Kill Fee by Barbara Paul

him.
Do
something. Don't let it go on festering."
    "Easier said than done."
    "You already said that."
    He sighed. "I know."
    Murtaugh was trying hard not to feel depressed; he could no longer avoid facing an unpalatable truth about his life. More than unpalatable—a nauseating, debilitating truth. And that was: he was as far as he would ever go. All these years as lieutenant, and he knew now he'd never make captain. No matter what he did, he was stuck. Advancement was out of the question, and for one simple reason.
    Ansbacher.
    Captain Ansbacher had blocked Murtaugh's two attempts at getting himself promoted. In Murtaugh's first try, Ansbacher had shot him down during the board interview. Murtaugh didn't know what his superior had done to sabotage the second attempt. But a sympathetic word had filtered down from above:
Make friends with your Captain.
    It was impossible even to maintain a friendly atmosphere when Ansbacher was around. Murtaugh tried, but everything about the man rubbed him the wrong way—the way he dismissed your theories about a case without even thinking about them, the way he treated his detectives as if they were dirt. Even the way he talked bothered Murtaugh; every syllable was pronounced
so
carefully,
so
distinctly—as if he were making a special effort to spell things out clearly for the moron he was talking to. Impossible to get along with a man who went out of his way to let you know how deficient he considered you to be. And Ansbacher never reevaluated his opinion of anything.
    Once the man had his mind set, there was no budging him. There would always be people who thought changing one's mind was a sign of weakness, and Ansbacher was one of them. He'd put Murtaugh into a certain category years ago, and there Murtaugh was going to stay. That category wasn't at the
top
of Ansbacher's shit list; the Captain wasn't out to destroy him, only to prevent his rising any higher in the police hierarchy. Murtaugh was luckier than some.
    The man was
weird.
He looked upon himself as a bastion of moral strength in a corrupt and uncaring world. Only Captain Ansbacher knew the real difference between right and wrong. An avid churchgoer all his life, he never quoted scripture at you; consequently newcomers who were unlucky enough to joke about organized religion suddenly found themselves in hot water. The Captain stood foursquare for all the conventional virtues. Murtaugh had gotten on Ansbacher's wrong side because he and Ellie had lived together for two years before they married.
    "Decided to make an honest woman of her, did you?" had been Ansbacher's remark at the time of the wedding.
    A tacky joke, in terrible taste, but Murtaugh had been going to laugh anyway—when he suddenly realized Ansbacher wasn't joking. He meant it.
Make an honest woman of her
—good lord. The man actually thought that way, in this day and in this place. And the Captain's treatment of those who did not conform to his own personal rules of conduct was downright criminal, in Murtaugh's view. Ansbacher had taken one look at a young officer and decided from the way he walked that he was a pansy. The officer's career in law enforcement came to an abrupt end shortly after that.
    How could he do things like that, how could he get away with it? It was something that Murtaugh hadn't been able to puzzle out. Whatever Ansbacher did had the backing of the Commissioner's office, even his meddling in his officers' private lives. There was something warped about Ansbacher, some sexual hang-up that made him rabidly intolerant of any way of life different from his own. There was no he-ing and she-ing among the men and women under Ansbacher's command, no casual talk of affairs. Ansbacher's wife of thirty years was one of the women who "choose to stay at home"; his children were grown and successful and respectable. Murtaugh had no children and his wife worked at a career of her own; ergo, he was suspect.
    He was suspect, and he would