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To what purpose?
Boldt: I have ideas but no proof. If you’d give me time to track some of this down… Instead you’ve got me in here with you two, and all we’re going to do is circle the drain.
You were going to tell us about your relationship with Captain Shoswitz.
Boldt: I was going to tell you that my uncle Vic moved on to form the first SWAT squad this department ever had. Worked with Jerry Fleming from the Bureau. Jerry had run the D. B. Cooper case. Remember that one: guy hijacks a plane and jumps from a jet with eighty grand? Jerry’s the real thing. His son, Walt, too. He’s the sheriff over in Sun Valley. And Uncle Vic and Jerry set up a response squad-special weapons and tactics. That’s when Vic got into the interesting work. Over the next few years, he and his squad saved sixteen lives. Hostages. Attempted suicides. You name it. And he might have left this department with his chin up and a chance at a private-sector job if some TV crew hadn’t scared a jumper off the I-5 bridge back in the ’80s and made it look like Vic had screwed the pooch. It wasn’t Vic that lost that guy-but the video made it look that way. And that was the end of Vic. That’s what you guys are. Do you see that? You’re the TV crew in my career. Twenty-seven years, and you’re going to make it look like I did this thing. And I did not.
Captain Shoswitz.
Boldt: Sergeant Shoswitz recruited me for a vice sting on the canal. A gaming room in an abandoned vessel. Maybe he took me for my size, maybe because he owed one to Uncle Vic. But I got the call. I was riding in Freemont mostly. Watching the grass grow between the cracks. Not a lot of work in Freemont. A stolen salmon maybe. A buoy snatching. Lowball stuff. And Shoswitz calls me onto a vice sting. I don’t think I slept the night before that. I was pretty wound up. Vice. That was the real stuff. This is the late ’70s. I was a young buck. The wharves and the canals were full of prosts and dealers. Coke and weed. Some H. AIDS hadn’t arrived yet. Vice was the place to be. When you love this job, you love it. I think my uncle Vic understood that about me: he knew I had something to prove. That I wasn’t my father. That I wasn’t going to go down a bottle and that I wanted to fix things instead of screw them up. That Crosby, Stills and Nash song. You ever hear that one: “Teach Your Children”? I’m a jazz guy myself, but that song pretty much sums up the first part of my life. The second part, once I was wearing that uniform, was going to be different, and the sergeant understood that about me.
So you owed him.
Boldt: I did. I do. Yes, absolutely. You know the way it is. Show me anyone who doesn’t owe somebody something. Nuns owe it all to God. For Lance Armstrong, it’s the bike. Gimme a break. It’s all co
That co
Boldt: The thing about you guys in I.I. is you lose your trust. You lose your faith. You spend too much time investigating your fellow blue and you lose perspective.
Philip Shoswitz received a favorable bank loan from your wife. You want to tell us about that?
Boldt: Am I supposed to be impressed that you did your homework? Listen, it was a car loan. It was back in the Stone Age. He got the loan well before I ever met Liz. She and I tell people we met in college. We’ve told that so many times maybe even we believe it. But it’s not right. We met in a bank. Across a loan desk in a bank. Romantic, huh? The lieu had taken out a bank loan on a new car-some kind of Buick, I think. He told me about it. Incredible rate. An incentive thing, you know? Back when interest rates were obscene. But if you opened a checking and savings account then, they shaved a bunch of points off the car loan. It was this all-in-one thing. A promotional thing. Best deal in the city. So I went, and the loan officer… Well, you know: one of those stories. A year later we were hitched. I was never great with math. I don’t handle the money at the house, guys. So you implying I handled money here… that’s just plain wrong.
We’ve implied nothing.
Boldt: You’ve charged me. Excuse me. You’ve charged me with… let me get this straight… placing ten thousand dollars cash-in bills twenty dollars and less-back into the property room. Not stealing, but returning. Isn’t that right? So the charge is, what, not stealing?
You know what the charges are.
Boldt: Not really.
Your wife, Elizabeth. You may have met her in a bank, but it was her recruitment of you that led to your relationship. It’s that kind of fudging the line, Lieutenant, that ultimately will work against you.
Boldt: You have as long on the job as a guy like me, and you expect people to come after you. The reputation gets too big. The department doesn’t like any officer getting bigger than the badge. But listen, that hasn’t happened here. I’m well aware of my limitations and shortcomings. I have a lot yet to prove, cases to close. If you’re trying to pressure me off the force, this is a hell of a convoluted way of doing it.
Dr. Hainer: Your wife’s neighbor was having problems with her husband. Tell us about that. She asked you for some help with that.
Sergeant Feldman: You can’t take on that kind of employment while carrying the shield. It’s moonlighting. It’s not permitted.
Boldt: This was fifteen years ago.
You were off-shift. You put a man in the hospital with a broken collarbone and a dislocated elbow.
Boldt: The guy beat his wife on the bottom of her feet with a length of garden hose filled with bird shot. He performed acts-sexual acts-that she did not consent to. Repeatedly. He withheld food from her and drugged her against her will. It’s true he took a swing at me and I defended myself. It’s also true he got the short end of that stick and ended up in need of medical attention. How I got there that night… there is no record of that. What you’re citing is rumor and hearsay. Unsubstantiated nonsense.
It was that incident that brought you and your wife together.
Boldt: You see: it’s that legend thing again. Rumors. I never asked for that mantle. People who get that, they never ask for it. It just arrives one day. And believe me, it’s a damn uncomfortable thing, that kind of label. What good does it do anyone? I maintained an 80 percent clearance rate for the better part of eight years on homicide. That’s luck. Plain and simple. I’m not a super-cop. You’re gi
[Interrupts] Because it solidified and defined the relationship between you and Captain Shoswitz.
Boldt: Not true! You are way off base. Stick to the facts. You’re not paying attention to the facts.
And the facts are?
Boldt: Okay. [subject looks between the two interviewers] You want this from my side? [subject clears his throat] You allege that ten thousand dollars went missing from Property, that the missing money was discovered in a random inventory. You neglect to figure into this-somehow-that the discovery was kept secret. Neither I nor anyone else below the chief, I assume, was made aware of the missing money. You then suggest that I somehow divined the money was missing, recovered the money, and returned it in order to protect Phil Shoswitz, who you claim stole it in the first place. Throughout all of this, you fail to give any credence to the idea that the initial inventory was inaccurate, that someone made a mistake on the front end of this thing, and that all of this is just a horrible accounting error.