From where Officer Herbert Prasko of the Five Squad of the Narcotics Unit of the Philadelphia Police Department had stationed himself on the second-floor balcony of the Howard Johnson motel on Roosevelt Boulevard, he had an extraordinarily good view of the vehicle he was surveilling.
The new four-door Chevrolet sedan was parked, nose out, in front of a row of rooms in the rear of the motel. It was a Hertz rental, picked up at the Philadelphia International Airport four hours before by Ronald R. Ketcham, white male, twenty-five, five-ten, brown hair, 165 pounds, no previous arrests, who resided in a luxury apartment on Overbrook Avenue not far from the Episcopal Academy, of which he was a graduate.
Mr. Ketcham, who was not quite as smart as he believed himself to be, was laboring under the misimpression that the use of a rental automobile rather than his Buick coupe was one more clever thing he had done to conceal both his illegal activity and identity from both the police and other criminals.
Officer Prasko didn’t know if the other criminals involved knew Mr. Ketcham’s identity—the scumbags probably couldn’t care less—but his identity had been known to Five Squad for five weeks, from the time they had first followed Amos J. Williams, black male, thirty-two, six-three, 180 pounds, twenty-eight previous arrests, and four of his goons to a delivery rendezvous with Mr. Ketcham, who seemed to be one of his better customers.
For a number of reasons, it had been decided not to make an arrest at that time, but it had not been hard at all to trace the customer’s rental car back through the Hertz main office to their airport rental operation, and from the rental agreement to identify Mr. Ketcham in some detail.
Hertz had been very cooperative. They had promised to notify Five Squad the next time Mr. Ketcham rented a car, and had done so today. Officer Prasko thought that was pretty dumb on Mr. Ketcham’s part, to go back to Hertz; he should have changed to Avis, or somebody else. And it was also dumb for him to go back to the Howard Johnson motel. There were a lot of other motels. If he had set up this meet someplace else, he would not be about to find his ass in a very deep crack.
Five Squad had come up with a plan after the first time they had followed Mr. Williams to his rendezvous with Mr. Ketcham. On being notified by Hertz that Mr. Ketcham had again rented an automobile, a Five Squad plainclothes officer—who turned out to be Officer Prasko—would proceed to the Howard Johnson motel, and there await the possible arrival of Mr. Ketcham.
Herb Prasko, en route to the motel in an undercover car—a two-year-old Mercury, formerly the property of another drug dealer scumbag—had thought the odds were that he would be pissing in the wind. But you never could really tell. Sometimes people were really stupid, as Mr. Ketcham had turned out to be by returning to the same Howard Johnson motel instead of going someplace else to do his business.
But he had waited, parked just inside the motel, slumped down on the front seat of the Mercury, watching the entrance to the motel, for nearly three hours, before Ketcham had shown up.
He had a dame with him, white female, early twenties, 120 pounds, blonde, nice figure, who sat in the car while Mr. Ketcham went in the motel office for the key. Officer Prasko slipped down all the way on the seat of the Mercury as they drove past him, and then watched where they were going in the rearview mirror.
Then, when the Chevy had gone around the first row of rooms to the back, he got out of the car, trotted quickly after them, and got to the corner of the building in time to see Mr. Ketcham enter 138, a ground-floor room in about the middle of the back row of rooms.
He then went to the pay phone outside the motel office and called Sergeant Patrick J. Dolan at Narcotics and told him what he had. Dolan—who could be a prick—made him repeat everything he said, and then told him not to let the door to 138 out of his sight, as if he thought Prasko had come on the job last Tuesday and had to be told shit like that.
Five Squad would be there as soon as they could get there, Dolan said, and said to