Treachery in Death (In Death #32)(57)

He puffed out his cheeks, released the air. “Maybe all that sounds like picking nits, too.”

“I don’t think so.”

“Every boss has a style,” he commented, and looked at Peabody. “We pick up the style, learn to work with it so everybody gets the job done.”

“That’s how I see it,” Peabody agreed. “The job’s the thing.”

“The job’s the thing.” He nodded. “But she’d question the direction of an investigation, pull you off one and stick you on another. Dump somebody else’s petty case on you. That happened to me twice. I’m this close to making a bust, and she pulls me in, reassigns. When I argue it, she sits there behind her fancy desk and tells me she’s not satisfied with the quality of my work, or with my attitude.”

“That’s not style,” Peabody put in. “That’s not making the job the thing.”

“Sure as hell not.”

“Did you complain up the chain?” Eve asked him, though she had the answer in the file.

“No. I don’t work that way. The boss is the boss, and hell, the squad was closing cases. Plus this is Saint Oberman’s daughter, and when she came on as boss she was the golden girl.”

“And she hung a life-sized portrait of her father in the office, in case any of you forgot.”

Allo smiled at Eve. “You sure as hell couldn’t miss it. Anybody paying attention could see she was weeding out the old, sowing in the new. Handpicking when she could.”

He shrugged. “Boss’s privilege. But it got so I hated going in to work, hated knowing I’d be sitting in that squad room. It wears at you, makes you hard to live with. Hard enough to live with a cop, right?”

“No argument.”

“It wore me down. She wore me down. I knew she wanted me out, and I knew—after the rip—she was going to find a way. I wasn’t going to go out that way. I wasn’t going to have her put another mark on my record. The boss is the boss,” he said again, “but I’ll be damned. I might as well add my wife put her foot down, and I can’t blame her. So I put in for the transfer. I had another three years with a good squad, a good boss. And when I put in my papers, Lieutenant, it was my choice.”

“I’m going to ask you something, Detective-Sergeant.”

“Allo,” he said. “Just Allo.”

“Was she on the take?”

He sat back, shook his head from side-to-side. “I knew this was coming. Goddamn it.” He rubbed a hand over his face, shook his head again. “Did you see the name of my boat?”

“Yes, I did. The Blue Line.”

“Being retired doesn’t shift the line.”

“From where I stand that line breaks for a wrong cop, or it means nothing. For a cop who uses her badge, her authority to fill her own pockets, and worse, the line breaks.”

He kept his gaze hard on her face. “And if I say hell, yeah, you’re going to believe me after everything I just told you?”

“Yes, I am. I came to you because I believe you’re a good cop—f*ck retirement, Allo, you’re still a cop. You’ll always be a cop. I came to you because I believe you respect the badge, and because I believe I can take your word, even your opinion, to the bank.”

He took a long drink, let out a long breath. “I’m going to say hell, yeah, but I couldn’t prove it, couldn’t give you one solid piece of evidence. Not then, not now. She liked her closed-door meetings with her chosen few. And I know damn well with a couple of the busts I managed to stick on, somebody skimmed. No way I underestimate junk by the amounts it came back to after weigh-in. My mistake there was going to her on just that. Telling the boss I suspected somebody’d skimmed some off the top. That’s when things got bad for me. Or worse, I guess you’d say.”

He shrugged. “Coincidence? Maybe if you believe in coincidence. I never did.”

“Neither do I. I bet you still have your notebooks. I bet you still have your records of the investigations and busts you took part in under Lieutenant Oberman.”

“You’d win that bet.”

“I’m trusting you, Allo, to keep everything said here to yourself. Not to share it, at this time, with the friends you talk to, hook up with. I’m not going to insult you by saying if you do that, if you trust me with those records I’ll see that rip is expunged from your record. But I will tell you, either way you go, I’m going to look into that.”

“I’m not asking for a favor, but I won’t turn this one down.” He sat another minute. “She’s done murder, too?”

“Her hands are bloody.”

“I’m sorry to hear it, sorry because of her old man. You’re going to take her down.”

It wasn’t a question, but Eve answered anyway. “To the ground.”

He nodded, rose. “I’ll get my books.”

He paused at the door, turned back. “There was an officer—female officer—who went down in the line under Oberman.”

“Detective Gail Devin.”

He nodded. “She was a good cop. She was the daughter of an old friend of mine. My oldest friend. We went to school together in the old neighborhood. She had some concerns about Oberman and came to me with them.”