Men In Blue

ONE

I think I am, the long-haired, long-legged blonde thought, torn between excitement and alarm,about to have my first affair with a married man.

Her name was Louise Dutton, and she pursed her lips thoughtfully and cocked her head unconsciously to one side as she considered that improbable likelihood.

She was at the wheel of a yellow, six-year-old, 1967 Cadillac convertible, the roof down, moving fifteen miles over the posted forty-five-miles-per-hour speed limit northward in the center lane of Roosevelt Boulevard, which runs through the center of Northeast Philadelphia, from Broad Street to the Bucks County line.

Louise Dutton was twenty-five years old, weighed 115 pounds, and her blond hair was real-a genetic gift from her father. She had graduated three years before (BA, English) from the University of Chicago. She had worked a year as a general-assignment reporter on the Cedar Rapids, Iowa,Clarion; six months as a newswriter for KLOS-TV (Channel 10), Los Angeles, California; and for eleven months as an on-camera reporter for WNOG-TV (Channel 7), New Orleans, Louisiana. For the past five weeks Louise Dutton had been co-anchor of "Nine's News," over WCBL-TV (Channel 9), Philadelphia: thirty minutes of local news telecast at six p.m., preceding the 6:30 national news, and again at 11 p.m.

A crazy scenario entered her mind.

She would get arrested for speeding. Preferably by one of the hotshot Highway Patrolmen. He would swagger over to the car, in his shiny leather jacket and his gun and holster with all the bullets showing.

"Where's the fire, honey?" Mr. Macho, with a gun and a badge, would demand.

"Actually," she would say, batting her eyelashes at him, "I'm on my way to meet Captain Moffitt."

Captain Richard C. "Dutch" Moffitt was the commanding officer of the Philadelphia Highway Patrol.

And the cop who stopped her for speeding would either believe her, and leave her properly awed, or he would not believe her, and ask her where she was supposed to meet the captain, and she would tell him, and maybe he would follow her there to see if she was telling the truth. That would be even better. Maybe it would embarrass Dutch Moffitt to have one of his men learn that he was meeting a blonde in a restaurant.

It would not, she decided. He'd love it. The cop would wink at Captain Big Dutch Moffitt and Dutch would modestly shrug his shoulders. Dutch expected to have blond young women running after him.

I am losing my mind.

Is this what happened to my mother? One day my father appeared, and she went crazy?

Is that why I'm going where I'm going, and in this circumstance? Because Dutch Moffitt reminds me of my father?

Is it true that all little girls harbor a shameful secret desire to go to bed with their fathers? Is that what this is, "Dutch Moffitt, in loco parentis"?

Ahead, on the left, she spotted the site of their rendezvous. Or was it assignation?

The Waikiki Diner, to judge from the outside decor, was not going to be the Philadelphia equivalent of Arnaud's, or for that matter, even Brennan's; more like the Golden Kettle in Cedar Rapids.

She turned into the U-turn lane, jammed the accelerator to the floor to move her ahead of an oncoming wave of traffic, and then turned off Roosevelt Boulevard, too fast. Louise winced when she felt the Cadillac bottom going over the curb.

The Cadillac was her college graduation gift. Or one of them. Her father had handed her a check and told her to pick herself out a car.

"I'd rather have yours," she said. "If I could."

He had looked at her, confused, for a moment, and then understood. " The yellow convertible? It's three years old. I was about to get rid of it."

"Then I can have it?" she'd said. "It's hardly used." He had looked at her for a moment, understanding, she thought, before replying.

"Of course," he said. "I'll have someone bring it here."

She had leaned forward and kissed him and said, "Thank you, Daddy," and he'd hugged her.

Louise Dutton's father was not, and never had been, married to her mother. She was illegitimate, a bastard; but the reality hadn't beenwasn't-as bad as most people, when they heard the facts, presumed it was.

She had been presented with the facts when she was a little girl, matter-of-factly told there were reasons her father and mother could not be married, that he could not live with them, or see her as often as he would like. That was the way things were, and it wasn't going to change. She didn't even hate her father's wife, or her half-brothers and -sisters.

It wasn't as if her father considered her an embarrassment, wished she had never happened. The older she got, the more she saw of him. He spent his Christmases with his family, and she spent hers with her mother and her mother's husband, and she called both men "Daddy." So far as she knew, they had never met, and she had never seen her father's family, even across a room.

Her father had always, from the time she was nine or ten, found a couple of days to spend with her before or after Christmas, and he sent for her several times during the year, and she spent several days or a week with him, and he always introduced her as "my daughter."

She had been a freshman in college when he'd taken her deep-sea fishing for ten days in Baja, California. She'd flown to Los Angeles, and spent the night in his beach house in Malibu, and then driven, in the yellow convertible, to Baja. A wonderful ten days. And he knew why she wanted the convertible.

She had wondered what his wife, and her half-brothers and -sisters thought about her, and finally realized they were in the same position she was. Stanford Former Wells III, chairman of the board of Wells Newspapers, Inc., did what he damned well pleased. They were just lucky that what he damned well pleased to do was almost invariably kind, and thoughtful, and ethical.

Maybe that was easier if you had inherited that kind of money, and maybe he wouldn't have been so kind, thoughtful, or ethical if he was a life insurance salesman or an automobile dealer,but he wasn't. He had inherited seventeen newspapers and three radio stations from his father, and turned that into thirty-one newspapers, four television stations, and four (larger) radio stations.

The only thing that Louise could discover that her father had done wrong was, as a married man, impregnate a woman to whom he was not married. He had sownher seed in a forbidden field. But even then, he had done the decent thing. He had not abandoned his wife and children for the greener fields of a much younger woman, and he had not abandonedher. He could very easily have made "appropriate financial arrangements" and never shown his face.

She loved and admired her father, and if people didn't understand that, fuck 'em.

Louise found a place to park the yellow convertible, and then walked to the Waikiki Diner. There were no cars in the parking lot that looked like unmarked police cars, which meant that he had either come in his own car, or that he wasn't here yet.

She pushed open the door to the Waikiki Diner and stepped inside. It was larger inside than it looked to be from the outside. It was shaped like an L. The shorter leg, which was what she had seen from the street, held a counter, with padded seats on stools, and one row of banquettes against the wall. Beside the door, which was at the juncture of the legs, was the cashier's glass counter and a bar with a couple of stools, but obviously primarily a service bar. The longer leg was also wider, and was a dining room. There were probably forty tables in there, Louise judged, plus banquettes against the walls.

He wasn't in there.

She thought: Captain Richard C. "Dutch" Moffitt, commanding officer of the Philadelphia Police Department 's Highway Patrol, has not yet found time to grace the Waikiki Diner with his patronage.

"Help you, doll?" a waitress asked. She was slight, had orange hair, too much makeup, and was pushing sixty.

"I'm supposed to meet someone here," Louise said.

"Why'ncha take a table?" the waitress asked, and led Louise into the dining room. Louise saw that one of the banquettes against the wall, in a position where she could see the door beside the cash register, was empty, and she slipped into it. The waitress went thirty feet farther before she realized that she wasn't being followed.

Then she turned and, obviously miffed, laid an enormous menu in front of Louise.

"You want a cocktail or something while you're waiting?" she asked.

"Coffee, please, black," Louise said.

She didn't want alcohol to cloud her reasoning any more than it was already clouded.

She looked around the dining room. It was arguably, she decided, the ugliest dining room she had ever been in. Fake Tiffany lamps, with enormous rotating fans hanging from them, in turn hung from plastic replicas of wooden ceiling beams. The banquettes were upholstered in diamond-embossed purple vinyl. The wall across the room was a really awful mural of lasses in flowing dresses and lads in what looked like diapers dancing around what was probably supposed to be the Parthenon.

The coffee was delivered in a thick china mug decorated with a pair of leaning palm trees and the legend,"Waikiki Diner Roosevelt Blvd. Phila Penna."

Captain Richard C. "Dutch" Moffitt came in as Louise had removed, in shock and surprise, the scalding hot mug from her burned lips.

He had no sooner come through the door by the cashier than a small, slight man with a large mustache, wearing a tight, prominently pinstriped suit, came up to him and offered his hand, his smile revealing a lot of goldwork.

Dutch smiled back at him, revealing his own mouthful of large, white, even teeth. And then he saw Louise, and the smile brightened, and his eyebrows rose and he headed toward the table.

"Hello," Dutch said to her, sliding into the chair facing her.

"Hi!" Louise said.

"This is our host," Dutch said, nodding at the mustached man. "Teddy Galanapoulos."

"A pleasure, I'm sure. Any friend of Captain Moffitt's…"

"Hello," Louise said. There was a slight Greek accent, and the gowned lasses and the lads in diapers dancing around the Parthenon were now explained.

"You're beautiful," Dutch said.

"Thank you," Louise said, mortified when she felt her face flush. She stood up. "Will you excuse me, please?"

When she came back from the ladies' room, where she had, furious with herself, checked her hair and her lipstick, Dutch had changed places. He was now sitting on the purple vinyl banquette seat. His left hand, which was enormous, was curled around a squat glass of whiskey. There was a wide gold wedding band on the proper finger.

He started to get up when he saw her.

It was the first time she had ever seen him in civilian clothing. He was wearing a blue blazer over a yellow knit shirt. The shirt was tight against his large chest, and there wasn't, she thought, a lot of excess room in the shoulders of the blazer either.

"Keep your seat," Louise said, "since you seem to like that one better."

"I'm a cop," he said. "Cops don't like to sit with their backs to the door."

"Really?" she asked, not sure if he was pulling her leg or not.

"Really," he said, then added: "I didn't know what you drink."

"I'm surprised," she said. She had first met him two days before. His Honor, Mayor Jerry Carlucci, who never passed up an opportunity to get his face in the newspapers or on television, reopened a repaired stretch of the Schuylkill Expressway with a ribbon-cutting ceremony. Louise, having nothing better to do at the time, had gone along with the regular crew of cameraman/producer and reporter, originally intending to do the on-camera bit herself.

But when she got there, and saw what it was, much ado about nothing, she had decided not to usurp the reporter. But instead of leaving, she decided to hang around in case the mayor ran off at the mouth again. Mayor Carlucci had a tendency to do that (in the most recent incident, he had referred to a city councilman as "an ignorant coon") and that would make a story.

She told the cameraman to shoot the mayor from the time he arrived until he left.

The mayor usually moved around the city in style, in a black Cadillac limousine, preceded by two unmarked police cars carrying his plainclothes bodyguards.

A third car had stopped right where Louise had been standing. The driver's door had opened, and Captain Richard C. "Dutch" Moffitt had erupted from it. He was a large man, and he had been in uniform. The Highway Patrol wore different uniforms than the rest of the Philadelphia Police Department.

The Highway Patrol had begun, years before, as a traffic-control force, and had been mounted on motorcycles. They had kept their motorcyclist outfits-leather jackets and breeches and black leather puttees-even though, except for mostly ceremonial occasions, they had given up their motorcycles for patrol cars; and had, in fact become an elite force within the police department, deployed city-wide in highcrime areas.

In the Channel 9 newsroom, the Philadelphia Highway Patrol was referred to as "Carlucci's Commandos." But, not, Louise had noticed, without a not-insignificant tone of respect, however grudging.

Louise Dutton had found herself standing so close to Captain Richard C. Moffitt that she could smell his leather jacket, and that he had been chewing Sen-Sen. Her eyes were on the level of his badge, above which was pinned a blue, gold-striped ribbon, on which were half a dozen stars. It was, Louise correctly guessed, some kind of a citation. Citations, plural, with the stars representing multiple awards.

He winked at her, and then, putting his hand on the car door, rose on his toes to look back at Mayor Carlucci's limousine. Louise saw that he wore a wedding ring, and then turned to see what he was looking at. Two plainclothesmen were shouldering a path for His Honor the Mayor through the crowd to the flag-bedecked sawhorses where the ribbon would be cut.

Then he looked down at her.

"I've seen you on the tube," he said. "I'm Dutch Moffitt."

She gave him her hand and her name.

"You look better in real life, Louise Dutton," he said.

"May I ask you a question, Captain Moffitt?" she had said.

"Sure."

"Some of the people I know refer to the Highway Patrol as 'Carlucci's Commandos.' What's your reaction to that?"

"Fuck 'em," he said immediately, matter-of-factly.

"Can I quote you?" she flared.

"You can, but I don't think you could say that on TV," he said, smiling down at her.

"You arrogant bastard!"

"I'd be happy, since you just came to town, to explain what the Highway Patrol does," he said. "And why that annoys the punks and the faggots."

She gave him what she hoped was her most disdainful look.

"I'll even throw in a couple of drinks and dinner," he said.

"Why don't you call me?" Louise had asked, flashing him her most dazzling smile. "At home, of course. I wouldn't want it to get around the station that I was having drinks and dinner with one of Carlucci's Commandos. Especially a married one. Sonice to talk to you, Captain."

She did not get the response she expected.

"You're really full of piss and vinegar, aren't you?" he said, approvingly.

She had stormed furiously away. She first decided that he was arrogant enough to call her, even if her sarcasm had flown six feet over his head. She took what she later recognized was childish solace in the telephone arrangements at the studios. With all the kooks and nuts out there in TV Land, you just couldn't call Channel 9 and get put through to Louise Dutton. But they might put a police captain through, and then what?

When she went back to the studio, she went to the head telephone operator and told her that for reasons she couldn't go into, if a police captain named Moffitt called, she didn't want to talk to him; tell him she was out.

The arrogant bastard would sooner or later get the message.

And there was no way he could call her at home. The studio wouldn't tell him where she lived, and the number was unlisted.

Today, three hours before, the telephone had rung in her apartment, just as she had stepped into the shower.

She knew it wasn't her father; he had called at ten, waking her up, asking her how it was going. Anybody else could wait. If they'd dropped the atomic bomb, she would have heard it go off.

The phone had not stopped ringing, and finally, torn between gross annoyance and a growing concern that some big story had developed, she walked, dripping water, to the telephone beside her bed.

"Hello?"

"Are you all right?"

There was genuine concern in Captain Dutch Moffitt's voice, but she realized this only after she had snapped at him.

"Why shouldn't I be all right?"

"People have been robbed, and worse, in there before," he said.

"How did you get this number?" Louise demanded, and then thought of another question. "How did you know I was home?"

"I sent a car by," he said. "They told me the yellow convertible was in the garage."

She raised her eyes and saw the reflection of her starkers body in the mirror doors of her closet. She wondered what Captain Dutch Moffitt would think if he could see her.

She shook her head, and felt her face flush.

"What do you want?" she asked.

"I want to see you," he said.

"That's absurd," she said.

"Yeah, I know," he said. "I can take off early at four. There's a diner on Roosevelt Boulevard, at Harbison, called the Waikiki. Meet me there, say four-fifteen."

"Impossible," she said.

"Why impossible?"

"I have to work," she said.

"No, you don't. Don't lie to me, Louise."

"Oh, hell, Dutch!"

"Four-fifteen," he said, and hung up.

And she had looked at her naked body in the mirror again and known that at four o'clock, she would be in the Waikiki Diner.

And here she was, looking into this married man's eyes and suddenly aware that the last thing she wanted in the world was to get involved with him, in bed, or in any other way.

What the hell was I thinking of? I was absolutely out of my mind to come here!

"I'm a cop," he said. "Finding out where you lived and getting your phone number wasn't hard,"

"I think I will have a scotch and soda," Louise said. "Johnnie Walker Black."

He pushed his glass to her.

"I'll get another," he said.

It was rude and certainly unsanitary but she picked it up and sipped from it as he gestured toward the bar for another.

Why the hell did I do that? she wondered, and then the answer came to her: Because I don't know what to do to keep myself from making more of a fool of myself than I already have. How am I going to get out of this?

The mustached Greek proprietor delivered the drink immediately himself.

"We seem to have at least one thing in common," Dutch Moffitt said.

"Wow!" she said.

"Relax, Louise," he said. "I'm not going to hurt you."

She looked at him again, met his eyes for a moment, and then looked away.

"I don't know why I came here," she said. "But just to clear the air, I now realize it was a mistake."

Dutch Moffitt opened his mouth to reply, but before the words came out, he was interrupted by a male voice.

"Good afternoon, Captain Moffitt, nice to see you."

The sleeve of a glen-plaid suit passed in front of Louise's face.

"Hello, Angelo," Moffitt said.

Louise, once the arm was withdrawn, looked up. A pleasant-looking, olive-skinned man-Italian to judge by the "Angelo"-well barbered, smelling of some expensive cologne, was standing by the table.

"My father was asking about you just this morning," the man said.

"How's your mother, Angelo?" Moffitt asked.

"Very well, thank you," Angelo said.

"Give her my regards," Moffitt said.

Angelo smiled at Louise, and then looked at Moffitt.

"Are you going to introduce me to this charming lady?"

"Nice to see you, Angelo," Moffitt said.

Angelo colored, and then walked away.

"What was that," Louise demanded. "Simply bad manners? Or-"

"That was Angelo Turpino," Moffitt said. "You don't want to know him."

"Why?"

"He's a thug," Moffitt said. "No. Correction. He's a made man. Their standards are slipping. A couple of years ago, that slimy little turd wouldn't have made a pimple on a made man's ass."

"What's a 'made man'?"

He looked at her, into her eyes again.

"When one commences on a career in organized crime, one's highest aspiration is to become a made man," Moffitt said, mockingly. "A made man, so to speak, is one who is accepted, one who enjoys all the rights and privileges of acknowledged master craftsmanship in his chosen trade. Analogous, one might say, to the designation of an individual as a doctor of medicine."

"You're saying that he's in the Mafia?"

"The 'family,' we call it," Moffitt said.

"What did he do to become 'made'?"

"About six weeks ago, Vito Poltaro, sometimes known-from his initials, you see-as 'the vice president,' was found in the trunk of his car in a parking garage downtown, behind the Bellevue-Stratford Hotel. Poor Vito had two.22 holes in the back of his head. Fivedollar bills were found in his mouth, his ears, his nostrils, and other body orifices. This signifies greed. I think that Angelo did it. A week after Organized Crime found Vito, they heard that Angelo had been to New York and had come back a made man."

There was no question in Louise's mind that what he was telling her was true.

"What about Organized Crime finding the body?" she asked. "I didn't understand that."

"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 staffs; the chief inspectors and their staffs; and a plethora of other senior police officers.

With more than a thousand police vehicles "on the street" at any one time, it was necessary to develop, both by careful planning and by trial and error, a system permitting instant contact with the right vehicle at the right time. The police commissioner is not really interested to learn instantly of every automobile accident in Philadelphia, nor is a request from the airport police for a paddy wagon to haul off three drunks from the airport of much interest to a detective looking for a murder suspect in an alley off North Broad Street.

So far as the police were concerned, Philadelphia was broken down into seven geographical divisions, each headed by an inspector. Each division contained from two to four districts, each headed by a captain. Each division was assigned its own radio frequency. Detectives' cars and those assigned to other investigative units (Narcotics, Intelligence, Organized Crime, et cetera) had radios operating on the H-Band.All police car radios could be switched to an all-purpose emergency and utility frequency called the J-Band.

For example, a police car in the Sixteenth District would routinely have his switch set to F-l, which would permit him to communicate with his (the West) division. Switching to F-2 would put him on the universal J-Band. A car assigned to South Philadelphia with his switch set to F-l would be in contact with the South Division. A detective operating anywhere with his switch set to F-l would be on the (Detectives') H-Band, but he too, by switching to F-2, would be on the J-Band.

Senior police brass are able to communicate with other senior police brass, and most often on the detective frequency or on the frequency of some other service in which he has a personal interest. Ordinary police cars are required to communicate through the dispatcher, and forbidden to talk car-to-car. Car-to-car communication is authorized on the J- and H-bands.

"Communications discipline" is strictly enforced. Otherwise, there would be communications chaos.

By throwing the appropriate switch, a Radio Room dispatcher may send a radio message to every radio-equipped vehicle, from a police boat making its. way against the current of the Delaware River, through the hundreds of police cars on patrol, to the commissioner's car.

It happens when a light flashes on a console and an operator throws a switch and says, "Police Radio," and the party calling says, "Officer needs assistance. Shots fired."

Not every call making such an announcement is legitimate. The wise guys have watched cop movies on television, and know the cant; and ten or twelve times every day they decide that watching a flock of police cars, lights flashing and sirens screaming, descend on a particular street corner would be a good way to liven up an otherwise dull afternoon.

The people who answer the telephones didn't come to work yesterday, however, and sometimes theyknow, by the timbre of the caller's voice possibly, or the assurance with which the caller raises the alarm, thatthis call is legitimate.

The dispatcher who took Captain Richard C. "Dutch" Moffitt's call from the Waikiki Diner was Mrs. Leander Polk, forty-eight, a more than pleasantly plump black lady who had been on the job for nineteen years.

"Lieutenant!" she called, raising her voice, just to get his attention, not to ask his permission. Then she threw the appropriate switch.

Two beeps, signifying an emergency message, were broadcast to every police radio in Philadelphia.

"Roosevelt Boulevard and Harbison," Mrs. Polk said clearly. "The Waikiki Diner. Assist officer. Police by phone."

She repeated that message once again, and then went on: "Report of a robbery, shooting, and hospital case." She repeated that, and then, quickly, to the lieutenant who had come to her station: "Captain Moffitt called it in."

And then she broadcast: "All cars going in on the assist, Harbison and the Boulevard, flash information on a robbery at that location. Be on the lookout for white male, long blond hair, brown jacket, direction taken unknown' armed with a gun."

And then she repeated that.