“Well,” Carella said, and shrugged.
“What’ll it take?” Grimm asked suddenly.
“What’ll what take?”
“To get a clean bill of health from you.”
“I’m not sure my word alone would convince your insurers that...”
“But it would help, wouldn’t it?”
“Maybe, maybe not. What would really help is if we caught the arsonist. And the man who killed Frank Reardon. Assuming they’re one and the same, which they might not be.”
“I think if you went to them and told them I had nothing to do with the fire, they’d release the money,” Grimm said. He was standing just directly to the left of where Carella sat now, looking down at him intently. “Will you do it?”
“No,” Carella said. “I don’t know who burned down your warehouse, Mr. Grimm. Not yet, I don’t.”
“How much?” Grimm said.
“What?”
“I said how much.”
The office went still.
“I’ll pretend I didn’t hear that,” Carella said.
“I meant how much time,” Grimm said quickly. “How much time will you need to...?”
“I’m sure you did,” Carella said. He rose, put on his jacket, and went to the door. “If that canceled check shows up, give me a ring,” he said, and left the office. He had not mentioned Grimm’s police record, and Grimm had not volunteered the information. But then again, if everybody was always totally honest with everybody else, Diogenes wouldn’t have had a job, either.
Meanwhile, back at the scene of the crime, Hawes was going through the building at 2914 Landis Avenue with a detective from the 83rd Squad, in which precinct Diamondback happened to be located. The detective was named Oliver Weeks. He was affectionately called Big Ollie by his colleagues on the Eight-Three. (He was not so affectionately called Fat Ollie by various despicable types he had busted over the years.) Big/Fat Ollie was both fat and big. He also sweated a lot. And he smelled. Hawes considered him a pig.
“Looks like he was beat to death, don’t it to you?” Ollie asked.
“Yeah,” Hawes said.
They were climbing the steps to the first floor of the building, where the offices of Arthur Kendall, Attorney at Law, were located. Ollie was just ahead of Hawes, puffing up the stairs, a powerful aroma wafting back down the stairwell.
“Not with fists, though,” Ollie said, panting.
“No,” Hawes said.
“Sawed-off stickball bat,” Ollie said. “Or maybe a hammer.”
“Medical examiner’ll tell us,” Hawes said, and took out his handkerchief and blew his nose.
“You getting a cold there?” Ollie asked.
“No,” Hawes said.
“Summer colds are the worst kind,” Ollie said. “You know this guy Kendall?”
“No,” Hawes said.
“He’s a jig lawyer, represents half the punks who get in trouble around here.”
“Who represents the other half?” Hawes asked.
“Huh?” Ollie said, and opened the door to Kendall’s office.
Kendall’s secretary looked up from her desk in surprise. She was perhaps twenty-three years old, a good-looking black girl wearing an Afro cut, a pale blue jumper over a white blouse, her legs bare, her pastel-blue pumps off her feet and resting to the side of her swivel chair. Her surprise seemed genuine enough, but Hawes wondered how she could possibly have missed all the excitement downstairs — a dead man lying on the floor of the lobby, radio motor patrol cars at the curb, the police photographer taking pictures, the assistant medical examiner bustling about, the ambulance waiting to carry the body to the morgue.
“Yes?” she said, and bent over to put on her shoes.
“Detective Weeks,” Ollie said, “83rd Squad.”
“Yes?” the girl said.
“What’s your name?” Ollie asked.
“Susan Coleridge.”
“We got a dead man downstairs,” Ollie said.
“Yes, I know,” Susan answered.
“Hear anything happening down there?” Ollie asked.
“No.”
“How come? It’s just down one flight of steps there.”
“I was typing,” Susan said. “And the radio was on.”
“It ain’t on now,” Ollie said.
“I turned it off when I heard the police cars. I went out in the hall to see what was happening. That’s when I realized Charlie’d been killed.”
“Oh, you knew him?”
“Yes. He worked upstairs.”
“Where?”
“Diamondback Development.”
“Your boss in?”
“He’s in court.”
“Keeping you busy these days?” Ollie asked.
“Yes,” Susan said.
“So you didn’t see nor hear nothing, is that right?”
“That’s right,” Susan said.
“Thanks,” Ollie said, and motioned for Hawes to follow him out. In the hallway, Ollie said, “These jigs never see nor hear nothin.’ This whole neighborhood’s deaf, dumb, and blind.”
“If she was typing...”
“Yeah, they’re always typing,” Ollie said. “Or the radio’s on. Or the washing machine. Or something. It’s always something. These jigs stick together like peanut butter and jelly. Nothing they like better than to see us busting our asses.” They had reached the second-floor landing now. The lettering on the frosted glass door at the top of the steps read DIAMONDBACK DEVELOPMENT, INC. Ollie glanced at it sourly, said, “Sounds like a bullshit operation,” and pushed open the door.
Two black men in shirtsleeves were sitting at a long table near the windows. One of the men was tall and thin, light-complected, with a rather long nose and mild amber eyes. The other was quite dark, a heavyset man with brown eyes magnified by thick-lensed glasses. He was chewing on the stub of a dead cigar. The wall to the left of the table was hung with large photographic blowups of rows and rows of tenements, alongside of which were pinned architectural drawings for what looked like a city of the future. Half a dozen of the buildings in the blowups had large red Xs taped across their faces. The tabletop was covered with eight-by-ten glossies of tenements and empty lots. The heavyset man was holding a stack of photographs of gasoline stations and putting them on the table, one by one, before the amber-eyed man, who then consulted a typewritten sheet. Both of them looked up together as Ollie walked briskly toward the table.
“Detective Weeks,” he said in his abrupt, direct manner. “This is Detective Hawes. Who’re you?”
“Alfred Allen Chase,” the amber-eyed man said.
“Robinson Worthy,” the man with the glasses said, and put down the gasoline-station pictures and shifted the dead cigar stub to the opposite side of his mouth.
“I’m investigating the murder of Charles Harrod,” Ollie said. “I understand he worked here.”
“Yes, that’s right,” Chase said.
“You don’t seem too broken up over his untimely demise,” Ollie said. “Business as usual, huh?”
“We’ve already called his mother, and we tried to reach his girlfriend,” Chase said. “What else would you like us to do? He’s dead. Ain’t nothing we can do about that.”
“What kind of job did he have here?”
“He took pictures for us,” Worthy said, and gestured toward the wall of tenement photographs and then the glossies on the desk.
“Just went around taking pictures of old buildings, huh?” Ollie said.
“We’re a development company,” Chase said. “We’re trying to reclaim this whole area.”
“Sounds like a big job,” Ollie said in mock appreciation.
“It is,” Worthy said flatly.
“How much of it have you reclaimed so far?” Ollie said.