Bread (87th Precinct) by Ed McBain Read Free Book Online Page B

“From his friendly neighborhood pusher.”
    “Where’ve you been?” Meyer said.
    “On vacation,” Hawes said.
    “That explains it.”
    “Explains what?”
    “Why you don’t know what’s going on.”
    “I hate mysteries,” Hawes said. “You want to tell me what’s going on, or you want to go back and explain that kid’s rights to him?”
    “Brown’s doing that,” Meyer said, glancing over his shoulder. “For the fifth time. I’d better go see if he’s making any progress there,” he said, and walked back to where Brown was patiently explaining Miranda-Escobedo to the addict, who kept looking up at him solemnly.
    “So what’d you get from the IS?” Carella asked Hawes.
    “Nothing on Reardon, clean as a whistle.”
    “What about Roger Grimm?”
    “He took a fall six years ago.”
    “What for?”
    “Forgery/Three. He was working for an import-export house at the time, sold close to a hundred thousand dollars’ worth of phony stock certificates before he got caught. Seventy-five thousand was recovered, stashed away in a bank.”
    “What about the rest?”
    “Spent it. Bought himself a new Cadillac, was living high on the hog at a hotel downtown on Jefferson.”
    “Was he convicted?”
    “Oh, sure. Sentenced to three years, and a two-thousand-dollar fine. Served a year and a half at Castleview, and was released on parole…Let me see,” Hawes said, and consulted his notes. “Four years ago, this June,”
    “How about since?”
    “Nothing. Honest as the day is long.”
    “Except that all of a sudden he has two fires.”
    “Yeah, well, anybody can have a fire, Steve.”
    “Anybody can sell phony stock certificates, too.”
    “So where do we go from here?”
    “I’ve got Reardon’s address from his driver’s license. I’d like to hit his apartment tomorrow morning, see what we can turn up there.”
    “Okay. Shall we go together, or what?”
    “What’s tomorrow?”
    “Friday. The sixteenth.”
    “You take it alone, Cotton. I want to get a search warrant before the weekend, and the way the courts are jammed, I’m liable to be there all day.”
    “What do you plan to do? Shake down Grimm’s office?”
    “Yeah, the Bailey Street place, where he keeps his books. That seems like the next logical step, don’t you think?”
    “Sounds good to me,” Hawes said.
    “So let’s go home.”
    “Half-a-day today?” Meyer called from where he and Brown were still explaining Miranda-Escobedo to the kid.
    “So what do you say, sonny?” Brown asked. “You want to talk to us or not?” He was standing in his shirtsleeves near the chair in which the addict sat, his sleeves rolled up over powerful forearms, a huge black man who dwarfed the kid sitting in the chair with his wrist handcuffed to the desk.
    “What if I tell you about the scag?” the kid said. “Will you forget about the wristwatches?”
    “Now, sonny,” Brown said, “you’re asking us to make deals only the DA can make.”
    “But you want to know about those two decks, don’t you?”
    “We’re mildly interested,” Brown said, “let me put it that way. We got you dead to rights on the burglary…”
    “The robbery, you mean.”
    “No, the burglary,” Brown said.
    “I thought a burglary was when you went into somebody’s apartment and ripped it off.”
    “Sonny, I don’t have time to give you a lecture on the Penal Law. You want the charge to read robbery, well be happy to oblige. You also got a rape or a homicide you want to tell us about, why, we’ll just be tickled to death to listen. But Third-Degree Burglary is what we got you on, and that’s what we’re going to book you for. If that’s okay with you.”
    “Okay, fine,” the kid said.
    “Now, if you want to cooperate with us,” Brown said, “and I’m not making any promises because that’s expressly forbidden by Miranda-Escobedo…but if you want to cooperate with us and talk about how you got that heroin, why maybe we can later whisper in the