Artist's Proof by Gordon Cotler

twenty-two or -three. With college looming for two kids, the pension would be better, but I had another reason: There was a shortage of lieutenants around that time and I figured I owed the department the benefit of my experience a while longer.
    *   *   *
    F OR ALMOST ALL of my twentieth year on the job there wasn’t a taxi crime I thought worth my time to check out. But late that winter word reached me of a suspect in a cabby murder in the South Bronx. Ballistics didn’t match the bullet that did in Pop, but that in itself meant little; some shooters trade off their guns after they fire them, so as not to lay down an MO profile.
    What drew me to this case—and it wasn’t much—was the single shot that killed the victim. The gun had been hooked into the upper curve of his right ear, and faced slightly forward—exactly the placement of the weapon that had killed my father. A hunch, more than reason—a gut feeling—sent me up to where the suspect was being held for arraignment in the Bronx County Courthouse on 161st Street. His name was Ray Drummit.
    His back was turned when I entered the interview room where they had left him for me to question alone. The first thing I saw was the ring. He had been rear-cuffed, and the tiny ruby glowed dully.
    He turned to face me with a sullen smirk, but I spun him around and he let out a gasped “Hey!” when I pulled the ring off him. I knew it was Pop’s without checking, but I checked anyway. The engraving was now so faint I had to turn the ring this way and that to find it. It was there.
    I spun him to face me again. “Where’d you get this ring?” I demanded. I usually kept my voice friendly at the beginning of an interrogation; I couldn’t manage it this time.
    He was thirty, pipe cleaner skinny, with a ferret’s face and tiny eyes. “What do you mean? What the hell you doing?” he spit out. “You can’t do that, man. Take my property.”
    â€œWhere’d you get this ring?” I repeated.
    â€œIt was my grandmama’s,” he said, meeting my eyes. “Her ring. She left it to me.”
    â€œYou had a grandmother named Sam?”
    He had never read the inscription, but he barely took a beat. “Yeah, that’s what they called her. For a nickname.” His tiny eyes were taking my measure, and his tone became conspiratorial. “Listen, man, you want the ring? Hey, it’s yours. It ain’t worth shit to me.”
    Without thinking, I drew back my fist and drove it into his face. It was just the one punch, but I felt something give. He staggered back against the wall. A moment later he spit out a tooth, maybe two, and blood bubbled from his mouth. And he let out a howl of anguish.
    I had never done anything so dumb in my life—striking a handcuffed prisoner. At my worst, I had never been a physical cop; in the course of a long career I had used force only in the heat of an arrest where there was resistance. I was known on patrol and then in detective squads as “one of those talkers.” I had found that talking usually got me what I needed to know.
    That moment of dumb cost me. The suspect beat the charge he had been arrested on (the missing teeth helped; he looked like a lost waif to the grand jury), and there was not nearly enough evidence to tie him to my father’s murder. He claimed he didn’t know where his grandmother got the ring. I ended up with it, and with a twenty-year retirement hastily forced on me by a department eager to distance itself from a possible charge of police brutality.
    Apparently, after nearly two years, here it came.
    *   *   *
    T HE CRIME SCENE Unit arrived three minutes behind Detective Docherty, and I invited myself out of the house. The county cop seemed to have a festering sore he blamed on the NYPD, and this was not the time to pick at it. Even before I left the corridor he was saying to