Police Radio did not respond to Officer McFadden directly, but instead, after checking the board to see what was available, called the Emergency Patrol Wagon directly:

"Twelve Oh One."

"Twelve Oh One," the wagon replied.

"Meet the burglary detail at the parking lot of Penrose Plaza, Island at Lindbergh, with a prisoner."

"Twelve Oh One, okay," EPW 1201 replied.

Charley McFadden put the portable radio back on the seat of his Volkswagen.

When the two police officers assigned to 1201, the Twelfth District wagon responding to the call to transport a prisoner, arrived at the scene, they found that the arresting officers were having more trouble with the victim than with the prisoner.

The prisoner was on his feet, his hands cuffed behind him, leaning on the victim's car and apparently resigned to his fate. Even, to judge by the look on his face, a little smug about it.

The victim, having been informed that her two packages had become evidence, and could not be returned to her until released by proper authority, was engaged in a heated conversation with Officer McFadden, telling him that she had to have the shopping bags, at least the one fromJohn Wanamaker amp; Sons which contained a formal dress shirt for her husband, a shirt he absolutely had to have for a dinner party that night.

"Ma'am, if you'll just go the West Detectives, at Fifty-fifth and Pine, and sign the Property Receipt, they'll give you your stuff right back."

"What I don't understand is why I can't sign whatever it is I have to sign right here," she said.

"I don't have the form, lady; you have to do it at West Detectives," Charley McFadden said. "That's the rules."

That was not the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. But it had been Officer McFadden's experience that if he gave the victim back her property here and now, that would be the last he, or more importantly, the criminal justice system, would ever see of her. It had been his experience that the ordinary citizen's interest in law enforcement ended when they had to make their own contribution, like showing up in court and swearing under oath that the stuff the critter had stolen belonged to her.

The chances of her showing up in court, and thus perhaps aiding in sending Mr. Sims off to jail, would be aided if she got the idea, by signing a Property Receipt, that she was already involved andhad to show up in court.

"And what if I refuse to press charges?" the victim said, finally, in desperate exasperation.

"Lady, I'm pressing charges," Charley McFadden said, equally exasperated. "Or Hay-zus is. Thecity is. Wecaught him stealing that stuff from your car."

"Well, we'll see about that, young man," the victim said. "We'll just see about that. My brother-in-law just happens to be a very prominent attorney."

"Yes, ma'am," Charley McFadden said. He turned to the two wagon cops. "You can take him," he said.

"And I'm going to get on the telephone right now and tell him about this," the victim said. "This is simply outrageous."

"Yes, ma'am," Charley McFadden said.

Clarence Sims was led to the wagon, helped inside, and driven to the West Detectives District at Fifty-fifth and Pine Streets, where his glowing ember of hope that he was going to walk was extinguished by a detective who began their discussion by explaining his rights underMiranda.

Lieutenant Ed Michleson, the Day Watch commander at the Twelfth District, was not at all surprised to get the telephone call from Sergeant Willoughby of Chief Inspector Coughlin's office informing him that he was about to lose the services of Officers Jesus Martinez and Charles McFadden.

When they had been assigned to the Twelfth District, it had been with the understanding that it was only temporary, that they would be reassigned. The District Commander had told him that he had gotten it from Chief Coughlin himself that their assignment was only until he could find a good job for them.

They had been previously working plainclothes in Narcotics, a good, but not unusual assignment for young cops who showed promise and whose faces were not yet known on the street, and who, if they let their hair grow and dressed like bums could sort of melt into the drug culture.

When their faces became known, which was inevitable, the next step was usually back into uniform. But McFadden and Martinez had, on their own, staked out the Bridge amp; Pratt Street terminal of the subway, and there found the junkie who had shot Captain Dutch Moffitt, of Highway Patrol, to death. McFadden had chased Gerald Vincent Gallagher down the tracks where Gallagher had fallen against the third rail and then gotten himself run over by a subway train.

In the movies, or in a cop-and-robbers program on TV, with the mayor and assorted big shots beaming in the background, the Commissioner would have handed them detectives' badges, and congratulations for a job well done. But this was real life, and promotions to detective in the Philadelphia Police Department came only after you had taken, and passed, the civil service examination. Martinez had taken the exam and flunked it, and McFadden hadn't been a cop long enough to be eligible to even take it.

But it was good police work, and Chief Inspector Coughlin, who was a good guy, didn't want to put them back into uniform-which young cops working plainclothes considered a demotion-even though with their pictures on the front page of every newspaper in Philadelphia, and on TV, their effectiveness as undercover Narcs was destroyed.

So he'd loaned them to Twelfth District, which was under-strength, and had a problem with thieves working shopping mall parking lots, until he could find someplace to assign them permanently. And now he had.

Lieutenant Michleson got up and walked into the Operations Room and asked the corporal where Mutt and Jeff were. They looked like Mutt and Jeff. McFadden was a great big kid, large boned, tall and heavy. Martinez was a little Latin type, wiry and just over Department minimums for height and weight.

"They're on their way in," the corporal said. "They just arrested a guy robbing a car in the parking lot at Penrose Plaza. That makes five they caught since they been here."

"When they finish up the paperwork, send them in to me," Michleson said. "We're going to lose them."

"Where they going?"

"Highway."

"Highway?" the corporal replied, surprised, then laughed. "Those two?"

"That's not kind, Charley," Michleson said, smiling at the mental image of Mutt and Jeff all decked out in Highway Patrol regalia.

"I don't think Hay-zus is big enough to straddle a Harley," the corporal said.

"Maybe somebody figures they paid their dues," Lieutenant Michleson said. "Highway didn't catch the critter who shot Captain Moffitt. They did."

"When are they going?"

"They're to report in the morning."

Staff Inspector Peter Wohl, at thirty-five the youngest of the eighteen Staff Inspectors of the Police Department of the City of Philadelphia, who was lying on his back, looked up from what he was doing and found himself staring up a woman's shorts at her underpants. The underpants were red, and more or less transparent, and worn under a pair of white shorts.

He pushed himself, on his mechanic's crawler, the rest of the way out from under the Jaguar XK-120, and sat up. There was grease on his face, and on his bare, smoothly muscled chest, but there was still something about him that suggested more the accountant, or the lawyer, than a mechanic. Or a police officer.

"Hi," the wearer of the red underpants and white shorts said.

"Hi," Peter Wohl said, noticing now that she was also wearing a man's white shirt, the bottom rolled up and tied in a knot under her bosom, which served to bare her belly and put her not at all unattractive navel on display.