The Squad Room Read Online Free Page A

morning tomorrow, and both of them lived far away—Medveded in Brighton Beach, in the same apartment he’d grown up in—so they’d also both decided to sleep at the precinct. Medveded headed off to the dorms, while Morrison walked up the back staircase towards the squad room. He knew that trying to sleep would be futile for the time being; again the bagpipes were playing loudly in his head.
    Sergeant Rivera was already back at his desk, the door to his office open. Looking up as Morrison passed and recognizing the look in the Captain’s eyes, Rivera got up and headed casually over to his office.
    “Hey, Cap. You got a minute to talk?” he asked. This was a common enough routine with them; he didn’t have anything in particular to talk about, but he knew the Captain did, and knew that asking him like this was the best way to get him to relax.
    “Sure,” said Morrison, and sat. The two men sat quietly for a while, Rivera taking slow sips at his coffee, before Morrison spoke up.
    “Let me ask you a question,” Morrison said. “You were in Vietnam, right?”
    Rivera had described his experience in the military to Bill Morrison more than once, but was always ready to tell him again when the Captain was in this frame of mind. “Yeah,” he said. “I was drafted when I was nineteen and a half. I had to report to Whitehall Street forthe usual induction procedure before they sent me to Fort Gordon, in Georgia. I was assigned to the 25 th Infantry. They sent me to advanced infantry training at one of the ugliest places in America—Fort Polk Louisiana. Tigerland. When I finished my training with a bunch of other guys, we were shipped out.”
    Morrison listened, and sat thoughtfully again for a moment. “All right, well, let me ask you this,” he said finally. “Have you ever talked to Arndt about your time there?”
    Rivera smiled cryptically. “Why do you ask?” he said.
    “Oh, I don’t know,” Morrison said; “just a hunch of mine, I guess. I was at a dinner a while back, where he accepted an award from the Mayor for his service in Vietnam. He cried like a baby the whole time, talking about how returning vets were treated, and what an honor it was. It just—it seemed a little too over-the-top for me to buy.”
    “Well, he’s right about how we were treated then,” Rivera said slowly, “but him being in Vietnam?” He laughed. “If you ask me, your hunch is right. I’m sure he wasn’t there.”
    “Why do you say that?”
    “Well, I haven’t been around the guy much. But the few times I have been around him—in fact, the last time we spoke, a couple of years ago, he’d been talking to a few guys in the precinct about being in the military. None of these guys had served, mind you. When I walked in on the conversation, I heard him say he was at the battle of Khe Sahn. Thing is, it was the Marines who were at Khe Sahn—Con Thien, Hill 881, I remember—and he was saying he was in the army. I was in the army, and we weren’t there during the offensive. I asked him if he had a CIB—a Combat Infantry Badge—and he gave me a funny look, and found a way out of the conversation.” Rivera shook his head. “Man, if you’re going to lie about being in ’Nam, at least do your research.”
    “I knew it,” Morrison said quietly, leaning back with a sardonic smile. He wasn’t quite sure if he was satisfied or not. “You know, Chief Donohue, God rest his soul—he couldn’t stand Arndt. Now there was a guy born to be Chief of Detectives. He must be rolling in his grave,to have had this guy take over for him.”
    “So was it just the politics that got him in?” Rivera asked.
    “One hundred percent,” Morrison said. “The Commissioner didn’t want to appoint him—you know Harrington hated him almost as much as I do.”
    “Yeah, I figured that,” Rivera said. He knew the answer to his next question, but asked it anyway. “Didn’t you and the PC work together as cops?”
    “Yeah, sure, back in