Read Online Investigation by Dorothy Uhnak - Free Book Online

Tim’s future career in the department.
    “Hell,” Tim had said to me the next day in the hospital, where he was resting up from smoke inhalation and I was awaiting surgery on the torn cartilage of my right knee, “I’m not going to end up burning my ass for a bunch of little nigger kids left alone by their whore of a mother. I’m signing up at Delehanty’s for the next sergeant’s exam and if you have any brains at all you’ll come with me.”
    I spent three weeks on sick leave and then four weeks on light duty while my knee was healing. I was assigned to a desk job at the old Bureau of Criminal Identification, where I made a few useful contacts and performed a few “favors” for a couple of people in positions to reciprocate if and when I needed a favor. Which is something that Delehanty’s doesn’t teach you: how and under what circumstances to pile up favors owed. And when to call in debts.
    In the next couple of years, while I worked foot patrol out of the old Twenty-third Precinct in Harlem, Tim was collecting sergeant’s stripes and managed to get himself assigned to a spot in Manhattan headquarters, which gave him plenty of time to study for the lieutenant’s exam. I liked my job; I liked the people up there. It wasn’t the way it is now, when even a black cop’s life is on the line the minute he sets foot outside the precinct house. If you were a good guy, you made a certain number of friends—among the local shopkeepers, ginmill owners and customers, neighborhood working stiffs as well as neighborhood sharpies. It was like any other situation: people were suspicious at first, then once they sized you up, once they accepted you, once you had an established working relationship and people knew what they could expect from you, you knew what to expect from them.
    I delivered a lot of babies; broke up a hundred family Saturday-night fights; arrested more than twenty rapists even though I knew that when it’s black on black the case is odds on to be dumped. I saved—or at least prolonged—a couple of lives, using first-aid techniques. I collected twelve more commendations before I killed a man and nearly got killed myself.
    I went into a tenement to try and reason with some lunatic who had slashed his wife’s throat, then castrated and stabbed her lover. Before I said one reassuring word, he managed to sink his knife into the side of my neck so that within seconds we were in close, intimate contact, his knife in me, my revolver dug into the soft tissue of his throat just beneath his jaw. My shot blew half his head off, and as he died he dragged his knife down along my neck and across my chest. I got a first-class commendation for killing that guy, although the general opinion was that I was a dumbbell for having allowed myself to get cut: that I should have come in shooting and saved conversation for later. An opinion with which, of course, I finally agreed.
    While I was recuperating, with thirty-six stitches making a jagged pattern down my throat and chest, Tim Neary came to wise me up. He had just passed pretty high on the lieutenant’s list and was already beginning to study for the captain’s exam. Tim was a lot smarter than me in a lot of ways. For instance, he knew how to use what I had collected over the years. About a week after I spoke with Tim, a lieutenant from the Bureau of Special Services visited me on behalf of his newly appointed squad commander, a deputy inspector I had done a favor for when he was still a captain. I followed Tim’s instructions: said all the right things, looked blank at all the right times. I was assigned to the B.O.S.S. as a third-grade detective when my recuperation was over.
    The squad handled all kinds of undercover surveillance assignments, ranging from illegal activities of various political dissidents to wildcat-strike threats by leaders of municipal unions, to discreet background investigations of individuals proposed for high city-government appointive