It was now 8:30 A.M.
Elizabeth Benjamin was awake and being fed intravenously because her jaw was wired and she could not open her mouth. Neither could she nod or shake her head in answer to police questions. So Ollie stuck a pencil in her right hand and propped up a pad for her, and then asked his questions. Willingly but awkwardly, Elizabeth wrote her answers onto the pad.
“These are police photographs,” he said, “of six members of a street gang called The Ancient Skulls. We took these pictures up in the squadroom last night when we arrested these guys, and we’d like you to look at them now and tell us if any of them were involved in beating you up. This is a young man named Lewis Coombs. Was he one of your attackers?”
“This is a young man named Avery Evans. Was he one of your attackers?”
“This punk... this young man is named Felix Collins. Was he in on the attack?”
“How about this one? His name is John Morley.”
“This one? Jamison Holder?”
“Here’s the last one. Timothy Anderson.”
“Okay now, that was very good, Miss Benjamin,” Ollie said, “and I know you’re tired and I don’t want to keep you any longer than I have to. There’s just one other thing I need, and that’s a picture of you. That’s for the district attorney,” Ollie said, “to help in preparing his case against these punks who hurt you so bad. I can take a picture with this Polaroid I got here, but you’re all wired up and all, and I’d prefer having a picture that resembles you more like when you were more yourself, if you know what I mean. Would you have such a picture?”
Elizabeth watched him out of puffed and swollen eyes, picked up the pencil again, and wrote on the pad:
Ollie asked the nurse to fetch Elizabeth’s wallet, and when she brought it to him, he gave it to Elizabeth. Both her legs were in casts to the hip, her broken jaw was wired, her broken ribs taped, and there were bandages covering her bruised face and arms. It was only with great effort that she located the snapshot in the plastic gatefold, extracted it, and handed it to Ollie.
In the photo, she was standing in front of a Diamondback tenement wall, smiling into the sunshine. She was wearing a simple yellow frock and low sandals. She looked quite pretty.
“Thank you,” Ollie said, “I will show this to the DA.”
He had no intention of showing it to the DA.
From a telephone booth across the street from the tenement in which Rosalie Waggener’s sumptuous pad was located, Cotton Hawes called the number listed in the Isola directory and waited for Rosalie to answer the phone. When her voice came onto the line at last, it was fuzzy with sleep.
“Hello?” she said.
“Rosalie?” he said.
“Mmm.”
“My name’s Dick Coopersmith, I’m from Detroit. I was talking to a man in a bar who said I might enjoy meeting you.”
“What man?” Rosalie said.
“Fellow named Dave Carter. Or Carson. Fm not sure which.”
“You’ve got the wrong number,” Rosalie said, and hung up.
Hawes shrugged, put the receiver back on the hook, and walked out of the booth. He had only been trying to ascertain whether or not Rosalie was still in the apartment, but he’d figured he might as well take a whack at establishing her occupation at the same time. Some you win, some you lose. He took up position in a doorway some fifteen feet from the phone booth, and hoped Rosalie wouldn’t sleep too late and that eventually she’d come out of the building and lead him straight to Oscar Hemmings.
In his own squadroom, at his own desk, Steve Carella put in a long-distance call to the prison at Castleview-on-Rawley, and asked to talk to someone in Records. The man who came onto the line identified himself as Peter Yarborough.
“What can I do for you?” he asked.
“This is Detective Steve Carella, the 87th Squad, down here in Isola. I’m looking for a record of correspondence to and from a man who...”
“Who’d you say this was?”
“Detective Steve Carella, 87th Squad.”
“Put it in writing, Carella,” Yarborough said. “We can’t answer telephone requests.”
“This is urgent,” Carella said. “We’re investigating homicide and arson.”
“What’d you say your name was?”
“Carella. Steve Carella.”
“Where you calling from, Carella?”
“The squadroom.”
“What’s the number there?”
“Frederick 7-8024.”
“I’ll get back to you,” Yarborough said, and hung up.
Carella looked at the mouthpiece and then slammed the receiver down onto the cradle. The phone rang twenty minutes later. He lifted the receiver. “87th Squad, Carella,” he said.
“This is Yarborough.”
“Hello, Yarborough,” Carella said.
“I wanted to call you back because how did I know you were really a detective?” Yarborough said.
“That’s right, you did the right thing,” Carella said.
“I did better than the right thing. I first called Headquarters down there in the city and made sure this number was really the number of a detective squadroom.”
“You did very well,” Carella said. “Can you help with that record of correspondence?”
“I’ll try,” Yarborough said. “What was the prisoner’s name?”
“Alfred Allen Chase.”
“When was he here?”
“Started serving his sentence five years ago. Served three and a half.”
“What were you interested in, Carella?”
“I want to know if there was any correspondence between him and a man named Roger Grimm, who’s also one of your graduates.”
“Yeah, we get ’em all here, sooner or later,” Yarborough said dryly. “Any special time period? Some of these lists are a mile long, take me all morning to go through ‘em.”
“Grimm was paroled in June, four years ago. Can you start there?”
“Yeah, I guess so,” Yarborough said reluctantly. “Let me get back to you.”
At ten minutes to 10:00 Fat Ollie Weeks walked into the second-floor offices of Diamondback Development. There were two men seated at the long table in front of the wall of photographs. One of them was Robinson Worthy. The other was a black man Ollie had never seen before.
“Good morning,” Ollie said cheerily. “Just happened to be in the neighborhood and thought I’d stop by.”
“Good morning,” Worthy said. His voice was frosty, his eyes wary.
“I don’t believe I’ve had the pleasure,” Ollie said to the other man.
“This is my other partner,” Worthy said. “Oscar Hemmings.”
“Pleased to meet you, Mr. Hemmings,” Ollie said, and extended his hand.
Hemmings was a handsome man of perhaps fifty, impeccably dressed in a brown lightweight business suit, beige shirt with a button-down collar, simple tie of a deeper shade of brown. His face was craggy, a strong sledgehammer nose, well-pronounced cheekbones, a firm mouth, a square jaw. His hair was turning gray, styled to hide the fact that it was thinning a bit. His handshake was firm. He smiled thinly and said in a very low voice, “Nice to meet you, Detective Weeks.”