Bread (87th Precinct) (4 page)

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 CC1
₃
CH0.H
₂
0. 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.”

“That may tie in with what I found here.”

“You think it’s the old electric-bulb gimmick?”

“Could be,” Carella said. “I’ve also got a bottle that may or may not have chloral hydrate in it, a pair of spent 9-mm cartridge cases…”

“Oh-oh,” Hawes said.

“Right. We’ve got a homicide, Cotton.”

“Who?”

“Frank Reardon, day watchman here at the warehouse.”

“Any idea why?”

“Probably to shut him up. It’s my guess he doctored the booze the night watchmen would be drinking. Do me a favor and run a routine check on him, will you?”

“Right. When’re you coming back here?”

“The loot’s contacting the clean-up boys now,” Carella said. “Knowing them, I’ll be here at least another hour. One more thing you can do while I’m gone.”

“What’s that?”

“Run a check on Roger Grimm, too. If this was an inside job…”

“Got you.”

“I’ll see you later. Few things I’ve got to tag and bag before the mob arrives.”

“Take your time. It’s very quiet up here right now.”

It was not quiet when Carella got back to the squadroom at a quarter to six. Detectives Meyer and Brown had already come
in to relieve the skeleton team, and they were busy in the corner of the room, yelling at a young man who sat with his right wrist handcuffed to a leg of the metal desk. Hawes was sitting at his own desk, oblivious of the noisy confrontation going on behind him. He looked up when Carella came through the gate.

“I’ve been waiting for you,” he said.

“So
do
you want a lawyer or
don’t
you?” Brown shouted.

“I don’t know,” the young man said. “Tell me my rights again.”

“Jeee-sus
Christ
!” Brown exploded.

“Took a little longer than I expected,” Carella said.

“As usual,” Hawes said. “Who’d Homicide send over? Monoghan and Monroe?”

“They’re on vacation. These were two new guys, never saw them before. What’d you get from the IS?”

Meyer Meyer, hitching up his trousers, walked over to Hawes’s desk. He was a burly man with china-blue eyes and a bald pate, which he mopped now with his handkerchief as he sat on the edge of the desk. “Explained his rights four times,” he said. He held up his right hand like an Indian war bonnet. “
Four
goddamn times, can you imagine it? He
still
can’t make up his mind.”

“Screw him,” Hawes said. “
Don’t
tell him his rights.”

“Yeah, sure,” Meyer said.

“What’d he do?” Carella asked.

“Smash-and-grab. A jewelry store on Culver Avenue. Caught him with six wristwatches in his pocket.”

“So what’s with the rights? You’ve got him cold. Book him and ship him out.”

“No, we want to ask him some questions,” Meyer said.

“What about?”

“He was carrying two decks of heroin. We’d like to know how he got them.”

“Same way as anybody else,” Hawes said. “From his friendly neighborhood pusher.”

“Where’ve
you
been?” Meyer said.

“On vacation,” Hawes said.

“That explains it.”

“Explains what?”

“Why you don’t know what’s going on.”

“I hate mysteries,” Hawes said. “You want to tell me what’s going on, or you want to go back and explain that kid’s rights to him?”

“Brown’s doing that,” Meyer said, glancing over his shoulder. “For the
fifth
time. I’d better go see if he’s making any progress there,” he said, and walked back to where Brown was patiently explaining Miranda-Escobedo to the addict, who kept looking up at him solemnly.

“So what’d you get from the IS?” Carella asked Hawes.

“Nothing on Reardon, clean as a whistle.”

“What about Roger Grimm?”

“He took a fall six years ago.”

“What for?”

“Forgery/Three. He was working for an import-export house at the time, sold close to a hundred thousand dollars’ worth of phony stock certificates before he got caught. Seventy-five thousand was recovered, stashed away in a bank.”

“What about the rest?”

“Spent it. Bought himself a new Cadillac, was living high on the hog at a hotel downtown on Jefferson.”

“Was he convicted?”

“Oh, sure. Sentenced to three years, and a two-thousand-dollar fine. Served a year and a half at Castleview, and was released on parole…Let me see,” Hawes said, and consulted his notes. “Four years ago, this June,”

“How about since?”

“Nothing. Honest as the day is long.”

“Except that all of a sudden he has two fires.”

“Yeah, well, anybody can have a fire, Steve.”

“Anybody can sell phony stock certificates, too.”

“So where do we go from here?”

“I’ve got Reardon’s address from his driver’s license. I’d like to hit his apartment tomorrow morning, see what we can turn up there.”

“Okay. Shall we go together, or what?”

“What’s tomorrow?”

“Friday. The sixteenth.”

“You take it alone, Cotton. I want to get a search warrant before the weekend, and the way the courts are jammed, I’m liable to be there all day.”

“What do you plan to do? Shake down Grimm’s office?”

“Yeah, the Bailey Street place, where he keeps his books. That seems like the next logical step, don’t you think?”

“Sounds good to me,” Hawes said.

“So let’s go home.”

“Half-a-day today?” Meyer called from where he and Brown were still explaining Miranda-Escobedo to the kid.

“So what do you say, sonny?” Brown asked. “You want to talk to us or not?” He was standing in his shirtsleeves near the chair in which the addict sat, his sleeves rolled up over powerful forearms, a huge black man who dwarfed the kid sitting in the chair with his wrist handcuffed to the desk.

“What if I tell you about the scag?” the kid said. “Will you forget about the wristwatches?”

“Now, sonny,” Brown said, “you’re asking us to make deals only the DA can make.”

“But you want to know about those two decks, don’t you?”

“We’re mildly interested,” Brown said, “let me put it that way. We got you dead to rights on the burglary…”

“The robbery, you mean.”

“No, the burglary,” Brown said.

“I thought a burglary was when you went into somebody’s apartment and ripped it off.”

“Sonny, I don’t have time to give you a lecture on the Penal Law. You want the charge to read robbery, well be happy to oblige. You also got a rape or a homicide you want to tell us about, why, we’ll just be tickled to death to listen. But Third-Degree Burglary is what we got you on, and that’s what we’re going to book you for. If that’s okay with you.”

“Okay, fine,” the kid said.

“Now, if you want to cooperate with us,” Brown said, “and I’m not making any promises because that’s expressly forbidden by Miranda-Escobedo…but if you want to cooperate with us and talk about how you got that heroin, why maybe we can later whisper in the DA’s ear that you were helpful, though I’m not making any promises.”

The kid looked up at Brown. He was a skinny kid with a longish nose and pale blue eyes and hollow cheeks. He was wearing dungarees and a striped, short-sleeved polo shirt. The hit marks of his addiction ran up the length of his arm, following the veins like an army of marauding ants.

“What do you say?” Brown asked. “You’re wasting our time here. If you want to talk to us, speak now or forever hold your peace. The sergeant downstairs is waiting to write your name in the book.”

“Well, I don’t see no harm talking to you,” the kid said. “Provided…”

“Never mind ‘provided,’ “ Meyer said. “He just told you we can’t make any promises.”

“Well, I
realize
that,” the kid said, offended.

“Well, fine,” Meyer said. “So shit or get off the pot, will you?”

“I
said
I’d talk to you”

“Okay, so talk.”

“What do you want to know?” the kid asked.

“How about starting with your name?” Brown said.

“Samuel Rosenstein.”

“You Jewish?” Meyer said.

“Yes,” the kid said defensively. “What of it?”

“You stupid son of a bitch,” Meyer said, “why’re you shooting that poison into your body?”