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“I got to pay off the Commissioner,” O’Hara said. “And I thought I might take a look at the Overnights.”
The Overnights were reports from the various districts and other bureaucratic divisions of the Philadelphia Police Department of out-of-the-ordinary police activity overnight furnished to senior police officials for their general information.
They were internal Police Department correspondence not made available to the public or the press. Mr. Michael J. O’Hara, as a civilian, and especially as a journalist, was not entitled to be privy to them.
But Mickey O’Hara enjoyed a special relationship with the Police Department. He was not in their pocket, devoting his journalistic skills to puff pieces, but on the other hand, neither did he spend all of his time looking for stories that made the Department or its officers look bad. Most important, he could be trusted. If he was told something off the record, it stayed off the record.
“Come on in, then,” Chief Matdorf said. “I’ll even buy you a cup of coffee.”
He touched O’Hara’s arm and they started toward the rear door of the building. There is a front entrance, overlooking Metropolitan Hospital, but it is normally locked. The rear door opens onto a small foyer. Just inside is a uniformed police officer sitting behind a heavy plate-glass window controlling access to the building’s lobby with a solenoid switch.
To the right is a corridor leading past the Bail Clerk’s Office and the Arraignment Room to the Holding Room. The Municipal Judge’s Court is a small, somewhat narrow room separated from the corridor by heavy glass. There are seats for spectators in the corridor. Farther to the right is the entrance to the Holding Room, in effect a holding prison, to which prisoners brought from the various police districts and initially locked up in cells in the basement are brought to be booked and to face a Municipal Court Judge, who sets bail. Those prisoners for whom bail is denied, or who can’t make it, are moved, males to the Detention Center, females to the House of Correction.
When the corporal on duty behind the plate-glass window saw Chief Matdorf, he activated the solenoid, the lock buzzed, and Matdorf pushed the door open and waved O’Hara through it ahead of him into the lobby of the PAB, where the general civilian populace is not allowed.
They walked toward the elevators, past the wall display of photographs of police officers who have been killed in the line of duty. As they approached the elevator, the door opened and discharged a half-dozen people, among them Chief Inspector Dennis V. Coughlin and Inspector Peter Wohl.
“Hey, whaddaya say, Mickey?” Chief Coughlin greeted him with a smile, and offered his hand.
“Hello, Mick,” Wohl said, as he offered his hand first to O’Hara and then to Chief Matdorf.
Mickey O’Hara had not earned the admiration of his peers, or the Pulitzer Prize, by being wholly immune to the significance of body language.
Despite that warm greeting, neither of these two is at all happy to see me. That means that something is going on that they would rather not tell me about just now. And what are the two of them doing together this early in the morning?
“What’s up, Mickey?” Chief Coughlin asked.
“I hoped maybe you would tell me.”
Chief Coughlin shrugged, indicating nothing.
Bullshit, Denny.
“I thought I’d take a look at the Overnights,” O’Hara said.
“They’re on my desk, Mick. Tell Veronica I said you could have a look,” Coughlin said.
Veronica Casey was Coughlin’s secretary.
“Thanks, Denny,” O’Hara said. “Good to see you. And you too, Peter.”
They shook hands again. Chief Coughlin and Inspector Wohl walked out the rear entrance. Mickey got on the elevator with Chief Matdorf and his driver.
“Jesus, I forgot something in the car,” O’Hara said, and got off the elevator.
He went through the rear door in time to see Coughlin and Wohl walking with what he judged to be unusual speed toward their cars. He stayed just inside the door until they were both in their cars and moving, then went out and quickly got behind the wheel of his Buick and followed them out of the parking lot.
Those two are going somewhere interesting together, somewhere they hope I won’t show up.
He turned on all three of the shortwave receivers mounted under the dashboard. The receivers in Mickey O’Hara’s car were the best the Bulletin’s money could buy. They were each capable of being switched to receive any of the ten different frequencies utilized by the Police Department.
One of these was the universal band (called the J-Band) to which every police vehicle had access. Each of Philadelphia’s seven police divisions had its own radio frequency. An eighth freq
uency (the H-Band) was assigned for the exclusive use of investigative units (detectives’ cars, and those assigned to Narcotics, Intelligence, Organized Crime, etcetera). And since Mayor Jerry Carlucci had gotten all that lovely ACT Grant money from Congress, there was a new special band (the W-Band) for the exclusive use of Special Operations (including the Highway Patrol).
Ordinary police cars were limited to the use of two bands, the Universal J Band, and either one of the division frequencies, or the H (Detective) Band.
Mickey switched one of his radios to the J (Universal) Band, the second to the H (Detective) Band, and the third to the W (Special Operations) Band, a little smugly deciding that if anything interesting was happening, or if Wohl and Coughlin wanted to talk to each other, the odds were that it would come over one of the three.
