“I can always make money building decks and putting up drywall…”

The last natural police detective in America slinging spackle. It’s a depressing image, and James says nothing.

“… or delivering furs. There’s a lot of money in furs.”

Worden finishes breakfast with another cup of black coffee, followed by another cigar. Then he cleans the desk and waits for the 9:00 A.M. shift at the courthouse in cold, empty silence.

Fred Ceruti knows it’s a bad one when he turns the corner on Whittier and sees the ambulance. Time of call was 0343 and that was a half an hour ago, he calculates, so what the hell is the guy still doing in the ambo?

The detective edges the Cavalier up behind the red glow of the medic unit’s emergency lights, then stares for a moment at the frenzied paramedics in the rear of the ambulance. Standing on the ambo’s rear running board, a Western uniform looks back at Ceruti and gives a quick thumb’s down.

“He don’t look so hot,” says the uniform as Ceruti gets out of his car and steps toward the red strobes. “They’ve been here twenty minutes and he still ain’t stable.”

“Where’s he hit?”

“Head shot. One in the arm too.”

The victim is writhing on his litter, moaning, with his legs buckling back and forth in slow repetition-outward at the knees, inward at the toes-an involuntary movement that tells a homicide detective to post the vacancy sign. When a head-shot victim starts dancing on his ambo litter-“doing the Funky Chicken,” Jay Landsman calls it-you can write it down as a murder.

Ceruti watches the paramedics struggle as they begin working a pair of pressure pants around the victim’s legs. Fully inflated with air, the device greatly constricts blood flow to the lower extremities, thereby maintaining blood pressure in the head and torso. In Ceruti’s mind, the pressure pants are as much of a threat as anything else; the damn things can keep a man alive until he arrives at an emergency room, but the trauma team eventually has to deflate those bad boys, and at that point, blood pressure takes a nose dive and all hell breaks loose.

“Where’s he going?” Ceruti asks.

“Shock-Trauma, if we can stabilize him,” says the ambo driver. “But I mean, shit, we haven’t been able to get him leveled out.”

Ceruti looks up and down Whittier Avenue and reads the scene like a short grocery list. Dark side street. Ambush. No witnesses. No physical evidence. Probable drug murder. Don’t die on me, you bastard. Don’t you dare go and die on me.

“Are you the first officer?”

“Yeah. Seven-A-thirty-four unit.”

Ceruti begins collecting the particulars in his notebook, then follows the uniform to an alleyway between the rowhouses at 2300 and 2302.

“We got the call as shots fired and found him lying right there, head to the wall. He still had this in his waistband when we rolled him.”

The patrolman holds up a.38 five-shot.

No good, thinks Ceruti, no good at all. His last case was also a drug murder from the Western. Boy by the name of Stokes shot down in an alley off Carrollton, skinny kid who turned out to be HIV-positive when they got him down to the ME’s office. That case, too, is still open.

Ceruti fills a couple of pages in his notepad, then walks a block and a half east to a corner pay phone to call for reinforcements. Landsman answers the phone on the first ring.

“Hey, Jay,” says the detective, “this guy didn’t look good in the ambo.”

“Oh yeah?”

“Yeah. He’s shot in the head and it’s gonna be a murder. You better wake Dunnigan up…”

No, Landsman tells him. Not this time.

“Whoa, Jay. I had the last one…”

“It’s your call, Fred. Do what you got to do. Are you sending anyone down here?”

“There’s no one to send. There aren’t any witnesses or anything close.”

“Okay, Fred. Gimme a call when you finish up at the scene.”

Ceruti slams the receiver into its cradle, cursing his sergeant bitterly. The brief conversation has left him with no doubt that Landsman is trying to fuck him, sending him out on calls alone and holding back when he calls for help. It was the same thing on the Stokes homicide last month and on the beating in the Southwest back in April. Those are the last two homicides handled by Landsman’s squad and Ceruti was the primary on both; this guy here on Whittier makes three in a row. Landsman reads the board, Ceruti tells himself. He knows what’s up. So why the hell doesn’t he get on Dunnigan and send his ass out here to pick up this murder?

Ceruti knows the answer. At least he thinks he does. He isn’t the golden boy of Landsman’s squad, not by a long shot. He and Pellegrini arrived at the same time, but it was Pellegrini who caught the interest of the sergeant, Pellegrini with whom Landsman preferred to handle calls. Tom is not only a prospect but a sidekick for his sergeant, a straight man for the situation comedy in which Landsman lives. Two or three good cases and Tom is suddenly a prodigy, a candidate for rookie of the year. Ceruti is simply the other one, the dime-a-dozen new kid from the districts. And now he is alone.

Ceruti makes his way back from the pay phone just as the ambo is pulling away. He tries to forget the conversation with Landsman and do what he needs to do, working what little there is of this murder-to-be. One of the uniforms manages to find a spent bullet on a nearby stoop, a.38 or.32 from the look of it, but too badly mutilated to be of any use in a ballistics comparison. A lab tech arrives a few minutes later to bag the bullet and take scene photos. Ceruti wanders back to the pay phone to tell Landsman that he’s on his way in.

That’s his intention, anyway, until he spots a heavyset woman on an Orem Avenue porch, watching him strangely as he walks toward the phone. He changes direction and saunters up to the house as casually as possible, given that it’s four in the morning.

Incredibly, she saw them. More incredible still, she is willing to tell Ceruti what she saw. There were three of them running after the sound of shots, sprinting down the street toward one of the houses at the other end of Orem. No, she didn’t recognize them, but she saw them. Ceruti asks several more questions and the woman becomes nervous-understandably, since she still has to live in this neighborhood. If he takes her off the porch now, Ceruti tells the whole street that she’s a witness. Instead, he leaves with a name and phone number.

Back at the homicide office, Landsman is watching the overnight news channel when Ceruti returns and throws the notepad down on a desk.

“Hey, Fred,” says Landsman coolly. “How’d it go out there?”

Ceruti glares at him, then shrugs.

Landsman turns back to the television. “Maybe you’ll get a call on it.”

“Yeah. Maybe.”

From Ceruti’s point of view, his sergeant is being senselessly cruel. But for Landsman, the equation is simple. A new man comes up and you show him the ropes, carrying him along on a few cases until he knows the game. If you can, you may even throw him a few dunkers to feed his confidence. But up in homicide, that’s about it for the orientation program. After that, it’s sink or swim.

It is true that Landsman thinks the world of Pellegrini; it is also true that he would rather work a murder with Pellegrini than with anyone else in the squad. But Ceruti has had a year of handling calls with Dunnigan or Requer watching over him; he isn’t exactly being thrown naked to the wolves here. In that sense, he is right to find meaning in the fact that he has worked the squad’s last three murders and worked them alone. They were homicides and he’s a homicide detective and, in Landsman’s mind, now is the time to see if Ceruti can find the meaning in that.

Fred Ceruti is a good cop, brought to homicide by the captain after four years’ experience in the Eastern District. He did some respectable plainclothes work in the ops unit there, and in a department where affirmative action is a standing policy, a good black plainclothesman is going to get noticed. But still, CID homicide after only four years of experience is a hard road for anyone to walk, and the other sixth-floor units were littered with detectives who had been bounced from the Crimes Against Persons section. At crime scenes and during interrogations, things that could never slip past a more experienced investigator could still elude Ceruti. Such limitations weren’t immediately noticeable when he was working cases as a secondary investigator with Dunnigan or Requer. Nor did they become immediately apparent when Landsman began sending him out alone on calls four months ago.