“That may tie in with what I found here.”
“You think it’s the old electric-bulb gimmick?”
“Could be,” Carella said. “I’ve also got a bottle that may or may not have chloral hydrate in it, a pair of spent 9-mm cartridge cases...”
“Oh-oh,” Hawes said.
“Right. We’ve got a homicide, Cotton.”
“Who?”
“Frank Reardon, day watchman here at the warehouse.”
“Any idea why?”
“Probably to shut him up. It’s my guess he doctored the booze the night watchmen would be drinking. Do me a favor and run a routine check on him, will you?”
“Right. When’re you coming back here?”
“The loot’s contacting the clean-up boys now,” Carella said. “Knowing them, I’ll be here at least another hour. One more thing you can do while I’m gone.”
“What’s that?”
“Run a check on Roger Grimm, too. If this was an inside job...”
“Got you.”
“I’ll see you later. Few things I’ve got to tag and bag before the mob arrives.”
“Take your time. It’s very quiet up here right now.”
It was not quiet when Carella got back to the squadroom at a quarter to six. Detectives Meyer and Brown had already come in to relieve the skeleton team, and they were busy in the corner of the room, yelling at a young man who sat with his right wrist handcuffed to a leg of the metal desk. Hawes was sitting at his own desk, oblivious of the noisy confrontation going on behind him. He looked up when Carella came through the gate.
“I’ve been waiting for you,” he said.
“So do you want a lawyer or don’t you?” Brown shouted.
“I don’t know,” the young man said. “Tell me my rights again.”
“Jeee-sus Christ!” Brown exploded.
“Took a little longer than I expected,” Carella said.
“As usual,” Hawes said. “Who’d Homicide send over? Monoghan and Monroe?”
“They’re on vacation. These were two new guys, never saw them before. What’d you get from the IS?”
Meyer Meyer, hitching up his trousers, walked over to Hawes’s desk. He was a burly man with china-blue eyes and a bald pate, which he mopped now with his handkerchief as he sat on the edge of the desk. “Explained his rights four times,” he said. He held up his right hand like an Indian war bonnet. “Four goddamn times, can you imagine it? He still can’t make up his mind.”
“Screw him,” Hawes said. “Don’t tell him his rights.”
“Yeah, sure,” Meyer said.
“What’d he do?” Carella asked.
“Smash-and-grab. A jewelry store on Culver Avenue. Caught him with six wristwatches in his pocket.”
“So what’s with the rights? You’ve got him cold. Book him and ship him out.”
“No, we want to ask him some questions,” Meyer said.
“What about?”
“He was carrying two decks of heroin. We’d like to know how he got them.”
“Same way as anybody else,” Hawes said. “From his friendly neighborhood pusher.”
“Where’ve you been?” Meyer said.
“On vacation,” Hawes said.
“That explains it.”
“Explains what?”
“Why you don’t know what’s going on.”
“I hate mysteries,” Hawes said. “You want to tell me what’s going on, or you want to go back and explain that kid’s rights to him?”
“Brown’s doing that,” Meyer said, glancing over his shoulder. “For the fifth time. I’d better go see if he’s making any progress there,” he said, and walked back to where Brown was patiently explaining Miranda-Escobedo to the addict, who kept looking up at him solemnly.
“So what’d you get from the IS?” Carella asked Hawes.
“Nothing on Reardon, clean as a whistle.”
“What about Roger Grimm?”
“He took a fall six years ago.”
“What for?”
“Forgery/Three. He was working for an import-export house at the time, sold close to a hundred thousand dollars’ worth of phony stock certificates before he got caught. Seventy-five thousand was recovered, stashed away in a bank.”
“What about the rest?”
“Spent it. Bought himself a new Cadillac, was living high on the hog at a hotel downtown on Jefferson.”
“Was he convicted?”
“Oh, sure. Sentenced to three years, and a two-thousand-dollar fine. Served a year and a half at Castleview, and was released on parole... Let me see,” Hawes said, and consulted his notes. “Four years ago, this June,”
“How about since?”
“Nothing. Honest as the day is long.”
“Except that all of a sudden he has two fires.”
“Yeah, well, anybody can have a fire, Steve.”
“Anybody can sell phony stock certificates, too.”
“So where do we go from here?”
“I’ve got Reardon’s address from his driver’s license. I’d like to hit his apartment tomorrow morning, see what we can turn up there.”
“Okay. Shall we go together, or what?”
“What’s tomorrow?”
“Friday. The sixteenth.”
“You take it alone, Cotton. I want to get a search warrant before the weekend, and the way the courts are jammed, I’m liable to be there all day.”
“What do you plan to do? Shake down Grimm’s office?”
“Yeah, the Bailey Street place, where he keeps his books. That seems like the next logical step, don’t you think?”
“Sounds good to me,” Hawes said.
“So let’s go home.”
“Half-a-day today?” Meyer called from where he and Brown were still explaining Miranda-Escobedo to the kid.
“So what do you say, sonny?” Brown asked. “You want to talk to us or not?” He was standing in his shirtsleeves near the chair in which the addict sat, his sleeves rolled up over powerful forearms, a huge black man who dwarfed the kid sitting in the chair with his wrist handcuffed to the desk.
“What if I tell you about the scag?” the kid said. “Will you forget about the wristwatches?”
“Now, sonny,” Brown said, “you’re asking us to make deals only the DA can make.”
“But you want to know about those two decks, don’t you?”
“We’re mildly interested,” Brown said, “let me put it that way. We got you dead to rights on the burglary...”
“The robbery, you mean.”
“No, the burglary,” Brown said.
“I thought a burglary was when you went into somebody’s apartment and ripped it off.”
“Sonny, I don’t have time to give you a lecture on the Penal Law. You want the charge to read robbery, well be happy to oblige. You also got a rape or a homicide you want to tell us about, why, we’ll just be tickled to death to listen. But Third-Degree Burglary is what we got you on, and that’s what we’re going to book you for. If that’s okay with you.”
“Okay, fine,” the kid said.
“Now, if you want to cooperate with us,” Brown said, “and I’m not making any promises because that’s expressly forbidden by Miranda-Escobedo... but if you want to cooperate with us and talk about how you got that heroin, why maybe we can later whisper in the DA’s ear that you were helpful, though I’m not making any promises.”
The kid looked up at Brown. He was a skinny kid with a longish nose and pale blue eyes and hollow cheeks. He was wearing dungarees and a striped, short-sleeved polo shirt. The hit marks of his addiction ran up the length of his arm, following the veins like an army of marauding ants.
“What do you say?” Brown asked. “You’re wasting our time here. If you want to talk to us, speak now or forever hold your peace. The sergeant downstairs is waiting to write your name in the book.”