Bread (87th Precinct)

by McBain, Ed

  In corroboration of Grimm’s earlier statement, there were orders from retail stores all over the country for the entire stock on hand, and there was return correspondence from Grimm promising delivery on or about August 12. There was also a new batch of correspondence with Gülzow, ordering another 400,000 of the animals, at a further slightly reduced price, and several letters from Grimm instructing that the shipment should be delivered first to a packing firm in Bremerhaven, since a portion of the previous shipment had arrived partially damaged and he wished to make certain this did not happen again. (Grimm was quick to assure Gülzow that he was in no way holding Gülzow Aussenhandel responsible for the damage en route, but that since precautionary packing measures would be costing him 6,000 marks, could not Gülzow adjust the price on the new shipment to take into account this additional expense? Gülzow promptly replied that his firm “packed quite well the animals,” and that any additional packing Grimm felt necessary would have to be undertaken at his own expense. It was agreed that the animals would be sent to Bachmann Speditionsfirma, a packing house in Bremerhaven, on or about July 15, and that Bachmann would in turn ship them to the United States. Gülzow asked for the customary 10-percent check before sending the goods to Bachmann. There was a canceled check in the files, indicating that Grimm had complied with the request on July 9.

  There was also a sheaf of correspondence with Erhard Bachmann, the Bremerhaven packer, chronologically overlapping the letters to and from Gülzow. The first letter in the Bachmann file outlined the method of packing he proposed to use; the carvings would first be individually wrapped in straw-filled brown paper, and then packed in wooden crates stuffed with excelsior. A condition of the contract with Bachmann (dated July 3) was that he would be held financially responsible for any portion of the shipment that arrived in anything less than perfect condition. Grimm’s letter in reply agreed to the method of packing. The next letter from Bachmann advised Grimm that he had received the 400,000 animals from Hamburg on July 17, and was proceeding to pack them as per instructions. The last letter was dated July 26, and advised Grimm that the animals had been packed and would be shipped aboard the cargo vessel Lottchen leaving Bremerhaven on August 21 and arriving in America on August 28. It further mentioned that Bachmann had been advised through Gülzow that a certified check in the amount of 1,336,320 marks was expected to be turned over to his company representative at the port of entry before delivery of the cargo was made. There was only one puzzling paragraph in Bachmann’s letter. The paragraph said:

  We have today received your payment for packing as per our contract of July 3, for which thank you. Please be assured the cargo will reach you in excellent order.

  Carella searched through the canceled checks again. He could find no check made out to Bachmann Speditionsfirma. He glanced up at Grimm, who was sitting at his desk and watching Carella in silence.

  “This payment Bachmann mentions,” Carella said. “When was it made?”

  “Sometime at the end of last month,” Grimm said.

  “I don’t see a canceled check for it.”

  “It sometimes takes time for checks to clear,” Grimm said. “Payment was made in marks. Where foreign exchange is involved…”

  “Well, this is the sixteenth of August,” Carella said. “It should have cleared by now, don’t you think?”

  “It should have, but it hasn’t. I’m not in charge of international banking,” Grimm said with some irritation.

  “Mind if I see the stub for the check you wrote?” Carella asked.

  “The checkbook is in the top drawer of the filing cabinet on your left,” Grimm said.

  Carella opened the file drawer and took out the company checkbook. “July when, did you say?”

  “I’m not sure of the exact date.”

  Carella had already opened the checkbook and was leafing through the stubs. “Is this it,” he asked. “Six thousand marks made payable to Bachmann Speditionsfirma on July twenty-fourth?”

  “Yes, that’s the check.”

  “He sure got it fast enough,” Carella said.

  “What do you mean?” Grimm said.

  “You sent the check on July twenty-fourth. He acknowledges receipt of it in his letter of July twenty-sixth.”

  “That’s not unusual,” Grimm said. “The mails between here and Europe are very fast.”

  “Are you saying it normally takes only two days for a letter to get from here to Germany?”

  “Two days, three days,” Grimm said, and shrugged.

  “I thought it was more like five days, six days.”

  “Well, I don’t keep track of how long it takes a letter to get there. Sometimes it’s faster, sometimes it’s slower.”

  “This time it was faster,” Carella said.

  “That’s what it looks like. Unless Bachmann made a mistake in dating his letter. That’s possible, too. These Germans pride themselves on their efficiency, but sometimes they make incredibly stupid mistakes.”

  “Like mistakenly dating a letter acknowledging a check, right?”

  “You’d be surprised at the mistakes they make,” Grimm said.

  Carella said nothing. He turned back to the ledger and the file of correspondence. The next sheaf consisted of carbons of Grimm’s letters to the Allied Insurance Company of America and originals of their letters to him. He had apparently begun doing business with them in June, when he had requested a schedule of rates for insuring 200,000 carved wooden animals, worth half a million dollars, while they were awaiting shipment from his warehouse. Allied had written back to ask for verification of the value of the stock, which he had supplied by sending them Xerox copies of the orders he had on hand. They had then informed him that $500,000 was a rather large risk for one company to take, and that they would be willing to share the risk with Mutual Assurance of Connecticut if Grimm was amenable to this arrangement. There then followed several letters in a similar vein between Grimm and Mutual Assurance, and the whole thing was finally settled by the end of June, with Grimm getting his insurance shortly before the second shipment arrived from Germany. There was no record in the files of Grimm having insured the first shipment. It almost seemed he was expecting a fire the second time around.

  “I notice you didn’t insure that first shipment,” Carella said. “The one in January.”

  “Couldn’t afford it,” Grimm said. “I had to take my chances.”

  “Lucky you insured the second batch,” Carella said dryly.

  “Yeah,” Grimm said. “If they pay me. If they don’t, I’m not so sure how lucky I was.”

  “Oh, they’ll pay you sooner or later,” Carella said. He closed the ledger and began copying the addresses, telephone numbers, cable addresses, and Telex numbers of both German firms into his notebook.

  “Later isn’t soon enough,” Grimm said.

  “Well,” Carella said, and shrugged.

  “What’ll it take?” Grimm asked suddenly.

  “What’ll what take?”

  “To get a clean bill of health from you.”

  “I’m not sure my word alone would convince your insurers that…”

  “But it would help, wouldn’t it?”

  “Maybe, maybe not. What would really help is if we caught the arsonist. And the man who killed Frank Reardon. Assuming they’re one and the same, which they might not be.”

  “I think if you went to them and told them I had nothing to do with the fire, they’d release the money,” Grimm said. He was standing just directly to the left of where Carella sat now, looking down at him intently. “Will you do it?”

  “No,” Carella said. “I don’t know who burned down your warehouse, Mr. Grimm. Not yet, I don’t.”

  “How much?” Grimm said.

  “What?”

  “I said how much.”

  The office went still.

  “I’ll pretend I didn’t hear that,” Carella said.

  “I meant how much time,” Grimm said quickly. “How much time will you need
to…?”

  “I’m sure you did,” Carella said. He rose, put on his jacket, and went to the door. “If that canceled check shows up, give me a ring,” he said, and left the office. He had not mentioned Grimm’s police record, and Grimm had not volunteered the information. But then again, if everybody was always totally honest with everybody else, Diogenes wouldn’t have had a job, either.

  Meanwhile, back at the scene of the crime, Hawes was going through the building at 2914 Landis Avenue with a detective from the 83rd Squad, in which precinct Diamondback happened to be located. The detective was named Oliver Weeks. He was affectionately called Big Ollie by his colleagues on the Eight-Three. (He was not so affectionately called Fat Ollie by various despicable types he had busted over the years.) Big/Fat Ollie was both fat and big. He also sweated a lot. And he smelled. Hawes considered him a pig.

  “Looks like he was beat to death, don’t it to you?” Ollie asked.

  “Yeah,” Hawes said.

  They were climbing the steps to the first floor of the building, where the offices of Arthur Kendall, Attorney at Law, were located. Ollie was just ahead of Hawes, puffing up the stairs, a powerful aroma wafting back down the stairwell.

  “Not with fists, though,” Ollie said, panting.

  “No,” Hawes said.

  “Sawed-off stickball bat,” Ollie said. “Or maybe a hammer.”

  “Medical examiner’ll tell us,” Hawes said, and took out his handkerchief and blew his nose.

  “You getting a cold there?” Ollie asked.

  “No,” Hawes said.

  “Summer colds are the worst kind,” Ollie said. “You know this guy Kendall?”

  “No,” Hawes said.

  “He’s a jig lawyer, represents half the punks who get in trouble around here.”

  “Who represents the other half?” Hawes asked.

  “Huh?” Ollie said, and opened the door to Kendall’s office.

  Kendall’s secretary looked up from her desk in surprise. She was perhaps twenty-three years old, a good-looking black girl wearing an Afro cut, a pale blue jumper over a white blouse, her legs bare, her pastel-blue pumps off her feet and resting to the side of her swivel chair. Her surprise seemed genuine enough, but Hawes wondered how she could possibly have missed all the excitement downstairs—a dead man lying on the floor of the lobby, radio motor patrol cars at the curb, the police photographer taking pictures, the assistant medical examiner bustling about, the ambulance waiting to carry the body to the morgue.

  “Yes?” she said, and bent over to put on her shoes.

  “Detective Weeks,” Ollie said, “83rd Squad.”

  “Yes?” the girl said.

  “What’s your name?” Ollie asked.

  “Susan Coleridge.”

  “We got a dead man downstairs,” Ollie said.

  “Yes, I know,” Susan answered.

  “Hear anything happening down there?” Ollie asked.

  “No.”

  “How come? It’s just down one flight of steps there.”

  “I was typing,” Susan said. “And the radio was on.”

  “It ain’t on now,” Ollie said.

  “I turned it off when I heard the police cars. I went out in the hall to see what was happening. That’s when I realized Charlie’d been killed.”

  “Oh, you knew him?”

  “Yes. He worked upstairs.”

  “Where?”

  “Diamondback Development.”

  “Your boss in?”

  “He’s in court.”

  “Keeping you busy these days?” Ollie asked.

  “Yes,” Susan said.

  “So you didn’t see nor hear nothing, is that right?”

  “That’s right,” Susan said.

  “Thanks,” Ollie said, and motioned for Hawes to follow him out. In the hallway, Ollie said, “These jigs never see nor hear nothin.’ This whole neighborhood’s deaf, dumb, and blind.”

  “If she was typing…”

  “Yeah, they’re always typing,” Ollie said. “Or the radio’s on. Or the washing machine. Or something. It’s always something. These jigs stick together like peanut butter and jelly. Nothing they like better than to see us busting our asses.” They had reached the second-floor landing now. The lettering on the frosted glass door at the top of the steps read DIAMONDBACK DEVELOPMENT, INC. Ollie glanced at it sourly, said, “Sounds like a bullshit operation,” and pushed open the door.

  Two black men in shirtsleeves were sitting at a long table near the windows. One of the men was tall and thin, light-complected, with a rather long nose and mild amber eyes. The other was quite dark, a heavyset man with brown eyes magnified by thick-lensed glasses. He was chewing on the stub of a dead cigar. The wall to the left of the table was hung with large photographic blowups of rows and rows of tenements, alongside of which were pinned architectural drawings for what looked like a city of the future. Half a dozen of the buildings in the blowups had large red Xs taped across their faces. The tabletop was covered with eight-by-ten glossies of tenements and empty lots. The heavyset man was holding a stack of photographs of gasoline stations and putting them on the table, one by one, before the amber-eyed man, who then consulted a typewritten sheet. Both of them looked up together as Ollie walked briskly toward the table.

  “Detective Weeks,” he said in his abrupt, direct manner. “This is Detective Hawes. Who’re you?”

  “Alfred Allen Chase,” the amber-eyed man said.

  “Robinson Worthy,” the man with the glasses said, and put down the gasoline-station pictures and shifted the dead cigar stub to the opposite side of his mouth.

  “I’m investigating the murder of Charles Harrod,” Ollie said. “I understand he worked here.”

  “Yes, that’s right,” Chase said.

  “You don’t seem too broken up over his untimely demise,” Ollie said. “Business as usual, huh?”

  “We’ve already called his mother, and we tried to reach his girlfriend,” Chase said. “What else would you like us to do? He’s dead. Ain’t nothing we can do about that.”

  “What kind of job did he have here?”

  “He took pictures for us,” Worthy said, and gestured toward the wall of tenement photographs and then the glossies on the desk.

  “Just went around taking pictures of old buildings, huh?” Ollie said.

  “We’re a development company,” Chase said. “We’re trying to reclaim this whole area.”

  “Sounds like a big job,” Ollie said in mock appreciation.

  “It is,” Worthy said flatly.

  “How much of it have you reclaimed so far?” Ollie said.

  “We’re just starting.”

  “How do you start reclaiming a shithole like Diamondback?” Ollie said.

  “Well, I don’t know as it’s incumbent upon us to explain our operation to you,” Worthy said.

  “No, it ain’t incumbent at all,” Ollie said. “How long’ve you been in business here?”

  “Close to a year.”

  “You sure you ain’t running a numbers drop?”

  “We’re sure,” Chase said.

  “This is just a nice legit operation, huh?”

  “That’s what it is,” Worthy said. “We’re trying to make Diamondback a decent place to live.”

  “Ah, yes, ain’t we all,” Ollie said, imitating W. C. Fields. “Ain’t we all.”

  “And we’re trying to make a buck besides,” Chase said. “Ain’t nothing wrong with the black man making a buck, is there?”

  “Don’t bleed on me about the black man,” Ollie said. “I ain’t interested. I got a black man lying on the floor downstairs, and chances are he was done in by another black man, and all I know is that black men give me trouble. If you’re so goddamn beautiful, how about starting to act beautiful?”

  “Reclaiming the area is a legal, responsible, and proud enterprise,” Worthy said with dignity. “Charles Harrod worked for us on a part-time basis. We have no idea why he was killed or who kill
ed him. His murder in no way reflects on what we’re trying to do here.”

  “Well put, Professor,” Ollie said.

  “If you’re finished,” Worthy said, “we’ve got work to do.” He picked up the glossy photographs of the gasoline stations, turned to Chase, and said, “This one is on Ainsley and Thirty-first. Have you…?”

  Ollie suddenly reached over, clamped one hand into Worthy’s shirtfront, yanked him out of his chair, and slammed him against the wall of tenement blowups and architectural drawings. “Don’t get wise with me,” he said, “or I’ll ram those gas stations clear down your throat, you hear me?”

  “Cut it out, Ollie,” Hawes said.

  “You keep out of this,” Ollie said. “You hear me, Mr. Robinson Worthy, or do you hear me?”

  “Yes, I hear you,” Worthy said.

  “What’d Harrod really do for this bullshit operation?”

  “He took pictures of abandoned tenements that we…”

  “Don’t give me any crap about your development company. You and your friend here probably got records as long as…”

  “That is not true,” Worthy said.

  “Shut up till I’m finished talking,” Ollie said.

  “Let go of him,” Hawes said.

  “Go on home,” Ollie said over his shoulder. His fist was still clamped into Worthy’s shirtfront, and he was still holding him pinned to the wall like one of his own architectural drawings. “The stiff downstairs is mine, and I’ll handle this any way I want to.”

  “I’ll give you thirty seconds to turn him loose,” Hawes said. “After that, I’m calling in to file departmental charges.”

  “Charges?” Ollie said. “What charges? This man is running a phony bullshit operation here, and he’s scared to death I’m going to find out just what he’s covering. Ain’t that right, Mr. Robinson Worthy?”

  “No, that’s not right,” Worthy said.