Part 28 (1/2)

Gerald Vincent Gallagher stopped running, and turned around and grabbed the railing beside the walkway, and dropped to his knees.

”I give up,” he said. ”For Christ's sake, don't shoot me!”

Officer Charley McFadden could understand what he said, even the way he said it puffing and out of breath.

Unable to speak himself, he walked up the walkway, heaving with the exertion.

And then he raised his arm, the left one, without the pistol, and pointed down the track, and tried to find his voice. What he wanted to say was ”Watch out, there's a train coming!”

He couldn't find his voice, but Gerald Vincent Gallagher took his meaning. He looked over his shoulder at the approaching train. And tried to get to his feet, so that he would be able to hold on to the railing good and tight as the train pa.s.sed.

And he slipped.

And he fell onto the tracks.

And he put his hand out as a reflex motion, to break his fall, and his wrist found the third rail and Gerald Vincent Gallagher fried.

And then the train came, and all four cars rolled over him.

When Officer Jesus Martinez came down the walkway, he found Officer Charley McFadden bent over the railing, sick white in the face, and covered with vomitus.

Michael J. ”Mickey” O'Hara had worked, at one time or another, for all the newspapers in Philadelphia, and had ventured as far afield as New York City and Was.h.i.+ngton, DC.

He was an ”old-time” reporter, and even something of a legend, although he was just past forty. He looked older than forty. Mickey liked a drop of the grape whenever he could get his hands on one, and that was the usual reason his employment had been terminated; for in his cups Mickey O'Hara was p.r.o.ne not only to describing the character flaws and ancestry of his superiors in picaresque profanity worthy of a cavalry sergeant, but also, depending on the imagined level of provocation and the amount of alcohol in his system, to punch them out.

But on the other hand, Mickey O'Hara was, when off the sauce, one h.e.l.l of a reporter. He had what some believe to be the genetic Irish talent for storytelling. He could breathe life into a story that otherwise really wouldn't deserve repeating. He was also a master pract.i.tioner of his craft, which was journalism generally and the police beat specifically. His car was equipped with a very elaborate shortwave receiver permitting Mickey to listen in to police communications.

Mickey had come to know a lot of cops in twenty years, and although he was technically not a member of either organization, if there was an affair of the Emerald Society or the Fraternal Order of Police and Mickey O'Hara was not there, people wondered, with concern, if he was sick or something.

Mickey liked most cops and most cops liked Mickey. Mickey, however, considered few cops above the grade of sergeant as cops. The cant of the law-enforcement community gets in the way here. All policemen are police officers, which means they are executing an office for the government.

There is a rank structure in the police department, paralleling that of the army, even to the insignia of rank. So far as Mickey was concerned, anybody in the rank of lieutenant or higher (a white-s.h.i.+rt) was not really a cop, but a bra.s.s hat, a member of the establishment. There were exceptions to this, of course. Mickey was very fond of Chief Inspector Matt Lowenstein, for example, and had used his considerable influence with the managing editor to see that when Lowenstein's boys were bar mitzvahed, those socioreligious events had been prominently featured in the paper.

And he had liked Dutch Moffitt. There were a few others, a captain here, a lieutenant there, whom Mickey liked, even including Staff Inspector Peter Wohl, but by and large he considered anyone who wore a white s.h.i.+rt with his uniform to be much like the officers he had known and actively disliked in the army.

He liked the guys-the ordinary patrolmen and the corporals and detectives and sergeants-on the street, and they liked him. He got their pictures in the paper, with their names spelled right, and he never violated a confidence.

Mickey O'Hara had just gone to work when he heard the call, ”man with a gun at the El terminal at Frankford and Pratt.'' That is to say, he had just left Mulvaney's Tap Room at Tabor and Rising Sun avenues, where he had had two beers and n.o.bly refused the offer of a third, and gotten in his car to drive downtown, where he planned to begin the day by dropping by the Ninth District police station.

Almost immediately, there were other calls. Another Fifteenth District car was ordered to the Margaret-Orthodox Station, which was the next station, headed downtown, from Bridge and Pratt Streets, and then right after that came an ”a.s.sist officer” call, and then a warning that plainclothes officers were on the scene. Finally, there was a call for the rescue squad and the fire department.

Mickey O'Hara decided that whatever was happening between the Pratt & Bridge Streets Terminal and the Margaret-Orthodox Station might be worthy of his professional attention.

He went down to Roosevelt Boulevard, turned left, and entered the center lane. He drove fast, but not recklessly, weaving skillfully through traffic, cursing and being cursed in turn by the drivers of more slowly moving vehicles. He went around the bend at Friends' Hospital, slipped into the outside lane, and made a right turn, through a red light, onto Bridge Street.

When Mickey O'Hara got to the Bridge & Pratt Streets Terminal, he found a crowd of people who were being kept from going up the stairs to the El station by four or five cops under the supervision of a sergeant.

He caught the eye of the sergeant, winked, and shrugged his shoulders in a ”what's up?” gesture.

A moment later, the sergeant shouldered his way through the crowd.

”Undercover Narcotics guy spotted the kid who shot Dutch Moffitt,” the sergeant said instead of a greeting when they shook hands. ”He took off down the tracks, with the undercover chasing him, and fell off the walkway, fried himself on the third rail, and then got himself run over by a train.”

”Jesus!” Mickey O'Hara said.

”They're still up there,” the sergeant said.

”Is there anyway I can get up there?” Mickey asked ”Watch out for the third rail, Mick,” the sergeant said

THIRTEEN.

Ward V. Fengler, who had three months before been named a partner of Mawson, Payne, Stockton, McAdoo & Lester (there were seventeen partners, in addition to the five senior partners), pushed open the gla.s.s door from the Butler Aviation waiting room at Philadelphia International Airport and walked onto the tarmac as the Bell Ranger helicopter touched down.

Fengler was very tall and very thin and, at thirty-two, already evidencing male pattern baldness. He had spent most of the day, from ten o'clock onward, waiting around the airport for Mr. Wells.

Stanford Fortner Wells III got out of the helicopter, and then turned to reach for his luggage. He was a small man, intense, graying, superbly tailored. The temple piece of a set of horn-rimmed gla.s.ses hung outside the pocket of his glen plaid suit.

”Mr. Wells, I'm Ward Fengler of Mawson, Payne, Stockton, McAdoo and Lester,” Fengler said. ”Colonel Mawson asked me to meet you.”

Wells examined him quickly but carefully and put out his hand.

”Sorry to have kept you waiting like this,” he said. ”First, we had to land in Newfoundland, and then when we got to New York, the G.o.dd.a.m.ned airport, I suppose predictably, was stacked to heaven's bas.e.m.e.nt.”

”I hope you had a good flight,” Fengler said.

”I hate airplanes,” Wells said, matter-of-factly.

”We have a car,” Fengler said. ”And Colonel Mawson has put you up in the Warwick. I hope that's all right.”

”Fine,” Wells said. ”Has Mawson talked to Kruger?”

”I don't know, sir.”

”The reason I asked is that someone is to meet me at the Warwick.”

”I don't know anything about that, sir.”

”Then maybe something is finally breaking right,” Wells said. ”The Warwick's fine.”

The only thing Stanford Fortner Wells III said on the ride downtown was to make the announcement that he used to come to Philadelphia when he was at Princeton.

”And I went from Philadelphia to Princeton,” Fengler said.

Wells grunted, and smiled.