Carella’s bedside phone rang in the middle of the night. He fumbled for the receiver, lifted it, and said, “Hullo,” not sure he was talking into the right end.
“Carella? This is Ollie Weeks.”
“Ollie?” Carella said. “Oh, hullo, Ollie. How are you? What time is it, Ollie?”
“I don’t know what time it is,” Ollie said. “Carella, I can’t sleep.”
“That’s too bad,” Carella said, and squinted at the luminous dial on the alarm clock near his bed. It was ten minutes past 4:00. “Have you tried counting sheep, Ollie?”
“I’ve been thinking about this guy,” Ollie said.
“What guy, Ollie?”
“This guy Oscar Hemmings. The third guy in Diamondback Development.”
“Oh, yes,” Carella said. “Yes, what about him?”
“I’ve been thinking if I wait till morning, he’s liable to be not there.”
“Well,” Carella said, and hesitated. It seemed to him that Ollie had just uttered a choice non sequitur, but he couldn’t be quite certain because he was still half asleep.
“At his apartment, I mean,” Ollie said. “At the address I have for him.”
“Yes, there’s always the chance he’ll be out,” Carella said, and looked at the clock again.
“Unless I go there now,” Ollie said.
“It’s four o’clock in the morning,” Carella said. “It’s twelve past four.”
“That’s the idea,” Ollie said. “Nobody’s not home at four in the morning. It’s too late to be out on the town and too early to be getting out of bed. If I go there now, I’m sure to nab him.”
“Okay,” Carella said. “Fine.”
“What do you mean?”
“Go there. Go nab him.”
“You want to come with me?” Ollie said.
“No,” Carella said.
“Aw, come on.”
“No,” Carella said. “Listen, are you crazy or something, waking me up at four o’clock, four-fifteen, whatever the hell it is? What’s the matter with you? You cracked your case, you’ve got your...”
“Those guys up there bother me.”
“Why?”
“Because they’ve got eight hundred thousand dollars in their safety deposit box. Where’d those jigs get money like that if it ain’t dirty money?”
“I don’t know where, Ollie.”
“Ain’t you even interested? Harrod worked for them, and Harrod knew Reardon, and Reardon is dead, and Hawes tells me Harrod’s gun killed him. Now ain’t that interesting to you?”
“It’s interesting. But Harrod’s also dead, and I can’t arrest a dead man for killing another dead man.”
“Why are all these guys getting knocked off?” Ollie said.
“The homicides aren’t connected,” Carella said patiently. “You’ve got the punks who killed Harrod, and if Harrod killed Reardon, it was because Reardon knew about an arson in which Harrod may or may not have been... Damn it, Ollie, you’re waking me up! I don’t want to wake up! I want to go back to sleep. Goodnight, Ollie.”
Carella hung up. Beside him, his wife Teddy lay asleep with one leg twisted in the sheet. She could not, and therefore had not, heard the ringing telephone or the ensuing conversation, and for that he was grateful. He untangled the sheet, and was snuggling up close to her when the phone rang again. He snapped the receiver from its cradle and shouted, “Yes, damn it!”
“Steve?”
“Who’s this?”
“It’s me. Cotton.”
“What do you want, Cotton?”
“Did Ollie Weeks just call you?”
“Yes, Ollie Weeks just called me! And now you’re just calling me! Why don’t you two guys get married and stop bothering me in the middle of the goddamn night? I’m trying to sleep here. I’m trying to get some sleep here. I’m trying...”
“Steve?”
“What?”
“You want to go with him?”
“No, I don’t want to go with him.”
“I think we ought to go with him,” Hawes said.
“You like him so much, you go with him,” Carella said.
“I don’t like him at all, but I think maybe he’s right,” Hawes said. “I think maybe Diamondback Development has something to do with Roger Grimm’s fires, and I think we’re not going to get anything out of Worthy and Chase right now, but maybe we’ve got a chance to get something out of the third guy if we go up there in the middle of the night and surprise him. I think Ollie’s right.”
There was silence on the line.
“Steve?” Hawes said.
There was more silence.
“Steve?”
“Where do you want to meet?” Carella said wearily.
They met in an all-night diner on Ainsley Avenue at a quarter to five. They sat in a corner booth and quietly discussed their next move. What they were about to do was risky in that they did not have a court order to enter the premises occupied by one Oscar Hemmings at 1137 St. Sebastian, and if Hemmings so chose, he could tell them to run along and go play cops and robbers elsewhere. America was not yet a police state, and the Gestapo could not break down your door in the middle of the night and haul you out of bed. They could question Hemmings, true, because they were seeking information about a crime of which they had knowledge, but they couldn’t question him unless he agreed to being questioned. If he refused, they could tell him they’d be back with a subpoena and he could answer questions before a grand jury, the choice was his, and that might scare him into cooperating. But they didn’t want to go that route with Hemmings, and so they concocted a ruse in the diner, and they hoped the ruse would work. If he bought their story, he might talk to them and reveal something important. If he did not buy it, he was within his rights to slam the door in their faces.
The ruse they concocted was a good one and a simple one.
They assumed that Hemmings, being a partner in Diamondback Development, already knew that Charlie Harrod was dead. However, no matter how fast the Diamondback grapevine worked, he probably did not yet know that The Ancient Skulls had been picked up and charged with Harrod’s murder. The several assumptions they had made about Roger Grimm’s warehouse fire were that (a) Reardon had doped the booze the night watchmen later drank, and (b) Reardon had been killed because he might talk about his role in the arson. They knew, in addition, that Reardon had been visited two or three times in the week or so before the fire by two black men — one of whom had been Charlie Harrod; that Reardon had deposited $5,000 into his savings account five days before the fire; and that Elizabeth Benjamin had spent the two nights preceding the fire in Reardon’s apartment, presumably to add a little sexual persuasion to the financial inducement he’d already received. A positive identification of Harrod and Elizabeth would have to be made by Barbara Loomis, who had seen them both. In the meantime, her descriptions seemed to jibe, and so they worked on the assumption that Reardon was the connecting link between Harrod and the warehouse fire.