Free The Good Cop by Brad Parks Page A

said. “They tossed him in the shower to sober him up. And then he did himself in in the shower.”
    “You hearing all that, huh?”
    “We got sources.”
    “What else you hear?”
    I paused, not sure how much further to push things. Mike Fusco damn near strangled me when I asked him about Kipps being corrupt. But at least I had a little bit of a size advantage on Fusco. Hightower? If he wanted to, he could fold me in quarters and stuff me in his pocket.
    Still, nothing ventured, nothing gained. So I took a deep breath and said: “There’s talk that Detective Kipps might have gotten himself tangled up in something inappropriate, that he might have gotten caught, and that maybe that’s why he pulled the trigger. But then I’ve had other people telling me he was legit. So I guess I’m trying to figure out which it was.”
    I braced myself, and Hightower’s face twitched a little. But all he did was take a drag on his cigarette. “What do you care?” he asked.
    “Well, the way my bosses think, a crooked cop who shoots himself is probably getting what he deserves, and therefore we don’t have much of a story,” I ventured. “Then again, maybe the cop is straight. Maybe he didn’t even kill himself in the first place, in which case there’s a lot more going on than we might realize. You follow me?”
    I had set him up to tell me all kinds of wonderful things about Darius Kipps. And mindful of what Pritch said about black officers in the Fourth being tight with each other, I figured that’s what I was going to hear.
    But he flicked his cigarette on the ground and exhaled a long line of smoke. Without any expression, he said, “Sounds to me like you don’t got a story.”
    “What makes you say that?”
    But he didn’t reply, just brushed past me and up the front steps, disappearing into that long-infamous building.
    *   *   *
    It was starting to feel like I needed a scorecard just to keep track of who was in the “Darius Dirty” column and who belonged in “Darius Clean.” Pritch and Officer Hightower seemed to be in the former, while Mike Fusco and Uncle Bernie were in the latter. Me? I was right in the middle, in a third column that might as well have been labeled “Carter Clueless.”
    I was trudging back to my car when my phone chirped with a text message. It was from Tommy Hernandez, our city hall beat writer and a coconspirator in what had turned out to be some of my finer capers. Tommy and I did our best to look out for each other in the newsroom. So I took it seriously when his text read: “TT on warpath. Watch ur back.”
    TT was, of course, Tina Thompson. And I didn’t know what he was talking about until moments later, when my phone rang. It was coming from a number with a 315 area code, which I knew was Syracuse, N.Y. Over the years, we had enough interns from Syracuse University’s Newhouse School of Public Communications to know those three digits cold.
    “Carter Ross.”
    “Hey, Carter, it’s Geoff Ginsburg.”
    Geoff was another Syracuse intern. In the modern newsroom—which has more demand for work than money to pay for it—interns have two of the things editors prize most: enthusiasm and affordability. Like some invasive species, interns started in relatively small numbers, but with no natural prey—beyond their own inability to survive on the near-poverty-level wages we pay them—they have been allowed to proliferate to the point where I think the interns now outnumber the full-time staff members.
    Talent-wise, they were a mixed lot, though Geoff was better than most. He was a smart kid, an excellent writer, and a keen reporter. Because of his surname, some wiseacre on the copy desk had taken to calling him Ruth Bader. That turned rather quickly into Ruthie, the name that stuck. Mind you, unlike the Supreme Court justice, our Ruthie looked like he was about thirteen years old. He had an enthusiastic demeanor that made you wonder if he was getting his Journalism Merit