Bread (87th Precinct) by Ed McBain Page A

first offense?” Meyer asked.
    “Yeah. I usually…I usually get money from my parents, you know? I mean, enough to get me through the week. I don’t have to steal, they help me out, you know? But the prices are so high, and the junk is so lousy…I mean, you’re paying twice as much for half the quality, it’s terrible, I mean it. I know guys who’re shooting all kinds of shit in their arms. It’s a bad scene, I got to tell you.”
    “How old are you, Sammy?” Meyer asked.
    “Me? I’ll be twenty on the sixth of September.”
    Meyer shook his head and walked away. Brown unlocked the handcuff and led Sammy out of the squadroom, to where he would be booked for Third-Degree Burglary at the muster desk downstairs. He had told them nothing new.
    “So now what?” Meyer said to Carella. “Now we book him on the smash-and-grab, and he’ll be convicted, of course, and what did we accomplish? We sent another addict to prison. That’s like sending diabetics to prison.” He shook his head again and, almost to himself, said, “A nice Jewish boy.”

 
    Frank Reardon had lived in an eight-story building on Avenue J, across the street from a huge multilevel parking lot. On Friday morning the electric company was tearing up the street outside in an attempt to get at some underground cables, and cars were stalled all up and down the avenue as Hawes rang the bell to the superintendent’s apartment. The apartment was on street level, at the far end of a narrow alley on the left-hand side of the building. Even here, insulated from the street outside, Hawes could hear the insistent stutter of the pneumatic drills, the impatient honking of horns, the shouts of the motorists, the angry retorts of the men tearing up the street. He rang the bell again, unable to hear anything over the din and wondered if it was working.
    The door opened suddenly. The woman standing there in the shaded doorway to the apartment was perhaps forty-five years old, a blond slattern wearing only a soiled pink slip and fluffypink house slippers. She looked up at Hawes out of pale, cool green eyes, flicked an ash from her cigarette, and said, “Yeah?”
    “Detective Hawes,” he said, “87th Squad. I’m looking for the super.”
    “I’m his wife,” the woman said. She dragged on her cigarette, let out a stream of smoke, studied Hawes again, and said, “Mind showing me your badge?”
    Hawes took out his wallet and opened it to where his shield was pinned to the leather opposite a Lucite-encased identification card. “Is your husband home?” he asked.
    “He’s downtown picking up some hardware,” the woman said. “What can I do for you?”
    “I’m investigating a homicide,” Hawes said. “I’d like to take a look at Frank Reardon’s apartment.”
    “He kill somebody?” the woman asked.
    “The other way around.”
    “Figures,” she said knowingly. “Let me put something on, and get the key.”
    She went back into the apartment without closing the door. Hawes waited outside in the cool alleyway. The forecasters had predicted a high of ninety-four degrees, a humidity reading of 81 percent, and an unsatisfactory air-pollution level. On the street outside, the motorists were honking and yelling, and the drills were yammering. Through the open doorway, Hawes saw the woman pull the slip over her head. She had been naked under the garment, and she moved silently across the room now, her body flashing white as she receded deeper into the dimness. When she came back to the doorway, her hair was combed and she had put on fresh lipstick, a short green cotton smock, and white sandals.
    “Ready?” she said.
    He followed her out of the alley into the sudden blinding heat of the day, and then to the front door of the building and up thestairs to the third floor. The woman said nothing. The hallways and the steps were scrupulously clean and smelled of Lysol. At 10:00 in the morning the building was silent. The woman stopped outside an apartment