Men In Blue Read online

  She shook her head, and felt her face flush.

  “What do you want?” she asked.

  “I want to see you,” he said.

  “That’s absurd,” she said.

  “Yeah, I know,” he said. “I can take off early at four. There’s a diner on Roosevelt Boulevard, at Harbison, called the Waikiki. Meet me there, say four-fifteen.”

  “Impossible,” she said.

  “Why impossible?”

  “I have to work,” she said.

  “No, you don’t. Don’t lie to me, Louise.”

  “Oh, hell, Dutch!”

  “Four-fifteen,” he said, and hung up.

  And she had looked at her naked body in the mirror again and known that at four o’clock, she would be in the Waikiki Diner.

  And here she was, looking into this married man’s eyes and suddenly aware that the last thing she wanted in the world was to get involved with him, in bed, or in any other way.

  What the hell was I thinking of? I was absolutely out of my mind to come here!

  “I’m a cop,” he said. “Finding out where you lived and getting your phone number wasn’t hard,”

  “I think I will have a scotch and soda,” Louise said. “Johnnie Walker Black.”

  He pushed his glass to her.

  “I’ll get another,” he said.

  It was rude and certainly unsanitary but she picked it up and sipped from it as he gestured toward the bar for another.

  Why the hell did I do that? she wondered, and then the answer came to her: Because I don’t know what to do to keep myself from making more of a fool of myself than I already have. How am I going to get out of this?

  The mustached Greek proprietor delivered the drink immediately himself.

  “We seem to have at least one thing in common,” Dutch Moffitt said.

  “Wow!” she said.

  “Relax, Louise,” he said. “I’m not going to hurt you.”

  She looked at him again, met his eyes for a moment, and then looked away.

  “I don’t know why I came here,” she said. “But just to clear the air, I now realize it was a mistake.”

  Dutch Moffitt opened his mouth to reply, but before the words came out, he was interrupted by a male voice.

  “Good afternoon, Captain Moffitt, nice to see you.”

  The sleeve of a glen-plaid suit passed in front of Louise’s face.

  “Hello, Angelo,” Moffitt said.

  Louise, once the arm was withdrawn, looked up. A pleasant-looking, olive-skinned man-Italian to judge by the “Angelo”-well barbered, smelling of some expensive cologne, was standing by the table.

  “My father was asking about you just this morning,” the man said.

  “How’s your mother, Angelo?” Moffitt asked.

  “Very well, thank you,” Angelo said.

  “Give her my regards,” Moffitt said.

  Angelo smiled at Louise, and then looked at Moffitt.

  “Are you going to introduce me to this charming lady?”

  “Nice to see you, Angelo,” Moffitt said.

  Angelo colored, and then walked away.

  “What was that,” Louise demanded. “Simply bad manners? Or-”

  “That was Angelo Turpino,” Moffitt said. “You don’t want to know him.”

  “Why?”

  “He’s a thug,” Moffitt said. “No. Correction. He’s a made man. Their standards are slipping. A couple of years ago, that slimy little turd wouldn’t have made a pimple on a made man’s ass.”

  “What’s a ‘made man’?”

  He looked at her, into her eyes again.

  “When one commences on a career in organized crime, one’s highest aspiration is to become a made man,” Moffitt said, mockingly. “A made man, so to speak, is one who is accepted, one who enjoys all the rights and privileges of acknowledged master craftsmanship in his chosen trade. Analogous, one might say, to the designation of an individual as a doctor of medicine.”

  “You’re saying that he’s in the Mafia?”

  “The ‘family,’ we call it,” Moffitt said.

  “What did he do to become ‘made’?”

  “About six weeks ago, Vito Poltaro, sometimes known—from his initials, you see—as ‘the vice president,’ was found in the trunk of his car in a parking garage downtown, behind the Bellevue-Stratford Hotel. Poor Vito had two .22 holes in the back of his head. Five-dollar bills were found in his mouth, his ears, his nostrils, and other body orifices. This signifies greed. I think that Angelo did it. A week after Organized Crime found Vito, they heard that Angelo had been to New York and had come back a made man.”

  There was no question in Louise’s mind that what he was telling her was true.

  “What about Organized Crime finding the body?” she asked. “I didn’t understand that.”

  “There’s a unit, called Organized Crime, because what it does is try to keep tabs on people like Angelo,” he said.

  They were looking into each other’s eyes again. Louise averted hers.

  “You don’t really want to talk about the mob, do you?” he asked.

  “No,” she said. “I don’t.”

  “Then what shall we talk about?”

  “What about your wife?” Louise blurted.

  He lowered his head, and shrugged and then looked at her.

  And then he said, “Oh, shit!”

  He was, she saw, looking over her shoulder.

  She started to turn around.

  “Don’t turn around!” he said, quietly but very firmly.

  He slipped off the banquette and started toward the door, moving on the balls of his feet, like a cat.

  She wanted desperately to look, and started to turn, and then couldn’t, because he had said not to. And then she could see him, faintly, in the mirrored side surface of a service table. She saw him brush the flap of his blazer aside with his hand, and then she saw that he had a gun.

  Then she turned, chilled.

  He was holding the gun with the muzzle pointed down, beside his leg. And he was walking to the cash register.

  There was a young man at the cash register, skinny, with long blond hair. He was wearing a zipper jacket, and he had a brown paper bag in his hand, extended toward the cashier as if he was handing it to her.

  And then Dutch Moffitt was five feet away from him, and the pistol came up.

  She could hear him, even over the sounds of the Waikiki Diner.

  “Lay the gun on the counter, son,” Dutch said. “I’m a police officer. I don’t want to have to kill you.”

  The kid looked at him, his face turned even more pale. He licked his lips, and he seemed to be lowering the paper bag.

  And then there were pops, one after the other, five or six of them, sounding like Chinese firecrackers.

  “Oh, shit!” Dutch Moffitt said, more sadly than angrily.

  The glass front of the cashier’s stand slid with a crash to the floor, and there was an eruption of liquid and falling glass in the rows of liquor bottles in the service bar.

  Dutch grabbed the skinny blond kid by the collar of his zipper jacket and threw him violently across the room. Then he took three steps to the door of the diner. He pushed it open with his shoulder, and went through it; and then he was holding his pistol in both hands, taking aim; and then he fired, and again and again.

  The noise from his pistol was deafening, shocking, and Louise heard a woman yelp, and someone swore.

  The skinny blond boy came running down the aisle. She got a good look at his face. He looked sick.

  Louise pushed herself off her chair and ran down the aisle to the cash register.

  Dutch was outside, on his knees beside a form on the ground. Louise thought it was another blond boy, but then Dutch turned the body over on its back and she saw lipstick and red, round-framed women’s eyeglasses.

  “He ran into the restaurant,” Louise screamed. When there was no response from Dutch she screamed his name, and got his attention, and, pointing,
repeated, “He ran into the restaurant. The blond boy.”

  He got up and walked quickly past her. She followed him.

  The Greek proprietor came up.

  “He ran through the kitchen, the sonofabitch,” he reported.

  Dutch nodded.

  He put his pistol back in its holster and fished the cashier’s telephone from where it had fallen, onto the cigars and foil-wrapped chocolates, when the glass counter had shattered.

  He dialed a number.

  “This is Captain Moffitt, Highway Patrol,” he said. “I’m at Harbison and the Boulevard, the Waikiki Diner. Give me an assist. I have a robbery and a police shooting and a hospital case. I’m hit. One male fled on foot, direction unknown, white, in his twenties. Long blond hair, brown zipper jacket. No! Goddamn it. Harbison and the Boulevard.”

  He put the phone back in the cradle, smiled reassuringly at Louise, and raised his voice.

  “It’s all over, folks,” he said. “Nothing else to worry about. You just sit there and finish your meals.”

  He turned and looked at Louise again.

  “Dutch, are you all right?” Louise asked.

  “Fine,” he said. “I’m fine.”

  And then he staggered, moving backward until he encountered the wall. His face was now very white.

  “It was a goddamned girl!” he said, surprised, barely audibly.

  And then he just crumpled to the floor. “Dutch!” Louise cried, and went to him.

  He’s fainted! That’s all it is, he’s fainted!

  And then she saw his eyes, and there was no life in them.

  “Oh, Dutch!” Louise wailed. “Oh, damn you, Dutch!”

  ****

  Philadelphia, in 1973 the fourth largest city of the United States, lies in the center of the New York-Washington corridor, one of the most densely populated areas in the country.

  A one-hundred-mile-radius circle drawn from William Penn’s statue atop City Hall at Broad and Market Streets in downtown Philadelphia takes in Harrisburg to the west’, skirts Washington, D.C., to the south; takes in almost all of Delaware and the New Jersey shore to the southeast and east; touches the tip of Manhattan Island to the northeast; and just misses Scranton, Pennsylvania to the north.

  Within that one-hundred-mile-radius circle are major cities: Baltimore, Maryland; Camden, Trenton, Elizabeth, Newark, and Jersey City, New Jersey; plus a long list of somewhat smaller cities, such as Atlantic City, New Jersey; Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania; Wilmington, Delaware, and New Brunswick, New Jersey; York, Lancaster, Reading, Allentown, Bethlehem, and Hazleton, Pennsylvania; plus the boroughs of Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Richmond (Staten Island) of New York City.

  There are more than four million people in the “standard metropolitan statistical area” of Philadelphia and its environs, and something over two million people within the city limits, which covers 129 square miles. In 1973, there were approximately eight thousand policemen keeping the peace in the City of Brotherly Love.

  The Police Administration Building on Vine Street in downtown Philadelphia is what in another city would be called “police headquarters.” In Philadelphia it is known to the police and public as “the Roundhouse.”

  The architect who envisioned the building managed to pass on his enthusiasm for the curve to those city officials charged with approving its design. There are no straight corridors; the interior and exterior walls, even those of the elevators, are curved.

  The Radio Room of the Philadelphia Police Department is on the second floor of the Roundhouse. Within the Radio Room are rows of civilian employees, leavened with a few sworn police officers, who sit at telephone and radio consoles receiving calls from the public, and from police vehicles “on the street” and relaying official orders to police vehicles.

  There are twenty-two police districts in Philadelphia, each charged with maintaining the peace in its area. Each has its complement of radio-equipped police cars and vans. Additionally, there are seven divisions of detectives, occupying office space in district buildings, but answering to a detective hierarchy, rather than to the district commander. They have their own, radio-equipped, police cars.

  Radio communication is also maintained with the vehicles of the Philadelphia Highway Patrol, which has its own headquarters; with the vehicles of the Traffic, Accident, and Juvenile divisions; with the fleet of police tow trucks; and with the vehicles of the various special-purpose units, such as the K-9 Unit, the Marine Unit, the Vice, Narcotics, Organized Crime units, and others.

  And on top of this, of course, is the necessity to maintain communications with the vehicles of the senior command hierarchy of the police department, the commissioner, and his staff; the deputy commissioners and their staffs; the chief inspectors and their staffs; and a plethora of other senior police officers.

  With more than a thousand police vehicles “on the street” at any one time, it was necessary to develop, both by careful planning and by trial and error, a system permitting instant contact with the right vehicle at the right time. The police commissioner is not really interested to learn instantly of every automobile accident in Philadelphia, nor is a request from the airport police for a paddy wagon to haul off three drunks from the airport of much interest to a detective looking for a murder suspect in an alley off North Broad Street.

  So far as the police were concerned, Philadelphia was broken down into seven geographical divisions, each headed by an inspector. Each division contained from two to four districts, each headed by a captain. Each division was assigned its own radio frequency. Detectives’ cars and those assigned to other investigative units (Narcotics, Intelligence, Organized Crime, et cetera) had radios operating on the H-Band. All police car radios could be switched to an all-purpose emergency and utility frequency called the J-Band.

  For example, a police car in the Sixteenth District would routinely have his switch set to F-l, which would permit him to communicate with his (the West) division. Switching to F-2 would put him on the universal J-Band. A car assigned to South Philadelphia with his switch set to F-l would be in contact with the South Division. A detective operating anywhere with his switch set to F-l would be on the (Detectives’) H-Band, but he too, by switching to F-2, would be on the J-Band.

  Senior police brass are able to communicate with other senior police brass, and most often on the detective frequency or on the frequency of some other service in which he has a personal interest. Ordinary police cars are required to communicate through the dispatcher, and forbidden to talk car-to-car. Car-to-car communication is authorized on the J- and H-bands.

  “Communications discipline” is strictly enforced. Otherwise, there would be communications chaos.

  By throwing the appropriate switch, a Radio Room dispatcher may send a radio message to every radio-equipped vehicle, from a police boat making its. way against the current of the Delaware River, through the hundreds of police cars on patrol, to the commissioner’s car.

  It happens when a light flashes on a console and an operator throws a switch and says, “Police Radio,” and the party calling says, “Officer needs assistance. Shots fired.”

  Not every call making such an announcement is legitimate. The wise guys have watched cop movies on television, and know the cant; and ten or twelve times every day they decide that watching a flock of police cars, lights flashing and sirens screaming, descend on a particular street corner would be a good way to liven up an otherwise dull afternoon.

  The people who answer the telephones didn’t come to work yesterday, however, and sometimes they know, by the timbre of the caller’s voice possibly, or the assurance with which the caller raises the alarm, that this call is legitimate.

  The dispatcher who took Captain Richard C. “Dutch” Moffitt’s call from the Waikiki Diner was Mrs. Leander Polk, forty-eight, a more than pleasantly plump black lady who had been on the job for nineteen years.

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

  Two beeps, signifying an emergency message, were broadcast to every police radio in Philadelphia.

  “Roosevelt Boulevard and Harbison,” Mrs. Polk said clearly. “The Waikiki Diner. Assist officer. Police by phone.”

  She repeated that message once again, and then went on: “Report of a robbery, shooting, and hospital case.” She repeated that, and then, quickly, to the lieutenant who had come to her station: “Captain Moffitt called it in.”

  And then she broadcast: “All cars going in on the assist, Harbison and the Boulevard, flash information on a robbery at that location. Be on the lookout for white male, long blond hair, brown jacket, direction taken unknown’ armed with a gun.”

  And then she repeated that.

  TWO

  Highway Two-B was a Philadelphia Highway Patrol vehicle moving southward on Roosevelt Boulevard, just entering Oxford Circle. It was occupied by Sergeant Alexander W. Dannelly, and driven by Police Officer David N. Waldron. Sergeant Dannelly and Officer Waldron had moments before seen Captain Dutch Moffitt going into the Waikiki Diner, dressed to kill in civvies.

  It was four in the afternoon, and Captain Dutch Moffitt usually worked until half-past five, and often longer. And in uniform.

  “The captain is obviously engaged in a very secret undercover investigation,” Sergeant Dannelly said.

  “Under-the-covers, you said, Sergeant?” Officer Waldron asked, grinning.

  “You have an evil mind, Officer Waldron,” Sergeant Dannelly said, grinning back. “Shame on you!”

  “How about a cup of coffee, Sergeant?” Waldron asked. “The Waikiki serves a fine cup of coffee.”

  “You also have a suicidal tendency,” Sergeant Dannelly said. “I ever tell you that?”

  Two beeps on the radio cut off the conversation.

  “Roosevelt Boulevard and Harbison,” the dispatcher’s voice said. “The Waikiki Diner. Assist officer. Police by phone. Roosevelt Boulevard and Harbison. The Waikiki Diner. Assist officer. Police by phone.”

  “Jesus Christ!” Officer Waldron said.

  “That’s got to be the captain,” Dannelly said.