Bread (87th Precinct) (11 page)

It was close to 6:00 when Hawes got to Diamondback. Two radio motor patrol cars were parked at the curb in front of the building, their red dome lights rotating and blinking. Two patrolmen, one black and one white, were standing on the stoop looking out over the crowd of men and women who had gathered to enjoy another of the city’s outdoor summer spectacles. A plainclothes cop with his shield pinned to the pocket of his jacket was sitting in one of the cars, the radio mike in his fist, the car door open, one foot outside on the curb. Hawes locked his car, and then pinned his own shield to his jacket as he walked across to the building. He climbed onto the stoop, identified himself to the nearest patrolman, and said, “I called in the 10-34. What happened?”

“Lady upstairs is near dead,” the patrolman said. “Ambulance is on the way.”

“Who’s up there now?”

“Lewis and Ruggiero, from the other car, and a Detective Kissman of the Narcotics Squad. He’s the one who got here first. Busted in the door, but whoever did the job was already gone. Must’ve been more than one of them. They messed her up real bad.”

“Who’s that on the squawk box?”

“Detective Boyd, the Eight-Three.”

“Tell him I’ll be upstairs, okay?” Hawes said, and went into the building.

He was stopped on the fifth floor by one of the patrolmen from the second RMP car. He identified himself, and went up to the sixth floor. The patrolman outside 6A glanced at Hawes’s shield and said nothing as he went into the apartment. Elizabeth was lying unconscious on the floor near the kitchen table. Her clothes were torn and bloodied, her jaw hung open, and both legs were twisted under her at an angle that clearly indicated they’d been broken. A man in a brown cardigan sweater was sitting at the kitchen table, the telephone receiver to his ear. He looked up as Hawes came in, waved, and then said, into the mouthpiece, “Got no idea. I busted in because all hell was breaking loose.” He listened a moment, and then said, “All of it, from the phone call on. Right, I’ll talk to you later.” He hung up, rose, and walked toward Hawes, his hand outstretched. He was a tall, angular man with a relaxed and easy manner. Like the other policemen on the scene, he wore his shield pinned to an outer garment—in his case, the left-hand side of his sweater, just over the heart.

“I’m Martin Kissman,” he said. “Narcotics.”

“Cotton Hawes, 87th,” Hawes said, and reached for Kissman’s extended hand.

“Oh,” Kissman said, surprised. “So
you’re
Hawes, huh?”

“What do you mean?” Hawes said, puzzled.

“I was going to call you later today, soon as I got relieved. We’ve got the apartment bugged, I’ve been sitting the wire.”

“Oh,” Hawes said. “You got my message, huh?”

“Loud and clear. And I got the conversation you had with her later, after Harrod was killed. They knew the joint was wired, huh? I should have realized it. We thought the phone mike went dead, but that didn’t explain the waterfall whenever anybody was talking in the kitchen. I told the lieutenant they’d tipped, that the only time they said anything they didn’t want us to hear was in the kitchen. Everything else was either phony leads or routine garbage, like where they planned to go that night, or what they were buying for dinner. I also got some very sexy tapes from the bedroom mike, if you know anybody who’s interested.” Kissman grinned, pulled a pipe and tobacco pouch from the pocket of his sweater, and began filling the pipe.

For the first time, Hawes noticed the holes burned in Kissman’s sweater. Hawes’s father had smoked a pipe, and there were always burn holes in his sweater, not to mention the carpet, the furniture, and on several occasions the drapes. To make matters worse, the Hawes family had owned a Siamese cat with a penchant for eating wool. There had been no valid excuse for that animal’s appetite; she was not pregnant, she had no vitamin deficiencies of which Hawes was aware, she was simply a voracious wool-eating beast. What the coals from his father’s pipe did not accomplish, the cat did. Hawes’s mother once said to his father, “You look moth-eaten all the time.” His father had looked up in surprise and said, “What do you mean, Abby?”

Hawes realized he was smiling only when Kissman, still loading the pipe, said, “Something?”

“No, no,” Hawes said, and shook his head. “Why’s the place wired?” he asked.

“We knew Harrod was a junkie, and we suspected he was a pusher as well. We were trying to get a line on the big boys.”

“Any luck?”

“Not so far. Harrod sent us on wild-goose chases all over town. That’s one of the reasons I figured he’d tipped to the bug. But the lieutenant said no, so who’s going to argue with a lieutenant?”

Kissman struck a match and began puffing great clouds of smoke into the kitchen. Neither of the two men so much as glanced at the unconscious girl. They both knew an ambulance was on the way, and there was nothing they could do for Elizabeth right now—except try to discover who was responsible for her present condition. Besides, there is a curious detachment about police officers confronted with the results of bloody mayhem. Like surgeons performing an operation—the hole in the surgical sheet circumscribing the area of surgery, the rest of the body covered, the lung or the liver or the brain becoming a part somehow isolated from and unrelated to the whole—detectives will often dissociate the victim from the crime itself, throw a sheet over the body, so to speak, so that they can concentrate completely on the specific part requiring their full attention. Elizabeth Benjamin lay hurt and bleeding on the kitchen floor, and the ambulance was on the way, and now the detectives discussed the who’s and why’s and wherefore’s with all the detachment of surgeons peering into an open heart.

“The first I heard of Harrod’s murder,” Kissman said, “was when I picked up the conversation with you and the girl earlier today. You know what I thought? I thought, Great, there goes a lot of hard work up the chimney.”

“Were you listening when the girl called me later?”

“Picked it up on the bug there under the cabinet. Just
her
side of the conversation, you understand. Then I picked up the glass smashing, and I heard these guys busting in on her, and her screaming, and I rushed right over. I’m staked out in an apartment in the next building; we ran our wires up over the roof and
then down the back side. Took me maybe five minutes to get here. I found the girl just the way she is. Whoever broke in had gone out again, probably the same way. At least, I didn’t meet anybody coming down the stairs on my way up. The cars got here maybe two minutes after I did. You the one who sent them?”

“Yeah,” Hawes said. “I didn’t think I could…”

“There she is,” someone at the door said, and Hawes turned to see two ambulance attendants and what he assumed was an intern coming into the room.

The intern bent quickly over Elizabeth, his eyes darting from her bruised and bleeding face to the hanging jaw, over the ripped front of her jersey top and the purple marks on her exposed breasts, and then down to the obviously broken legs. The ambulance attendants put down their stretcher and lifted her gently onto it. Elizabeth moaned, and the intern said, “It’s all right, dear.” He was perhaps twenty-five years old, but he sounded like a man who’d been practicing medicine for sixty years. One of the attendants nodded to his partner, and they picked up the stretcher again.

“How does it look?” Kissman asked.

“Not so great,” the intern replied. “If you want to check in later, I’m Dr. Mendez, Diamondback Hospital.”

“Think we’ll be able to talk to her?” Hawes asked.

I doubt it, that jaw looks broken,” Mendez said. “Give me a ring in an hour or so.” The attendants had already left the apartment. Mendez nodded curtly and followed them out.

“The girl said you’d been in here a few times,” Hawes said. “Was she right?”

“Right as rain,” Kissman said. “Came in six times altogether.”

“She said
four.
”

“Shows how careful we can be when we want to,” Kissman said. “We were all playing a little footsie here. Harrod knew the place was bugged and gave us false leads, and we came in four
times that we let him know about, but two
more
times without letting him know.”

“Find anything?”

“Nothing. Took off all the switch plates, searched the toilet tank, the bedsprings, the ceiling fixtures, you name it. Only place he could have hidden any dope was up his rear end.”

“How about those locked file cabinets in the darkroom?”

“What file cabinets?”

“Under the counter in there.”

“Those must be new.”

“When were you in here last?”

“About a month ago.”

“Let’s bust them open now,” Hawes said.

“I’ll see if the guys downstairs have a crowbar,” Kissman said, and went out.

Hawes walked over to the window. The glass had been completely smashed out and the box of geraniums had been overturned, the soil scattered over the windowsill, the uprooted flowers knocked into the room and onto the floor. Not four feet from the broken window, Elizabeth Benjamin’s blood stained the linoleum. Hawes stared at the blood for a long while, and then went to the phone and dialed the squadroom.

Carella picked up on the third ring. “Where the hell are you?” he said. “I go down the hall for a minute, and the next thing I know you’ve vanished.”

“Didn’t Dave fill you in?”

“Dave got relieved more than an hour ago. Nobody ever tells me anything,” Carella said.

“Somebody broke in on the Benjamin girl and roughed her up,” Hawes said. “She was on the phone with me when it started. I ran right over. I found out who planted the wire up here, Steve. A guy named Kissman from Narcotics.”

“Right, I know him,” Carella said. “Alan Kissman, right?”

“Martin Kissman.”

“Martin Kissman, right,” Carella said.

“Did I tell you Ollie Weeks called?”

“No.”

“You must’ve been down the hall. The ME told him Harrod was killed by several people armed with an assortment of weapons. He was a junkie, Steve.”

“Is that why Kissman had the place wired?”

“Right. We’re going to bust into these locked file drawers as soon as he gets back with a crowbar. What’s going on up there?”

“Nothing much. Nothing connected with this, anyway.”

“You think we should run our own check on Worthy and Chase?”

“What do you mean our
own
check? Who else is running one?”

“Ollie Weeks. I thought I told you that.”

“I must’ve been down the hall. What’s your reasoning, Cotton?”

“My reasoning is if Harrod had tread marks running up and down both arms, his bosses should have noticed, especially in the summertime with short-sleeved shirts. But all they could tell me was that he took pictures for them. Maybe Ollie’s right. Maybe the development company
is
a front.”

“For what?”

“Drugs? Kissman thinks Harrod was a pusher.”

“Even if he was, that doesn’t mean Worthy and Chase knew anything about it.”

“Then why didn’t they tell me he was a junkie? He’d just been killed. What were they protecting?”

“I don’t know. But let Ollie do the digging for us. One thing we don’t need right now is more work.”

“I don’t like Ollie,” Hawes said.

“Neither do I, but…”

“Ollie’s a bigot.”

‘That’s right, but so’s Andy Parker.”

“Yeah, but I
have
to work with Parker, he’s on the goddamn squad. I
don’t
have to work with Ollie.”

“He’s a thorough cop.”

“Hah!” Hawes said.

“He is. There’s a difference between him and Parker.”

“I fail to see it.”

“There is. It’s the difference between crab grass and dandelions. Parker is the crab grass, ugly as hell, and absolutely good for nothing. Ollie’s the dandelion…”

“Some dandelion,” Hawes said.

“A dandelion,” Carella insisted. “Just as ugly as the crab grass, except when it blooms a pretty yellow flower. And don’t forget, you can put it in a salad.”

“I’d
like
to put Ollie in a salad,” Hawes said. “And drown him with oil and vinegar.”

“Let him handle the legwork, Cotton. Did he say he’d be in touch?”

“He should be showing up at the squadroom any minute now. You know what I wish? I wish Artie Brown is there when he starts spewing some of his racial horse manure. Artie’ll knock him on his ass and send him gift-wrapped to his uncle in Alabama.”

“Why’s he coming up here?” Carella asked.

“He thinks I’m on my way in with the Benjamin girl. Tell him what happened, will you? Maybe he’ll go right back home and stick pins in his little Sidney Poitier doll.”

“How bad is the girl?”

“Pretty bad. Looks like they broke her jaw and both her legs.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know. Here’s Kissman now, I’ll talk to you later. Are you heading home?”

“In a little while.”

“I think we’d better meet on this later tonight, Steve. It’s getting complicated.”

“Yeah,” Carella said, and hung up.

There is hardly anything you can’t open with a crowbar, except maybe a tin of anchovies.