Sure enough, McNulty has taken Lester out to a bar so he can hear the whole story of what led to the last thirteen years AND FOUR MONTHS of Lester's employment as a police officer. We join just as Lester is getting to it: "I caught this case in the Brooklyn Homes, summer of '87. Eighty-year-old woman, stabbed up, nightgown, in bed, forced window, rear entry." Lord, I hope he's just talking about how the perp got in to the apartment. "Worked it for a couple of weeks. Got the names of two squirrels over in Curtis Bay. Squirrel #1 gives it up, and tries to put all the weight on Squirrel #2." "Back up the statements?" asks McNulty. "Printed on the rear window for #2," says Lester, "and another one for #1 on the medicine chest." "So it's down, yeah?" says McNulty. Seriously, with him looking like that and talking like that, I don't know how Ronnie ever kicked his ass out of bed -- unless he was better on the floor, as they say. But this isn't about me and all the ways I would do McNulty. Back to Lester! (Whom I would also show a good time, frankly -- just more slowly, because he's old.) Lester: "Even better is when Squirrel #1 drives it by the house where they fenced the old lady's shit -- clock radio, TV, toaster oven." McNulty asks what the problem was. Lester sighs: "The problem is the fence. Turned out he was the son of one of the big editors over at the News American." I'm not sure the case was in the summer of '87, then, given this, but maybe the editor still had pull a year after the paper was done. Anyway: "This man is running the afternoon newspaper, and his son is getting all fucked up doing the dirt and getting high down in Locust Point. The deputy -- who I guess is in a favour-doing mood -- sends word down to the major [that] I'm supposed to make the case without the fence. Just the print hits and the statement. Play it like that." "So he's doing this for what?" asks McNulty. "To have some newspaper guy in his pocket?" Hardly seems worth it for a guy who was unemployed by then, but anyway, Lester says he guesses so. McNulty chuckles, and asks if the deputy in question was Burrell, but it wasn't: Mueller, who had the job before him. McNulty asks what Lester did, and Lester replies, "What do you think I did? I charged him with receiving, then had his ass testify!" McNulty, fondly, says that Lester probably could have made the case out of the prints and everything else, and Lester agrees that he probably could...and then stares pointedly at McNulty, like, "You wouldn't have, and neither did I." McNulty asks why he didn't, and Lester says, "Why. Why are you fucking up yourself chasing Avon Barksdale?" McNulty's like, "Touché."