Outskirts Press, INC.

True Detective

April 2003. American troops advance on Baghdad.

Two NYPD detectives, each marked by the attacks on the World Trade Center, search for a suspect who may be planning the next terrorist attack. On their first night together they make a bizarre discovery-a carefully stuffed human cadaver skin. Who did it? Why? What does it mean? As contemporary as the news from Iraq, True Detective is a profound meditation on truth, faith and meaning in the Age of Terror.



Advance praise for True Detective:

"...True Detective is a true delight. Though Marlowe, the NYPD narrator, claims his name refers to the Elizabethan playwright and sounds more like Chandler's master of the mean streets, he is in truth Conrad's Marlow, journeying into the heart of the darkness spreading from 9/11... a genre-bending thriller, a mystery, a love story, a literary pastiche filled with tricks and tropes, literary allusions and literal illusions, a parable on current events, a metaphysical novel in wolf's clothing...[but] always a straight-ahead, fast-paced police procedural...all this combines to make the title resonate, for the true detective must solve the only true crime." - Bink's Books', V18, No. 4



"Provocative...wraps you up in its twists and turns...full of surprises...a great read." - B. OKeeffe, Scottsdale



"Hitchcock would have loved it!" - S. Thomasson, Detroit

It was mid-afternoon when I climbed out of the subway at Canal, walked over to Varick, and turned downtown past the outlet for the Holland Tunnel. I was tipped off that I was in the right place by the dozens of illegally parked cars with NYPD decals. That and the green light outside. The building had been done from the same set of prints as every other station house in Manhattan: long and narrow, three stories with a tile roof. The fake Italian architecture was well disguised by cheap bright blue paint that covered the doors, surrounded the windows and outlined the eaves. Even the wooden precinct sign was lettered white over the same blue background. No one had bothered to cover up the original "Fourth Precinct" sign carved in stone across the facade.

Sitting in the dark, watching a dark room for hours at a time, particularly with a guy like Cross who didn't seem to like the sound of his own voice - or mine for that matter - is as exciting as it sounds. Worse, being alone in the dark with your thoughts is more than a lot of guys, me included, could take. Take away the light and you can evaporate. Your flesh and blood become insubstantial, replaced by a hard and absolute emptiness.


Cross picked up the right arm bag. It looked to be full of paper. He opened it, grabbed a handful and dumped it on the table.
I stood next to him. I saw lottery tickets, scratch tickets, OTB slips. “Too bad” I said, “looks like they’ve all been used. We could check the numbers, though. You never know.”
“We could trace these and see where they were sold.”
“What crime is it exactly that we are investigating? Wrongful disposition of a corpse? Littering? Looks to me like someone was picking up litter.”
He ignored me and picked up the bag marked left leg. He held it up to me. I looked through the plastic and saw used condoms, condom wrappers, a dildo, a copy of Hustler, wadded up pictures torn from other skin mags. “So?” I said, “More of the good things in life.”
“This isn’t random garbage.”
“So it’s sorted garbage.”
“Marlowe, why would anyone sort it out like this?” Like he was a school teacher looking for little Suzy in the back row to shine.
“Why would someone peel and stuff a cadaver? Why do people do anything? This is weird but what crime are we investigating? Before we canvass all the newsstands in the city to find out who buys porn and Lotto tickets, maybe we better develop more of a case.”

“You were baptized in the Church, weren’t you Marlowe?”
“Yeah, I’m safe.” It hadn’t been my idea.
I’m not sure he heard me, “Many theologians believe in the concept of Limbo for the unbaptized innocent, but the Church has never recognized it as doctrine. The Limbo of the Fathers is doctrine, of course, but not the Limbo of the Children.”
“That’s new to me.” It was. “The Limbo of the Fathers? Do they have to shimmy under a stick?”
He ignored it. “The Limbo of the Fathers is for the righteous who were born and died before Christ.”
“And that makes sense, but not Limbo for children?”
His tone hardened from pedant to preacher. “In the first place, I said many theologians believe in the Limbo of the Innocents. In the second place it is a matter of faith. It does not need to make sense. Have you lost your faith, Marlowe?”
I didn’t answer him. You can’t lose what you never had, I thought.
“I’ll pray for you, Marlowe.”
“Do it quietly,” I said.

I had no idea why I went there instead of my usual stop on 109th. Over the years the dive where Kerouac and Ginsberg had shared drinks and maybe swapped spit had been progressively gentrified and existed in name only. I hadn’t been in the West End since I joined the Marines. No one recognized me. Maybe that’s what I wanted.

I had no choice but to step forward as the door shut, then opened, still only a few inches, but unchained. A lot of things crossed my mind. Would she recognize me? Would she react? And why the hell didn’t we have a female officer around when we needed one? Cross pushed the door back. She wore a sheer, see-through nightgown.
Cross was speaking. “We would also like you to come down to the precinct and answer some questions.” She hadn’t looked at me yet. She stared at Cross as if he were an unpleasant smell. “If you don’t mind?” Cross added lamely.
She gave the briefest nod of her head and glanced at me, “Marlowe,” she said, drawing my name out. I thought I saw recognition. I thought I saw the tiniest hint of a smile. She turned away. I followed. I watched her rump through the nightgown. I stopped thinking.

It was my first visit to Ground Zero in eighteen months. When I had last been there I had been standing in a long line of other cops on top of the debris pile passing chunks of metal and buckets none of us wanted to look into. We wore gloves, masks, hard hats and paper overalls. No one and nothing was recognizable. It was a scene from someone’s idea of hell. There were fires burning everywhere. There were random explosions. There was no level place, only a treacherous badlands of spikes and pits. Footing gave way. There were tectonic shifts as chunks of debris moved or were moved. Machines of all sizes crawled over the pile, dwarfed, like maggots on a corpse. Teams with dogs sniffed for survivors. They found only rotting flesh.
I had felt no terror. I had felt disgust from the stench. Smoke, dust, sweat, shit, puke, death. No respirator ever made could have kept that at bay. Give me fire and brimstone any time.

“What do you believe?” His full gaze was upon me.
“I don’t know,” was all I could answer.
He wasn’t done.
“But it does not stop there, detective.
“Whenever I hear something branded evil I am afraid. Do you know why?”
I shook my head.
“Hitler branded the Jews as evil, detective. And he was hardly the first person to do so. When politicians declare that evil is loose in the world they become secular theologians. They organize the faithful to eradicate heresy. They stigmatize the other as evil and give license to any barbarity. To paraphrase your Jesus, let him first identify evil in himself before casting a stone at someone else. I do not trust anyone who says he can identify evil in others.”
“I guess you don’t vote Republican.”

Cross jumped into the silence of my third failure to respond. “I explained to Marlowe that you became my Confessor when I joined the force.” He turned to me, “When I lost my father I felt despair and I turned away from the Church. The Councilman helped me regain myself. He helped me understand that there are other paths to Christ, that the Rapture was coming-“
Givings looked a bit uncomfortable and jumped in, “I was speaking at Columbia Law when I met this poor young man who was so obviously grieving. I tried to console him and counsel him in his dark hour. His success as a man is all the thanks I could ever want.”
The two of them were playing a scene. What I didn’t know was how scripted it was and whether it was being staged for themselves or solely for my benefit.