Chuck Hustmyre - A Killer Like Me

Twenty-seven violations in all. Alone, none worth more than an ass chewing by his platoon commander or a letter of reprimand in his personnel jacket, but taken together, and pushed by the hidden hand of the mayor, they earned him a 180-day suspension, the maximum allowed under civil-service rules.

After the suspension, which had also cost Murphy his new sergeant stripes, the chief converted the suspension into a termination.

If the department had just fired him, Murphy could have hired a lawyer and begun his appeal. He also could have looked for a job. Department rules require an officer-even a suspended officer-to get official approval for any outside employment, something the department brass never gives a suspended cop. After six months of living on his savings, Murphy was broke.

Luckily, he was friends with an ex-NOPD sergeant who had gone to night school to become an attorney. The lawyer agreed to handle Murphy’s appeal and defer his fee until Murphy got back on his feet. At a Police Civil Service Board hearing six months later, Murphy’s lawyer kicked the crap out of the city attorney. The board reversed the termination order and reduced Murphy’s 180-day suspension to ninety days and ordered the city to give him three months’ back pay.

In a bureaucratic oversight, the board’s decision didn’t address the issue of Murphy’s demotion from sergeant back to patrolman, so the department got to keep his stripes. When the check for the back pay finally came, the ex-cop turned lawyer took half of it.

Murphy had his job back, though.

A year later, he got into a shootout with a pair of cranked-up bank robbers who had just murdered a security guard. Murphy killed one bandit and wounded the other. He managed to parlay the shootout into a transfer back to Homicide.

Then came Katrina and nothing had been right since.

“I just want to know one thing, Murphy,” Donovan said. “What the fuck were you thinking? What did you think was going to happen after the mayor and the chief read the paper this morning? Did you think they were going to give you a task force?”

Murphy didn’t answer. There was nothing so say.

“No, I really want to know,” Donovan continued. “I mean, it’s the clearest violation of section seventy-four point eight of the department’s manual of orders I’ve ever seen, and I’m just curious what you thought was going to happen.”

A miserable silence hung in the air. Donovan and DeMarco stared at Murphy.

“I don’t know, Captain,” Murphy said. “It was a mistake, I know that, but I thought the public had a right to know what was going on. I also figured some press coverage might generate tips from-”

“Who gave you the authority to make decisions for this department, Murphy?” the homicide commander shouted. “Who the fuck put you in charge?”

The assistant chief looked at his watch. “Captain,” he said, “we’ve got a press conference to go to. Let’s wrap this up.”

Donovan hoisted himself to his feet. “Officer Murphy, as of this moment you are assigned to Central Evidence and Property. Beginning tonight and until further notice, you will report to the property room each day, in uniform, for your regular shift, ten twenty-five p.m. to seven a.m. Before you leave here this morning, you will clean out your desk and turn in all of your case files, all your notes, your office keys, your radio, your vest, and your car.”

Donovan leaned across his desk. “Then you will get out of my division and wait for the order to come down to terminate your ass.”

The assistant chief coughed into his hand.

Donovan stabbed a finger toward the door. “Now get the fuck out of my office!”

Murphy turned around and walked out.

The most humiliating part of Murphy’s summary dismissal from the Homicide Division was the final walk through the squad room. It was like a cliche from a bad cop movie that Murphy was watching instead of living, a sort of out-of-body experience.

He emptied his few personal possessions from the desk he shared with a detective on the opposite shift, a man Murphy saw for five minutes two or three times a week. The only thing he knew about his counterpart was that he was married to a pretty brunette, a nurse, judging by the scrubs she wore in a photo on the desk. The picture was of the two of them together at a bar. They were both smiling. They had two children, a boy and a girl, information Murphy gleaned from the second photograph in the two-picture drugstore frame.

Murphy had often looked with a certain degree of envy at the photographs and wondered what his counterpart’s life was like behind the picture-perfect images. Were the detective and his wife as happy as they looked, or were their smiles just the same masks that everyone else wore? Did they fight a lot? Was she fucking a doctor while her husband worked nights? Did he have a shack job?

In the second photo, the boy looked about twelve, his sister a couple of years younger. Were they as happy and well-adjusted as they seemed, or had the two years that had elapsed since the picture appeared on the desk changed them? Had the boy turned into a dope-smoking hippy and the girl a prepubescent slut?

Sometimes in his darker moments, Murphy hoped so. Then he felt bad about thinking that, so he said the Lord’s Prayer in his head to clear his conscience. Just like his mother used to tell him to do when he was a teenager and she caught him staring at a girl.

Murphy dumped everything he owned into a discarded copypaper box he found next to the trash can. But the box was too big. His belongings could have fit into a shoe box.

The stapler was his, as was a box of government Skilcraft pens he’d bummed from his buddy at ATF. He had a paperback copy of Michael Connelly’s The Black Echo, a day planner to keep track of court dates, a stack of new notebooks held together with a pair of rubber bands, a tape dispenser, a set of crime-scene sketch templates, and a copy of Practical Homicide Investigation.

That was it.

No pictures, no Valentine’s Day cards, no kids’ drawings of Daddy in his police uniform.

Murphy tossed his car keys on the desk, picked up his cardboard box, and started for the door. On his way out he pinched a blank leave slip from the secretary’s desk.

During that final, cliched walk, the squad room turned eerily silent. Just to break the tension, one detective said, “See you around, Murph.”

Another asked if he needed a ride.

Murphy nodded. “Yeah, actually I do.”

As he shuffled through the parking lot, Murphy saw his department-issued Taurus and remembered he had some personal items locked inside it, but the keys were back on his desk. He decided to collect his belongings later.

The ride home was painful. The other detective did the obligatory motherfucking of the rank, but Murphy got the feeling the guy was doing it just to fill the silence that would otherwise have engulfed the car. Mercifully, traffic was light going uptown. Murphy told the detective to drop him off at a corner grocery store a block from his apartment. Murphy knew the owner, an old Sicilian named Vincent Dispenza. In the back office, Vincent had a fax machine he had let Murphy use before.

At the corner, Murphy climbed out of the detective’s car and stood on the street clutching his pathetic cardboard box. “Thanks for the ride.”

“Sure, Murph,” the detective said as he drummed the steering wheel. “You’ll get back up there one day.” Then he drove off, practically spinning the tires in his desire to get away. Murphy understood. He was a pariah, a disease carrier next to whom no one wanted to stand for fear of catching his contagion.

Murphy turned toward Vincent’s. The grocery store was old New Orleans, a corner store actually built on the corner, with the double doors facing the apex of the sidewalk.