hated corruption in others and certainly would never bend himself. It was a nasty crack, and she was sorry for it. She tried to apologize, but he wouldn’t acknowledge. She had made her mistake; there was no point in continuing to talk about it. “My husband works with dogs all the time,” she said to change the subject. “Some attack dogs, but mostly just sniffers. They’re his best weapon, so he says.”
“I hear about his dogs. All of them are supposedly trained to kill despite that ‘sniffer’ bullshit. I’ve heard the stories about those dogs.”
She frowned. “What stories?”
“Oh, nothing much really. Just that those dogs sometimes get so excited when they sniff out a little dope that they just happen to kill the jerk they find it on… sometimes. But I guess you husband’s told you all about that.”
“Let’s drop it, Wilson. We don’t need to go at each other like this. My husband hasn’t told me anything about dogs that kill suspects. It sounds pretty outlandish if you ask me.”
Wilson snorted, said nothing more. But Becky had heard the rumors he was referring to, that Dick’s team sometimes used dogs on difficult suspects. “At least he’s not on the take,” Becky thought. “I hope to God he’s not.” Then she thought of a certain problem they used to have paying for his father’s nursing home, a problem that seemed to have disappeared—but she refused to think about it
Corruption was the one thing about police work she hated. Many officers considered the money part of the job, rationalizing it with the idea that their victims were criminals anyway and the payoffs were nothing more than a richly deserved fine. But as far as Becky Neff was concerned, that was crap. You did your job and got your pay, that ought to be enough. She forced herself not to rise to Wilson’s bait about her husband, it would probably start a shouting argument.
“Stories aside, I’ve heard a lot about Tom Rilker. Dick thinks damn highly of him. Says he could train a dog to walk a tightrope if he wanted to.” Thomas D. Rilker was a civilian who worked closely with the NYPD, the FBI, and U. S. Customs training the dogs they used in their work. He also did private contract work. He was good, probably the best in the city, maybe the best in the world. His specialty was training dogs to sniff. He had dope dogs, fire dogs, tobacco dogs, booze dogs, you name it. They worked mostly for the Narcotics Squad and the customs agents. They had revolutionized the technique of investigation in these areas and greatly reduced the amount of drugs moving through the port of New York. Becky knew that Dick thought the world of Tom Rilker.
“Keep this damn car moving, sweetheart. You ain’t in a parade!”
“You drive, Wilson.”
“
She pulled over to the curb. “You don’t like my driving, you do it yourself.”
“I can’t, dearest—my license lapsed last year.”
“When you teamed up with me, dip.”
“Thank you, I’ll make a note of that.”
Becky swung the car out into traffic and jammed the accelerator to the floor. She wasn’t going to let him get to her. Part of the reason he was like this was because she had forced herself on him. Between her husband Dick and her uncle Bob she had exerted plenty of pull to get herself into Homicide and to land a partner once she got there. It took the pull of her husband’s captaincy and her uncle’s inspectorship to move her out of the secretary syndrome and onto the street. She had done well as a patrolman and gotten herself promoted to Detective Sergeant when she deserved it. Most of the women she knew on the force got their promotions at least two or three years late, and then had to fight to avoid ending up on some rotten squad like Missing Persons, where the only action you ever saw was an occasional flat tire on an unmaintained squad car.
So here came Becky Neff just when George Wilson’s most recent partner had punched him in the face and transferred to Safes and Locks. Wilson had to take what he could get, and in this situation it was a rookie detective and, worse, a woman.
He had looked at her as if she had contagious leprosy. For the first six weeks together he had said no more than a word a week to her—six words in six weeks, all of them four-letter. He had schemed to get her out of the division, even started dark rumors about a Board of Inquiry when she missed an important lead in what should have been an easy case.
But gradually she had become better at the work, until even he had been forced to acknowledge it. Soon they were making collars pretty often. In fact they were getting a reputation.
“Women are mostly awful cops,” were his final words on the subject, “but you’re unique. Instead of being awful, you’re just bad.”
Coming from Wilson that was a compliment, perhaps the highest he had ever paid a fellow officer. After that his grumbling became inarticulate and he let the partnership roll along under its own considerable steam.
They worked like two parts of the same person, constantly completing each other’s thoughts. People like the Chief Medical Examiner started requesting their help on troublesome cases. But when their work started to reach the papers, it was invariably the attractive, unusual lady cop Becky Neff who ended up in the
“You’re making a wrong turn, Becky. We’re supposed to be stopping at the Seventy-fifth to get pictures. of the bodies and pawprints for Rilker. Give him something to work with.”
She wheeled the car around and turned up Flatlands Avenue toward the station house. “Also we ought to call ahead,” she said, “let him know we’re coming.”
“You’re sure we trust him? I mean, what if he’s doing a little work on the side, like for somebody bad. Calling ahead’ll give him time to think.”
“Rilker’s not working for the Mafia. I don’t think that’s even worthy of consideration.”
“Then I won’t consider it.” He slumped down in the seat, pushing his knees up against the glove compartment and letting his head lean forward against his chest. It looked like agony, but he closed his eyes. Becky lit a cigarette and drove on in silence, mentally reviewing the case. Despite the fact that it looked like they were on a good lead she could not dismiss the feeling that something was wrong with it. Some element didn’t fit. Again and again she reviewed the facts but she couldn’t come up with the answer. The one thing that worried her was the lack of resistance. It had happened so fast that they hadn’t appeared dangerous until the very last moment.
