Men In Blue Read online

  “He’s gone, Jack,” Wohl said.

  “Jesus,” McGovern said, and crossed himself.

  “I think it would be better if you took care of the parking lot,” Wohl said. “You’re in uniform. You see the woman’s body?”

  McGovern shook his head. “A woman? A woman shot Dutch?”

  “There were two of them,” Wohl said. “One ran. Dutch got the other one. I don’t know who shot Dutch.”

  “He said it was a woman,” Louise Dutton said, softly.

  Captain McGovern looked at her, his eyebrows raising, and then at Wohl.

  “This lady was with Captain Moffitt at the time,” Wohl said, evenly. He turned to Louise. “I’ve got to make a telephone call,” he said. “It won’t take a moment.”

  She nodded.

  Wohl looked around for a telephone, saw the cashier’s phone lying on the floor off the hook, and went to a pay phone on the wall. He dropped a dime in it and dialed a number from memory.

  “Commissioner’s office, Sergeant Jankowitz.”

  “Peter Wohl, Jank. Let me talk to him. It’s important.”

  “Peter?” Commissioner Taddeus Czernick said when he came on the line a moment later. “What’s up?”

  “Commissioner, Dutch Moffitt walked into a holdup at the Waikiki Diner on Roosevelt Boulevard. He was shot to death. He put down one of them; the other got away.”

  “Jesus H. Christ!” Commissioner Czernick replied. “The one he got is dead?”

  “Yes, sir. It’s a woman, and a witness says she’s the one that shot him. She said Dutch said a woman got him. I just got here.”

  “Who else is there?”

  “Captain McGovern.”

  “Jesus Christ, Dutch’s brother got himself killed too,” the commissioner said. “You remember that?”

  “I heard that, sir.” And then, delicately, he added: “Commissioner, the witness, a woman, was with Dutch.”

  There was a perceptible pause.

  “So?” Commissioner Czernick asked.

  “I don’t know, sir,” Wohl said.

  “That was the other phone, Peter. We just got notification from radio,” Commissioner Czernick said. “Who’s the woman?”

  “I don’t know. She looks familiar. Young, blond, good-looking.”

  “Goddamn!”

  “I thought I had better call, sir.”

  “You stay there, Peter,” the commissioner ordered. “I’ll call the mayor, and get out there as soon as I can. Do what you think has to be done about the woman.”

  “Yes, sir,” Wohl said.

  The commissioner hung up without saying anything else.

  Wohl put the phone back in its cradle, and without thinking about it, ran his fingers in the coin return slot. He was surprised when his fingers touched coins. He took them out and looked at them, and then went to Louise Dutton.

  “Are you all right?”

  Louise shrugged.

  “A real tragedy,” Wohl said. “He has three young children. “

  “I know he was married,” Louise said, coldly.

  “Would you mind telling me how you happened to be here with him?” Wohl asked.

  “I’m with WCBL-TV,” she said.

  “I knew your face was familiar,” Wohl said.

  “He was going to tell me what he thinks about people calling the Highway Patrol ‘Carlucci’s Commandos,’” Louise said, carefully.

  That’s bullshit, Wohl decided. There was something between them.

  As if that was a cue, the Channel 9 cameraman appeared at the door. A policeman blocked his way.

  “Christ, if she’s in there, why can’t I go in?” the cameraman protested.

  Wohl stepped to the door, spotted McGovern, and raised his voice. “Jack, would you get up some barricades, please? And keep people out of our way?”

  He saw from the look on McGovern’s face that the television cameraman had slipped around the policemen McGovern had already put in place.

  “Get that guy out of there,” McGovern said, sharply, to a sergeant. “The TV guy.”

  Wohl turned back to Louise.

  “It would be very unpleasant for Mrs. Moffitt, or the children,” he said, “if they heard about this over the television, or the radio.”

  Louise looked at him without real comprehension for a minute.

  “I don’t know about Philadelphia,” she said. “But most places, there’s an unwritten rule that nothing, no names anyway, about something like this gets on the air until the next of kin are notified.”

  “That’s true here, too,” Wohl said. “But I always like to be double sure.”

  “Okay,” she said. “I suppose I could call.”

  “That would be very much appreciated,” Wohl said. He extended his hand to her, palm upward, offering her change for the telephone.

  Louise dialed the “Nine’s News” newsroom, and Leonard Cohen, the news director, answered.

  “Leonard, this is Louise Dutton. A policeman has been killed—”

  “At the Waikiki Diner on Roosevelt Boulevard?” Cohen interrupted. “You there?”

  “Yes,” Louise said. “Leonard, the police don’t want his wife to hear about it over the air.”

  “You know who it was?”

  “I was with him,” Louise said.

  “You saw it?”

  “I don’t want his wife to find out over the air,” Louise said.

  “Hey, no problem. Of course not. Have the public affairs guy call us when we can use it, like usual.”

  “All right,” Louise said.

  “Tell the crew to get what they can, at an absolute minimum, some location shots, and then you come in, and we can put it together here,” Cohen said. “We’ll probably use it for the lead-in and the major piece. Nothing else much has happened. And you saw it?”

  “I saw it,” Louise said. “I’ll be in.”

  She hung up the phone.

  “I just spoke with the news director,” she said. “He said he won’t use it until your public affairs officer clears it. He wants him to call.”

  “I’ll take care of it,” Wohl said. “Thank you very much, Miss Dutton.”

  She shrugged, bitterly. “For what?” she asked, and then: “How will she find out? Who tells her?”

  Wohl hesitated a moment, and then told her: “There’s a routine, a procedure, we follow in a situation like this. The captain in charge of the district where Captain Moffitt lived was notified right away. He will go to Captain Moffitt’s house and drive Mrs. Moffitt to the hospital. By the time they get there, the mayor, and probably the commissioner and the chief of Special Patrol, will be there. And probably Captain Moffitt’s parish priest, or the department Catholic chaplain. They will tell her. They’re friends. Captain Moffitt is from an old police family.”

  She nodded.

  “While that’s been going on,” Wohl said, wondering why, since he hadn’t been asked, he was telling her all this, “radio will have notified Homicide, and the Crime Lab, and the Northeast Detectives. They’ll be here in a few minutes. Probably, since Captain Moffitt was a senior police officer, the chief inspector in charge of homicide will roll on this, too.”

  “And she gets to ride to the hospital, while the police radio is talking about what happened here, right? God that’s brutal!”

  “The police radio in the car will be turned off,” Wohl said.

  She looked at him.

  “We learn from our mistakes,” Wohl said. “Policemen get killed. Captain Moffitt’s brother was killed in the line of duty, too.”

  She met his eyes, and her eyebrows rose questioningly, but she didn’t say anything.

  “The homicide detectives will want to interview you,” Wohl said. “I suppose you understand that you’re a sort of special witness, a trained observer. The way that’s ordinarily done is to transport you downtown, to the Homicide Division in the Roundhouse ...”

  “Oh, God!” Louise Dutton said. “Do I have to go through that?”

&nb
sp; “I said ‘ordinarily,” Wohl said. “There’s always an exception.”

  “Because I was with him? Or because I’m with WCBL-TV?”

  ‘ ‘How about a little bit of both?” Wohl replied evenly. “In this case, what I’m going to do is have an officer drive you home.”

  I have the authority to let her get away from here, to send her away, Wohl thought. The commissioner said, “Do what you have to do about the woman,” but I didn’t have to. I wonder why I did?

  “I’m not going home,” she said. “I’m going to the studio.”

  “Yes, of course,” he said. “Then to the studio, and then home. Then, in an hour or so, when things have settled down a little, I’ll arrange to have some officers come to the station, or your house, and take you to the Roundhouse for your statement.”

  “I don’t need anybody to drive me anywhere,” Louise said, almost defiantly.

  “I think maybe you do,” Wohl said. “You’ve gone through an awful experience, and I really don’t think you should be driving. And we owe you one, anyway.”

  She looked at him, as if she’s seeing me for the first time, Wohl thought.

  “I didn’t get your name,” she said.

  “Wohl, Peter Wohl,” he said.

  “And you’re a policeman?”

  “I’m a Staff Inspector,” he said.

  “I don’t know what that is,” she said. “But I saw you ordering that captain around.”

  “I didn’t mean to do that,” he said. “But right now, I’m the senior officer on the scene.”

  She exhaled audibly.

  “All right,” she said. “Thank you. All of a sudden I feel a little woozy. Maybe I shouldn’t be driving.”

  “It always pays to be careful,” Wohl said, and took her arm and went to the door and caught Captain McGovern’s attention and motioned him over.

  “Jack, this is Miss Louise Dutton, of Channel 9. She’s been very cooperative. Can you get me a couple of officers and a car, to drive her to the studio, drive her car, too, and then take her home?”

  “I recognize Miss Dutton, now,” McGovern said. “Sure, Inspector. No problem. You got it. Glad to be able to be of help, Miss Dutton.”

  “Have you caught the other one, the boy?” Louise asked.

  “Not yet,” Captain McGovern said. “But we’ll get him.”

  “And the other one, the one who shot Captain Moffitt, was it a girl?”

  “Yes, ma’am, it was a girl,” Captain McGovern said, and nodded with his head.

  Louise followed the nod. A man in civilian clothing, but with a pistol on his hip, and therefore certainly a cop, was stepping around the body, taking pictures of it from all angles. And then he finished. When he did, another policeman (a detective, Louise corrected herself) bent over and with a thick chunk of yellow chalk, outlined the body on the parking lot’s macadam.

  “Where’s your car, Miss Dutton?” Wohl asked.

  Louise could not remember where she had left it. She looked around until she found it, and then pointed to it.

  “Over there,” she said, “the yellow one.”

  “Would you like to ride in your car, or in the police car?” Wohl asked.

  Louise thought that over for a moment before replying, “I think my car.”

  “These officers will take you to the studio and then home, Miss Dutton,” Wohl said. “Please don’t go anywhere else until we’ve taken care of your interview with Homicide. Thank you very much for your cooperation.”

  He offered his hand, and she took it.

  The first thing Wohl thought was professional. Her hand was a little clammy, often a symptom of stress. Getting a cop to drive her had been a good idea, beyond hoping that it would make her think well of the police department. Then he thought that it was a very nice hand, indeed. Soft and smooth skinned.

  There was little question what Dutch saw in her, he thought. But what did she see in him? This was a tough, well-educated young woman, not some secretary likely to be awed by a big, strong policeman.

  A black Oldsmobile with red lights flashing from behind the grille pulled into the parking lot as Louise Dutton’s yellow convertible, following a blue-and-white, turned onto Roosevelt Boulevard.

  Chief Inspector of Detectives Matt Lowenstein, a large, florid-faced, silver-haired man in his fifties, got out the passenger side and walked purposefully over to McGovern and Wohl.

  “Goddamned shame,” he said. “Goddamned shame. They pick up the one that got away?”

  “Not yet, sir,” McGovern said. “But we will.”

  “Every male east of Broad Street with a zipper jacket and blond hair has been stopped for questioning,” Wohl said, dryly. Lowenstein looked at him, waiting for an explanation. “A Highway Patrol sergeant went on the J-Band and ordered every Highway vehicle to respond.”

  Lowenstein shook his head. He agreed with Wohl that had been unnecessary, even unwise. But the Highway Patrol was the Highway Patrol, and when one of their own was involved in a police shooting, they could be expected to act that way. And, anyway, it was too late now, water under the dam, to change anything.

  “I understand we got an eyewitness,” he said.

  “I just sent her home,” Wohl said.

  “They interviewed her here? Already?”

  “No. I told her that someone would pick her up for the interview at her home in about an hour,” Wohl said.

  Captain McGovern’s eyes grew wide. Wohl had overstepped his authority, and it was clear to him that he was about to get his ass eaten out by Chief Inspector Lowenstein.

  But Chief Inspector Lowenstein didn’t even comment.

  “Jank Jankowitz tried to reach you on the radio, Peter,” he said. “When he couldn’t, he got on the horn to me. The commissioner thinks it would be a good idea for you to go by the hospital. . . . Where did they take him?”

  “I don’t know, Chief. I can find out,” Wohl replied.

  Lowenstein nodded. “If you miss him there, he’s going by the Moffitt house. Meet him there.”

  “Yes, sir,” Peter said.

  THREE

  Leonard Cohen, before he had become the news director of WCBL-TV, had been what he thought of as a bona fide journalist. That is, he had worked for newspapers before they were somewhat condescendingly referred to as “the print media.”

  He privately thought that the trouble with most of the people he knew in “electronic journalism” was that few of them had started out working for a newspaper, and consequently were incapable of recognizing the iceberg tip of a genuine story, unless they happened to fall over it on their way to the mirror to touch up their makeup, and sometimes not then.

  The phone wasn’t even back in its cradle after Louise Dutton had called to make sure they wouldn’t put the name of the cop who got himself shot on the air before the cops could inform his widow when he sensed there was more to what was going on than Louise Dutton had told him.

  He was a little embarrassed that he hadn’t picked up on it while he had her on the telephone.

  He went quickly to the engineering room.

  “Are we in touch with the van at the Waikiki Diner?” he asked.

  “I dunno,” the technician said. “Sometimes it works, and sometimes it don’t.”

  “Find out, Goddamn it!”

  Penny Bakersfield’s voice, clipped and metallic because of the shortwave radio’s modulation limitations, came clearly over the loudspeaker.

  “Yes, Leonard?”

  “Penny, can you see what Louise Dutton is doing out there?”

  “At the moment, she’s walking toward her car. There are a couple of cops with her.”

  “Tell Whatsisname—”

  “Ned,” she furnished.

  “Tell Ned to shoot it,” he ordered. “Tell him to shoot whatever he can of her out there. If you can get the cops in the shot, so much the better.”

  “May I ask why?”

  “Goddamn it, Penny, do what you’re told. And then the two of you get
back here as soon as you can.”

  “You don’t have to snip at me, Leonard!” Penny said.

  ****

  Officer Mason, once he and Officer Foley had slid the stretcher with Captain Richard C. Moffitt on it into the back of Two-Oh-One, had been faced with the decision of which hospital the “wounded” Highway Patrol officer should be transported to.

  There had been really no doubt in his mind that Moffitt was dead; in the year and a half he’d been assigned to wagon duty, he’d seen enough dead and nearly dead people to tell the difference. But Moffitt was a cop, and no matter what, “wounded” and “injured” cops were hauled to a hospital.

  “Tell Radio Nazareth,” Officer Mason had said to Officer Foley as he flicked on the siren and lights.

  Nazareth Hospital, at Roosevelt Boulevard and Pennypack Circle, was not the nearest hospital, but it was, in Officer Mason’s opinion, the best choice of the several available to him. Maybe Dutch Moffitt wasn’t dead.

  They had been waiting for him at Nazareth Emergency, nurses and doctors and everything else, but Dutch Moffitt was dead, period.

  Police Commissioner Taddeus Czernick had arrived a few minutes later, and on his heels came cars bearing Mayor Jerry Carlucci, Chief Inspector Dennis V. Coughlin, and Captain Charley Gait of the Civil Disobedience Squad. Officer Mason heard Captain Gaft explain his presence to Chief Inspector Coughlin: Until last month, he had been Dutch Moffitt’s home district commander, and he thought he should come; he knew Jeannie Moffitt pretty good.

  And then Captain Paul Mowery, Dutch Moffitt’s new home district commander, appeared. He held open the glass door from the Emergency parking lot for Jeannie Moffitt. She was a tall, healthy-looking, white-skinned woman with reddish brown hair. She was wearing a faded cotton housedress and a gray, unbuttoned cardigan.

  “Be strong, Jeannie,” Chief Inspector Coughlin said. “Dutch’s gone.”

  “I knew it,” Jean Moffitt said, almost matter-of-factly. “I knew it.” And then she fumbled in her purse for a handkerchief, and then started to sob. “Oh, God, Denny! What am I going to tell the kids?”

  Coughlin wrapped his arms around her, and Mayor Carlucci and Commissioner Czernick stepped close to the two of them, their faces mirroring their emotions. They desperately wanted to do something, anything, to help, and there was nothing in their power that could.