Deception Read Online Free PDF Page A

by authorized personnel.
    Twelfth floor’s intelligence, identification, juvenile, and narcotics. Thirteenth floor’s the DA’s office and Internal Affairs, where for six months I spent more time than I care to remember. They’d gotten bad information from the Tribune and went after my scalp.
    I pushed fourteen for detective division. It has only one place the general public can go—the reception desk, with a thick bulletproof window and no door that opens from the outside. All the detectives hang their hats here, everyone from robbery and pawnshop details to homicide.
    I hadn’t even made it through security before Mitzie called, “Chief needs to see you.”
    “Let me get settled first.”
    “His assistant said it’s urgent.”
    “Does that mean I’ll have to wait one hour instead of two?”
    I went to my workstation and looked out the huge windows, soaking in the panoramic view of Portland. It all seemed so tranquil from up there. So ordered and peaceful. Years ago it was just a bunch of buildings to me. Now it’s more than that. Feels like nothing should escape your sight up here. Ironic that such a grand view is from homicide. My job takes me lower to the ground, where things aren’t so lofty and inspiring.
    I retraced my steps to the elevator and pushed floor 15, home of the chief of police’s office and the media room. If any chief ever wanted to be near media, it was Lennox.
    After passing through security, I was escorted into the waiting area outside the chief’s office. It brought back memories of when a cop could walk right through the chief’s open door. Now who’d want to?
    I saw on the walls three paintings, two of which were classical, with people centuries old wearing funny hats and looking serene. The other was vague and surreal, the type I saw in a gallery that Sharon made me go to in retaliation for pretending I had the flu so I could watch a play-off game and miss her family gathering. They were paintings you had to develop a taste for. I was still at the gag reflex stage.
    The chief’s assistant, Mona, fifty-five trying to look thirty-five, marched toward me. Her perfume arrived three seconds before she did. Her aide, twenty-five trying to look thirty-five, walked eighteen inches behind her, leaning forward to hear every word.
    “Sit,” Mona said. “Chief Lennox will be with you soon. He’s on an important phone call.”
    I started to sit in a chair facing away from the chief’s office.
    “No,” Mona said, waving her hand, propelling the perfume toward me like nerve gas. “There, on the couch. Chief Lennox prefers people to sit on the couch. But you must take off that raincoat.”
    “It’s a trench coat. Columbo wore a raincoat. Sam Spade wore a trench coat … and a fedora.” I waved my hat at her.
    Her assistant looked curious, but Mona Estée Lauder, lip curled, looked at me like I was an idiot.
    “Humphrey Bogart in The Maltese Falcon? Raincoats are to trench coats what a minivan is to a sports car.” I posed dramatically, like a fashion model on the runway. “Notice the ten buttons, epaulets, shoulder straps, and D rings. In the inside pocket we have—”
    “It’s wet and it stinks. Keep it off the couch.” Mona marched off, her assistant smiling back at me. The younger woman was too new to realize she didn’t need to be cordial with working stiffs who put away bad guys. She could save her smiles for journalists and the public.
    I sat down, still wearing the coat. I gazed across the corridor into the inner sanctum—throne room of the King of Police.
    A long man with a big jaw threw his voice at the speaker phone on his desk, leaning toward it, bawling it out. He was gangly and mechanical. Yet his voice was smooth and commanding, a radio voice, the kind that comes in handy for banana republic dictators and Eastern European tyrants.
    “That’s not going to cut it,” Lennox said. “Those dogs won’t bark.” A few minutes later I heard, “He’s dumb as a