“Yes, sir.”
“Make sure that he understands what you’re telling him is for him personally, not for the Ledger. Tell him as much as you think you can. I don’t want the Ledger screaming about police ineptitude. And stay with the Dutton woman, too. I don’t want the Philadelphia Police Department’s federal grants cut because Stanford Fortner Wells III tells his politicians to cut them. Which I think he damned sure would have done if we had brought his daughter here handcuffed in the back of a wagon.”
“Yes, sir,” Peter said.
“That’s it, Peter,” Commissioner Czernick said. “Keep me advised.”
NINE
Mr. and Mrs. Kevin McFadden, who lived in a row house on Fitzgerald Street, not far from Methodist Hospital in South Philadelphia, were not entirely pleased with their son Charles’s choice of a career as a policeman. Kevin McFadden had been an employee of the Philadelphia Gas Works since he had left high school, and Mrs. McFadden (Agnes) had just naturally assumed that Charley would follow in his father’s footsteps. By and large the gas works had treated Kevin McFadden all right for twenty-seven years, and when he turned sixty, he would have a
nice pension, based on (by then) forty-one years of service to the company.
Mrs. Agnes McFadden could not understand why Charley, who his father had got on as a helper with the gas works after his graduation from Bishop Newman High School, had thrown that over to become a cop. Her primary concern was for her son’s safety. Being a policeman was a dangerous job. Whenever she went in Charley’s room and saw his gun and the boxes of ammunition for it, on the closet shelf, it made her shudder.
And it wasn’t as if he would have been a helper forever. You can’t start at the top, you have to work your way up. Kevin had worked his way up. He was now a lead foreman, and the money was good, and with his seniority, he got all of his weekends and most holidays off.
Kevin hadn’t been a lot of a help, when Agnes McFadden had tried to talk Charley out of quitting the gas works and going on the cops. He had taken Charley’s side, agreeing with him that a pension when you were forty-five was a hell of a lot better than a pension you got only when you were sixty, if you lived that long.
“Christ,” he said, “Charley could retire at forty-five years old, still a young man, and go get another job, and every month there would be a check from the city for as long as he lived.”
And he added that if Charley didn’t want to work for the gas works, that was his business.
Mr. and Mrs. McFadden, however, were in agreement concerning Charley’s duties within the police department. They didn’t like that one damned bit, even if they tried (with not much success) to keep it to themselves.
He went around looking like a goddamned bum. Facts are facts. Agnes hadn’t let Kevin go to work in clothes like that, even way back when he didn’t have much seniority and was working underground. God only knew what people in the neighborhood thought Charley was doing for a living.
Not that he was around the neighborhood much. They hardly ever saw him, they couldn’t remember the last time he had gone to church with them, and he never even went to Flo & Danny’s Bar & Grill with his father anymore.
They understood, of course, when he told them he had been assigned to the Narcotics Squad, in a “plainclothes” assignment, and that the reason he dressed like a bum was you couldn’t expect to catch drug guys unless you looked like them. It wasn’t like arresting somebody for speeding. And they believed him when he said it was an opportunity, that if he did good, he could get promoted quickly, and that there was practically unlimited overtime right now.
So far as Agnes McFadden was concerned, overtime was fine, but there was also such a thing as too much of a good thing. Charley had had his own phone put in; and two, three, and sometimes even more nights a week, he would no sooner get home, usually at some ungodly hour after they had gone to bed, than it would ring, and it would be his partner calling; and she would hear him running down the stairs and slamming the front door (he’d been doing that since he was five years old) and then she would hear him starting up the battered old car—a Volkswagen— he drove and tearing off down the street.
Maybe, Agnes McFadden thought, if he was a real cop, and wore a uniform, and shaved, and had his hair cut; and rode around in a prowl car giving out tickets, going to accidents, and doing real cop-type things; it wouldn’t be so bad; but she didn’t like it at all, now, and if he wouldn’t admit it, neither did his father.
Charley was twenty-five, and it was time for him to be thinking about getting married and starting a family. No decent girl would want to be seen with him in public, the way he looked (and sometimes smelled) and no girl in her right mind would marry somebody she couldn’t count on to come home for supper, or who would jump out of bed in the middle of the night every time the phone rang. Not to mention being in constant danger of getting shot or stabbed or run over with a car by some nigger or spic or dago full of some kind of drug.
Officer Charles McFadden, who had been engaged in dipping a piece of toast into the yolk of his fried eggs, looked up at his father.
“Pop, ask me how many stars are in the sky?”
His father, who had been checking the basketball scores in the sports section of the Philadelphia Daily News, eyed him suspiciously, and took another forkful of his own eggs.
“It’s not dirty,” Charley McFadden said, reading his father’s mind.
“Okay,” Kevin McFadden said. “How many stars are in the sky?”
“All of them,” Charley McFadden said, pleased with himself.
It took Kevin a moment, but finally he caught on, and laughed.
“Wiseass,” he said.
“Chip off the old block,” Charley said.
“I don’t understand,” Agnes McFadden said.
“The only place, Mom, stars is, is in the sky,” Charley explained.