“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.