The Investigators (Badge of Honor 7)

“Yes, sir.”

Weisbach went to the closet-size room, opened the door, and snapped on the lights. He knew the large, muscular man sleeping on his back, his mouth open, snoring lightly, but not well; they had never really worked together. Searching his memory, he couldn’t come up with one thing, good or bad, about Lieutenant Mitchell Roberts, except what everybody thought about him. He was a good cop. Not an exceptional cop. It had taken him four shots at the lieutenants’ examination before he scored high enough on it to make the promotion list.

Lieutenant Mitchell Roberts woke and pushed himself up on the cot, supporting himself on his elbows, squinting in the sudden light.

“Who are you?” he asked, half indignantly, half curiously.

“Mike Weisbach, Mitch. Sorry to wake you.”

“Jesus, Inspector, I didn’t recognize you right off. Sorry.”

“Sorry to have to wake you.”

“What can I do for you?”

“I need to look at some of your records,” Weisbach said.

“Sure,” he said, and then had a second thought: “Jesus, at this time of night? I thought you guys worked the day shift.”

“At this time of night,” Weisbach said, and then made a decision based on nothing more than intuition: Lieutenant Mitchell Roberts could be trusted.

“I’m really glad to see you here, Mitch.”

“Asleep?” Roberts asked.

“I’ve taken a nap or two in here myself,” Weisbach said. “What I meant was that I know I can trust you to keep your mouth shut.”

“Yes, sir. Sure you can.”

“Can you tell your sergeant he didn’t see me in here? And expect him to keep his mouth shut?”

“Yes, sir,” Roberts replied, after taking time to think it over. “Michaels is a good cop.”

“Ordinarily, that would be good enough, but sometimes good cops change when it has to do with dirty cops. I don’t pretend to understand that, but that’s the way it is. They start thinking ‘It’s we cops, we brothers, against everybody else’ even when—as in this case—the dirty cops are really slime.”

“Is that what this is about? Dirty cops?”

“ ‘Dirty’—or ‘slime’—doesn’t do these scumbags justice,” Weisbach said. “I really want these bastards, and I don’t want your sergeant to keep me from getting them by running off at the mouth to anybody.”

“Oh,” Roberts said. “Okay. That’s good enough, coming from you, for me. Don’t worry about Michaels.”

“I’ll worry,” Weisbach said. “Prove me wrong.”

“What do you need?”

“I want you to get me the records of everybody the Narcotics Five Squad has brought in here in the last ten days.”

“One of those Narcotics Five Squad hotshots is dirty? But you said ‘these scumbags’, plural ‘scumbags’, didn’t you?”

“I don’t want you even to say ‘Narcotics Five Squad’ out loud, Mitch. And I don’t want your sergeant, or anybody else, to know what records you took out of the files.”

“What am I going to do with the records, once I get them out of the file?”

“I’m going to leave Lockup now, before you come out. I’m going upstairs to Chief Coughlin’s office, where you will bring the records. After we Xerox them, you will bring them back here and put them back in the files.”

“Chief Coughlin’s office? He’s up there?”

“No, but by the time I get there, Frank Hollaran is supposed to be there and have the Xerox machine warmed up,” Weisbach said.