Эд Макбейн - Bread

“This ain’t a goddamn taxi,” Halloran said, but he started the truck and pointed it downtown.

“Carella?”

“Yes?”

“This is Yarborough. I got that information you want.”

“Go ahead,” Carella said.

“This Roger Grimm character was paroled four years ago. Chase was still here at the time, had already served a year and a little more of his sentence.”

“Right, I’ve got that already.”

“Okay. The minute Grimm got out, he began writing to Chase. Correspondence was hot and heavy for about six months. Chase wrote to Grimm, and vice versa, at least once a week, sometimes twice. Then all at once, the correspondence stopped. You know what I think? These guys maybe had a thing here in prison, you know what I mean? Lovers, you know? You’d be surprised what goes on up here.”

“Yes, I’d be surprised,” Carella said.

“I’m only speculating,” Yarborough said. “Maybe they were just friends, who knows? You know the one about the lady with the monkeys?”

“No, which one is that?” Carella said.

“This lady comes into a taxidermist with two dead monkeys, you know, and she says she wants them stuffed. So the taxidermist says, ‘Yes, lady, I’ll stuff the monkeys. You want them mounted, too?’ And the lady thinks for a minute and says, ‘No, they were only friends. Just have them shaking hands.’ ” Yarborough burst out laughing. Carella, who had remembered the joke after the first line, chuckled politely. “So maybe Grimm and Chase were only friends, who knows?” Yarborough said, still laughing. “Anyway, they wrote to each other a lot after Grimm got out.”

“You wouldn’t know whether or not they were cellmates, would you?”

“That’s another department,” Yarborough said.

“When did the correspondence between them stop?”

“Six months after Grimm got paroled.”

“Okay,” Carella said. “Thanks a lot.”

“ Wait a minute,” Yarborough said. “Two other things.”

“I’m sorry, I thought you were...”

“They began writing to each other again just before Chase got paroled. Chase wrote the first letter, and then Grimm answered, and then they exchanged maybe a dozen more letters before Chase finally left this joint. That’s the first thing.”

“What’s the second thing?”

“The second thing is I need a letter from you formally requesting this information.”

“You already gave me the information,” Carella said. “Why do you need a letter from me requesting it?”

“To cover me. Just in case.”

“In case of what?”

“I don’t know what. Just in case. Send me the letter, Carella.”

“Okay,” Carella said, and sighed. “Thanks again.”

“How’s it down there in the city?” Yarborough asked.

“Hot,” Carella said.

“Yeah, here too,” Yarborough said, and hung up.

Carella pressed one of the buttons in the receiver rest, held it down for a second, and then released it, getting a dial tone. He called the Identification Section and told the man he spoke to that he urgently needed some eight-by-ten glossies of Alfred Allen Chase’s mug shots.

The man listened to the request, and then said, “This is Saturday, pal.”

“Yeah, it’s Saturday here, too,” Carella said.

“I don’t even know if there’s anybody next door in the Photo Unit.”

“ Find somebody,” Carella said.

Downtown on High Street, the man in the Photographic Unit took the roll of film from Ollie’s hand and said, “You’re gonna have to wait. I just got a rush order from next door.”

“Yeah, well make it snappy, willya?” Ollie said. “ This is a rush order, too.” He went down the hall to the phone booths, dialed the 87th, and when he got Carella, said, “I took more’n a dozen pictures, we’re bound to get one or two good ones. You heard from Hawes yet?”

“No, not yet.”

“What the hell’s the matter with him? Don’t he know he’s supposed to check in?”

“I guess he’s busy,” Carella said.

“What’d you find out at Castleview?”

“Chase and Grimm knew each other. They corresponded regularly.”

“Just what we figured,” Ollie said. “Did you get those pictures from the IS?”

“Should be here in a little while, I hope.”

“Okay, I’ll see you soon,” Ollie said.

He had not told Carella where he was, and Carella did not think to ask. Nor did the man in the Photographic Unit tell Ollie that the rush order from next door was earmarked for a detective named Steve Carella of the 87th Squad. He did not tell Ollie because it was none of Ollie’s business. Ollie didn’t ask him anything about the rush order because all Ollie wanted was his own damn pictures and fast. Besides, Carella had already assured him the mug shots of Chase should be up at the squadroom in just a little while. Ollie left High Street with his own eight-by-ten glossies at a quarter to one. The package to Carella from the PU (as it was affectionately called by any detective who’d ever had to wait for photographs) did not arrive at the squadroom until almost 1:30. They had still not heard from Hawes, so they decided to hit Reardon’s landlady all by their lonesomes.

Rosalie Waggener’s taxi had traveled directly up Ainsley Avenue until it reached the Hamilton Bridge. Actually there were two Hamilton Bridges in the city, one of them on the northern side of Isola, crossing the River Harb into the next state, and formally called the Alexander Hamilton Bridge. This was not to be confused with the plain old Hamilton Bridge, which crossed the Diamondback River up around Piney Hill Terrace (upon which there was not a single pine tree) and connected Isola and Riverhead, which were both parts of the same state and, in fact, the same city. If you asked anyone in the city for directions to the Hamilton Bridge, they would invariably give you directions to the Alexander Hamilton Bridge. In fact, odds were nine-to-five that nobody in the city even knew there was a bridge simply called the Hamilton, less than a block long and spanning the Diamondback River, which incidentally became the River Dix a little further west — it was all very complicated, though not as complicated as the city of Bologna, Italy.

The cab continued south into Riverhead, crossing the old College Road and then turning and proceeding west on Marlowe Avenue for several blocks. It finally pulled up before a red-brick apartment building on Marlowe, a few blocks from the elevated train tracks on Geraldson Avenue. Hawes pulled his own car into the curb, cut the ignition, and watched as Rosalie, some seven car lengths ahead, got out of the taxi and went directly into the building. He waited a respectable five minutes, figuring a building so tall had to be an elevator building, and not wanting her to be waiting in the lobby when he went inside. At the end of that time, he went in, found the mailboxes, and began checking out the nameplates.

There were ten stories in the building, with six apartments on each floor. According to the nameplates, Oscar Hemmings did not live in the building.

But on the mailbox for Apartment 45, there was a plate engraved with a name Hawes recognized.

He squinted at the name, and then scratched his head.

“My husband is downtown buying hardware,” Barbara Loomis said. “Anything I can do for you?”

She was wearing very tight, very short navy-blue shorts and a pink shirt with the tails knotted just under her breasts. “Come in,” she said, “come in. Nobody going to bite you.”

They went into the apartment and sat at the kitchen table. Fat Ollie kept trying to look into her blouse. He was sure she wasn’t wearing a bra, and the top three buttons of the blouse were unbuttoned. Carella spread the photographs on the tabletop — the mug shots of Alfred Allen Chase; the police photographer’s shots of Charlie Harrod in death, eyes wide and staring up at the camera; the snapshot of Elizabeth Benjamin standing against the tenement wall, smiling; and the front and side shots Ollie had taken of Robinson Worthy and Oscar Hemmings that morning.