The Good Cop Read Online Free PDF

without having to worry about it coming back to him.
    He answered his phone on the second ring, saying, “Hey, if it ain’t Woodward N. Bernstein!”
    Pritch was under the belief that the famous Washington Post reporting duo of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein was actually one person. I never bothered correcting him.
    “Not too bad, not too bad,” I said. “Though I did just come from Darius Kipps’s house.”
    “Oh, you heard about that, huh?”
    “Yeah. We’re getting word he offed himself in a shower stall at the Fourth?”
    “Yeah, man, that’s the word. It’s sad. Dude just had a baby and everything.”
    “You knew him?”
    “Yeah. Before I came downtown, I was in the Fourth with him. I was already detective when he was hired on patrol, so I only knew him a little. He made detective not long before I went downtown, so we never worked a case together or anything. But, yeah, I knew him.”
    “What’d you think of him?”
    “Good dude. Real good dude. He was one of those cops who was all about the law, you know?”
    “What do you mean?”
    “There are guys in the department who look at the law like it’s an impediment. You know, like, ‘We’d really be able to clean up this city if it weren’t for the damn Fourth Amendment.’ But Kipps, he wasn’t like that. He understood the job was about upholding the law, even when the law didn’t make sense. You know what I’m saying?”
    “Maybe,” I said. “Give me an example.”
    “Like, say a scumbag you put away got off on some technicality or got himself some slick defense attorney who was able to get armed robbery down to PTI”—pretrial intervention—“or something like that? Some guys get really pissed, go on and on about how the system is effed up. Not Kipps. He took that stuff in stride. He understood that the law was there to protect everyone—even criminals sometimes. He wanted to bust ’em as bad as anyone. But he wanted to do it the right way. He treated everyone with respect. It’s like, if you were going to play good cop, bad cop with a suspect, Kipps was always going to be the good cop. You know what I mean?”
    “The good cop,” I repeated. “Okay, I hear you. So what do you make of this, then?”
    “What do you mean?”
    I had been fidgeting with my empty Coke Zero bottle, the label of which was now completely removed. I took a deep breath and said: “I don’t know, Pritch. It just strikes me as a little off. I didn’t know the guy like you did. But I just spent the morning talking to his family and he didn’t seem like type to do something like this. There’s the new baby. He was talking about buying a new house. Heck, he was going to be taking his kids to Disney World. Those are pretty optimistic things, you know? Is there something here I’m missing? Something his family didn’t know or wouldn’t tell me? I’m not writing it. This is just my own personal curiosity at this point.”
    “I know what you’re saying. But I’ll tell you what, this job”—he pushed out a large gust of air—“it chews you up. Being a cop, you see some stuff, man, especially in this city. Some guys, they can put a good face on it for years. They laugh it off and seem to be good family men, but inside it’s eating at them the whole time, you know? Some guys start drinking or they let it ruin their marriage. But other guys? It just gets to be too much. Then one day they go off and swallow their gun.”
    “You think what’s what happened here?”
    I continued folding and refolding the Coke Zero label as I waited for Pritch to answer.
    “Well, probably, yeah,” he said at last. “I don’t know nothing. And I don’t want to go giving Woodward N. Bernstein a big scoop. But…”
    “But what?”
    “Well, the Fourth is … like I said, I came up in the Fourth, so I know it pretty well. And it’s tight. Especially the black officers, no offense,” he said, as if I would somehow be offended I had been left out. “The brothers of