Bread (87th Precinct) Read Online Free PDF Page A

judgment (which he didn’t), he’d have been unwilling to accept such a sweeping acquittal. Competition was possibly the strongest motive for arson, and Carella wasn’t about to dismiss Grimm’s business rivals as suspects until he’d checked them out thoroughly himself. Nor was he willing to dismiss insurance fraud (First Comic: “Hello, Sam, I hear you had a big fire in your store last night.” Second Comic: “Shhh, that’s tomorrow night!”) or the destruction of books and records as alternate motives, even though Parker seemed convinced that Grimm was clean. As for extortion,intimidation, or revenge, those possibilities would also depend on what they could learn about Mr. Roger Grimm. For all Carella knew, Grimm may have been hobnobbing with all sorts of criminal types who’d finally decided to make things hot for him. Or maybe there were a dozen people Grimm had screwed in the past, all of whom might have been capable of setting the torch to his house, his warehouse, and also the brim of his straw hat. Carella would have to wait and see.
    The remaining possible motive was that someone had set the warehouse fire in order to conceal a crime. (Have you left jimmy marks on the windows and fingerprints all over the wall safe? So what? Just bum down the joint as you’re leaving.) Curious reasoning, admittedly, since Burglary/One was punishable by a maximum of thirty and a minimum of ten, whereas Arsons/One, Two, and Three were punishable respectively by forty, twenty-five, and fifteen—but who can fathom the intricate workings of the criminal mind? And whereas the warehouse fire had probably succeeded in obliterating any evidence of theft, it was highly improbable that anyone would steal an indeterminate amount of wooden animals and then set fire to the remainder of the stock to conceal such petty pilfering. Moreover, if someone had committed a crime at the warehouse and then committed arson to conceal the crime, it was ridiculous to believe he would later burn down Grimm’s house as a cover for the initial cover. Such an elaborate smoke screen was for the comic books.
    Which left pyromania.
    When Carella first learned about the warehouse fire, he’d thought it might have been set by a firebug, despite the fact that two night watchmen had been drugged—pyromaniacs will rarely go to such limits. But the minute he learned of the second fire, Carella knew for certain they were not dealing with a nut. In all his experience with pyromaniacs, he had never met a single onewith any real motive for setting a fire. Most of them had done it for kicks, not always but often sexually oriented. They liked to watch the flames, they liked to hear the fire engines, they liked the excitement of the crowds, they liked the tumult and the frenzy. They ranged in age from ten to a hundred and ten, they were usually loners, male or female, intellectual or half-wit, corporation executive or short-order cook. Two of the pyros he’d arrested were male alcoholics. Another was a hysterical, pregnant woman. Still another said she’d set a fire only because she was suffering menstrual cramps. All of them had picked their fire sites at random, usually because the building looked “safe”—vacant, abandoned, or in a lonely, unpatrolled neighborhood.
    Most firebugs were very sad people. Carella had known only one funny firebug during all his years as a cop, and he supposed that one couldn’t have been considered a true pyromaniac at all. He was, in fact, a man Carella had locked up for Armed Robbery. When the man was released from Castleview, he called Carella at the squadroom and told him to come over to his place right away, without his gun, or else he was going to set fire to his own kid brother. His kid brother happened to be thirty-six years old, a man who himself had been in and out of jail since the time he was fifteen. His barbecue, if carried out as threatened, would have caused very little grief up at the old squadroom. So Carella