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“Well, it was fucking great, Mickey,” Payne said, his tone bitter, “until Philadelphia raised its ugly head down here.”
“Whoa! What do you mean?” He paused in thought, then added, “This wouldn’t have to do with the McCain girl, would it?”
Payne was quiet for a long moment, then said, “What do you know about that?”
“Screw you, buddy. The question is, What do you know about it?”
“Not a damn thing. I wish I did, though.”
“Oh, come on! Matty—”
“I’m out of the loop, Mickey. Even Jason Washington won’t tell me what the hell is going on. All I know is what Daffy Nesbitt told Chad: that it was a home invasion. Amanda has been trying to reach Maggie for the last hour.”
“The Black Buddha—the best homicide detective on the East Coast—is working a home invasion case? I don’t buy it.”
“I agree. And I didn’t say that. Because I don’t know. I just got off the phone with him. For whatever reason, he says I can’t ask about it.”
“That’s interesting.”
Payne grunted. “That’s one way to put it. All I know for sure is that it’s starting to screw up what began as an amazing trip down here.” He paused, then added, “Why are you playing journalist? You’re supposed to be the boss now.”
“I am the boss. But once a journalist, always a journalist, Matty. Write that down. It’s in my blood to chase a good story, just as it’s in your blood to chase bad guys. And when the home of a scion of a Philly family is firebombed and she’s missing, I’m personally going to cover the story.”
“Did you say firebombed?”
“Yeah. The accelerant was gasoline. One of the guys in on the crime scene—you can guess who—quietly told me Molotov cocktails.”
“No shit . . .”
“And I’ve got the scoop on whose house it is because my so-called competition hasn’t figured that out. It’s listed on the property records under a generic named trust, and neighbors aren’t talking to the media for fear they might be next. Old Lady McDougal just had three—count ’em, three—new dead bolts put on her front door. She said she wouldn’t have opened her door if she hadn’t known I was ‘a nice laddie.’ So, I know it’s Maggie’s, and I like Maggie and want to help.”
“How do you know her?”
“I can’t believe you just asked that. I know damn near everyone. It’s my job.”
Matt grunted again. “Point taken. So, how?”
“About a year ago she called me about my CPS stories, and said because of Mary’s House she wanted to continue our talks. . . .”
—
When Michael J. O’Hara had been the lead investigative reporter at The Philadelphia Bulletin, he wrote “Follow the Money,” a series of articles that blew open the City of Philadelphia Department of Human Services. O’Hara had spent months digging, and uncovered gross incompetence and graft. His front-page reports led to a wholesale revision of the department, including the resignation of long-entrenched top administrators.
It also won O’Hara a Pulitzer Prize for public service.
Curiously, his winning the prestigious award had been the beginning of the end of O’Hara’s long career in newspapers.
The owners of the Bulletin had put their public relations flacks to work overtime, boasting that the Pulitzer proved their newspaper offered the highest caliber of reporting anywhere. Mickey’s redheaded mug was plastered on the sides of Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority buses and practically every billboard in town. But all that—and the perception of the PR having gone to O’Hara’s head—had created more than a little animosity among certain colleagues in the newsroom.
A great deal of the friction was the result of petty jealousy on the part of the managing editor, Roscoe G. Kennedy, who took enormous pride in having earned a master’s degree from the University of Missouri School of Journalism. Kennedy knew that O’Hara was equally proud of having, as Mickey put it, attended the School of Hard Knocks.
Mickey’s first job with the Bulletin was at age twelve, when he pedaled his rusty bicycle on a West Philly newspaper route, slinging copies of the afternoon edition at row house after row house.
By the time Mickey was sixteen, one of his best buddies at West Catholic High School convinced him to add a sideline to his route—running numbers slips for Francesco “Frankie the Gut” Guttermo.
That had worked out reasonably well, until Monsignor Dooley, who had made absolutely clear that he would not tolerate any immoral act, caught Mickey with the slips at school. The monsignor offered to go lenient on him if Mickey would confess his sins—and assist the monsignor in cleansing the school of the unholy filth that was gambling.
Mickey, embracing the code of silence that was omertà, refused to rat out his buddy. And he damn sure knew better than to even mutter the name Frankie the Gut.
