David Milch - True Blue

To the memory of my brother John

-B.C.

To Rita, my wife, and our beloved children, Elizabeth, Ben, and Olivia

-D.M.

CONTENTS

Kathleen Farley on the steps of her neighbors home as police arrive

Photo originally appeared in the New York Daily News

Chapter 1

The morning she died, Kathleen Farley had a backache that kept her home from work. The backache got her murdered, because a skel junkie broke in to rob her house and when she heard the noise and came downstairs the junkie strangled and killed her.

This was Bill, talking to me at P. J. Clarkes restaurant, a steak joint in midtown Manhattan where in years past when he was off-duty as a detective he had worked as a bouncer. Bill and I ate in more steak joints the months we were getting to know each other than Ive eaten in all the rest of my life.

Steven Bochco and the network executives at ABC were at an impasse over what kind of street language and how much nudity would be allowed on the new series about New York City cops that Steven and I had created, the first two hours of which Id just written. My personality makes me a liability in those kinds of discussions, so while Steven and the network negotiated, I flew from Los Angeles to New York to research more episodes. A friend, Michael Daly, a newspaper columnist whod written about New York City cops for twenty years, had given me Bills name, saying Bill was the best detective he knew. Wed met an hour before in Bills office in the homicide squad of the 112th Precinct in Queens and driven together to the restaurant in Manhattan. Id asked him to tell me about a good case, and Bill started talking about Kathleen Farley.

This womans last conversation was with her husband, who had just gotten to his job and called home to see how she was feeling, and she told him her back was a little better and she was going to make meatballs for dinner and shed freeze some more for them to have another day. It mustve been right a er she hung up from this call that she heard a noise and went downstairs and saw the guy whod broken in through the basement window.

The skel laid hands on her, strangled her till she lost consciousness, then he went upstairs and started to ransack the dressers looking for money and jewelry and whatever else he could carry away with him and sell for dope. And then he heard the woman stirring downstairs, in his confession he said he heard Kathleen Farley starting to come up the stairs, so he went back down and laid hands on her again till she passed out, then he found her purse and cut the strap off to wrap around her neck, but the strap was too short, so he cut an electrical cord and used that, he got her facedown with his knee in her back to get leverage and he strangled her with the cord, then he went back upstairs and finished rummaging and stealing.

Now this prick comes back down and stops and takes a knife from the kitchen and slits the womans throat as he goes by her on his way out of the house. What he does, the woman was just about out of her misery, but by him slitting her throat, a little air began to get into her lungs through the wound below the electrical cord, so when the skel left she was getting enough air where she could drag herself up and outside her house to try to get help.

Kathleen Farley went to her neighbors door that she knew for fourteen years and rang the doorbell, but when her neighbor came to the door the neighbor didnt recognize her because her face had gone blue-black from the air being cut off and there was blood pouring out her neck and she was holding the kitchen knife the skel had used to cut her throat, and the neighbor was frightened and closed the door on her. This was a woman who was close friends with Kathleen Farley and felt terrible afterward she came to the courtroom every day when this guy was on trial and told me shed never forgive herself for not recognizing Kathleen Farley while she went staggering out into the street trying to stop a car to get someone to help her.

People kept running to phones to call 911 theres five or six calls came in within a minute or so of each other-and meanwhile one of the cars she nearly bumped into and where the guy had pulled over to call it in, this guy turned out to be a New York Daily News photographer, and he snapped pictures of this woman in the street and as the patrol cars came to assist her, and those pictures wound up in the paper and wound up jamming the skel up who did this to her, because I found the paper opened to the picture in the skels shitbox of a filthy apartment aft.er the guy had run off and thats when I knew I was looking for the right guy.

Bill considered me as he talked. Hed agreed to our meeting because of his relationship with Michael, whod sat up with Bill through the long night after Bills younger brother had died (wed tell the story of Bills younger brother in an episode about Detective James Martinez in the middle of our first season). Also, he knew that Steven and I had worked on the police series Hill Street Blues, parts of which he had admired. Still, Bill understood that the realities of TV storytelling and his own job were different, and I could feel him weighing what it was prudent or useful to say.

On my side of the table, I knew Id just gotten lucky. The two episodes of NYPD Blue Id already written had established the characters and complicated relationship of Detectives John Kelly and Andy Sipowicz and other personalities in the world of the 15th Detective Squad. But Id painted them in broad strokes; I needed a better sense of the worlds specific rhythms and textures. And here was Bill, with his hard-minded details and almost defiant pride in his job.