That stopped her; or at least, she sat still, and that might have been the cause. If she made a sound, I couldn’t hear her. I couldn’t, in fact, hear anything much around us, and I wondered that I hadn’t noticed earlier what a quiet night it seemed to be.

“How are you using ‘bad cop’?” she asked, in a voice that seemed merely curious. “One that’s not skillful? Or ‘bad,’ as in ‘a bad apple?’ Rotten?”

I said, carefully, “I don’t know. I’m just quoting you.”

She sighed. “One can lead to the other, it turns out. I grew up thinking my dad was a good cop. It was the religion of my youth, in fact. I had a pretty fuzzy notion of Jesus, but I was certain my father was a good cop, and that everyone admired him. His precinct buddies would come over to play cards, or for backyard picnics, and they’d take me on their knees and say, ‘Bet you’re proud of your daddy.’ And they were right. I was so proud of him that I hardly had to think about it. That was one of the pillars that held my life up—that my daddy was a good cop, and I was proud of him.”

“What happened?” I asked.

“About what you’d expect, given an introduction like that.” Her cigarette followed roughly the same arc as mine had, into the street. “He wasn’t good, at least when the going got tough. I think first he was unskillful. Then he tried to make up for it by being crooked. It turned out a lot of those guys who’d held me on their knees were taking a little something and looking the other way—from party houses, stolen car parts rings, coke dealers.

“But I didn’t know about it for a long time. My mom knew before I did. He knew that she knew, and they’d fight, and after a while he started to hit her. That was when I realized there was something wrong. And… one night, when he was on duty, I got her to tell me what it was.”

I thought I knew how that must have felt. I remembered what it had felt like when one morning my mom had come home at the end of her shift, and lost her temper over something, and said to me—no, never mind what she said to me. But I knew the feeling, as if your insides were an elevator in a tall building, and someone had just set off the fire alarm. Straight to the basement, do not pass Go. “Did you… confront him with it?”