Final Justice Read online

  The fat guy went to the handset dangling from the wall phone, put it to his ear, listened a moment—just long enough to be able to determine with whom Mrs. Fernandez was speaking—then grabbed the coiled expansion cord and ripped it free from the telephone.

  Then he looked at Mrs. Fernandez and said, “You fucking bitch!” and raised his revolver to arm’s length and fired at her. The bullet struck her just below her left ear and exited her skull just above her right ear.

  Her convulsing body slid down the wall until her knees were fully bent, and then it fell forward onto the floor.

  The fat guy then brandished his revolver at the other kitchen workers. There were six: three men and three women. The fat guy had not seen Amal al Zaid when he had shoved the kitchen door open. He had done so with such force that it went past the spring stop, causing it to remain in the open position at a right angle to the doorway. Amal al Zaid was behind it, his back pressed against the wall, literally paralyzed by fear.

  “In the fucking cooler, motherfuckers!” the fat guy said, waving his revolver and gesturing toward the walk-in refrigerator.

  When the kitchen staff—stumbling in their haste, one of the women moaning in terror as she held both hands to her mouth—had gone inside the walk-in refrigerator, the fat guy walked quickly toward it, closed the door, and looked around the kitchen.

  Holy Christ! Amal al Zaid thought. That crazy nigger’s going to see me!

  The fat guy found what he wanted—a wooden-handled sharpening steel—on a worktable right behind him, picked it up, and jammed it in the loops intended for a padlock in the refrigerator door. Then he turned and started for the kitchen door.

  In the logical presumption that he would be seen by the guy who’d just shot Manuela, Amal al Zaid lost control of his bladder, and momentarily forgot that he was no longer a Christian.

  Our Father, Who art in heaven, hallowed be Thy name . . .

  The fat guy looked to the left as he made his way across the kitchen, paused briefly to look down at the body of the goddamn bitch who had called the motherfucking cops, and then went through the open kitchen door into the dining area.

  Amal al Zaid finally found the courage to look through the narrow crack between the door and the doorjamb, and saw that the fat guy was working his way though the dining room, collecting wallets and coin purses and watches and rings from the customers.

  The other sonofabitch was at the cashier’s station by the front door, taking the paper money from the cash register.

  The fat guy finished robbing the four people at the banquette he was working, then walked toward the front of the restaurant.

  “Let’s get the fuck out of here,” the fat guy said.

  “Fuck, fuck, fucking fuck, it’s a fucking cop!” the guy at the register said, gesturing through the window.

  He squatted down behind the cash register. The fat guy slid into the banquette nearest to him on the right.

  At 11:26, Officer Charlton entered the restaurant, holding his service pistol at his side. He glanced at the cashier’s station, saw the man crouching behind it, and took a half-dozen steps around the cashier’s station.

  The guy at the cash register suddenly stood up, lunged at Officer Charlton, and wrapped his arms around him, preventing Officer Charlton from raising his pistol to fire it.

  The fat guy jumped from the banquette, ran to them, shoved the muzzle of his pistol under Charlton’s “bulletproof” vest, and fired.

  Officer Charlton stiffened, then went limp and fell to the floor. The guy who had been behind the cash register then stepped over Charlton’s body. Then he turned and fired twice at the body. Then he ran out of the restaurant onto South Broad Street after the fat guy.

  After a moment, Amal al Zaid pushed himself off the wall and ran to the employees’ locker room.

  Shit! Oh, fuck, I pissed in my pants!

  In the employees’ locker room, he opened his locker and took his cellular telephone from his jacket, punched in 911, and when the voice said, “Police Radio?” he blurted: “This is the Roy Rogers restaurant at Broad and Snyder. Two black guys just shot the kitchen lady and a cop who walked in while they was robbing us.”

  This call too, coincidentally, was answered by Miss Regis. And again her experience told her the call was legitimate.

  “Sergeant!” she called, raising her voice just to get his attention, not to ask his permission. Then she threw the appropriate switch.

  Three fast, short beeps, signifying an emergency message, were broadcast to every police radio in Philadelphia.

  Miss Regis pressed the switch activating her microphone.

  “Assist the officer, Broad and Snyder, inside the Roy Rogers, report of an officer shot. Assist the officer, Broad and Snyder, inside the Roy Rogers, report of an officer shot. This is a civilian by phone, we have officers responding to a previous call of a possible armed robbery at that location.”

  [TWO]

  The second vehicle to reach the Roy Rogers restaurant at South Broad and Snyder Streets in response to the first “possible armed robbery in progress” call over the F-Band was a new Buick Rendezvous CXL Sport Utility Vehicle, on the roof of which were three antennas capable of listening to police radio frequencies. A fourth antenna was mounted on the rear window, and just before getting close to Synder Street, the driver of the car switched off a flashing blue light with a magnetic base that he had put on the roof after hearing the call.

  The driver, however, was not a sworn police officer of the Philadelphia police department, and—as had often been pointed out to him—using the flashing blue light on the roof to speed one’s way through traffic was in violation of at least four laws of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, ranging from violation of Paragraph 4912 of the Criminal Code of Pennsylvania—impersonation of a public official, such as a police officer—to violation of Paragraph 6504 of the Criminal Code—setting up a nuisance in public.

  The Rendezvous itself, and all the expensive radios and scanners, were the property of the Philadelphia Bulletin, with whom the driver, Michael J. “Mickey” O’Hara, a wiry, curly-haired man in his late thirties, was professionally associated. The magnetic base flashing blue light was the property of the Philadelphia police department, having been removed by Mr. O’Hara from a wrecked and burned unmarked car, rendering him liable to charges of having violated one or more of Paragraphs 3921, 3924, and 3925 of the Criminal Code, which deal with the unlawful taking of property.

  Mr. O’Hara’s association with the Bulletin went back twenty-one years, to his sixteenth year, when he was hired as a copyboy, shortly after having been expelled from West Catholic High School. Monsignor Dooley had caught Mickey with a pocketful of Francesco “Frankie the Gut” Guttermo’s numbers slips, and when Mickey had refused to name his accomplice in that illegal and immoral enterprise, the monsignor had given him the boot.

  Mickey had immediately found a home in journalism, and had become a reporter—the Bulletin said “staff writer”— before he was old enough to vote. As he had risen in the Bulletin city room hierarchy, his remuneration had naturally increased. He had been perfectly happy with his relationship with the Bulletin and the compensation he was given until his childhood friend, Casimir Bolinski, had brought the subject up.

  “Face it, Mickey, those bastards are screwing you,” Casimir had said when passing through Philadelphia to visit his parents.

  It was more than an idle observation; it was a professional one. Because Mickey had refused to name him as his fellow numbers runner, Casimir, already known as “The Bull,” had graduated from West Catholic High, gone on to Notre Dame on a football scholarship, and from Notre Dame to the Green Bay Packers.

  There, while his Packers teammates had spent their off seasons in various nonproductive if pleasant pursuits, Casimir had studied the law. He hadn’t wanted to, if the truth be known, but Mrs. Antoinette Bolinski, who weighed approximately one third as much as her husband, was a woman of great determination, and The Bull knew bette
r than to argue with her.

  To his surprise, Casimir liked the study of law, and immediately showed a flair for the business aspects of the profession. The day after the Packers—in an emotional ceremony— retired The Bull’s jersey, Casimir J. Bolinski, D. Juris, announced the opening of his law offices, in which he intended to deal with the relationships between professional athletes and their employers. He started, rather naturally, by representing professional football players, but as word spread throughout the world of sports about how successful The Bull had been in securing pay far beyond the expectations of the players, professionals from baseball, basketball, and even a number of jockeys—the crème de la crème, so to speak, of the world of sports—began to beat a path to his door.

  “The way it is, Mickey,” Casimir had explained, “is when I first quit the game, the guys would come to see me and say ‘How they hanging, Bull? What’s this bullshit about you being a lawyer?’ and now they come in, shaved and all dressed up in suits, and say, ‘Thank you very much for seeing me, Dr. Bolinski.’”

  Antoinette Bolinski had been thrilled to find out that D. Juris stood for “Doctor of Law,” and that she was thus entitled to refer to Casimir as “my husband, Dr. Bolinski.” She immediately began to do so. The phrase had a really classy ring to it, and if the other lawyers didn’t want to use the title, screw them.

  As once the fabled defense of the Detroit Lions had crumpled before The Charging Bull in that never-to-be-forgotten 32-zilch game, the assembled legal counsel of the Bulletin gave way before Dr. Bolinski’s persuasive arguments that the few extra dollars they were going to have to spend on Mickey were nothing compared to the dollars they would lose in lost circulation if Mickey moved over to the Inquirer or the Daily News.

  “Jesus, you’re dumb, Mickey,” Casimir had said later. “You’ve got the fucking Pulitzer, for Christ’s sake. You should have known that’s worth a whole lot of dead presidents’ pictures.”

  As a result of the negotiations by Dr. Bolinski on behalf of Mr. O’Hara with the Bulletin, Mr. O’Hara’s compensation was quadrupled, and it was agreed that the Bulletin would provide Mr. O’Hara with a private office and an automobile of Mr. O’Hara’s choice, equipped as Mr. O’Hara wished; and that he would be reimbursed for all expenses incurred in his professional work, it being clearly understood this would involve a substantial amount of business entertainment.

  With one exception, however—Mickey was the sole supporter of his widowed mother, and had been having a really hard time paying her tab at the Cobbs Creek Nursing Center & Retirement Home—his new affluence didn’t change his life much.

  After toying with the suggestion of Dr. Bolinski that he have the Bulletin buy him either a Mercedes or a Cadillac, Mickey had chosen the Buick Rendezvous. A Caddie, or a Kraut-mobile, he reasoned, would piss off most of the people with whom he worked. By that he meant the police officers. It was said—with more than a little justification—that Mickey knew more cops by their first names than anyone else, and that more cops knew Mickey by sight than they did the police commissioner.

  Mickey knew that most—certainly not all—of Philly’s cops liked him, and he attributed this to both reciprocation—he liked most cops—and to the fact that he spelled their names right, got the facts right, and never betrayed a confidence.

  As he did most nights, Mickey O’Hara had been cruising the city in the Rendezvous when one of the scanners had caught the “possible armed robbery” call. He was then five blocks south of the Roy Rogers on South Broad Street.

  “Possible, my ass,” he had said, aloud, then put the gum-ball machine on the roof, glanced in the rearview mirror, and made an illegal U-turn on Broad Street.

  When he reached the Roy Rogers, he saw there was a blue-and -white, door open, parked on Snyder, which told him the cops had just arrived, and the possible robbery in progress was probably still in progress, because the cop wouldn’t have left his car door open if he hadn’t been in a hell of a hurry.

  He double-parked on Snyder, beside the police car, grabbed his digital camera from the passenger seat, and quickly got out of the Rendezvous. Two black guys were coming out of the restaurant in a hurry. In a reflex action, Mickey put the digital camera to his eye and snapped a picture.

  The short fat black guy saw him, raised his arm, and took a shot at Mickey with a short-barreled revolver. He missed, but Mickey, as a prudent measure, dropped to the ground beside the Rendezvous. When he looked up, both of the doers were hauling ass down Snyder Street.

  Mickey got to his feet, ran quickly to the Roy Rogers, and went inside.

  Just inside the door there was a cop on the floor, facedown, in a spreading pool of blood.

  Mickey snapped that picture, and then as he was waiting for the camera to recycle, to take a second shot, realized he knew the dead cop. He was Kenny Charlton of the First District.

  Sonofabitch! Kenny was a good guy, seventeen, eighteen years on the job. His wife works for the UGI. They have a couple of kids.

  The green light in the camera came on, and he took another picture.

  He was about to step around the body when he sensed motion behind him and looked over his shoulder.

  A very large black man, in the peculiar uniform of the Highway Patrol, had entered the restaurant, pistol drawn. Another highway patrolman was on his heels.

  “I think the doers just ran down Snyder,” Mickey said, pointing. “Two black guys, one short and fat . . . two black guys.”

  Sergeant Wilson Carter turned to the highway patrolman behind him. “Get out a flash,” he ordered.

  The second highway patrolman—Mickey knew the face but couldn’t come up with a name—left the restaurant quickly.

  Sergeant Carter looked down at the body of Officer Charlton, dropped to his knees, felt his carotid artery, and shook his head.

  “Jesus, Mickey, what happened?” he asked.

  “I got here just before you did,” O’Hara said, shrugging in a helpless gesture.

  There were now the sounds of approaching sirens, at least two, probably three, maybe more.

  “They shot somebody in the kitchen, too,” one of the restaurant patrons called out.

  Sergeant Carter looked around to see who had called out, and when he did, one of the patrons, a very tall, very thin, hawk-featured black man, stood up and pointed to the kitchen.

  Sergeant Carter headed for the rear of the restaurant. Mickey followed him, holding the digital camera in his hand, concealing it as well as he could.

  Carter pushed open the door and went in the kitchen. Mickey caught it before it closed and followed him in.

  There was a body of a chubby woman, some kind of Latina, on the floor, her head distorted and lying in a pool of blood.

  “Jesus Christ!” Sergeant Carter said.

  “One of them came in the kitchen,” a young black guy in kitchen whites said. “Manuela was calling the cops. He shot her.”

  “They all gone?” Carter asked.

  “There was just the two of them,” the young black guy said. “They’re gone.”

  “You get a good look at him? Them?”

  The young black guy nodded.

  Carter went back into the dining room.

  Mickey didn’t follow him. He took a picture of the young black guy, then held up his finger, signaling him not to go anywhere, and then took two pictures, different angles, of the body on the floor.

  Then he slipped the digital camera into his pocket.

  “What’s your name?” he asked.

  “Amal al Zaid.”

  “You want to spell that for me?” Mickey asked, and wrote it down, and then asked where he lived.

  Then he asked Amal al Zaid what had happened, and had just about finished writing that down when three other police officers entered the kitchen—a lieutenant, a detective, and a uniform.

  Lieutenant Stanley J. Wrigley was acquainted with Mr. O’Hara.

  “Jesus Christ, Mickey, how did you get in here?” he asked.

/>   “I got here before Highway,” Mickey replied. “The doers were two black guys. Carter put out a flash.”

  “You have to get out of here, Mickey, you know that,” Lieutenant Wrigley said.

  “Yeah.”

  “Do me a favor,” Wrigley said. “Go out the back door. Otherwise the rest of the media will bitch you’re getting special treatment again.”

  “Yeah, sure, Stan.”

  “You get a pretty good look at the doers?” the detective asked.

  “Not good. Two young black guys, one of them short and fat.”

  “You told that to Carter?” Wrigley asked.

  Mickey nodded.

  “Thanks, Mick,” Wrigley said, and O’Hara went to the rear door of the kitchen and went through it.

  [THREE]

  Twelve minutes later, Mickey O’Hara walked into his glass-walled office just off the city room of the Philadelphia Bulletin, adjusted the venetian blinds over the glass of the windows and doors so that he could not be seen from the city room, locked the door, and then sat down at his personal computer, switched it on, and waited for it to boot up.

  He had two computers. One was tied into the Bulletin’s network, and the other was his personally. While he was waiting for his personal computer to boot up, he spun around in his chair and faced the Bulletin computer terminal keyboard and rapidly typed:

  CE

  Hold me space for the double murder at the Roy Rogers.

  I was there and may have pics.

  O’Hara

  He read what he had typed, then pushed the Send key.

  Then he spun around in his chair again and faced his own computer. This state-of-the-art device, which fell under the provisions of his contract for personal services with the Bulletin, requiring the Bulletin to provide him with “whatever electronic devices and other tools he considered necessary to the efficient performance of his duties,” was brand new. It had a twenty-one-inch liquid crystal diode color monitor, and provided more than a hundred different typefaces, each clearer and more legible than the single typeface available on the Bulletin’s computer terminals.