Cop Job Read Online Free Page B

Esther’s academic credentials and accomplishments, including a master’s in sociology from Princeton.
    Esther herself was equally well kept, slim, poised, and handsome. Her perfume filled the room like a bunch of fresh-cut flowers. Her face would have been pretty if it hadn’t spent so much time expressing wariness and assumed affront. Like your mother always warned, if you keep crossing your eyes like that, they’re gonna stay that way.
    “What went down with Alfie—wrong, wrong, wrong,” she said.
    “Any ideas?” I asked.
    “ ’Bout what?”
    “Who killed him.”
    “That’s a leap. Somebody killin’ him. Didn’t just fall in the water?” she asked.
    “After he duct taped himself to the chair? Neat trick. I’d like to see you do it.”
    “No you wouldn’t. I’d prove you wrong.”
    “Probably would, but you know what I’m saying,” I said.
    “I do. It’s just too depressing.”
    “So no ideas.”
    “You keep sayin’ that,” she said.
    “What else should I say? I want to know who killed him. Maybe you have an insight or two. You were his case manager. Nobody knew him better.”
    “I already told the police what I know,” she said, like that should be the end of the conversation.
    “I don’t care what you told the cops. I want to know what you really think,” I said.
    She sat forward in her red leather chair and gripped the arms, as if preparing to leap at me.
    “You think I wouldn’t be totally forthcoming with the police? You think I’m crazy, or just self-destructive?” she asked.
    “What was Alfie’s general mood in the weeks before he died? Anything unusual?”
    “His mood was the same mood as always. Paranoid schizophrenic. The man was exceedingly clinical. Livin’ right on the line. A little shove would’ve sent him right over.”
    “That’s what he got. A little shove into the harbor.”
    She shifted papers around her desk without looking at them, since her eyes were fixed on mine.
    “You know, Alfie wasn’t the only character in town people would call crazy,” she said. “That people would be scared to death of.”
    I couldn’t tell if that was a threat or an insult, or both. I just knew I wouldn’t take the bait.
    “Jackie Swaitkowski thought he was more agitated than normal,” I said. “More fearful.”
    “Some people are separated from society because of mental illness, or unfortunate circumstances,” she said, not wanting to let it go. “And some are just antisocial.”
    “Not me. I got lots of friends.”
    “Yeah. Like Alfie Aldergreen. And look where that got him.”
    “If you’d locked him away like you wanted to, he’d be just as dead,” I said, grabbing that bait with both hands.
    And there it was. Esther had started the legal process of declaring Alfie incompetent and would have either moved him into an institution, or some group home Up Island where the state agency she worked for maintained the fiction that they integrated their jobless, drug-lobotomized clients into the community. I got in her way, and with the help of Jackie and Jimmy Watruss, had kept her at bay.
    She’d lost an older brother to the streets, severely manic-depressive, after they closed the mental hospital where he’d lived for most of his life. This decided Esther’s choice of careers, and also cemented her skepticism toward deinstitutionalization, a view that ran counter to the current thinking of the mental health profession. That said, a contrarian position suited her nature.
    “Some people deserve to be locked up, no matter what the courts say. And I’m not talkin’ Alfie Aldergreen.”
    She was referring to a persistent rumor that I’d gotten away with murder a few times. A belief unfortunately shared by important members of the law enforcement community, including Ross. She thought mention of that would be disturbing to me, but I’d heard it enough by then that it was old hat.
    “Okay,” I said, “I didn’t think you’d be much help.”
    I got up and