ONE
Mary Elizabeth Flannery first came to the attention of the Police Department of the City of Philadelphia at 9:21 P.M., June 29, 1973, when an unidentified civilian called the Police Emergency number and reported that as she and her husband had been driving through Fairmount Park, going down Bell’s Mill Road toward Chestnut Hill, they had seen a naked woman, just walking around, on the Chestnut Hill side of the bridge over Wissahickon Creek.
The call was taken in the Police Radio Room, which is on the second floor of the Police Building in downtown Philadelphia. The operator who took the call was a civilian, a temporary employee, a twenty-two-year-old, 227-pound, six-foot-three-inch black man named Foster H. Lewis, Jr.
Foster H. Lewis, Sr., was a sergeant in the Eighteenth District. That hadn’t hurt any when Foster H. Lewis, Jr., had appeared three years before in the City Administration Building across from City Hall to apply for a part-time job to help him with his tuition at Temple University, where he was then a premedical sophomore.
Foster H. Lewis, Jr., who was perhaps predictably known as “Tiny,” had been at first more than a little awed by the Radio Room, with its rows of operators sitting before control consoles, and made more than a little uncomfortable by the steady stream of calls for help, often from people on the edge of hysteria.
Alone of America’s major city police forces, Philadelphia police respond to any call for help, not just to reports of crime. It is deeply imbedded in the subconscious minds of Philadelphia’s 2.1 million citizens (there are more than five million people in the Philadelphia metropolitan area) that what you do when Uncle Charley breaks a leg or the kid falls off his bike and is bleeding pretty bad at the mouth or when you see a naked woman just walking around in Fairmount Park is “call the cops.”
Tiny Lewis had worked in the Radio Room two, three nights a week, and weekends, and full time during the summers for three years now, and he was no longer awed by either the Radio Room or his responsibilities in dealing with a citizen who was calling for help.
For one thing, he was reasonably sure that this citizen’s call was for real, and that the citizen herself was neither hysterical or drunk, or both.
“May I have your name, please, ma’am?” Tiny Lewis asked, politely.
“Never mind about that,” the caller snapped. “Just help that poor woman.”
“Ma’am, I have to have your name,” Tiny Lewis said, reasonably. Sometimes that worked, and sometimes it didn’t. It didn’t now. The phone went dead.
“Joe!” Tiny Lewis called, just loud enough to catch the attention of the Police Dispatcher, a sworn police officer named Joe Bullock.
Joe Bullock had had sixteen years on the job when he pulled a drunk to the curb on the Baltimore Pike in West Philadelphia. He had him standing outside his car when another drunk had come along and rear-ended the stopped car. Neither civilian had been seriously injured, but Joe Bullock had spent seven months in University Hospital. The Department had wanted to put him out on a Thirty-Two, a Civil Service Disability Pension for Injuries Received in the Line of Duty, but Bullock had appealed to the Police Commissioner.
The Police Commissioner, then the Honorable Jerry Carlucci, had found time to see Officer Bullock, even though his time was pretty much taken up with his campaign to get himself elected mayor. Commissioner Carlucci only vaguely remembered Officer Bullock, when Bullock politely reminded him that he used to see him when the Commissioner had been a Highway Sergeant, but he shook his hand warmly, and assured him that as long as he was either Police Commissioner or mayor, the expletive-deleted paper pushers on the Civil Service Commission were not going to push out on a Thirty-Two any good cop who wanted to stay on the job and had a contribution to make.
Officer Bullock was assigned to the Radio Division as a Police Dispatcher.
“What have you got, Tiny?” Officer Bullock inquired of Tiny Lewis.
“A naked woman in the park at Bell’s Mill and Wissahickon Creek, around the Forbidden Drive,” Tiny said. “I think there’s something to it.”
“It could be some girl changed her mind at the last minute,” Joe Bullock said.
Forbidden Drive, despite the ominous name, was an unpaved road running along Wissahickon Creek, used in the daylight hours by respectable citizens for horseback riding, hiking, and at night by young couples seeking a place to park a car in reasonable privacy.
“I don’t think so,” Tiny said, repeating, “I think there’s something to this.”
Joe Bullock nodded. He knew that Tiny Lewis had a feel for his job, and very rarely got excited. He knew too that the location was in Chestnut Hill. It was said that ninety-five percent of Philadelphia was owned by people who lived in Chestnut Hill, very often in very large houses on very large pieces of property; the sort of people who were accustomed to the very best of police protection and who could get through to the mayor immediately if they didn’t think they were getting it.
Bullock went to his console, and checked the display for the Fourteenth Police District, which was charged with maintaining the peace in the area of Northwest Philadelphia including Chestnut Hill. He was not surprised to find that an indicator with “1423” on it was lit up. The “14” made reference to the district; “23” was the Radio Patrol Car (RPC) assigned to cover Chestnut Hill. He would have been surprised if 1423 was not lit up, signifying that it was on a job, and not available. Chestnut Hill was not a high-crime area, or even an area with a traffic problem.
“Fourteen Twenty-Three,” Joe Bullock said into the microphone.
There was an immediate response: “Fourteen Twenty-Three.”
“Fourteen Twenty-Three,” Joe Bullock said to his microphone, “report of a naked female on Forbidden Drive, in the vicinity of Bell’s Mill Road and the bridge. Civilian by phone.”
“Fourteen Twenty-Three, okay,” Police Officer William Dohner, who was cruising his district on Germantown Avenue, near Springfield Street, said into his microphone. He then put the microphone down, flipped on the siren and the flashing lights, and turned his 1972 Ford around and headed for Forbidden Drive.
As this was going on, Tiny Lewis was writing the pertinent information on a three-by-eight card. At this stage, the incident was officially an “Investigation, Person.” He then put the card between electrical contacts on a shelf above his console. Doing so interrupted the current lighting the small bulb behind the “1423” block on the display console. The block went dark, signifying that Fourteen Twenty-Three had a job.
Joe Bullock’s Police Radio call vis-à-vis the naked woman in Fairmount Park was received as well over the radios installed in other police vehicle
s. Almost immediately, a 1971 Ford van, EPW 1405, one of the two-man Emergency Patrol Wagons assigned to the Fourteenth District to transport the injured, prisoners, and otherwise assist in law enforcement, turned on its flashing lights and siren and headed for Forbidden Drive. So did Highway Nineteen, which happened to be in the area. So did D-209, an unmarked car assigned to the Northwest Detective District. And others.
It had been a relatively quiet night, and a naked female on Forbidden Drive certainly required all the assistance an otherwise unoccupied police officer could render.
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 twenty-year-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 & 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 of I 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 good-looking 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.