Free The Big Fear by Andrew Case Page A

you were lucky you didn’t have to spend a full hour at the window more than once every couple of days. Because waiting for you on the other side of that window was a thick angry river of the general public, free to make demands on you. There were a few vics coming to pick up a necklace that had been recovered from the pawnshop after the babysitter lifted it, sure, but well over ninety percent of the items vouchered at Property were the effects of people who had themselves been arrested. Lottery tickets that had been scratched but held onto just in case. Half a pack of cigarettes that would have been worth twenty dollars apiece in lockup. A nickel-plated pipe that no one was even going to bother to test for drugs because the perp had been brought in on a stabbing anyway. And each morning after the bail hearings, a swarm of newly released not-quite-criminals crossed Jay Street and stumbled toward Gold to demand the return of their personal scraps. On the first of the month, when the Social Security office next door had checks, they would make it all in one trip. The NYPD sent its worst officers to the Property Clerk Division because it didn’t really care how people coming off an arrest were treated. Most likely they’d be back inside in a few months, after their plea, so why not give them a taste of it now.
    Mulino had done his hour as best he could. The other cops in Property didn’t speak to him at all. He was a probie to them. In a few days, a week maybe, he might be back out on the street—as stale as OCCB felt to Mulino, it would have been a dream to most of these guys. So when each skell at the window handed him a yellow carbon-copy voucher, he walked down the stairs to hunt for the envelope himself. And each time the guy said that there were twenty bucks missing from his envelope, Mulino slid over a complaint form and a pen. He didn’t ask for any help from anyone. If in a couple of months the Department frowned on him and decided that he could spend the rest of his career in Property, then he would be one of them.
    Or maybe not. Because here in Property, surrounded by officers who had been ratted out or had caught a raw deal or had otherwise been beaten down by the NYPD, Mulino felt the cold disdain of what had happened at the Ebbets Field Apartments more than he ever had at OCCB. These guys had been betrayed, and most of them had been on the force long enough to remember what Mulino had done. They weren’t like Sparks, who maybe heard the story along with fifteen or twenty others. When these guys heard that Detective Ralph Mulino was coming in, they knew who he was in a snap.
    He turned the last corner onto the landing and shook out his knee. He stopped to catch his breath. He had felt light, walking up the stairway without his gun, his radio, his flashlight, but after four flights he was still winded. He checked that his shirt was tucked in. He pushed into the hallway and announced himself to the admin, a sleek woman who had grown her nails so long that she couldn’t possibly use her fingers to type.
    “Detective Ralph Mulino for Chief Travis.”
    The woman nodded. He had been announced downstairs. Mulino walked toward the square wooden chairs, a few copies of day-old tabloids on the end table. Ordinarily he would leaf through them while he waited. Today that wasn’t such a good idea.
    Whenever he started thinking about Ebbets Field, he always imagined something he could have done. Some way to make it end differently. But it always came out the same. It had been hot that night, not as hot as the night on the ship but hot enough. Mulino had been in OCCB no more than a month and was still taking radio runs, still hoping that he could prove something to someone and move far enough up the ladder to make a difference. He was paired with Chuck Ramsay, a real old-school guy, someone who had weathered Knapp and Mollen and laughed at all the jokers in suits who had never been on the streets but thought they could