Bread (87th Precinct)

by McBain, Ed

  “Been out tonight?”

  “What do you think? I don’t usually get dressed like this to bring in the milk.”

  “Why do you get dressed like that?” Ollie asked.

  Again, the question was transparent. And again, the girl chose to ignore its implications.

  “I went to a party,” she said.

  “Where?”

  “On Silvermine Oval. Downtown.”

  “What kind of party?”

  “A private party.”

  “Must’ve been a good party,” Hawes said.

  “It was an excellent party,” Rosalie answered, and polished off the remainder of the cognac. Immediately, she poured herself another full snifter. “Would you like to tell me what you’re doing here?” she said.

  “We’re investigating an arson,” Carella said, deciding to play it at least partially straight; they were also investigating the business affairs of Diamondback Development, Inc.

  “Tell us about Oscar Hemmings,” Ollie said.

  “Oscar’s not involved in any arson,” Rosalie said.

  “Nobody said he was. Tell us about him.”

  “He’s a friend,” Rosalie said.

  “Must be a very good friend, to let you list the phone in his name. You got a lease for this place?”

  “I have.”

  “Mind if I see it?”

  “I don’t keep it here.”

  “Where do you keep it?”

  “At my mother’s house. In Riverhead,” she said quickly, and they knew immediately she was lying.

  “Lease in your name?”

  “Of course.”

  “What’d it cost you to redecorate this place?”

  “A lot.”

  “How much?”

  “I forget. I’m very bad on figures.”

  “You must like living up here in Diamondback.”

  “I like it fine.”

  “Must’ve cost you thousands of dollars to fix up an apartment in one of the worst neighborhoods in the city,” Ollie said.

  “Yeah, well, I like it here.”

  “Got a lot of jig friends, have you?” Ollie asked.

  “Listen, Ollie,” Hawes said, “how about…?”

  “Black friends, do you mean?” Rosalie interrupted.

  “That’s what I said, ain’t it?”

  “Yes, I have some black friends.”

  “You must have a lot of them, living in this neighborhood.”

  “I have enough of them,” Rosalie said.

  “White ones, too, I’ll bet.”

  “Yes, white ones, too.”

  “You a call girl, Rosalie?”

  “No.”

  “Then what the hell are you doing in this place, huh? You want to tell us that?”

  “I’ve already told you. I live here.”

  “Where does Oscar live?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I thought you said he was a good friend. How come you don’t know where he lives?”

  “He recently moved.”

  “From where?”

  “He used to live up on the Hill. I don’t know where he lives now.”

  “When did you see him last?”

  “Oh, must be two or three weeks, at least.”

  “Let’s take a look at some of your things, okay, Rosalie?”

  “No, it’s not okay,” she said.

  “Rosalie,” Ollie said, slowly and softly and patiently, “if you are running a whorehouse up here, we are going to hound your ass till we find out about it. Now how about cooperating? We’re not trying to bust up the prostitution racket in this city. We’re working on an arson.”

  “I’m not a prostitute, and I don’t care what you’re working on.”

  “No, you’re just a Vassar graduate, right? Living here in Spade-land for the fun of it, right?”

  “I can live where I like. There’s no law against living wherever I want to live.”

  “Correct,” Ollie said. “Now tell us exactly where you were tonight.”

  “Why?”

  “Because all of a sudden this has become an investigation into illegal prostitution.”

  Rosalie sighed.

  “We’re listening,” Ollie said.

  “Go ahead,” she said, “look through the place. I’ve got nothing to hide.”

  Ollie and Hawes went into the bedroom. Rosalie poured herself another drink, and then said to Carella, “You want some of this?”

  “No, thank you.”

  She sipped at the cognac, watching him over the rim of the glass. In the bedroom, Carella heard drawers being opened and closed. The girl grimaced and jerked her head toward the sound, trying to share with Carella her sense of outrage at this invasion of privacy. Carella gave no sign that he understood what she was trying to convey. The setup, to say the least, stank to high heaven; he, too, believed that Rosalie was a call girl.

  Hawes came back into the living room. He was holding an American passport in his hands. “This yours?” he asked.

  “If you found it in my dresser, it’s mine.”

  Hawes opened the passport and began leafing through it. “Travel a lot, Miss Waggener?” he asked.

  “Every now and then.”

  “Want to take a look at this, Steve?” he asked, and handed Carella the passport.

  Carella studied the page to which it was opened. According to the stamped information on that page, Rosalie Waggener had entered West Germany through Bremen Flughafen on July 25, and had returned to the United States on July 27. Carella looked up from the passport. “I see you’ve been to Germany lately,” he said conversationally.

  “Yes.”

  “How come?”

  Ollie, who had been listening in the bedroom, said in imitation of an SS officer, “I varn you not to lie, Fräulein. Ve know you haff relatives in Chermany.” Ollie, it appeared, was a man of many talents.

  “I do have relatives in Germany,” Rosalie said, half to the bedroom and half to Carella and Hawes, who were watching her intently. “The family name used to be Wagner. It got bastardized.”

  “Vatch your language, Fräulein!” Ollie called from the other room.

  “Do you speak German?” Carella asked, again conversationally.

  “Yes.”

  “And you have relatives in Bremen, is that it?”

  “In Zeven,” Rosalie said. “Just outside Bremen.” The hand holding the brandy snifter was trembling.

  “Well, nothing wrong with visiting relatives,” Carella said, and handed the passport to her. “Short trip, though, wasn’t it?”

  Rosalie took the passport. “I only had a few days,” she said.

  “Vacation, was it?”

  “Yes.”

  “From your job?”

  “Yes.”

  “Where do you work?”

  “Diamondback Development,” she said. “Part time.”

  “What sort of work do you do for them?”

  “Secretarial work,” she said.

  Carella looked at the trembling hand holding the brandy snifter. The fingernails on that hand were long and pointed, and painted an emerald green that matched Rosalie’s gown and slippers. “Oscar Hemmings is a partner in that company, isn’t he?”

  “Yes, he is.”

  “Did he get the job for you?”

  “He recommended me for it. As I told you, he’s a good friend.”

  “Do you work directly under him?” Ollie shouted from the other room, and laughed obscenely.

  “I work for all three partners,” Rosalie said.

  “But only part time.”

  “Only when they need me to take dictation or do filing. Like that,” she said.

  “Sounds okay to me,” Carella said. “How we doing in there, Ollie?”

  Ollie came back into the living room, perspiring. “I thought you lived here alone,” he said to Rosalie.

  “I do,” she said.

  “Then what’re all those men’s clothes doing in the closet and the dre
sser drawers?”

  “Well,” she said, and shrugged.

  “Shirts monogrammed O. H.,” Ollie said. “That’d be for Oscar Hemmings, wouldn’t it?”

  “I suppose so,” Rosalie said.

  “Yes or no?”

  “Yes.”

  “What’s your real relationship with Hemmings?” Ollie asked.

  “We’re engaged.”

  “In what?” Ollie said, and laughed.

  “He’s my fiancé.”

  “Why didn’t you say so in the first place?”

  “I didn’t want to get him in trouble.”

  “What kind of trouble were you thinking about?”

  “You said something about arson.”

  “Well, as you can see,” Ollie said, “we ain’t trying to get him in any trouble at all. Nor you, either.”

  “Mmm,” Rosalie said.

  “We’re sorry to have bothered you,” Carella said. “We’d like to keep in touch, though, so don’t leave the city or anything, okay?”

  “I don’t plan on leaving the city.”

  “What he means is don’t go visiting no relatives in Germany,” Ollie said.

  “I know what he means. Who’s going to pay for having my lock fixed?”

  “What lock is that?” Ollie said.

  “On the door” Rosalie said. “What the hell lock do you think?”

  “Gee,” Ollie said innocently, “that was busted when we got here.”

  It was beginning to look like something—but they didn’t know what.

  They only knew that the case was getting very hot, and the best way to solve a case that’s beginning to sizzle is to stick with it as advised in the Detective Division’s mimeographed flyer titled Investigation of Homicides and Suspicious Deaths: “This is your case…stick with the investigation and don’t do unimportant jobs.” Whether or not the Detective Division would have considered the examination of a World Atlas an “important” job was open to question. But a glance at that book revealed immediately that not only was Bremen close to Zeven (where Rosalie Waggener claimed she had relatives), it was also close to Bremerhaven— where a man named Erhard Bachmann ran a firm called Bachmann Speditionsfirma.

  It may have been coincidental that Rosalie had arrived in Bremen on July 25, and that Bachmann had received payment for packing Grimm’s little wooden beasts the very next day, according to his letter of July 26, written to Grimm. It may also have been coincidental that Charlie Harrod’s gun had killed Frank Reardon, who had worked for Roger Grimm, who was in turn doing business with a firm in Bremerhaven, some fifty kilometers from Bremen. And the biggest coincidence of all may have been that yet another man associated with Diamondback Development had served time at Castleview State Penitentiary while Roger Grimm himself was incarcerated there. Alfred Allen Chase’s first year at Castleview had overlapped Roger Grimm’s last year there. In effect, the men had served concurrent terms for that period of time. All these seemingly related facts may only have been trains passing in the night. But it didn’t look that way to the detectives.

  None of the three had had much sleep, but they had all eaten hearty breakfasts in the 83rd’s squadroom. They were now ready to head out into the city again, in an attempt to unravel some of the knots. They agreed that their telephone drop would be the 87th’s squadroom, and then they left the 83rd. Carella was carrying police photos of Charlie Harrod’s dead body. Ollie was carrying a Polaroid camera, and police photos of the members of The Ancient Skulls. Hawes wasn’t carrying anything.

  It was now 8:30 A.M.

  Elizabeth Benjamin was awake and being fed intravenously because her jaw was wired and she could not open her mouth. Neither could she nod or shake her head in answer to police questions. So Ollie stuck a pencil in her right hand and propped up a pad for her, and then asked his questions. Willingly but awkwardly, Elizabeth wrote her answers onto the pad.

  “These are police photographs,” he said, “of six members of a street gang called The Ancient Skulls. We took these pictures up in the squadroom last night when we arrested these guys, and we’d like you to look at them now and tell us if any of them were involved in beating you up. This is a young man named Lewis Coombs. Was he one of your attackers?”

  “This is a young man named Avery Evans. Was he one of your attackers?”

  “This punk…this young man is named Felix Collins. Was he in on the attack?”

  “How about this one? His name is John Morley.”

  “This one? Jamison Holder?”

  “Here’s the last one. Timothy Anderson.”

  “Okay now, that was very good, Miss Benjamin,” Ollie said, “and I know you’re tired and I don’t want to keep you any longer than I have to. There’s just one other thing I need, and that’s a picture of you. That’s for the district attorney,” Ollie said, “to help in preparing his case against these punks who hurt you so bad. I can take a picture with this Polaroid I got here, but you’re all wired up and all, and I’d prefer having a picture that resembles you more like when you were more yourself, if you know what I mean. Would you have such a picture?”

  Elizabeth watched him out of puffed and swollen eyes, picked up the pencil again, and wrote on the pad:

  Ollie asked the nurse to fetch Elizabeth’s wallet, and when she brought it to him, he gave it to Elizabeth. Both her legs were in casts to the hip, her broken jaw was wired, her broken ribs taped, and there were bandages covering her bruised face and arms. It was only with great effort that she located the snapshot in the plastic gatefold, extracted it, and handed it to Ollie.

  In the photo, she was standing in front of a Diamondback tenement wall, smiling into the sunshine. She was wearing a simple yellow frock and low sandals. She looked quite pretty.

  “Thank you,” Ollie said, “I will show this to the DA.”

  He had no intention of showing it to the DA.

  From a telephone booth across the street from the tenement in which Rosalie Waggener’s sumptuous pad was located, Cotton Hawes called the number listed in the Isola directory and waited for Rosalie to answer the phone. When her voice came onto the line at last, it was fuzzy with sleep.

  “Hello?” she said.

  “Rosalie?” he said.

  “Mmm.”

  “My name’s Dick Coopersmith, I’m from Detroit. I was talking to a man in a bar who said I might enjoy meeting you.”

  “What man?” Rosalie said.

  “Fellow named Dave Carter. Or Carson. Fm not sure which.”

  “You’ve got the wrong number,” Rosalie said, and hung up.

  Hawes shrugged, put the receiver back on the hook, and walked out of the booth. He had only been trying to ascertain whether or not Rosalie was still in the apartment, but he’d figured he might as well take a whack at establishing her occupation at the same time. Some you win, some you lose. He took up position in a doorway some fifteen feet from the phone booth, and hoped Rosalie wouldn’t sleep too late and that eventually she’d come out of the building and lead him straight to Oscar Hemmings.

  In his own squadroom, at his own desk, Steve Carella put in a long-distance call to the prison at Castleview-on-Rawley, and asked to talk to someone in Records. The man who came onto the line identified himself as Peter Yarborough.

  “What can I do for you?” he asked.

  “This is Detective Steve Carella, the 87th Squad, down here in Isola. I’m looking for a record of correspondence to and from a man who…”

  “Who’d you say this was?”

  “Detective Steve Carella, 87th Squad.”

  “Put it in writing, Carella,” Yarborough said. “We can’t answer telephone requests.”

  “This is urgent,” Carella said. “We’re investigating homicide and arson.”

  “What’d you say your name was?”

  “Carella. Steve Carella.”

  “Where you calling from, Carella?”

  “The squadroom.”

  “What’s the number there?”

  “Fr
ederick 7-8024.”

  “I’ll get back to you,” Yarborough said, and hung up.

  Carella looked at the mouthpiece and then slammed the receiver down onto the cradle. The phone rang twenty minutes later. He lifted the receiver. “87th Squad, Carella,” he said.

  “This is Yarborough.”

  “Hello, Yarborough,” Carella said.

  “I wanted to call you back because how did I know you were really a detective?” Yarborough said.

  “That’s right, you did the right thing,” Carella said.

  “I did better than the right thing. I first called Headquarters down there in the city and made sure this number was really the number of a detective squadroom.”

  “You did very well,” Carella said. “Can you help with that record of correspondence?”

  “I’ll try,” Yarborough said. “What was the prisoner’s name?”

  “Alfred Allen Chase.”

  “When was he here?”

  “Started serving his sentence five years ago. Served three and a half.”

  “What were you interested in, Carella?”

  “I want to know if there was any correspondence between him and a man named Roger Grimm, who’s also one of your graduates.”

  “Yeah, we get ’em all here, sooner or later,” Yarborough said dryly. “Any special time period? Some of these lists are a mile long, take me all morning to go through ‘em.”

  “Grimm was paroled in June, four years ago. Can you start there?”

  “Yeah, I guess so,” Yarborough said reluctantly. “Let me get back to you.”

  At ten minutes to 10:00 Fat Ollie Weeks walked into the second-floor offices of Diamondback Development. There were two men seated at the long table in front of the wall of photographs. One of them was Robinson Worthy. The other was a black man Ollie had never seen before.

  “Good morning,” Ollie said cheerily. “Just happened to be in the neighborhood and thought I’d stop by.”

  “Good morning,” Worthy said. His voice was frosty, his eyes wary.

  “I don’t believe I’ve had the pleasure,” Ollie said to the other man.

  “This is my other partner,” Worthy said. “Oscar Hemmings.”