Case file · 030 · aired 2026-07-14
The Borrowed Name
What the station's canon holds on this case.
Nothing here spoils a case you haven't heard — banked cases aren't on these pages at all. Horizon · Case 064
Case 030 "The Borrowed Name" opened with Pauly Marchetti hiring the nameless detective to find whoever had been collecting on his docks under his name, and Dale's question about whose shakedown he was stopping left the detective realizing he'd taken the job without knowing the answer. He traced the impostor to a dockers' widow keeping a freezing survival racket alive in the space Marchetti's own retreat had left behind, and when he delivered the truth, Marchetti thanked him, reclaimed his docks, and quietly marked him as one of his clean men — a debt the detective hadn't meant to incur, closing with an open door across town that now counted his office among its own.
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Pauly Marchetti, the crime boss. Hired the detective directly in Case 030 (first time a boss's money bought his time; reclaimed his docks from a dockers' widow's survival racket run in his name) and marked him a "clean man" unasked; Case 031 drew on that name…
Pyrrhic_win: the detective found and handed over clean (no burial) the whole truth of who was collecting on Marchetti's docks, but the win itself cost him — Marchetti now counts him among his own clean men, a status he never asked for and can't yet see how to…
Dead as of Case 030. A dockers' widow, not a rival, running a survival racket in Marchetti's name.
Dead as of Case 030, and Case 031 showed exactly how the ownership works in practice: on call, whenever Marchetti needs a name nobody doubts. Case 043 deepened it: the detective came to Marchetti of his own need, and Marchetti received the ask and wrote it…