'Peter?' Commissioner Taddeus Czernick said when he came on the line a moment later. 'What's up?'
'Commissioner, Dutch Moffitt walked into a holdup at the Waikiki Diner on Roosevelt Boulevard. He was shot to death. He put down one of them; the other got away.'
'Jesus H. Christ!' Commissioner Czernick replied. 'The one he got is dead?'
'Yes, sir. It's a woman, and a witness says she's the one that shot him. She said Dutch said a woman got him. I just got here.'
'Who else is there?'
'Captain McGovern.'
'Jesus Christ, Dutch's brother got himself killed too,' the commissioner said. 'You remember that?'
'I heard that, sir.' And then, delicately, he added: 'Commissioner, the witness, a woman, was with Dutch.'
There was a perceptible pause.
'So?' Commissioner Czernick asked.
'I don't know, sir,' Wohl said.
'That was the other phone, Peter. We just got notification from radio,' Commissioner Czernick said. 'Who's the woman?'
'I don't know. She looks familiar. Young, blond, good-looking.'
'Goddamn!'
'I thought I had better call, sir.'
'You stay there, Peter,' the commissioner ordered. 'I'll call the mayor, and get out there as soon as I can. Do what you think has to be done about the woman.'
'Yes, sir,' Wohl said.
The commissioner hung up without saying anything else.
Wohl put the phone back in its cradle, and without thinking about it, ran his fingers in the coin return slot. He was surprised when his fingers touched coins. He took them out and looked at them, and then went to Louise Dutton.
'Are you all right?'
Louise shrugged.
'A real tragedy,' Wohl said. 'He has three young children. '
'I know he was married,' Louise said, coldly.
'Would you mind telling me how you happened to be here with him?' Wohl asked.
'I'm with WCBL-TV,' she said.
'I knew your face was familiar,' Wohl said.
'He was going to tell me what he thinks about people calling the Highway Patrol 'Carlucci's Commandos,'' Louise said, carefully.
That's bullshit, Wohl decided. There was something between them.
As if that was a cue, the Channel 9 cameraman appeared at the door. A policeman blocked his way.
'Christ, if she's in there, why can't I go in?' the cameraman protested.
Wohl stepped to the door, spotted McGovern, and raised his voice. ' Jack, would you get up some barricades, please? And keep people out of our way?'
He saw from the look on McGovern's face that the television cameraman had slipped around the policemen McGovern had already put in place.
'Get that guy out of there,' McGovern said, sharply, to a sergeant. ' The TV guy.'
Wohl turned back to Louise.
'It would be very unpleasant for Mrs. Moffitt, or the children,' he said, 'if they heard about this over the television, or the radio.'
Louise looked at him without real comprehension for a minute.
'I don't know about Philadelphia,' she said. 'But most places, there' s an unwritten rule that nothing, no names anyway, about something like this gets on the air until the next of kin are notified.'
'That's true here, too,' Wohl said. 'But I always like to be double sure.'
'Okay,' she said. 'I suppose I could call.'
'That would be very much appreciated,' Wohl said. He extended his hand to her, palm upward, offering her change for the telephone.
Louise dialed the 'Nine's News' newsroom, and Leonard Cohen, the news director, answered.
'Leonard, this is Louise Dutton. A policeman has been killed-'
'At the Waikiki Diner on Roosevelt Boulevard?' Cohen interrupted. ' You there?'
'Yes,' Louise said. 'Leonard, the police don't want his wife to hear about it over the air.'
'You know who it was?'
'I was with him,' Louise said.
'You saw it?'
'I don't want his wife to find out over the air,' Louise said.
'Hey, no problem. Of course not. Have the public affairs guy call us when we can use it, like usual.'
'All right,' Louise said.
'Tell the crew to get what they can, at an absolute minimum, some location shots, and then you come in, and we can put it together here,' Cohen said. 'We'll probably use it for the lead-in and the major piece. Nothing else much has happened. And you saw it?'
'I saw it,' Louise said. 'I'll be in.'
She hung up the phone.
'I just spoke with the news director,' she said. 'He said he won't use it until your public affairs officer clears it. He wants him to call.'
'I'll take care of it,' Wohl said. 'Thank you very much, Miss Dutton.'
She shrugged, bitterly. 'For what?' she asked, and then: 'How will she find out? Who tells her?'
Wohl hesitated a moment, and then told her: 'There's a routine, a procedure, we follow in a situation like this. The captain in charge of the district where Captain Moffitt lived was notified right away. He will go to Captain Moffitt's house and drive Mrs. Moffitt to the hospital. By the time they get there, the mayor, and probably the commissioner and the chief of Special Patrol, will be there. And probably Captain Moffitt's parish priest, or the department Catholic chaplain. They will tell her. They're friends. Captain Moffitt is from an old police family.'
She nodded.
'While that's been going on,' Wohl said, wondering why, since he hadn't been asked, he was telling her all this, 'radio will have notified Homicide, and the Crime Lab, and the Northeast Detectives. They'll be here in a few minutes. Probably, since Captain Moffitt was a senior police officer, the chief inspector in charge of homicide will roll on this, too.'
'And she gets to ride to the hospital, while the police radio is talking about what happened here, right? God that's brutal!'
'The police radio in the car will be turned off,' Wohl said.
She looked at him.
'We learn from our mistakes,' Wohl said. 'Policemen get killed. Captain Moffitt's brother was killed in the line of duty, too.'
She met his eyes, and her eyebrows rose questioningly, but she didn't say anything.
'The homicide detectives will want to interview you,' Wohl said. 'I suppose you understand that you're a sort of special witness, a trained observer. The way that's ordinarily done is to transport you downtown, to the Homicide Division in the Roundhouse…'
'Oh, God!' Louise Dutton said. 'Do I have to go through that?'
'I said 'ordinarily,' Wohl said. 'There's always an exception.'
'Because I was with him? Or because I'm with WCBL-TV?'
' 'How about a little bit of both?' Wohl replied evenly. 'In this case, what I'm going to do is have an officer drive you home.'
I have the authority to let her get away from here, to send her away, Wohl thought. The commissioner said, 'Do what you have to do about the woman,' but I didn't have to. I wonder why I did?
