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eBook Category: Mystery/Crime
eBook Description: Good old Stanley, always willing to do a favor. Stanley Hastings, the worst private detective in New York--maybe in the known universe--enters the big league. When asked to investigate Sergeant MacAullif's son-in-law, Stanley gets himself into trouble yet again. Doing favors can create a lot of problems. When Stanley takes on the case, he ends up doing one more favor than he expected: he unwittingly takes the blame for the questionable dealings of MacAullif's son-in-law. Now he must find a way out of this mess. Maybe he'll learn to be more cautious next time he's asked to do a favor.

eBook Publisher: e-reads, Published: 1988
Fictionwise Release Date: September 2001

This eBook is part of the following series:

• Parnell Hall's Stanley Hastings Series

16 Reader Ratings: Great Good OK Poor

Available eBook Formats [MultiFormat - What's this?]: Adobe Acrobat (PDF) [1.4 MB], eReader (PDB) [198 KB], Palm Doc (PDB) [190 KB], Rocket/REB1100 (RB) [172 KB], Microsoft Reader (LIT) [175 KB] - PocketPC 1.0+ Compatible, Franklin eBookMan (FUB) [217 KB], hiebook (KML) [494 KB], Sony Reader (LRF) [231 KB], iSilo (PDB) [156 KB], Mobipocket (PRC) [197 KB], Kindle Compatible (MOBI) [229 KB], OEBFF Format (IMP) [265 KB]
Words: 63139
Reading time: 180-252 min.
Microsoft Reader (LIT) Format: Printing DISABLED, Read-Aloud ENABLED
Adobe Acrobat (PDF) Format:  Printing DISABLED, Read-Aloud DISABLED
All Other formats: Printing DISABLED, Read-aloud DISABLED

"I have a daughter."

"Oh?"

There was no reason for me to be surprised. MacAullif certainly had every right to have a daughter. After all, he was somewhere around fifty, and he was a big, solid, virile-looking man, presumably capable of having produced any number of daughters. He wasn't the handsomest man in the world by any stretch of the imagination, but he wasn't the ugliest either, and it wasn't inconceivable that in his youth he had been attractive and agreeable enough to have wooed and wed a young lady and raised a family. So there was no reason for me to be surprised.

But I was.

You see, MacAullif was a cop.

I know that doesn't make any sense. That's because the fault did not lie in MacAullif, or in his being a cop, but in me. You see, my problem is my view of the world is colored by my own personal preconceptions and misconceptions. And one of my severe failings is an inability to attribute personal lives to people I meet on a professional basis. That is to say, if I'm being examined by the doctor, I tend to think of him as a doctor, and it doesn't occur to me that maybe he has a wife he wants to get home to, or perhaps he has a cold.

And with cops, it's ten times worse. Cops are authority figures. They're intimidating. They're the law. Somehow, you never really think of a cop as having a family. Except cops that get shot, of course. Cops who get shot inevitably have a wife and at least three kids. But the cops who pull you over and give you a ticket never have any families at all.

Now MacAullif was not only a cop, he was a homicide cop, and a sergeant to boot. I'd met him in the course of two homicide investigations. The first time had been in passing. The second time had been longer, seeing as how I'd been cast in the role of the murder suspect. So I'd gotten to know him pretty well.

But on a professional basis.

This was something else.

MacAullif took out a cigar, unwrapped it, and surveyed the end of it gloomily. I knew he wasn't going to smoke it--his doctor had made him give them up. He just liked to play with them now and then. Particularly when he had something to say.

We were sitting alone in MacAullif's office. He had called me up and asked me to come down. He hadn't said why, so I had no idea what I was doing there. At least I had no idea when I came. Now I assumed it had something to do with his daughter, unless MacAullif was just making polite conversation. Somehow I doubted it. MacAullif wasn't much of a one for small talk.

MacAullif eyed the cigar as if it were a perpetrator. "Yeah, I have a daughter," he said.

I had a sudden flash. The cigar was a phallic symbol, the perpetrator was a rapist, and his daughter'd been attacked.

I felt a wave of sympathy for MacAullif. Fortunately, I didn't express it, for, as usual, I was dead wrong.

"She's twenty-eight," MacAullif said. "Lives in a suburb of Atlantic City. She's married; she's got a daughter, seven."

Jesus. MacAullif had a daughter and a granddaughter.

"I see," I said. I didn't see at all.

"They were up last weekend. They stayed with us. Me and the missus. At our house. We got a house in Brooklyn. Bay Ridge."

Things were coming thick and fast. MacAullif had a house in Brooklyn. A house with a woman in it. The missus. A woman waiting to hug the old side of beef when he got home from work.

My additions to the conversation thus far had not been earth-shattering. To them I now added, "Yes."

MacAullif leaned back in his chair, took a deep breath, and blew it out again.

"My son-in-law came with them. He's thirty. Dark hair, blue eyes, five-ten, a hundred sixty pounds."

I realized what I'd just heard was a police description. I also realized MacAullif had just identified the perpetrator. The situation, such as it was, was beginning to take shape.

"His name is Harold. Harold Dunleavy," MacAullif said. He added, belatedly, "Oh, I didn't tell you my daughter's name. It's Barbara."

As he said that, I suddenly realized I didn't know MacAullif's name either. He knew my name--Stanley Hastings--but then, he'd interrogated me in a murder investigation. In such circumstances, it is standard procedure to ask the suspect's name. It is not standard procedure for the suspect to ask the interrogator's, however. So the only first name I'd ever heard MacAullif addressed by was Sergeant.

MacAullif raised his eyes and looked at the wall behind me, another habit he had when he was thinking of what to say. I recalled from the other times I'd been in his office that the wall was covered with framed certificates. It occurred to me that his name would be on them. But I'd never noticed it, which gives you an idea of how observant I am. I didn't want to turn around and stare at them now, but I made a mental note to check his name on the way out.

MacAullif's gaze shifted to his cigar. I think he realized he was squeezing it tighter than the prescribed method for cigar holding. At any rate, he put it down. He rubbed his forehead and looked up at me.

"It's about my son-in-law," he said.

"What about him?"

MacAullif rubbed his chin. "I don't know."

"I see," I said.

MacAullif looked at me sharply, and I immediately regretted the remark. There was no way it could be considered as anything other than ironic.

"I know, I know," MacAullif said. "I don't seem to be making any sense. I'll spit it out."

He did. After his stumbling reticence, it suddenly all came pouring out.

"It's my son-in-law. There's something wrong with him. But that's not just it. There's always been something wrong with him. I never liked him, you know. I know, I know, it's natural. A father feels that way about the guy who takes away his little girl. But it's more than that. There's something wrong with him. Always has been. You gotta understand, I'm a cop. I'm a good judge of people. I know it's personal, and that makes it different. But even separating that, I can tell. And he's a wrong one, you know what I mean?"

"Yeah."

"But last weekend was different. Harold was different. He's a stockbroker, and I tell you something, if I had any stocks I sure wouldn't trust him with them. He's the type of broker, if he was on Wall Street, I'd suspect him of insider trading. I don't think they get those opportunities in Atlantic City. Where was I? Oh, yeah. He was different, somehow. I'd ask him about his work--I always did, I had to talk to him about something--and he was particularly evasive. More than usual. If I didn't know better, I would have thought he'd been fired. But if he had, Barbara would have told me. And that was the other thing. Barbara. She wasn't herself either. You know?"

I didn't know. And I felt I was knowing less and less as the conversation progressed.

"Look," I said. "Evidently your daughter and your son-in-law are having some sort of marital problems. And I'm sorry about it and I sympathize with you. But, you'll pardon me for asking, but how in the world does all this concern me?"

MacAullif sighed. A deep heavy sigh. Then he looked me right in the eye.

"I want to hire you."