W.E.B Griffin: Men In Blue

"Help you, doll?" a waitress asked. She was slight, had orange hair, too much makeup, and was pushing sixty.

"I'm supposed to meet someone here," Louise said.

"Why'ncha take a table?" the waitress asked, and led Louise into the dining room. Louise saw that one of the banquettes against the wall, in a position where she could see the door beside the cash register, was empty, and she slipped into it. The waitress went thirty feet farther before she realized that she wasn't being followed.

Then she turned and, obviously miffed, laid an enormous menu in front of Louise.

"You want a cocktail or something while you're waiting?" she asked.

"Coffee, please, black," Louise said.

She didn't want alcohol to cloud her reasoning any more than it was already clouded.

She looked around the dining room. It was arguably, she decided, the ugliest dining room she had ever been in. Fake Tiffany lamps, with enormous rotating fans hanging from them, in turn hung from plastic replicas of wooden ceiling beams. The banquettes were upholstered in diamond-embossed purple vinyl. The wall across the room was a really awful mural of lasses in flowing dresses and lads in what looked like diapers dancing around what was probably supposed to be the Parthenon.

The coffee was delivered in a thick china mug decorated with a pair of leaning palm trees and the legend,"Waikiki Diner Roosevelt Blvd. Phila Penna."

Captain Richard C. "Dutch" Moffitt came in as Louise had removed, in shock and surprise, the scalding hot mug from her burned lips.

He had no sooner come through the door by the cashier than a small, slight man with a large mustache, wearing a tight, prominently pinstriped suit, came up to him and offered his hand, his smile revealing a lot of goldwork.

Dutch smiled back at him, revealing his own mouthful of large, white, even teeth. And then he saw Louise, and the smile brightened, and his eyebrows rose and he headed toward the table.

"Hello," Dutch said to her, sliding into the chair facing her.

"Hi!" Louise said.

"This is our host," Dutch said, nodding at the mustached man. "Teddy Galanapoulos."

"A pleasure, I'm sure. Any friend of Captain Moffitt's…"

"Hello," Louise said. There was a slight Greek accent, and the gowned lasses and the lads in diapers dancing around the Parthenon were now explained.

"You're beautiful," Dutch said.

"Thank you," Louise said, mortified when she felt her face flush. She stood up. "Will you excuse me, please?"

When she came back from the ladies' room, where she had, furious with herself, checked her hair and her lipstick, Dutch had changed places. He was now sitting on the purple vinyl banquette seat. His left hand, which was enormous, was curled around a squat glass of whiskey. There was a wide gold wedding band on the proper finger.

He started to get up when he saw her.

It was the first time she had ever seen him in civilian clothing. He was wearing a blue blazer over a yellow knit shirt. The shirt was tight against his large chest, and there wasn't, she thought, a lot of excess room in the shoulders of the blazer either.

"Keep your seat," Louise said, "since you seem to like that one better."

"I'm a cop," he said. "Cops don't like to sit with their backs to the door."

"Really?" she asked, not sure if he was pulling her leg or not.

"Really," he said, then added: "I didn't know what you drink."

"I'm surprised," she said. She had first met him two days before. His Honor, Mayor Jerry Carlucci, who never passed up an opportunity to get his face in the newspapers or on television, reopened a repaired stretch of the Schuylkill Expressway with a ribbon-cutting ceremony. Louise, having nothing better to do at the time, had gone along with the regular crew of cameraman/producer and reporter, originally intending to do the on-camera bit herself.

But when she got there, and saw what it was, much ado about nothing, she had decided not to usurp the reporter. But instead of leaving, she decided to hang around in case the mayor ran off at the mouth again. Mayor Carlucci had a tendency to do that (in the most recent incident, he had referred to a city councilman as "an ignorant coon") and that would make a story.

She told the cameraman to shoot the mayor from the time he arrived until he left.

The mayor usually moved around the city in style, in a black Cadillac limousine, preceded by two unmarked police cars carrying his plainclothes bodyguards.

A third car had stopped right where Louise had been standing. The driver's door had opened, and Captain Richard C. "Dutch" Moffitt had erupted from it. He was a large man, and he had been in uniform. The Highway Patrol wore different uniforms than the rest of the Philadelphia Police Department.

The Highway Patrol had begun, years before, as a traffic-control force, and had been mounted on motorcycles. They had kept their motorcyclist outfits-leather jackets and breeches and black leather puttees-even though, except for mostly ceremonial occasions, they had given up their motorcycles for patrol cars; and had, in fact become an elite force within the police department, deployed city-wide in highcrime areas.

In the Channel 9 newsroom, the Philadelphia Highway Patrol was referred to as "Carlucci's Commandos." But, not, Louise had noticed, without a not-insignificant tone of respect, however grudging.

Louise Dutton had found herself standing so close to Captain Richard C. Moffitt that she could smell his leather jacket, and that he had been chewing Sen-Sen. Her eyes were on the level of his badge, above which was pinned a blue, gold-striped ribbon, on which were half a dozen stars. It was, Louise correctly guessed, some kind of a citation. Citations, plural, with the stars representing multiple awards.

He winked at her, and then, putting his hand on the car door, rose on his toes to look back at Mayor Carlucci's limousine. Louise saw that he wore a wedding ring, and then turned to see what he was looking at. Two plainclothesmen were shouldering a path for His Honor the Mayor through the crowd to the flag-bedecked sawhorses where the ribbon would be cut.

Then he looked down at her.

"I've seen you on the tube," he said. "I'm Dutch Moffitt."

She gave him her hand and her name.

"You look better in real life, Louise Dutton," he said.

"May I ask you a question, Captain Moffitt?" she had said.

"Sure."

"Some of the people I know refer to the Highway Patrol as 'Carlucci's Commandos.' What's your reaction to that?"

"Fuck 'em," he said immediately, matter-of-factly.

"Can I quote you?" she flared.

"You can, but I don't think you could say that on TV," he said, smiling down at her.

"You arrogant bastard!"

"I'd be happy, since you just came to town, to explain what the Highway Patrol does," he said. "And why that annoys the punks and the faggots."

She gave him what she hoped was her most disdainful look.

"I'll even throw in a couple of drinks and dinner," he said.

"Why don't you call me?" Louise had asked, flashing him her most dazzling smile. "At home, of course. I wouldn't want it to get around the station that I was having drinks and dinner with one of Carlucci's Commandos. Especially a married one. Sonice to talk to you, Captain."

She did not get the response she expected.

"You're really full of piss and vinegar, aren't you?" he said, approvingly.

She had stormed furiously away. She first decided that he was arrogant enough to call her, even if her sarcasm had flown six feet over his head. She took what she later recognized was childish solace in the telephone arrangements at the studios. With all the kooks and nuts out there in TV Land, you just couldn't call Channel 9 and get put through to Louise Dutton. But they might put a police captain through, and then what?