Men In Blue Page 5

  Jean Moffitt got control of herself, in a faint voice asked if she could see him, and the three of them led her into the curtained-off cubicle where the doctors had officially decreed that Dutch Moffitt was dead.

  A moment later, Jean Moffitt was led out of the cubicle,

  and out of the Emergency Room by Commissioner Czernick and Captain Mowery.

  Chief Inspector Coughlin and the mayor, who was blowing his nose, watched her leave.

  “Get the sonofabitch who did this, Denny,” the mayor said.

  “Yes, sir,” Coughlin said, almost fervently. “We’ll get him.”

  The mayor and Chief Inspector Coughlin waited until Captain Mowery’s car had gone, and then left the Emergency Room.

  As the mayor’s Cadillac left the parking lot, it had to brake abruptly twice, as first a plain and battered Chevrolet, and then moments later a police car festooned with lights and sirens, turned off the street. Homicide, in the person of Lieutenant Louis Natali, and the Highway Patrol, in the person of Lieutenant Mike Sabara, had arrived.

  ****

  When Staff Inspector Peter Wohl drove into the Emergency entrance at Nazareth, five minutes later, he was not surprised to find three other police cars there, plus the Second District wagon. One of the cars, except that it was light blue, was identical to his. One was a well-worn green Chevrolet, and one was a black Ford.

  When he went inside, it was easy to assign the cars to the people there. The blue LTD belonged to Captain Charley Gaft of the Civil Disobedience Squad. New, unmarked cars worked their way down the hierarchy of the police department, first assigned to officers in the grades of inspector and above, and then turned over, when newer cars came in, to captains, who turned their cars over to lieutenants. Exceptions were made for staff inspectors and for some captains with unusual jobs, like Gaft’s assignment, who got new cars.

  Wohl wasn’t sure what the exact function of the Civil Disobedience Squad was. It was new, one of Taddeus Czernick’s ideas, and Gaft had been named as its first commander. Wohl thought that whatever it did, it was inaptly named (everything, from murder to spitting on the sidewalk, was really “civil disobedience”) and he wasn’t sure whether Gaft had been given the job because he was a bright officer, or whether it had been a tactful way of getting him out of his district.

  The well-worn, unmarked Chevrolet belonged to Lieutenant Louis Natali of Homicide, and the black Ford with the outsized high-speed tires and two extra shortwave antennae sticking up from the trunk deck was obviously that of Lieutenant Mike Sabara of the Highway Patrol. Now that Dutch was dead, Sabara, the ranking officer on the Highway Patrol, was, at least until a permanent decision was made, its commanding officer.

  Lieutenant Sabara’s face showed that he was surprised and not particularly happy to see Staff Inspector Wohl. He was a Lebanese with dark, acne-scarred skin. He was heavy, and short, a smart, tough cop. He was in uniform, and the leather jacket and puttees added to his menacing appearance.

  “Hello, Peter,” Captain Gaft said.

  “Charley,” Wohl said, and smiled at the others. “Mike. Lou.”

  They nodded and murmured, “Inspector.”

  “You just missed the mayor, the commissioner, and Chief Coughlin,” Captain Gaft said. “Plus, of course, poor Jeannie Moffitt.”

  The conversation was interrupted as Officers Foley and Mason rolled a cart with a sheet-covered body toward them.

  “Just a minute please,” Wohl said. “Where are Captain Moffitt’s personal things? And his pistol?”

  Natali tapped his briefcase.

  “What’s on your mind, Inspector?” Lieutenant Sabara asked.

  “Natali,” Wohl asked. “May I have a look, please?”

  “What does that mean?” Sabara asked.

  “It means I want me to have a look at what Dutch had in his pockets,” Wohl said.

  “Why?” Sabara pursued.

  “Because I want to, Lieutenant,” Wohl said.

  “It sounds as if you’re looking for something wrong,” Sabara said.

  “I don’t care what it sounds like, Mike,” Wohl said. “What it means is that I want to see what Dutch had in his pockets. Dutch and I were friends. I want to make sure he had nothing in his wallet that his wife shouldn’t see. Let me have it, Natali.”

  Natali opened the briefcase, took out several plastic envelopes, and laid them on a narrow table against the wall. Wohl picked up one of them, which held a wallet, keys, change, and other small items, dumped the contents on the table and went through them carefully. He found nothing that made a connection with Miss Louise Dutton. There were three phone numbers without names, one written on the back of a Strawbridge & Clothier furniture salesman’s business card, and two inside matchbooks.

  Wohl handed the card and the matchbooks to Natali.

  “I don’t suppose you’ve had the time to check those numbers out, Natali?” he said.

  “I was going to turn them over to the assigned detective,” Natali said. “But it wouldn’t be any trouble to do it now.”

  “Would you, please?” Wohl asked.

  Natali nodded and went looking for a phone.

  Wohl met Sabara’s eyes.

  “What about the bimbo, Peter?” he asked. “Is that what this is all about?”

  “What ‘bimbo,’ Mike?” Wohl replied, a hint of ice in his voice.

  And then he felt a cramp. He urgently had to move his bowels.

  “Excuse me,” he said, and went looking for a men’s room.

  He wondered if it was something he had eaten, or whether he had caught another goddamned flu bug, and then realized it was most probably a reaction to what had happened to Dutch at the Waikiki Diner.

  When he returned to the corridor, Lieutenant Natali was there, but the cart with Dutch Moffitt’s body on it was gone. Through the plate-glass door Wohl saw the wagon men loading it into the wagon.

  “The furniture salesman’s number is his home phone,” Lieutenant Natali reported. “One of the others is the rectory of St. Aloysius, and the last one is a pay phone in 30th Street Station.”

  Wohl nodded and picked up another of the plastic bags. In it was a Smith & Wesson Model 36, five-shot “Chief’s Special.” There were also four fired cartridge casings in the bag.

  “Just four casings?” Wohl asked. Natali looked at Captain Gaft before replying. “That’s all that was in it, Inspector,” he said. “I removed those from Captain Moffitt’s weapon at the scene.” Wohl met his eyes.

  There was no question in Wohl’s mind that he was lying. There had been a fifth, unfired cartridge, and it was probably in Natali’s pocket, or Mike Sabara’s. Thirty minutes from now, if it wasn’t already, it would be in the Delaware, or the Schuylkill.

  The Philadelphia Police Department prescribed the weaponry with which its officers would be armed. Uniformed personnel were issued Smith & Wesson Model 10 “Military & Police” six-shot revolvers, chambered to fire the .38 Special cartridge through a four-inch barrel. Detectives were issued Colt “Detective Special” six-shot revolvers, also chambered for the .38 Special cartridge, which have two-inch barrels. They are smaller, and thus more readily concealable, weapons.

  Senior officers, officers on plainclothes duty, and off-duty policemen were permitted to carry whatever pistol they wished, either their issue weapon, or one they had purchased with their own money, provided it was chambered for the .38 Special cartridge. Those who purchased their own weapons usually bought the Colt “Detective Special” or the Smith & Wesson Model 36 “Chiefs Special,” a five-shot, two-inch-barrel revolver, or the Smith & Wesson Model 37, which was an aluminum-framed version of the Chief’s Special. There were some Model 38’s around, “the Bodyguard,” a variation of the Chiefs Special which encloses the hammer in a shroud.

  All the Smith & Wesson snub-noses were slightly smaller, and thus slightly more concealable, than the Colts. Aside from that, Colt revolvers for all practical purposes differed from the Smith & Wessons only in that their cylin
ders revolved clockwise and the S&W’s counterclockwise. And there were some Ruger revolvers coming into use, and even recently, some Colt and S&W copies made in Brazil.

  The regulation gave policemen no choice of ammunition. On duty or off, they would load their pistols with issue ammunition. The prescribed ammunition was the standard .38 Special cartridge, firing a round-nose lead bullet weighing 158 grains. Fired through a four-inch barrel at approximately 850 feet per second, it produces approximately 250 foot pounds of energy at the muzzle.

  The .38 Special cartridges made by Remington, Winchester, and Federal are virtually identical, and what brand of cartridges are issued by the Philadelphia Police Department depends on who among the three major manufacturers offered the best price when the annual bids were let.

  That particular cartridge is as old as the .38 Special pistol itself, dating back to the turn of the century. The U.S. Army found .38 Special cartridges inadequate to kill or immobilize the enemy, and turned to the .45 caliber automatic Colt pistol and cartridge long before the First World War.

  In 1937, the .357 Magnum cartridge was developed. Despite the name, the .38 barrel has a diameter of .357 inch, and the new round fired the same bullet as the .38 Special. The difference was that the .357 cartridge case was a few thousandths of an inch longer, so that it would not fit into a .38 Special chamber, and that it fired the same 158-grain bullet at about fourteen hundred feet per second, and produced about 845 foot pounds of energy, or more than three times that of the .38 Special.

  There was some hyperbole. The .357 Magnum would go through an automobile engine block as through a sheet of paper. It would fell an elephant with one shot. It would not; but it was, literally, three times as effective as a .38 Special in immobilizing people who were shot with it. It was, many policemen decided, the ideal police cartridge. There was only one thing wrong with it, as far as they were concerned: The heat generated when firing a lead bullet at the higher velocity was such that the outer surface of the bullet actually melted going down the barrel, leaving a thin coating of lead against the grooves and rifling. It was a bitch to get out, and unless you promptly got it out after firing, not only would it adversely affect accuracy, but it would cause the barrel to become rusted and pitted. That problem was solved with the introduction of the jacketed bullet, which encased a quarter of an inch at the rear of the bullet in a copper alloy cup. This essentially eliminated “leading,” and had another, bonus, characteristic. When the bullet hit something, the jacket kept the rear of the bullet together, which made the front of the bullet expand, causing a larger wound.

  The .357 Magnum cartridge was, as many civil libertarians promptly decided, far too awesome a tool of death to be put into the hands of the police. Ideally, the civil libertarians reasoned, firearms should be used only as a last resort, and then to wound the malefactor, preferably in the arm or shoulder, so that he could be brought to trial, and then sent to prison to be rehabilitated for return to society. If a societal misfit, venting his frustration at his inability to cope with a cruel world by robbing a bank, were shot in the shoulder with a .357, capable of felling an elephant with one shot, it would blow the shoulder off, and the societal misfit’s Constitutional entitlement to rehabilitation would be denied him.

  The civil libertarians of Philadelphia prevailed. Philadelphia police were flatly forbidden to arm themselves with the .357 Magnum, or any cartridge but the issued, 158-grain round-nose bullet .38 Special. To insure compliance, Philadelphia police were flatly forbidden to carry a pistol that would even chamber the .357 Magnum. Doing so was cause for disciplinary action.

  But it was possible for a skilled reloader to make, using .38 Special casings, cartridges that produced velocity and foot pounds of energy very close to those of the .357 Magnum, using jacketed .357 bullets. The trick was to put the right amount of gunpowder (Bull’s-eye powder was the usual choice) into the case, enough to increase velocity, but not too much, so that the cylinder would not let go when it was fired. The cartridges were tough on small (“J” Frame) Smith & Wesson snub noses, but you weren’t going to put a couple of hundred rounds through one.

  Just a cylinderful, when it was important.

  Captain Richard C. Moffitt was not only a skilled re-loader, but he had given Staff Inspector Peter Wohl a box of such cartridges.

  “Don’t tell anybody where you got these, Peter.”

  There was no question in Peter Wohl’s mind now that— when it was important, when the left ventricle of his aorta was already ruptured and his life’s blood was pumping away—Dutch Moffitt had fired four homemade hot .38’s at his assailant, and put her down.

  Neither was there any question in his mind that, when Lieutenant Natali had examined Dutch’s Chiefs Special at the Waikiki Diner, there had been one unfired cartridge in the cylinder, and that the bullet in that cartridge had been jacketed and hollow-pointed, as had been the bullets in the cartridges Dutch had given him, as were the cartridges in his own Smith & Wesson “Bodyguard.”

  It was possible that no one “would notice” that the bullets that would be removed from the body of Unknown White Female Suspect were jacketed. It was unlikely that anyone could have missed the hollow-nosed jacketed bullet in the unfired casing. There would have been trouble.

  “What about the female suspect?” Wohl asked. He could almost hear Natali’s relief that he hadn’t pressed him about a fifth cartridge.

  “She’s a junkie, Inspector,” Natali said. “I talked to Sergeant Hobbs, who’s at the Medical Examiner’s. He said they found needle marks all over her. I called Narcotics and they’re going to run people by over there, to see if they can identify her.”

  “Well, I don’t suppose there’s any point in hanging around here,” Wohl said.

  Both Lieutenant Sabara and Captain Gaft shook hands with him formally. They had been worried, Wohl knew. He had a reputation for being a straight arrow, and sometimes a prick. Lieutenant Natali just nodded at him.

  ****

  The van with Penny Bakersfield and the tape reached WCBL-TV fifteen minutes after Louise Dutton had walked in, trailed by two cops. There was time enough for News Director Leonard Cohen to get the story out of her, and to decide what he was going to do about it, before they put the tape up on a monitor, and he got a good look at it. It was even better than he hoped. There was a sequence, just long enough, thirty-odd seconds, for what he wanted. It showed Louise being put into her car, driven by a cop, and then following a police car out of the Waikiki Diner parking lot.

  Cohen edited it himself, down to twenty seconds exactly, and then he sat down at his typewriter and wrote the voice-over himself for Penny to read.

  “This is a special ‘Nine’s News’ bulletin. A Philadelphia police captain gave his life this afternoon foiling a holdup. ‘Nine’s News’ co-anchor Louise Dutton was an eyewitness. Full details on ‘Nine’s News’ at six.”

  He got the station manager into the control room, ran the tape for him, and with less trouble than he thought he would have, got him to agree to run the thirty-second spot during every hourly and half-hourly break until six. They would lose some advertising revenue, but what they had was what, in the olden days, was called a “scoop,” or an “exclusive.”

  And then he went to help Louise prepare her segment for the six o’clock news. He thought he would have to write that, too, but she had already written it, and handed it to him when he walked up to her. It was good stuff. She had looked kind of flaky, which was understandable, considering the cop had been killed in front of her, but she was apparently tougher than she looked.

  And when they made her up, and lit the set and put her on camera, she got it right the first time. Perfect. Her voice had started to break twice, but she hadn’t lost it, and the teary eyes were perfect.

  “You want me to do that again?” she asked. “I broke up.”

  “It’s fine the way it is,” Leonard Cohen said; and he went to her, and repeated that she had done fine, and that what he wanted—what he
insisted—was for her to go home and have a stiff drink, and if she needed anything to call.

  Then he sat down at the typewriter again, and personally wrote what he was going to have Barton Ellison open with, fading to a shot of Louise getting into her car with the cop to go home.

  “Louise Dutton isn’t here with me tonight,” Barton Ellison would solemnly intone. “She wanted to be. But she was an eyewitness to the gun-battle in which Philadelphia Highway Patrol Captain Richard C. Moffitt gave his life this afternoon. She knows the face of the bandit that is, at this moment, still free. Louise Dutton is under police protection. Full details, and exclusive ‘Nine’s News at Six’ film after these messages.”

  What I should have done, Leonard Cohen thought, was go to Hollywood and be a press agent for the movies.

  ****

  Stanford Fortner Wells III did not own either a newspaper or a radio or television station in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. It might be closed on Sunday, as the comedian had quipped, but it was the nation’s fourth largest city. It was also a “good market,” in media parlance, which meant that newspapers and radio and television stations were making a lot of money. Since Wells had been in a position to be interested, none of the City of Brotherly Love’s five newspapers (the Bulletin, the Ledger, the Herald, the Inquirer, and the Daily News) had come on the market, and only one of its five television stations had. The price they wanted for that didn’t seem worth it.

  When Louise called and told him she had accepted an offer to go with WCBL-TV in Philadelphia, therefore, there was not one of his people instantly available on the scene to deliver a report on what his daughter would encounter when she got there.

  In his neat, methodical hand, “Fort” Wells prepared a list of the questions he wished answered, and handed it to his secretary to be telexed to the publisher of the Binghamton, New York, Call-Chronicle, not because it was the newspaper he owned closest to Philadelphia (it was not) but because he knew that Karl Kruger knew his relationship to Louise Dutton. Karl would handle the last question on the list (“Availability adequate, convenient to WCBL-TV, safe, apartment for single, 25-year-old female”) with both discretion and awareness of that question’s especial importance to the chairman of the board and chief executive officer of Wells Newspapers, Inc.