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“What have you got, Bailey?”
“You working the job, Detective?”
“The assigned detective’s not here. But I’m working it.”
“What I got may not be anything, but I thought it was worth telling you.”
“What have you got, Bailey?”
“A fellow named James Howard Leslie—he’s a junkie, done some time for burglary—was burning garbage in his backyard.”
“And?” Detective Kramer asked, somewhat impatiently.
“I put the fire out, and then I got a good look at what he was burning. I don’t know…”
“What, Bailey?”
“There was a photograph of Officer Kellog and his wife, on their wedding day, in his garbage.”
There was a moment’s silence, and then Detective Kramer asked, very carefully: “How do you know it was Officer Kellog?”
“There’s a sign on the wall behind him. ‘Good Luck Officer Kellog From the Seventeenth District.’ And I remembered his picture in the newspapers.”
“Where’s the picture now?”
“I left it there.”
“Where’s the guy…Leslie, you said?”
“In my car. I arrested him for setting an unlawful fire.”
“Where are you?”
“Behind his house. In the alley. The 1900 block of Sedgwick Street.”
“I’ll be there in ten minutes. Don’t let him out of your sight, don’t let anybody near where you found the picture, and don’t touch nothing you don’t have to.”
Bailey hung up the telephone, then called the Thirty-ninth District and asked for a supervisor to meet him at the scene.
“What have you got, Bailey?” the Corporal inquired.
“A garbage burner,” Bailey said, and hung up.
He nodded at Leslie’s Puerto Rican woman, then walked back through the yard to his car and got behind the wheel.
“Hey, Officer, what’s happening?” Mr. Leslie inquired, sliding forward with some difficulty on the seat to get closer to the fucking cop.
“You under arrest, Speed,” Officer Bailey replied. “For setting a fire in your backyard.”
“Oh, Jesus Christ, man! For burning some fucking garbage?”
“If I was you, I’d just sit there and close my mouth,” Officer Bailey replied.
As a general rule of thumb, unless the visitor to the Mayor’s office was someone really important (“really important” being defined as someone of the ilk of a United States Senator, the Governor of the State of Pennsylvania, or the Cardinal Archbishop of the Diocese of Philadelphia) Mrs. Annette Cossino, the Mayor’s secretary, would escort the visitor to the door of the Mayor’s office, push it open, and say, “The Mayor will see you now.”The visitor would then be able to see the Mayor deep in concentration, dealing with some document of great importance laid out on his massive desk. After a moment or two, the Mayor would glance toward the door, look surprised and apologetic, and rise to his feet.
“Please excuse me,” he would say. “Sometimes…”
Visitors would rarely fail to be impressed with the fact that the Mayor was tearing himself from Something Important to receive them.
