He squatted down behind the cash register. The fat guy slid into the banquette nearest to him on the right.
At 11:26, Officer Charlton entered the restaurant, holding his service pistol at his side. He glanced at the cashier’s station, saw the man crouching behind it, and took a half-dozen steps around the cashier’s station.
The guy at the cash register suddenly stood up, lunged at Officer Charlton, and wrapped his arms around him, preventing Officer Charlton from raising his pistol to fire it.
The fat guy jumped from the banquette, ran to them, shoved the muzzle of his pistol under Charlton’s “bulletproof” vest, and fired.
Officer Charlton stiffened, then went limp and fell to the floor. The guy who had been behind the cash register then stepped over Charlton’s body. Then he turned and fired twice at the body. Then he ran out of the restaurant onto South Broad Street after the fat guy.
After a moment, Amal al Zaid pushed himself off the wall and ran to the employees’ locker room.
Shit! Oh, fuck, I pissed in my pants!
In the employees’ locker room, he opened his locker and took his cellular telephone from his jacket, punched in 911, and when the voice said, “Police Radio?” he blurted: “This is the Roy Rogers restaurant at Broad and Snyder. Two black guys just shot the kitchen lady and a cop who walked in while they was robbing us.”
This call too, coincidentally, was answered by Miss Regis. And again her experience told her the call was legitimate.
“Sergeant!” she called, raising her voice just to get his attention, not to ask his permission. Then she threw the appropriate switch.
Three fast, short beeps, signifying an emergency message, were broadcast to every police radio in Philadelphia.
Miss Regis pressed the switch activating her microphone.
“Assist the officer, Broad and Snyder, inside the Roy Rogers, report of an officer shot. Assist the officer, Broad and Snyder, inside the Roy Rogers, report of an officer shot. This is a civilian by phone, we have officers responding to a previous call of a possible armed robbery at that location.”
TWO
The second vehicle to reach the Roy Rogers restaurant at South Broad and Snyder Streets in response to the first “possible armed robbery in progress” call over the F-Band was a new Buick Rendezvous CXL Sport Utility Vehicle, on the roof of which were three antennas capable of listening to police radio frequencies. A fourth antenna was mounted on the rear window, and just before getting close to Synder Street, the driver of the car switched off a flashing blue light with a magnetic base that he had put on the roof after hearing the call.
The driver, however, was not a sworn police officer of the Philadelphia police department, and-as had often been pointed out to him-using the flashing blue light on the roof to speed one’s way through traffic was in violation of at least four laws of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, ranging from violation of Paragraph 4912 of the Criminal Code of Pennsylvania-impersonation of a public official, such as a police officer-to violation of Paragraph 6504 of the Criminal Code-setting up a nuisance in public.
The Rendezvous itself, and all the expensive radios and scanners, were the property of the Philadelphia Bulletin, with whom the driver, Michael J. “Mickey” O’Hara, a wiry, curly-haired man in his late thirties, was professionally associated. The magnetic base flashing blue light was the property of the Philadelphia police department, having been removed by Mr. O’Hara from a wrecked and burned unmarked car, rendering him liable to charges of having violated one or more of Paragraphs 3921, 3924, and 3925 of the Criminal Code, which deal with the unlawful taking of property.
Mr. O’Hara’s association with the Bulletin went back twenty-one years, to his sixteenth year, when he was hired a
s a copyboy, shortly after having been expelled from West Catholic High School. Monsignor Dooley had caught Mickey with a pocketful of Francesco “Frankie the Gut” Guttermo’s numbers slips, and when Mickey had refused to name his accomplice in that illegal and immoral enterprise, the monsignor had given him the boot.
Mickey had immediately found a home in journalism, and had become a reporter-the Bulletin said “staff writer”- before he was old enough to vote. As he had risen in the Bulletin city room hierarchy, his remuneration had naturally increased. He had been perfectly happy with his relationship with the Bulletin and the compensation he was given until his childhood friend, Casimir Bolinski, had brought the subject up.
“Face it, Mickey, those bastards are screwing you,” Casimir had said when passing through Philadelphia to visit his parents.
It was more than an idle observation; it was a professional one. Because Mickey had refused to name him as his fellow numbers runner, Casimir, already known as “The Bull,” had graduated from West Catholic High, gone on to Notre Dame on a football scholarship, and from Notre Dame to the Green Bay Packers.
There, while his Packers teammates had spent their off seasons in various nonproductive if pleasant pursuits, Casimir had studied the law. He hadn’t wanted to, if the truth be known, but Mrs. Antoinette Bolinski, who weighed approximately one third as much as her husband, was a woman of great determination, and The Bull knew better than to argue with her.
To his surprise, Casimir liked the study of law, and immediately showed a flair for the business aspects of the profession. The day after the Packers-in an emotional ceremony- retired The Bull’s jersey, Casimir J. Bolinski, D. Juris, announced the opening of his law offices, in which he intended to deal with the relationships between professional athletes and their employers. He started, rather naturally, by representing professional football players, but as word spread throughout the world of sports about how successful The Bull had been in securing pay far beyond the expectations of the players, professionals from baseball, basketball, and even a number of jockeys-the creme de la creme, so to speak, of the world of sports-began to beat a path to his door.
“The way it is, Mickey,” Casimir had explained, “is when I first quit the game, the guys would come to see me and say ‘How they hanging, Bull? What’s this bullshit about you being a lawyer?’ and now they come in, shaved and all dressed up in suits, and say, ‘Thank you very much for seeing me, Dr. Bolinski.’”
Antoinette Bolinski had been thrilled to find out that D. Juris stood for “Doctor of Law,” and that she was thus entitled to refer to Casimir as “my husband, Dr. Bolinski.” She immediately began to do so. The phrase had a really classy ring to it, and if the other lawyers didn’t want to use the title, screw them.
As once the fabled defense of the Detroit Lions had crumpled before The Charging Bull in that never-to-be-forgotten 32-zilch game, the assembled legal counsel of the Bulletin gave way before Dr. Bolinski’s persuasive arguments that the few extra dollars they were going to have to spend on Mickey were nothing compared to the dollars they would lose in lost circulation if Mickey moved over to the Inquirer or the Daily News.
“Jesus, you’re dumb, Mickey,” Casimir had said later. “You’ve got the fucking Pulitzer, for Christ’s sake. You should have known that’s worth a whole lot of dead presidents’ pictures.”
As a result of the negotiations by Dr. Bolinski on behalf of Mr. O’Hara with the Bulletin, Mr. O’Hara’s compensation was quadrupled, and it was agreed that the Bulletin would provide Mr. O’Hara with a private office and an automobile of Mr. O’Hara’s choice, equipped as Mr. O’Hara wished; and that he would be reimbursed for all expenses incurred in his professional work, it being clearly understood this would involve a substantial amount of business entertainment.
With one exception, however-Mickey was the sole supporter of his widowed mother, and had been having a really hard time paying her tab at the Cobbs Creek Nursing Center amp; Retirement Home-his new affluence didn’t change his life much.