Bread (87th Precinct) (16 page)

“Yes.”

“What’s your
real
relationship with Hemmings?” Ollie asked.

“We’re engaged.”

“In
what
?” Ollie said, and laughed.

“He’s my fiancé.”

“Why didn’t you say so in the first place?”

“I didn’t want to get him in trouble.”

“What kind of trouble were you thinking about?”

“You said something about arson.”

“Well, as you can see,” Ollie said, “we ain’t trying to get him in any trouble at all. Nor you, either.”

“Mmm,” Rosalie said.

“We’re sorry to have bothered you,” Carella said. “We’d like to keep in touch, though, so don’t leave the city or anything, okay?”

“I don’t plan on leaving the city.”

“What he means is don’t go visiting no relatives in Germany,” Ollie said.

“I know what he means. Who’s going to pay for having my lock fixed?”

“What lock is that?” Ollie said.

“On the
door
” Rosalie said. “What the hell lock do you think?”

“Gee,” Ollie said innocently, “that was busted when we got here.”

It was beginning to look like something—but they didn’t know what.

They only knew that the case was getting very hot, and the best way to solve a case that’s beginning to sizzle is to stick with it as advised in the Detective Division’s mimeographed flyer titled
Investigation of Homicides and Suspicious Deaths:
“This is
your
case…stick with the investigation and
don’t do
unimportant jobs.” Whether or not the Detective Division would have considered the examination of a World Atlas an “important” job was open to question. But a glance at that book revealed immediately that not only was Bremen close to Zeven (where Rosalie Waggener claimed she had relatives), it was
also
close to Bremerhaven— where a man named Erhard Bachmann ran a firm called Bachmann Speditionsfirma.

It may have been coincidental that Rosalie had arrived in Bremen on July 25, and that Bachmann had received payment for packing Grimm’s little wooden beasts the very next day, according to his letter of July 26, written to Grimm. It may also have been coincidental that Charlie Harrod’s gun had killed Frank Reardon, who had worked for Roger Grimm, who was in turn doing business with a firm in Bremerhaven, some fifty kilometers from Bremen. And the biggest coincidence of all may have been that yet another man associated with Diamondback Development had served time at Castleview State Penitentiary while Roger Grimm himself was incarcerated there. Alfred Allen Chase’s
first
year at Castleview had overlapped Roger Grimm’s
last
year there. In effect, the men had served concurrent terms for that period of time. All these seemingly related facts may only have been trains passing in the night. But it didn’t look that way to the detectives.

None of the three had had much sleep, but they had all eaten hearty breakfasts in the 83rd’s squadroom. They were now ready to head out into the city again, in an attempt to unravel some of the knots. They agreed that their telephone drop would be the
87th’s squadroom, and then they left the 83rd. Carella was carrying police photos of Charlie Harrod’s dead body. Ollie was carrying a Polaroid camera, and police photos of the members of The Ancient Skulls. Hawes wasn’t carrying anything.

It was now 8:30
A.M.

Elizabeth Benjamin was awake and being fed intravenously because her jaw was wired and she could not open her mouth. Neither could she nod or shake her head in answer to police questions. So Ollie stuck a pencil in her right hand and propped up a pad for her, and then asked his questions. Willingly but awkwardly, Elizabeth wrote her answers onto the pad.

“These are police photographs,” he said, “of six members of a street gang called The Ancient Skulls. We took these pictures up in the squadroom last night when we arrested these guys, and we’d like you to look at them now and tell us if any of them were involved in beating you up. This is a young man named Lewis Coombs. Was he one of your attackers?”

“This is a young man named Avery Evans. Was he one of your attackers?”

“This punk…this young man is named Felix Collins. Was he in on the attack?”

“How about this one? His name is John Morley.”

“This one? Jamison Holder?”

“Here’s the last one. Timothy Anderson.”

“Okay now, that was very good, Miss Benjamin,” Ollie said, “and I know you’re tired and I don’t want to keep you any longer than I have to. There’s just one other thing I need, and that’s a picture of you. That’s for the district attorney,” Ollie said, “to help in preparing his case against these punks who hurt you so bad. I can take a picture with this Polaroid I got here, but you’re all wired up and all, and I’d prefer having a picture that resembles you more like when you were more yourself, if you know what I mean. Would you have such a picture?”

Elizabeth watched him out of puffed and swollen eyes, picked up the pencil again, and wrote on the pad:

Ollie asked the nurse to fetch Elizabeth’s wallet, and when she brought it to him, he gave it to Elizabeth. Both her legs were in casts to the hip, her broken jaw was wired, her broken ribs taped, and there were bandages covering her bruised face and arms. It was only with great effort that she located the snapshot in the plastic gatefold, extracted it, and handed it to Ollie.

In the photo, she was standing in front of a Diamondback tenement wall, smiling into the sunshine. She was wearing a simple yellow frock and low sandals. She looked quite pretty.

“Thank you,” Ollie said, “I will show this to the DA.”

He had no intention of showing it to the DA.

From a telephone booth across the street from the tenement in which Rosalie Waggener’s sumptuous pad was located, Cotton Hawes called the number listed in the Isola directory and waited for Rosalie to answer the phone. When her voice came onto the line at last, it was fuzzy with sleep.

“Hello?” she said.

“Rosalie?” he said.

“Mmm.”

“My name’s Dick Coopersmith, I’m from Detroit. I was talking to a man in a bar who said I might enjoy meeting you.”

“What man?” Rosalie said.

“Fellow named Dave Carter. Or Carson. Fm not sure which.”

“You’ve got the wrong number,” Rosalie said, and hung up.

Hawes shrugged, put the receiver back on the hook, and walked out of the booth. He had only been trying to ascertain whether or not Rosalie was still in the apartment, but he’d figured he might as well take a whack at establishing her occupation at the same time. Some you win, some you lose. He took up position in a doorway some fifteen feet from the phone booth, and hoped Rosalie wouldn’t sleep too late and that eventually she’d come out of the building and lead him straight to Oscar Hemmings.

In his own squadroom, at his own desk, Steve Carella put in a long-distance call to the prison at Castleview-on-Rawley, and asked to talk to someone in Records. The man who came onto the line identified himself as Peter Yarborough.

“What can I do for you?” he asked.

“This is Detective Steve Carella, the 87th Squad, down here in Isola. I’m looking for a record of correspondence to and from a man who…”