Bread

3

Except in cases of pyromania, where the perpetrator acts without conscious motive, there are very real reasons for arson, and every cop in the world knows them by heart.

Parker had checked out Grimm’s competitors in the brisk wooden-goods trade, and expressed the opinion that none of them had sufficient motive for committing a crime as heavy as arson. Well, even if Carella respected Parker’s judgment (which he didn’t), he’d have been unwilling to accept such a sweeping acquittal. Competition was possibly the strongest motive for arson, and Carella wasn’t about to dismiss Grimm’s business rivals as suspects until he’d checked them out thoroughly himself. Nor was he willing to dismiss insurance fraud (First Comic: “Hello, Sam, I hear you had a big fire in your store last night.” Second Comic: “Shhh, that’s tomorrow night!”) or the destruction of books and records as alternate motives, even though Parker seemed convinced that Grimm was clean. As for extortion, intimidation, or revenge, those possibilities would also depend on what they could learn about Mr. Roger Grimm. For all Carella knew, Grimm may have been hobnobbing with all sorts of criminal types who’d finally decided to make things hot for him. Or maybe there were a dozen people Grimm had screwed in the past, all of whom might have been capable of setting the torch to his house, his warehouse, and also the brim of his straw hat. Carella would have to wait and see.

The remaining possible motive was that someone had set the warehouse fire in order to conceal a crime. (Have you left jimmy marks on the windows and fingerprints all over the wall safe? So what? Just bum down the joint as you’re leaving.) Curious reasoning, admittedly, since Burglary/One was punishable by a maximum of thirty and a minimum of ten, whereas Arsons/One, Two, and Three were punishable respectively by forty, twenty-five, and fifteen — but who can fathom the intricate workings of the criminal mind? And whereas the warehouse fire had probably succeeded in obliterating any evidence of theft, it was highly improbable that anyone would steal an indeterminate amount of wooden animals and then set fire to the remainder of the stock to conceal such petty pilfering. Moreover, if someone had committed a crime at the warehouse and then committed arson to conceal the crime, it was ridiculous to believe he would later burn down Grimm’s house as a cover for the initial cover. Such an elaborate smoke screen was for the comic books.

Which left pyromania.

When Carella first learned about the warehouse fire, he’d thought it might have been set by a firebug, despite the fact that two night watchmen had been drugged — pyromaniacs will rarely go to such limits. But the minute he learned of the second fire, Carella knew for certain they were not dealing with a nut. In all his experience with pyromaniacs, he had never met a single one with any real motive for setting a fire. Most of them had done it for kicks, not always but often sexually oriented. They liked to watch the flames, they liked to hear the fire engines, they liked the excitement of the crowds, they liked the tumult and the frenzy. They ranged in age from ten to a hundred and ten, they were usually loners, male or female, intellectual or half-wit, corporation executive or short-order cook. Two of the pyros he’d arrested were male alcoholics. Another was a hysterical, pregnant woman. Still another said she’d set a fire only because she was suffering menstrual cramps. All of them had picked their fire sites at random, usually because the building looked “safe” — vacant, abandoned, or in a lonely, unpatrolled neighborhood.

Most firebugs were very sad people. Carella had known only one funny firebug during all his years as a cop, and he supposed that one couldn’t have been considered a true pyromaniac at all. He was, in fact, a man Carella had locked up for Armed Robbery. When the man was released from Castleview, he called Carella at the squadroom and told him to come over to his place right away, without his gun, or else he was going to set fire to his own kid brother. His kid brother happened to be thirty-six years old, a man who himself had been in and out of jail since the time he was fifteen. His barbecue, if carried out as threatened, would have caused very little grief up at the old squadroom. So Carella told his Castleview friend to go ahead and set fire to his brother, and hung up. Naturally, the man didn’t do it. But there were many nuts in the city for which Carella worked, and not all of them were in the Police Department, and he was sure that none of them had set Grimm’s fires.

Grimm’s warehouse was on Clinton Street and Avenue L, adjacent to the waterfront docks on the River Harb. The building was made of red brick, four stories high, with a padlocked cyclone fence running completely around it. A man in his sixties, wearing a watchman’s uniform, pistol holstered at his side, was standing inside the gate as Carella pulled up in his Chevy sedan. Carella showed him his police shield, and the man took a key from a ring on his belt and unlocked the gate for him.

“You with the 87th Squad?” he asked.

“Yes,” Carella said.

“Because they’ve already been here, you know.”

“Yes, I know that,” Carella said. “I’m Detective Carella, who are you?”

“Frank Reardon,” he said.

“Do you know the men who were on duty the night of the fire, Mr. Reardon?”

“Yep. Jim Lockhart and Lenny Barnes. I know them.”

“Have you seen them since?”

“See them every night. They relieve me every night at eight o’clock on the dot.”

“They mention anything about what happened?”

“Only that somebody doped them up. Wha’d you want to look at first, Mr. Carella?”

“The basement.”

Reardon locked the gate behind them, and then led Carella across a cobblestoned courtyard to a metal fire door on the side of the building. He unlocked the door with a key from the ring on his belt, and they went inside. After the bright sunlight outdoors, the small hallway they entered seemed much dimmer than it really was. Carella followed Reardon down a dark flight of stairs that terminated abruptly in a basement still flooded with water from the broken main. Half a dozen drowned rats were floating near the furnace. The shattered pipe was one of those huge, near-indestructible cast-iron jobs. It seemed evident to Carella that the arsonist had used an explosive charge on it. It also seemed evident that he had not set his fire in the basement of the building, it being difficult for fires to burn underwater.

“Want to take a little swim?” Reardon asked, and cackled unexpectedly.

“Let’s take a look upstairs, okay?”

“Nothing to see up there,” Reardon said. “Fire done a pretty good job.”

The fire had indeed done a pretty good job, nor was it difficult to understand how $500,000 worth of miniature wooden rabbits, puppy dogs, and pussycats had provided excellent tinder for a blaze of monumental proportions. The mess underfoot was a combination of waterlogged ashes and charcoal, with here and there a recognizable head, tail, or paw. The crates had probably been piled on metal tables, the scorched and twisted remnants of which had been shoved aside or thrown over by the firemen in their efforts to quench the flames. Hanging light fixtures with metal shades, their bulbs shattered by the heat, were spaced evenly across the high ceiling of the room. One of these fixtures caught Carella’s attention because a fire-frayed length of electrical wire was dangling from its bulb socket. He pulled a table over and climbed onto it. The length of wire was an extension cord equipped with a fitting that screwed into the socket ordinarily occupied by the bulb. The hanging wire had been burned short by the fire, but it was reasonable to assume it had once been long enough to reach from the fixture down to one of the tables.

Carella frowned.

He frowned because Andy Parker was supposed to be a cop, and cops are supposed to know that most criminal fires are not started with matches; since the whole idea of arson is to be far away from the place when it bursts into flame, such instant ignition is impractical and dangerous. Parker had mentioned that he’d conducted a thorough search for wicks, fuses, mechanical devices, traces of chemicals — anything that would have caused delayed ignition. But he had not noticed the hanging extension cord, and the only thing Carella could assume was that Parker had been too intent on his vacation to spot what could easily have been a primitive but highly effective incendiary device. He had investigated too many arsons in the past (and he was sure Parker had as well) where the fires had been started by wrapping an electric light bulb in wool, rayon, or chiffon, and then suspending it over a pile of highly inflammable material such as movie film, cotton, excelsior, or simple wood shavings.

With Reardon at his elbow, Carella, still frowning, walked across the room to the light switch near the entrance door. The toggle was in the oN position. This meant that the arsonist, working with a flashlight in the dark, could have screwed in his extension cord, hung his light bulb over the prepared nest of combustibles, walked to the door, turned on the light switch, and left the building — secure that he’d have a merry conflagration in a short period of time.

“Anybody dust this light switch?” he asked Reardon.

“What?”

“Did any of the lab technicians examine this switch for fingerprints?”

“Gee, I don’t know,” Reardon said. “Why?”

Carella reached into his inside jacket pocket and pulled out a sheaf of evidence tags. From his side pocket, and musing on the fact that a cop in the field is a walking stationery store, he removed a small roll of Scotch tape. He yanked one of the evidence tags from under the rubber band holding the stack together and then Scotch-taped it, top and bottom, over the light switch. “Somebody’ll be here later,” he told Reardon. “Leave this just the way it is.”

“Okay,” Reardon said. He looked puzzled.

“Mind if I use your phone?”

“On the wall outside,” Reardon said. “Near the clock.”

Carella went out into the corridor. Scribbled onto the wall in pencil alongside the phone were the names and numbers of Reardon’s counterparts, Lockhart and Barnes. Carella dialed the Police Laboratory downtown on High Street and spoke to a lab assistant named Jeff Warren, telling him what he thought and requesting that somebody come to the warehouse to dust the switch. Warren told him they were up to their asses at the moment with a pile of dirty clothes from a suspected murderer’s apartment, going through it all for laundry and dry-cleaning marks, and he doubted anybody could get up there before morning. Carella told him to do the best he could, hung up, and fished in his pocket for another dime. He found only three quarters, and asked Reardon if he had any change. Reardon gave him two dimes and a nickel, and Carella dialed Lockhart’s number from the penciled scrawl on the warehouse wall.

Lockhart sounded sleepy when he answered the phone. Carella belatedly remembered that he was dealing with a night watchman and instantly apologized for having awakened him. Lockhart said he hadn’t been asleep and asked what Carella wanted. Carella told him he was investigating the Grimm fire and would appreciate talking to him and Barnes if the three of them could get together sometime later in the afternoon. They agreed on 3:00, and Lockhart said he would call Barnes to tell him about the meeting. Carella thanked him and hung up. Reardon was still at his elbow.

“Yes?” Carella said.

“They won’t be able to tell you anything,” Reardon said. “The other cop already talked to them.”

“Have any idea what they said?”

“Me? How would I know?”

“I thought they were friends of yours.”

“Well, they relieve me every night, but that’s about it.”

“What’ve you got here?” Carella asked. “Three shifts?”

“Just two,” Reardon said. “Eight in the morning till eight at night, and vice versa.”

“Those are long shifts,” Carella said.

Reardon shrugged. “It ain’t a hard job,” he said. “And most of the time, nothing happens.”

Carella treated himself to a long, leisurely lunch at a French restaurant on Meredith Street, wishing that his wife were there to share the meal with him. There is perhaps nothing more lonely than eating a French meal all by yourself, unless it’s eating Chinese food alone, but then the Chinese are experts at torture. Carella rarely longed for Teddy’s company while coping with the minute-by-minute aggravations of police work, but here and now, relieved of routine for just a little while, he wished she were there to talk to him.

Contrary to the opinion of some male show-business pigs who surmised that being married to a beautiful deaf-mute guaranteed a lifetime of submissive silence, Teddy was the most talkative woman Carella knew. She talked with her face, she talked with her hands, she talked with her eyes, she even “talked” when he was talking, her lips unconsciously mouthing the words his own lips formed as she watched and read the words. They talked together about everything and anything. He suspected that the day they stopped talking would be the day they stopped loving each other. Even their fights (and her silent raging anger was frightening to behold, those eyes flashing, those fingers shooting sparks of molten fury) were a form of talking, and he cherished them as he cherished Teddy herself. He ate his Duck Bigarade in silence, alone, and then drove to Stiller Avenue for his 3:00 appointment with Lockhart and Barnes.

Clearview, in Calm’s Point, was a section of the city variously labeled “heterogeneous,” “fragmented,” or “alienated,” depending on who was doing the labeling. Carella saw it for exactly what it was: a festering slum in which white men, black men, and Puerto Ricans lived elbows-to-buttocks in abject poverty. Perhaps Mr. Agnew, who had seen one slum and therefore seen them all, had never had to work in one. Carella worked in a great many different slums as part of his everyday routine, and since he was not a milkman or a letter carrier or a Bible salesman, but was instead a police officer, his job sometimes got a bit difficult. If there is one thing the residents of a slum can detect immediately, it is the smell of a cop. Slum dwellers do not like policemen. Being a cop (and naturally being a bit defensive about judgments made on the basis of whether or not a man is carrying a police shield), Carella could nonetheless recognize the fact that slum dwellers, both criminal and honest, had very good reasons for looking upon the Law with a dubious and distrustful eye.

Many of the cops Carella knew were non-discriminating. This did not mean they were unprejudiced. In fact, they were sometimes too overly democratic when it came to deciding exactly which citizen was in possession of a glassine bag of heroin lying on a sawdust-covered floor. If you were a black or a tan slum dweller, and a white cop entered the joint, the odds were six-to-five that he suspected all non-whites of using narcotics, and you could only pray to God that a nearby junkie (of whatever color) would not panic and dispose of his dope by dropping it at your feet. You also realized that, God forbid, you might just possibly bear a slight resemblance to a man who’d held up a liquor store or mugged an old lady in the park (white cops sometimes finding it difficult to distinguish one black man or one Puerto Rican from another) and end up at the old station house being advised of your rights and subjected to a strictly by-the-book interrogation that would crack Jesus Christ himself.

If you happened to be white, you were in even worse trouble. In the city for which Carella worked, most of the cops were white. They naturally resented all criminals (and slum dwellers were often automatically equated with criminals), but they especially resented white criminals, who were expected to know better than to run around making the life of a white cop difficult. The best thing a slum dweller could do when he smelled a cop approaching was get the hell out fast. Which is exactly what everybody in the bar did the moment Carella walked in. This did not surprise him; it had happened too often before. But it did leave him feeling somewhat weary, and resigned, and angry, and self-pitying, and sorrowful. In short, it left him feeling human — like the slum dwellers who had fled at his approach.

A white man and a black man were sitting together in a booth near the jukebox. With the exception of the bartender and a hooker in hot pants (who wasn’t worried about a bust, probably because her pimp had a fix in with the cop on the beat), they were the only two people who didn’t immediately down their drinks and disappear. Carella figured them to be Lockhart and Barnes. He went over to the booth, introduced himself, and ordered a fresh round of drinks for them. Aside from their coloration, Lockhart and Barnes were similar in almost every other respect. Each man was in his early seventies, each was going bald, each had the veined nose and rheumy eyes of the habitual drinker, each had work-worn hands, each had a face furrowed with deep wrinkles and stamped indelibly with weariness and defeat, the permanent stigmata of a lifetime of grinding poverty and meaningless labor. Carella told them he was investigating the Grimm case and wanted to know everything they could remember about the night of the fire. Lockhart, the white man, looked at Barnes.

“Yes?” Carella said.

“Well, there’s not much to tell,” Lockhart said.

“Nothing to tell, in fact,” Barnes said.

“As I understand it, you were both drugged.”

“That’s right,” Lockhart said.

“That’s right,” Barnes said.

“Want to tell me about that?”

“Well, there’s not much to tell,” Lockhart said again.

“Nothing to tell, in fact,” Barnes said.

“We just passed out, that’s all.”

“What time was that?”

“Little after ten, must’ve been. Isn’t that right, Lenny?”

“That’s right,” Barnes said.

“And you both got to work at eight, is that right?”

“Eight on the dot. Always try to relieve Frank right on time,” Lockhart said. “It’s a long enough day without having to wait for your relief.”

“Anybody come to the factory between eight and ten?”

“Not a soul,” Barnes said.

“None of those coffee-and-sandwich wagons, nothing like that?”

“Nothing,” Lockhart said. “We make our own coffee. We got a little hot plate in the room just off the entrance door there. Near where the wall phone is hanging.”

“And did you make coffee last Wednesday night?”

“We did.”

“Who made it?”

“Me,” Lockhart said.

“What time was that?”

“Well, we had a cup must’ve been about nine. Wasn’t it about nine, Lenny?”

“Yeah, must’ve been about nine,” Barnes said, and nodded.

“Did you have another cup along about ten?”

“No, just that one cup,” Lockhart said.

“Just that one cup,” Barnes said.

“Then what?”

“Well, I went back outside again,” Lockhart said, “and Lenny here went inside to make the rounds. Takes a good hour to go through the whole place, you know. There’s four floors to the building.”

“So you had a cup of coffee at about nine, and then you went your separate ways, and you didn’t see each other again until after the fire. Is that about it?”

“Well, we saw each other again,” Barnes said, and glanced at Lockhart.

“When was that?”

“When I finished my rounds, I came down and chatted awhile with Jim here.”

“What time was that?”

“Well, like Jim said, it takes about an hour to go through the building, so I guess it was about ten or a little before.”

“But you didn’t have another cup of coffee at that time?”

“No, no,” Lockhart said.

“No,” Barnes said, and shook his head.

“What did you have?” Carella asked.

“Nothing,” Lockhart said.

“Nothing,” Barnes said.

“A shot of whiskey, maybe?”

“Oh, no,” Lockhart said.

“Ain’t allowed to drink on the job,” Barnes said.

“But you do enjoy a little drink every now and then, don’t you?”

“Oh, sure,” Lockhart said. “Everybody enjoys a little drink every now and then.”

“But not on the job.”

“No, never on the job.”

“Well, it’s a mystery to me,” Carella said. “Chloral hydrate works very fast, you see...”

“Yeah, it’s a mystery to us, too,” Lockhart said.

“Yeah,” Barnes said.

“If you both passed out at ten o’clock...”

“Well, ten or a little after.”

“Are you sure you didn’t have another cup of coffee? Try to remember.”

“Well, maybe we did,” Lockhart said.

“Yeah, maybe,” Barnes said.

“Be easy to forget a second cup of coffee,” Carella said.

“I think we must’ve had a second cup. What do you think, Lenny?”

“I think so. I think we must’ve.”

“But nobody came to the warehouse, you said.”

“That’s right.”

“Then who put the knockout drops in your coffee?”

“Well, we don’t know who could’ve done it,” Lockhart said.

“That’s the mystery,” Barnes said.

“Unless you did it yourselves,” Carella said.

“What?” Lockhart said.

“Why would we do that?” Barnes said.

“Maybe somebody paid you to do it.”

“No, no,” Lockhart said.

“Nobody gave us a penny,” Barnes said.

“Then why’d you do it?”

“Well, we didn’t do it,” Lockhart said.

“That’s right,” Barnes said.

“Then who did it?” Carella asked. “Who else could have done it? You were alone in the warehouse, it had to be one or both of you. I can’t see any other explanation, can you?”

“Well, no, unless...”

“Yes?”

“Well, it might’ve been something else. Besides the coffee.”

“Like what?”

“I don’t know,” Lockhart said, and shrugged.

“He means, like something else we didn’t realize,” Barnes said.

“Something you drank, do you mean?”

“Well, maybe.”

“But you just told me you didn’t drink anything but the coffee.”

“We’re not allowed to drink on the job,” Barnes said.

“No one’s suggesting you ever get drunk on the job,” Carella said.

“No, we never get drunk,” Lockhart said.

“But you do have a little nip every now and then, is that it?”

“Well, it gets chilly in the night sometimes.”

“Just to take the chill off,” Barnes said.

“You really didn’t have a second cup of coffee, did you?”

“Well, no,” Lockhart said.

“No,” Barnes said.

“What did you have? A shot of whiskey?”

“Look, we don’t want to get in trouble,” Lockhart said.

“Did you have a shot of whiskey? Yes or no?”

“Yes,” Lockhart said.

“Yes,” Barnes said.

“Where’d you get the whiskey?”

“We keep a bottle in the cabinet over the hot plate. In the little room near the wall phone.”

“Keep it in the same place all the time?”

“Yes.”

“Who else knows about that bottle?”

Lockhart looked at Barnes.

“Who else?” Carella said. “Does Frank Reardon know where you keep that bottle?”

“Yes,” Lockhart said. “Frank knows where we keep it.”

“Yes,” Barnes said.

There’s nothing simpler to solve than an inside job, and this was shaping up as just that. Frank Reardon knew that the two nighttime shleppers hit the bottle, and he knew just where they stashed it. All he had to do was dose the booze, and then let nature take its course. Since one of the watchmen worked outside, any observer would know the minute the Mickey took effect.

Carella drove back over the Calm’s Point Bridge, eager now to confront Reardon with the facts, accuse him of doctoring the sauce, and find out why he’d done it and whether or not he was working with anyone else. He parked the Chevy at the curb outside the warehouse and walked swiftly to the gate in the cyclone fence. The gate was unlocked, and so was the side entrance door to the building.

Frank Reardon lay just inside that door, two bullet holes in his face.