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Benny & Ray 131 4 Birds Dee Gilles Rated R

Daniel Briggs backed into his steep, darkened driveway, parked and pulled on the emergency brake with a grunt. He exited his old Chevy pickup, yanked the box of case files from the passenger seat, and hoisted it onto his shoulder. His driveway was already several inches deep with snow. He could feel slick ice underneath; it had rained heavily all morning. He walked gingerly from his slippery driveway to his front stoop, cursing the bad weather. First thing in the morning, he'd have some shoveling to do.

This afternoon, the rain had changed over to sleet and then to snow. The season's first snowstorm had hammered the streets of Chicago, rendering his short commute almost two hours. Traffic was backed up from the moment he pulled out of the 27's parking lot, to the time he got to the dim little brick bungalow on North Page Ave that he called home.

Briggs had shaken his head as he sat in bumper-to-bumper traffic, frustrated. It was like people had forgotten how to drive in snow since last winter. There were spinouts all over the place. It hadn't helped that the city hadn't dispatched a single snowplow or salt truck; the snow had come as a surprise to everyone.

Briggs let himself into the house, stamping his feet on the doormat to shake the snow off his boots. Securing the door, he dropped his keys on the door-side table, and dumped the box in his office, silently treading through the dark house.

He moved through the tiny rooms to turn on lights. In his bedroom, he removed his shoes and changed into sweatpants and a sweatshirt. In the kitchen, he opened up a can of tuna and a can of Boston baked beans, and ate them straight out of the can, bent over the kitchen sink.

He grabbed himself a Pabst and cracked open the can, took it to his cramped and dim study. Finally letting himself down into his old worn leather La-Z-Boy recliner, he sat back, put up his feet, and sighed in weary relief. He slowly sucked the beer down until there was nothing left.

Briggs tossed the empty can in the direction of the trash can. Missed. The can joined a candy bar wrapper and an empty pack of cigarettes on the floor. He grabbed his newly opened pack from the table next to him, and lit a cigarette. He inhaled the pungent smoke deeply, watching the tip glow in the dim room. He set it down after a few more puffs, in the old cereal bowl he used for an ash tray, and then grabbed the box of case files and dug in for the night.

He had already thoroughly reviewed not only the cases, but the personnel file of Benton Fraser. Added to his and Sgt. Ernest Kidd's own notes regarding his performance with the Mounted was Lt. Harding Welsh's reviews at the 27. Welsh had given him the highest marks and there were also several commendations for exceptional performance, despite Fraser's relatively short career. The reviews were glowing. Of course they were; Fraser kissed Welsh's ass every day. Fraser tried to kiss his, too, with his over-politeness and his fake little smiles, and patronizing false flattery.

Fraser also got away with a lot because of his good looks. Women and men too, treated him with a deference he hadn't really earned. Briggs hated pretty people who coasted on their good looks. Every day, Briggs hated Benton Fraser just a little more, from the tip of his highly polished Italian leather shoes to the top of his perfectly gelled head. Fraser was what his father would have called "a real dandy"--a pretty-boy fag. He had no doubt he was the one who took it up the ass. He imagined Benton bent over the big oak desk in Briggs' own office, naked from the waist down, shirt and tie still neatly on. He imagined punishing Benton with his big hard cock. He imagined Benton liking it, moaning for more. The image made his cock began to rise with interest. Briggs squashed the feeling down as best he could. He took a few more drags from his cigarette.

He thought that Detective Fraser was also a smart-ass and a know-it-all. A couple of weeks ago, Fraser had the balls to correct him right in front of Commander Combs, making him look like a real idiot in front of his boss. Briggs hadn't spoken to Fraser for two days.

Not only was Fraser trouble, so was his boyfriend Vecchio. They had gotten into it when Vecchio showed up in the bullpen to take Fraser home. Vecchio was in his face, and even pushed him a little when he left. Briggs had tried to laugh and shrug it off after he saw everybody staring at him after Vecchio walked away. Briggs had gone upstairs to his office, closed the door, and stayed there for the rest of the day.

A couple of days later, Vecchio had bitched to the Chief because he hadn't let his "wife" go home when he was sick. How was Briggs supposed to know he really was sick? Guys faked it all the time, when they needed a day or two off.

When Briggs had returned to the office after a weekend off, the detective was at his desk coughing and hacking away. He had a deep congested cough that sound horrible. Briggs kept his distance, afraid to catch what he had. It could have been AIDS-related pneumonia and not the flu after all; he sure as hell wasn't taking any chances.

Briggs bent over his box and retrieved the thickest personnel file he had ever seen; that of Sergeant Raymond M. Vecchio's. It had been easy enough to pull some strings and get his hands on a copy. Vecchio's performance as a Chicago police officer was all over the board. Briggs had never seen such a patchwork of good write-ups and commendations peppered with official reprimands, notices of probation, or Incidence Reports from Internal Affairs. Since Vecchio had been promoted to Field Training Officer, there was only good stuff in his reviews. In fact, his current supervisor had written an endorsement that Sergeant Vecchio would make a great candidate for Lieutenant once he had another year or two of leadership experience under his belt.

He'd see about that. Fags like Vecchio didn't need to be in highly-visible leadership positions. It was bad for the department's image. If Briggs had anything to do with it, he'd have Vecchio busted all the way back to foot-patrol, anyway, just because he couldn't stand him; Vecchio obviously thought of himself as some kind of tough guy, a big shot. Briggs would dearly love to take him down a peg or two.

Briggs thumbed through the pages, trying to commit everything to memory. Vecchio had had quite a few run-ins with IA almost from the moment that Will Kelly had promoted him to detective. He'd been investigated for a possible connection with racketeering in 1986. He'd been suspended over the assault of Westside Boss Frank Zuko in 1996. IA had investigated him for illegal entrapment-- twice. He'd almost gotten fired over an incident of assault of some neighborhood thug named Guy Rankin. The guy was a hell of a loose cannon.

There was a notation made in his '94 review that Vecchio had begun to work some cases with Constable Benton Fraser of the RCMP. Half of the "cases" that Detective Vecchio and Constable Fraser had gotten into, once they formed their odd alliance, weren't even official police business. Briggs couldn't understand how Lt. Welsh let Vecchio waste the city's tax dollars by paying this clown to do a job that wasn't even his. Vecchio and Fraser had some pretty nutty cases together; things like investigating a case of tainted meat from Petit's Food Town a few years back, or like Vecchio getting involved in helping Fraser transport a Canadian prisoner back to Canada in his personal car, and Vecchio getting involved in a mistaken case of black-market baby selling. Each time it had been Dudley Do-Right that had dragged Vecchio into it. Both men were a menace, together and separately.

Unfortunately, there were enough people who looked out for both of them, to ensure that their rise through the ranks was eminent. Captain Miller had been in the process of getting Fraser promoted to detective first-grade when she left. The paperwork had come through, much to Briggs' chagrin, and he had coldly and briefly informed Fraser on Wednesday of his new rank and pay raise. The promotion officially was effective on Monday.

Briggs tossed Vecchio's file aside at last, and finally began to dig through the huge stack of cold cases submitted to the CCD by each of his detectives. He wasn't particularly happy with any of them right now. The crime rate had risen by four percent this year, and the mayor was putting pressure on the Superintendent, who was putting pressure on his Deputy Superintendents, and the chief, and the shit was just rolling downhill from them to all the Deputy Chiefs, all the commanders and all the captains. Briggs was doing his part by kicking the shit out of Welsh. But Welsh didn't really seem to give a damn. Lt. Harding Welsh was a huge part of the problem; he was too soft on the detectives. He didn't hold them accountable. Briggs couldn't wait until Welsh retired so he could get him out of his hair. In the meantime, it was Briggs who'd take the bull by the horns.

He read through several recent murder cases that had gone cold. A lot of them had gone cold because eyewitnesses didn't want to talk to the cops. Briggs had been seeing that a lot lately. People didn't want to get involved. They didn't want to be seen as a rat or a snitch in the neighborhood. And the ones who were willing to testify to what they had witnessed were often threatened with their lives. `Witness intimidation', they called it. It was very effective. There had been two murders in September, four in August, and three in July that had taken place on busy streets in broad daylight. Yet nobody had seen a thing.

There were also several robbery cases that had gone unsolved, too. Two of the cases were submitted by Dewey and Pato, and three by Doyle and Franklin.

Dewey and Pato also had turned over to the Cold Case team three rape cases, two armed robberies, and five aggravated assaults. But Doyle and Franklin by far had submitted the most cold cases; they were responsible for about three quarters of them. Briggs wondered if he could make a movement to get Doyle and Franklin transferred out or demoted for their poor solve rate. It was something he thought he might look into Monday morning.

He continued leafing through yet another file of Doyle and Franklin's, eyes quickly skimming. This case was connected to a case that he had read up on a couple of weeks ago. With great interest, he thumbed back to the first page and read slowly and carefully this time.

And what an interesting case it was, indeed. The case, last notations made in August, had been sent to the CCD by Detective Franklin on October 27th. It had to do with an assault that was most likely retaliation for an assault that took place on April 8th. After having pursued several leads, and interviewed several suspects, the case had lead Doyle and Franklin to a dead end, evidently.

Doyle stood and went to another stack of boxes in the back corner, almost frantically searching through the boxes for the case that was referenced in the Domenico assault case. He found it in the last file of the third box he rooted through.

He re-read the facts: Tomas DeBenedetto had walked in on three men that were vandalizing his home; Matthew Domenico, Andrew Domenico, and Joseph Medeiros. Andrew Domenico had beaten DeBenedetto's head in with a baseball bat and left him for dead. It had been classified as a hate crime. Briggs preferred to think of it as doing society a favor.

Detective Fraser had written and attached to the DeBenedetto file a disclosure statement in which he noted that Tomas DeBenedetto was a personal friend of his. Which meant he was probably a personal friend of Vecchio's, too. And Vecchio was a type of guy who maybe believed in a little street justice every once in a while. He knew Vecchio wasn't quite dumb enough to do the job himself, but Briggs would be willing to bet the farm that Vecchio sure as hell knew who had.

He knew that Vecchio had been partners with Micky Doyle for a long time, and partners as a general rule had to be pretty tight, even after they were separated. Franklin and Vecchio went back for years, too, going back to the days when she worked as his civilian aide.

What it could mean was that Fraser, Doyle and Franklin may possibly have suppressed evidence implicating Ray Vecchio in the assault of Domenico, Domenico, and Medeiros.

Daniel Briggs smiled in the dark, thinking he may have just found the means to kill four birds with one stone.

FINIS