Naked Cruelty Read Free Page B

weaknesses. The trouble was that Abe’s did not retard his functioning superbly as a lieutenant, whereas Corey’s did. I have never favored one over the other!
    It was Maureen speaking, of course. Corey’s wife was the root cause of all his troubles; get him drunk enough, and he’d admit it freely. A bitter, envious, ambitious woman, she was also a relentless nagger. So that was the direction her mischief was taking, was it? Easy enough to deal with when they had been his team members, but now that Corey was to some extent free of Carmine, Maureen’s natural dislike of her husband’s boss could flower. And there was nothing he could do about it.
    Back in his own office, he wrestled with a different woman, a different feminine dilemma.
    Commissioner John Silvestri had always dreamed of a trainee detective program as a way of injecting younger blood into the Detective Division. There were strict criteria governing the admission of a uniformed man (or woman) into Detectives: they had to be at least thirty years old, and have passed their sergeant’s exams with distinction. Silvestri’s contention was that they missed out on some of the advantages only youth could bring with it; his answer was to harass Hartford for a trainee program, admitting a university graduate with at least two years’ experience as a uniformed cop into Detectives as a trainee who would be subjected to a formal program of classes and tuition as well as gain experience on the job. Since he had been harassing Hartford for twenty years about it, no one ever expected to see it bear fruit. But sometimes strange things happened
    No one in the modest, little old city of Holloman could escape its most influential citizen, Mawson MacIntosh, the President of that world famous institution of higher learning, Chubb University. M.M., as he was universally known, had one promising son, Mansfield, who never put a foot wrong. Mansfield was currently working in a Washington, D.C., law firm renowned for turning out politicians. As far as M.M. was concerned, one day Mansfield would also be a president—but of the U.S.A.
    Unfortunately M.M.’s daughter, Helen, was very different. She had inherited her family’s high intelligence and striking good looks, but she was stubborn, scatty, strange, and quite ungovernable. Having graduated summa cum laude from Harvard, she joined the NYPD, flew through the academy at the head of her class, and was at once shunted to traffic patrol in Queens. For two years she stuck it out, then quit alleging sexual discrimination. Working outside Connecticut had been a mistake; Daddy’s influence waned across the border. New Yorkers weren’t even true Yankees.
    Helen applied to join the Detectives Division of the Holloman PD, and was refused courteously but firmly. So Helen appealed to her father, and everybody got in on the act, including the Governor.
    Finally, after an interview with M.M. that saw John Silvestri paint him a picture of his inexperienced, too-young daughter dead in a Holloman ghetto street, the two men cooked up a scheme that saw the Commissioner’s twenty-year-old dream become reality: Helen MacIntosh would join Holloman Detectives as its first trainee. M.M.’s share of things was to prise the money out of Hartford and guarantee that the trainee program would continue after Helen graduated from it. Silvestri guaranteed that Carmine Delmonico and his cohorts would give Helen great training and background for anything from three to twelve months, however long it took.
    Madam had not been pleased, but when her father made it plain that her only chance to be a detective was to be a trainee one, she dismounted from her high horse and agreed.
    Now, after three weeks in Detectives, during which she was obliged to spend time in the uniformed division, as well as in pathology, forensics and legal, Miss Helen MacIntosh was starting to settle in. Not without pain. Nick Jefferson,