Thrown-away Child

Lamston’s. “I want your decision before you take off down south for the holiday.”
    My decision.
    Only a couple of days ago, I made a splashy murder case with the collar of a society lady up in the same East Side neighborhood where Neglio and his Rolex live. Before I took her down, a sizable part of New York’s population was panicked by this woman’s idea of a memorable Hallowe’en: the systematic killing of low-rent homosexuals as a cover for whacking a bigger fish—namely her husband, a Madison Avenue big shot whose feathers she tried tarring with a lavender brush. That way, she figured, the homicide detectives would not be inspired to do what they are paid to do. Cop reasoning in this case being, What’s the big deal about another fag bumped? King Kong Kowalski saw to it that such reasoning was paramount.
    With the considerable help of Davy Mogaill—my rabbi in the ways of the department, who was himself forcibly retired and who is currently reduced to working as a licensed New York peep—I saved this husband’s neck in the absolute nick of time. Also I made the case under considerable personal strain. Number one, I had just graduated from a six-week sentence at the Straight and Narrow, which is an actual intersection of streets over in Paterson where some priests run a rummy tank for New York cops who have had way too many. Number two, the reason I wound up in this Jersey tank from being overly thirsty had to do with some recent and very ugly discoveries about my Irish family that broke my heart. And number three, my brand-new wife, Ruby Flagg, was practically ready to dump me as the biggest mistake of her life.
    Never mind, that is all another story. But in that story, I did what I had to do—in spite of King Kong Kowalski’s many irritations. And what was my thanks for all this? Did the inspector take me off restricted duty? Did he give me back my Nina so I did not have to walk around with a naked holster? No, and no.
    And these are not the only things that now cause me bitterness, that have me lying awake nights thinking over the option of hanging it up and taking early pension checks from the city every month for the rest of my days. Another thing is the unfinished business of Kowalski himself.
    Joseph Kowalski belongs to the Holy Name Society of Our Lady of the Blessed Agony Church in Queens. Also he is the overnight desk sergeant at Manhattan Sex Crimes who freely exercises a famous habit of torturing homosexual perps. This habit he regards as a moral crusade, and squad room entertainment.
    Because I have squawked loud about this, the word ¡s out that I am some sort of champion of homosexuals. I am an unlikely champion. Two guys kissing on the lips creeps me. But then, the whole psychopathology of romance between men and women likewise creeps me. Anybody who ever read a history book knows that the things people do in the name of love, not to mention religion, are not nearly so noble as they are pathetic and dangerous.
    Along these lines, as a human being and a cop I specifically object to some gay blade having his bold fellow walloped for the sake of some precinct station house sport. Which is Sergeant Joseph Kowalski’s meat, so to speak.
    He says to some frightened homosexual perp, after he has inked his fingerprints onto the standard FBI forms, “Come on now, queeny, drop trou and plop your lolly-johnson up here on the pad so’s I can take your dickprint.” Just routine, Kowalski says. Then instead of being routine like with the fingers, the sergeant goes into a drawer, brings out a braided sap, and smacks the guy. For this holy sport, and because of his gorilla girth, he is called King Kong Kowalski.
    So I wrote out a formal complaint about the big ape and filed it with Inspector Neglio. Also I made a couple of things very clear: the department is not big enough for both Kowalski and me; and if it was me who had to walk, then I would go down in tabloid flames by spilling everything I knew about Kowalski to my pal Slattery at the New York Post.
    In other words, I broke a pair of unbreakable cop rules. Number one, I made things personal. Number two, I ratted out another cop. (For this second heresy, I was awarded the usual recognition by my colleagues in blue. Somebody hung a half-dozen dead sewer rats on my locker at the station house. Also somebody used a set of picks one day to get into my apartment building, whereupon he decorated my door with an arrangement of more dead rats,