AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“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.
“So what are you going to do today?”
“I got court,” Charley replied. “Which means I get off at four.”
“I told you, they’re paying me double-time.”
“How come?”
“Because it’s less than twenty-four hours since my last overtime tour. I got overtime yesterday too.”
“You’re not getting enough sleep,” Charley said.
“So tonight, after I meet you in the FOP at seven-fifteen, and we have dinner, I go to bed early.”
The Fraternal Order of Police, on Spring Garden Street, was just a couple of minutes walk from Hahnemann Hospital on North Broad Street in downtown Philadelphia.
“Yeah,” he said. “This isn’t a hell of a lot of fun, is it?”
“Most people are broke when they get married, and have to go in debt. We won’t be.”
“To hell with it. Let’s get married and go in debt.”
She laughed and leaned over and kissed him again.
They had breakfast in the medical staff cafeteria at Temple Hospital. The food was good and reasonable and there was a place to park the Volkswagen. As long as she was wearing a nurse’s uniform and her R.N. pin, she could eat there. When she was in regular clothes, for some reason, they wouldn’t let her do that.
Charley sometimes felt a little uncomfortable when he was in his Highway uniform and they ate there. He had the feeling that some of the medical personnel had started believing the bullshit the Philadelphia Ledger had been printing about the cops generally, and Highway specifically. The Ledger had really been on Highway’s ass, with that “Carlucci’s Commandos” and “Gestapo” bullshit, so it wasn’t really surprising. People believe what they read.
He thought that if he was really a Highway guy, maybe he wouldn’t be so sensitive about it. Nobody in the world knew it but Margaret, but the truth was, he didn’t like Highway. What he really wanted to be was a detective.
If I was in here in plainclothes, nobody would give me a second look; they would think I was a doctor, or a pill salesman, or something.
When they finished breakfast, Charley got in the Volkswagen and drove to Highway headquarters at Bustleton and Bowler Streets in Northeast Philadelphia.
There, he met his partner, Police Officer Gerald “Gerry” D. Quinn, who was thirty-three, had been on the job eleven years and in Highway for five years.
The very first day he and Quinn had gone on patrol together, they had stopped a ’72 Buick for speeding. It had turned out to be stolen. The case was finally coming up for trial today.
They stood roll call, and then drew a car, Highway 22, a year-old Chevrolet with 97,000-odd miles on its odometer. If by some miracle the trial went off as scheduled, they could then go on patrol. They drove downtown to City Hall at the intersection of Broad and Market Streets and parked just outside the southeast corner entrance.
Just off the southeast stairwell is Court Attendance, an administrative unit of the Police Department, which tries to keep track of which police officer is to testify at what time in which courtroom. They checked in there, learned where they were supposed to go to testify, and then went to the stairwell itself, where a blind concessionaire brewed what most police agreed was the worst coffee in the Delaware River Basin. They shot the bull with other cops for a while, and then went upstairs to their courtroom to wait for their case to be called.
The day began for Staff Inspector Peter Frederick Wohl at about the same time, a few minutes before six, as it had for Officer Charles McFadden.
Wohl was wakened by the ringing of one of the two telephones on the bedside table in his bedroom in his apartment. His over-a-six-car-garage apartment had once been the chauffeur’s quarters of a turn-of-the-century mansion on the 800 block of Norwood Street in Chestnut Hill. The mansion itself had been divided into luxury apartments.
“Inspector Wohl,” he said, somewhat formally. The phone that had been ringing was the official phone, paid for by the Police Department.
