Bread

8

It was close to 6:00 when Hawes got to Diamondback. Two radio motor patrol cars were parked at the curb in front of the building, their red dome lights rotating and blinking. Two patrolmen, one black and one white, were standing on the stoop looking out over the crowd of men and women who had gathered to enjoy another of the city’s outdoor summer spectacles. A plainclothes cop with his shield pinned to the pocket of his jacket was sitting in one of the cars, the radio mike in his fist, the car door open, one foot outside on the curb. Hawes locked his car, and then pinned his own shield to his jacket as he walked across to the building. He climbed onto the stoop, identified himself to the nearest patrolman, and said, “I called in the 10–34. What happened?”

“Lady upstairs is near dead,” the patrolman said. “Ambulance is on the way.”

“Who’s up there now?”

“Lewis and Ruggiero, from the other car, and a Detective Kissman of the Narcotics Squad. He’s the one who got here first. Busted in the door, but whoever did the job was already gone. Must’ve been more than one of them. They messed her up real bad.”

“Who’s that on the squawk box?”

“Detective Boyd, the Eight-Three.”

“Tell him I’ll be upstairs, okay?” Hawes said, and went into the building.

He was stopped on the fifth floor by one of the patrolmen from the second RMP car. He identified himself, and went up to the sixth floor. The patrolman outside 6A glanced at Hawes’s shield and said nothing as he went into the apartment. Elizabeth was lying unconscious on the floor near the kitchen table. Her clothes were torn and bloodied, her jaw hung open, and both legs were twisted under her at an angle that clearly indicated they’d been broken. A man in a brown cardigan sweater was sitting at the kitchen table, the telephone receiver to his ear. He looked up as Hawes came in, waved, and then said, into the mouthpiece, “Got no idea. I busted in because all hell was breaking loose.” He listened a moment, and then said, “All of it, from the phone call on. Right, I’ll talk to you later.” He hung up, rose, and walked toward Hawes, his hand outstretched. He was a tall, angular man with a relaxed and easy manner. Like the other policemen on the scene, he wore his shield pinned to an outer garment — in his case, the left-hand side of his sweater, just over the heart.

“I’m Martin Kissman,” he said. “Narcotics.”

“Cotton Hawes, 87th,” Hawes said, and reached for Kissman’s extended hand.

“Oh,” Kissman said, surprised. “So you’re Hawes, huh?”

“What do you mean?” Hawes said, puzzled.

“I was going to call you later today, soon as I got relieved. We’ve got the apartment bugged, I’ve been sitting the wire.”

“Oh,” Hawes said. “You got my message, huh?”

“Loud and clear. And I got the conversation you had with her later, after Harrod was killed. They knew the joint was wired, huh? I should have realized it. We thought the phone mike went dead, but that didn’t explain the waterfall whenever anybody was talking in the kitchen. I told the lieutenant they’d tipped, that the only time they said anything they didn’t want us to hear was in the kitchen. Everything else was either phony leads or routine garbage, like where they planned to go that night, or what they were buying for dinner. I also got some very sexy tapes from the bedroom mike, if you know anybody who’s interested.” Kissman grinned, pulled a pipe and tobacco pouch from the pocket of his sweater, and began filling the pipe.

For the first time, Hawes noticed the holes burned in Kissman’s sweater. Hawes’s father had smoked a pipe, and there were always burn holes in his sweater, not to mention the carpet, the furniture, and on several occasions the drapes. To make matters worse, the Hawes family had owned a Siamese cat with a penchant for eating wool. There had been no valid excuse for that animal’s appetite; she was not pregnant, she had no vitamin deficiencies of which Hawes was aware, she was simply a voracious wool-eating beast. What the coals from his father’s pipe did not accomplish, the cat did. Hawes’s mother once said to his father, “You look moth-eaten all the time.” His father had looked up in surprise and said, “What do you mean, Abby?”

Hawes realized he was smiling only when Kissman, still loading the pipe, said, “Something?”

“No, no,” Hawes said, and shook his head. “Why’s the place wired?” he asked.

“We knew Harrod was a junkie, and we suspected he was a pusher as well. We were trying to get a line on the big boys.”

“Any luck?”

“Not so far. Harrod sent us on wild-goose chases all over town. That’s one of the reasons I figured he’d tipped to the bug. But the lieutenant said no, so who’s going to argue with a lieutenant?”

Kissman struck a match and began puffing great clouds of smoke into the kitchen. Neither of the two men so much as glanced at the unconscious girl. They both knew an ambulance was on the way, and there was nothing they could do for Elizabeth right now — except try to discover who was responsible for her present condition. Besides, there is a curious detachment about police officers confronted with the results of bloody mayhem. Like surgeons performing an operation — the hole in the surgical sheet circumscribing the area of surgery, the rest of the body covered, the lung or the liver or the brain becoming a part somehow isolated from and unrelated to the whole — detectives will often dissociate the victim from the crime itself, throw a sheet over the body, so to speak, so that they can concentrate completely on the specific part requiring their full attention. Elizabeth Benjamin lay hurt and bleeding on the kitchen floor, and the ambulance was on the way, and now the detectives discussed the who’s and why’s and wherefore’s with all the detachment of surgeons peering into an open heart.

“The first I heard of Harrod’s murder,” Kissman said, “was when I picked up the conversation with you and the girl earlier today. You know what I thought? I thought, Great, there goes a lot of hard work up the chimney.”

“Were you listening when the girl called me later?”

“Picked it up on the bug there under the cabinet. Just her side of the conversation, you understand. Then I picked up the glass smashing, and I heard these guys busting in on her, and her screaming, and I rushed right over. I’m staked out in an apartment in the next building; we ran our wires up over the roof and then down the back side. Took me maybe five minutes to get here. I found the girl just the way she is. Whoever broke in had gone out again, probably the same way. At least, I didn’t meet anybody coming down the stairs on my way up. The cars got here maybe two minutes after I did. You the one who sent them?”

“Yeah,” Hawes said. “I didn’t think I could...”

“There she is,” someone at the door said, and Hawes turned to see two ambulance attendants and what he assumed was an intern coming into the room.

The intern bent quickly over Elizabeth, his eyes darting from her bruised and bleeding face to the hanging jaw, over the ripped front of her jersey top and the purple marks on her exposed breasts, and then down to the obviously broken legs. The ambulance attendants put down their stretcher and lifted her gently onto it. Elizabeth moaned, and the intern said, “It’s all right, dear.” He was perhaps twenty-five years old, but he sounded like a man who’d been practicing medicine for sixty years. One of the attendants nodded to his partner, and they picked up the stretcher again.

“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.

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.

“You’re damn right I’ve been busy,” Ollie said, and grinned, thereby adding modesty to all his other virtues.

Both men heard voices in the corridor outside, and turned toward the slatted railing. Hawes was coming into the squadroom, followed by Kissman, who was carrying a tape recorder. Kissman looked older than Carella remembered him. He suddenly wondered if he looked the same way to Kissman.

“Hi, Alan,” he said.

“Martin,” Kissman said.

“Martin, Martin, right,” Carella said, and nodded. He was tired, his head was full of too many figures. Money, money, money, it always got down to love or money in the crime business. “This is Ollie Weeks of the Eight-Three. Martin Kissman, Narcotics.”

The men shook hands briefly, and looked each other over, like advertising executives wondering if they’d be working together on the same account.

“Where’s the girl?” Ollie asked, suddenly realizing Hawes had gone out to bust Elizabeth Benjamin and had come back with a Narcotics cop instead.

“In Diamondback Hospital,” Hawes said.

“With two broken legs, some broken ribs, and a broken jaw,” Kissman said.

“Why didn’t you call me?” Ollie said to Hawes, offended.

“It all happened too fast,” Hawes answered. “But Kissman’s got a tape of what went on in the apartment...”

“A tape?” Ollie said. He was enormously confused. He blinked his eyes and reached for a handkerchief. Mopping his brow, he said, “I don’t know what’s going on here,” which was true enough.

Hawes explained it to him while Kissman set up the recorder. Then the four men sat in straight-backed chairs around the desk as Kissman pressed the PLAY button. The tape started with a sequence that had been recorded earlier in the day:

— His things’ve been looked through. Four times already. The pigs’ve been in and out of this place like it was a subway station.

“Who’s that?” Ollie whispered.

“The girl,” Hawes whispered back.

— The police have been here before?

— Not while we were home.

— Then how do you know they were here?

“Who’s the guy?” Ollie asked.

“Me,” Hawes said.

“You?” Ollie said, even more confused.

— Charlie set traps for them. Pigs ain’t exactly bright, you know. Charlie found those bugs—

“Can you run it ahead?” Hawes asked.

— ten minutes after they planted them.

Kissman stopped the tape, and then pressed the FAST FORWARD button, watching the footage meter, stabbing the STOP button, and then pushing the PLAY button again. This time he was closer on target:

— better get here fast. The apartment. I did what you said, I stayed here. And now they’ve come to get me. The ones who killed Charlie. They’re outside on the fire escape. They’re gonna smash in here as soon as they work up the courage.

There was the sound of shattering glass, and then at last three, possibly four different voices erupted onto the tape:

— Get away from that phone!

— Hold her, watch it!

— She’s...

— I’ve got her!

Elizabeth screamed. There was a click on the tape, probably the phone being replaced on its cradle, and then the sounds of a scuffle, a chair being overturned perhaps, feet moving in rapid confusion over the linoleum floor. From the squadroom railing, Meyer Meyer, coming back with a container of coffee and a cheese Danish, said, “What’s going on?”

“Quiet,” Hawes said.

Elizabeth was sobbing now. There were the sodden sounds of something hard hitting human flesh.

— Oh, please, no.

— Shut up, bitch!

— Hold her, get her legs!

— Please, please.

She screamed again, a long blood-curdling scream that raised the hackles on the necks of five experienced detectives who had seen and heard almost everything in the horror department. There was the sound of more blows, even in cadence now, a methodical beating being administered to a girl already unconscious.

— Come on, that’s enough.

— Hold her, lay off, you’re gonna kill her!

— Let’s go, let’s go.

— What’s that?

— Let’s get the hell out of here, man.

There was the sound of footsteps running, the tinkle of glass, window shards probably breaking loose as they went out through the window. The sensitive mike picked up a moan from the kitchen floor, and then there was utter silence.

Kissman turned off the recorder.

“How many do you think?” Hawes asked.

“Four or five,” Ollie said. “Hard to tell.”

“There’s something I don’t understand,” Carella said, frowning. “You want to run that back for me, Martin?”

“To where?”

“To where one of them says something about killing her.”

Kissman rewound the tape, and then pushed the PLAY button:

— Oh, please, no.

— Shut up, bitch!

— Hold her, get her legs!

— Please, please.

The girl’s terrified scream sounded into the squadroom again, and again the men sat speechless, like children who did not know about monsters in the night. They listened again to the speechlessly administered beating, and waited for the next voice on the tape:

— Come on, that’s enough.

— Hold her, lay off, you’re gonna kill her!

— Let’s go, let’s go.

“Cut it there,” Carella said, and Kissman turned off the machine. “I don’t get those instructions.”

“What instructions?”

“The guy tells somebody to hold her and to lay off at the same time,” Carella said. “That doesn’t make sense.”

“He keeps yelling that all through the tape,” Kissman said.

“What do you mean?”

“To hold her. He keeps telling one of the other guys to hold her.”

“There’s a lot of noise on that tape,” Ollie said. “Maybe we’re hearing it wrong.”

“No, that comes through loud and clear,” Hawes said. “He yells ‘Hold her,’ there’s no question about it.”

“Do they sound young to you?” Kissman said.

“Some of them.”

“They sound black, that’s for sure,” Ollie said, and Hawes frowned at him, but Ollie didn’t seem to notice.

“Play that part again, will you?” Carella said. “About killing her.”

Kissman located the spot on the tape, and they played the single sentence over and over again, listening to it intently, searching for meaning in the seeming contradiction: Hold her, lay off, you’re gonna kill her! Hold her, lay off, you’re gonna kill her! Hold her, lay off, you’re gonna kill her! Hold her, hold her, hold ‘er, hold ‘er, holder, holder...

“It’s his name!” Hawes said, rising suddenly out of his chair.

“What?” Ollie said.

“Holder! Jamie Holder!”

Three of them went into the clubroom together — Ollie Weeks because officially the Harrod homicide was his; Carella and Hawes because officially the Reardon homicide was theirs. Besides, it does not hurt to have a lot of firepower when you’re going in against an indeterminate number of hoodlums.

The clubroom was in the basement of a tenement on North Twenty-seventh Street. They had no difficulty locating the clubroom because the cops of the 83rd kept an active file on all neighborhood street gangs, and a call from Ollie to his own squadroom immediately pinpointed the headquarters of The Ancient Skulls. Standing in the basement corridor outside the clubroom, they listened at the door and heard music within, and several voices, male and female. They did not knock, they did not bother with any formalities; they were dealing here with people who had maybe committed murder and assault. Fat Ollie kicked in the door, and Carella and Hawes fanned into the room directly behind him, guns drawn. Two young men standing at the record player turned toward the door as it burst open into the room. A boy and a girl, necking on a sofa on the wall opposite the door, jumped to their feet the moment the detectives entered. Two other couples were dancing close in separate dim corners. They turned immediately toward the intruders and stopped dancing, but did not break apart. There was another door at the far end of the room. Ollie moved to it swiftly and kicked it open. A naked boy and girl were on the bed.

“Up!” Ollie said. “Put your clothes on!”

“What is this?” one of the boys near the record player asked.

Hawes recognized him as the bearded pool player named Avery Evans.

“It’s a bust,” Carella said. “Shut up.”

“Where’s Jamie Holder?” Hawes asked.

“In the other room.”

“Hurry it up, Lover Boy,” Ollie said. “Man outside wants to talk to you.”

“What’d I do?” Holder asked from the other room.

“I’m the president here,” Avery said, moving away from the record player. “I’d like to know what’s going on, if you don’t mind.”

“What’s your name?” Carella said.

“Avery Evans.”

“Nice to meet you,” Ollie said. “You! Get over against the wall there! This ain’t a Friday night social. Cut off that record player!”

“I expect you have a warrant,” Avery said.

“Yeah, here’s our warrant,” Ollie said, and gestured with the .38 Special in his fist. “You want to read it?”

“I don’t understand this,” Avery said. “The Ancient Skulls have always cooperated with the police. Would you mind telling me...?”

“We’ll tell you at the squadroom,” Ollie said. “Come on, girls, you too!” He shoved his pistol into the other room, and shouted, “You ain’t dressing for the governor’s ball, Holder! Shake it up in there or I’ll come help you.”

The girl who had been in bed with Holder had dressed rapidly, and now came out of the other room, buttoning her blouse. She could not have been older than sixteen, a doe-eyed girl with a beautiful face and a flawless complexion Avery stepped up close to Carella and said, as if he were confiding to him, “I suppose you realize that The Ancient Skulls are the only neighborhood club that...”

“Tell us later,” Carella said.

“Will you tell us why you’re taking us to the squadroom?” Avery asked. “Has there been some trouble with one of the other clubs?”

“No,” Carella said flatly.

Jamie Holder came into the room. He was as big as Hawes remembered him, with powerful wrists and huge hands. “What’s the static, man?” he asked.

“They’ve made a mistake, Holder,” Avery said.

“Oh, sure,” Holder said.

The Ancient Skulls were not all as old as their title proclaimed, but they nonetheless ranged in age from eighteen to twenty-six, which meant that they were not juvenile offenders and could therefore be questioned in a police station. Nobody had ever told the cops in this city exactly where a juvenile offender should be interrogated. Usually, they took any suspect juvenile to a part of the building that was not contaminated by various and sundry sordid types, thereby giving lip service to the ruling — strange are the ways of the Law. The Ancient Skulls, of course, were entitled to a recitation and explanation of their rights, and they were entitled to maintain silence if they so chose, and they were also entitled to legal counsel whether or not they decided to answer any questions. Miranda-Escobedo, the Supreme Court decision that granted all these rights, was not the hindrance some police officers claimed it to be. In fact, a survey among law-enforcement officers around the country had revealed that as many confessions had been obtained since the Miranda-Escobedo decision as before, without the use of backroom, third-degree techniques.

Avery Evans, the leader of The Ancient Skulls, was the oldest member of the gang, twenty-six going on twenty-seven. He was also the smartest, and presumably the toughest. He maintained that the police were making some kind of mistake, and he said he would freely answer any and all questions they asked him. He had nothing to hide. The Ancient Skulls had always cooperated with the police, and he was certainly willing to cooperate with them now. He advised the other members of the gang — or at least those members present, it being estimated that there were a hundred and twelve Ancient Skulls residing in Isola and another fifty-some-odd in Riverhead — that they, likewise, could answer any questions the cops put to them. Avery Evans was cool, smart, tough, supremely confident, and the leader of a proud and noble band. He did not know, of course, that the police had a tape recording of what he and his proud and noble followers had done to Elizabeth Benjamin.

“You still haven’t told me what this is all about, man,” he said.

He was sitting in the Interrogation Room at the 83rd, at a long table facing a one-way mirror, sometimes called a two-way mirror — stranger and stranger are the ways of the Law. Those cops who called it a one-way mirror did so on the grounds that it only reflected on one side, whereas the other side was a clear pane of glass through which you could observe the person looking into the mirror. One way you looked into it, one way you looked through it — hence a one-way mirror. But there were other cops who called it a two-way mirror because of its double role as looking glass and glass for looking. You could not reasonably expect cops, who couldn’t even agree on the interpretation of Miranda-Escobedo after all these years, to agree on what the hell to call a one-way-two-way mirror. The important thing was that any suspect looking into the mirror, which hung conspicuously on the wall of the otherwise bare-walled Interrogation Room, knew immediately that he was looking into a trick mirror and (nine times out of ten) being photographed through it from the adjacent room. Which is just what was happening to Avery Evans, with his complete knowledge. But, of course, he had nothing to hide. He was convinced the cops had nothing on him. Let them take his picture through their phony mirror, let them run through all the nonsense. In half an hour he’d be back dancing at the old clubhouse.

Ollie — who was running the interrogation, since this was his corral, so to speak, even though it differed only slightly in decrepitude from the squadroom of the 87th — immediately said, “Before we start, let me make sure again that you understand your rights as we explained them to you, and that you’re willing to answer questions without a lawyer here. Is that right?”

“Oh, sure, sure,” Avery said. “I got nothing to hide, man.”

“Okay, then, you want to give me your full name?”

“Avery Moses Evans.”

“Where do you live, Ave?”

“On Ainsley Avenue — 1194 Ainsley, Apartment 32.”

“Live alone?”

“I live with my mother.”

“What’s her name?”

“Eloise Evans.”

“Father living?”

“They’re separated,” Avery said.

“Where were you born, Ave?”

“Right here. This city.”

“How old are you?”

“I’ll be twenty-seven two days before Christmas.”

“Where do you work?”

“I am at present unemployed.”

“Are you a member of the gang called The Ancient Skulls?”

“It’s a club,” Avery said.

“Sure. Are you a member?”

“I’m the president,” Avery said.

“Is Jamie Holder a member?”

“Jamison Holder, that’s right. Good man,” Avery said, and grinned.

“Where were you and Jamie Holder tonight between five and five-thirty P.M.?”

“I don’t remember exactly.”

“Try to remember exactly,” Ollie said.

“Hanging around.”

“Hanging around where?”

“Probably shooting pool.”

“Where would that have been?”

“Ace Billiards. On Kruger Street.”

“Anybody see you and Jamie there at that time?”

“Lots of guys from the Skulls were there.”

“Anybody besides members of your gang?”

“Club.”

“Anybody besides them?”

“I couldn’t say for sure. I don’t make a habit of finding out who’s in a place.”

“Know anybody named Charlie Harrod?” Ollie asked, and tweaked his nose with his thumb and forefinger. This was the signal to begin a flanking attack, Ollie continuing the frontal assault while Carella and Hawes closed in from either side.

“Never heard of him,” Avery said.

“Elizabeth Benjamin?” Hawes asked. “Ever hear of her?”

“Nope.”

“Harrod was a junkie,” Carella said.

“Yeah?” Avery said, and smiled. “I notice you used the past tense, man. Did he kick the habit?”

“Yes, he kicked it,” Hawes said.

“Good for him. We got no junkies in our club. I think you guys already know that. Ask any of the cops up here, they’ll tell you the Skulls are clean.”

“Oh yeah, we know that,” Ollie said.

“It’s a fact, man.”

“But you never heard of Harrod, huh?”

“Nope. All I know is if he kicked the habit, I’m proud of him. Too much junk in this neighborhood. That’s one thing you got to say about the Skulls, we’re doing our share to make this neighborhood a better place to live in.”

“Oh, ain’t we all,” Ollie said, doing his now-famous W. C. Fields imitation, “ain’t we all.”

“And another thing,” Avery said, “it’s the Skulls, and only the Skulls, who’re always negotiating with the other clubs to keep the peace around here. If it wasn’t for us, you guys would have your hands full. There’d be war all the goddamn time. I think you owe us at least a little gratitude for that.”

“Oh, sure we do,” Ollie said.

None of the cops bothered to mention that if there were no street gangs, there would be no wars, and therefore no need for any of the gangs to negotiate for peace. Each of the men questioning Avery knew that today’s gangs were far more dangerous than those existing twenty years ago, mainly because the current version came fully equipped with an ideology. The ideology provided a built-in justification for mayhem. If you’re doing something because it’s helping the neighborhood, why then, you can do any damn thing you like. Moreover, you can do it with a sense of pride.

“Where were you this afternoon, a little before twelve?” Hawes asked.

“Man, you guys sure expect a person to pinpoint his whereabouts, don’t you?”

“You don’t have to answer if you don’t want to,” Hawes said.

“I got nothing to hide,” Avery said. “I was probably down at the clubhouse.”

“Anybody see you there?”

“Oh sure, lots of the guys...”

“Besides members of the gang.”

“Only club members are allowed in the clubhouse.”

“By the clubhouse, do you mean the basement we found you in tonight?” Ollie asked.

“That’s the clubhouse,” Avery said.

The three detectives had moved closer to him, and they now formed a somewhat claustrophobic circle around his chair. They began to interrogate him more rapidly now, firing their questions one after the other, Avery at first turning to look at each of them in turn, and then finally directing all of his answers to Ollie, who stood directly in front of him.

“You got an annex to that clubhouse?” Ollie asked.

“No.”

“Where do you keep your arsenal?” Carella asked.

“We don’t have no arsenal, man. We’re a peace-loving club.”

“No guns?” Hawes asked.

“No knives?” Carella asked.

“No ball bats?” Ollie asked.

“None of that stuff.”

“You wouldn’t keep a stash of guns someplace else, huh?”

“No.”

“Someplace other than the clubhouse?”

“No.”

“Or knives?”

“No.”

“Charlie Harrod was stabbed today.”

“Didn’t know him.”

“He was also beaten to death.”

“Still don’t know him.”

“You familiar with that Kruger Street area?”

“Just a bit.”

“You just told us you shoot pool in Ace Billiards.”

“That’s right, I do. Every now and then.”

“That’s next door to where Charlie lived.”

“That a fact?”

“Apartment 6A, 1512 Kruger.”

“What about it?”

“Ever in that apartment?”

“Never.”

“Ever see Elizabeth Benjamin in the neighborhood?”

“Nope.”

“Did you know Charlie Harrod was a junkie?”

“Didn’t know what he was. Didn’t know the man, you dig?”

“Ever beat up a junkie?”

“Never.”

“That’s a lie,” Ollie said. “We had you punks in here six months ago for beating up a pusher named Shoemouth Kendricks.”

“That was a pusher, man. That wasn’t no junkie. Junkies are sick people. Pushers are what makes them sick.” Avery paused. “How come you know about that, anyway? You weren’t the cop who handled it.”

Ollie reached behind him, lifted a manila folder from the desk, and threw it into Avery’s lap. “This is the file on your little club, Mr. President. It gets thicker every day. We know all about you punks, and we know you stink.”

“Well now, I wouldn’t say exactly that, Mr. Weeks,” Avery said, and grinned, and handed the folder back to Ollie.

“We know, for example,” Ollie said, “that you keep your arsenal in the apartment of one Melissa Beam at 211 North 23rd, and that it consists of fourteen handguns, two dozen hand grenades, six World War Two bayonets and sheaths, and any number of switchblades, baseball bats, and sawed-off broom handles.”

“That’s a lie, man,” Avery said. “Who told you that jive?”

“A member of another little club called The Royal Savages.”

“Those jerks?” Avery said disdainfully. “They wouldn’t know an arsenal from their own assholes. Anyway, if you thought all that stuff was over there on Twenty-third, how come you didn’t raid it?”

“Because the last time you were up here, Mr. President, you made all kinds of law-abiding promises to a detective named Thomas Boyd, and in return he made a deal not to hassle you or your club.”

“That’s right, we are law-abiding,” Avery said. “We keep the peace.”

“Detective Boyd is over on Twenty-third right this minute,” Ollie said, “busting into that apartment. I hope he doesn’t find any weapons we can trace back to you and your gang. Like, for example, the knife that was used on Charlie Harrod.”

“He won’t, don’t worry,” Avery said, but he seemed a trifle shaken now. He cleared his throat.

“What do you call Jamie Holder?” Carella said.

“I call him Holder.”

“You call him by his last name?”

“That’s right.”

“How come?”

“Jamie sounds like a pansy. He likes being called Holder. It’s a strong name. He’s a big man, and a proud man. Holder fits him good.”

“Ever hear of voiceprints?” Hawes asked.

“Nope.”

“They’re like fingerprints,” Carella said.

“We can compare them. We can make positive identifications of voices.”

“Ain’t that interesting,” Avery said.

“We’ve got your voice on tape,” Ollie said.

“You been taping this?” Avery said, and looked quickly around for a hidden recorder. “I didn’t give you permission to do that.”

“No, no, we haven’t taped this,” Ollie said, and smiled.

“We’ve got a tape, though,” Carella said, and smiled.

“You and Holder are the stars on it,” Hawes said, and smiled.

“Want to hear it, Avery?”

“Sure, why not?” Avery said, and shrugged, and folded his arms across his chest.

Ollie immediately left the squadroom. The tape recorder was in the Clerical Office down the hall, and he could have picked it up in thirty seconds flat, but he dallied for a full five minutes before returning to where Avery was sitting in his straight-backed chair, arms folded. Neither of the other two detectives had said a word to him while Ollie was gone. Now Ollie put the recorder on the desk, gave Avery a sympathetic look that translated as “Man, are you in trouble,” and stabbed at the PLAY button. Casually, the detectives stood around Avery Evans and watched him as he listened to the tape.

— Hawes? You better get here fast. The apartment. I did what you said, I stayed here. And now they’ve come to get me. The ones who killed Charlie. They’re outside on the fire escape. They’re gonna smash in here as soon as they work up the courage.

Avery blinked when he heard the sound of glass shattering. His arms still folded across his chest, he leaned forward only slightly when he heard the next voices:

— Get away from that phone!

— Holder, watch it!

— She’s...

— I’ve got her!

Elizabeth screamed, and Avery began to sweat. The perspiration popped out on his forehead and ran down over his temples and cheeks as he heard the click of the phone being replaced on its cradle, the sounds of the chair being overturned, the tattoo of feet on linoleum, Elizabeth sobbing, the brutal sounds of flesh yielding to weapons.

— Oh, please, no.

— Shut up, bitch!

— Holder, get her legs!

— Please, please.

There was another scream, and the sweat rolled over Avery’s jaw and into his beard, moved inexorably in rivulets down the corded muscles of his neck, and was sopped up by the white T-shirt under the blue denim gang jacket. He listened to the beating, blinked when he heard the voices again:

— Come on, that’s enough.

— Holder, lay off, you’re gonna kill her!

— Let’s go, let’s go.

— What’s that?

— Let’s get the hell out of here, man.

He listened to the running footsteps and the tinkle of the broken window shards, and turned his head away when Elizabeth moaned. The tape went silent.

Ollie cut off the machine. “Recognize any of those voices?”

Avery did not answer.

“The girl’s alive,” Hawes said. “She’ll identify you.”

“How come you didn’t finish her off? Figure a scare was good enough?”

Avery did not answer.

“Did you think Harrod was a pusher?”

“Did his expensive clothes and Caddy fool you?”

“Did you think the girl was dealing, too?”

Avery still said nothing.

“Who hung up the phone, Ave?”

“We’ll get fingerprints from the receiver, you know.”

“And we’ll compare the voices on that tape with voiceprint of you and Holder.”

“And the rest of your pals, too.”

“And we’ll compare the white paint scrapings under Harrod’s fingernails with the paint on those jackets you wear.”

“How many of you jumped Harrod?”

“You stupid little punk!” Ollie shouted. “You think you can run around killing and hurting anybody you want? We’re gonna lock you up and throw away the key, you hear me, Mr. President?”

“I want a lawyer,” Avery said.