Final Justice boh-8 Read online

  “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 amp; 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 wen
t 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:

  CEHold 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.

  Mickey took his digital camera-another $1,200 electronic device he considered necessary for the performance of his duties-from his trouser pocket, carefully removed the memory chip, replaced it with another $79.95 64-megabyte memory chip, and shoved the chip he had removed into the mouth-it reminded him of a feeding goldfish-of a device connected to the keyboard of his computer.

  He tapped some keys, which caused the JPG images on the memory chip to be transferred into his computer. The quick tapping of more keys brought the images up on the LCD monitor.

  He then removed the memory chip from the goldfish’s mouth, unlocked a drawer in his desk and unlocked a metal box in the drawer, dropped the memory chip into it, relocked it, closed the desk drawer, and relocked that.

  Mickey was thinking of writing a book-Casimir Bolinski said he was sure he could sell it for him “for big bucks, Mick, if you ever get off your lazy Irish ass and write a proposal”-and if he did, he would need the pictures.

  He tapped keys again and a photo-editing program came up on the LCD monitor’s screen. The first picture, of the two black guys coming out of the Roy Rogers, appeared.

  It was really a lousy picture, understandable in the circumstances.

  For one thing, he had thrown the viewfinder to his eye with such haste that the picture was cockeyed; the two doers appeared in the lower right quarter of the picture, and only from the waist up.

  Far worse, the camera’s internal light meter had detected the bright light coming from the door, decided that was the ambient light, and set the camera accordingly. The entrance to the restaurant appeared in near perfect clarity, but the two doers were not in the light from the door, and consequently they could hardly be seen. You could see it was two guys, but you couldn’t see any facial details.

  Mickey quite skillfully tried to fix it, using all of the capabilities of the photo-editing program. He “lightened” the two guys. That didn’t work. Neither did darkening the perfectly captured restaurant entrance. He tried everything else he could think of, but nothing worked.

  Finally he gave up. He cropped out the unnecessary background, typed keys that renamed “00001. JPG” to “Doers-XRR. JPG,” then pressed the Enter key. Then he pushed other keys, which ordered yet another electronic device necessary to the performance of his duties to print three copies, eight by ten inches, 1,200 dots per square inch. A $5,300 electronic device hummed and clicked as it began to execute the order.

  00002. JPG and 00003. JPG-the pictures of the body of Officer Kenneth J. Charlton, the poor bastard, lying dead at the entrance of the Roy Rogers-also required editing.

  He first made a copy of each as they had come from the camera, renaming them Chardwn1. JPG and Chardwn2. JPG respectively, and ordered three eight-by-ten copies of each at 1,200 dots per square inch.

  Then he went back to each picture in turn, cropped out unnecessary background, very carefully edited the picture so that Officer Charlton’s eyes appeared to be closed, not twisted in agony, and then made the pool of blood in which Charlton’s head was lying disappear. He then renamed these pictures Charbul1. JPG and Charbul2. JPG, ordered the printing of one eight-by-ten of each, and also sent the pictures by the Internet to O’Hara@PhillyBulletin. com.

  He did much the same thing with the other pictures-those of that poor dame in the kitchen and the young black kid- that he had made with the digital camera.

  Although a somewhat complicated process, doing everything took him less than ten minutes. He had a good deal of experience doing the same sort of thing, and of course he had, literally, the best equipment the Bulletin’s money could buy to do it with.

  Mickey knew that some people-just about any cop- would think what he should have done was simply turn the memory chip over to the cops, to assist them in their search for the murderers.

  Mickey had several problems with that. For one thing, if the cops had the memory chip, there was no way he could get copies of the pictures before the Bulletin went to bed at 3 A.M. For another, while Mickey thought it was important that the public get to see the bodies of Kenny Charlton and the Puerto Rican, Latina, whatever, lady lying where they had fallen, there were families involved, and there was no reason the families had to see how fucking gruesome it actually was. Seeing Daddy and Momma in the Bulletin lying dead was going to be bad enough.

  When he had finished, he picked up his telephone with one hand, and with the other slid out a shelf on his desk to which a list of telephone numbers was affixed under celluloid. He found what he wanted and punched it in.

  “First District, Corporal Foley.”

  “Mickey O’Hara, Jerry. Did they pick up the Roy Rogers doers yet?”

  “Not yet, Mick. They’re still looking.”

  “You’re sure, Jerry?”

  “Jesus, yeah, I’m sure. I thought they would have something by now. Every cop in Philadelphia’s down here looking for them.”

  "Thank you, Jerry.”

  He dropped the telephone into its cradle, looked at the gray monitor before him, a cursor blinking on it, and then tapped the balls of his fingers together as he searched for the lead sentence of what he was about to write. He wanted to get it right.

  After a moment, it came to him.

  CESlug-Massive Manhunt Begins for Roy Rogers Murderers

  By Michael J. O’Hara, Bulletin Staff Writer,Photos by Michael J. O’Hara

  Philadelphia April 27-Philadelphia police began a massive manhunt just before midnight, confident they would quickly apprehend the two young black men eyewitnesses say first shot to death Mrs. Maria Manuela Fernandez, kitchen supervisor of the Roy Rogers restaurant at South Broad and Snyder Streets, during a robbery and then shot Police Officer Kenneth J. Charlton, of the First District, who responded to the call, killing him instantly. Amal al Zaid, a maintenance worker at the restaurant, told this reporter Mrs. Fernandez, a single mother of three, was shot without warning by one of the robbers as she was on the telephone reporting the robbery to police authorities, and then ambushed Officer Charlton as he entered the restaurant a few minutes later.

  Five minutes and 250 words later, Mickey gave the computer screen a quick read, cursed the goddamn sci-fi movie typeface, then inserted a missing comma and pushed the Send key.

  Then he turned to the printer, picked the photographs from the tray, put the ones intended for the cops into a large manila envelope, and, carrying the ones from which he had deleted the blood, walked out of his office and across the city room to the city editor.

  “These the pics?” the city editor asked.

  “I thought you should see them in color,” Mickey said. “I appended them to my piece, but they’ll look black-and-white on the El Chea
po network.”

  The city editor examined the photographs.

  “No blood,” he said. It was both a question and a statement.

  “You noticed, did you, you perceptible sonofabitch?”

  “Nice work, Mickey,” the city editor said.

  Mickey O’Hara held up his hands in a what are you going to do? gesture, then walked out of the city room.

  He got in his car, which was parked in a slot marked with a RESERVED FOR MR. O’HARA sign, and drove to the Roundhouse, where he parked in a slot marked with a RESERVED FOR INSPECTORS sign, and then entered the building.

  The uniforms behind the plate-glass window pushed the solenoid that opened the door to the lobby.

  One of the uniforms, a corporal, called: “I thought you’d be out at the Roy Rogers, Mickey.”

  Mickey waved the manila envelope in his hand.

  “Been there, done that,” he said, and walked across the lobby to the elevator. He rode it to the first floor, and then walked down the corridor until he came to a door marked HOMICIDE.

  He pushed it open, then made his way past a locked barrier by putting his hand behind it and pushing the hidden solenoid switch.

  There was only one detective in the room, a younger man who looked like he needed both a new razor and a month’s good meals.

  “Got you minding the store, have they, Fenson?”

  “What can I do for you, O’Hara?” the detective asked.

  “Washington’s the lieutenant?”

  “This week at least,” Fenson said.

  Lieutenant Jason Washington had taken the examination for promotion to captain. It was universally expected that he would pass.

  “I hear the results of the sergeant’s exam will be out tomorrow,” he said. “The lieutenant’s and captain’s should be right after that.”