IN THE OFFICE AT CENTRE Street Headquarters where Inspector Oscar Piper kept his desk and hung his hat, the phone began to ring. The inspector, suffocating in a welter of the administrative chores that he still considered an unreasonable imposition, came up for air and grabbed the noisy instrument with the reprieved feeling that it was at least something different to do. His bark was answered by the suave voice of the commissioner himself. “Oscar? How’s everything in Homicide?” The inspector, taking this question as rhetorical, raked the fingers of his free hand through grizzled hair and responded cautiously, with a touch of Black Irish humor, that things in Homicide were pretty dead. He was rewarded with a polite chuckle at the other end of the wire. “I’m sending someone over to see you, Oscar,” the commissioner said. “He’s on his way.” “What does he want?” “I’ll let him tell you that. Frankly, more than anything else, I think he needs to have his hand held.”
