Tough Cop

The crooks, the grafters, all of New York&apos;s underworld kept telling themselves that they never had it so good as they would now, with Johnny Devereaux retiring from the force after 21 years. Devereaux was a tough cop, tough to encounter and impossible to bluff.<P> Devereaux was doing a little chortling of his own. He was still young enough to enjoy life; he wanted to read some books, take a little trip, fulfill a few dreams. He was sitting in his car that evening, thinking about his beautiful future, when his beautiful future – in the form of Jennifer Phillips – opened the door of the car, sat down, and said, «Please hurry!»<P> So she was twenty years his junior – so what? She was very, very beautiful, she was in trouble, and Devereaux was ripe for romance. Or call it an automatic reflex, if you prefer to think of him as a tough cop; say he had been on the force so long that he responded mechanically to a try for assistance.<P> "Roeburt returned in his fourth to the tough-guy genre and a character modeled on the later Bogart." – Mike Nevins