Codes of Betrayal Read Free Page B

call, no matter what the time, day or night. When they were young and newly married, she worked for her teaching degree at Queens College and he worked round the clock in uniform. They were happy in the small two-room apartment in an old building in Forest Hills; they couldn’t wait to see, talk, touch each other. She’d come wide awake at the sound of his key in the door. They’d make love even if he was tired and bored from a long uneventful eight hours on patrol, or overly excited by the unexpected, wildly implausible events every cop encounters.
    She’d tell him about her student teaching classes: how much she liked the kids, how guilty she felt when she really couldn’t warm up to a particular student. He’d tell her about his amazement when he watched a group of women in their mid-thirties being booked for prostitution. All housewives from a community in Long Island, working the motels for some extra cash, for mortgage payments, clothes, an extra car. One even was sending her kid to a private school to protect her from the riffraff in the public school.
    They talked about the odd things people did, the peculiar way lives were lived. He couldn’t get over the way total strangers confided in him: men and women both, telling him their deepest thoughts and hopes, their sex lives, some of their darkest deeds and regrets. Nick had a sympathetic manner, but he was often uneasy about what was told to him. But he could tell Kathy anything. Actually, whatever he saw or encountered didn’t seem complete until he shared it with her.
    Some of the mounting tension between them began as he became more and more involved in the criminal justice system. He couldn’t believe the way the law, as written and practiced, bent over backward to favor the criminal. The bad guys walked free while citizens started to live behind expensive, decorative bars and triple locks and signal devices. He’d lock a guy up and meet him hours later on the street, bailed out or d.o.r.
    When Kathy argued that some bad guys were bound to benefit from laws that were necessary to protect the innocent, Nick gave up arguing. Her government classes taught her one thing; his reality showed him another. Nick had never seen an innocent guy stay locked up. He sure as hell saw plenty of guilty perps walk free, grinning at their victims. The randomness of the system was overwhelming. A guy walked on the whim of a judge; on a technicality because someone was careless; or because the DA just couldn’t be bothered, and agreed to a deal without really knowing what was involved. He watched vicious, violent crimes bargained down and adjudicated for time served. And, on occasion, he’d seen the bad guys walk because of something much more sinister: outside interference. Manipulation. Corruption.
    Kathy maintained her schoolgirl innocence and confidence. In one bitter argument, he told her he was glad she hadn’t become a lawyer. She’d have that revolving door spinning.
    She had influenced him, though, to continue college—and he had to admit he loved his classes at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. The courses were repeated, day and night, to accommodate the working tours for the cops going for their degrees. The civilians in the classes didn’t know the way the criminal justice system really worked. They just read the books and the learned opinions. No one told them about the deals cops had to make with the scum of the earth, who would become your informant-partner in order to reach even lower scum. No one taught them the difference between theory and practice.
    The kids Kathy taught in her senior high school government classes were suburban kids—mostly from intact families, with an average share of drug, alcohol, and sex abuse in their backgrounds. What she didn’t experience, on a day-to-day basis, was the kind of charged atmosphere in which a mob of high school kids would be ready to kill a best friend or casual acquaintance over a dirty look, an