The Last Witness (Badge of Honor 11)

Accordingly, the monsignor booted Mickey

to the curb, telling him not to come back until he was repentant and prepared to make amends.

Mickey, turning to his Bulletin job to fill his now extra time, discovered that a newsroom copyboy position had opened. He was told that it was little more than a gritty gofer job, but it sounded like the best job on earth to someone who was looking at another bitter winter throwing papers from a worn-out bike.

Against all odds—including being evasive about his proof of having graduated from high school early—he got the job and survived the ninety-day probationary period.

Mickey had found the newsroom a fascinating environment. He not only did the lowly tasks thrown at him, he made sure he was conveniently in the line of sight when the assistant city editor looked around for someone to do last-minute work no one else wanted—research, fact-checking telephone calls, et cetera.

Proving himself competent and reliable, he soon was given small writing assignments.

Everything was going beyond his wildest expectations until, days shy of his eighteenth birthday, he was called into the managing editor’s office.

The assistant city editor was there, and Mickey was convinced that this was the end of his run. But when he was shown the front page of the edition just off the presses—and the byline Michael J. O’Hara at the end of a very short article he’d researched and written—he found himself accepting a job offer as a very junior reporter.

Then, twenty years later, looking at his proud mother seated at the front table in the ballroom of the Waldorf Astoria in New York City, O’Hara found himself giving an acceptance speech after being awarded the Pulitzer Prize.

He did not think life could get any better—he was being paid to do a job he loved, and one he did damn well, while helping those who couldn’t help themselves, such as the orphans and the abused stuck in the morass of Child Protective Services.

Then, mere days after returning from New York, he was told in no uncertain terms: “Face it, Mickey, those bastards are screwing you.”

The giant of a black man delivering this news—one Casimir J. Bolinski, Esquire—happened to serve as legal counsel and business agent to heavy-hitting professional athletes.

Casimir “the Bull” Bolinski had also been Mickey’s coconspirator at West Catholic running Frankie the Gut’s numbers slips.

If Mickey had given in to Dooley the Drooler, Casimir would have found himself also booted out of school—thus ending the Bull’s path to a Notre Dame scholarship and, more critically, his career playing for the Green Bay Packers. And without that high pay of pro ball, Casimir would not have been able to afford to study law in the off-seasons, then become a sports agent after retiring his helmet and shoulder pads.

A highly successful agent, he represented the best of the best. He was ultimately earning far more off the field than he’d ever been paid to play.

And for all that, the Bull said, “I can never adequately repay you, Mickey.”

The Bull, however, did try—by taking him on as a client. And the post–Pulitzer Prize employment contract that Bolinski negotiated for O’Hara with “those bastards” at the Bulletin was far beyond anything Mickey thought possible. It included compensation consistent with, the Bull announced, what he found other winners of the Pulitzer were being paid, as well as a fat expense account, a new company vehicle, and more vacation days than Mickey thought he could ever use.

The contract also included language for an exit clause—one that would prove critical.

Roscoe Kennedy and Mickey O’Hara had been having what euphemistically could be described as “creative differences” over the treatment of Mickey’s exclusive that was about to be the Bulletin’s lead story. It was about Sergeant M. M. Payne having shot two robbers after they almost killed a couple in a restaurant parking lot. It was accompanied by a photograph O’Hara had taken of Payne—wearing a tuxedo, cell phone in one hand and .45 in the other—standing over a dead robber.

Kennedy had written a snide “Wyatt Earp of the Main Line Shoot-Out” headline, defending it by saying that the photograph made Payne look like the bloodthirsty gunslinger he really was. O’Hara called him out for twisting the moniker Mickey had given Matt as a compliment, then for using the story in an attempt to publicly ridicule a cop who was doing his job.

And then he punched Kennedy.

Bolinski, who happened to witness the whole incident unfold, carried Mickey out as Kennedy yelled before the whole newsroom unflattering descriptions of O’Hara—and that he was fired.

The contract, however, proved solid. It provided Mickey with a paid thirty-day break, one he decided to use by traveling to France. A fugitive from Philly—Fort Festung, who’d been found guilty in absentia for murdering his girlfriend and leaving her body to mummify in a trunk—was enjoying the French’s refusal to extradite anyone sentenced to death. O’Hara felt that the outrage warranted a book. He needed research, and dragged along Matt Payne, who after the shooting also found himself with time on his hands.

When the Philly courts allowed Festung’s sentence to be reduced to life behind bars, France gave in to the extradition—and Mickey O’Hara got a picture of Sergeant M. M. Payne arresting the fugitive Festung.

While Mickey wrote his book, the Bull found him new employment as the publisher and chief executive officer of an Internet start-up venture—CrimeFreePhilly.com—backed by very deep pockets. It not only allowed O’Hara to be in charge of doing what he did so well, it also gave him a platform and an audience far greater than anything the Bulletin ever could have. And it had allowed him to develop other news reporting properties.

—

“Okay, Matty, I’ll give you the journalist’s Who, What, Where, When, and Why. Here’s the lead of my story tonight: ‘Margaret McCain, the twenty-five-year-old scion of one of Philadelphia’s founding families, remains missing tonight following what Philadelphia Police are calling a home invasion that left her Society Hill town house engulfed in flames late last night.’”

“That’s pretty straightforward.”

“Wait. There’s more. Last sentence of lead: ‘Police are withholding comment as to whose body was secreted from the scene after the medical examiner’s van was parked in the closed garage of the McCain residence.’”

“Really? I hadn’t heard that detail either. That’s curious.”