“Does Detective Milham know that you’ve come to see me?”
“Of course not!”
“Why do you think anyone would want to ‘pin’ what happened to your husband on you? Or Detective Milham?”
“I just told you! To cover up. To protect themselves. They’re all dirty. The whole damned Five Squad is dirty! That’s probably why Jerry was killed. He never really wanted to get involved with that. They made him! And maybe he was going to tell somebody or do something.”
“By dirty, you mean you believe your husband was taking money from someone?”
“Yes, of course.”
“Did he tell you he was?”
“No. He wouldn’t talk about it at all.”
“Then how do you know?”
“He was getting the money from someplace.”
“What money?”
“All of the money. All of a sudden we’ve got lots of money. You’re a cop. You know how much a cop, even with overtime, makes.”
“And Jerry had large sums of money?”
“We—he—bought a condo at the shore, and there’s a boat. And he paid cash. He didn’t get that kind of money from the Police Department.”
“Did you ask him where the money came from?”
“He wouldn’t tell me. That’s when we started to have trouble, when he wouldn’t tell me.”
“Have you told anything about this to Detective Milham?”
“No.”
“May I ask why not?”
“Because if I did, he would have done something about it. He’s an honest cop.”
“Then wouldn’t he logically be the person to tell?”
“I didn’t want Jerry to go to jail,” she said. “And besides, what would it look like, coming from me? Me living with Wally. I’d look like a bitch of a wife trying to make trouble.”
“Did you come to me for advice, Mrs. Kellog?” Washington asked.
“For help. For advice.”
“If what you told me is true…”
“Of course it’s true!” she interrupted.
“…then the information you have should be placed in the hands of the people who can do something about it. I’m sure you know that we have an Internal Affairs Division…”
“If I thought I could trust Internal Affairs, I wouldn’t be here,” she said. “They’re all in on it.”
“Mrs. Kellog, I can understand why you’re upset, but believe me, you can trust Internal Affairs.”
At this moment, unfortunately, I’m not absolutely sure that’s true. And neither am I sure that what I so glibly said before, that the Department is ninety-nine and forty-four one hundredths percent pure is true, either.