“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 Thirty-fifth 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.
“An ounce and a half!.” 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 the Philadelphia 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 the Bulletin 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’t know that for sure.
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 Brother
ly Love, and at least a dozen people, including, lately, a couple of females, who covered crime. The best crime coverage was in the Bulletin, and the best reporter on the Bulletin 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 Southwest 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 the Philadelphia 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 for Phildalephia 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 the Baltimore Sun and the Washington 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.
What had happened was that Casimir “the Bull” Bolinski had come to town a month before, and Mickey had gone to see him at the Warwick. Mickey and the Bull went way back, all the way to the third grade at Saint Stephen’s Parochial School, at Tenth and Butler Streets where Roosevelt Boulevard turns into the Northeast Extension. So far back that he still called the Bull “Casimir” and the Bull called him “Michael.”
Sister Mary Magdalene, principal of Saint Stephen’s, had had this thing about nicknames. Your name was what they had given you when you were baptized, and since baptism was a sacrament, sacred before God, you used that name, not one you had made up yourself. Sister Mary Magdalene had enforced her theologic views among her charges with her eighteen-inch, steel-reinforced ruler, which she had carried around with her, and used either like a cattle prod, jabbing it in young sinners’ ribs, or like a riding crop, cracked smartly across young bottoms.
Casimir Bolinski had gone on to graduate from West Catholic High School, largely because when Monsignor Dooley had caught Michael J. O’Hara with a pocketful of Frankie the Gut Guttermo’s numbers slips, Mickey had refused to name his accomplice in that illegal and immoral enterprise.
Casimir Bolinski had gone on to Notre Dame, where he was an all-American tackle, and then on to a sixteen-year career with the Green Bay Packers. His professional football career ended only when the chief of orthopedic surgical services at the University of Illinois Medical College informed Mrs. Bolinski that unless she could dissuade her husband from returning to the gridiron she should start looking for a wheelchair in which she could roll him around for the rest of his life.
It was then, shortly after Bull Bolinski’s tearful farewell-to-professional-football news conference, that his secret, carefully kept from his teammates, coaches and the management of the Green Bay Packers came out. Bull Bolinski was also Casimir J. Bolinski, D. Juris (Cum Laude), the University of Southern California, admitted to the California, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Illinois, and New York bars, and admitted to practice before the Supreme Court of the United States of America.
He had not, as was popularly believed, spent his off seasons on the West Coast drinking beer on the beach and making babies with Mrs. Bolinski. And neither was Mrs. Antoinette Bolinski quite what most people on the Packers thought her to be, that is just a pretty, good li’l old broad with a spectacular set of knockers who kept the Bull on a pretty short leash.
Mrs. Bolinski had been a schoolteacher when she met her husband. She had been somewhat reluctantly escorting a group of sixth-graders on a field trip to watch the Packers in spring training. She held the view at the time that professional football was sort of a reincarnation of the Roman games, a blood sport with few if any redeeming societal benefits.
The first time she saw Casimir, he had tackled a fellow player with such skill and enthusiasm that there were three people kneeling over the ball carrier, trying to restore him to consciousness and feeling for broken bones. Casimir, who had taken off his helmet, was standing there, chewing what she later learned was Old Mule rough cut mentholated chewing tobacco, watching.
Antoinette had never before in her entire (twenty-three-year) life seen such tender compassion in a man’s eyes, or experienced an emotional reaction such as that she felt when Casimir glanced over at her, spat, smiled shyly, winked, and said, “Hiya, honey!”
By the time, two months later, Mr. and Mrs. Casimir Bolinski returned from their three-day honeymoon in the Conrad Hilton Hotel in Chicago, she had him off Old Mule rough cut mentholated chewing tobacco and onto mint Life Savers, and already thinking about his—now their—future, which, pre-Antoinette, had been a vague notion that when he couldn’t play anymore, he would get a job as a coach or maybe get a bar and grill or something.
Two days after the management of the Green Bay Packers had stood before the lights of the television cameras of all three networks and given Bull Bolinski a solid gold Rolex diver’s watch, a set of golf clubs, a Buick convertible and announced that the number he had worn so proudly on his jersey for sixteen years would be retired, they received a letter on the engraved crisp bond stationery of Heidenheimer & Bolinski, Counselors At Law, advising them that the firm now represented Messrs. J. Stanley Wozniski; Franklin D. R. Marshall; and Ezra J. Houghton, and would do so in the upcoming renegotiation of the contracts for their professional services, and to please communicate in the future directly with Mr. Bolinski in any and all matters thereto pertaining.
This was shortly followed by that legendary television interview with linebacker F. D. R. Marshall and quarterback E. J. Houghton, during which Mr. Marshall had said, “If t
he bleeping Packers don’t want to deal with the Bull, so far’s I’m concerned, they can shove that bleeping football up their bleep,” only to be chastised by Mr. Houghton, who said, “Shut up, FDR, you can’t talk dirty like that on the bleeping TV.”
So Mickey O’Hara was aware from the very beginning that the Bull had not only succeeded in getting a fair deal for his former teammates from the Packers, but had also, within a matter of a couple of years, become the most successful sports agent in the business, and grown rich in the process.
But it wasn’t until the Bull had come to town and Mickey had picked him up at the Warwick and they had driven into South Philadelphia for some real homemade Italian sausage and some really good lasagna that he even dreamed that it could have anything to do, however remotely, with him.
“Turn the fucking air conditioner on, Michael, why don’t you?” the Bull said to Mickey when they were no more than fifty yards from the Warwick.
“It’s broke,” Mickey had replied.
“What are you riding around in this piece of shit for anyway?” The Bull then looked around the car and warmed to the subject. “Jesus, this is really a goddamned junker, Michael.”
“Fuck you, Casimir. It’s reliable. And it’s paid for.”
“You always were a cheapskate,” the Bull said. “Life ain’t no rehearsal, Michael. Go buy yourself some decent wheels. You can afford it, for Christ’s sake. You ain’t even married.”
“Huh!” Mickey snorted. “That’s what you think.”
“What do they pay you, Michael?”
Mickey told him and the Bull laughed and said, “Bullshit,” and Mickey said, “That’s it. No crap, Casimir.”
“I’ll be goddamned, you mean it,” the Bull had said, genuinely surprised. Then he grew angry: “Why those cheap sonsofbitches!”
Three days later, the publisher of the Bulletin had received a letter on Heidenheimer & Bolinski stationery stating that since preliminary negotiations had failed to reach agreement on a satisfactory interim compensation schedule for Mr. Michael J. O’Hara’s professional services, to be in effect while a final contract could be agreed upon between the parties, Mr. O’Hara was forced, effective immediately, to withhold his professional services.
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