Men In Blue (Badge of Honor 1)

“He’ll be given a departmental funeral, of course, and at Saint Dominic’s. We hope the cardinal will be free to offer the mass. You would be welcome to come, of course.”

“Come? Of course, I’ll come.”

“I thought I had the duty to tell you,” Gertrude Moffitt said, and hung up.

Patricia Payne, her eyes full of tears, pushed the handset against her mouth.

“You old bitch!” she said bitterly, her voice on the edge of breaking.

Mrs. Newman’s eyebrows rose, but she said nothing.

****

When Karl and Christina Mauhfehrt, of Kreis Braunfels, Hesse-Kassel, debarked from the North German Lloyd Steamer Hanover in New York in the spring of 1876, Christina was heavy with child. They were processed through Ellis Island, where Karl told the Immigration and Naturalization officer, one Sean O’Mallory, that his name was Mauhfehrt and that he was an uhrmacher by trade. Inspector O’Mallory had been on the job long enough to know that an uhrmacher was a watchmaker, and he wrote that in the appropriate blank on the form. He had considerably more trouble with Mauhfehrt, and after a moment’s indecision entered “Moffitt” as the surname on the form, and “Charles” as the given name.

Charles and Christina Moffitt spent the next three days on the Lower East Side of New York, in a room in a dark, cold, and filthy “railroad” flat. On their fourth morning in the United States, they took the ferry across the Hudson River to Hoboken, New Jersey, where they boarded a train of the Pennsylvania Railroad. Three hours later they emerged from the Pennsylvania Station at Fifteenth and Market Streets in Philadelphia.

An enormous building was under construction before their eyes. Within a few days, Charles Moffitt was to learn that it would be the City Hall, and that it was intended to top it off with a statue of William Penn, an Englishman, for whom the state of Pennsylvania was named. Many years later, he was to learn that the design was patterned after a wing of the Louvre Palace in Paris, France.

He and Christina walked the cobblestone streets, and within a matter of hours found a room down by the river. He spent the next six days walking the streets, finding clock- and watchmakers and offering his services and being rejected. Finally, hired because he was young and large and strong, he found work at the City Hall construction site, as a carpenter’s helper, building and then tearing down and then building again the scaffolding up which the granite blocks for the City Hall were hauled.

Their first child, Anna, was born when they had been in Philadelphia two months. Their first son, Charles, Jr., was born almost to the day a year later. By then, he had enough English to converse in what probably should be called pidgin English with his Italian, Polish, and Irish co-workers, and had been promoted to a position which was de facto, but not de jure, foreman. He made, in other words, no more money than the men he supervised, and he was hired by the day, which meant that if he didn’t work, he didn’t get paid.

It was steady work, however, and it was enough for him to rent a flat in an old building on what was called Society Hill, not far from the run-down building in which the Constitution of the United States had been written.

And he picked up a little extra money fixing clocks for people he worked with, and in the neighborhood, but he came to understand that his dream of becoming a watchmaker with his own store in the United States just wasn’t going to happen.

When Charles, Jr. turned sixteen, in 1893, he was able to find work with his father, who by then was officially a foreman in the employ of Jos. Sullivan & Sons, Building Contractors. But by then, the job was coming to an end. The City Hall building itself was up, needing only interior completion. Italian master masons and stonecutters had that trade pretty well sewn up, and the Charles Moffitts, pere et fils, were construction carpenters, not stonemasons.

When Charles, Jr. was twenty-two, in 1899, he went off to the Spanish-American War, arriving in Cuba just before hostilities were over, and returning to Philadelphia a corporal of cavalry, and just in time to take advantage of the politicians’ fervor to do something for Philadelphia’s Heroic Soldier Boys.

Specifically, he was appointed to the police department, and assigned to the ninety-three-horse-strong mounted patrol, which had been formed just ten years previously. Officer Moffitt was on crowd-control duty on his horse when the City Hall was officially opened in 1901.

He had been a policeman four years when his father fell to his death from a wharf under construction into the Delaware River in 1903. He was at that time still living at home, and with his father gone, he had little choice but to continue to do so; there was not enough money to maintain two houses.

Nor did he take a wife, so long as his mother was alive, partly because of economics and partly because no woman would take him with his mother part of the bargain. Consequently, Charles Moffitt, Jr. married late in life, eighteen months after his mother had gone to her final reward.

He married a German Catholic woman, Gertrude Haffner, who some people said, although she was nearly twenty years younger than her husband, bore a remarkable resemblance to his mother, and certainly manifested the same kind of devout, strong-willed character.

He and Gertrude had two sons, John Xavier, born in 1924, and, as something of a surprise to both of them, Richard Charles, who came along eight years later in 1932.

Charles Moffitt was a sergeant when he retired from the mounted patrol of the police department in 1937 at the age of sixty. He lived to be seventy-two, despite at least two packages of cigarettes and at least two quarts of beer a day, finally passing of a cerebral hemorrhage in 1949. By then his son John was on the police force, and his son Richard about to graduate from high school.

****

Patricia Payne leaned her head against the wall and put her hand on the hook of the wall-mounted telephone, without realizing what she was doing.

A moment later, the phone rang again. Pat Payne handed the handset to Mrs. Newman.

“The Payne residence,” Mrs. Newman said, and then a moment later: “I’m not sure if Mrs. Payne is at home. I will inquire.”

She covered the mouthpiece with her hand.

“A gentleman who says he is Chief Inspector Coughlin of the Philadelphia Police Department,” Mrs. Newman said.

Patricia Payne finished blowing her nose, and then reached for the telephone.

“Hello, Denny,” Patricia Payne said. “I think I know why you’re calling.”