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“Yes, sir,” Dye said.
“Whose suite is this?” Wells asked.
Fengler and Kruger looked at each other and shrugged, and smiled.
“Well, find out. And then see if you can turn the other one in on a room for Dick,” Wells said. “Make sure he stays here in the hotel, in any case.”
Then he walked quickly among them, shook their hands, and left the suite.
****
There was a Ford pulling away from the front door of WCBL-TV when the limousine arrived. The limousine took that place.
Wells walked up to the receptionist.
“My name is Stanford Wells,” he said. “I would like to see Miss Louise Dutton.”
The name Stanford Wells meant nothing whatever to the receptionist, but she thought that the nicely dressed man standing before her didn’t look like a kook.
“Does Miss Dutton expect you?” she asked with a smile.
“No, but I bet if you tell her her father is out here, she’ll come out and get me.”
“Oh, I’m so sorry,” the receptionist said. “You just missed her! I’m surprised you didn’t see her. She just this minute left.”
“Do you have any idea where she went?”
“No,” the receptionist said. “But she was with Inspector Wohl, if that’s any help.”
“Thank you very much,” Stanford Fortner Wells III said, and went out and got back in the limousine. He fished in his pockets and then swore.
“Something wrong, sir?” the chauffeur asked.
“Take me back to the hotel. I left my daughter’s address on the goddamned dresser.”
****
Mickey O’Hara sat virtually motionless for three minutes before the computer terminal on his desk in the city room of the Philadelphia Bulletin. The only thing that moved was his tongue behind his lower lip.
Then, all of a sudden, his bushy eyebrows rose, his eyes lit up, his lips reflected satisfaction, and his fingers began to fly over the keys. He had been searching for his lead, and he had found it.
SLUG: Fried Thug
By Michael J. O'Hara
Gerald Vincent Gallagher, 24, was electrocuted and dismembered at 4:28 this afternoon, ending a massive, citywide, twenty-four-hour manhunt by eight thousand Philadelphia policemen.
Gallagher, of a West Lindley Avenue address, had been sought by police on murder charges since he eluded capture following a foiled robbery at the Waikiki Diner on Roosevelt Boulevard yesterday afternoon. Highway Patrol Captain Richard C. “Dutch” Moffitt happened to be in the restaurant, in civilian clothes, with WCBL-TV Anchorwoman Louise Dutton. Police say Captain Moffitt was shot to death in a gun battle with Dorothy Ann Schmeltzer, whom police say was Gallagher's accomplice, when he attempted to arrest Gallagher.
At 4:24 p.m. Charles McFadden, a 22-year-old Narcotics plainclothesman, spotted Gallagher, at the Bridge & Pratt Streets Terminal in Northeast Philadelphia. Gallagher attempted escape by running down a narrow workman's platform alongside the elevated tracks toward the Margaret-Orthodox Station. Just as McFadden caught up with him, he slipped, fell to the tracks, touched the third rail; and moments later was run over by four cars of a northbound elevated train.
Mickey O’Hara stopped typing, looked at the screen, and read what he had written. The thoughtful look came back on his face. He typed MORETOCOME MORETOCOME, then punched the send key.
Then he stood up and walked across the city room to the city editor’s desk, and then stepped behind it. When the city editor was finished with what he was doing, he looked up and over his shoulder at Mickey O’Hara.
“Punch up ‘fried thug,’ “ Mickey said.
The city editor did so, by pressing keys on one of his terminals that called up the story from the central computer memory and displayed it on his monitor.
