What they wanted to know, and this was why they were visiting Hemmings in the early hours of the morning, was why Harrod had been involved in arson. Assuming he had contacted Reardon to engage his services in helping to administer the Mickey, and assuming Reardon had been paid $5,000 for those services, and assuming Elizabeth had been sent to him to sweeten the pot — why had Harrod wanted to burn down Grimm’s warehouse in the first place? What was his motive? Was he working for Diamondback Development or for himself? Worthy and Chase had already said all they would ever say about Charlie Harrod. Good photographer, mother lives alone, girlfriend a bit flashy, blah, blah, blah. Hemmings hadn’t yet told them anything, and now they hoped he would — if their little ruse worked.
This was the structure upon which they based their plan:
Hemmings knew that Harrod had been killed.
Hemmings did not know The Skulls had been charged with Harrod’s murder.
Worthy and Chase knew both Ollie and Hawes.
Worthy and Chase had undoubtedly told their partner, Hemmings, about the visit from the two cops, and may have also described them.
The only cop Worthy, Chase, and Hemmings did not know was Steve Carella.
This was the scenario they evolved:
Ollie and Hawes would knock on Hemmings’s door. They would apologize for awakening him so early in the morning, but they had a man with them who, they suspected, had killed Charlie Harrod that afternoon. They would then produce the man, in handcuffs. The man would be rather tall and slender, with brown hair and brown, slanted eyes, an altogether unimpressive nebbish, but nobody says you have to look like John Wayne in order to be capable of committing murder. The man in handcuffs would be Steve Carella.
Ollie and Hawes would tell Hemmings that the man, whose name they decided would be Alphonse Di Bari (over Carella’s objections, since he didn’t think he looked particularly Italian), had claimed he would never have murdered Charlie Harrod, because he was a close friend of his and had, in fact, worked together with him at Diamondback Development. It was essential to the case they had against Di Bari that someone from Diamondback Development either positively identify him as an employee, or else put the lie to rest. Hemmings, of course, would say he had never before seen this Alphonse Di Bari (Carella still objected to the name, this time on the grounds that he didn’t particularly look like an Alphonse). Then the detectives would get sort of chummy with Hemmings and explain how they had tracked Di Bari to his apartment and found the murder weapon there, and Carella (as Di Bari) would protest all along that they had the wrong man, and would beg Hemmings to please tell these guys he legitimately worked for Diamondback Development, that Charlie Harrod had hired him to take photographs of a warehouse belonging to a man named Roger Grimm, please, mister, will you please tell these guys they’re making a mistake?
Everybody would be watching Hemmings very closely at this point, hoping he would by his manner or by his speech drop something revealing (like perhaps his teeth) the moment the warehouse was mentioned. If he did not react immediately, they would keep hammering at the warehouse story, supposedly enlisting Hemmings’s aid, listening all the while for telltale little clues, actually questioning him while making him believe they were in reality seeking information that would disprove Di Bari’s lie.
It was not a bad scenario.
Listen, this was 5:00 in the morning, and they weren’t shooting a picture for Twentieth Century-Fox.
With Carella in handcuffs (he felt stupid), the detectives went into the building on St. Sebastian Avenue and began climbing the steps to the fourth floor.
Even at this early hour of the morning, Ollie was no rose garden, but then again, he had never promised anybody he was. Cotton Hawes had a very sensitive nose. He hated firing his pistol senselessly because the stench of cordite almost always made him slightly nauseous. During his naval career this had been a severe handicap, since somebody or other always seemed to be firing a gun at somebody else or other. Ollie did not smell of cordite. It was difficult to place his smell.
“I thought they renovated this dump,” Ollie said. “It’s a garbage heap, that’s what it is.”
Yes, Hawes thought, that’s it.
They stopped outside Hemmings’s door and knocked on it. And knocked on it again. And again, and again, and again. Nobody answered.
“What now?” Hawes asked.
“You think he’s in there?” Ollie said.
“If he is, he’s not letting us know about it.”
“He should be in there,” Ollie said, frowning. “It’s five o’clock in the morning. Nobody’s not in bed at five o’clock in the morning.”
“Except me,” Carella said.
“What do you think?” Ollie said.
They held a brief consultation in the hallway outside Hemmings’s door, and decided to call off the movie. They removed the handcuffs from Carella’s wrists, and were starting down the steps to the street when Ollie said, “What the hell are we pussyfooting around for?” and went back to the door and kicked it in without another word.
Carella and Hawes looked at each other. Hawes sighed. Together, they followed Ollie into the apartment.
“Look at this joint, willya?” Ollie said.
They were looking at it. They were, in fact, looking at it bugeyed. For whereas 1137 St. Sebastian was a tenement, and whereas the stairway leading up to the fourth floor had been as littered and as noisome as any to be found in the slums, and whereas the chipped and peeling door to Oscar Hemmings’s apartment looked exactly like every other door on the floor, the apartment inside came as a series of surprises.
The first surprise was a small entrance foyer. You did not ordinarily find entrance foyers in Diamondback. Entrance foyers were for Marie Antoinette. In Diamondback, you stepped immediately into a kitchen. But here was an honest-to-God entrance foyer, with mirrors running around it on all three surrounding walls, optically enlarging the space and reflecting the images of three dumbfounded detectives. Ollie, who was already peeking past the foyer into the rest of the apartment, was thinking it resembled a place he had once seen on a science-fiction television show. Carella and Hawes, who were beside him, weren’t thinking anything at the moment. They just stood there looking like a pair of baggy-pantsed Arabs who had accidentally wandered into a formal reception at the Israeli Embassy.
To the right of the entrance foyer was a kitchen, sleek with Formica and walnut, brushed chrome, white vinyl tile. The thick pale blue carpet that began in the entrance foyer ran completely through the rest of the apartment. Knee-deep in it, or so it seemed, the detectives waded into the living room, where a lacquered white sectional couch nestled into the right-angle corner of the room, its cushions a deeper blue against drapes the color of the carpet. A huge modern painting, all slashes and streaks, reds, blacks, whites, and varying shades of blue, hung over one section of the couch, illuminated by a pale white sculpted floor lamp operated from a mercury switch at the door. There was a walnut bar lined with glasses unmistakably designed in Scandinavia, glistening against a bottled backdrop of expensive whiskeys and liqueurs. Floor-to-ceiling walnut bookshelves covered the wall opposite one section of the couch, stacked with titles Ollie had meant to read but had never got around to.