Free Cop Job by Chris Knopf Page B

no.”
    “No?”
    “We can barely get DNA from a murder weapon these days. They’re backed up, like, fifty years,” he said.
    “He’d do it for you.”
    “No. But he might do it for Jackie.”
    “Really?”
    “I can submit it as evidence,” he said, “then she can tickle his tummy or whatever it takes to put it through sometime before the end of the century.”
    I shook off the unwanted image before it could take hold.
    “Okay. Can I bring it over?”
    “I said I was off.”
    “I know where you live. I’ll bring coffee.”
    “Milk, no sugar,” he said, then hung up.
    B ACK IN the early twentieth century when regular middle-class neighborhoods were growing up around Southampton Village, it was common practice to put a little free-standing apartment at the back of the lot, often over a garage, to have a place to store surplus relatives, sometimes a maid or gardener, or even rent-paying boarders. Municipal planning had outlawed the practice for new construction, for no good reason, though grandfathered “mother-in-law” apartments and guesthouses endured, instantly hiking the value of any property thus endowed.
    Joe Sullivan lived in one behind the home of a friend’s parents, local people thrilled to have such an eminent police presence in their neighborhood. Most of the other locals had sold out long before, converting the Hamptons’s breathtaking real estate inflation into bigger houses in South Carolina and unexpectedly sumptuous retirements.
    Though crime in the area was nearly unheard of, the old couple was unnerved by all the summer homes left abandoned nine months out of the year.
    The cottage Sullivan rented was a miniature version of the main house, enclosed in mature shrubbery and made no less quaint by the unmarked Ford Crown Victoria parked a few feet from the front door.
    I rang the doorbell, waited a few minutes, then rang it again. Sullivan swung open the door, greeting me with a snarl.
    “Repeated ringing of a doorbell doesn’t make a person answer any quicker,” he said.
    “Now you tell me.”
    He was wearing a sweat suit that loudly declared affiliation with the New York Giants. In his hand was a large coffee mug. On his feet were US Army desert-tan combat boots. I wondered where he’d stowed the lightweight .38 that never left his body.
    He backed away from the door so I could enter a comfortable living area, unadorned, but clean and well lit, with a pair of plain fabric couches and a flat-screen TV.
    “I brought reinforcements,” I said, holding up a large cup of coffee bought at the corner place in the Village.
    We sat across from each other on the couches. He stuck out his mug and I filled it up. The sour, sugary smell of metabolizing alcohol scented the air.
    “How’re you doing these days, Joe,” I asked.
    He looked unhappy with the question.
    “Never better. What about you? What’s with the grey hair?”
    “It’s what happens when it doesn’t fall out.”
    “Great. Something else to look forward to.”
    Sullivan’s wife had left him the year before. She cited, fairly, his career’s lousy hours, dangerous working conditions, and short money. I’d never met her, but heard enough gritching in the background whenever I called him to guess the woman’s nature. I didn’t know how he felt about the whole thing, since we never talked about it.
    “Or you could die early and avoid the whole thing,” I said.
    “Thanks for the coffee,” he said, after taking a tentative sip.
    “Pretty nice place,” I said, looking around.
    “You have to live somewhere.”
    I took the plastic bag with the glass shard and tossed it over to him.
    “It’s from the busted rear window of my Grand Prix. You can see the red stain pretty clearly. Makes me think the idiot used his fist to punch out the glass.”
    “Not easy to do,” he said.
    “But possible if you know how.”
    “Or you’re too dumb to know better.”
    “Sure. If you’re dumb, but strong,” I said.
    He put the bag in