Final justice - W.E.B. Griffin [158]
Mr. Galloway was wearing a tweed jacket with leather patches on the elbows and shoulder and a matching brimmed cap. He held a twelve-bore Belgian Browning over-and-under shotgun, the action open, crooked over his right arm. He could have been standing in a Scottish field, waiting for the beaters to start the pheasants flying.
As the chief looked, a flashbulb went off, and then a second and a third. The chief saw Charley Whelan, of the Mobile Register, standing atop his Jeep Cherokee in such a position that he could get Mr. Chambers D. Galloway; the prone, handcuffed man in black coveralls; and most of the police officers and their vehicles in his shot.
In a sense, Mr. Whelan was Mobile's Mickey O'Hara. He was considerably younger, and far less well paid, but he was the crime reporter for the Register.
And he had a police frequency scanner both on his desk in the city room of the Register and in his Cherokee. He had been in the city room--the Register had just gone to bed-- when he heard the call announcing that shots had been fired at the Lake Forest Yacht Club.
He almost didn't go to the scene. No matter what he found at the Yacht Club, it was too late to get it in the morning's paper. But on the other hand, it might be an interesting story. Shots were rarely fired on the eastern shore of Mobile Bay, which was not true of other areas in Mobile.
So he got in the Cherokee and raced across the I-10 bridge, which connects Mobile with the eastern shore.
And when he saw what was happening, he was glad he'd come.
This was hilarious. Half the cops on the eastern shore had gathered at the scene of a captured Peeping Tom. And the actual capture of this dangerous lunatic had been made by an old fart with a shotgun, who looked as if he was about to bag a couple of quail.
Charley Whelan got off the roof of his Cherokee, tried and failed to get the Peeping Tom's name from the chief, got the old fart's name and another picture of him, and then drove back to Mobile, this time exceeding the speed limit by only fifteen miles per hour.
The city editor was still there, and Charley made quick prints of the images in his digital camera and showed them to him.
"Well, it's too late for today's rag," the city editor said. "Put it on the Atlanta wire; those big papers close later than we do. We'll run it tomorrow."
Charley sat down at his computer terminal and quickly typed,
Daphne, AL
Possible Peeping Tom Bagged By
Community Watcher, 72
Shown here with his shotgun and his as yet unidentified quarry handcuffed on the ground is retired business executive Chambers D. Galloway, 72, a member of Daphne's Jackson Oak Citizens' Community Watch, Inc., who made a middle-of-the-night citizen's arrest of the man after he was seen peeping into the windows of a resident of the Lake Forest Yacht Club Condominiums, whom police declined to identify.
Four Daphne police cars, two Fairhope police cars, a Baldwin County deputy sheriff, and an Alabama state trooper converged on the scene to take the suspect off Mr. Galloway's hands. The accused peeper will be held in the Daphne police jail while the investigation continues.
Mobile Register Photos By Charles E. Whelan
When the pictures and the story reached the Associated Press in Atlanta, the night man there also thought the yarn--and especially the pictures of the old guy with the shotgun--was funny, good human interest, and pushed the National button. This caused the photos and story to be instantly sent to newspapers all over the United States, which of course included those in Philadelphia.
[FOUR]
The device that electronically chimed "Be It Ever So Humble" when the doorbell of the residence of Sergeant Matthew Payne was pushed had two controls. One provided a selection of the numbers of bars of music to be played, from Six to All, and the other was a volume control.
Detective Payne, who had few visitors to his home, and used the device primarily as a backup alarm clock, had set both controls to the maximum choices offered.
A full rendition of "Be It Ever So Humble" played at maximum