Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    WASHINGTON MASQUERADE: A FIONA FITZGERALD MYSTERY
    WASHINGTON MASQUERADE: A FIONA FITZGERALD MYSTERY
    WASHINGTON MASQUERADE: A FIONA FITZGERALD MYSTERY
    Ebook321 pages4 hours

    WASHINGTON MASQUERADE: A FIONA FITZGERALD MYSTERY

    By Warren Adler

    3.5/5

    ()

    Read preview
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherStonehouse Press
    Release dateJan 24, 2017
    ISBN9781532891489
    WASHINGTON MASQUERADE: A FIONA FITZGERALD MYSTERY
    Author

    Warren Adler

    Acclaimed author, playwright, poet, and essayist Warren Adler is best known for The War of the Roses, his masterpiece fictionalization of a macabre divorce adapted into the BAFTA- and Golden Globe–nominated hit film starring Danny DeVito, Michael Douglas, and Kathleen Turner. Adler has also optioned and sold film rights for a number of his works, including Random Hearts (starring Harrison Ford and Kristin Scott Thomas) and The Sunset Gang (produced by Linda Lavin for PBS’s American Playhouse series starring Jerry Stiller, Uta Hagen, Harold Gould, and Doris Roberts), which garnered Doris Roberts an Emmy nomination for Best Supporting Actress in a Miniseries. His recent stage/film/TV developments include the Broadway adaptation of The War of the Roses, to be produced by Jay and Cindy Gutterman, The War of the Roses: The Children (Grey Eagle Films and Permut Presentations), a feature film adaptation of the sequel to Adler’s iconic divorce story, and Capitol Crimes (Grey Eagle Films and Sennet Entertainment), a television series based on his Fiona Fitzgerald mystery series. For an entire list of developments, news and updates visit www.Greyeaglefilms.com. Adler’s works have been translated into more than 25 languages, including his staged version of The War of the Roses, which has opened to spectacular reviews worldwide. Adler has taught creative writing seminars at New York University, and has lectured on creative writing, film and television adaptation, and electronic publishing.

    Read more from Warren Adler

    Related to WASHINGTON MASQUERADE

    Related ebooks

    Mystery For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      Fiction Meets Chaos Theory

      Dec 21, 2021

      Fiction Meets Chaos Theory
      8 min read

    • Article

      Those Who Left Us: Select Literary Obituaries of 2017

      Jan 10, 2018

      Poets, editors, songwriters, teachers, journalists, novelists—some great writers and some under-sung ones left us this year. Here, in chronological order of their deaths, is a selective compendium of literary obituaries from 2017.     Bhara

      15 min read

    • Article

      Poet Of The Newsroom

      Mar 2, 2020

      Poet Of The Newsroom
      4 min read

    • Article

      The California Gaze

      Apr 1, 2023

      The California Gaze
      7 min read

    • Article

      The Curse Of The Prophet

      Jun 7, 2020

      The Curse Of The Prophet
      9 min read

    • Article

      Love In The Ruins

      Oct 4, 2022

      Love In The Ruins
      4 min read

    • Article

      These 'Wanderers' Are Heading For The End Of The World

      Jul 6, 2019

      Chuck Wendig's massive new novel imagines a plague of sleepwalkers — unresponsive people endlessly walking to an unknown destination as a fearful, hate-ridden country tears itself apart around them.

      3 min read

    • Article

      The 19 Best Books of 2018

      Dec 26, 2018

      The 19 Best Books of 2018
      13 min read

    • Article

      New Zealand Books

      Jul 14, 2019

      It’s astonishing to realise on finishing this book that Marilyn Waring had been in Parliament for nine years when she retired at the age of 32. And that she developed and maintained a powerful influence on national politics in that time – and afterwa

      4 min read

    • Article

      The Miseducation of Henry Adams

      Jun 30, 2017

      The running joke of the book is that Adams continually fails at everything he turns his hand to: he speaks repeatedly of not being able to understand, of being left out of the conversation, of being excluded, of failing, of not being equal to the tas

      9 min read

    • Article

      The Pursuit Of Love: Why Are We Still So Obsessed With The Mitford Sisters?

      May 11, 2021

      Is there any greater example of the Problematic Fave than the Mitford sisters? They were posh, gossipy, fabulous, stylish and politically extreme. Were a couple of them – let’s just say it – outrageously right-wing? Yes. But are we still – myself inc

      6 min read

    • Article

      International Books

      Mar 9, 2020

      When 15-year-old Vanessa decides she wants to go to Browick, a prestigious boarding school in Maine, she makes an impassioned presentation to her hard-working parents as to why she should attend. And when she wins a scholarship, they let her go. But

      5 min read

    • Article

      Tuesday New Release Day: Starring Allende, Smith, Eisenberg, Cummins, Chayka, and More

      Jan 21, 2020

      Here’s a quick look at some notable books—new titles from the likes of Isabel Allende, Danez Smith, Emma Copley Eisenberg, Jeanine Cummins, Kyle Chayka, and more—that are publishing this week. Want to learn more about upcoming titles? Then go read ou

      5 min read

    • Article

      An Aneurism of Axe Murders: On ‘The Man from the Train’

      Oct 9, 2017

      You can’t help but read these murders as a parable of alienation. The lone drifter stalking the country by train, itself a mode of transport from a bygone era, to literally smash apart families with an instrument that evoked America’s timbered fronti

      6 min read

    • Article

      The Queen of Oversharing

      Sep 11, 2017

      The Queen of Oversharing
      5 min read

    • Article

      Keeping Tabs On The ’Loids

      Apr 20, 2018

      Keeping Tabs On The ’Loids
      7 min read

    • Article

      Ten Groundbreaking True Crime Books

      Mar 10, 2022

      Crime fiction may desire order out of chaos, but true crime grapples with the chaos while hoping for catharsis in the meantime. These 10 books helped me make sense of the world's darkest corners. The post Ten Groundbreaking True Crime Books appeared

      4 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for WASHINGTON MASQUERADE

    3.5/5

    3 ratings1 review

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 4/5
      Adam Burns, raving right-wing columnist for the Washington Post, is killed by a Washington metro train. He's wearing a fake mustache and unnecessary glasses at the time. There's nothing to make suicide plausible, the few witnesses didn't see anything that supports murder, and the disguise makes accident too much of a coincidence.

      Sergeant Fiona Fitzgerald, homicide detective in D.C.'s Metropolitan Police Department, gets the hot potato of investigating this death, even as Washington explodes with rumor, scandal, and conspiracy theory, attributing the death to a hit ordered by the President or someone inside his administration.

      Eight books in is not necessarily the best place to start reading a mystery series, but Adler provides enough background that I didn't have difficulty hooking in to the current story. It may have helped that in this book, Fiona is breaking in a new partner, Izzy. The character development is excellent, and no one here is a cartoon or stick figure stuck in to fill a role.

      Adler keeps the balls in the air very effectively, and only very briefly, near the end, did I find myself saying, "Why don't they look at...?" It's a very brief lapse, as Fiona and Izzy do notice what they briefly missed. Altogether, a nicely engaging mystery with characters worth spending the time with.

      Recommended.

      I received a free electronic galley from the publisher via NetGalley.

    Book preview

    WASHINGTON MASQUERADE - Warren Adler

    Author

    Chapter 1

    The fall rain slapped against the moving train as it slowed to enter Shady Grove station, the last stop on the Red Line that snaked through the Washington subway system like a boomerang gone awry. Burns welcomed the rain. He could wear his long trench-coat collar up and a rain-resistant khaki fedora pulled down low. He was certain it made him less conspicuous without having to resort to his usual subterfuges. Today as usual he wore a paste-on black moustache and a pair of tortoise shell eyeglasses. In his locked desk drawer at the newspaper, he had a good supply of generic, store-bought frames of different shapes and sizes, and a number of paste-ons that he could vary as he saw fit, the objective being to make it difficult to pin down an accurate description.

    Carol was a willing collaborator in what they had agreed was a very dangerous liaison. Both had, he thought, carefully and intelligently assessed the risks; devastation to their marriages, of course, but even those could be subject to some semblance of resurrection, mostly to protect their teenage children who were still an integral part of both households.

    Burns and his wife had a daughter, Barbara, who was a college sophomore at Harvard, and a fifteen-year-old, Lisa. McGrath and her husband also had a fifteen-year-old only child, Deirdre. The teenagers were students at the National Cathedral School, a prestigious all-girls middle school in Washington.

    The daughters were teammates on the girls’ soccer team, and it was there, as spectators and doting parent carpoolers, that Adam Burns had met Carol McGrath. Despite the incendiary relationship that it had spawned, they agreed that it was miraculous, life changing, incandescent, fateful, and—whatever risk it entailed—worth the danger and sacrifice.

    Each considered themselves good, loving parents and devoted spouses. This did, they admitted in their many brief post-coital moments of repose, sound somewhat hollow and certainly hypocritical, but to them, their rationalization made absolute sense. They were mysteriously enslaved by the wildly orgasmic bliss created between them.

    We are addicted to this, she often told him.

    He agreed absolutely. Their sexual hunger for each other had broken all boundaries and its intensity had increased with frequency. It had been going on once, more often twice a week for about ten months. Both knew it was beyond all reason, beyond personal discipline, beyond rational behavior. They feasted on each other like savages. They would often berate themselves for what they called, their awfulness, a critique that characterized their sexual impulses as reaching the outer limits of perversity.

    That very rebuke was an added turn-on. All the elements of this elaborate subterfuge, these carefully contrived deceptions and disguises added to their excitement from the very moment the details of the assignation entered their minds, like the lighting of a fuse that reached its explosive destination on contact.

    They never used cars. License plates were identifiable. Ever alert, they rode only public transportation, specifically the Metropolitan Washington subway system—but never together—checking into carefully researched motels or small hotels within walking distance to the stations. They never followed the same subway line or stayed at the same place in sequence, and debarked in different stations. They only purchased one-time, one-way tickets, which they discarded after reaching their destination. On their way to a rendezvous, they avoided all eye contact, commanding total isolation, burying their faces in newspapers. They never took their cell phones, which were traceable, and did not carry anything that could identify them, like licenses, credit cards, or business cards. Wallets were left in their offices. They carried only cash. To all intents and purposes, they were anonymous.

    Nor did they entertain any plans for a relationship beyond their current involvement. Above all, they had no intention of ever leaving their spouses. They reveled in the idea that they were leading secret lives, totally apart from family and careers, existing in a kind of delicious, fenced-off netherworld where sexual pleasure and passion reigned supreme. Before parting they inspected each other’s clothing and bodies. They reveled in the process.

    Communication required the utmost caution. From the beginning, they had eschewed any text messages or emails, a total ban. Information, based on Carol’s experience as a lawyer and a judge, could be reconstituted. They risked only an occasional call from a diminishing stock of pay phones or an anonymous store phone somewhere, but only in an emergency.

    So far, there had been only one emergency, a car crash in which Burns’ wife was shaken up and rushed to the hospital. Burns had been out of touch for three hours. Luckily, she was not hurt. He had told her his cell battery had died, an explanation his wife accepted without question. Never had he given her any cause to doubt his fidelity.

    Burns and McGrath had agreed on a half-hour grace period. Using a disguised voice, often accented, he booked via pay phone only places that did not have lobbies and rooms that faced a parking lot. To designate a room number after an all-cash check in, he would place a red sticky note on the door handle. They had invented an elaborate code. If she did not show after the half-hour grace period their tryst was aborted. Rarely did they fail to connect.

    He would check in first under an assumed name. His choices were Eastern European names like Mzishinski or Pzorki, unpronounceable and impossible to spell. Room clerks knew the drill. Burns suspected that they pocketed the cash. In the rooms, they never used the phone and, in another paranoid action, wiped every surface free of fingerprints. Carol thought it was going too far, but cooperated. They were also careful to muffle sounds, a feat sometimes requiring a pillow to mute her. She was a screamer when she came.

    They were careful about timing. At the very least, a three-hour interval in their schedules was required. It meant deft creativity for Carol, being a federal appeals judge.

    Adam had less time constraints. His schedule was his own. He was a columnist syndicated by the Washington Post. His caustic, ferocious criticisms of the president and the current administration circulated worldwide three times a week. For the Post, which was liberal, he was an aberration, but his readership was wide and loyal, and the newspaper put business ahead of its political bias in Burns’ case. His columns also allowed the Post to prove their evenhandedness.

    Despite his politics, the paper tolerated Burns, and despite the avalanche of criticism—including death threats—he was well liked and often characterized, with a wink, as the Post’s bad boy. He was, at least publicly, castigated by administration figures and party loyalists as a dangerous liar, but many disgruntled employees within the administration fed him inside dirt.

    Adam and Carol had to be creative and imaginative in the use of deception with everyone to whom they had a responsibility at home or at the office. Lying was difficult at first, since both of them had trouble weaning themselves from their ingrained ideas about integrity, loyalty, and honesty, that is, until they discovered the overwhelming power of their sexual attraction. It was, they discovered, the ultimate addiction.

    A rearrangement of schedules was a necessity. At times Burns had to beg off his regular twice-weekly morning squash games at the Army and Navy Club with his closest friend, Jack Perkins, who worked for an important and powerful senator and with whom he had always shared his most intimate confidences—except, of course, the secret relationship with Carol McGrath.

    Once he had prided himself on never missing a squash game. For the last ten months, he had to concoct a story that allowed him to postpone his participation if it interfered with his trysts with Carol. To do this, he invented a bad knee, using the excuse to cancel his game when such a conflict arose.

    Sometimes his meetings with Carol were early morning, sometimes early afternoon, mostly during the day, but never on weekends. Family obligations were harder to rearrange. Because of their careers, there could be no set pattern. Carol’s regular tennis games at the Chevy Chase Club were another complication, when times and absences had to be carefully planned to deflect any suspicion.

    At times, the affair had impacted their roles as cheerleaders, sometimes missing their daughters’ games, or worse, using the games as an excuse, employing the time for their more obsessive and addictive purposes. There was, of course, a fault line here, but as busy people, they could get away with the subterfuge, even though they might suffer their children’s disappointment.

    When they did attend the matches or were thrown together as parents at meetings, they were cautious in their socializing, rarely sitting together or even conversing, and above all, avoiding eye contact, which was often difficult. Ironically, Lisa and Deidre had once been close friends. For some reason they had had a falling out and were now mortal enemies, although as teammates, paradoxically, they worked smoothly together. Both were strikers and high scorers. The erratic nature of teenage girls in the first flush of the hormonal surge was unpredictable. For Adam Burns and Carol McGrath, this was not a source of despair, for if their children were close friends, they would be thrown together in social situations, which might have made their parents careless or foolhardy lovers, and inadvertently would have exposed their secret lives.

    Burns’ columns championed such virtues as integrity, justice, honesty, and transparency, and chastised those who did not live by them. His rants against the President and the Administration were based on such values. His use of such words as lies, deceit, chicanery, and mendacity were sprinkled throughout his articles. His distaste for the President and his cohorts was intense. Some said his critiques were over the top.

    More than once he had been persuaded by influential parties to cool his rhetoric. His editors and those who bought the column for their publications, most of whom disagreed with his point of view, rarely cautioned him to be more circumspect and less confrontational. When they did, it only made him more indignant and critical, but due to the popularity of his column he often prevailed. When death threats arrived, he felt validated.

    As a judge, Carol had the reputation that branded her as left of center, a genuine classic liberal. She had been appointed by Clinton and was considered a phenomenon for being younger than most appointees. She made certain her written opinions stayed reasonably independent, just far enough over the left part of the median strip to keep her critics guessing as to how she really stood on the usual hot-button issues. She had been prominently mentioned for the short list of appointment to the Supreme Court.

    What Democrats called the right-wing conspirators championed Burns’ columns. Despite Carol’s more neutral persona based on her judicial decisions, she was, in her heart, at a completely opposite end of the political divide from Burns. You are in the belly of the beast, she would chide him, although they never discussed those issues that divided them.

    Her career ambition to be a Supreme Court justice had been her motivating obsession—that is, until this sexual madness descended upon her and took an odd precedence. She assured herself that one had little to do with the other and pursued both with equal fervor.

    Carol was fifty-four years old and up until meeting Burns, had never experienced passion, never had an orgasm, never participated in anything but missionary-position sex. Her husband, an internist, gave her security, warmth, kindness, and support. He adored her, and she returned these virtues in kind. Their infrequent sexual congress was faked, perhaps on his part as well. Until she met Burns, she was certain that that part of her life was of little consequence, a marital necessity only. He was nine years her junior.

    In the conventional sense, she was not an obvious beauty. She had allowed the gray to seep into her dark hair, which she wore short and deliberately manageable. Her face was round, and chins had begun to sag slightly. Underneath her strictly business wardrobe, she once had an hourglass figure, with still-high, full breasts and a well-formed large firm butt. Burns thought her ravishing and could not get enough of her sexually. Such passion and preference was mutual.

    Burns was tall, lean and muscular, dark curly-haired, with craggy features and piercing Wedgwood blue eyes.

    She told him he was as gorgeous and as perfect as Michelangelo’s David, and he called her his Venus de Milo with arms. They had also invented odd names for their private parts. She called his dick Richard, his testicles Ping and Pong. Her vagina was the Snapping Tiger and her rear Balaam’s Door.

    They had no trouble reaching long ecstatic orgasms multiple times when they were sexually engaged. It was beyond madness, they both agreed; often during after-play, their dialogue set off joint hysterics. They believed that the intensity of their pleasure was an anatomical miracle.

    She had her own disguises, a variety of baseball hats to hide her hair. She wore sunglasses, and on the occasions of their trysts, never the same outfit. Both knew that the slightest whiff of scandal in the present cutthroat environment of Washington would be a media event to be feared and avoided at all costs, especially for her.

    His career, he felt certain, would escape damage. Who was interested in the private life of a newspaper columnist? To some it might reveal a kind of hypocrisy, a version of consorting with the enemy, which might dilute the effects of his attacks against the President and what he termed a corrupt and rotten administration. Indeed, in his heart, he was a libertarian and despised anything that impinged on personal freedom and liberty.

    If brought to light, she knew that she could be permanently scuttled in her bid to become a Supreme Court justice, interfering irrevocably with her carefully constructed career plan. She was, after all, a federal appellate judge in one of the most powerful courts in the land. The scandal that would ensue and the resultant media barrage would leave her badly wounded in her major quest, although she might, with luck, escape with her lifetime appointment to the appeals court intact.

    Exposed to public scrutiny, they knew they would look ridiculous. The obsessive attraction they felt for each other was baffling. And yet at this moment in time, it was the most cataclysmic event that had ever happened to either of them.

    Chapter 2

    Luther Hodges, Chief of Homicide, was having one of his depressive moments, a frequent occurrence these days. Behind his back, for reasons lost to career history, he was known as the Eggplant. To characterize him using this insulting but stubbornly persistent sobriquet made Fiona sometimes feel guilt stricken. Unfortunately, it was inextricably involved in the way that she thought about him, which was not meant to be debasing but affectionate in an odd way. Of course, she would never call him that to his face.

    He was not an eggplant in the derogatory Italian sense, meaning someone that was not the sharpest knife in the drawer. He was often irascible and cantankerous and occasionally, dictatorial and ruthless in the treatment of his subordinates, but his keen intelligence, insight and investigatory skills trumped his other less-attractive traits. And yet, despite the fury of their occasional battles, she knew that beneath it all, although never articulated, they admired and respected each other, not only for their police skills but for their insight into human behavior from each of their perspectives, as well.

    They were both outsiders. He was married to a woman who was part of a family of the aristocratic and snobbish blacks whose antecedents and achievements predated the Civil War, and to whom old family meant status in the world of Gold Coast Negroes who were at the top of the pecking order of that society. To them, the achieving whites that surrounded them were lesser in every human trait and accomplishment.

    His home life, she suspected, was a perpetual ordeal because he had chosen a profession that was considered beneath the aspirations of this group who were mostly doctors, professors, and in other prestigious careers. Only the title of Police Commissioner could vindicate this choice. So far that appointment had eluded him.

    Although he had the qualifications, education, and brainpower far above his peers, he lacked the required diplomatic skills, and he was incapable of suffering fools, both above and below him. Ironically, family connections kept him secure in his role as Chief of Homicide.

    Fiona’s own credentials were more conspicuous. She was the lily-white princess in this den of macho black cops. Daughter of a former senator, financially independent, raised in the precincts of the white-establishment of the capital’s power elites, she was deeply connected with both; the cave dwellers or the permanent cadre of Washington high society, including the political, diplomatic, and media high rollers, and decision makers who came in and out of the capital’s revolving doors. Her career choice was more than simply an aberration. It baffled everyone—that is, everyone but herself.

    To the question of why she had chosen such a high-risk, blue-collar, race-sensitive career, she would respond using the same coy answer offered by the mountain climber, Because it’s there. Nobody who knew her well ever asked the question again. Who could possibly believe that she felt becoming a homicide detective was her natural calling?

    Turnover, Chief Hodges sighed. We can’t compete with the expanding need for security by the private companies. We’re losing too many good people.

    Not us, Chief.

    Fiona knew he had spurned offers at twice or three times his policeman’s salary by these very same companies, and unlike many of their coworkers, the early pension was not the real lure. She, too, had had her share of offers.

    We both know why we stay, Chief, she told him gently, which was not the tone of her usual response in the heat of homicide business.

    Because we’re idiots, he sighed.

    It’s because we dig the bullshit, Fiona said. It had become a rationale in her head. We love being harangued, insulted, and assaulted by the bad guys. Love being abused by our superiors. Love the long hours, the stupid paperwork, the repressive expectations on addressing race, religion, and gender. Best of all, we love beating up on the lying scumbag killers who think they can get away with murder. There’s where the real high comes from, that and unraveling the puzzles. Because, Chief, say what you will, it’s fucking fun.

    Fun? He lowered his voice and offered a rare non-sarcastic smile, and she knew the cloud was passing. Sure, he said, with an ironic chuckle. Getting our kicks mucking around in the blood of dead people. Like being addicted to horror movies.

    That’s make-believe, Chief. We get into the picture like the old Woody Allen movie where the guy steps out of the frame. Only the reality is reversed.

    Are we now into the meaning of life, Fitzgerald?

    Every day, Chief. Only it’s the meaning of death. She shook her head. I’m beginning to sound like Izzy.

    Sergeant Isadore Silverman was her new partner. Talk about outsiders, she thought smiling. Now there was an anomaly, a black Jewish cop. She suspected that the Eggplant had done it deliberately, his idea of a joke. Actually, she was beginning to warm up to the arrangement, although Izzy drove her crazy with his Judaic slant on every aspect of the job.

    Is it working? Chief Hodges asked, unwrapping another Panatela.

    We’re adjusting, she admitted. She sorely missed some of her old partners, but the realities of attrition, and the lure of higher salaries had taken their toll. What was left were the truly dedicated and committed, like her, Chief Hodges, and Isadore Silverman. Izzy could be infuriating with his penchant to philosophize with obscure Talmudic references. So far they had handled only the routine and mundane. Nothing controversial had come their way in the two weeks they had been together.

    He’s a good man, Hodges said. He put the unlit Panatela in his mouth and bit down. The telephone rang, and he picked it up, looking out the window. She got up and went back to the squad room.

    ***

    The call came in about an hour later. A man had jumped or fallen in front of a subway train at Metro Center. The whole system would have to be delayed until the police got there.

    Bad choice, Izzy said, as they sped toward the station. With high-rises and bridges everywhere, why throw yourself in front of a train?

    Maybe he was pushed, Fiona grunted.

    Suicide is against God’s plan. He owns our bodies, and no one has a right to deliberately destroy it.

    She looked toward him and made a face with good-natured admonishment.

    Leave God out of it, Izzy.

    Not possible. Although that concept is more Christian than Jewish.

    He was gaunt with high cheekbones and a strong chin, and at certain angles he struck her as movie-actor handsome. His complexion had a mahogany sheen, and against his premature graying hair, white teeth, and hazel eyes, which in bright light turned green, he had a look that was decidedly different, it hinted at some pure but obscure African bloodline. Despite that she had heard there were pockets of black African-Americans who considered themselves Jews, she had never met one and was having difficulty getting used to the phenomenon.

    She was, of course, curious about his unusual background, but refused to pry. She didn’t have to. Knowing he was an anomaly, he offered Fiona occasional information about his unique background, noting that he was inspired to enter police work by Reuben Greenberg, the much honored and revered black Jewish Chief of Police of Charleston, South Carolina, who had transformed that once crime-ridden city and created a model for outstanding police work.

    Izzy was in his late thirties with two children and a wife who was an analyst in the Department of Education. She had converted to his faith and both had joined the Anshe Emet Temple off Connecticut Avenue. Raised in Harlem in the tight, tiny, black, self-proclaimed Jewish sect, he had earned a Master’s degree from New York University, and nearly ten years with the New York City Police Department when his wife was transferred to Washington. He was deeply committed to his work. Izzy was awkward with camaraderie and slightly standoffish, which was often interpreted by his fellow officers as snobbery. He knew exactly where he stood in the societal pecking order: a natural target for triple bigotry—religious, racial, and class. Thankfully, he had a healthy sense of humor and a talent for investigative insight.

    Izzy’s insufferable Judaic comparisons aside, he had a rigid moral

    Enjoying the preview?
    Page 1 of 1