Free Cop Job by Chris Knopf Page A

distribution of drugs. At the same time, they were both skilled in what to share and what to withhold. It was simple economics. If a snitch shared too much it reduced the value of the product, and often increased the possibility of getting caught by the snitched-upon. A bad career move.
    With Alfie it was hard to tell. Sullivan was terse and to the point in his reports. Tempering with heavy qualifications any of Alfie’s commentary. Unlike Joey and Lilly, who had a focus—heroin and prostitution respectively—Alfie was more generalized. A good example concerned an elegant woman with an indefinable foreign accent who frequented the more expensive boutiques in Southampton Village. Alfie noticed that she looked heavier leaving a shop than she did going in, and always seemed to be carrying the same bags every day. Sullivan worked with a Village cop named Judy Rensler to set up a sting, and sure enough, the woman was a professional shoplifter born and raised in Babylon on Long Island.
    Other cases involved an old lady who picked up the wrong pug from where it was tied to a street sign, a team of teenaged pickpockets—a girl and a boy who used the proceeds to buy surfing gear—and a skinny but lovely Latvian hostess at one of the restaurants on Jobs Lane who supplemented her income by giving blowjobs to anyone weighing less than three hundred pounds and in possession of an exotic sports car.
    Hardly the stuff that should lead to summary execution.
    Veckstrom, on the other hand, wrote like a career journalist with pretensions toward literary fiction. He had a law degree and a wealthy wife whose family’s house on the beach in Southampton had been the original draw to the East End. The guy hated my guts, so it took a little effort to appreciate the intellectual sophistication beneath the arrogant sneer and relentless accusation.
    He described his dealings with Joey Wentworth in terms of a psychological dynamic that had more to do with Joey’s relationship with his rich, effeminate father and overbearing, but infantile mother than the kid’s thirst for quick, sleazy profiteering. It was police paperwork in the form of Ibsen and O’Neill, though I admit it had me reading to the end, with Joey splattered all over the inside of his SUV, leaving Veckstrom at a loss over motive or perpetrator.
    Not for lack of suspects. Everyone in the underground distribution chain had used his marine delivery services at one time or another, though no one really liked him personally, and he didn’t like any of them.
    No wife, no girlfriend—or boyfriend—no group affiliations or notorious feuds, just a low-grade sociopath with a souped-up picnic boat and a penchant for risky business.
    Despite the concentrated effort, there was more to read in the snitch files, but it was late, my eyes were sore, and a woman who made me promise to wake her up was quietly sleeping only a few doors away.
    B EFORE I’ D brought the Grand Prix to the repair guys to fix the rear window, I’d noticed in the daylight a rosy smear around an area that hadn’t quite busted through. My first thought was bloodstain, a thought that vanished from my consciousness almost as quickly as it arrived.
    Until I saw the plastic sour cream container in my shop that held the salvaged piece of glass. I picked it out of the container with a pair of pliers and looked at it under a task light. The stain was still there, now dried a darker red, but unmistakable.
    I slipped the shard into a zip loc bag and stuck it in my pocket.
    I worked another few hours in the shop, then called Joe Sullivan.
    “Say Joe, how close are you with the ME these days?” I asked him when he answered the phone.
    “No closer than I have to be.”
    “I think the guy who smashed in my rear window left a bloodstain. Do you think he’d run a DNA test for you?”
    “I don’t answer ridiculous questions when I’m off duty.”
    “They let you off duty?” I asked.
    “Ask me tomorrow so I can officially say