'There's a unit, called Organized Crime, because what it does is try to keep tabs on people like Angelo,' he said.
They were looking into each other's eyes again. Louise averted hers.
'You don't really want to talk about the mob, do you?' he asked.
'No,' she said. 'I don't.'
'Then what shall we talk about?'
'What about your wife?' Louise blurted.
He lowered his head, and shrugged and then looked at her.
And then he said, 'Oh,shit!'
He was, she saw, looking over her shoulder.
She started to turn around.
'Don't turn around!' he said, quietly but very firmly.
He slipped off the banquette and started toward the door, moving on the balls of his feet, like a cat.
She wanted desperately to look, and started to turn, and then couldn' t, because he had said not to. And then she could see him, faintly, in the mirrored side surface of a service table. She saw him brush the flap of his blazer aside with his hand, and then she saw that he had a gun.
Then she turned, chilled.
He was holding the gun with the muzzle pointed down, beside his leg. And he was walking to the cash register.
There was a young man at the cash register, skinny, with long blond hair. He was wearing a zipper jacket, and he had a brown paper bag in his hand, extended toward the cashier as if he was handing it to her.
And then Dutch Moffitt was five feet away from him, and the pistol came up.
She could hear him, even over the sounds of the Waikiki Diner.
'Lay the gun on the counter, son,' Dutch said. 'I'm a police officer. I don't want to have to kill you.'
The kid looked at him, his face turned even more pale. He licked his lips, and he seemed to be lowering the paper bag.
And then there were pops, one after the other, five or six of them, sounding like Chinese firecrackers.
'Oh, shit!' Dutch Moffitt said, more sadly than angrily.
The glass front of the cashier's stand slid with a crash to the floor, and there was an eruption of liquid and falling glass in the rows of liquor bottles in the service bar.
Dutch grabbed the skinny blond kid by the collar of his zipper jacket and threw him violently across the room. Then he took three steps to the door of the diner. He pushed it open with his shoulder, and went through it; and then he was holding his pistol in both hands, taking aim; and then he fired, and again and again.
The noise from his pistol was deafening, shocking, and Louise heard a woman yelp, and someone swore.
The skinny blond boy came running down the aisle. She got a good look at his face. He looked sick.
Louise pushed herself off her chair and ran down the aisle to the cash register.
Dutch was outside, on his knees beside a form on the ground. Louise thought it was another blond boy, but then Dutch turned the body over on its back and she saw lipstick and red, round-framed women's eyeglasses.
'He ran into the restaurant,' Louise screamed. When there was no response from Dutch she screamed his name, and got his attention, and, pointing, repeated, 'He ran into the restaurant. The blond boy.'
He got up and walked quickly past her. She followed him.
The Greek proprietor came up.
'He ran through the kitchen, the sonofabitch,' he reported.
Dutch nodded.
He put his pistol back in its holster and fished the cashier's telephone from where it had fallen, onto the cigars and foil-wrapped chocolates, when the glass counter had shattered.
He dialed a number.
'This is Captain Moffitt, Highway Patrol,' he said. 'I'm at Harbison and the Boulevard, the Waikiki Diner. Give me an assist. I have a robbery and a police shooting and a hospital case. I'm hit. One male fled on foot, direction unknown, white, in his twenties. Long blond hair, brown zipper jacket. No!Goddamn it.Harbison and the Boulevard.'
He put the phone back in the cradle, smiled reassuringly at Louise, and raised his voice.
'It's all over, folks,' he said. 'Nothing else to worry about. You just sit there and finish your meals.'
He turned and looked at Louise again.
'Dutch, are you all right?' Louise asked.
'Fine,' he said. 'I'm fine.'
And then he staggered, moving backward until he encountered the wall. His face was now very white.
'It was a goddamned girl!' he said, surprised, barely audibly.
And then he just crumpled to the floor. 'Dutch!' Louise cried, and went to him.
He's fainted! That's all it is, he's fainted!
And then she saw his eyes, and there was no life in them.
'Oh, Dutch!' Louise wailed. 'Oh, damn you, Dutch!'
Philadelphia, in 1973 the fourth largest city of the United States, lies in the center of the New York- Washington corridor, one of the most densely populated areas in the country.
A one-hundred-mile-radius circle drawn from William Penn's statue atop City Hall at Broad and Market Streets in downtown Philadelphia takes in Harrisburg to the west', skirts Washington, D.C., to the south; takes in almost all of Delaware and the New Jersey shore to the southeast and east; touches the tip of Manhattan Island to the northeast; and just misses Scranton, Pennsylvania to the north.
Within that one-hundred-mile-radius circle are major cities: Baltimore, Maryland; Camden, Trenton, Elizabeth, Newark, and Jersey City, New Jersey; plus a long list of somewhat smaller cities, such as Atlantic City, New Jersey; Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania; Wilmington, Delaware, and New Brunswick, New Jersey; York, Lancaster, Reading, Allentown, Bethlehem, and Hazleton, Pennsylvania; plus the boroughs of Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Richmond (Staten Island) of New York City.
There are more than four million people in the 'standard metropolitan statistical area' of Philadelphia and its environs, and something over two million people within the city limits, which covers 129 square miles. In 1973, there were approximately eight thousand policemen keeping the peace in the City of Brotherly Love.
The Police Administration Building on Vine Street in downtown Philadelphia is what in another city would be called 'police headquarters.' In Philadelphia it is known to the police and public as 'the Roundhouse.'
The architect who envisioned the building managed to pass on his enthusiasm for the curve to those city officials charged with approving its design. There are no straight corridors; the interior and exterior walls, even those of the elevators, are curved.
The Radio Room of the Philadelphia Police Department is on the second floor of the Roundhouse. Within the Radio Room are rows of civilian employees, leavened with a few sworn police officers, who sit at telephone and radio consoles receiving calls from the public, and from police vehicles 'on the street' and relaying official orders to police vehicles.
There are twenty-two police districts in Philadelphia, each charged with maintaining the peace in its area. Each has its complement of radio-equipped police cars and vans. Additionally, there are seven divisions of detectives, occupying office space in district buildings, but answering to a detective hierarchy, rather than to the district commander. They have their own, radio-equipped, police cars.
Radio communication is also maintained with the vehicles of the Philadelphia Highway Patrol, which has its own headquarters; with the vehicles of the Traffic, Accident, and Juvenile divisions; with the fleet of police tow trucks; and with the vehicles of the various special-purpose units, such as the K-9 Unit, the Marine Unit, the Vice, Narcotics, Organized Crime units, and others.
And on top of this, of course, is the necessity to maintain communications with the vehicles of the senior command hierarchy of the police department, the commissioner, and his staff; the deputy commissioners and their
