AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“DA-1 to C-1.”
“Go.”
“Can you tell the commissioner that DA-1 is en route to the Roundhouse, and would like him to be there if he has the time?”
There was a thirty-second delay, which Detective Unger had correctly presumed was how long it took to relay the message to the commissioner in the backseat and get a response.
“DA-1, the commissioner will be there in thirty minutes.”
Commissioner Mariani nodded at Deputy Commissioner Coughlin and Chief of Detectives Lowenstein, and sat down in Coughlin’s chair, left vacant for him at the head of the table.
“I didn’t hear anything on the radio,” he said. “What’s going on?”
“We’ve positively identified one of the doers in the Roy Rogers job,” Coughlin said. “And have a pretty good idea who the other one is. He fits the description, he’s the other guy’s cousin, and he’s been in trouble with the doer before.”
“Good. You could have told me that on the telephone. Who are they?”
“Two young guys from the Paschall Homes Housing Project, ” Coughlin said. “You know, Seventy-second and Elm-wood in southwest Philly?”
Mariani nodded.
“Lawrence John Porter, twenty, the doer, the one we’ve been calling the ‘fat guy,’ and Ralph David Williams, nineteen, ” Coughlin went on. “Neither has ever been in bad trouble before.”
“How’d you find them?”
“Tony Harris went to Harrisburg. The State Police’ve got a new machine, and they could lift more points from the print than Candelle could here,” Lowenstein said.
“Good points?”
“It wouldn’t matter if they were, Ralph,” Eileen said.
“Excuse me?”
“A federal judge refused to admit fingerprints in a trial-a trial here-a couple of months back.”
“I heard something about that.”
“I’m not saying it’ll happen, but we do have judges here who like to make law by following federal precedent. If the prints are inadmissible, all you’ve got is witnesses…”
“Something wrong with that, Eileen?”
“All the defense has to do is create reasonable doubt in the mind of one juror,” she said. “And we all know the jury pool always contains a number of people who are simply unable to believe that any black kid ever did anything wrong.”
“You’re not trying to tell me you think these two cop-killers are going to walk?”
“I’m trying to tell you, Ralph, that it’s a possibility, which will become a certainty if we make any mistakes from here on in.”
“God damn it!”
“That’s the bad news, Ralph,” Coughlin said. “The good news might, I say might, be that we can find the murder weapon… It’s a revolver and we have a bullet-”
“And can tie the weapon to either one of these two,” Eileen interjected. “Credibly tie it to either one of them.”
“Or really get lucky, and once they’re arrested, they confess. They’re just a couple of young punks,” Coughlin went on.
“Which any public defender six months out of law school will contend was obtained by mental duress…” Eileen said.
“Jesus,” Lowenst
