*
The following morning, I finished a custody report and, wanting to get out of the house, drove to the West L.A. courthouse and dropped off the papers at the judge’s chambers. The police station was nearby, and I walked over. The civilian clerk knew me and waved me up without clearance.
I climbed the stairs and walked past the big Robbery-Homicide room where Milo had once worked with all the other detectives, continued up the hall.
He’d spent a decade and a half in that room, never an insider because of his sexuality and his own loner tendencies. Early on there’d been plenty of hostility, mostly from uniforms and brass, but none recently and never from detectives.
Detectives are too bright and too busy for that kind of nonsense. For the last few years, Milo’s high solve-rate had earned him silent respect.
A little over a year ago, his life had changed. Chasing down a vicious, twenty-year-old cold-case sex murder had led him to unearth some of the police chief’s personal secrets. The chief, now deposed, had offered a solution: Milo, in return for not ruining both of them, would get promoted to lieutenant but would be spared the pencil-pushing that went with a lieutenant’s position. Exiled to his own space, away from other D’s, he’d be a special case: allowed to pick his cases, expected to keep a low profile. If he needed assistance, he was free to enlist junior D’s. Otherwise, he’d be on his own.
Shunting and coopting. It’s the kind of thing government does all the time. Milo knew he was being manipulated, and he hated the idea. He considered quitting—for a few moments. Veered away from self-destruction and convinced himself isolation could be freedom. Banking the extra salary wasn’t bad either, and while the chief was in power, his job security was assured.
Now the chief was gone, and a new replacement had yet to be picked. Ten candidates had announced their intentions, including an assistant chief from Community Services who tossed his name in the ring after granting an interview to a San Francisco paper in which he came out of a thirty-year closet and named his longtime companion.
I asked Milo if that would change things in the department.
He laughed. “When Berger’s name hit the list, eyes rolled so loud you could hear it in Pacoima. His chance of winning is about the same as my growing a second pancreas.”
“Even so. The fact that he went public.”
“Public as far as the public’s concerned. Everyone in the department’s known about him for years.”
“Oh,” I said.
“Times are different than when I started,” he said. “No one looks, no one tells, no one leaves nasty stuff in my locker. But the basics—the psychodynamics—aren’t ever going to change, are they? The way I see it, humans are built that way, it’s in our DNA. Us-them, someone’s gotta be in, someone’s gotta be out. Every few years we have to beat someone up to feel good about ourselves. If most of the world was like me, straights would be stigmatized. Probably some evolutionary thing, though I can’t figure it out. Got any wisdom for me?”
“Left the wisdom pills in the car.”
He laughed again, in that joyless way he’s perfected. “Savagery reigns. I’ll never be lacking for work.”
*
The door to his office was open, and he was sitting at his desk, reading a file. The space is windowless, barely large enough for him, with nothing on the wall and a picture of Milo and Rick on the desk. Fishing, somewhere in Colorado. Both of them in plaid shirts, they looked like a couple of outdoorsmen. For most of the trip, Milo had suffered from altitude sickness.
His computer was on, and his screen saver was a shark chasing a diver. Each time the fish’s rapacious jaws nudged the swimmer’s fins, he got kicked in the face. A floating legend read, NO GOOD DEED GOES UNPUNISHED.
I knocked on the doorjamb.
“Yeah,” he grumbled, without looking up.
“Good day to you, too. Turns out Gavin Quick’s not the first patient of Koppel’s who’s seen an untimely end.”
He looked up, stared as if we’d never met. His eyes cleared. The file was Gavin’s. He slapped it shut.