Эд Макбейн - Bread

“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.

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.