The Judgment Read Free Page A

outfit to a Turkish bazaar. Half the cops have something going on the side. It’s like being the chief operating officer of a mall. Everybody is doing a little business.”
    “If you knew that, why did you take the job?”
    “It was important to me. I thought, over time, I might be able to make things better.”
    “Sure.”
    He smiled. “I mean it, whether you believe me or not. Anyway, I think in the past couple of years I’ve done some good. We don’t have the money or the people to do a proper job, but I like to think we have come a long way.”
    “How about crooked cops?”
    He raised his hands as if in surrender. “There are a lot fewer than when I took over. There’s a lot of money out there on the street. Sometimes, especially for a young cop, temptation overcomes common sense. Anyway, I cleaned up Internal Affairs, put my own people in there, and we’ve been weeding out as many bad cops as we can, as a practical matter.”
    “A practical matter that can cover a lot of territory. Or very little, depending on your point of view.”
    “I’ll get down to specifics,” he said. “My boss, on paper anyway, is too stupid to steal. That’s done for him by others.”
    “Oh?”
    “Our mayor is a multimillionaire. He had to borrow car fare when he was elected. Does that tell you anything?”
    “The feds have tried to nail him, and each time they failed. He’s either honest or smart as hell.”
    “Smart. He has the mind of a twelfth-century Italian merchant. And he has his hand in almost everything that goes on in this town.”
    “So arrest him.”
    “I can’t.”
    “Why not?”
    He smiled, but it slid into another sneer. “Because of lawyer rules, mostly. We know who his bagmen are. Who his drug contacts are. We have everything, except a willing witness, or something to convince a jury of a payoff.”
    “Did you actually start an investigation?”
    He nodded. “With my own selected people, or so I thought, called the Untouchables. We have more spies at headquarters than the CIA ever did in Russia. Some report to the drug dealers, some to me, some to the mayor.”
    “What’s all this got to do with your problem?”
    “If you had a bloodhound on your trail, what would you do?” He paused only for effect. “You’d shoot the dog, right?”
    “Maybe.”
    “Well, this is the mayor’s version of shooting the dog. He can’t fire me. That would raise too many questions, and it would be embarrassing if I told what I know. That leaves murder, which is messy, especially if you don’t need to resort to it.”
    “Are you saying the mayor is trying to frame you?”
    “God, you’re quick, Sloan.”
    “And just how does the mayor propose to do this?”
    For the first time he looked nervous. Those eyes seemed to have lost some of their intensity. “They say I stole from a police department fund, a fund founded with confiscated drug money.”
    “Aren’t those things audited?”
    “Not this one. It’s all cash. We use it to pay informers. The city has been after us for years to have their auditors take a look.”
    “And you resisted, obviously.”
    “Sure I did. That would open a whole list of informersfor the mayor’s inspection.” He smiled. “Hell, the first thing he’d do is sell that list to the highest bidder. We’d have bodies all over the street and no one would ever give us the time of day again.”
    “You must have some procedure for keeping track?”
    “I did. My own auditor. The Mouse. Remember him?”
    It would be hard to forget the Mouse. He was a policeman but looked like a mountain. Six and a half feet and three hundred pounds. He had played one year for the Green Bay Packers but injured his knee, probably in someone’s throat, an injury that cut short his football career. He had become a Detroit cop and had attached himself to Conroy and had become his very large shadow, his aide, and possibly Conroy’s only friend.
    “The Mouse any good at keeping track of money?”
    He