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overwhelms me when I visit my mother’s grave, when I brush my fingers across the letters of her name chiseled in a marble headstone. Sadder yet, I realized—too late to tell him—how much affection I had for my friend, a neighborhood good guy.
    “Oh, that’s right, you live in the city, in Hell’s Kitchen yet—that slum.” Becker was missing the point all over the place. Also he was chewing on a doughnut. Sugar crumbs bounced on soggy lips as he talked. “For crying out loud, Hockaday, you never heard of the Island?”
    Becker lives in the Long Island cop ghetto of Massapequa. Other than driving back and forth between the suburban tract house where he sleeps and the precinct station house where he sits, he does not get around much. Consequently, he has no clue about the Evian gulpers crowding my neighborhood; how they would take one look at his face blotchy from crullers and his shiny pants and make him for something that goes to bed at night inside a cardboard box propped up in a doorway.
    Any other day, I might have given Becker my low opinion °f Massapequa and the Island in general. I would have asked, How’d you like an army of Island-hating cops like rue—worse than me, cops with dark complexions—commuting out to Massapequa every day with guns and bad attitudes? But today it would give me no such pleasure to make Becker’s neck bulge.
    Besides which, I had no time. I needed clearance from my inspector—not an easy man to reach on the phone—and then I wanted to hurry over to Temple Ezrath Israel before a killer’s trail went cool. A shadow? So I let it go with Becker by telling him, “Do all the decent folks a big favor, Sergeant. Shut your hole.”
    Becker bellied up to me, so close I could smell cinnamon on his breath. “You should watch your mouth, Hockaday. Maybe your back, too. You don’t want it that somebody decorates you with a couple more nice wreaths. Follow?”
    I turned, and slowly walked away from Becker. Also I followed him, so to speak. Meaning I know a threat when I hear one.
    Of the various NYPD fraternal customs down through the years, “wreathing” is among the unloveliest. Cops employ this threatening custom to deter officers from ratting out their own kind, which is to say lodging a misconduct complaint against another cop with the Internal Affairs Division down at One-Pee-Pee. Last year, I was twice wreathed—a double commemoration of my filing brutality charges against one Joseph Kowalski, a desk sergeant at the Manhattan Sex Crimes Squad. What is it with these desk sergeants?
    First it was in the station house basement, with a garland of thirteen dead sewer rats nailed anonymously to my locker door. The day after, another baker’s dozen of the expired sweeties were strung over the outside doorknob of my apartment. This was all on account of my being uncharmed by what a number of my brethren either ignore or take as comedy, to wit: the “dickprint,” meaning a ritual torturing of homosexual perpetrators in the custody of Sergeant “King Kong” Kowalski, as he is called on account of his size.
    A couple of years ago when I was working a case that overlapped with the Sex Crimes Squad, I got wind of the dickprint routine. Two years and no resolution on my complaint of a drill that goes like this:
    Some gay perp gets himself collared and is hauled into Kowalski’s bailiwick. The perp is nervous, maybe this is his first time. Seeing the chance of squad room merriment, Kowalski feigns a sort of fatherly concern for the tenderfoot. He volunteers to personally take the guy’s fingerprints. Kowalski escorts the perp into an airless, unused janitor’s closet below the stairs at the Sex Crimes Squad, where stands a small battered desk, an immense chair, and an overhead naked light bulb. Kowalski takes the chair and rummages through the desk drawer, removing a standard FBI fingerprint form and an ink pad. He takes the perp’s trembly hands and rolls them nice and gentle over