Case file · 038 · aired 2026-08-11
The Straight Left
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
The detective saw through the promoter's threat at once — the leverage was never the fight, it was the dawn call list that fed the fighter's brother. He found the crime the law could hold, a fighter's hand broken two winters back for the same defiance, and let the commission's men take the promoter's rented muscle out from under him before the bell. The bout went honest, the boy's name got called at the gate on the detective's word alone, and Dale marked it for what it was: a man who kept his honor and his brother's bread both, and the city let him.
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Four cases after Dale warned him to vet a client's word first, he checked the fighter's wife's story before moving on it, and Dale made him say so out loud. Closed.
Clean_win (3rd after 028/033). A club fighter's wife hired the detective after a promoter threatened the dawn call list feeding the fighter's kid brother over a rigged bout. He surfaced an earlier fighter crippled for the same refusal and let the boxing…
A prizefighter, dead for refusing to throw a bout; a nobody hangs for it. Echoed twice, both survived: a club fighter refused and, with the detective on it, won clean (Case 038); a cannery forewoman refused the same demand and kept her line (Case 042). (Doyle…
Dead as of Case 021: once he asks it's for a collectible favor (030), and he keeps asking (031) — but there's a ledger even he won't touch (032). Cases 033–041 confirmed he isn't behind everything; some is ordinary greed with no leash. In Case 042 Marchetti…
The theory that Dale's warning about vetting a client's own word would go unanswered forever — dead as of Case 038. Four cases after she first raised it, the detective checked a client's story before he moved on it instead of after, and made himself say so.