“Michael, I’m not going to tell you again,” Casimir said.
“You can’t talk to me like that, O’Hara!”
“I just did. What are you going to do about it?”
Mr. Michael J. O’Hara assumed a fighting crouch and cocked his fists.
Mr. Roscoe G. Kennedy rose to the challenge.
He threw a roundhouse right at Mr. O’Hara. Mr. O’Hara nimbly dodged the punch, feinted with his right, then punched Mr. Kennedy in the nose with his left, and then in the abdomen with his right.
Mr. Kennedy fell, doubled over, to the floor, taking with him the Bulletin’s computer terminal.
Casimir J. Bolinski, Esq., erupted from Mr. O’Hara’s $2,10 °Charles Eames chair, rushed across the office, wrapped his arms around Mr. O’Hara, and without much apparent effort carried him across the city room-past many members of the Bulletin staff-and into an elevator. Mrs. Bolinski followed them.
Mr. Kennedy regained his feet and sort of staggered to the door.
“You’re fired, you insane shanty Irish sonofabitch! Fired!” he shouted. “When I’m through with you, you won’t be able to get a job on the National Enquirer.”
Mrs. Bolinski stuck her tongue out at Mr. Kennedy.
> Ten minutes later, after an application of ice had stopped his nosebleed, Mr. Kennedy gave Mr. O’Hara’s latest-and as far as he was concerned, certainly last-contribution to the Bulletin some serious thought.
And then he called his assistant and told him to save space on page one, section one, copy to come, for a three-column pic, plus a four-hundred-word jump inside with three or four pics.
When Inspector Weisbach came into the Internal Affairs Unit Captain Daniel Kimberly was talking with Lieutenant McGuire and another man he sensed was a police officer. He didn’t see Payne.
Kimberly anticipated his question.
“I put Sergeant Payne in an interview room and asked him to wait,” Kimberly said. “Nothing else. And I called the FOP.”
“Good,” Weisbach said.
“Who called back just a moment ago to inform me that Mr. Armando C. Giacomo is en route here to represent Sergeant Payne.”
“How fortunate for Sergeant Payne,” Weisbach said.
“Inspector, this is Lieutenant McGuire…”
“How are you, Lieutenant?”
“Good evening, sir. Or good morning, sir.”
“And this is Sergeant Al Nevins, Inspector,” McGuire said.
“You were the first supervisor on the scene?”
“Yes, sir.”
“A uniform got there ahead of you?”
“No, sir. Mickey O’Hara got there first-by about thirty seconds. When Nevins and I got there, he had already taken Payne’s picture, standing over the man Payne put down.”
“I understood there were two men shot?”
“Yes, sir. One fatally. Payne blew his brains out.”
“How do you know that, Lieutenant?”