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He knew Corporal Eddie Young.
“Tom Coogan, Eddie. How are you?”
“Can’t complain, Tom. What’s up?”
“Need a favor.”
“Try me. All I can say is ‘no.’”
“One of our guys, Jerry Kellog, you know him?”
“No, I don’t think so.”
“He lives at 300 West Luray Street. He’s supposed to be here. Our Sergeant is shitting a brick. Could you send somebody over to his house and see if he’s there and wake him up and tell him to get his ass over here? I’ve been trying to call him. His phone is off the hook. I think he’s probably sleeping one off.”
“Give me the address again and it’s done, and you owe me one.”
A nearly new Buick turned off Seventh Street and into the parking lot at the rear of the Police Administration Building of the City of Philadelphia. The driver, Mr. Michael J. O’Hara, a wiry, curly-haired man in his late thirties, made a quick sweep through the parking lot, found no parking spot he considered convenient enough, pulled to the curb directly in front of the rear entrance to the building, and got out.A young police officer who had been on the job just over a year, and assigned to duty at the PAB three days before, intercepted Mr. O’Hara as he headed toward the door.
“Excuse me, sir,” he said. “You can’t leave your car there.”
Mr. O’Hara smiled at what he considered the young officer’s rather charming naivete.
“It’s OK, son,” he said. “I’m Commissioner Czernich’s bookie.”
“Excuse me?” the young officer said, not quite believing what he heard.
“The Commissioner,” Mr. O’Hara went on, now enjoying himself, “put two bucks on a long shot. It paid a hundred ninety-eight eighty. When I come here to pay him off, he says I can park anywhere I want.”
The young officer’s uneasiness was made worse by the appearance of Chief Inspector Heinrich “Heine” Matdorf, Chief of Training for the Philadelphia Police Department, whom the young officer remembered very clearly from his days at the Police Academy. It was the first time the young officer had ever seen him smile.
“What did you tell him?” Chief Matdorf asked.
“I told him I was Czernich’s bookie.”
“Jesus Christ, Mickey!” Matdorf laughed, patting him on the back as he did so.
As the young police officer had begun to suspect, the driver of the Buick was not a bookmaker. Mr. Michael J. “Mickey” O’Hara was in fact a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter employed by the Philadelphia Bulletin. There was little question in the minds of his peers—and absolutely none in his own mind—that he was the best police reporter between Boston and Washington, and possibly in an even larger geographical area.
Mickey O’Hara extended his hand to Matdorf’s driver, a sergeant.
“How are you, Mr. O’Hara?” the Sergeant asked, a respectful tone in his voice.
“Heine,” O’Hara asked, “have you got enough pull around here to tell this fine young officer I can park here?”
“The minute he goes inside,” Chief Matdorf instructed the young officer, “let the air out of his tires.”
“Thanks a lot, Heine.”
“What’s going on, Mickey?”
“I hoped maybe you could tell me,” O’Hara said.
“So far as I know, not much. There was nothing on the radio.”
“I know,” O’Hara said.
“Going in, Mickey?” Matdorf asked.
