Special Operations boh-2 Read online

"Well, I guess that's up to the doctor," Hemmings said. "He'll probably want you to spend the night here."

  "I don't want to spend the night here," she said, angrily. "I want to go home."

  "Well, that's probably your decision…"

  "How am I going to get home? I don't have any clothing, my purse…"

  "If you'd like me to, Miss Flannery," Hemmings said, "I'll be going to your apartment. I could bring you some clothing, and if you can work it out with the doctor, I'd be happy to drive you home. But if you want my advice, I'd stay here, or at least spend the night with your family, or a friend-"

  " 'Hello, Daddy, guess what happened to me?'"

  "I'm sure your father would understand," Hemmings said.

  She snorted.

  "What my father would say would be, 'I told you if you insisted on getting an apartment by yourself, something like this would happen.'"

  "Well, what about a friend?"

  "I don't want to have to answer any more questions from anybody," she said.

  "Well, I'll go get you some clothing," Hemmings said. "And bring it here. You think about it."

  THREE

  As Mickey O'Hara had walked across the fine carpets laid over the marble floor of the lobby of the Bellevue-Stratford Hotel, and then onto South Broad Street, 6.3 miles to the north, where Old York Road cuts into Broad Street at an angle, about a mile south of the city line, the line of traffic headed toward downtown Philadelphia from the north suddenly slowed, taking the driver of a 1971 Buick Super sedan by surprise.

  He braked sharply and the nose of the Buick dipped, and there was a squeal from the brakes. The driver of the Mercury in front of him looked back first with alarm, and then with annoyance.

  I'm probably a little gassed, the driver of the Buick thought. I'll have to watch myself.

  His name was David James Pekach, and he was thirty-two years old. He was five feet nine inches tall, and weighed 143 pounds. He was smooth shaven, but he wore his hair long, parted in the middle, and gathered together in the back in a pigtail held in place by a rubber band. He was wearing a white shirt and a necktie. The shirt was mussed and sweat stained. The jacket of his seersucker suit was on the seat beside him.

  The Buick Super was not quite three years old, but the odometer had already turned over at 100,000 miles. The shocks were shot, and so were the brakes. The foam rubber cushion under David James Pekach's rear end had long ago lost its resilience, and the front-end suspension was shot, and the right-rear passenger door had to be kicked to get it open. But the air conditioner still worked, and Pekach had been running it full blast against the ninety-eight percent humidity and ninety-three degree temperature of the late June night.

  David James Pekach was on his way home from upper Bucks County. His cousin Stanley had been married at eleven o'clock that morning at Saint Stanislaus's Roman Catholic Church in Bethlehem, and there had been a reception following at the bride's home near Riegelsville, on the Delaware River, at the absolute upper end of Bucks County.

  The booze had really flowed, and he had had more than he could handle. He was a little guy, at least compared to his brothers and cousins, and he couldn't handle very much, anyway.

  There had been the usual cracks about his size, and of course the pigtail, at the reception("You know what Davie is? With that pigtail? One Hung Low. The world's only Polack Chink.") and every time he'd looked at the priest, he'd found the priest looking at him, then suddenly turning on an uneasy smile. He wasn't their priest, he was the bride's family's priest, and what he was obviously thinking was," What's a bum like that doing in the Pekach family?"

  He saw the reason for the sudden slowdown, flashing blue lights on two Philadelphia police cars at the corner. A wreck. Probably a bad one, he thought, with two cars at the scene.

  He hadn't been paying much attention to where he was. He looked around to see where he was.

  When he got to the cop directing traffic, the cop signaled him to stop. Dave Pekach rolled down the window.

  "You almost rear-ended the Mercury," the cop accused. From the way the cop looked at him, Dave Pekach knew that he didn't like men who wore long blond hair in a pigtail any more than the priest had.

  "I know," Dave Pekach said, politely. "I wasn't paying attention."

  "You been drinking?" It was an accusation, not a question.

  "I just came from a wedding," Pekach admitted. "But I'm all right."

  The cop flashed his light around the inside of the Buick, to see what he could see, let Pekach sweat twenty seconds, then waved him on.

  Pekach drove fifty feet, swore, and then braked hard again. The brakes squealed again, and there was a loud, dull groan from the front end as he bounced over a curb and stopped.

  He opened the door and got out and started walking toward two men standing by the hood of a five-year-old Ford sedan.

  "Hey, buddy!" the cop who had stopped him called. "What do you think you're doing?"

  Pekach ignored him.

  The cop, trotting over, reached the old Ford just as Pekach did, just in time to hear one of the men greet Pekach: "Hey, Captain," one of the men said. He was a heavy, redheaded Irishman in a T-shirt and blue jeans. "Don't you look spiffy!"

  The cop was embarrassed. He had sensed there was something not quite right with the car, or the man driving it. There were some subtle things. The relatively new automobile had obviously not been washed, much less polished, in some time. It looked as if it had been used hard. The driver's side vent window had a thumb-sized piece of glass missing, and was badly cracked. The tires had black walls, and on closer examination were larger than the tires that had come with the car. But until right now, the cop had been looking for something wrong, something that would have given him reasonable cause to see what the clown in the pigtail might have under the seat or in the glove compartment or in the trunk. Now he looked at the car again, and saw that he had missed the real giveaway: On the shelf between the top of the backseat and the window was a thin eight-inch-tall shortwave radio antenna.

  The battered Buick was a police car, and the funny-looking little guy with the hippy pigtail was a police officer. More than a cop. One of the Narcotics guys had called him "Captain."

  And then the cop put it all together. The little guy with the pigtail was Captain David Pekach, of the Narcotics Division of the Philadelphia Police Department. He remembered now, too, that Pekach had just made captain. Now that he was a captain, the cop thought, Pekach was probably going to have to get rid of the pigtail. Captains don't work undercover; neither do lieutenants, and only rarely a sergeant. The cop remembered a story that had gone around the bar of the Fraternal Order of Police. A Narcotics Lieutenant (obviously, now Pekach) had been jumped on by the Commissioner himself for the pigtail. Pekach had stood up to him. If he was supposed to supervise his undercover men working the streets, the only way he could do that was, from time to time, to go on the streets with them. And a very good way to blow the cover of plainclothes cops working Narcotics dressed like addicts was to have them seen talking to some guy in a business suit and a neat, show-your-ears haircut. No questions were likely to be asked about a guy in a dirty sweatshirt and a pigtail. The story going around the FOP bar was that Commissioner Czernick had backed off.

  "What's going on?" Captain Pekach asked the red-haired Narc, whose name was Coogan.

  "We were cutting the grass in Wissahickon Park," the other Narcotics officer said. He was a Latin American, wearing a sleeveless denim jacket, his naked chest and stomach sweaty under it. He was a small man, smaller than Captain Pekach. At five feet seven even, he had just made the height requirement for police officers.

  "Cutting the grass" was a witticism. Parks have grass.Cannibas sativa, commonly known as marijuana, is known on the street as " grass." But arresting vendors of small quantities of grass is not a high-priority function of plainclothes officers of the Narcotics Division. The Narcotics officers knew that, and they knew that Captain David Pekach knew it. "And?" Pekach asked. />
  "It was a slow night, Captain," Alexandro Gres-Narino said, uncomfortably.

  "Except for the naked lady," Tom Coogan said.

  "What naked lady?" Pekach asked.

  "Some dame was running around without any clothes in the park by the Wissahickon Bridge," Tom Coogan said. "Every car north of Market Street went in on it."

  "Tell me about this," Pekach said, impatiently, gesturing vaguely around him.

  "So there was a buy, and they run," Coogan said. "And we chased them. And they run off the road here."

  "High-speed pursuit, no doubt?" Pekach asked, dryly.

  "Not by us, Captain," Coogan said, firmly and righteously. "We got on the radio and gave a description of the car, and a Thirty-fifth district car spotted it, and they chased them. We only come over here after they wrecked the car."

  "So what have you got?" Pekach asked, a tired, disgusted tone in his voice.

  Without waiting for a reply, he walked over to one of the Thirtyfifth District patrol cars, and looked through the partially opened rear seat window. There were four white kids crowded in the back, two boys and two girls, all four of them looking scared.

  "Anybody hurt?" Pekach asked.

  Four heads shook no, but nobody said anything.

  "Whose car?" Pekach asked.

  There was no reply immediately, but finally one of the boys, mustering what bravado he could, said, "Mine."

  "Yours? Or your father's?" Pekach asked. "My father's," the boy said.

  "He's going to love you for this," Pekach said, and walked back to the Narcotics Division officers.

  "Well, what have you got on them?" he asked Officer Coogan.

  "About an ounce and a half," Coogan replied, uncomfortably.

  "Anounceandahalf." Pekach said in sarcastic wonderment.

  "Failure to heed a flashing light, speeding, reckless driving," Coogan went on, visibly a little uncomfortable.

  "You like traffic work, do you, Coogan? Keeping the streets free of reckless drivers? Maybe rolling on a naked lady?"

  Officer Coogan did not reply.

  There was the growl of a siren, and Pekach looked over his shoulder and saw a Thirty-fifth District wagon pulling up. The two policemen in it got out, spoke to one of the patrol car cops, and then one of them went to the van and opened the rear door while the other went to the patrol car with the patrol car cop. The patrol car cop opened the door and motioned the kids out.

  "Wait a minute," Pekach called. He walked over to them. One of the girls, an attractive little thing with long brown hair parted in the middle and large dark eyes, looked as if she was about to cry.

  "You got any money?" Pekach asked.

  "Who are you?" the van cop asked.

  "I'm Captain Pekach," he said. "Narcotics."

  The girl shook her head.

  Pekach pointed at one of the boys, the one who had told him it was his father's car. "You got any money, Casanova?"

  There was a just perceptible pause before the boy replied, "I got some money."

  "You got twenty bucks?" Pekach asked.

  The boy dug his wallet out of his hip pocket.

  "Give it to her," Pekach ordered. Then he turned to the patrol car cop. "You have the names and addresses?"

  "Yes, sir."

  "Put the girls in a cab," Pekach said.

  He turned to the girl with the large dark eyes.

  "Your boyfriends are going to jail," he said. "First, they're going to the District, and then they'll be taken downtown to Central lockup. When they get out, ask them what it was like."

  Pekach found Officers Alexandro Gres-Narino and Thomas L. Coogan.

  "If you can fit me into your busy schedule, I would like a moment of your time at half-past three tomorrow in my office," he said.

  "Yes, sir," they said, almost in unison.

  Pekach took one more look at the girl with the large dark eyes. There were tears running down her cheeks.

  "Thank you," she said, barely audibly.

  Captain Dave Pekach then walked to the worn-out Buick, coaxed the engine to life, and drove home.

  ****

  At five minutes after nine the next morning, Mickey O'Hara again pulled his battered Chevrolet Impala to the curb in front of the Bellevue-Stratford Hotel by the no parking at any time tow away zone sign. He was not worried about a ticket. There was about as much chance a police officer would cite him for illegal parking, much less summon a police tow truck to haul Mickey O'Hara's car away, as there was for a white hat to slap a ticket on his Honor, Mayor Jerry Carlucci's mayoral Cadillac limousine.

  There were perhaps a couple of dozen police officers among the eight thousand or so cops on the force who would not recognize the battered, antennae-festooned Chevrolet as belonging to Mr. Mickey O'Hara, of the editorial staff of thePhiladelphia Bulletin. The others, from Commissioner Taddeus Czernick to the most recent graduates of the Police Academy, if they saw Mickey O'Hara climb out of his illegally parked vehicle, would wave cheerfully at him, or, if they were close enough, offer their hands, and more than likely say, "Hey, Mickey, how's it going? What's going on?"

  It was generally conceded that Mickey O'Hara knew more of what was going on at any given moment, in the area of interesting crime, than the entire staff of the Police Radio Room on the second floor of the Roundhouse. Equally important, Mickey O'Hara was nearly universally regarded as a good guy, a friend of the cops, someone who understood their problems, someone who would put it in the paper the way it had really gone down. Mickey O'Hara, in other words, was accustomed to ignoring NO PARKING signs.

  But today, when he got out of his car, Mickey looked at the sign, and read it, and for a moment actually considered getting back in, and taking the car someplace to park it legally. The cold truth was that right now he was not a police reporter. The Bull could call it" withholding professional services" all day and all night, but the truth of the matter was that Mickey O'Hara was out of work. If you didn't have a job, and nobody was going to hand you a paycheck, you were, ergo sum, out of work.

  Mickey decided against moving the car someplace legal. That would have been tantamount to an admission of defeat. He didn't know that theBulletin was going to tell him, more accurately tell his agent, to "go fuck yourselves, we don't need him." That struck Mickey as the most likely probability in the circumstances, but he didn'tknow that forsure.

  He had hoped to have the issue resolved, one way or the other, last night. But the Bull's plane had been late, so that hadn't happened. It had been pretty goddamned depressing, and he had woken up, with a minor hangover, rather proud of himself for not, after he'd drained the last bottle of Ortleib's, having gone out and really tied one on.

  Mickey straightened his shoulders and marched resolutely toward the revolving door giving access to the lobby of the Bellevue-Stratford. There was nothing to really worry about, he told himself. For one thing, he was the undisputed king of his trade in Philadelphia. There were four daily newspapers in the City of Brotherly Love, and at least a dozen people, including, lately, a couple of females, who covered crime. The best crime coverage was in theBulletin, and the best reporter on theBulletin was Michael J. O'Hara, even if most of the other reporters, including both women, had master's degrees in journalism from places like Columbia and Missouri.

  Mickey himself had no college degree. For that matter, he didn't even have a high school diploma. He had begun his career, as a copy boy, in the days when reporters typed their stories on battered typewriters, and then held it over their head, bellowing "copy" until a copy boy came to carry it to the city desk.

  Mickey had been expelled from West Catholic High School in midterm of his junior year. The offenses alleged involved intoxicants, tobacco, and so far as Monsignor John F. Dooley, the principal, was concerned, incontrovertible proof that Michael J. O'Hara had been running numbers to the janitorial staff and student body on behalf of one Francisco Guttermo, who, it was correctly alleged, operated one of the most successful numbers routes in Sout
hwest Philly.

  It had been Monsignor Dooley's intention to teach Mickey something about the wages of sin by banishing him in shame from the company of his classmates for, say, three weeks, and then permitting him to return, chastened, to the halls of academe.

  The day after he was expelled, Mickey spotted a sign, crudely lettered, thumbtacked to the door of thePhiladelphia Daily News, which in those days occupied a run-down building on Arch Street, way up by the Schuylkill River. The sign read, simply, COPY BOY WANTED.

  Mickey had no idea what a copy boy was expected to do, but in the belief that it couldn't be any worse than his other options, becoming a stock boy in an Acme Supermarket, or an office boy somewhere, he went inside and upstairs to the second floor and applied for the position.

  James T. "Spike" Dolan, the City Editor of the Daily News, saw in young Mickey O'Hara a kindred soul and hired him. Within hours Mickey realized that he had found his niche in life. He never went back to West Catholic High School, although many years later, in a reversal of roles in which he found himself the interviewee for a reporter forPhiladelphia Magazine, he gave West Catholic High, specifically the nearly three years of Latin he had been force-fed there, credit for his skill with words. The interview came after Mickey had been awarded the Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting. The series of stories had dealt with chicanery involving the bail bond system then in effect.

  He told himself too that not only was he the best police reporter in town, but that his agent was one of the best agents there was, period. He didn't do too well with this, because there were a couple of things wrong with it, and he knew it. For one thing, newspaper reporters don' t have agents. Movie stars have agents, and television personalities have agents, and sports figures have agents, but not newspaper police beat reporters.

  Police reporters don't have contracts for their professional services. Police reporters are employed at the pleasure of the city editor, and subject to getting canned whenever it pleases the city editor, or whenever they displease the city editor. Mickey, who had been fired at least once from every newspaper in Philadelphia, plus theBaltimore Sun and theWashington Post during his journalistic career, knew that from experience. And police reporters don't make the kind of money his agent had assured him he would get him, or kiss his ass at Broad and Market at high noon.