downtown to work cleaning white apartments; he walked past young
girls peddling their asses; he walked past young men in gang jackets and old men sitting on wooden crates, watching their shoes, and young men shooting dice on a hallway blanket, and men who were bootblacks and lavatory attendants and some who worked for ad agencies downtown (but who had trouble getting a taxi uptown after work, unless a brother was a hackie); he walked past short-order cooks and pushers, waiters and train conductors and muggers. He walked past honest men and thieves, victims and victimizers alike, who in their desperation called each other “brothers” though the only thing that linked them together was the color of their skins.

  Hawes did not share the opinion of those who believed that slums were exciting because at least they were alive. The way Hawes looked at it, slums were at least dying, if not already dead. The idea depressed and angered him as much as any assault or homicide would. He wondered why it did not depress or anger those men in high government positions who, instead, seemed to prefer looking away from what was an open, bleeding, possibly fatal wound.

  Go make your speeches on your high podiums, Hawes thought, in your blue serge suit and your polished brown shoes. Promise us equality and justice and tell us how the poorest son of a bitch on our welfare rolls would be considered a wealthy man in a nation someplace that’s just coming out of the Stone Age. Grin, and shake all the hands, and exhibit your smiling wife, and tell us what a tireless campaigner she was, and explain how we are a nation on the edge of greatness. Tell us everything’s all right, pal. Assure us, and reassure us. And then take a walk here in Diamondback. And keep your eyes on that girl ahead, because she is most likely a hooker, and she is living with a man who may be involved in a homicide, and that is America, too, and it isn’t going to change simply because you tell us everything’s all right, pal, when we know everything may just possibly be all wrong.

  The girl stopped on the comer to talk to two men, jostling one of them with her hip, giggling, and then moving on again with her practiced prance, tight little behind wiggling in the short skirt, high-heeled pumps tapping a rapid tattoo on the pavement. On the corner of Mead and Landis, she went into a three-story tenement that had been converted into an office building. Hawes took up position in a doorway across the street. There were three street-side windows on each floor of the building Elizabeth had entered. On the first floor of the building, the middle window was lettered in gold with the words ARTHUR KENDALL, ATTORNEY AT LAW, the flanking windows decorated with large red seals and the words NOTARY PUBLIC. Two of the windows on the second floor of the building had been painted out; the middle window read DIAMONDBACK DEVELOPMENT, INC. The third floor of the building was occupied by a firm that announced itself, in fancy script lettering, as BLACK FASHIONS.

  Elizabeth came out of the building not a moment after she had entered it.

  She came out at a dead run, shoulder bag flying, skirt riding high on her long legs as she ran in seeming panic up the street. Hawes did not try to stop her. He crossed the street quickly and went into the building. A well-dressed black man was lying in the lobby, bleeding onto the broken blue-and-white-tile flooring. His eyes were rolled up in his head and he was staring sightlessly at the naked light bulb in the ceiling. A four-inch-long scar ran jaggedly through the cuts and bruises and open bleeding wounds on his face.

  Hawes figured he had found Charlie Harrod.

  In Roger Grimm’s office, downtown on Bailey Street, Carella did not yet know that another body had turned up in Diamondback. All he knew was that two arsons and a homicide had already been committed, and that Roger Grimm had a police record. (It was true, of course, that Grimm had paid his debt to society. But some debts can never be paid, and a police record is rather like a stray wolf you’ve taken in on a dark and snowy night: it follows you for the rest of your life.)

  Carella had spent all morning in court and was armed with a search warrant, but he preferred not to use it unless he had to. His reasoning was simple. Grimm was a suspect, but he did not want Grimm to know that. And so both men went through a pointless dialogue: Carella trying to hide the fact that he already had a warrant in the pocket of his jacket lest Grimm suspect he was a suspect; and Grimm trying to hide scrutiny of his records, a maneuver suspicious in itself.

  “When did I become a suspect in this?” he asked, straight for the jugular.

  “No one’s even suggesting that,” Carella said.

  “Then why do you want to go through my files?”

  “You’re anxious to clear up this business with the insurance company, aren’t you?” Carella said. “I assume you’ve got nothing to hide…”

  “That’s right.”

  “Then what’s the problem?”

  “I’m a businessman,” Grimm said. “I’ve got competitors. I don’t know whether I like the idea of someone having access to my files.”

  “Consider me a priest,” Carella said, and smiled.

  Grimm did not smile back.

  “Or a psychiatrist,” Carella said.

  “I’m not religious, and I’m not crazy,” Grimm said.

  “I’m merely trying to say…”

  “I know what you’re trying to say.”

  “That I’m not about to run to the nearest importer of little wooden animals and reveal the inner workings of your operation. I’m investigating arson and homicide. All I want…”

  “What’ve my records got to do with arson and homicide?”

  “Nothing, I hope,” Carella said. “Frankly, I’d like nothing better than to go through them and be able to report to your insurance company…”

  “Companies.”

  “Companies, that you’re clean. Isn’t that what you want, too, Mr. Grimm?”

  “Yes, but…”

  “Officially, the warehouse arson is Parker’s case. Officially, the fire in Logan belongs to the Logan police. But the Reardon homicide is mine. Okay, I’m here for two reasons, Mr. Grimm. First, I’d like to help you with your insurance company…companies. That’s why you came to me, Mr. Grimm, remember? To get help, remember?”

  “I remember.”

  “Okay. So if, first, I can help establish your innocence with the insurance people, and, second, get a lead onto the homicide, I’ll go home happy. What do you say, Mr. Grimm? You want to send me home happy, or you want my wife and kids to eat with a grouch tonight?”

  “My books and my correspondence are my business,” Grimm said, “not the Police Department’s.”

  “When Parker gets back from vacation, he’ll probably want to look at them, anyway. And he can get a warrant, if he has to.”

  “Then tell him to get one. Or go get one yourself.”

  “I’ve already got one,” Carella said, and handed it to him.

  Grimm read it in silence. He looked up and said, “So what was the song and dance?”

  “We try to be friendly, Mr. Grimm,” Carella said. “You want to unlock your file cabinets, please?”

  If Grimm had anything to hide, it was not immediately apparent to Carella. According to his records, he had started the import business in January, eight months ago, with a capital investment of $150,000…

  “Mr. Grimm,” Carella said, looking up from the ledger, “the last time we talked, you told me you’d come into some money last year. Would that be the hundred and fifty thousand you used to start this business?”

  “That’s right,” Grimm said.

  “How’d you happen to come into it?”

  “My uncle died and left it to me. You can check if you like. His name was Ralph Grimm, and the will was settled last year, in September.”

  “I’ll take your word for it,” Carella said, and went back to the ledger. He had no intention of taking Grimm’s word for anything.

  The first business transaction listed in Grimm’s books was for the initial purchase of a hundred thousand little wooden beasties back in January. There was a sheaf of related correspondence starting in December, in which Grimm haggled back and forth over the price with a man named Otto Gülzow of Gülzow Aussenhandel Gesellscha
ft in Hamburg. There was also a customs receipt indicating that Grimm had paid an 8-percent duty at the port of entry. There were three separate canceled checks: one for 37,120 marks paid to the order of Gülzow Aussenhandel and totaling approximately 10 percent of the agreed-upon purchase price (presumably to cover Gülzow for the risk of packing and shipping); another for 9,280 American dollars paid to the order of the Bureau of Customs; and the last, a certified check for 334,080 marks, paid to the order of Gülzow, and dated January 18, presumably the date the shipment had been handed over to Grimm. The three checks totaled close to $125,000, the price Grimm had said he’d paid for the first shipment. Everything seemed in order. An honest businessman doing business, legally shipping in his little wooden creatures, paying the import duty, and then selling them to retail outlets all over the United States.

  According to Grimm’s records, the wooden menagerie had indeed caught on like crazy. His files substantiated that there had been orders for the entire first shipment, and payments to his firm (which incidentally was called Grimports, Inc., Carella realized with a wince) totaling $248,873.94, somewhat less than the $250,000 Grimm had estimated but close enough to establish his veracity. There followed another batch of correspondence with Herr Gülzow, during which Grimm argued for a lower price on the next shipment, since he was ordering twice as many little wooden dogs, cats, turtles, rabbits, horses, etc. Gülzow argued back in Teutonically stiff English that no discount was possible, since he himself purchased the carvings at exorbitant prices from peasants who whittled them in cottages here and there throughout the Fatherland. They finally compromised on a price somewhat higher than what Grimm had desired. Again, there was a canceled check for 10 percent of the purchase price, a check to the Bureau of Customs, and a certified check to Gülzow Aussenhandel. Again the total came near to the $250,000 Grimm had stated to be the cost of the second shipment from Germany. This had been the shipment lost in the warehouse fire.