Bread (87th Precinct) (12 page)

Hawes, Kissman, and Detective Boyd of the Eight-Three utilized a sort of nonstop approach in prying open the locked drawers in Harrod’s darkroom. Instead of prying one open, and then examining its contents, they opened the entire lot en masse, six drawers in all, and then sat down to examine the contents at their leisure. It took them ten minutes to open the drawers, and nearly an hour and ten minutes to go through the contents. Because the only light in the darkroom was furnished by the red bulb hanging over the counter, they carried all six drawers into the bedroom, and turned on the overhead fixture, and sat among and between the drawers like kids rummaging through old furniture and clothes in the attic of an old house on a rainy day. Outside, the street noises began to diminish—this was the dinner hour in Diamondback.

Charlie Harrod had been a busy person.

So had Elizabeth Benjamin.

Part of Harrod’s busy-ness had to do with the taking of drugs. If there had been any doubts left by the medical examiner’s report as to whether or not Charlie had been an addict, these all vanished when the detectives went through the contents of the first drawer. In an empty cigar box in that drawer, they found a hypodermic syringe, a teaspoon with the bottom of the bowl blackened and the handle bent, and half a dozen books of matches. Hidden in the barrel of a two-cell flashlight, they found three
glassine bags of a powdery white substance they assumed to be heroin. In a second empty cigar box in that same drawer, and presumably kept as insurance against hard times, they found a safety pin, an eyedropper, and a sooty bottle cap fitted into a looped piece of copper wire. The bottle cap was a makeshift spoon, used to heat and dissolve the heroin with water; the safety pin was used for puncturing the vein; the eyedropper was used for injecting the drug into the bloodstream—very primitive, but very effective if the monkey was on your back and your syringe was broken and you’d run out of kitchen utensils.

Further back in the drawer they found a collection of books, pamphlets, and magazine and newspaper clippings relating to drugs and drug abuse, including one reprinted from the monthly police magazine to which most cops in the city subscribed. A separate manila folder contained a file of newspaper clippings reporting seizures of large shipments of heroin, arrests of pushers, police drives against the narcotics traffic, and what appeared to be a page Xeroxed from a text on toxicology, outlining the symptoms of alkaloid poisoning and its antidotes. There was nothing in the first drawer to indicate that Harrod had been dealing. The stash of heroin was minuscule, the amount an addict might normally keep on hand to avoid running short. Whereas the law in this city stated that possession of more than two ounces of heroin created rebuttable presumption of intent to sell, none of the detectives believed there was enough dope hidden in Harrod’s flashlight to support such an allegation.

The remaining five drawers were packed with manila folders, labeled and cataloged alphabetically. From the way each of the separate manila folders was labeled, one might have suspected that the late Charlie Harrod’s tastes had run to matters literary, theatrical, mythological, historical, linguistic, instructional, and religious. A sampling of the white labels pasted to the tabs on
the folders revealed, for example, such diversified titles as
SNOW WHITE AND THE SEVEN DWARFS
, and
LASSIE
, and
THE TROJAN WARS,
and
INFANT AND CHILD CARE,
and
THE GOLDEN FLEECE,
and
TARZAN OF THE APES,
and
THE JOYS OF YIDDISH,
and
ZOO STORY,
and
THE BERLITZ SELF-TEACHER
(
French
), and
WAR AND PEACE,
and
THE RISE AND FALL OF THE THIRD REICH,
and even the
HOLY BIBLE.
One look at the contents of the folders, however, revealed what the titles really meant, and showed besides that Charlie Harrod had possessed a certain perverse sense of humor-The folders contained photographs.

Some of the photographs were obviously recent and had probably been taken by Charlie himself, here in his own apartment—in the bedroom primarily, but also in the living room, the kitchen, and (in one remarkable series) on the fire escape outside. Some of the photographs were enlarged prints of pictures taken decades ago—the costumes identifying the separate eras, telltale cracks, rips and fade marks indicating sources other than Charlie’s own camera.

All of the photographs were pornographic.

They depicted every conceivable sex act ever committed, devised, or imagined by and for humans and animals of every age, color, stripe, or persuasion in duets, trios, quartets, quintets, sextets (of course), crowds, mobs, tribes, or (as it seemed in one of the pictures) entire nations—performed with or without restraints, mechanical appliances, tools, gadgets, instruments of torture, or benefit of clergy. Since all of the photographs were marked with price tags, it was reasonable to assume that Charlie had been something more than a casual collector. In fact, it was almost mandatory to assume that Charlie’s expensive clothes and automobile were direct residuals of his penchant for photography. An important part of his busy-ness then (or business, if you prefer) was the peddling of porn. Nor had Elizabeth Benjamin been
lying when she’d stated she was not a hooker. Elizabeth Benjamin was a photographer’s model. At least two-thirds of the pictures in Charlie’s gallery featured Elizabeth as performer in a variety of roles. Her repertoire was apparently unlimited, her poses unselfconscious and unabashed, her star quality evident.

And so the dinner hour passed pleasantly, and dusk settled on the city as Kissman, Boyd, and Hawes spent a quiet interlude looking at dirty pictures, each man knowing at last what it felt like to be a member of a censorship board who, compelled to read all sorts of filthy books in the service of the community, finally determines which of those are too vile to be permitted space on the shelves of the public library.

The experience was purifying.

Steve Carella was beginning to feel like an accountant.

It was now twenty minutes to 8:00, and Ollie Weeks had arrived at the squadroom almost two hours ago with quite a bit of information on the firm called Diamondback Development, Inc., run by two gentlemen named Robinson Worthy and Alfred Allen Chase. Ollie had apparently done some thorough digging since the time he’d left Worthy and Chase with a promise to look into their company operations and the time he’d phoned Hawes to say, “I found out a few things about our friends Worthy and Chase,” a choice bit of meiosis, if ever there’d been one. Actually, Ollie had done some fine and fancy footwork in those few hours before most business offices closed for the day, proof positive that fat men are light on their feet and good dancers besides.

He had, of course, been running his case by the book, and the book dictated that certain things be done as a matter of form in the investigation of a suspect business operation. Ollie had done them all, and he was now anxious to prove to Hawes (or to Carella as his substitute) that he had not been overly hasty in
his judgment of the men who ran Diamondback Development. He knew Carella from a case they had worked jointly some five years back, at which time Carella had called Ollie on his peculiar idiosyncrasy of referring to an eighty-six-year-old Puerto Rican matriarch, grandmother to twelve children, and proud parent of a son who was then running for the City Council, as “that decrepit spic twat.” Ollie had taken offense at Carella’s having taken offense, and the working relationship had been somewhat strained from that moment on. Neither of the two men exchanged too many pleasantries now as they got down to business. Carella had a homicide, and Ollie had a homicide, and the two homicides were maybe linked somehow, and that gave them something in common.

“This is what I found out about those two creeps,” Ollie said. “First thing I did was call Cartwright and Fields, the credit reporting agency downtown, and talked to a lady named Mrs. Clara Tresore of the Service Department. She gave me a lot of static about coming down to the fourth floor there and showing my credentials, and I told her it was already three in the afternoon and I didn’t have time to come running downtown. So she hemmed and hawed, and finally called me back a half hour later to give me the information I needed. Okay, it turns out that Diamondback Development was incorporated in September of last year, the three officers of the corporation being Robinson Worthy as president, Alfred Allen Chase as vice-president, and a guy named Oscar Hemmings as treasurer. Principal assets at the time of incorporation were five thousand nine hundred seventy-five dollars, stock divided evenly among the three officers. Principal business activity of the firm was stated to be ‘the purchase and redevelopment of properties in that section of the city known as Diamondback.’ Sounds legit so far, don’t it?”
“It does,” Carella said. He was beginning to think about Roger Grimm and his import business, and the firms in Hamburg and Bremerhaven. He immediately put them out of his mind. He even had trouble explaining the new math to his twins, and he suspected he was not cut out for an executive position in an international cartel. He did not yet know that in a little while Hawes would bring him information about yet another business, the little porn shop Charlie Harrod had been running. His mind would have snapped.

“You with me so far?” Ollie asked.

“I’m with you,” Carella said, not entirely sure he was.

“Okay, I next checked with the Better Business Bureau
and
the Credit Bureau of Greater Isola
and
also the Diamondback Credit Bureau, and I learned that these guys have good credit ratings, no complaints from anybody they ever dealt with, bills paid on time, all the rest of it. It still looks good, it still looks legit.”

“When does it start looking bad?” Carella asked.

“Give me a minute, will you?” Ollie said. He consulted his notes, which he had fastidiously hand-lettered onto the backs of several printed Detective Division forms, and then looked up again. “Okay, so these guys are in the business of buying property and redeveloping it, right? So I called Land Transfer Records, and I found out these guys bought a total of nine abandoned buildings in Diamondback since they went into business. They bought all those buildings from their original owners, and the prices paid were less than what they would’ve got them for at auction. You want to hear some of the prices?”

“Sure, why not?” Carella said.

“The prices are important,” Ollie said. “For example, they paid sixty-three hundred for a three-story brick building on the south side of Thorp Avenue; twenty-seven hundred for a two-story frame on Kosinsky Boulevard; thirty-eight hundred for a
three-story limestone facade on Hull and Twenty-fifth, and like that. Total cost for the nine buildings was forty-eight thousand seven hundred fifty. You got that?”

“I’ve got it,” Carella said, not so sure he had.

“So next I called License and Building Records, and I learned that Diamondback Development, even though they now have nine buildings that they own outright and a firm of architects making drawings for them, has only renovated
one
building in all this time—a dump over on St. Sebastian Avenue. The architects are a firm called Design Associates on Ainsley. I called them and they told me their fee for the drawings had been fifty thousand dollars.”

“How’d you know who the architects were?”

“I called Worthy and Chase and they told me, how do you think? Those two creeps are anxious to establish they’re legit; they told me the name of their architects, and also the name of their bank—which was their first mistake.”

“What’s the bank?”

“Bankers First on Culver Avenue, three blocks from their office. I called about four o’clock, it must’ve been. They close the doors at three, you know, but they keep working inside there till five, sometimes six o’clock. I spoke to the manager, a guy named Fred Epstein, and he told me Diamondback Development had a checking account and also a safety deposit box. I asked him if I could take a peek in the box, and he said not without a court order—you need a goddamn court order for a coffee break nowadays. So I ran out of the office, and downtown, and I got a municipal judge to write me the order, and I got uptown again around five and went through the box, and guess what?”

“What?” Carella said.

“There’s close to eight hundred thousand in cash in that box. Now that’s a pretty hefty sum for three bare-assed develop
ers who started their business with five thousand nine hundred seventy-five dollars, don’t you think?”

“I think so, yes.”

“And who, don’t forget, have already laid out close to a hundred thousand buying buildings and getting architects to make drawings for them. Not to mention what it must’ve cost to do that one renovation job. Where’d all that money come from, Carella?”

“I don’t know,” Carella said.

“Neither do I.”

“Did you tell all this to Hawes?”

“I knew it when I called him, but there was one other thing I wanted to check before I filled him in.”

“What was that?”

“The third guy in Diamondback Development. Oscar Hemmings. The treasurer.”

“Did you get a line on him?”

“Yeah, he lives in that building on Saint Sebastian, the one Diamondback Development renovated. I plan to look him up tomorrow. I already checked with the IS, he hasn’t got a record. Neither has Worthy, by the way. Chase is another story. He took a fall five years ago, for Burglary/Two, was sentenced to ten at Castleview, got out on parole in three-and-a-half.”

“When was that?”

“When he was released? Be two years come November.”

“Has the FBI got anything on any of them?”

“Got a request in now,” Ollie said. “I should be hearing pretty soon.”

“You’ve been busy, Ollie,” Carella said. He did not like Ollie, but he made no attempt to hide his admiration for what Ollie had accomplished in the space of several hours. This was what he
had tried to explain to Hawes earlier. Fat Ollie Weeks was a terrible person, but in many respects a good cop. Throwing away his investigative instincts and his dogged ferreting-out of facts would be tantamount to throwing away the baby with the bathwater. And yet, working with him rankled. So what was one to do? In all good conscience, what was one to do? Treat him like a computer spewing out information, thereby dehumanizing him and committing the same offense that so offended? Ollie Weeks was a problem. Moreover, Carella suspected he was a problem without a solution. He was what he was. There was no taking him aside and calmly explaining the facts of life to him. “Uh, Ollie baby, it’s not
nice,
these things you say. Some people may find them offensive, you dig, Ollie?” How do you explain to a crocodile that it’s not nice to eat other animals? “It’s in my nature,” he’ll reply. “That’s why God gave me such sharp teeth.” God alone knew why He had given Ollie Weeks such sharp teeth, but short of knocking them out of his mouth, Carella didn’t know quite what to do about them.