The Referral Game

“… To recap, seven year old Sylvia Hanson remains missing at this hour. The Washington Heights youth was abducted from her front yard yesterday morning while playing with a puppy she had received for her birthday only two days before. Police report several active leads are being vigorously pursued. While police spokesman Dennis Schmidt would not speculate on a motive for this crime, this station has learned that no ransom note has been received the family. The distraught parents have made a public appeal for the return of their daughter. Mrs. Hanson in an emotional statement today …”

    I clicked the radio off. There’s almost never a happy ending for that sort of case. It was one of the reasons that I didn’t miss being a cop any more than I did. Dealing with parents in a situation like that was as close as you can get to impossible. I had quit the force three years earlier after a tough case of that kind. That little girl had been named Debbie Martin. I can still see her picture in my mind. A tiny wisp in pigtails with a beautiful smile. She had disappeared from a playground near her home. With no real leads to go on we rounded up the usual known perps. We grilled dozens of suspects, ran down dead end leads and checked stories for holes. It was grunt work, but it was all we had. Whether it was good police work or dumb luck I caught a suspect in a lie about his whereabouts at the time of the abduction. Homing in on him, I hammered him for hours catching him in one false statement after another. Finally he broke down and confessed that he had taken the girl and strangled her in a panic after she began screaming. He led us to the body. He had buried her at an abandoned landfill. By the time we got to her she had been there for weeks. She didn’t look like her picture anymore. But we had our man, case closed.
    I was the hero of the day. The papers lauded my detective skills and had me on the fast track to big things. But I didn’t feel like I was on my way to anywhere. At least nowhere I wanted to go. I found that I couldn’t go a day without Debbie’s face in my thoughts. Maybe I wasn’t as hard, wasn’t as strong as the other guys. They were affected to, but they could let it go and I couldn’t seem to. It killed my career in the department. My superiors took it as a sign of weakness, maybe even instability. Captain Vince Woodward, my immediate superior, especially felt that I didn’t have what it took to be a good cop. He had never liked me. He didn’t like young cops and he thought that I had made detective too quickly, too easily. He made it clear to me that he was going to be on my back
    “ Randall,” he said. “ If you’re going to moon around this squad room forever over one murder case, then you’re no good to me, yourself or anyone else in this department.”
    I hated him for saying it, but maybe he was right. So before they chained me permanently to a desk or squeezed me out altogether, I quit. I don’t like that word, but that’s what I did. I still don’t like to think about it.
    I leaned back in my chair to let the rest of the day wash over me. If I could just get through this Friday that was ahead of me I would have the weekend to recover from these forty-eight hours days life was throwing at me lately. But I was going to have to take a case soon or next month’s service charge was liable to wipe out what was left in the bank. I could always sell my car. That would tide me over for a few months. A car in city was a luxury anyway, parking was hard to find and expensive when you did. Looking around at the office nothing looked like it would bring any coin at a hockshop. A desk, a few high back chairs, filing cabinet and a couple of paintings that looked as if they were from the Holiday Inn collection. It was depressing to look at it so I stopped. Being a private investigator many of my clients never even saw the place. In some ways it was just a phone booth and a mailbox. All this for $195 a month and that included a cleaning lady I had never seen in all the time I’d been there. But for the client who expected an office this was it.
    It was almost five on Friday afternoon when the telephone rang. I jumped a bit in my seat because the phone hadn’t rang since that morning, and that had been a woman with a missing French poodle. I had passed. I picked up the newspaper on my desk from yesterday and scanned the headlines. Nixon was going to China for some reason. That didn’t