W. Griffin: Final Justice

“The Bull says he’s glad to hear you’re okay.”

“That’s nice of him.”

Mickey pushed another button on his worldwide telephone and put it to his ear.

“Hi, Mom!” he began. “How you doing?”

He spoke with his mother for five minutes, then handed the cellular to Matt.

“You want to call your mom?”

“Not particularly.”

“She’s your mother, for Christ’s sake. Call her.”

Matt called his mother and told her that he was fine, thank you, and that he was going to Paris tomorrow night with Mickey O’Hara.

When Air France Flight 2110 deposited them at Charles de Gaulle International Airport in Paris the second morning later, French customs showed great interest in Mr. O’Hara’s brand-new luggage-a last-minute purchase after Matt suggested that if they were going to be gone a couple of weeks Mickey would need more space than his zipper bag with the Philadelphia 76ers logotype would provide-and went through it suspiciously before gesturing they could pass.

Outside Customs, a man in a chauffeur’s cap was waiting for them, holding a sign lettered “M. O’Hara.”

He drove them, in a new Mercedes, to the George V Hotel, where they were installed in a two-bedroom, two-bath, sitting room suite on a corner of the building. From two windows in the sitting room, if they looked carefully, they could see the Champs Elysees, a block away.

They unpacked their luggage and then walked over to the Champs Elysees, took a quick look at the Arc de Triomphe at the other end, and went in search of breakfast.

Then they went to the U.S. Embassy at the foot of the hill, where-after Mickey threatened him with calling Pennsylvania’s junior senator right then and on his worldwide telephone-the press officer somewhat reluctantly promised to be prepared to give him the latest developments vis-a-vis the extradition of Isaac Festung once a day when Mickey called.

As they left the embassy, Matt said they were within walking distance of two famous Paris landmarks, the Louvre Museum and Harry’s New York Bar.

“Let’s take a quick look at the museum,” Mickey said. “Just so we can say we saw it. And then we’ll go to the bar and hoist a few.”

They went into the museum a few minutes before eleven and left a few minutes more than eight hours later, when at closing time three museum guards-immune to Mickey’s argument that he was the press, for Christ’s sake, and entitled to a little consideration-escorted them out.

He immediately announced to Matt that they were going to have to come back tomorrow.

“I could spend all goddamn day in there just looking at Venus de Milo,” Mickey said.

They called their respective maternal parents while sitting at the bar in Harry’s. When Matt told his mother they had spent most of the day in the Louvre, and had only minutes before arrived at Harry’s Bar, she chuckled knowingly.

“Have a good time, sweetheart,” she said. “But get some rest.”

When they left Harry’s four beers and an hour later, and were walking toward the Opera, where Matt remembered a restaurant his father particularly liked, Mickey offered a philosophical/historical/literary observation:

“Did you know that’s the joint where Hemingway used to hang out?” he asked.

“I heard.”

“Did you know that before he became a writer, he was a newspaperman?”

“I heard that too.”

“I don’t mean some schmuck on a small-town rag, he worked for the Herald-Tribune, here,” Mickey said. “He gave a speech one time where he said he thought working on a newspaper was the best training he ever had to become a writer.”

“I didn’t know that, but I’m sure he was right,” Matt said.

“Yeah,” Mickey said, thoughtfully. “He probably was.”

Am I in the company of the next Tom Clancy? The next Whatshisname, the guy who made millions writing about dinosaurs?

“When do you want to go to Cognac-Boeuf, Mick?”

“What’s that?”

“That’s where Festung is.”

“Soon, but not right away. I told you, I want to go back to the Louvre. You can’t see half what they have in that place in one day, for Christ’s sake.”

Over the next five days, they developed a routine. On waking, while Matt ordered their room-service breakfast, and while waiting for it to be delivered, Mickey first got on the phone to the embassy’s press officer, then would get on the Internet with Matt’s laptop, go to the Bulletin’s Web site, and catch up on what was happening in Philadelphia.

After breakfast, they took a cab to the Louvre. Matt thus got to see more of the museum than he’d seen in his previous- more than a dozen-visits to the City of Lights. Once they went out of the museum to lunch, but that took too much time for Mickey, so the other days they had eaten lunch standing up at a museum concession.

He did manage to get Mickey briefly to the top of the Eiffel Tower-to which Mickey’s reaction was “What’s the big deal?” and “Are you sure it’s safe? It’s rusty all over”- and to Napoleon’s Tomb, but that was about all.

They called their respective maternal parents daily, usually from Harry’s New York Bar after the Louvre closed. And then they went to dinner, and after that, twice, to jazz places on the East Bank.

Matt realized that he was having a good time, largely because Mickey was what his father described as “a good traveling companion.”

On the morning of the sixth day, Mickey called, “Hey, you better take a look at this!”

Matt, munching a croissant, walked to where Mickey was at his laptop. The screen showed the front page of the Bulletin, and for a moment Matt didn’t understand what he was being shown. And then, in the “Inside Today’s Bulletin” box, he saw: “Police Arrest Two in Fast-Food Restaurant Murder. Page 3, Section 2.”

There wasn’t much of a story there, even though it had a double byline on it.

TWO ARRESTED IN FAST-FOOD DOUBLE MURDER BY RICHARD HIGBEE AND BETTY-JO WOLFF BULLETIN STAFF WRITERS

Philadelphia-Police Commissioner Ralph J. Mariani announced the arrest early this morning “without incident” of Lawrence John Porter, 20, and Ralph David Williams, 19, at their homes in the Paschall Homes Project. The two, who are cousins, have been charged with the double murder of Ms. Maria M. Fernandez and Police Officer Kenneth J. Charlton during a robbery of the Roy Rogers restaurant at South Broad and Snyder Streets earlier this month.

“We’ve had the two under round-the-clock surveillance for some time,” Commissioner Mariani said, “but delayed arresting them while assembling irrefutable evidence against them.”

Mariani said that evidence included the murder weapon, a. 38-caliber handgun, which police divers, assisted by the Philadelphia Treasure Hunters Club, recovered later yesterday from the silt banks of the Schuylkill River, where it had been thrown.

Mariani cited the involvement of the Treasure Hunters, who joined the police in searching the murky waters of the Schuylkill, as another example “for which I am grateful and proud” of civilian cooperation with the police.

Philadelphia mayor Alvin W. Martin, in a separate statement, said that all Philadelphians “can and should take pride in the professionalism and dedication of the officers of the Special Operations Division Task Force, which I ordered formed, in apprehending these individuals under extremely difficult circumstances.”

“Jesus, what a shitty story,” O’Hara said. “And it took two of them to write it.”

“There’s not much, is there?” Matt said. “For all the effort that went into that job.”

“On the other hand,” O’Hara said, more charitably, “it might have been my pal Kennedy’s editing. I know the broad. She’s got talent.”