The Witness

by W. E. B Griffin

  “Mom, Margaret didn’t get off work until half past ten.”

  “Then you should have brought her straight home, instead of keeping her up all night,” Mrs. McFadden said, and then marched out of the room.

  Margaret McCarthy, R.N., a slight, blue-eyed, redheaded young woman, was the niece of Bob and Patricia McCarthy, who lived across Fitzgerald Street and had been in the neighborhood, and good friends, just about as long as the McFaddens, and that meant even before Charley had been born.

  Margaret and Charley had known each other as kids, before her parents had moved to Baltimore, and Agnes remembered seeing her after that, on holidays and whenever else her family had visited, but she and Charley had met again only a couple of months ago.

  Margaret had gone through the Nurse Training Program and gotten her R.N. at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, and now she was enrolled at Temple University to get a college degree.

  As smart as Margaret was, Agnes McFadden wouldn’t have been at all surprised if she wound up as a doctor.

  Anyway, Charley and Margaret had bumped into each other and started going out, and there was no question in Agnes’s mind that it was only a matter of time until Charley popped the question. She wouldn’t have been surprised if they were waiting for one of two things, Margaret finishing her first year at Temple, or Charley taking the examination for detective. Or maybe both.

  Agnes and Rudy McFadden approved of the match. She wasn’t sure that the McCarthys were all that enthusiastic. Bob McCarthy was the sort of man who held a grudge, and Agnes thought he was still sore at Charley for taking out the windshield of his brand-new Ford with a golf ball, playing stickball in the street, when Charley was still a kid.

  And Agnes knew full well all the nasty things Bob McCarthy had had to say about Charley when Charley had first gone on the cops and they’d made him work with the drug people.

  The truth was, Agnes realized, that Charley did look and act like a bum when that was going on. He wore a beard and filthy, dirty clothes, and he was out all night, every night, and he’d hardly ever gone to church.

  Anybody but Bob McCarthy, Agnes often thought, would have put that all behind him, and maybe even apologized, after Charley had caught the drug addict who had shot Captain Moffitt, and gotten a citation from Police Commissioner Czernich himself, and they’d let him wear a uniform like a regular cop. But people like Bob McCarthy, Agnes understood, found it very hard to admit they were wrong.

  Charley McFadden took a quick shower and shave and splashed himself liberally with Bahama Lime aftershave, a bottle of which had been Margaret’s birthday gift to him.

  He put on fresh underwear, went to the head of the stairs, and called down, “Don’t make no breakfast, Mom. We’re going out.”

  “I already made it,” she said. “Why don’t you bring her over here? There’s more than enough.”

  “We’re meeting some people,” Charley replied.

  That was not true. But he wanted to have breakfast with Margaret alone, not with his mother hanging over her shoulder.

  There was a snort of derision from the kitchen.

  Charley went into his room and put on his uniform. There was a blue shirt and a black necktie (a pretied tie that clipped on; regular ties that went around the neck could be grabbed), breeches, motorcycle boots, a leather jacket, a Sam Browne belt from which were suspended a holster for the service revolver, a handcuff case, and an attachment that held a nightstick. Finally, bending his knees to get a good look at himself in the mirror over his chest of drawers, Charley put squarely in place on his head a leather-brimmed cap. There was no crown stiffener.

  This was the uniform of the Highway Patrol, which differed considerably from the uniform of ordinary police officers. They wore trousers and shoes, for example, not breeches and boots, and the crowns of their brimmed caps were stiffly erect.

  Highway Patrol was considered, especially by members of the Highway Patrol, as the elite unit of the Philadelphia Police Department.

  In the ordinary course of events, a rookie cop such as Officer McFadden (who had been a policeman not yet two years) would be either walking a footbeat or working a van in a district, hauling sick fat ladies down stairwells for transport to a hospital, or prisoners between where they were arrested and the district holding cell and between there and the Central Cell Room in the Roundhouse. He would not ordinarily be trusted to ride around in a district radio patrol car. He would be working under close supervision, learning the policeman’s profession. The one thing a rookie cop would almost certainly not be doing would be putting on a Highway Patrolman’s distinctive uniform.

  But two extraordinary things had happened to Officer Charles McFadden in his short police career. The first had been his assignment, right from the Academy, to the Narcotics Bureau.

  Narcotics had learned that one of the more effective—perhaps the most effective—means to deal with people who trafficked in proscribed drugs was to infiltrate, so to speak, the drug culture.

  This could not be accomplished, Narcotics had learned, by simply putting Narcotics Division police officers in plainclothes and sending them out onto the streets. The faces of Narcotics Division officers were known to the drug people. And bringing in officers from districts far from the major areas of drug activity and putting them in plainclothes didn’t work either. Even if the vendors of controlled substances did not recognize the face of an individual police officer, they seemed to be able to “make him” by observing the subtle mannerisms of dress, behavior, or speech that, apparently, almost all policemen with a couple of years on the job seem to manifest.

  There was only one solution, and somewhat reluctantly Narcotics turned to it. One or two young, brand-new police officers were selected from each class at the Police Academy and asked to volunteer for a plainclothes and/or undercover assignment with Narcotics.

  A cop with a week on the job (or, less often, just graduated-from-the-Academy rookie) was not going to be recognized on the street because he had not been on the street. Nor had he been a cop long enough to acquire a cop’s mannerisms.

  Few rookies, whose notions of police work were mostly acquired from television and the movies, refused such an opportunity to battle crime. When asked, Officer Charley McFadden had accepted immediately.

  Some, perhaps even most, such volunteers don’t work out when they actually go on the streets. The tension is too much for some. Others simply cannot physically stomach what they see in the course of their duties, and some just prove inept. They are then, if they hadn’t graduated from the Academy, sent back to finish their training, or, if they have graduated, sent to a district.

  Charley McFadden proved to be the exception. He was a good undercover Narc virtually from almost the first day, and got even better at it with experience, and after he had grown a beard, and come to look, in his mother’s description, “like a filthy bum.”

  After three months on the job, he was paired with Officer Jesus Martinez, a slight, intense Latino who had been on the job for six months longer than Charley, and had learned the mannerisms of a successful middle-level drug dealer to near perfection.

  They were an odd couple, the extra large Irishman and the barely over the height and weight minimums Latino. Behind their backs, they were known by their brother Narcotics Bureau officers as Mutt & Jeff, after the cartoon characters.

  But they were good at what they did, and not only their peers understood this. Their lieutenant at the time, Dave Pekach, led them to believe that if they kept up the good work, he would do his very best to keep them in Narcotics even when their identities had become known on the street.

  That was important. They didn’t tell the rookies at the time they were recruited, but what usually happened when undercover Narcs became, inevitably, known on the street was that they were reassigned to a district. There, they picked up their police career where it had been interrupted. That is to say they now got to work a wagon and haul sick fat ladies down narrow stairways and prisoners
down to Central Cell Room.

  The way to become a detective in the Philadelphia Police Department was not the way it was in the movies, where a smiling police commissioner handed a detective’s badge to the undercover rookie who had just made a really good arrest. In Philadelphia, it doesn’t matter if you catch Jack the Ripper with the knife in his hand, you wait until you have two years on the job, and then you take the examination for detective, and if you pass, when your number comes up, then, and only then, you get to be a detective.

  What Lieutenant Dave Pekach had offered them, instead of being sent to some damned district to work school crossings and turn off fire hydrants, was a chance to stay in Narcotics as plainclothes officers until they had their time in to take the detective exam.

  Charley and Jesus would have killed to convince Lieutenant Pekach what good undercover Narcs they were, what good plainclothes cops they could be, if that would keep them from going out to some damned district in uniform.

  And it almost came to that.

  Captain Richard F. Moffitt, off duty and in civilian clothing, had walked in on a robbery in progress in a diner on Roosevelt Boulevard.

  The doer, to Captain Moffitt’s experienced eye, was a strung-out junkie, a poor, skinny, dirty Irish kid who had somehow got hooked on the shit and was, with a thirty-dollar Saturday Night Special .22 revolver, trying to score enough money for a hit, or something to eat, or probably both.

  “I’m a police officer,” Captain Moffitt said gently. “Put the gun down, son, before somebody gets hurt.”

  The doer, subsequently identified as a poor, skinny Irish kid who had somehow gotten hooked on a pharmacist’s encyclopedia of controlled substances, and whose name was Gerald Vincent Gallagher, fired every .22 Long Rifle cartridge his pistol held at Captain Moffitt, and managed to hit him once.

  That was enough. The bullet ruptured an artery, and Captain Richard F. Moffitt died a minute or so later, slumped against the wall of the diner.

  The killing of any cop triggers a deep emotional response in every other policeman. And “Dutch” Moffitt was not an ordinary cop. He was a captain. He was the son of a cop. His brother had been a cop, and it was immediately recalled that the brother, a sergeant, had been shot to death while answering a silent alarm.

  And Captain Dutch Moffitt had been the commanding officer of Highway Patrol. Highway Patrol had been organized years before to do what its name implied. The first Highway Patrolmen had patrolled the highways throughout the city on motorcycles. The breeches, boots, and leather jackets of Highway Patrol motorcylists were still worn, although radio patrol cars now outnumbered motorcycles.

  Highway Patrol had become, beginning with the reign of Captain Jerry Carlucci (and later with the blessing of Inspector Carlucci, and Chief Inspector Carlucci, and Deputy Commissioner Carlucci, and Commissioner Carlucci, and now Mayor Carlucci), a special force.

  Although the Philadelphia Ledger, which did not approve of much that Mayor Carlucci did, was prone to refer to the Highway Patrol as “Carlucci’s Commandos” and even as his “Jackbooted Gestapo,” just about everyone else in Philadelphia recognized Highway Patrol and its officers, who rode two men to an RPC, and who did most of their patrolling in high-crime areas of the city, as something special.

  Getting into Highway was difficult. As a general rule of thumb, an officer had to have four or five years, good years, on the job. It helped to be about six feet and at least 175 pounds, and it helped if you had come to the attention of someone who was (or had been) a Highway supervisor—that is, a sergeant or better—and he had decided that you were a better cop than most. An assignment to Highway was seen by many as a good step to take if you wanted to rise above sergeant elsewhere in the Police Department.

  Every police officer in Philadelphia reacted emotionally to the murder of Captain Dutch Moffitt—If the bad guys can get away with shooting a cop, what’s next?—but it was taken as a personal affront by every man in Highway.

  The result was that eight thousand police officers, most especially including every member of the Highway Patrol, were searching for Gerald Vincent Gallagher.

  He was found by two rookie cops, working undercover in Narcotics, whose names were Charley McFadden and Jesus Martinez. And it wasn’t a question of just stumbling onto the dirty little scumbag, either. On their own time, not even getting overtime, they had staked out Pratt Street Terminal, where Charley McFadden had an idea the miserable pissant would eventually show up.

  And he had, and Charley and Jesus had chased the scumbag down the elevated tracks until Charles Vincent Gallagher had slipped, fallen onto the third rail, fried himself, and then been cut into many pieces under the wheels of a train.

  Once they’d gotten their pictures in the newspaper, of course, Jesus’s and Charley’s effectiveness as undercover Narcs came to an end. And at a very awkward time for them, as Lieutenant David Pekach, having been promoted to captain, had been transferred out of Narcotics, and his replacement, a real shit heel, in their judgment, immediately made it clear that he felt no obligation to honor Lieutenant Pekach’s implied promise to keep them in Narcotics in plainclothes if they did a good job on the job.

  They had, however, also come to the attention of Chief Inspector Dennis V. Coughlin, who was arguably the most influential of the seven chief inspectors in the Department. Denny Coughlin saw in Charley McFadden something of himself. In other words, a good, hardworking Irish Catholic lad from South Philadelphia who was obviously destined to be a better than average cop. And Coughlin knew that once a rookie had worked the streets undercover, he regarded being put back in uniform as a demotion.

  So he arranged for Officer McFadden to be assigned, temporarily, to the 12th District, in plainclothes, to work on an auto burglary detail. Chief Coughlin felt no such kinship for Officer Martinez—for one thing, the little Mexican didn’t look big enough to be a real cop, and for another, Coughlin was made vaguely uneasy by someone who had the same name as the Son of God himself—but fair was fair, and he arranged for Jesus Martinez to be similarly assigned.

  Then when Mayor Carlucci had set up Special Operations and given it to Peter Wohl, the problem of what to do with McFadden and Martinez was, as far as Denny Coughlin was concerned, solved. He sent them over to Special Operations. Peter Wohl was a smart cop; he’d figure out something useful for them to do.

  The subordination of Highway Patrol to the new Special Operations Division had been regarded by many, most, Highway guys as bullshit. It was wondered, aloud, why the mayor, who was a real Highway guy, had let the commissioner get away with it.

  Giving command of Special Operations (and thus, Highway) to Staff Inspector Peter Wohl made it even worse. Everybody knew what staff inspectors did. Not that locking up judges and city commissioners and other big shots like that on the take wasn’t important, but it wasn’t the same thing as being out on the street, one-on-one, with the worst scumbags in Philadelphia.

  Wohl seemed to prove what a Roundhouse asshole he was when he was reliably quoted as saying that anyone who willingly got on a motorcycle wasn’t playing with a full deck. Every Highway Patrolman had to go through extensive motorcycle training (“Wheel School”) and prove he could really ride a motorcycle, and they didn’t like some Roundhouse politically savvy supercop making fun of that.

  That was all bad enough, but what really pissed people off, the straw that broke the fucking camel’s back, so to speak, was Wohl’s probationary Highway Patrolman idea. Wohl said that he would approve the transfer into Highway of outstanding young cops who didn’t have four or five years on the job. He would put them to work under a Highway supervisor for six months. At any time during the six months, the supervisor could recommend, in writing, that the rookie be transferred out of Highway. But he had to give his reasons. In other words, if the rookie didn’t screw up, he was in. He would get himself sent to Wheel School and if he got through that, he could go buy himself a pair of boots, breeches, and a crushed-crown brimmed cap.

  T
he first two probationary Highway Patrolmen were Officers Jesus Martinez and Charles McFadden.

  Officer Charley McFadden pulled open the top left-hand drawer of his dresser and took his Smith & Wesson Military & Police .38 Special caliber service revolver from under a pile of Jockey shorts and slipped it into his holster.

  Then he went down the stairs two at a time.

  “See you later, Mom!” he called at the bottom.

  “Ask Margaret if she’d like to come to supper,” Agnes McFadden said. “If you can spare the time for your mother.”

  “I’ll ask,” Charley said, and went out the door.

  He ran across Fitzgerald Street, down two houses, and up the steps to the porch. The door opened as he got there.

  Margaret was wearing her nurse suit. Sometimes she did, and sometimes she didn’t. Charley wasn’t sure exactly how that worked, but he did know that she was a real knockout in her starched white uniform. Not that she wasn’t in regular clothes too, of course. But there was something about that white uniform that turned Charley on.

  “Hi!” she said.

  “Hi!”

  She stood on her toes and kissed him. Chastely, but on the lips.

  She had an armful of books.

  “How come the books?”

  “Classes in the morning,” she said. “Then I agreed to fill in at the emergency room from one to seven.”

  “I get off at four,” he said, disappointed.

  “I need the money,” she said, and then corrected herself. “We need the money. And I’m getting double-time.”

  They went down the stairs. Charley unlocked the door of his Volkswagen.

  “Good morning, Margaret!” Agnes McFadden called from the white marble steps in front of her door.

  “Morning, Mrs. McFadden.”

  “Why don’t you come to supper?”

  “I’d love to, but I can’t. I’m working. Can I have a rain-check?”

  “Yeah, sure.”

  Charley closed the door after her, and then went around the front and got behind the wheel.