“Excuse me,” he said, and went looking for a men’s room.
He wondered if it was something he had eaten, or whether he had caught another goddamned flu bug, and then realized it was most probably a reaction to what had happened to Dutch at the Waikiki Diner.
When he returned to the corridor, Lieutenant Natali was there, but the cart with Dutch Moffitt’s body on it was gone. Through the plate-glass door Wohl saw the wagon men loading it into the wagon.
“The furniture salesman’s number is his home phone,” Lieutenant Natali reported. “One of the others is the rectory of St. Aloysius, and the last one is a pay phone in 30th Street Station.”
Wohl nodded and picked up another of the plastic bags. In it was a Smith & Wesson Model 36, five-shot “Chief’s Special.” There were also four fired cartridge casings in the bag.
“Just four casings?” Wohl asked. Natali looked at Captain Gaft before replying. “That’s all that was in it, Inspector,” he said. “I removed those from Captain Moffitt’s weapon at the scene.” Wohl met his eyes.
There was no question in Wohl’s mind that he was lying. There had been a fifth, unfired cartridge, and it was probably in Natali’s pocket, or Mike Sabara’s. Thirty minutes from now, if it wasn’t already, it would be in the Delaware, or the Schuylkill.
The Philadelphia Police Department prescribed the weaponry with which its officers would be armed. Uniformed personnel were issued Smith & Wesson Model 10 “Military & Police” six-shot revolvers, chambered to fire the .38 Special cartridge through a four-inch barrel. Detectives were issued Colt “Detective Special” six-shot revolvers, also chambered for the .38 Special cartridge, which have two-inch barrels. They are smaller, and thus more readily concealable, weapons.
Senior officers, officers on plainclothes duty, and off-duty policemen were permitted to carry whatever pistol they wished, either their issue weapon, or one they had purchased with their own money, provided it was chambered for the .38 Special cartridge. Those who purchased their own weapons usually bought the Colt “Detective Special” or the Smith & Wesson Model 36 “Chiefs Special,” a five-shot, two-inch-barrel revolver, or the Smith & Wesson Model 37, which was an aluminum-framed version of the Chief’s Special. There were some Model 38’s around, “the Bodyguard,” a variation of the Chiefs Special which encloses the hammer in a shroud.
All the Smith & Wesson snub-noses were slightly smaller, and thus slightly more concealable, than the Colts. Aside from that, Colt revolvers for all practical purposes differed from the Smith & Wessons only in that their cylin
ders revolved clockwise and the S&W’s counterclockwise. And there were some Ruger revolvers coming into use, and even recently, some Colt and S&W copies made in Brazil.
The regulation gave policemen no choice of ammunition. On duty or off, they would load their pistols with issue ammunition. The prescribed ammunition was the standard .38 Special cartridge, firing a round-nose lead bullet weighing 158 grains. Fired through a four-inch barrel at approximately 850 feet per second, it produces approximately 250 foot pounds of energy at the muzzle.
The .38 Special cartridges made by Remington, Winchester, and Federal are virtually identical, and what brand of cartridges are issued by the Philadelphia Police Department depends on who among the three major manufacturers offered the best price when the annual bids were let.
That particular cartridge is as old as the .38 Special pistol itself, dating back to the turn of the century. The U.S. Army found .38 Special cartridges inadequate to kill or immobilize the enemy, and turned to the .45 caliber automatic Colt pistol and cartridge long before the First World War.
In 1937, the .357 Magnum cartridge was developed. Despite the name, the .38 barrel has a diameter of .357 inch, and the new round fired the same bullet as the .38 Special. The difference was that the .357 cartridge case was a few thousandths of an inch longer, so that it would not fit into a .38 Special chamber, and that it fired the same 158-grain bullet at about fourteen hundred feet per second, and produced about 845 foot pounds of energy, or more than three times that of the .38 Special.
There was some hyperbole. The .357 Magnum would go through an automobile engine block as through a sheet of paper. It would fell an elephant with one shot. It would not; but it was, literally, three times as effective as a .38 Special in immobilizing people who were shot with it. It was, many policemen decided, the ideal police cartridge. There was only one thing wrong with it, as far as they were concerned: The heat generated when firing a lead bullet at the higher velocity was such that the outer surface of the bullet actually melted going down the barrel, leaving a thin coating of lead against the grooves and rifling. It was a bitch to get out, and unless you promptly got it out after firing, not only would it adversely affect accuracy, but it would cause the barrel to become rusted and pitted. That problem was solved with the introduction of the jacketed bullet, which encased a quarter of an inch at the rear of the bullet in a copper alloy cup. This essentially eliminated “leading,” and had another, bonus, characteristic. When the bullet hit something, the jacket kept the rear of the bullet together, which made the front of the bullet expand, causing a larger wound.
The .357 Magnum cartridge was, as many civil libertarians promptly decided, far too awesome a tool of death to be put into the hands of the police. Ideally, the civil libertarians reasoned, firearms should be used only as a last resort, and then to wound the malefactor, preferably in the arm or shoulder, so that he could be brought to trial, and then sent to prison to be rehabilitated for return to society. If a societal misfit, venting his frustration at his inability to cope with a cruel world by robbing a bank, were shot in the shoulder with a .357, capable of felling an elephant with one shot, it would blow the shoulder off, and the societal misfit’s Constitutional entitlement to rehabilitation would be denied him.
The civil libertarians of Philadelphia prevailed. Philadelphia police were flatly forbidden to arm themselves with the .357 Magnum, or any cartridge but the issued, 158-grain round-nose bullet .38 Special. To insure compliance, Philadelphia police were flatly forbidden to carry a pistol that would even chamber the .357 Magnum. Doing so was cause for disciplinary action.
But it was possible for a skilled reloader to make, using .38 Special casings, cartridges that produced velocity and foot pounds of energy very close to those of the .357 Magnum, using jacketed .357 bullets. The trick was to put the right amount of gunpowder (Bull’s-eye powder was the usual choice) into the case, enough to increase velocity, but not too much, so that the cylinder would not let go when it was fired. The cartridges were tough on small (“J” Frame) Smith & Wesson snub noses, but you weren’t going to put a couple of hundred rounds through one.
Just a cylinderful, when it was important.
Captain Richard C. Moffitt was not only a skilled re-loader, but he had given Staff Inspector Peter Wohl a box of such cartridges.
“Don’t tell anybody where you got these, Peter.”
There was no question in Peter Wohl’s mind now that— when it was important, when the left ventricle of his aorta was already ruptured and his life’s blood was pumping away—Dutch Moffitt had fired four homemade hot .38’s at his assailant, and put her down.
Neither was there any question in his mind that, when Lieutenant Natali had examined Dutch’s Chiefs Special at the Waikiki Diner, there had been one unfired cartridge in the cylinder, and that the bullet in that cartridge had been jacketed and hollow-pointed, as had been the bullets in the cartridges Dutch had given him, as were the cartridges in his own Smith & Wesson “Bodyguard.”
It was possible that no one “would notice” that the bullets that would be removed from the body of Unknown White Female Suspect were jacketed. It was unlikely that anyone could have missed the hollow-nosed jacketed bullet in the unfired casing. There would have been trouble.
“What about the female suspect?” Wohl asked. He could almost hear Natali’s relief that he hadn’t pressed him about a fifth cartridge.
“She’s a junkie, Inspector,” Natali said. “I talked to Sergeant Hobbs, who’s at the Medical Examiner’s. He said they found needle marks all over her. I called Narcotics and they’re going to run people by over there, to see if they can identify her.”
“Well, I don’t suppose there’s any point in hanging around here,” Wohl said.
Both Lieutenant Sabara and Captain Gaft shook hands with him formally. They had been worried, Wohl knew. He had a reputation for being a straight arrow, and sometimes a prick. Lieutenant Natali just nodded at him.
****