Joe Bullock's call was also received over the police-bands shortwave radio installed in a battered, four-year- old Chevrolet Impala coupe registered to one Michael J. O'Hara of the 2100 block of South Shields Street in West Philadelphia.
Mr. O'Hara had spent Sunday evening having dinner with his widowed mother, who resided in the Cobbs Creek Nursing Center, in the Mr. and Mrs. J. K. McNair Memorial Dining Facility. Mickey was a dutiful son and loved his mother, and made a valiant effort to have dinner with her twice a week. It was always a depressing experience. Mrs. O'Hara's mind was failing, and she talked a good deal about people who were long dead, or whom he had never known. And about fellow residents in the Cobbs Creek Nursing Center, who, if she was to be believed, carried on sinful sexual relations that would have worn out twentyyear-olds when they were not engaged in stealing things from Mrs. O' Hara. The food was also lousy; it reminded Mickey of what they used to feed him in basic training in the army.
After pushing his mother's wheelchair down the polished, slippery corridors of the Cobbs Creek Nursing Center to her room, Mickey O'Hara usually went directly to Brannigan's Bar amp; Grill, two blocks away at Seventieth and Kingessing, where he had a couple of quick belts of John Jamison's with a beer chaser.
Tonight, however, he had gone directly home, not because he didn't need a drink-quite the contrary-but because there was a recent development in his life that left him feeling more uneasy than he could ever remember having felt before. And Mickey knew himself well enough to know that the one thing he should not do in the circumstances was tie one on.
Home was the house in which he had grown up, the fourth row house on the right from the end of the 2100 block of South Shields Street. He had been living here alone now for two and a half years, since Father Delahanty of the Good Shepherd Roman Catholic Church had managed to convince Mrs. O'Hara that moving 'temporarily' to the Cobbs Creek Nursing Center was the best thing for her to do until she got her health back.
She was never going to leave Cobbs Creek, and everybody but Mrs. O' Hara knew that, but she kept talking about when she'd be going home, and Mickey didn't feel it would be right to go and see her and lie about selling the goddamned house and taking an apartment somewhere.
He went into the house and put the photo album back on the shelf where it had been kept since he was in short pants. He had carried the damned thing back and forth to Cobbs Creek two dozen times. She would ask him to bring it, and he would take it to her, and a week later, she would tell him to take it home and put it on the shelf; Cobbs Creek was full of thieves who were always stealing anything that wasn' t chained down, and she didn't want to lose it.
Then he went into the kitchen and decided that one lousy glass of beer wasn't going to get him in trouble, and filled a Pabst Blue Ribbon glass from a quart bottle of Ortleib's, which was a dime less a quart than Pabst, and so far as Mickey was concerned, a better beer to boot. He went into the living room, turned the TV on, and watched a rerun ofI Love Lucy until it was time to go downtown.
Bull Bolinski, who was probably his oldest friend, said his plane would arrive at half-past eight, and that Mickey should give him an hour or so to get to his hotel, and make a couple of phone calls. Mickey had offered to meet Bull at the airport, but Bull said there was no sense doing that, he would catch a cab.
When it was time to go meet the Bull, Mickey turned the TV off, rinsed out the Pabst Blue Ribbon glass in the sink, then went out and got in the car. He turned on the police-band radio without thinking about it. The 'naked lady in Fairmount Park' call from Police Radio came before he had pulled away from the curb.
He had two reactions to the call: First, that what he had heard was all there was to it, that some broad- drunk, stoned, or crazy-was running around Fairmount Park in her birthday suit. If she was a goodlooking broad, there might be a funny piece in it for him, providing she was drunk or stoned or maybe mad at her husband or her boyfriend. Every cop in Northwest Philly would go in on a 'naked lady' call; it would look like a meeting of the FOP, the Fraternal Order of Police.
But not if she was a looney. Mickey had his principles, among them that looney people aren't funny. Unless, of course, they thought they were the King of Pennsylvania or something. Mickey never wrote about loonies who were pitiful.
The second thought he had was more of a hunch than anything else. Itcould have something to do with a real looney, a dangerous one, a white male scumbag who had been running around lately raping women. Not just any women, but nice, young, middle-class white women, and not just raping them, either, but making them do all kinds of dirty things, weird things. Or doing the same to them. Jack Fisher, one of the Northwest detectives, had told Mickey that the looney had tied one girl down on her bed, taken off his own clothes, and then pissed all over her.
Then Mickey had a third thought: Whatever was going on was not, at the moment, of professional interest to Michael J. O'Hara. There would probably be a story in thePhiladelphia Bulletin, either a two-graph piece buried with the girdle ads in section C, or maybe even a bylined piece on the front page, but it would not be written by Michael J. O' Hara.
Michael J. O'Hara waswithholding his professional services from theBulletin, pending resolution of contractual differences between the parties. Bull Bolinski had told him,'No, you're not on strike. Bus drivers strike, steelworkers strike. You're a fucking professional. Get that through your thick head. '
Mickey O'Hara had beenwithholding his professional services for three weeks now. He had never been out of work that long in his life, and he was getting more than a little worried. If theBulletin didn't give in, he thought it entirely possible that he was through. Not only with theBulletin, but with the other newspapers in Philadelphia, too. The bastards in management all knew each other, they all had lunch at the Union League together, and there was no question in Mickey's mind that if theBulletin management decided to tell him or the Bull to go fuck himself, they wouldn't stop there, they would spread the word around that Mickey O'Hara, always a troublemaker, had really gone off the deep end this time.
And it was already past the point where he could tuck his tail between his legs and just show up in the City Room and go back to work. The only thing he could do was put his faith in the Bull. And sweat blood.
Mickey reached over and turned off the police-bands shortwave radio, then headed downtown, via the Roosevelt Boulevard Extension to North Broad Street, then down Broad toward City Hall.
Bill Dohner, a wiry, graying, forty-two-year-old cop who had been on the job for exactly half his life, turned off his lights and siren when he was four blocks away from Forbidden Drive, although he didn't slow down. Sometimes, flashing lights and a howling siren were the wrong way to handle a job.
He reached over on the front seat and found his flashlight, and had it in his hand as he braked sharply at the entrance to Forbidden Drive. The unpaved road looked deserted to him, so he continued down Bell's Mill Road and crossed the bridge over Wissahickon Creek. He didn't see anything there, either, so he turned around, quickly, but without squealing his tires, and returned to Forbidden Drive and turned right into it.
His headlights illuminated the road for a hundred yards or so, and there was nothing on it. Dohner drove very slowly down it, looking from side to side, down into Wissahickon Creek on his right, and into the woods on his left.
And then Dohner saw Mary Elizabeth Flannery. She was on her feet, just at the end of the area illuminated by his headlights, on the edge of the road. She had her head down and her hands behind her, as if they were tied, and she was naked.
Dohner accelerated quickly, reaching for his microphone.
'Fourteen Twenty-Three. I got a naked woman on Forbidden Drive. Can you send me backup?'
He braked sharply when he reached Mary Elizabeth Flannery, then reached onto the passenger side floorboard, coming up with a folded blanket. Then he jumped out of the car.
Dohner saw the blank look in Mary Elizabeth Flannery's eyes when she saw him, and saw that his guess had been right; her hands were tied behind her.
'It's going to be all right, miss,' Bill Dohner said, gently, as he draped the blanket around her shoulders. 'Can you tell me what happened?'
At that moment, every radio in every police car in the city of Philadelphia wentbeep beep beep, and then they heard Joe Bullock's voice. 'Assist Officer, Forbidden Drive at Bell's Mill Road. Police by radio. Assist Officer.
