Tom Mathews’s Reviews > The Long Goodbye > Status Update

“There ain’t no clean way to make a hundred million bucks,” Ohls said. “Maybe the head man thinks his hands are clean but somewhere along the line guys got pushed to the wall,

The law isn’t justice. It’s a very imperfect mechanism. If you press exactly the right buttons and are also lucky, justice may show up in the answer. A mechanism is all the law was ever intended to be.

There’s no law against lying to the cops. They expect it. They feel much happier when you lie to them than when you refuse to talk to them. That’s a direct challenge to their authority.