Read And Leave Her Lay Dying for Free Online Page B

you’re back in harness, am I right?”
    â€œIf I want it,” McGuire replied. He slumped against the back of the booth.
    â€œYou’ve got to want it, Joe.” Bernie Lipson stared solemnly back at McGuire. “Guy like you, you can’t throw away a career just because you tried to rearrange a lawyer’s face.” Lipson grinned. “By the way, apparently Judge Scaife can’t talk to anybody about what happened in court yesterday without breaking up. He says the expression on Rosen’s face when you grabbed him was the funniest thing he’d seen in thirty years on the bench. He wanted to do it himself, that’s what I bet.”
    â€œOh my goodness,” Ralph Innes interrupted. “Here comes paradise, mounted on the two longest legs in the city.”
    The other men looked up to see Janet Parsons striding through the crowded bar to their table. On the way, she acknowledged greetings from police officers and ignored the stares of strangers admiring her lean figure, her long dark hair swaying in a loosely-curled ponytail. The strangers assumed she was a fashion model; only the police officers knew she was in fact Detective First Class Janet Parsons, Homicide Squad, Boston Police Department.
    â€œHi, sweetie,” Innes said as he slid along the booth to make way for her. “What do you say we go back to my place from here? Just you and me and a whip and two midgets.”
    â€œJesus, Ralph, don’t you ever stop?” Bernie Lipson scowled at the younger man. Devoted to his family, Lipson rarely engaged in after-hours social sessions. The news of McGuire’s confrontation with Kavander had drawn Lipson to the nearby bar for one glass of soda water.
    Lipson had become McGuire’s partner when Ollie Schantz retired, but when his relaxed style conflicted too often with McGuire’s intensity, Kavander had split the team and reassigned them. They continued to take an interest in each other’s concerns. Especially when it came to dealing with Jack the Bear.
    Janet Parsons settled herself in the booth and waved the waiter over, ignoring Innes’s comment. She ordered a Dubonnet on ice and smiled at McGuire and Lipson.
    â€œCan’t figure you out, Legs,” Innes grinned. “With all my other girls I’m a regular Rudolph Vaselino.”
    â€œRalph,” she replied, looking down at her lap as she smoothed her skirt, “sometimes you are so repulsive I’m surprised your right hand still goes to bed with you.” She turned quickly to catch McGuire’s eye. “I don’t believe what I heard. Has Kavander really got you working the files?”
    â€œGrey files,” McGuire nodded. “Review them, look for screw-ups, see what’s worth running down, then send them off to the Bomb Shelter.”
    Grey files were dormant, unsolved homicide cases. No murder case was officially declared closed until a conviction had been secured. When a team of detectives had exhausted all leads and moved on to a new case, the information they had assembled was “grey-filed”—set aside; the case remained open but inactive. All the documentation was stored in grey envelopes identified by file number, victim’s name, and date and location of the crime. Data in these four categories were entered into the department’s overloaded computer for cross-indexing while the paperwork—autopsy reports, crime-scene photographs, witness statements, investigation memos—were transferred to a basement area known as the Bomb Shelter. The majority of grey file murders remained unsolved; convictions happened only as a result of blind luck, guilty conscience or death-bed confession.
    â€œFirst you bury the victim, then you bury the files,” Ollie Schantz once said to describe grey-filing. “Only difference is, after a year it’s easier to find the victim than the files.”
    â€œAll the grey files?” Janet