Free A Killer Like Me by Chuck Hustmyre Page B

Murphy, eventually forcing him to look away.
    Four years ago, DeMarco had been a deputy chief, the two-star commander of PIB and the driving force behind the internal investigation that led to Murphy being fired. Before taking command of PIB, DeMarco had spent ten years as the head of the Public Affairs Division, the department’s face on the nightly news. The public knew him and trusted him.
    DeMarco was a politician, not a cop, and like all politicians he was ambitious. He had his sights set on the chief’s chair. The current chief, Ralph Warren, had taken over the top spot a month after Katrina, after his predecessor had a mental breakdown and walked off the job, leaving the department and city in chaos. Warren was the mayor’s lapdog and DeMarco was the chief’s protégé and heir apparent.
    Four years ago was also when, as a newly made sergeant in the Major Narcotics Unit, Murphy put the mayor’s younger brother in jail after he and Gaudet caught him driving around in a city-owned Lincoln Town Car with two nearly naked strippers in the front seat and a kilo of cocaine in the backseat.
    Despite pressure from city hall, Murphy had refused to throw the case. The day after he testified at the preliminary hearing, PIB slammed him with a laundry list of “charges,” chickenshit departmental violations that included not notifying the dispatch desk that he and his partner were getting out on a vehicle stop when they pulled over the mayor’s brother, and failing to turn in trip sheets at the end of every shift.
    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.