because Leo’s confession would have been enough to hang a dozen bad guys.
Spolino sat at his desk in the day room at the Greenley police station, eating the chicken salad sandwich his wife had made for his lunch and sipping absent-mindedly at a diet Coke as he reread he old thug’s last earthly testament.
Leo Galatina had named his murderer and had cried down vengeance on his former partner, George Patchmore, for having sometime or other bungled something. The two were somehow related in his wounded and moribund mind, but George Patchmore was dead and nobody—not police records clerks, not the FBI, nobody—knew anything about or had ever even heard of a “Charlie Brush.”
So, in the end the only thing Spolino knew for certain so far was that he hated this case.
It was the sort of case every policeman hates, where the odds of making a collar decrease with every passing hour and everyone is screaming to have the perpetrator locked up two days ago.
If it had been a simple hit-and-run the chances would have been better—the driver would probably be local, probably some kid out with his parents’ car and a bottle of hooch in a brown paper bag, so you waited for the lab work to give you a fix on the car and then you started ringing doorbells. It was a good bet the guy would probably walk into the station within a few days, after he’d seen a lawyer and gotten his story straight, and that would be that.
But this particular time it wasn’t going to go down so easy, because what we had here was Murder One.
To begin with, Leo Galatina had not been the sort of man who dies by accident. He does not drown while out swimming in Long Island Sound, he is not struck by lightning, he does not get run over by some drunken teenager out in the family car. These things do not happen to him. Either he dies in his bed after a long illness or he is murdered. There is no third possibility. Leo Galatina had probably made his bones before Detective Lieutenant Thomas Spolino was even born. Leo Galatina had been one hard-assed son-of-a-bitch, a righteous villain of the old school, the kind of man who is immune to chance.
So somebody put the touch on him. It didn’t matter that for the past fifteen years he hadn’t been involved in anything shadier than forgetting now and then to put money in the downtown parking meters, somebody had wanted him dead. And murderers in that league were hardly ever caught.
So who needed all this shit? Why hadn’t whoever did it just bundle the old guy into the trunk of his car and arrange for him to disappear somewhere? If it was Family business, why make work for the police? Where was consideration? Whatever happened to professional pride? If there was anything Tom Spolino hated it was a sloppy hit man.
And Tom Spolino was in a position to judge, because his grandfather had been one of the best.
It was one of the little amenities of being a cop in Greenley that he had the day room practically to himself—at Manhattan South there would have been fifty guys at fifty desks, and the floor would have been a litter of crumpled paper and spilled coffee. Police work in Greenley was mainly traffic control and visiting the schools to lecture all those upwardly mobile kids about keeping their noses clean. There was a smaller than average drug problem in town, mostly cocaine, because the users made most of their buys in New York. There was plenty of burglary, but if there was more than one homicide a year it was a crime wave. Spolino was the senior detective, although business was so slow that he had never been promoted above lieutenant, and he got all the hairy stuff, which was just the way he liked it. There wasn’t much hairy stuff.
There was a refrigerator in the day room—unheard of luxury—and when he brought to work one of the lunches his wife packed for him he could be sure, come twelve o’clock, that it would be right there waiting for him. Nobody was going
Spolino sat at his desk in the day room at the Greenley police station, eating the chicken salad sandwich his wife had made for his lunch and sipping absent-mindedly at a diet Coke as he reread he old thug’s last earthly testament.
Leo Galatina had named his murderer and had cried down vengeance on his former partner, George Patchmore, for having sometime or other bungled something. The two were somehow related in his wounded and moribund mind, but George Patchmore was dead and nobody—not police records clerks, not the FBI, nobody—knew anything about or had ever even heard of a “Charlie Brush.”
So, in the end the only thing Spolino knew for certain so far was that he hated this case.
It was the sort of case every policeman hates, where the odds of making a collar decrease with every passing hour and everyone is screaming to have the perpetrator locked up two days ago.
If it had been a simple hit-and-run the chances would have been better—the driver would probably be local, probably some kid out with his parents’ car and a bottle of hooch in a brown paper bag, so you waited for the lab work to give you a fix on the car and then you started ringing doorbells. It was a good bet the guy would probably walk into the station within a few days, after he’d seen a lawyer and gotten his story straight, and that would be that.
But this particular time it wasn’t going to go down so easy, because what we had here was Murder One.
To begin with, Leo Galatina had not been the sort of man who dies by accident. He does not drown while out swimming in Long Island Sound, he is not struck by lightning, he does not get run over by some drunken teenager out in the family car. These things do not happen to him. Either he dies in his bed after a long illness or he is murdered. There is no third possibility. Leo Galatina had probably made his bones before Detective Lieutenant Thomas Spolino was even born. Leo Galatina had been one hard-assed son-of-a-bitch, a righteous villain of the old school, the kind of man who is immune to chance.
So somebody put the touch on him. It didn’t matter that for the past fifteen years he hadn’t been involved in anything shadier than forgetting now and then to put money in the downtown parking meters, somebody had wanted him dead. And murderers in that league were hardly ever caught.
So who needed all this shit? Why hadn’t whoever did it just bundle the old guy into the trunk of his car and arrange for him to disappear somewhere? If it was Family business, why make work for the police? Where was consideration? Whatever happened to professional pride? If there was anything Tom Spolino hated it was a sloppy hit man.
And Tom Spolino was in a position to judge, because his grandfather had been one of the best.
It was one of the little amenities of being a cop in Greenley that he had the day room practically to himself—at Manhattan South there would have been fifty guys at fifty desks, and the floor would have been a litter of crumpled paper and spilled coffee. Police work in Greenley was mainly traffic control and visiting the schools to lecture all those upwardly mobile kids about keeping their noses clean. There was a smaller than average drug problem in town, mostly cocaine, because the users made most of their buys in New York. There was plenty of burglary, but if there was more than one homicide a year it was a crime wave. Spolino was the senior detective, although business was so slow that he had never been promoted above lieutenant, and he got all the hairy stuff, which was just the way he liked it. There wasn’t much hairy stuff.
There was a refrigerator in the day room—unheard of luxury—and when he brought to work one of the lunches his wife packed for him he could be sure, come twelve o’clock, that it would be right there waiting for him. Nobody was going
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