Case file · 042 · aired 2026-08-25
The Line She Called
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 cannery forewoman was ordered to hand over the names of the women organizing her line or lose her own gate spot, and she refused to sell them out. The detective traced the superintendent's real leverage — a payroll he was skimming — and turned his own respectable paperwork into the audit that took him down before Marchetti's indifference could seal the forewoman's fate. The Monday list went unused, and one honest name stayed on it.
Hear it: the audio and the full transcript.
The dock-killing order-giver who walked into a better berth was caught three cases later as a cannery superintendent, when a payroll-skim audit downed him before Marchetti's indifference could shield him again. Closed.
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…
Partial_justice (3rd after 031/035). A dock widow, sole witness who could clear a framed partner after a walking boss's man rigged a fatal winch, was offered her dead husband's Blue Room marker wiped for swearing accident; she testified anyway. Brakeman…
Clean_win (4th after 028/033/038). A cannery forewoman refused to name the women organizing her line. The detective recognized the threatening superintendent as the same walking boss who walked free in Case 039's dock killing, traced his leverage to a payroll…
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…
Paid Case 019; what she holds now is knowledge, not a lien. She's used it to name the detective's costs across nearly every case since (026–048): the leash, prices still coming, choices made *for* people not *with* them, costs landing on whoever refuses to…
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…
Dead as of Case 028 (no favor, debt, or mark), again in 033, 038, 042. When a win isn't clean the cost still lands — on a bystander (039, 040) or, in Case 041, inside the detective himself for the first time. Case 042 was clean a fourth time, Dale with…