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“You get a good look at him? Them?”
The young black guy nodded.
Carter went back into the dining room.
Mickey didn’t follow him. He took a picture of the young black guy, then held up his finger, signaling him not to go anywhere, and then took two pictures, different angles, of the body on the floor.
Then he slipped the digital camera into his pocket.
“What’s your name?” he asked.
“Amal al Zaid.”
“You want to spell that for me?” Mickey asked, and wrote it down, and then asked where he lived.
Then he asked Amal al Zaid what had happened, and had just about finished writing that down when three other police officers entered the kitchen-a lieutenant, a detective, and a uniform.
Lieutenant Stanley J. Wrigley was acquainted with Mr. O’Hara.
“Jesus Christ, Mickey, how did you get in here?” he asked.
“I got here before Highway,” Mickey replied. “The doers were two black guys. Carter put out a flash.”
“You have to get out of here, Mickey, you know that,” Lieutenant Wrigley said.
“Yeah.”
“Do me a favor,” Wrigley said. “Go out the back door. Otherwise the rest of the media will bitch you’re getting special treatment again.”
“Yeah, sure, Stan.”
“You get a pretty good look at the doers?” the detective asked.
“Not good. Two young black guys, one of them short and fat.”
“You told that to Carter?” Wrigley asked.
Mickey nodded.
“Thanks, Mick,” Wrigley said, and O’Hara went to the rear door of the kitchen and wen
t through it.
THREE
Twelve minutes later, Mickey O’Hara walked into his glass-walled office just off the city room of the Philadelphia Bulletin, adjusted the venetian blinds over the glass of the windows and doors so that he could not be seen from the city room, locked the door, and then sat down at his personal computer, switched it on, and waited for it to boot up.
He had two computers. One was tied into the Bulletin’s network, and the other was his personally. While he was waiting for his personal computer to boot up, he spun around in his chair and faced the Bulletin computer terminal keyboard and rapidly typed:
CEHold me space for the double murder at the Roy Rogers. I was there and may have pics. O’Hara
He read what he had typed, then pushed the Send key.
Then he spun around in his chair again and faced his own computer. This state-of-the-art device, which fell under the provisions of his contract for personal services with the Bulletin, requiring the Bulletin to provide him with “whatever electronic devices and other tools he considered necessary to the efficient performance of his duties,” was brand new. It had a twenty-one-inch liquid crystal diode color monitor, and provided more than a hundred different typefaces, each clearer and more legible than the single typeface available on the Bulletin’s computer terminals.
Mickey took his digital camera-another $1,200 electronic device he considered necessary for the performance of his duties-from his trouser pocket, carefully removed the memory chip, replaced it with another $79.95 64-megabyte memory chip, and shoved the chip he had removed into the mouth-it reminded him of a feeding goldfish-of a device connected to the keyboard of his computer.
He tapped some keys, which caused the JPG images on the memory chip to be transferred into his computer. The quick tapping of more keys brought the images up on the LCD monitor.
