A nice little passage

I'm nearly at the end of a book by Michael Kurland, Too Soon Dead (1997), an author I only recently ran across. Too Soon Dead, the first of two books featuring 1930s columnist Alexander Brass and narrated by his assistant Morgan DeWitt, is mostly very good.  But this passage seems to me to be better than good.  "Raab" is the NYC homicide detective working on the murders in the book.

Inspector Raab put a finger on one picture contemplatively and then shifted it to another,  "Romans, 6, twenty-three," he said 

"What's that?" I asked. 

" 'For the wages of sin is death,' " Raab said.

"Don't get mystical, Brass said.  The wages of everything is death.  Some of us just have to wait longer to get paid off."