Chapter 35

I was sitting across the desk from my Uncle Joe about six weeks later ready to discuss my final report with him.

His chief of staff Malcom Whittaker sat slightly to his left and behind him with a copy open on his lap. I knew he had probably gone over the thing with a fine-tooth comb and if he spotted anything over the line he would have already talked it over with my Uncle. I couldn’t tell from their poker faces if they loved it or hated it for reasons of their own.

I had Julie sitting next to me ready to make corrections to the rough draft in front of me.

“Well, Mike, me lad, this is a real onion of a report. There are so many layers it took us awhile to get down to the core of thing and I thing we can both agree it is not a pretty picture.”

I saw Malcolm nervously tap his eyeglasses with his red ink pen warning me that he was on a short leash ready to start opening up like a hidden machine gun just as we were preparing to run across the open field to the relative cover of the tree-line on the other side.

Some of the content I was not comfortable with but the whole idea of the report was that we would present a consensus view of the grey area in the circumstantial evidence so no individual bias was present in the result.

I listened to Malcolm present an alternative view to several minor points but he did not debate the primary conclusion that the Internal Affairs Department should be disbanded and most of the high ranking member be bought up on charges before a Grand Jury as soon as possible. Even the FBI didn’t escape our findings with the New York Office criticized for colluding with the Internal Affairs Office in pursuing unfair cases against NYPD members running roughshod over their legal representatives using the threat of suspension to gain information about other suspects.

I knew for a fact it was the rule rather than the exception when proceeding with a prosecution against a uniformed member.

It hadn’t worked very well with me because I had easily seen through their sloppy interrogation techniques that relied primarily by brow-beating the witness rather than simply following a logical line of questioning.

Some of our sources were a long list of retired cops that didn’t mind giving up details about the shortcomings provided it didn’t impact their pension or cause them to be charged with something themselves.

Julie looked particularly bright and appealing that morning.

I remembered her doing her wifely duties the night before with her lust-laden eyes looking up at me.

I showed her the depth of my love hitting her special spot that always resulted in a shattering orgasm. Her release was so strong that I feared she might be heard by the Puerto Rican nanny on the other side of the plaster wall in our bedroom.

Still, we really needed the nanny for the baby because Julie was my partner as well as my wife and she was crucial to the preparation of the report and she had a wealth of insight into many of the details that were difficult for me to grasp in their entirety.

This morning, she was dressed in a custom tailored business suit that completely hid the fancy French undies that I had personally watched her put on with my rapt attention. I think she knew I was peeking at her getting dressed in the mirror in front of me as I shaved the stubble from my face that always looked dark and slightly dirty in the morning. I didn’t understand how these supposedly normal guys could condone a beard or even a moustache on their face or chin like it was natural and not an annoyance to be tolerated.

I could understand hair on one’s face in the wilderness or perhaps in a combat zone or some other godforsaken place where shaving was just another chore you had no time for when you were too involved fighting to survive.

Malcolm was making clearing his throat noises making his need to speak abundantly transparent but Uncle Joe and Julie and I pretended to ignore him and we soon got to the point where the rubber hits the road and Joe slammed his copy of the report shut and said in that deep throated voice of his, “I think it is show-time, boys and girls and we got us a definite Grand Jury voice on this thing before we go any further.”

Julie and I did our best to hide our glee at the decision and not to look at poor Malcolm who was turning a nice shade of purple as he stewed in his own juices and at being a minority vote at the table. I felt a little sorry for him because that was Malcolm and he would never change his bureaucratic stripes until the day he died.

I grabbed Julie’s arm and got out of there before my Uncle could invite us over to The Old Homestead for steaks and Irish whiskey. Being married had certainly changed my attitude about such things and I didn’t regret it for a minute because the picture of that French underwear was pestering my brain with possibilities so numerous that I was hard-pressed to pick a winner.

Consuela and her small daughter Maria were already in their pajamas when we got home and we were relieved that the baby was sound asleep in the crib with a huge smile on her tiny face and her thumb inserted into her mouth like it was the nipple on the bottle that she loved so much. The little thing was gaining weight fast and everyone except me thought that was just fine. I wondered it we might be setting this little girl for a lifetime of diets and watching the scale with a hawk’s eye to make certain her weight gain was temporary and not an indicator of my terrible introspective fears. No matter how much weight I lost overseas or at the VA hospital, I always saw myself as a “fatso” because of all the baby fat that I carried on me like an out of shape seal storing fat for winter.

We decided to split the presentation of the prosecution’s case as swiftly as possible.