The events that led up to that hearing were recounted:
A year and a half after Jake Mendoza's conviction, Mendoza's first appeals lawyer went into court with a statement sworn out by a middle-aged, frizzy-haired Brooklynite, a graphologist named Phyllis Komfeld. Komfeld claimed that an NYPD detective, whose name she didn't know, had. her a thousand dollars to forget Gus Metaxas's suicide paid note.
The judge convened the parties. Komfeld gave her testimony and was then cross-examined by the prosecutors. She could produce no evidence to support her allegation, and under harsh questioning admitted she had spent several years in mental institutions. Police handwriting experts reaffirmed that the note had been written in Metaxas's hand. The judge ruled that there were no grounds for a retrial. Mendoza hired a new lawyer. The Mendoza case ground on.
But then a strange thing happened. Six months after the hearing, Phyllis Komfeld was found tied to her bed, raped and strangled by an intruder.
Her apartment had been ransacked. Some valuables, mainly family silver, were taken.
At first the case was treated as a routine robbery-homicide, unconnected to Mendoza, perhaps one of a hundred similar crimes committed in Brooklyn that particular year. But then Dakin's office asked to take it over. The case was reassigned to Internal Affairs. For a while nothing more was heard about it, until one night a panicked Timmy Sheehan knocked on Janek's door.
IA was after him, Timmy said. Dakin was trying to prove that he, Timmy, had paid to have Komfeld assassinated.. They had a witness, a snitch named Ross Keniston, who would claim that Timmy had tried to hire him to do the job. According to Dakin's theory (leaked to Timmy by an old friend on Dakin's disaffected staff), Timmy found another killer, and the rape and robbery portions of the crime were added to divert attention from the motive: Timmy's need to prevent Komfeld from speaking further about her role as hired forger of the Metaxas note.
"I'm not worried about Keniston," Timmy told Janek that night. "He's an addict and a liar. What worries me is Dalcin. I hear he's around the bend, so crazy he's faking up evidence. He's claiming he interviewed Komfeld before she was killed, and that she IDed me as the one paid her for the forgery."
Janek and Timmy spent the rest of that night frantically war-gaming the problem. There were, they decided, two ways to deal with an IA investigation: The first and most common was to let it take its course, dealing with it when and if charges were formally filed; the second method, rarely employed and filled with risk, was to preempt by lodging counter charges first. This was the route they decided to follow, with Janek acting as Timmy's counsel under a special provision in police regulations.
When the day of the departmental hearing arrived, they were prepared.
They had cashed in on all the favors they were owed, and had used all their skills as street detectives to compile a list of Dakin's abuses.
Rather than concentrating on his improprieties in the Komfeld case, Janek launched a broadside attack. Believing Dakin was obsessed with duplicity and plots, he intended to goad him until he acted out.
Dakin, preening in his virtue, was flustered by Janek's litany.
Attempting to take up each abuse in turn, he started out fairly well, then turned incoherent.
Janek let him ramble, keeping a close eye on the judges.
When he felt the moment was right, he gently interrupted.
"Everyone's against you. It's all a conspiracy. That's what you're saying, Chief-isn't it?"
Dakin, disarmed by the suggestion, which mimicked the very thoughts he was harboring, nodded fiercely and began to carve the air. He must have realized he was making a bad impression, because he suddenly sat rigid.
Then, thrusting his trembling forefinger at Timmy, his reedy voice went shrill:
"That snake killed my witness! They're trying to get me now ' I'm on to them! Don't you see, it's a diversion, this fuckin' hearing!
That snake's a fuckin' killer!"
After his outburst Dakin clamped his jaws. Everyone in the room could hear the crunch of teeth.
Janek turned to the judges, spread his hands and shrugged: "There you are," his gestures said, "the paranoid revealed."
The judges understood. Their voices turned solicitous. When one of them offered to fetch Dakin a glass of water, Janek knew he'd won. It was, he had felt at the time, a brilliant moment, perhaps his finest as a cop.
He had successfully sandbagged The Dark One, and, at the same time, lifted suspicion from his friend.
But contrary to expectations, the cloud was not so easily raised.
Because the IA case had been rendered incomplete, Timmy's role in regard to the Metaxas note was left unresolved.
The result of the hearing was that Dakin took immediate retirement and Timmy himself retired six months later. Although both men received full pensions, their reputations were besmirched. In the end the special hearing about Dakin's overreaching only added to the cluster of rumors and ambiguities that had come to surround the original Mendoza investigation, turning it into the phenomenon known around the Department simply as Mendoza.
"Whatsa matter? Dreamin'?" Dakin stood before Janek, clutching his paper, leering. "You took me. Didn't you, Frank?"
Janek glanced into Dakin's eyes. It was the first time the chief had ever called him by his first name. Dakin, however, quickly turned away.
Then he started back toward his building, his stride awkward, urgent.
"It was right out of that damn Caine Mutiny movie. Get me up there, throw me cream puffs, then watch me destroy myself batting them down too hard. I was never a sophisticated man. I was always up front direct.
One-track mind. Eyes forward, with the blinders on. So you blind sighted me and I never even knew it until I turned around and saw the looks on the faces of those judges. Lord, that was something! Then it hit me. I was cooked. I was going down and there was nothing I could do about it.
Nothing..
"Look, I don't think we should-"
"What?" Dakin snapped. "Rehash it? Want to pretend it never happened?
We'd do better to act like a couple of old generals, crusty World War II types, shooting the bull at a reunion, finding out what the other had in mind the day of the big battle, maybe even fessing up to a few mistakes.
Be interesting, I think." Janek thought through his answer. "But we're not like two old generals. You were a chief-"
"Still am! Don't ever forget it!" -and I was and still am a lieutenant. Also, I don't think enough time's passed to heal the wounds."
Dakin nodded. "Fine, that's the way you want it. It was just my way of saying I respect you for what you did, even though I'm the one bore the brunt of it. Your job was to get me. You got me good. I don't hate you for that. The one I blame… well, never mind… "
Who the hell does he blame? Janek wondered. Some power behind me pulling my strings?
In the end, he knew, it was impossible to probe the labyrinth of a paranoid's mind. There was always one step in the thinking you couldn't make yourself, one room full of conspirators you could never find because it was hidden too deep within the maze.
But Dakin was still rambling:
"Sheehan's your buddy," he sneered. "You don't have the balls to take him down. That's the trouble with having buddies, see. A man calls you ''-he'll always expect a favor. Me, I never had any buddies and I never granted any favors. Not once! Ever! I'm proud of that.
They can carve it on my gravestone if they dare. ' buddies and no favors. ''d be pleased to rest under a stone like that. I could rest under it forever!"
Oh, Jesus!
But that wasn't the end of it-Dakin was on a heavy riff. The words continued to tumble out:
"Trouble today is everyone's forgotten the point. You got a department, you keep it clean, no matter who falls in sacrifice. A slime snake like Sheehan poisons the well, then everyone drinks from it gets sick. The Department's been drinking putrid water nine years.
Soon the venom'll kill it. Then you'll see the ruin, my friend. The blood'll flow. The city'll drown in puke and gore. It won't be long now, unless someone's got the guts to reach deep down the well and pull the vile slime snake out!"