Special Operations (Badge of Honor 2)

He turned to the girl with the large dark eyes.

“Your boyfriends are going to jail,” he said. “First, they’re going to the District, and then they’ll be taken downtown to Central lockup. When they get out, ask them what it was like.”

Pekach found Officers Alexandro Gres-Narino and Thomas L. Coogan.

“If you can fit me into your busy schedule, I would like a moment of your time at half-past three tomorrow in my office,” he said.

“Yes, sir,” they said, almost in unison.

Pekach took one more look at the girl with the large dark eyes. There were tears running down her cheeks.

“Thank you,” she said, barely audibly.

Captain Dave Pekach then walked to the worn-out Buick, coaxed the engine to life, and drove home.

At five minutes after nine the next morning, Mickey O’Hara again pulled his battered Chevrolet Impala to the curb in front of the Bellevue-Stratford Hotel by the NO PARKING AT ANY TIME TOW AWAY ZONE sign. He was not worried about a ticket. There was about as much chance a police officer would cite him for illegal parking, much less summon a police tow truck to haul Mickey O’Hara’s car away, as there was for a white hat to slap a ticket on his Honor, Mayor Jerry Carlucci’s mayoral Cadillac limousine.

There were perhaps a couple of dozen police officers among the eight thousand or so cops on the force who would not recognize the battered, antennae-festooned Chevrolet as belonging to Mr. Mickey O’Hara, of the editorial staff of the Philadelphia Bulletin. The others, from Commissioner Taddeus Czernick to the most recent graduates of the Police Academy, if they saw Mickey O’Hara climb out of his illegally parked vehicle, would wave cheerfully at him, or, if they were close enough, offer their hands, and more than likely say, “Hey, Mickey, how’s it going? What’s going on?”

It was generally conceded that Mickey O’Hara knew more of what was going on at any given moment, in the area of interesting crime, than the entire staff of the Police Radio Room on the second floor of the Roundhouse. Equally important, Mickey O’Hara was nearly universally regarded as a good guy, a friend of the cops, someone who understood their problems, someone who would put it in the paper the way it had really gone down. Mickey O’Hara, in other words, was accustomed to ignoring NO PARKING signs.

But today, when he got out of his car, Mickey looked at the sign, and read it, and for a moment actually considered getting back in, and taking the car someplace to park it legally. The cold truth was that right now he was not a police reporter. The Bull could call it “withholding professional services” all day and all night, but the truth of the matter was that Mickey O’Hara was out of work. If you didn’t have a job, and nobody was going to hand you a paycheck, you were, ergo sum, out of work.

Mickey decided against moving the car someplace legal. That would have been tantamount to an admission of defeat. He didn’t know that the Bulletin was going to tell him, more accurately tell his agent, to “go fuck yourselves, we don’t need him.” That struck Mickey as the most likely probability in the circumstances, but he didn’t know that for sure.

He had hoped to have the issue resolved, one way or the other, last night. But the Bull’s plane had been late, so that hadn’t happened. It had been pretty goddamned depressing, and he had woken up, with a minor hangover, rather proud of himself for not, after he’d drained the last bottle of Ortleib’s, having gone out and really tied one on.

Mickey straightened his shoulders and marched resolutely toward the revolving door giving access to the lobby of the Bellevue-Stratford. There was nothing to really worry about, he told himself. For one thing, he was the undisputed king of his trade in Philadelphia. There were four daily newspapers in the City of Brother

ly Love, and at least a dozen people, including, lately, a couple of females, who covered crime. The best crime coverage was in the Bulletin, and the best reporter on the Bulletin was Michael J. O’Hara, even if most of the other reporters, including both women, had master’s degrees in journalism from places like Columbia and Missouri.

Mickey himself had no college degree. For that matter, he didn’t even have a high school diploma. He had begun his career, as a copy boy, in the days when reporters typed their stories on battered typewriters, and then held it over their head, bellowing “copy” until a copy boy came to carry it to the city desk.

Mickey had been expelled from West Catholic High School in midterm of his junior year. The offenses alleged involved intoxicants, tobacco, and so far as Monsignor John F. Dooley, the principal, was concerned, incontrovertible proof that Michael J. O’Hara had been running numbers to the janitorial staff and student body on behalf of one Francisco Guttermo, who, it was correctly alleged, operated one of the most successful numbers routes in Southwest Philly.

It had been Monsignor Dooley’s intention to teach Mickey something about the wages of sin by banishing him in shame from the company of his classmates for, say, three weeks, and then permitting him to return, chastened, to the halls of academe.

The day after he was expelled, Mickey spotted a sign, crudely lettered, thumbtacked to the door of the Philadelphia Daily News, which in those days occupied a run-down building on Arch Street, way up by the Schuylkill River. The sign read, simply, COPY BOY WANTED.

Mickey had no idea what a copy boy was expected to do, but in the belief that it couldn’t be any worse than his other options, becoming a stock boy in an Acme Supermarket, or an office boy somewhere, he went inside and upstairs to the second floor and applied for the position.

James T. “Spike” Dolan, the City Editor of the Daily News, saw in young Mickey O’Hara a kindred soul and hired him. Within hours Mickey realized that he had found his niche in life. He never went back to West Catholic High School, although many years later, in a reversal of roles in which he found himself the interviewee for a reporter for Phildalephia Magazine, he gave West Catholic High, specifically the nearly three years of Latin he had been force-fed there, credit for his skill with words. The interview came after Mickey had been awarded the Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting. The series of stories had dealt with chicanery involving the bail bond system then in effect.

He told himself too that not only was he the best police reporter in town, but that his agent was one of the best agents there was, period. He didn’t do too well with this, because there were a couple of things wrong with it, and he knew it. For one thing, newspaper reporters don’t have agents. Movie stars have agents, and television personalities have agents, and sports figures have agents, but not newspaper police beat reporters.

Police reporters don’t have contracts for their professional services. Police reporters are employed at the pleasure of the city editor, and subject to getting canned whenever it pleases the city editor, or whenever they displease the city editor. Mickey, who had been fired at least once from every newspaper in Philadelphia, plus the Baltimore Sun and the Washington Post during his journalistic career, knew that from experience. And police reporters don’t make the kind of money his agent had assured him he would get him, or kiss his ass at Broad and Market at high noon.

What had happened was that Casimir “the Bull” Bolinski had come to town a month before, and Mickey had gone to see him at the Warwick. Mickey and the Bull went way back, all the way to the third grade at Saint Stephen’s Parochial School, at Tenth and Butler Streets where Roosevelt Boulevard turns into the Northeast Extension. So far back that he still called the Bull “Casimir” and the Bull called him “Michael.”

Sister Mary Magdalene, principal of Saint Stephen’s, had had this thing about nicknames. Your name was what they had given you when you were baptized, and since baptism was a sacrament, sacred before God, you used that name, not one you had made up yourself. Sister Mary Magdalene had enforced her theologic views among her charges with her eighteen-inch, steel-reinforced ruler, which she had carried around with her, and used either like a cattle prod, jabbing it in young sinners’ ribs, or like a riding crop, cracked smartly across young bottoms.

Casimir Bolinski had gone on to graduate from West Catholic High School, largely because when Monsignor Dooley had caught Michael J. O’Hara with a pocketful of Frankie the Gut Guttermo’s numbers slips, Mickey had refused to name his accomplice in that illegal and immoral enterprise.

Casimir Bolinski had gone on to Notre Dame, where he was an all-American tackle, and then on to a sixteen-year career with the Green Bay Packers. His professional football career ended only when the chief of orthopedic surgical services at the University of Illinois Medical College informed Mrs. Bolinski that unless she could dissuade her husband from returning to the gridiron she should start looking for a wheelchair in which she could roll him around for the rest of his life.

It was then, shortly after Bull Bolinski’s tearful farewell-to-professional-football news conference, that his secret, carefully kept from his teammates, coaches and the management of the Green Bay Packers came out. Bull Bolinski was also Casimir J. Bolinski, D. Juris (Cum Laude), the University of Southern California, admitted to the California, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Illinois, and New York bars, and admitted to practice before the Supreme Court of the United States of America.

He had not, as was popularly believed, spent his off seasons on the West Coast drinking beer on the beach and making babies with Mrs. Bolinski. And neither was Mrs. Antoinette Bolinski quite what most people on the Packers thought her to be, that is just a pretty, good li’l old broad with a spectacular set of knockers who kept the Bull on a pretty short leash.