The Witness (Badge of Honor 4)

TRANSFERS:

EFFECTIVE 1201 AM JANUARY 3, 1974

LIEUTENANT ANTHONY S. LUCCI: REASSIGNED FROM SPECIAL OPERATIONS DIVISION TO MAJOR CRIMES DIVISION AS COMMANDING OFFICER AUTO SQUAD.

LIEUTENANT JOHN J. MALONE: REASSIGNED FROM AUTO SQUAD, MAJOR CRIMES DIVISION TO SPECIAL OPERATIONS DIVISION.

TADDEUS CZERNICH

POLICE COMMISSIONER

TWO

The day began for Police Officer Charles McFadden at five minutes before six A.M. when Mrs. Agnes McFadden, his mother, went into his bedroom, on the second floor of a row house on Fitzgerald Street, near Methodist Hospital in South Philadelphia, snapped on the lights, walked to his bed, and rather loudly announced, “Almost six. Rise and shine, Charley.”

Officer McFadden, who the previous Tuesday had celebrated his twenty-third birthday, was large-boned and broad-shouldered and weighed 214 pounds.

He rolled over on his back, shielded his eyes from the light, and replied, “Jesus, already?”

“Watch your mouth, mister,” his mother said sharply, and then added, “if you didn’t keep that poor girl out until all hours, you just might not have such trouble getting up in the morning.”

With a visible effort Charley McFadden hauled himself into a sitting position and swung his feet out of bed and onto the floor.

“Mom, Margaret didn’t get off work until half past ten.”

“Then you should have brought her straight home, instead of keeping her up all night,” Mrs. McFadden said, and then marched out of the room.

Margaret McCarthy, R.N., a slight, blue-eyed, redheaded young woman, was the niece of Bob and Patricia McCarthy, who lived across Fitzgerald Street and had been in the neighborhood, and good friends, just about as long as the McFaddens, and that meant even before Charley had been born.

Margaret and Charley had known each other as kids, before her parents had moved to Baltimore, and Agnes remembered seeing her after that, on holidays and whenever else her family had visited, but she and Charley had met again only a couple of months ago.

Margaret had gone through the Nurse Training Program and gotten her R.N. at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, and now she was enrolled at Temple University to get a college degree.

As smart as Margaret was, Agnes McFadden wouldn’t have been at all surprised if she wound up as a doctor.

Anyway, Charley and Margaret had bumped into each other and started going out, and there was no question in Agnes’s mind that it was only a matter of time until Charley popped the question. She wouldn’t have been surprised if they were waiting for one of two things, Margaret finishing her first year at Temple, or Charley taking the examination for detective. Or maybe both.

Agnes and Rudy McFadden approved of the match. She wasn’t sure that the McCarthys were all that enthusiastic. Bob McCarthy was the sort of man who held a grudge, and Agnes thought he was still sore at Charley for taking out the windshield of his brand-new Ford with a golf ball, playing stickball in the street, when Charley was still a kid.

And Agnes knew full well all the nasty things Bob McCarthy had had to say about Charley when Charley had first gone on the cops and they’d made him work with the drug people.

The truth was, Agnes realized, that Charley did look and act like a bum when that was going on. He wore a beard and filthy, dirty clothes, and he was out all night, every night, and he’d hardly ever gone to church.

Anybody but Bob McCarthy, Agnes often thought, would have put that all behind him, and maybe even apologized, after Charley had caught the drug addict who had shot Captain Moffitt, and gotten a citation from Police Commissioner Czernich himself, and they’d let him wear a uniform like a regular cop. But people like Bob McCarthy, Agnes understood, found it very hard to admit they were wrong.

Charley McFadden took a quick shower and shave and splashed himself liberally with Bahama Lime aftershave, a bottle of which had been Margaret’s birthday gift to him.

He put on fresh underwear, went to the head of the stairs, and called down, “Don’t make no breakfast, Mom. We’re going out.”

“I already made it,” she said. “Why don’t you bring her over here? There’s more than enough.”

“We’re meeting some people,” Charley replied.

That was not true. But he wanted to have breakfast with Margaret alone, not with his mother hanging over her shoulder.

There was a snort of derision from the kitchen.

Charley went into his room and put on his uniform. There was a blue shirt and a black necktie (a pretied tie that clipped on; regular ties that went around the neck could be grabbed), breeches, motorcycle boots, a leather jacket, a Sam Browne belt from which were suspended a holster for the service revolver, a handcuff case, and an attachment that held a nightstick. Finally, bending his knees to get a good look at himself in the mirror over his chest of drawers, Charley put squarely in place on his head a leather-brimmed cap. There was no crown stiffener.