Chapter 34

Before that expedition to the hospital, I had always considered my getting shot on the job going through that dangerous door as the turning point of my life because it meant I was not going to get a chance at a career with the NYPD.

Now, with the page being turned on my life with the birth of a baby and the news that my sham marriage to Julie was a on a lot more solid ground than I had ever thought possible, I accepted my new role as a husband and a father not just as a phony relationship merely on paper, but reality itself come full circle.

The more I thought about it, the happier I was with the outcome because I had tired of my jaded existence as a virtual womanizer. My days as a bunny rabbit hopping on any female with a come-hither look had come to an end. I knew that with Julie at home waiting for me, it would be impossible to look her in the eye if I was screwing around behind her back like so many of my married buddies that I had complete respect for due to their hypocritical lifestyle. I had fallen away from religion from the time that I first entered the military and thought that church-going folks were all like robots going to church every Sunday like clockwork. The simple truth was that I missed all that pomp and circumstance of the incense and the candles lit under the statues of one’s favorite Saint.

I knew now that we would be going to church every Sunday just like normal people and I would be confessing my sins instead of trying to push them out of my mind and pretending it never happened.

As my secretary, Julie knew most of my sexual transgressions and I knew she would forgive me for them with the possible exception of eighteen year old Eva with her killer body and that look on her face when she was feeling that she just had to have it without any need for small talk with the innocence of youth and unstoppable energy that could not be contained. I didn’t admit my guilt about that relationship to Julie because I knew instinctively she would not forgive me for crossing the line with the virginal Eva.

Some of the married neighbors in the building where Julie lived stopped by to see the new baby and they looked at me with a question in their eyes.

I explained that we were actually married but that Julie worked for me a long time and it was better if we kept that hidden from the general public. After that, everything was all sugar and spice and the wives relaxed when I was in the room because I was sudden safe from a marital perspective and not some tomcat roaming the alleys looking for a kitty to play with.

I moved my stuff from the office to Julie’s apartment and we hired a Puerto Rican nanny to watch the little one while we were at the office. She moved into the back bedroom along with her tiny daughter Maria. Her name was Consuela and she wore a rosary around her neck making her look more like a nun than a nanny at least from my perspective. We had some money coming in now from a few jobs skip tracing guys with bills that liked to move to avoid the bill collectors. We even got into the insurance investigation business with insurance companies wanting to verify that the customer was a real victim and not just pulling a fast one to make a quick buck.

I got my private investigator license over in New Jersey as well because there were some contracts to be made with the Gaming Commission checking out the bingo parlors and the other games of chance that might be infiltrated with organized crime. That was one area that the churches and the other agencies did not want connected to their effort to raise funds for worthy causes.

I let Julie concentrate on that area while I continued to investigate the murders with help from Uncle Joe’s staff that he was liberal about sharing with me to help me complete my final report.

Uncle Joe gave me a wad of cash that I could use to pay the pair of investigators that he had transferred over to my office just for the murders and the dirty cop case. In my mind, I had already labeled them as Abbot and Costello due more to their similarity to the body shapes of those two comedians and not because they were particularly funny.

I knew my Uncle kept a slush fund for such things from confiscated assets from the drug dealers rousted by his flying squad of crime stoppers working out of his office. It wasn’t exactly kosher but it was all accounted for and went only to police business and not to any personal items like expensive meals in pricy restaurants or any of that other corrupt monkey business that permeated the inner workings of any police headquarters.

It was time now for me to turn my attention back to the murders that in many ways seemed more important than the other criminal activities taking place with this case. The part of my report that had to do with the original murder of Donnie Anderson was fairly well-documented and I had listed all items of evidence with the proper chain of custody in each case.

The next file was on my cousin Raymond and I had all of the previous investigations to clearly put in order the evidence in that case as well.

In both murders, we had plenty of evidence to convict the immediate persons involved although I was unhappy that we were unable pinpoint exactly who had given the orders in each case and I doubted if that would ever be available without some stoolie turning state’s evidence to get the higher-ups actually giving the orders.

The next murder file was really thick and it was filled with documentation on the triple homicide at police headquarters. I had a lot of interrogation reports on the killing of Rita and Officer Jones. The file on the cleaning lady was not quite as thick because the poor lady was just in the wrong place at the wrong time.

The brutal violence of that assault was still fresh in my memory and I knew it was the final insult by the dirty cops to make the entire department look bad in the eyes of responsible law-abiding residents of the Big Apple and I was determined to catch the perpetrators and bring them to justice no matter what the cost.