‘Uh … in March, it’ll be three years.’
‘I was just coming aboard in Homicide. Newly escaped from Auto Theft.’
He gave her his avuncular smile. ‘You mean you didn’t love all those meaningful conversations about VINs? For shame.’ He thought. ‘I was here. Dietz was here then, wasn’t he?’
‘For a few months, before he transferred to Narcotics. Yes. Oscar was still in Auto Theft, Jason was out on Patrol. Ray followed me on board, from Child Abuse. Who’s that leave? Ollie. He came in three months after me.’
‘So it’s you and me – well, and Delaney.’
‘And I don’t remember us ever talking about the note. Why not?’
Leo raised his eyebrows and shrugged as high as he dared with so much paper around. ‘Well, you know, it wasn’t our case, at first. And “at first” lasted a long time – the embezzlement thing simmered along for most of the winter in fraud division, while the bank inspectors came in and pawed through records for weeks. Finally they arrested Frank Martin, of all people.’
‘That’s exactly how we all said it, wasn’t it? Like that was his full name, Frank Martin Of All People.’
‘Yes. The media people had fun with quotes like that for a week or so. Meantime, Martin was out on bail but also out of a job … what happened next?’
‘I’m trying to remember,’ Sarah said. ‘Seems to me we had some big case we were working on, multiple shootings …’
‘That’s right! That miserable drug war that erupted between the, what did we call them?’
‘The Snakes and the Worms. God, talk about police arrogance.’
‘No, it wasn’t,’ Leo said. ‘We didn’t feel we were superior to them. We felt they were inferior to everybody else on earth.’
‘I guess that’s right. How did they get those names, though?’
‘One side was a gang called the South Side Serpents. Mostly cousins, and they had those disgusting tattoos, snakes crawling all over them, remember? The other side was just a bunch of street thugs that aspired to be as rotten as the Serpents, so we ended up calling them the Worms, and pretty soon the Serpents became Snakes because it was easier to say.’
‘And even if they were mostly kids they were all full-blown outlaws, weren’t they?’
‘Every molecule of every person on both sides,’ Leo pronounced solemnly, ‘deserved heartfelt contempt, right down to their hair follicles and toenails.’
‘Remember the baby-killer? He said, “Sure I killed his baby – he took my dope.”’
‘My phone kept ringing,’ Leo remembered. ‘Friends and neighbors saying, “We’ll all be murdered in our beds if you don’t lock every one of these animals up, yadda yadda, what’s the world coming to …” like it was my job to know that.’
‘So when the quiet little comptroller killed himself after skimming a load of cash, it didn’t make much of an impression, did it? On us, I mean. We all said, ho hum, what else is new? We had bigger fish to fry.’
‘Yeah, teenage drug lords – sexy stuff.’ Leo looked thoughtful. ‘Still, though, Martin’s wasn’t a natural death, so there was an autopsy and somebody was assigned to that. Who?’ He looked at his stacks. ‘I haven’t come to that part of the story. Stick your head around there and ask Oscar who attended that autopsy.’
Oscar said, without looking up, ‘Funny name, Eisenstaat. You need the spelling?’
‘No,’ Sarah said. ‘I knew him.’
‘I heard him,’ Leo said when she turned back. He shook his head, looking tired. ‘Shit. If Harry got the case we’ll probably never know how the note got delivered.’
They sat quiet a moment, remembering the frustration of that last year with Eisenstaat. Sarah had heard the acronym LOP, for Live On Payday, before she came to Homicide, but had learned its full implications working around Eisenstaat, while he did as close as possible to nothing, in that last year before he retired.
‘We better be a little careful how we talk about this with Delaney,’ Leo said. ‘Harry was a major embarrassment for him.’
‘Oh? I didn’t know … In what way?’
‘He should have got him out of the department a year before he went. But Delaney came in as the fresh boss, and Harry was the classic passive-aggressive obstructionist; he used his long tenure to fake Delaney out of putting his foot down, at first. Then, after a few months, it was so close to Harry’s retirement that it seemed awkward to make him change jobs so Delaney let it go. But it taught him a lesson; he’s been a real hard-ass about not accepting anything but best efforts ever since. I think that’s why he’s so hard on …’ his voice dropped and he inclined his head toward Oscar’s workspace, ‘… you know who over there.’