Men In Blue

"Tom, is Inspector Kegley out there?"

"Yes, sir, I think so."

"Would you tell him, please, unless there is a good reason he can't, I would like him to find out exactly what happened?"

"Yes, sir."

"I mean right now, Tom," Coughlin said. "He doesn't have to give me a white paper, just get the information to me." Coughlin looked at his watch. "I'll be at Dutch's wake, say from six o'clock until it's over. Are you going over there with me?"

"Yes, sir," Lenihan said, and departed.

Two minutes later, Lenihan was back.

"Inspector Kegley's on his way, sir. He said he'd see you at Marshutz amp; Sons," he reported.

"Good, Tom. Thank you," Coughlin said. Staff Inspector George Kegley had come up through the Detective Bureau, and had done some time in Homicide. He was a quiet, phlegmatic, soft-eyed man who missed very little once he turned his attention to something. If there was something not quite right about the pursuit and death of Gerald Vincent Gallagher, Kegley would soon sniff it out.

Coughlin returned his attention to the file on his desk. It was a report from Internal Affairs involving two officers of the Northwest Police Division. There had been a party. Officer A had paid uncalledfor personal attention to Mrs. B. Mrs. B had not, in Officer B's (her husband's) judgment, declined the attention with the proper outraged indignation. She had, in fact, seemed to like it. Whereupon Officer B had belted his wife in the chops, and taken off after Officer A, pistol drawn, threatening to kill the sonofabitch. No real harm had been done, but the whole matter was now official, and something would have to be done.

"I don't want to deal with this now," De

He stood up, took his pistol from his left desk drawer, slipped it into his holster, and walked out of his office.

"Come on, Tom," he said to Sergeant Lenihan, "let's go."

FOURTEEN

Patrick Coughlin, a second-generation Irish-American (his father had been born in Philadelphia three months after his parents had immigrated from County Kildare in 1896) had spent his working life as a truck diver, and had been determined that his son De

But in 1946, despite an excellent record at Roman Catholic High School, De

Once De

Shortly after reporting aboard the aircraft carrier U.S.S.Coral Sea as an engineman striker, theCoral Sea's master at arms had offered him a chance to become what was in effect a shipboard policeman. That had far more appeal than long days in the hot and greasy bowels of the ship, and De

It wasn't what he thought it would be, marching into waterfront bars and hauling drunken sailors back to the ship, after beating them on the head with a nightstick. There was some of that, to be sure, and once or twice De

He found, too, that often the sailors were the aggrieved party to a dispute, that the saloonkeepers were in the wrong. And he found that he could deal with the saloonkeepers as well as he could with sailors. He sensed, long before he could put it into words, that the cowboys really had used the right word. He was apeace officer, and he was good at it.

After eighteen months of sea duty aboard theCoral Sea, he was assigned as a shore patrolman attached to the U.S. Naval Hospital, Philadelphia. He worked with the Philadelphia police, and came to the attention of several senior officers, who saw in him just what the department was looking for in its recruits: a large, healthy, bright, pleasant hometown boy with an imposing presence. The police department was suggested to him as a suitable civilian career when his navy hitch was up. With his navy veteran's preference, he had no trouble with the civil service exam. Once that was out of the way, Captain Francis X. Halloran had a word with the Honorable Lawrence Sheen, M.C., and shortly after that Bosun's Mate Third Class De

Three weeks after taking off his navy blues, De

On his first day there, he met John X. Moffitt, just back from a three-year hitch in the marines. They were of an age, they had much in common, and they became buddies. When they graduated from the academy, they were both assigned downtown, De

He needed the money, Jack Moffitt argued, and there wasn't going to be a war anyway; De

1950.

Jack was back in just over a year, medically retired as a staff sergeant for wounds received in the vicinity of Hangun-Ri, North Korea, where he also earned the Silver Star. He went back to work in the West Detective Division; De

But things weren't the same between them, primarily because of Patricia Stevens, whom Jack had met when she went with the girls from Saint Agnes's to entertain the boys in the navy hospital. De

A month after Jack Moffitt died of gunshot wounds suffered in the line of duty, a month before Matt was born, De

"You don't want to marry the girl, De

De