Shadow of the Bomb (A Snap Malek Mystery) Read online

"I suppose," the chief said absently. "And I also suppose you want some of Elsie's coffee."

  "You suppose right. As you know, it's rumored to be the best in the building."

  "That's no rumor," he said, hitting his intercom button three times, the coffee signal. Within seconds, Elsie came in and set a steaming mug of her brew on the desk. I blew her a kiss and got one in return.

  Fahey leaned back and interlaced his hands behind his head. "Now, what can I do for you, Snap? Or did you just come for the coffee and to ogle Elsie, as I suspect is usually the case?"

  I tried to look hurt. "Fergus, how can you say that? You know I am drawn to this office every day because of your warmth, your engaging personality, and of course your sense of humor."

  "Right. Which is why Fred Allen and Jack Benny are probably shaking in their boots for fear that I'll get a comedy show opposite one of them on another network. Now that we have that out of the way, there must be some case you want to ask about." It was clear Fergus wanted to get rid of me, and go back to his stack of paperwork.

  "Not really. I thought maybe you had something for me and for the hundreds of thousands of readers out there who love nothing more than a good juicy murder."

  Fahey stubbed out what was left of his cigarette and reached into my pack for another. "Things are awfully quiet at the moment–not that I'm complaining, mind you. But there is something…"

  "Yeah?"

  "Well, it's not really in my bailiwick, but at the commissioner's weekly meeting, where all of the department heads and the precinct commanders get together, Grady–you know him, the lieutenant who runs the Hyde Park station–feels like something's going on down there, but he can't seem to get a handle on it. Anybody on your paper heard any rumblings?"

  "Not that I know of, but I'll nose around. Let me get this straight: you're asking me for information? Now there's a switcheroo."

  "Why not, given all the stuff I've fed you over the years?" the chief snapped. "And if you didn't have that story-sharing crap in the press room, you'd have had a pile of exclusives for your paper."

  I grinned. "Point taken. Hyde Park's usually pretty peaceful, isn't it? Low crime statistics and all?"

  "Sure. And why not? It's mainly filled with quiet old houses and those nice, sedate apartment buildings and hotels along

  South Shore Drive, plus the University–and thanks to that intellectual snob president of theirs, Hutchins, they don't even play football anymore, so the Saturdays are quiet. Plus there's that Rosenwald Museum in Jackson Park–or I guess we're officially calling it the Museum of Science & Industry now, right?" "A Rosenwald by any other name," I deadpanned, waiting for Fahey, a rare cop who reads Shakespeare, to react. He did.

  "One more remark like that and I'll have Elsie revoke your coffee privileges," he muttered, cupping a hand to his mouth to hide a grin.

  "You do and it's no more Luckies," I countered. "But back to the subject: Exactly what makes Grady uneasy about Hyde Park?"

  Fahey furrowed his ruddy brow. "He wasn't very specific. But apparently little old ladies in those big houses north of the Midway, along streets like Kenwood and Dorchester, have claimed to see a lot of new faces along their sidewalks. Not students, they insist, but older people, men. Some of them look 'foreign,' they say, whatever that's supposed to mean." Fahey paused to take a drag on his cigarette. "These dowagers spend a lot of time watching the world from their parlors, and they're not shy about calling the police with every little thing, from boys throwing stones at stray dogs to the occasional drunk relieving himself under a streetlight at night."

  "Maybe those ladies haven't changed much over the years, but they're the exception," I said. "The war has altered things almost everywhere else. For instance, the other day we had a photo in the Trib of sailors drilling right there on the Midway. You wouldn't have seen that before Pearl Harbor."

  "Yeah, you're right," Fahey agreed. "Things are different damn near everywhere now. And to be honest–not for the record, of course–Grady tends to be something of a fussbudget, overreacting to residents' complaints. I was actually a little embarrassed for him at the meeting. When he came out with his comment, there were some looks exchanged between precinct commanders."

  "Well, as I said, I'll do some nosing around anyway."

  "Hardly high priority," Fahey muttered dismissively. "It's probably nothing."

  "Probably," I agreed, rising. "Keep the pack of Luckies."

  "My lucky day," Fahey said with a poker face, undoubtedly expecting a groan from me. He got it.

  Chapter 2

  I'd like to report that I followed up quickly on Fergus Fahey's request about Hyde Park, but when I got back to the press room, Dirk O'Farrell was beginning to brief the others about a hot item he picked up from the Vice Squad, one of his beats.

  "…so yesterday they broke up this high-priced call girl ring, and is it a doozie," he said, savoring the limelight. "Seems that these, er…ladies operated out of an apartment on

  North Lake Shore Drive, up around Belmont Harbor. And their clientele–listen to this." Dirk then proceeded to read off a list of names. It included two top trial lawyers, one divorce lawyer, a senior vice president at one of the city's biggest banks, a well-known radio personality, a Cubs pitcher, a society band leader, a North Side Protestant minister, and three men I would term "socialites," given that their pictures are on the society pages every week. "Now I call that an all-star lineup," Eddie Metz said approvingly, smacking his lips and slurping coffee.

  "Indeed it is," Anson Masters intoned. "But other than general details, the name of the madam and some quotes from the puffed-up commander of the Vice Squad, where does that put us? My editors certainly will not print the names of these now-tarnished luminaries, names which of course our readers crave. And in point of fact, one of the lawyers on that roster–I'm not at liberty to say which–plays golf regularly with my managing editor at an exclusive North Shore country club."

  "How 'bout you, Eddie?" Packy Farmer said with a smirk. "As the only tabloid we've got in this town, your rag will print just about anything, right?"

  Metz looked uncomfortable. "Uh…I don't think I could get these names past my brother and onto the page," he muttered. Tom "Hotshot" Metz was the bombastic city editor of the Times, surely the sole reason Eddie had a job on the paper.

  "Well, well," Masters said, looking around the room. "It would appear that no one of us will print the names. What about our young lady from City News?" He dipped his chin in Joanie's direction.

  She colored slightly. "I don't think so," she replied softly. "None of you would print them anyway, and I don't believe any of the radio stations would choose to use them either, do you?"

  "Certainly not the station whose guy got caught with his trousers down around his ankles," O'Farrell guffawed, swiveling toward the City News desk. "I bet they didn't prepare you for this in the hallowed halls up at good old Northwestern now, did they, Joan?"

  "Not really. They never taught us how to write whorehouse stories in Crime Reporting 101," she deadpanned, eliciting a round of laughter. Even though she got a good deal of teasing in the press room, we'd all come to like Joan in the weeks she'd been with us, to the extent of taking a somewhat paternal interest in her. And she was learning to give as well as she got in the office banter.

  Even without names, the call-girl story got big play in the afternoon editions of the Daily News, Herald American, and Times, as well as in the next morning's Trib and Sun, with banner heads in all five papers and photos of both the Vice Squad Commander and the Police Commissioner. It even bumped the war news down to second position on every front page, if only for one day.

  But all the papers did list the lines of work of the men whose names were listed in the madam's little black book, although the Cubs pitcher simply became "a major league baseball player" in print. It wasn't hard to imagine all the speculation going on around town as to the identities of these customers, and it undoubtedly led to guessing games at water coolers and
poker games and cocktail parties over the next several weeks.

  I got pumped myself by the regulars at Kilkenny's, the saloon on

  North Clark Street near my apartment that was my favorite hangout. But I chose to play dumb. "Aw, come on, Snap," Morty Easterly pleaded from his semi-permanent stool at the far end of the bar. "You musta learned who they were from the cops."

  "Nope, sorry, Morty," I lied, "they only gave us their professions. Your guesses are as good as mine."

  He and the others kept after me, even throwing out names as possibilities, but they tired of getting no response from me after a couple of nights of badgering, so the subject died down, both in Kilkenny's and in the newspapers as well.

  For us local reporters, though, it had been fun to grab some headlines, if only briefly, from the war correspondents in Europe, Africa, and the Pacific. Only after the call-girl story had run its course did I remember Fahey's query about Hyde Park. It was an area I had covered on occasion in my early days as a City News Bureau reporter, although that was well over a decade ago.

  The few times I could recall being in Hyde Park for reasons other than work was when I ushered at football games at Stagg Field back in my high school days. We didn't get paid, but we got to see the games, back when the Maroons, as they were called, were a football powerhouse. That was long before the school's administration decided it wasn't interested in being up there with the big boys, schools like Michigan and Notre Dame and Southern Cal.

  I started by phoning MacAfee, the Trib reporter on the South Police beat, which meant he covered all of the precinct stations in roughly the southern third of the city.

  "Hello, Mr. Malek," he said in a polite tone when I'd gotten hold of him at the Hyde Park precinct station. Al MacAfee was one of the paper's youngest reporters, earnest, hard-working, and eager to please.

  "Just wondering, Mac, if you've heard about anything unusual going on in Hyde Park. I'm checking out a tip from an informant."

  "Hmm, interesting to hear that. Seems that Grady, the precinct commander, is concerned as well. Says that he's gotten reports about so-called strangers prowling the neighborhoods around the university. But I tend to discount a lot of what he says–he's a good cop but something of a worry-wart. Did your tipster have any specifics?"

  "Not really. Pretty much the same thing Grady said. More strangers around than usual, some of them maybe foreign."

  MacAfee exhaled. "Well, from what I've seen of the university, a lot of the professors look pretty strange themselves. And a lot of them are probably foreign, too. But other than that, I don't know of anything out of the ordinary. Actually, it's a pretty quiet area most of the time. Oh, you've got the occasional drunken campus party, of course. And there are house burglaries from time to time, but it's usually pretty routine stuff. Very few murders. Other sections of town have lots more crime, as I'm sure you know."

  I told him thanks, signed off, and thumbed my dog-eared address book for the number of one Charlie "Pickles" Podgorny, a small-time grifter and the only person I knew well who lived out south, although he was in Englewood, not Hyde Park.

  Pickles owed me a favor. Back in '39, the cops hauled him in for running a crap game just two blocks from Police Headquarters in the back room of a saloon over on Wabash. I was impressed with his balls for gambling in the very shadow of the law, and I went to his hearing to see what kind of guy would pull such a stunt. I liked him instantly–short, squat, swarthy, bow-legged, and with a collection of colorful stories about con men, gamblers, and the shadowy world of the city's nocturnal underbelly that would have endeared him to Damon Runyon. While I was interviewing him for a possible feature (which never ran), he asked me for help, and I hooked him up with a lawyer I knew who got him off with a modest fine and a judge's Biblical admonition to "go, and sin no more."

  As far as I know, Pickles may have continued to sin in any number of ways, but apparently he hadn't got caught at it. And because of his gratitude to me, I on several occasions asked him to do some legwork for me on stories. He seemed to know every two-bit bookie, hustler, fence, and small-time gambler south of Roosevelt Road, and at least twice he steered me toward a source that helped me flesh out a piece, particularly a Sunday feature on some aspect of crime.

  Surprisingly, I reached him right away. "Pickles–what are you doing at home in the afternoon? Resting up for some action with those little six-sided cubes that have dots on them?"

  "Snap, old compadre–nice to hear your voice, my good man! But surely you jest. I've put my evil days behind me, and now I content myself with an occasional game of pasteboards with some friends right here in the neighborhood."

  "Uh-huh. Perhaps as in five-card stud with table stakes?"

  "Perhaps," he chuckled. "And sometimes even seven-card stud. But it's just a friendly game, call it a pastime."

  "Right. And a pastime which usually finds you with a fatter wallet at the end than at the start."

  "Oh, from time to time I am able to depart the table with what might be described as some modest earnings. Of course, the real joy for me is the companionship of kindred souls, not the transfer of legal tender. But Snap, as dear a friend as I know you to be, I sense that you haven't called simply to inquire as to my recreational activities."

  "You sense correctly, old timer. I hear rumors about something going on in Hyde Park, and it occurred to me that you, too, might have heard rumblings."

  "Cannot say as I have, Snap. As you know, it's a quiet community, extremely intellectual, of course. How specific are these rumors you hear?"

  "Not very–just that something seems to be in the air. Could be the result of hyperactive imaginations."

  "Tell you what, newshound. I'll go up there and poke around. Shoot, that neighborhood is almost next door to me anyway, and I know a hangout on

  55th Street called the "U.T."–stands for University Tavern. Students, locals, all sorts hang out in there. It's a lively spot, serves food as well as drink. I've been there a few times for a refreshing libation, and I might just pick something up. Nothing like a public house to learn what's going on in the environs. But I don't suppose you'd know that, would you?" "Don't be too sure of that, Pickles. I, too, sometimes go out in search of a refreshing libation. And by the way, I will reimburse you for any of the liquids that you might happen to consume at this Hyde Park watering hole."

  "Words I was hoping to hear. We shall stay in touch."

  Chapter 3

  With American entry into the war now nearing the one-year mark, increasing numbers of us were impacted. Consider the Headquarters press room alone:

  Although I could not enlist because of my history of rheumatic fever, I did have a cousin who was serving. Charlie Malek, son of my late father's younger brother Frank, was a corporal with an Army unit that had just landed in Algeria. I checked every week or so with Uncle Frank and Aunt Edna to see how he was faring. He wrote them almost daily, and Frank would sometimes read portions of a letter to me over the phone, including one in which Charlie wrote that his closest buddy in the platoon had been killed instantly by a mortar blast not twenty yards from him.

  Anson Masters' grandson served on a destroyer in the Pacific and from the deck had witnessed the sinking of the aircraft carrier USS Yorktown at the Battle of Midway.

  Dirk O'Farrell's stepson Dean served as a navigator on a B24 Liberator bomber that had just begun flying missions over Germany from an airbase in Britain. Dirk came into the press room one morning and reported that Dean's plane had been hit by anti-aircraft fire and limped back across the English Channel on two engines and a disabled landing gear. "They made a bumpy landing," Dirk told us, "but everybody survived, although Dean got a concussion and the nose gunner suffered three broken ribs and a busted leg."

  Scott, the older brother of Joanie from City News, was less fortunate. He was an Army lieutenant stationed at Bataan in the Philippines when the Japanese overran the peninsula in April, and he was one of thousands of U.S. troops captured by the Japanese. H
e has not been heard from in months and either was captured or is dead, most likely a casualty of the infamous "Bataan Death March." We have stopped asking Joanie about him, hoping (but doubtful) that one morning she will come in with happy news.

  I still hadn't heard from Pickles Podgorny a couple of mornings later when, in the Headquarters press room, I opened my three-star final edition of the Trib. "I'll be damned," I said to no one in particular as I scanned Page 1. "They found Rickenbacker alive at sea, along with those other guys from that plane crash. Only one of 'em died. More than three weeks in rubber life rafts out in the Pacific. What a story."

  "Yeah, and here's the corker," Packy Farmer responded, looking over the top of his own copy of the same edition. "A sea gull lands on Rickenbacker's head, he grabs it, and that poor bird becomes a meal for these guys."

  "Rick must have nine lives," Eddie Metz marveled, "after everything that happened back in 1918."

  "I guess I don't understand," Joanie from City News volunteered.

  "No reason you should," Anson Masters responded in his best Dutch-uncle tone. "You're far too young. Along with Sergeant York, Rickenbacker was the gold-plated American hero in what some of us still refer to as the Great War. He was a fearless fighter pilot, a wild man in the skies. He shot down more than twenty German planes in a very short time–a few weeks, I think, back in '18.

  "Then along comes this war, and our government, actually Secretary of War Stimson, sends him to the Pacific to look over our air operations there, and his plane goes down in the drink off some God-forsaken place like New Guinea. Ran out of fuel."

  "I read about that crash when it happened a few weeks ago, but I didn't read up on his background at the time," she said somberly.

  "It's certainly no exaggeration to call the guy a legend," Dirk O'Farrell said between drags on his cigarette. "What we need now is more like him, the way we're struggling. Think there are some new Eddie Rickenbackers around, this time to shoot down the Japanese Zeros and the Nazi Messerschmidts?"