In 1948, night tour still began at six P.M. and ran twelve hours. On the third Friday in March, Joe Leland checked in feeling quite chipper. It had been a blustery day but a pleasant one. The cool air had helped him sleep well after his tour the night before, and in the afternoon he and Karen had taken Steffie to the playground and then to a restaurant for dinner. He had left them outside a movie—Greer Garson and Walter Pidgeon in something or other—and Karen had asked to be awakened when he came home at a quarter to seven the next morning.

The early hours were quiet, as always, but the men braced for a big weekend. The weather had been bad the previous two weekends, when the hooples, the troublemakers, had hoped to come out of their winter shells. This was going to be a hoople night; the men said it as they came in.

Leland, in charge, wanted the pending paperwork cleared up quickly. At nine o’clock there was a stickup of a delicatessen in Westlake. At nine-thirty a patrolman found a man exposing himself in Lewis Park. The man was without identification and refused to give his name. He was put in the squad room tank while a description was circulated and the cars around Lewis Park were marked. Cars that did not move in twenty-four hours would be checked for ownership. Leland was confident that the man would be identified this way, if his family did not submit a missing persons report first. At ten o’clock, near State Street, a man approached a lone woman, punched her in the face, called her Clara—not her name—and ran into the crowd. It seemed to be a case of mistaken identity and Leland thought that they had better forget it. In the meantime, a burglary was reported on Annadale Avenue, one of the better blocks on the fringe of Joytown. Two men went over to get a list of what had been taken. At ten-forty a suspect in the delicatessen stickup was brought in, newly drunk, and thrown in the tank with the sex offender. A plainclothes patrolman brought in a whore for soliciting on State Street. When the two men came back with the burglary list it was eleven-thirty and the police buff who assisted the desk sergeant down-stairs was sent out for sandwiches and coffee.