picsOhara — in several ways, the first being annoyance. O’Hara’s message was very much in the form of an order, rather than a request or suggestion.
No matter how much money and perquisites O’Hara’s pal Casimir Bolinski, the football-jock-turned-sports- attorney, had beat the people upstairs out of in exchange for the services of Michael O’Hara, Roscoe G. Kennedy felt that this in no way changed the fact that Michael J. O’Hara was a staff writer, no more, and Roscoe G. Kennedy was the city editor, and thus entitled to tell the staff writer what to do, and when, not the reverse.
The second cause of annoyance was that in order to see what immortal prose Michael J. O’Hara believed was worthy of a three-column photograph on page one of section one-plus a jump with more pictures-before O’Hara saw fit in his own sweet time to send it to him, he would have to go to O’Hara’s office.
This was actually a double irritant. Mr. Kennedy did not think a lowly staff writer was entitled to an expensively furnished private office-O’Hara’s $2,100 exotic wood and calfskin-upholstered Charles Eames chair was more salt in the wound here-in the first place, and to get to it, he was going to have to get up from his desk and walk across the city room, which meant past a large number of other staff writers, all of whom would see that he was calling on O’Hara rather than the other way around.
The third irritant was that Roscoe G. Kennedy knew that if O’Hara thought he had something worthy of space on page one of section one, and with a large jump to be placed elsewhere, the sonofabitch probably did.
Roscoe G. Kennedy was honest enough to admit-if sometimes through clenched teeth-that Mickey O’Hara was really a hell of a good writer, and had earned his Pulitzer Prize.
So Mr. Kennedy resisted the urge to summon Mr. O’Hara to his presence to discuss his latest contribution to the Bulletin, and instead got up and walked across the city room and knocked politely at the door.
He saw that Mr. O’Hara had guests in his office, Casimir “The Bull” Bolinski and presumably Mrs. Bolinski, and he smiled at them.
“What have you got for me, Mickey?” Mr. Kennedy asked.
O’Hara raised one hand from the keyboard of his computer terminal, on which he was typing with great rapidity, and pointed to the screen of his personal (as opposed to the Bulletin’s) computer.
There was a very clear photograph of a well-known Philadelphia police officer on it, this one showing him in a dinner jacket, with a cellular phone in one hand and a. 45 Colt in the other, standing just a little triumphantly over a man lying on the ground.
“There’s more,” O’Hara said.
The city editor looked at the other images from the parking lot, then read Mickey’s story on the computer screen. He didn’t speak until O’Hara had finished and pushed the Transmit key. Then he said, “Great stuff, Mickey! Really great! The Wyatt Earp of the Main Line Does It Again.”
Mickey stood up.
“What did you say?” he asked.
“For a head, how about ‘Main Line Wyatt Earp 2, Bad Guys 0 in Shootout at the La Famiglia Corral’?”
“You sonofabitch,” Mickey said. “That’s a cop doing his job.”
“Watch your mouth, Michael,” Casimir said. “Antoinette…”
“A goddamn cop in a tuxedo who obviously likes to shoot people.”
“You sonofabitch, you’re no better than the goddamn Ledger!”
“Don’t call me a sonofabitch, O’Hara. I won’t stand for it.”
“Then don’t make wiseass remarks about a cop liking what he has to do to do his job, you arrogant, elitist, bleeding-heart…” Mickey paused, searching his memory for the most scalding insult he could think of, and then, triumphantly, concluded, “… Missouri School of Journalism sonofabitch!”
“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?”
“Well, sir, Payne told us. And we saw the body. The bullet struck right about here.”
He pointed at his own face.
“Did Payne also tell you what happened?”
“He said there had been an armed robbery of a couple picking up their car in the lot; that he’d walked up on it right afterward, told the robbers to stop. They ran, he went after them. They fired at him with a shotgun and a semiautomatic pistol, and he put both of them down.”
“Did they hit him?” Weisbach asked.
“No, sir,” McGuire said, and hesitated.
“Go on, Lieutenant,” Weisbach said.
“He was a little shaken up, sir.”
“How shaken up?”
“Acted odd, you know,” McGuire said.
“No, I don’t know.”
“Well, there was the business about his weapon,” McGuire said.
“What about his weapon?”
“I took it from him, of course,” McGuire said, and pointed to one of the desks in the room. There were two
