The Pursuit of Justice

But that wasn't all he'd been doing. He also used those women who couldn't pay, - sometimes the spouse is just too tight with the checkbook, - as sweeteners for Phillips business. High end society women, as an evening's entertainment? The kind of people Phillips did business with loved that kind of thing. Newton was very straight - five engagements and then you were free, and apparently, he stuck to that. What a prince. However, there was always at least one woman who couldn't pay, and that was On His List.

In among all this, we found dossiers he had set up on the women he was intended to blackmail. It was extensive -- Tracy Miles would give him details on her country club set; where they drank, their schedules, where they shopped, when they were having evening events, even where they had lovers or snuck off for an evening's debauchery. He had it all. He also had it on some less high-class people, too, some people who must have just caught his fancy. One of them was a stripper whose pole name was Chancey Moon, real name Amanda Pool. This one, she was special: blonde, voluptuous, not too bright, hell of a body, and a wonderful smile. She was also Macey Phillips main squeeze, and therein lay the reason for his murder, we supposed.

Sydney Newton / Ashton Polk was targeting Macey Phillips mistress as a potential for his blackmail scheme. Almost certainly, Macey Phillips had found out and sent his guys out to let Polk know his services would no longer be needed. They hadn't gotten the books from him, obviously, and they'd been looking for them.

We pieced all of this together over two long weeks, then spent another two weeks with the DA, preparing the cases. Then it was D day.

We pulled in almost thirty people in one go. Debra Gustav, it turned out, had not been a party to anything. Once we explained what was going on to her, she was wracking her brain to give us more details to put these assholes away. I made her little event with the pot go away; she got probation and a hundred hours of community service, and I made the entire arrest go away dependent on that being fulfilled. She was fine with that, although she did keep protesting that the pot in the trunk wasn't hers.

I took personal pleasure in arresting Tracy Miles, at her country club no less, in front of all her friends, and mentioning exactly why she was being arrested, so they'd all know what this woman was planning to do to them.

Miranda went with the guys to arrest Macey Phillips, himself. I think it gave her a thrill of satisfaction that a Lesbian Detective would personally put the cuffs on him. He wasn't walking away from this one; his high placed friends were sitting right next to him the dock. I partly wanted to go, but figured I'd get physical if I was there; retribution for my ex-partner. For that, the captain instructed me quite firmly to sit that one out.

The only downside was that, for the women still being blackmailed, it did come out. It didn't come out in the media, but their significant others were notified, and a couple of marriages did end, even though these women had been drugged into the situation in the first place.

That was sad, no question.

When all was said and done, three months later, after the dust settled, Miranda and I got a commendation. Which was nice.

We sat in the local cop bar, having a drink together, right after the mayor had given us whatever it was -- it was worthless, honestly. A medal we'd never wear. A raise would have been more use. Whatever.

"Salute," I said, raising a shot of vodka. Neither one of us was driving that day; Uber was the way home that day, for sure.

"Salute," Miranda echoed back, tossing it down. The other guys in the precinct had wanted to come and meet us, but I just wasn't in the mood for back slapping, loudness and outrageous lies, which is what usually happens at this kind of event.

"So," she said, "What's going on, John? You haven't seemed yourself?"

Straight to the point. I hadn't been completely myself recently, she was right.

"Just stuff. Lots of stuff. Getting old. Slowing down. Thinking about this case."

"Yeah, that's for sure. I dunno, we got Phillips bang to rights on so many things, but the actual murder... I mean, it's circumstantial, I mean really circumstantial, but oh so believable. I mean, who else would have killed this dweeb?"

I laughed drily. "How about any of the husbands and wives of the people he was blackmailing?"

She looked at me for a second, then cracked a smile.

"Oh, come on. These are high society people. They don't go around hiring assassins. They'd have come to us, or the Feds."

I shrugged. "I can't rightly say why I'm in a funk. I'm just getting old I guess. Like I said, too much going on up here." I tapped my forehead.

"Still," she mused, considering it from all angles, "Phillips did seem genuinely like he'd never heard of Newton when we confronted him in his office? When we brought it up in interrogation, he kept denying it. When we put the evidence of motive in front of him, he started yelling that he would have executed that little shit, if he'd known. He did seem somewhat convincing, and why did he send Tyrone to see Debra if he already knew that Polk was dead?"

"Well, in that situation, you have to, right? I mean, if he hadn't said all of that or not said he was looking for him, it would have been a clear signal that he knew that Newton was gone."

"Oh yeah. I see your point."

We got another shot. It seemed appropriate.

"Think we'll ever know the truth?" she asked, after we got the next round.

"Probably not, but how much do we care?" I replied, savoring the taste of the vodka this time.

"Well, yes, there's that," she agreed. "The best thing we can take from this is that we got a scum bag and his crew off the streets, and all the vultures who were feeding off him. That's to be celebrated! And the fact that Newton is dead? Oh dear. How sad. Never mind. Good riddance to garbage, I say!"

She raised her glass in salute, and I followed suit. The reality was, she was getting a bit tipsy. I looked at my watch, and grimaced. "Time to go home. Clarice will be waiting," I said.

She nodded, and then smiled, with a definite buzzed look. "I got a hot date! Don't wait up!"

I laughed, as she leaned in and gave me a kiss on my cheek. "It all good, John, we got the bad guys. Let's relax a bit. Go get a massage. Do something for yourself."

And then she was gone.

In the Uber home, I sat in the back and mused about the case. 'Things on my mind' was true. I'd let her run this investigation almost from the word go, and for good reasons. I had a lot of other things on my mind, and the time for decision making, well, the second time for decision making, was upon me.

Do I go home and kick out Clarice and divorce her over what she'd been doing, or just get over it and move on, and let it all go?

To explain that, I have to explain something else. Miranda had said that we'd probably never know what the true facts of the murder were, and I hoped fervently that was true, mainly because I was the one who had executed Sydney Newton that night. In cold blood, and I went home and slept soundly because of it. It wasn't legal, but it sure as hell was justice, and I didn't regret if for a second.

I did it for several reasons, not least of which was that Sydney Newton, as Ashton Polk, had been carrying on an occasional affair with my wife for at least the past two years, if not more. I'd pretty much confirmed it was at least two years, but it may have been more than that, I had no way of knowing when their first meeting was, without confronting Clarice and her telling me. Newton hadn't been very forthcoming, and I hadn't the desire to spend too much time questioning him at the time. I went there to do a job, and I did it.

I'd discovered it by accident, as so many husbands do. I'd actually been out of state, in Illinois, on a joint taskforce meeting to talk about drug trafficking, and managed to leave early. Clarice had been at a conference in Ohio, and I had thought, wildly, why not go visit her? Surprise her? I wasn't even due back in Minnesota till the day after; it could be a snatched couple of days, just the two of us, away from the city and everything that came with it.

I'd changed my flight, - Southwest allows that easily, thank you Southwest, - and flown out to Cincinnati. I'd managed to persuade the clerk to give me a key to her room at the Hyatt, where she was staying; sometimes the badge comes in handy, and then I'd gone up. No one was there.

I'd called her on her cell, and talked to her; she'd been rushed, and I never got a word in to explain that I was there, and then she mentioned that she had to go, she was just out of the shower and getting ready for dinner with some co-workers. Well, it wasn't a large room, but I could see she wasn't getting out of the shower, at least, not the one in her room.

That's what started it. I immediately left, hung around the lobby a bit, and saw her exiting the elevators with this guy, guiding her with his hand in the small of her back. Familiar, intimate touches between the two of them; not the stuff you get between 'just friends'.

I didn't even stick around after that. I'm a cop. I'm very aware of how people get when they are angry, as I was. I know the things they can do. Hell, I know the things I can do. I had to get away, to understand, gather evidence, plan. I had to get into cop mode and stay there.

And so I did. I took a couple of pictures on them on the cell phone, and then I went to work.

I won't bore you with everything I did over the next few weeks. I did voice activated recorders in her car, I put them in at home, I put GPS in her car, key logger on the computer, I did everything.

I came up with nothing. Zilch. No incriminating phone calls, no emails, no texts on her phone, nothing. If I hadn't seen it with my own eyes, I would never have known anything was wrong. Clarice was the same person she'd always been at home: loving, kind, concerned, just there for me, available, never hiding anything. I turned the whole house over one weekend; I told her I was looking for a book I'd lost, but the reality was, I was looking for anything out of the ordinary. Quite instead of her trying to stop me, she joined in! She said it was a great opportunity to spring clean, and so we did it side by side; there was no way for her to hide anything and no opportunity to do so either. No attempts to guide me away from any specific areas... There was nothing in our house to find! I even turned over the other two apartments on some pretext and found nothing there either.

I got frustrated, and was about to jack the whole thing in as a bad idea, trying to invent reasons why my wife would have lied to me in the first place. Perhaps this guy had been a one-off thing? If so, I could work at forgiving her.

Then another conference came up, she had to go, represent the legal company's department, and while she was there, she had to go visit another set of lawyers anyway. This time in California, Anaheim, home of Disneyland. Just on impulse, I added a small voice activated recorder with a week's record time and battery into her backpack she calls a purse that she carry's everywhere. Just for extra coverage. It was through that, after she got home, I got the full story.

They were having an affair. It was purely physical, from what I could gather, quite a lot of the conversation was garbled, but I got enough. They were very, very careful, and it was totally unplanned. When either one of them went to a conference, they would stand next to the badge table, where badges were handed out, at three o'clock on the first day of sessions. If the other was there, they'd meet. If not, well, not this time. There was no planning, no organizing, no communication. Just are you here? If so, let's eat and fuck. And that's what they did. They fucked. A lot. When they weren't doing what there were supposed to be doing there, that's what they did. It was all physical, very little emotions. I still don't know how they hooked up, or even why she was doing it. I got some references to the naughtiness of it, and a few times he asked about me, in general terms, but she shut that down pretty fast.

Then I got to hear his name. Ashton Polk.

I started digging, I'm a cop, after all. That's when I discovered he didn't exist, at least not as far as I could find him. That got me more curious. I mean, wouldn't you be? Was he there to get to me through her? What was this guy?

I did a little late night breaking and entering, and eventually, after watching him for a bit, discovered that he had a dual life going on.

I honestly didn't know what to do. I'd already discovered that he was cooking the books for Phillips through other means, and Phillips and I had unfinished business, through other means. Hey, like I said, cops have resources, CI's and all the other stuff. We just can't use them most of the time. Well, this time, I did. There are some risks you have to take.

I didn't really know who Newton was, in terms of his own culpability. It took an evening of a paid-for out of town hooker getting him slightly drunk, and then dosing him with his own date rape drugs, so I could get access to his keys and his other laptop, in order to open up his main computer; that was a late night. What I read there disgusted me on so many levels, and this man was also screwing my wife. What was worse, I could see that he had put her in the same dossier as the other blackmailed women, only with intent to use, not take money. She didn't have money to take, so into the stable she would go. He just hadn't pulled that trigger yet. I had a brain storm on being confronted with that; I made the decision about what I was going to do there and then, and literally substituted Macey Phillips' girlfriend for Clarice. I took some pictures off the website of the place she danced at, and that was that. The pump was primed.

Now, I just had to pull the trigger, so to speak.

The thing is, it wasn't hard. Executing that piece of shit, as he cringed on the floor of his office, offering me money or access to other women. He was less than human, the things he had done to other people, what he planned to do to my own wife. What he'd already been doing to my wife. People's lives and marriages had been destroyed, and people had died because of him. Fuck his life and his right to breath clean air. What about their rights?

Phillips got what was coming to him, too. It didn't even matter if he took the rap for the murder, there'd be enough on the computer to put him away forever anyway.

Like I said, maybe not legal, but it was certainly justice.

Why not just inform the cops? Come clean with what I was doing and what I'd found? Good question. As a true-blue cop, I was doing a terrible thing, legally speaking. Well, several reasons. The first being, I burned for this mother fucker. I wanted him dead. He'd intruded on something sacred to me, and anything less than that wasn't going to stand, but also, the evidence I had gathered was tainted. The cops couldn't use it or act on it; it was all gained illegally. In fact, the circumstance that it was gathered illegally almost certainly killed the case against them. Plus, Phillips had people in his pocket. We knew that; he'd already bounced from two open and shut cases against him, so it was clear there were high up people he was paying off. Even if the justice department could have taken that evidence, Phillips, - and likely Newton, who knew way too much about Phillips' private business, - would have walked. Phillips would have made sure of that. Plus, for some reason, I wanted Clarice kept out of it. I wanted to deal with that myself, if at all. I was pretty confused on my longer-term plans on that. Some days I wanted to throttle her, others I just wanted to forget.

No, there was only one way forward, and I had been trained in doing things myself, when need be. No cops in the middle of the Atlantic when you are on a cargo freighter, and one of the crew is a psychopath.

I took it upon myself to administer justice. Like I said, I don't regret it in the slightest.

Getting called on to investigate the crime, that was just bad luck. David Murphy should have been up that night, and called on to take the case, but his bad luck in breaking his leg had been my bad luck. Or good luck, depending on your point of view. Once I was called in, I tried to let Miranda take as much of the lead as possible, so no one would notice me guiding the investigation, mainly, because I wasn't. I had set up all the dominos, now they just needed to be knocked down, one by one.

Debra Gustav had proven a harder obstacle than I had imagined, and I am slightly ashamed to say that yes, she was telling the truth when she declared the drugs in her trunk not hers. They weren't. I put them there that day, after stealing them from a drug runner CI I have, who I allowed certain latitude in return for warnings about impending gang warfare. There was no way I was going to ask him; you don't give CI's leverage against you as a cop. You just don't.

I had always intended to ensure she got off if she wasn't involved, as I was pretty sure she was not. But we needed her in Polk's office, and we needed to make the connection between Polk and Newton.

The biggest question I had, of the whole thing, was this: Did Clarice know who Ashton Polk was? That he was Sydney Newton? That he had a double life, and was consorting with the local mob and blackmailing high society women? I had to believe she didn't, but I had to be at least try and be sure, which is why I dropped Newton's name to her. If she knew, I'd get a reaction. She didn't, of that I'm now certain. God knows she would have reacted if I had dropped Polk's name, but I already knew that.

So here we were. Newton/Polk was gone, and again, no regrets. Sure, I'd taken a father from a wife and kids, but he'd barely been there anyway, and with his behaviors, what the hell would he have taught them was acceptable anyway? Phillips was going away for a long time. Those who were ensnared by Polk were free, even if some relationships had suffered; there was simply no way to do it without that happening to some degree, and I regret that, but better that than letting it continue.

Now I was on my way home to my wife, who still hadn't demonstrated any out of the ordinary behaviors. She was still the same woman I had always known, concerned for me, loving, sweet, doing the small things a husband and wife do for each other when you have a good relationship.

Whatever else, I owed her. She'd been there for me when I really needed her, but her behavior with Polk, it was beyond bizarre and I was at a loss how to proceed. The reality was that Polk's name was going to come out when the trials started, and she'd know he was dead, so there was no hiding that. Her reaction to that would be interesting, for sure.

So here I am, in an Uber on my way home, from a major criminal investigation triumph, and I have no clue what my next move should be.

What would you do?

Fin.