Badge Of Honor: Men In Blue Part 27

She turned and ran down the stairs.

Wohl entered the funeral home. The corridors were crowded with people, a third of the men in uniform. And, Peter thought, two-thirds of the men in civilian clothing were cops, too.

He waited in line, signed the guest book, and then made his way to the Green Room.

Dutch's casket was nearly hidden by flowers, and there was a uniformed Highway Patrolman standing at parade rest at each end of the coffin. Wohl waited in line again, until it was his turn to drop to his knees at the prie-dieu in front of the casket.

Without thinking about it, he crossed himself. Dutch was in uniform. He looks, Wohl thought, as if he just came from the barber's.

And then he had another irreverent thought: I just covered your a.s.s again, Dutch. One last time.

And then, surprising him, his throat grew very tight, and he felt his eyes start to tear.

He stayed there, with his head bent, until he was sure he was in control of himself, and then got up.

TWELVE.

Karl August Fenstermacher had immigrated to the United States in 1837, at the age of two. His father had indentured himself for a period of four years to Fritz W. Diehl, who had gone to the United States from the same village, Mochsdorf, in the Kingdom of Bavaria, twenty years previously. Mr. Diehl had entered the sausage business in Philadelphia, and prospered to the point where he needed good reliable help. His brother Adolph, back in Mochsdorf, had recommended Johann Fenstermacher to him, and the deal was struck: Diehl would provide pa.s.sage money for Fenstermacher and his wife and three children, provide living quarters for them over the shop, and see that they were clothed and fed. At the end of four years, provided Fenstermacher proved to be a faithful, hardworking employee, he would either offer young Fenstermacher a position with the firm, or give him one hundred dollars, so that he could make his way in life somewhere else.

At the end of two years, instead of the called-for four, Fritz released Johann Fenstermacher from his indenture, coinciding with the opening of Fritz's stall (Fritz Diehl Fine Wurstware & Fresh Meats) at the Twelfth Street Market. In 1860, when Diehl opened an abattoir just outside the city limits, the firm was Diehl & Fenstermacher, Meat Purveyors to the Trade. Both men believed that G.o.d had been as good to them as he could be.

They were wrong. The Civil War came, and with it a limitless demand for smoked and tinned meats and hides. They became wealthy. Fritz Diehl took a North German Lloyd steamer from Philadelphia to Bremen, and went back to Mochsdorf, where he presented St. Johann's Lutheran Church with a stained gla.s.s window. He died of a stroke in Mochsdorf ten days before the window was to be officially consecrated.

His widow elected to remain in Germany. From that day until her death, Johann Fenstermacher scrupulously sent her half the profits from the firm, although, after several years, he changed the name to J. Fenstermacher & Sons. The name was retained on the Old Man's death, just before the Spanish-American War, by Karl Fenstermacher, who bought out his brother's interest, and formed J. Fenstermacher & Sons, Incorporated.

He turned over the business to his son Fritz in 1910, when he was seventy-five. He lived six more years. In early 1916, when it was clear that his father was failing, Fritz Fenstermacher went to Francisco Scalamandre, whose firm was to stonecutting in Philadelphia what J. Fenstermacher & Sons, Inc., was to the meat trade, and ordered the construction of a suitable monument where his mother and father could lie together for eternity.

It was erected in Cedar Hill Cemetery on Cheltenham Avenue in Northeast Philadelphia, of the finest Barre, Vermont, granite. Mr. Scalamandre's elder son Guigliemo himself sculpted the ten-foot-tall statue of the Angel Gabriel, arms spread, which was mounted on the roof of the tomb, and personally supervised the installation of both the stained gla.s.s windows and the solid bronze doors.

Karl Fenstermacher was laid to his last rest there on December 11, 1916, in a snowstorm. His wife followed him in death, and into the tomb, eight months later.

They lay there together, undisturbed, in bronze caskets in a marble tomb behind the solid bronze doors until several months before the shooting in the Waikiki Diner, when Gerald Vincent Gallagher, running away from both the police and an Afro-American dealer in heroin found himself leaning against the solid bronze doors.

It wasn't safe to leave the cemetery yet, Gerald Vincent Gallagher had decided; then both the cops and the jigaboo were really after his a.s.s, but unless he could get inside somewhere, out of the f.u.c.king wind and snow, he was going to freeze to f.u.c.king death.

Gerald Vincent Gallagher had managed, without much effort at all, to pick the solid bronze lock mechanism on the solid bra.s.s door with a sharpened screwdriver he just happened to have with him; and he had spent the next four hours sitting, s.h.i.+vering but not freezing, and out of the snow, on top of Karl Fenstermacher's tomb.

The next time he went back to Cedar Hill Cemetery, he was prepared. He had cans of Sterno with him, and a dozen big, thick, white, pure beeswax candles he had lifted from St. George's Greek Orthodox Church. Both burned without smoke, and it was amazing how much heat that jelly alcohol, or whatever the f.u.c.k it was, made.

And the first thing Gerald Vincent Gallagher had thought when he ran out of the Waikiki Diner was that if he could only make it to the f.u.c.king cemetery, he would be all right. It was not the first, or the fifth, time he had run from the cops and hidden in the cemetery until things cooled off.

When he was in Karl and Maria Fenstermacher's mausoleum, and the fear was mostly gone, and he got his breath back, and he had time to think things over, the first thing he thought was that when he got together with Dorothy Ann again, he really should kick the dumb b.i.t.c.h's a.s.s. All she was supposed to do was stay outside and look out for the cops. Now she'd really gotten their a.s.s in a crack. All the charge would have been was robbery. There was nothing like that on his record. Any public defender with half the brains he was born with could have plea-bargained that down to something that would have meant no more than a year in Holmesburg Prison, and with a little bit of luck, maybe even probation.

But the minute she had fired that f.u.c.king gun, she had really got them in f.u.c.king trouble. About the dumbest f.u.c.king thing she could have done was take a shot at a cop. That made it attempted murder, and the G.o.dd.a.m.ned cops would pull every string they could to get them sent before Judge Mitch.e.l.l "Hanging Mitch" Roberts, who thought that taking a poke, much less a shot, at a cop was worse than blowing up the Vatican with the pope in it.

Thank Christ, she had missed. The last thing he saw when he ran through the Waikiki Diner was the cop, or the detective, whatever the sonofab.i.t.c.h was, was him shooting Dorothy Ann. If she had hit the sonofab.i.t.c.h, that would be the G.o.dd.a.m.ned end. He would be an old man before they let him out.

Another thought entered his mind. Maybe the cop had hit her and killed her when he shot back. It would serve the dumb b.i.t.c.h right, and if she was dead, she couldn't identify him. The cas.h.i.+er had been scared s.h.i.+tless; she wouldn't be able to remember him, much less identify him. The best thing that could have happened was that both Dorothy Ann and the cop was both dead. Then n.o.body could identify him.

The trouble with that was there was another f.u.c.king law that said if anybody got killed during a robbery, or some other felony, even somebody doing the robbery, it was just as if they had shot him their selves. So if the cop had killed Dorothy Ann, they could hang a murder rap on him.

In the times he had been in the mausoleum before (almost for a way to pa.s.s the time), Gerald Vincent Gallagher had taken his screwdriver and worked on the lead that held the little pieces of stained gla.s.s in place, so that he could remove a little piece of gla.s.s and have a look around. There was stained gla.s.s in all four walls of the place.

He hadn't been in the mausoleum half an hour before he saw, through the hole where he'd taken a piece of stained gla.s.s out, a police car driving slowly through Cedar Hill Cemetery. Not just a police car, but a Highway Patrol car, he could tell that because there was two cops in it, and regular cop cars had only one cop in them. Those Highway Patrol cops was real mean motherf.u.c.kers, who would as soon shoot you as not.

He told himself that there was really nothing to worry about, that it wasn't the first time a cop car had driven through the cemetery looking for him, and they wouldn't find him this time any more than they had before. They were thinking he might be hiding behind a tombstone, or a tree, or something. They wouldn't think he was inside one of the marble houses, or whatever the f.u.c.k they were called. They would drive through once, or maybe twice, or maybe a couple of cop cars would drive through. But they would give up sooner or later.

Everybody would give up sooner or later. This wasn't the only robbery that had happened in Philadelphia. There would be other robberies and auto accidents on Roosevelt Boulevard and Frankford Avenue, or some guy beating up on his wife, and they would go put their noses into that and ease off on looking for him.

The thing to do was sit tight until they did ease off, and then get the f.u.c.k out of town. He had money, 380 bucks. The reason they had stuck up the Waikiki Diner in the first place was to come up with another lousy 120 bucks. The connection had s.h.i.+t, good s.h.i.+t, but he wanted 500 bucks, and wasn't about to trust them for the 120 they was short, until they sold enough of it on the street to pay him back.

If the c.o.c.ksucker had only been reasonable, none of this would have happened!

Gerald Vincent Gallagher began to suspect, although he tried not to think about it, that he was really in the deep s.h.i.+t when not only did more cop cars, Highway Patrol and regular District ones, keep driving through the cemetery, but cops on foot came walking through. That had never happened before.

There was no place he could run to, so he put the little pieces of stained gla.s.s back into the holes, and sat down on the floor with his back against the wall and just hoped no one would come looking for him inside.

It grew dark, and that made things a little better, but he decided that the best thing to do was play it cool, and not light one of the Greek candles. If there was a cop looking, he would maybe see the light.

He took off his jacket and made a pillow of it, and lay down on the floor of the mausoleum and went to sleep.

Sometime in the middle of the night, he woke up, and looked out, and saw headlights coming into the cemetery. Then the car stopped and the headlights went out. A couple of minutes later, while he was still figuring out what the first car was doing, there were more headlights, and another car drove in. He saw that the first car was a cop car, and now he could see they were both cop cars. And a few minutes after that, a third cop car came in and parked beside the other two.

And then he understood what was going on. The cops were f.u.c.king off, that's what they were doing! They were supposed to be out patrolling the streets, looking for crooks, and instead they were in the G.o.dd.a.m.ned cemetery, taking a f.u.c.king nap!

Gerald Vincent Gallagher was outraged at this blatant example of dereliction of duty.

In the morning, he woke up hungry, but it would be a G.o.dd.a.m.ned fool thing to do to try to leave just yet, so he just waited. At noon, there was a funeral about a hundred yards away. Actually, they started getting ready for the funeral a little after eight, digging the hole, and then lowering a concrete vault in it, and then putting the phony gra.s.s over the pile of dirt they'd taken out of the hole, and then putting up a tent, and the whatever it was called they used to lower the casket into the hole.

Gerald Vincent Gallagher had never seen anything like that before, and it was interesting, and it helped to pa.s.s the time. So did the funeral. It was some kind of c.o.c.kamamie Protestant funeral, and the minister prayed a lot, and loud, and then when that was finally over, everybody who had come to the funeral just stayed around the hole, kissing and shaking hands, and talking and smiling, like they was at a party, instead of a funeral.

Finally, they left, and the people from the funeral home put some kind of a lever into the machine with the casket sitting on it, and the casket started dropping into the hole. When it was all the way in, they unhitched one end of the green web belts that had held the casket up, and pulled them free from under the casket.

A truck appeared and they put the machine on it, and then the folding chairs, and then took down the tent and loaded that on, and finally picked up the phony gra.s.s and put that on the truck. Then that truck left, and the one that had lowered the concrete vault into the hole appeared again. A guy got out and mixed cement or something in a plastic bucket, and then got into the hole with the bucket and a trowel and spread the cement on the bottom of the vault. Then they lowered the lid on the vault, jumped up and down on the lid, and then they left.

Next came a couple of old men from the cemetery who shoveled the dirt into the hole, wetting it down with a hose so that it would all go back in, and finally putting the real gra.s.s on top of that and watering that down. There was still a lot of dirt left over, and Gerald Vincent Gallagher supposed they would come back and cart that off somewhere.

By then it was four o'clock, and he was f.u.c.king starved! He was just about to leave the mausoleum when a car drove up, and three people got out. It looked to him like a father and his two sons. They walked over to the grave and the old man stood there for a minute and started to cry. Then the younger ones started to cry. Finally, the younger ones put their arms around the older one, the one who was probably the father, and led him back to the car and drove off.

Gerald Vincent Gallagher waited until he was sure they wouldn't change their minds and come back, and looked carefully in all four directions to make sure there wasn't a cop car making another slow trip through Cedar Hill, and then, after first carefully replacing all the stained gla.s.s, and bending the lead over it so the wind wouldn't blow it out, quickly opened the bronze doors, grunting with the effort, grunted again as he pushed them closed, and then started walking to the narrow macadam road that led to the exit.

He pa.s.sed the grave he had watched filled. There were what he guessed must be a thousand bucks' worth of flowers on it, and around it, just waiting to rot. He thought that was a h.e.l.l of a lot of money to be just thrown away like that.

Five minutes later he was at the Bridge & Pratt Streets Terminal. A clock in a store window said ten minutes after five. This had worked out okay. The terminal, and the subway itself, would be crowded with people coming from work, or going downtown. He could hide in the crowd. He would be careful, when the train pulled into the station, to look for any cop that might be on it, and make sure he didn't get on that car.

Then he would ride downtown to Market Street, walk underground to the Suburban Station, and ride from there to Thirtieth Street Station. There he would buy a ticket on the Pennsylvania Railroad to Baltimore. He would find out when it left, and then go to the men's c.r.a.pper, where he would stay until it was time for the train to leave. Then a quick trip up to the platform, onto the train, and he would be home free.

In Baltimore, he knew a couple of connections, if they were still in business, and he could get a little something to straighten him out. He was getting a little edgy, that way, and that would be the first thing to do, get himself straightened out. And then he would decide what to do next.

He walked past a place called Tates, where the smell of pizza made his stomach turn. He stopped and went to the window and ordered a slice of pizza and a c.o.ke. When the c.o.ke came, he drank it down. He hadn't realized he had been that thirsty.

"Do that again," he said, pus.h.i.+ng the container toward the kid behind the counter, and laying another dollar bill on the counter. There was a newsstand right beside Tates called-somebody thought he was a f.u.c.king wit-Your Newsstand.

Gerald Vincent Gallagher drank some of the second c.o.ke, then set the container down on the top of a garbage can and, taking a bite of the pizza, stepped to a newspaper rack offering the Philadelphia Daily News, to get a quick look at the headline, maybe there would be something about the Waikiki Diner in it.

There was. There were two photographs on the front page. One was of some cop in uniform, and the other was of Gerald Vincent Gallagher. The headline, in great big letters, asked, "COP KILLER?"

Under the photographs was a story that began, "A ma.s.sive citywide search is on for Gerald Vincent Gallagher, suspected of being the bandit who got away when Police Captain Richard C. Moffitt was shot to death in the Waikiki Diner yesterday."

Gerald Vincent Gallagher's stomach tied in a painful knot. He felt a cold chill, and as if the hair on his neck was crawling. He spit out the piece of pizza he had been chewing, and carefully laid the piece in his hand on the garbage can beside the c.o.ke container.

Then he started walking past Your Newsstand. At the end of the building was a gla.s.s door leading to a bingo parlor upstairs, and then the covered stairs to the subway platform.

Gerald Vincent Gallagher looked at the door and saw in it a reflection of the street. And something caught his eye. A big, fat sonofab.i.t.c.h was looking right at him as he came running across the street. The fat guy looked familiar and for a moment, Gerald Vincent Gallagher thought he was a guy he had done business with, but then the fat guy sort of kneeled down, and jerked up his pants leg, and pulled a gun from an ankle holster.

Then, as he started running again, he shouted, "Hold it right there, Gallagher, or I'll blow your a.s.s away!"

f.u.c.k him, Gerald Vincent Gallagher thought. That f.u.c.king narc isn't going to shoot that gun with all these people around!

He ran up the stairs toward the subway platform. With a little bit of luck, there would be a train there and he could get on it, and away.

The Bridge & Pratt Streets Terminal is the end of the line for the subway. The tracks are elevated, above Frank-ford Avenue, and widen as they reach the station. There is a center pa.s.senger platform, with stairs leading down to the lower level of the terminal, between the tracks, and a second pa.s.senger platform, to the right of the center platform. That way, pa.s.sengers can exit incoming from downtown trains through doors on both sides of the car. Pa.s.sengers heading downtown all have to board trains from the center platform.

After incoming trains from downtown Philadelphia offload their pa.s.sengers from the right (in direction of movement) track, they move several hundred yards farther on, where they stop, the crews move to the rear end of the train (which now becomes the front end), and move back, now on the left track, to the station, where they pick up downtown-bound pa.s.sengers.

The lower level of the terminal contains ticket booths, and two stairwells, one descending to the ground on either side of Frankford Avenue.

When Officer Charley McFadden spotted Gerald Vincent Gallagher shoving pizza in his face in front of Your Newsstand, he was sitting in his Volkswagen, which was parked in front of Gene & Jerry's Restaurant & Sandwiches on Pratt Street, fifty feet to the north of Frankford Avenue.

Officer Jesus Martinez was inside Gene & Jerry's sitting at the counter eating a ham and cheese sandwich, no mayonnaise or mustard or b.u.t.ter, just the ham and cheese and maybe a little piece of lettuce on whole wheat bread.

He had his mouth full of ham and cheese when he saw Charley erupt from the Volkswagen.

He swore, in Spanish, and spit out the sandwich, and jumped up and ran toward the door. As soon as he was through it, he dropped to his knees and drew his pistol from his ankle holster.

He had not seen Gerald Vincent Gallagher, but he knew that Charley McFadden must have seen him, for Charley, moving with speed remarkable for his bulk, was now headed up the stairs to the subway station.

Two cars and a truck, going like the hammers of h.e.l.l, delayed Officer Martinez's pa.s.sage across Pratt Street by thirty seconds. By the time he made it across, Charley McFadden was nowhere in sight. All he could see was people with wide eyes wondering what the f.u.c.k was going on.

"Police! Police!" Officer Martinez shouted as he forced his way through a crowd of people trying to leave the station.

He jumped over the turnstile, and then was forced to make a choice between stairs leading to the tracks for trains arriving from downtown and tracks for trains headed downtown. Deciding that it would be far more likely that McFadden and whoever it was he was chasing-almost certainly, Gerald Vincent Gallagher-would be on the downtown platform, he ran up those stairs.

Officer McFadden, who had lost sight of Gerald Vincent Gallagher as he ran up the stairs from Pratt Street, had made the same decision. Already starting to puff a little, he ran onto the platform. A downtown train had just pulled into the station; the platform was crowded with people in the process of boarding it.

Holding his pistol at the level of his head, muzzle pointed toward the sky, Charley McFadden ran down the train looking for Gallagher. He had reached the last car, and hadn't seen him, and had just about decided the little f.u.c.ker was on the train, that he had missed him, and would have to start at the first car and work his way back through it when he did see him. Gallagher was in the middle of the tracks, the other tracks, the incoming from downtown tracks. As McFadden ran to the side of the center platform, Gerald Vincent Gallagher boosted himself up on the platform on the far side.

It had been his intention to run back down the stairs and get onto Frankford Avenue, where he could lose himself in the crowd. The narc, Gerald Vincent Gallagher reasoned, would not dare use his pistol because of all the f.u.c.king people on the lower level of the terminal and on Frankford Avenue.

But Gallagher had spotted him, and there was no way he could run back toward the station, because there were no people on that platform, and the G.o.dd.a.m.ned narc would feel free to shoot at him. He turned, instead, and ran down the platform in the other direction, to the end, and jumped over a yellow painted barrier with a sign on it reading DANGER! KEEP OFF!

Beyond the barrier was a narrow workman's walkway. It ran as far as the next station, but Gerald Vincent Gallagher wasn't planning on running that far, just maybe two, three, blocks where he knew there was a stairway, more of a ladder, really, he could climb down to Frankford Avenue.

He looked over his shoulder and saw that the f.u.c.king narc was doing what he had done, crossing the tracks and then boosting himself up onto the pa.s.senger platform. The big fat sonofab.i.t.c.h had trouble hauling all that lard onto the platform, and for a moment, the way the f.u.c.king narc was flailing around with his legs trying to get up on the platform, Gerald Vincent Gallagher thought he might get lucky and the narc's legs would touch the third rail, and the c.o.c.ksucker would fry himself.

But that didn't happen.

Officer McFadden got first to his knees, and then stood up. Holding his pistol in both hands, he took aim at Gerald Vincent Gallagher.

But he didn't pull the trigger. Heaving and panting the way he was, there was little chance that he could hit the little sonofab.i.t.c.h as far away as he was, and Christ only knew where the bullet would go after he fired. Probably get some nun between the eyes.

"You little sonofab.i.t.c.h! I'm going to get your a.s.s!" he screamed in fury, and started racing after him again.

Officer Jesus Martinez reached the center platform at this time. He knew from the direction people were looking where the action was, and ran down the center platform to the end.

He saw Officer McFadden first, and then, fifty, sixty yards ahead of him, a slight white male that almost certainly had to be Gerald Vincent Gallagher. They were running, carefully, along the walkway next to the rail.

The reason they were running carefully was that the walkway was over the third rail. The walkway was built of short lengths, about five feet long, of prefabricated pieces. Some of them, the real old ones, were heavy wooden planking. Some of the newer ones were pierced steel, and the most modern were of exposed aggregate cement. They provided a precarious perch in any event, and they were not designed to be foot-racing paths.

Officer Martinez made another snap decision. There was no way he could catch up with them, and even to try would mean that he would have to jump down and cross the tracks, and risk electrocuting himself on the third rail. But he could catch the departing train, ride to the next station, and then start walking back. That would put Gerald Vincent Gallagher between them.

He ran for the train and jumped inside, just as the doors closed.

He scared h.e.l.l, with his pistol drawn, out of the people on the car, and they backed away from him as if he was on fire.

"I'm a police officer," he said, not very loudly because he was out of breath. "Nothing to worry about."

When the train pa.s.sed Charley McFadden and Gerald Vincent Gallagher, they were both still running very carefully, watching their feet.

Jesus Christ, Charley, shoot the sonofab.i.t.c.h!

The same thought had occurred to Charley McFadden at just about that moment, and even as he ran, he wondered why he didn't stop running, drop to his knees, and, using a two-handed hold, try to put Gerald Vincent Gallagher down.

There were several reasons, and they all came to him. For one thing, he wasn't at all sure that he could hit him. For another, he was worried about where the bullet, the bullets, plural, would go if he missed. People lived close to the tracks here. He didn't want to kill one of them.

And then he realized the real reason. He didn't want to kill Gerald Vincent Gallagher. The little s.h.i.+t might deserve it, and it might mean that Officer Charley McFadden didn't have the b.a.l.l.s to be a cop, but the facts were that Gerald Vincent Gallagher didn't have a gun-if he had, the little s.h.i.+t would have used it, he had nothing to lose from a second charge of murder-and wasn't posing, right now, any real threat to anybody but himself, running down the tracks like this.

Hay-zus must have figured out what was going on by now, and got on the radio and called for help. In a couple of minutes, there would be cops responding from all over. All he had to do was keep Gerald Vincent Gallagher in sight, and keep him from hurting himself or somebody else, and everything would be all right.

Eighteen hundred and fifty-three feet (as was later measured with great care) south of the Bridge & Pratt Streets Terminal, Gerald Vincent Gallagher realized that he could not run another ten feet. His chest hurt so much he wanted to cry from the pain. And that big, fat, f.u.c.king narc was still on his tail.