The Good Cop Read Online Free PDF Page B

the Fourth stick together.”
    “So?”
    “So I’m just hearing some weird stuff, is all. Stuff I never thought I’d hear coming from the Fourth. I went over there this morning, just to pay a visit to some of the guys I still know over there, see how they were doing with it, and…”
    “What?”
    “You ain’t writing this, right?”
    “No. My paper doesn’t write suicides. It’s kind of a policy.”
    “Okay. Well. Shoot, man, I shouldn’t even be talking about this. But they were saying Kipps might have been dirty.”
    “Dirty? Dirty how?”
    “I don’t know. But word is out he recently had contact with Internal Affairs. And a cop who’s spending time with IA, man, that doesn’t always look good.”
    “Yeah, I guess not. Did anyone say specifically what it might have been? There’s all different kinds of dirty.”
    “No. No one said. And I didn’t ask,” Pritch said. “The truth is, I don’t even want to know. The man is dead. Leave it at that.”
    “Of course, of course,” I said as another call started ringing through on my phone. I took a glance at the screen.
    It was Mimi Kipps.
    “Pritch, I gotta run. Darius Kipps’s widow is calling on the other line.”
    “Oh, geez,” he said. “Well, remember: I didn’t tell you nothing and you don’t know nothing, especially not about Kipps being dirty. That’s the last thing that woman needs to hear. She’s going to have it hard enough.”
    *   *   *
    As I clicked from one call to the other, I realized there was no good way to handle this. I couldn’t exactly continue the charade that I was going to be writing a glowing thousand-word paean to the life and times of Sergeant Kipps when I knew there were going to be about three paragraphs in the next day’s paper. At the same time, if the Newark Police Department hadn’t informed Mimi Kipps about the nature of or circumstances surrounding her husband’s death, I sure wasn’t going to tell her.
    But I was spared at least part of that quandary when Mimi started off our conversation with: “He didn’t kill himself.”
    “Mimi?” I said, just to make sure it was her.
    “Yes, this is Mimi Kipps, and I want you to know: my husband did not kill himself. I don’t want you writing it that way. I don’t want anyone talking about him that way. I don’t care what the Newark Police Department or anyone else has to say about it. There is no way he did what they’re saying he did.”
    The preternaturally calm Mimi Kipps I had met earlier this morning was gone. This version was spitting sharp stuff.
    “I know my husband,” she continued. “And I know how he felt about suicide. You know what he called people who killed themselves? Cowards. Every time he responded to a suicide call—and he would catch them from time to time—he would always say the same thing: ‘That’s the coward’s way out.’ Especially when it was a man with a family. He’d said, ‘That man had no right to do that to himself and leave those kids behind without a daddy.’”
    I had already left the pizzeria by this point. The Green Street headquarters of the Newark Police Department was right around the corner, but I wasn’t walking in that direction. I was going toward the Eagle-Examiner parking garage. I could tell Mimi and I needed to chat in person.
    “Mimi, I—”
    “Do you know why that chaplain didn’t give me any of the details earlier this morning?” she interrupted. “Because the higher-ups down at Green Street were debating how to word the press release. A stupid press release. They didn’t want to use the word ‘suicide’ because they thought it would make the department look bad. So they settled on ‘self-inflicted gunshot wound.’ As if nobody knows that it means the same thing. They were just out here, showing me a copy of it before they sent it out. Can you believe that? All they care about is how they’re going to look to the media. I threw them out of the house. It’s bull. It’s bull.