Then he went to the rear door of the residence and knocked on it. There was no response. Woodrow knocked again, and again there was no response. Woodrow gave the door a couple of good licks with his stick.
“Who the fuck is that?” a voice demanded in indignation.
“Speed, get your trashy ass out here!”
James Howard Leslie appeared behind the dirty glass of his kitchen door, and then opened it.
He did not seem particularly happy to see Officer Bailey, but neither did he seem at all concerned. He was wearing dirty blue jeans, a bead necklace, and nothing else.
“What’s happening?” Mr. Leslie inquired.
Officer Bailey lost his temper. He caught Mr. Leslie’s wrist and twisted it behind his back. Then he marched Mr. Leslie off his porch and to the smoldering pile of garbage, and manipulated Mr. Leslie’s body so that his nose was perhaps six inches from the garbage.
“That’s what’s happening, Speed,” Officer Bailey said.
“Man, you’re hurting me! What the fuck!”
“You trying to burn the neighborhood down, Speed? What’s the matter with you? You lost the sense you were born with?”
“What the fuck is the big deal? So I burned some garbage! So what the fuck?”
At this point in similar situations, it was normally Officer Bailey’s practice to first hurt the trash a little, either with a slap in the face or by jabbing them in the abdomen with his stick to get their attention. To further get their attention, he would then put handcuffs about their wrists and search them for weapons and illegal substances. Very often he encountered the latter, if only a few specks of spilled marijuana in their pockets.
Then he would explain in some detail what crimes they had committed, with special emphasis on the punishments provided by law. If he had found illegal substances on their persons, so much the better.
By then, the malefactor would be contrite. He did not want to go through the inconvenience he knew would be associated with an arrest: detention in the Thirty-ninth District, followed by transportation way the hell downtown to Central Lockup. And then several hours in Central Lockup before being arraigned before a magistrate.
The malefactors knew that the magistrate would probably release them on their own recognizance, and that if they actually got to trial they would walk, but it was a fucking pain in the ass to go through all that bullshit.
Officer Bailey would at some point shortly thereafter inform the trash there was a way to avoid all the inconvenience. They could make their backyard so clean they could eat off it. Get rid of all the garbage, right down to where there once had been grass. Get it all in plastic bags or something, and put it out on the street so the garbageman could take it off.
And keep it that way from now on, or Officer Bailey, who was going to check, would come down on their trashy asses like a ton of bricks, they could believe that.
Far more often than not, the malefactors would agree to this alternate solution of the problem at hand.
Mr. Leslie had, indeed, heard stories about the old black cop who had a hair up his ass about burning garbage, and had heard stories that if he caught you, he’d make you clean up the whole goddamned place or throw your ass in jail.
He was debating- Jesus Christ, I’m tired -whether it would be better to let the cop lock him up, or clean up the yard. It would take fucking forever to get all this shit out of here.
Mr. Leslie was not given the opportunity to make a choice.
Officer Bailey just spun him around and, guiding him with one hand on his arm and the other on his shoulder, led him to the cop car. He opened the door and guided Mr. Leslie to a seat in the rear.
Then he returned to the backyard, and the pile of garbage. He took a mechanical pencil from his pocket, squatted beside the garbage, and began to shove things aside. The first item he uncovered was a wedding picture.
He looked at it carefully.
“Lord almighty!” he said wonderingly.
He stirred the garbage a bit more. He was looking for the frame it was logical to assume would be with a photograph of what was supposed to be the happiest moment of a man’s life. He could not find one.
He stopped stirring, and, still squatting, was motionless in thought for about thirty seconds.
Then he stood up and walked to Leslie’s house. He rapped on the door with his nightstick until the brown-trash Puerto Rican woman appeared.
She stared at him with contempt.
“ Telefono? ” Officer Bailey inquired.
The brown-trash woman just looked at him.
He looked over her shoulder, saw a telephone sitting on top of the refrigerator, pointed to it and repeated, “ Telefono.”
Her expression didn’t change, but she shrugged, which Officer Bailey decided could be interpreted to mean that she had given him permission to enter her home.
And now the phone won’t work. They won’t have paid that bill either.
There was a dial tone.
“Homicide, Detective Kramer.”
“Detective, this is Officer Woodrow W. Bailey, of the Thirty-ninth District.”
“What can I do for you, Bailey?”
“I’d like to talk to somebody working the job of that police officer, Kellog, who was murdered.”
“What have you got, Bailey?”
“You working the job, Detective?”
“The assigned detective’s not here. But I’m working it.”
“What I got may not be anything, but I thought it was worth telling you.”
“What have you got, Bailey?”
“A fellow named James Howard Leslie-he’s a junkie, done some time for burglary-was burning garbage in his backyard.”
“And?” Detective Kramer asked, somewhat impatiently.
“I put the fire out, and then I got a good look at what he was burning. I don’t know…”
“What, Bailey?”
“There was a photograph of Officer Kellog and his wife, on their wedding day, in his garbage.”
There was a moment’s silence, and then Detective Kramer asked, very carefully: “How do you know it was Officer Kellog?”
“There’s a sign on the wall behind him. ‘Good Luck Officer Kellog From the Seventeenth District.’ And I remembered his picture in the newspapers.”
“Where’s the picture now?”
“I left it there.”
“Where’s the guy…Leslie, you said?”
“In my car. I arrested him for setting an unlawful fire.”
“Where are you?”
“Behind his house. In the alley. The 1900 block of Sedgwick Street.”
“I’ll be there in ten minutes. Don’t let him out of your sight, don’t let anybody near where you found the picture, and don’t touch nothing you don’t have to.”
Bailey hung up the telephone, then called the Thirty-ninth District and asked for a supervisor to meet him at the scene.
“What have you got, Bailey?” the Corporal inquired.
“A garbage burner,” Bailey said, and hung up.
He nodded at Leslie’s Puerto Rican woman, then walked back through the yard to his car and got behind the wheel.
“Hey, Officer, what’s happening?” Mr. Leslie inquired, sliding forward with some difficulty on the seat to get closer to the fucking cop.
“You under arrest, Speed,” Officer Bailey replied. “For setting a fire in your backyard.”
“Oh, Jesus Christ, man! For burning some fucking garbage?”
“If I was you, I’d just sit there and close my mouth,” Officer Bailey replied.
As a general rule of thumb, unless the visitor to the Mayor’s office was someone really important (“really important” being defined as someone of the ilk of a United States Senator, the Governor of the State of Pennsylvania, or the Cardinal Archbishop of the Diocese of Philadelphia) Mrs. Annette Cossino, the Mayor’s secretary, would escort the visitor to the door of the Mayor’s office, push it open, and say, “The Mayor will see you now.”
The visitor would then be able to see the Mayor deep in concentration, dealing with some document of great importance laid out on his massive desk. After a moment or two, the Mayor would glance toward the door, look surprised and apologetic, and rise to his feet.