Chapter 13

So the next morning, bright and tolerably early, I was at the station, in an interrogation room, going through personnel files. I hate paperwork – it's one reason I'm not a cop anymore – but sometimes the only way to avoid it is to be illiterate, and that I don't think I could handle. Life without Larry Niven and Robert B. Parker and Jonathan Edwards and John Calvin would be intolerable.

Even a small police department has enough officers, and enough paperwork, to make for a very long spell of tedium if you're going through it looking for ... whatever you find. My general notion was to see if there was anything in the records that would point to perhaps this officer or that maybe being a little more susceptible to corruption than others. But that's a very vague and broad search criterion. If I did a Google search that nebulous I'd get about 236 quadrillion hits. If I told Darlia to do something in such ambiguous terms, she could do whatever she pleased or nothing at all and be within the limits of the command. It was a search tool that was almost useless; using a leaf rake to pull the salt out of the ocean would have been almost as productive.

But I had to do it. Investigation is almost entirely tedious work. I can't even say that there are moments of stark terror to punctuate the boredom, because in 20 years of law enforcement work I've had exactly one such moment. At most the stark terror I've experienced in this work was .00285% of the total time I've spent in the field, and 3/1000 of a percent isn't a lot.

Don't let Mickey Spillane fool you – PIs don't go around shooting the truth out of people. Nor do they batter information out of someone. Yeah, there are shady characters who use force instead of brains and ability, but they're not terribly common or terribly successful; it is a crime, after all, to beat someone up, even if you're a PI. To learn the truth requires hard, boring work. And I was doing it.

And doing it...

And doing it...

After a certain amount of skull sweat the mind begins to shut down. You can tire out your brain just as surely as you can tire out your legs. By noon I was in that state. I would read a paragraph three times and still not have a clue what I had just read. The words were ceasing to make sense. And I had at least two thirds of the stack yet to deal with. It was enough.

I gathered up the folders I'd read and put 'em back in the box they'd come in, stuck an empty manila folder on its end behind them, and inserted the rest behind the folder. I'd been way too optimistic when I pulled all the folders out at once. When I started again I'd pull folders one at a time, and put 'em back in on the forward side of the divider.

You don't leave personnel records out where just anyone can get at 'em. If I pulled a stunt like that I'd have every cop in Red Hawk after me, and with justification. There's information in there that's personal and private, and it was going back under lock and key. I picked up the box and carried it to Harry's office. He was in his chair, rubbing his head, staring at a form that didn't seem to be cooperative. He seemed relieved to see me.

"Darvin," he said, "if they'd told me back in 66 that being a cop meant being a paper pusher, I'd have told 'em where to put their badge."

"I know what you mean. You bust a guy, and before you finish writing your reports he's made bail and he's back out there doing whatever he does."

"Yeah – and that's after it's taken two hours to find his lawyer and locate a bail bondsman willing to back him. It took him two hours – but the reports take four or five. At least it seems that way..." He ran his hand over his head. "Did you know that in order to get more batteries for our maglights I have to fill out a two-page requisition?"

"It'd be easier to go down to the store and buy 'em."

"It would – but the city wouldn't reimburse me."

I grunted. "Of course not – why should they pay for batteries if you're not willing to contort yourself into a pretzel first?" I set the box down on his desk. "Is there a place I can lock up these files till I'm through with 'em?"

"I've got a cabinet I can put them in." He smiled up at me. "Are you sorry you asked for 'em?"

"Of course I am – I was sorry before I ever started. I'm also sorry that I didn't meet Cecelia when I was 20, and I'm sorry that DeForest Kelly died, and I'm sorry that Albuquerque's baseball team is the Isotopes. But being sorry ain't a-gonna fix none o' them things."

"No, it won't. So have you found anything yet?"

"Of course not. I won't find anything till I get to the end of the pile, and if I'd started there I still wouldn't find anything till I got to the end. You know how it works; whatever you're looking for is somewhere else."

"Do I ever know how it is. I remember the time I was looking for my ball peen hammer..."

I'd heard the story before, but not for 16 years or more, and it was a good story. I sat down in a chair, and cocked my boots up on a corner of Harry's desk. It felt good to be able to turn my mind off for a bit.

In the afternoon I started in on the other angle that seemed likely to be productive. Drugs are everywhere these days, Red Hawk included. There weren't any neighborhoods where every corner had someone hawking his particular brand of rock, but if you knew where to look, you could find drugs. The cops tried to keep it out, but couldn't; they tried to smash it, but couldn't. When people demand laws which they then violate, it puts the police in an impossible position. I don't advocate repealing laws against drugs, I know too well the harm the drugs themselves cause, but we're fighting in a sense the same battle that we lost with Prohibition. Too many people who claim to not want drugs turn around and use 'em.

I cruised around the southwest corner of town. It reminded me, somewhat, of where Tina and I had lived, but while our neighborhood wasn't first class, it wasn't utterly trashy either. Where I was driving now was the epitome of trash. It was early afternoon, but there were men sitting on porches or in the yard or on the curb, not working and not evincing any intention to work anytime soon. Children from diapers up to teenagers ran loose, and I don't think any of them were more than middling clean – and some of the ones in diapers appeared to be old enough that they should have learned by now how to do without them, had their parents bothered to interest themselves in the matter. Litter was everywhere – some of it litter that it would take a pickup truck to haul away. The automobiles were mostly junk, but there was the occasional high-priced job; I knew that the payments didn't come out of anyone's honest salary.

Of course everyone knew I was a cop. There is no such thing as an absolutely unmarked car; you can put a Smokey in a plain brown wrapper, but he's still a bear and it shows. The lack of hubcaps, and the light bar in the back window, and the buggy whip antenna on the trunk would have given me away even if I wore a clown suit and painted the car Day-Glo orange. But I wasn't trying to hide what I was. I was just looking. I didn't see anyone who appeared to be holding, or selling, or buying, or using drugs – but then I didn't expect to. Such people would have disappeared before I got in sight, and would crawl back out of their holes after I went by. But I knew they were there. I've been in law enforcement long enough that I know what a neighborhood looks like when drugs take over. Down here people didn't merely dress like gangbangers – they were, in a small town way. Granted that Red Hawk couldn't support the Crips or the Bloods or any other national gang, but I saw colors, and signs, and graffiti. And I knew that if someone came in here looking like he might be a banger, and didn't have the right colors and signs, he might leave by way of the dump. It wasn't anything compared to gang neighborhoods in Albuquerque, but it was unpleasant enough. It was enough to almost make me hope that Red Hawk continued to shrink, until it was dead. That would at least get rid of the gangs.

It didn't frighten me much; I've been at it long enough that I can take care of myself, and anyway gangbangers mostly shoot themselves or others who live in the neighborhood. It did sicken me. Human beings have such potential, and then they waste it on all the wrong things. It's very well to talk about poverty and rage and despair, when you're in a comfortable armchair in a house with an alarm system, or standing at a university lectern. But no one forces people to smoke rock, or shoot poison into their veins, or do any of the other stupid things that lead only to death. And enormous numbers of people have dealt with worse circumstances, without turning into savages. Cecelia's great grandfather was a slave until the Civil War freed him, and her grandfather and father were sharecroppers who lived under the shadow of the Ku Klux Klan and suffered from Jim Crow. Yet they never succumbed to self-destructiveness, and Cecelia, who grew up dirt poor – poorer than these drugged out characters – was a college graduate who had more self-esteem and more courage and more strength in her little finger than any of these people could dredge up.

It was obvious that there was money down here. It costs money to dress in gang colors. Those shoes don't come cheap, for instance. And the CDs I heard, and the speakers that shook the street, and the cars that cruised around thumping louder than an earthquake, weren't free. The people who lived down here weren't putting money into urban renewal, but they had money, at least some of them did. And it had to come from drugs; nothing else could have infused that much hidden cash into the neighborhood. It was a very small area, and neither as bad in appearance or in reality as any big city could provide, but for a small town cop the money in this little part of town could be a temptation.

The question was whether any of Red Hawk's cops had wound up with some of that cash in his pocket. Even in this small town there would be deals that could in five minutes see more money change hands than an officer would make in months. I doubted that whole kilos were coming into this neighborhood – it seemed more likely to me that that kind of weight would be further upstream – but even if all that came in was small amounts, it doesn't take long for a few ounces of coke and a few hits of skag and a few lids of grass to add up to money. To paraphrase a particularly asinine member of Congress, a few hundred here and a few hundred there, and pretty soon you're talking about real money.

A cop might bust someone who was holding, in drugs or in cash, more money than the cop would ever see in one place – and who would offer him some if the bust just "never happened." Or a cop might decide that with all the money floating around, he was going to get a piece of the action – or else bring in a few officers to disrupt the trade. Maybe a shooting gallery or a lab offered to give the guy in the patrol car a few big ones to simply not notice what was going on at that address. There were lots of possibilities. These people here wouldn't be nearly as sophisticated at the fine art of suborning cops as the Mafia had become before John Gotti pretty much destroyed the Italians as a national force, but it doesn't take a lot of brains to exchange untraceable cash for protection.

After I'd cruised around for a bit I found my way back to the cleaner part of town. It didn't take long; in reality that little corner of Red Hawk wasn't more than three or four blocks square. After being southwest, even the neighborhood where Tina and I had lived looked clean and fresh and attractive. You roll on the manure pile long enough, and even a mud puddle seems clean.

I'd have to find out whether any of Red Hawk's cops specifically wanted to work the patrol area that included the ground I'd just surveyed, and whether any of them appeared to be living above their means. When police officers say that crooks are as dumb as a box of rocks, they don't make exceptions for crooked cops. More than one officer's gone on a pad, and then given it away by spending money he didn't have any business having. Of course, there's no point in having money just to have it, which is why, although I am rich, I've never tried to pile it up in heaps. But crooked cops would want to spend, and by spending give themselves away eventually.