"It's a pretty pathetic one, I'll tell you. I forget his name, but he was a mousy, withdrawn little guy of about forty-five who couldn't make eye contact. Crazy as a loon. Claimed that Dewey was actually a Nazi spy who grew a mustache because Hitler had one. He was an unemployed former bicycle messenger, single and living in a three-flat in Ravenswood with his aged mother who kept telling our men what a good boy he was. They were living, such as it was, on her late husband's pension from one of the railroads.
"This character worshipped FDR. I mean really worshipped him. His bedroom was a shrine to him. He had photos of the president all over his walls, some of them in color, cut out of the rotogravure sections of the newspapers. He'd drawn in a halo over Roosevelt's head in one of the pictures and printed the words 'Franklin Our God' next to it. He even had red, white, and blue crepe paper framing one of the pictures. It almost looked like a goddamn altar. All the room lacked was a bunch of burning candles and some incense. Creepy."
"Creepy is right. Where is this guy today?"
Fahey lifted his shoulders and let them drop. "Probably locked away over in Dunning or at one of the other asylums around here. I do remember that he was committed at the time."
"Well, you might want to check on his whereabouts now. I only hope that he or somebody equally harmless was my caller."
"So do I," Fahey sighed, taking a long drag on his Lucky and turning back to the ever-present pile of paperwork that littered his desk.
Chapter Four
M3 O1 R1 A1 T1 O1 R1 I1 U1 M3
(n) a suspension of activity.
I heard nothing more from my nasal-voiced caller for two days and had almost forgotten him when on Friday morning I received a plain white envelope in the press room. It was addressed in ink in printed capital letters to TRIBUNE MAN MALIK, POLICE BUILDING,
SOUTH STATE STREET, CHICAGO. I slipped a folded sheet of cheap white notepaper from the envelope, which of course had no return address. The message also was printed neatly in ink, all uppercase:
TRIBUNE MAN MALIK,
I THINK YOU DON'T TAKE US REAL SERIOUSLY LIKE YOU OUGHT TO. YOU AND YOUR PAPER SHOULD ALSO BE GLAD ABOUT WHAT WE ARE GOING TO DO. YOU MUST WRITE ABOUT US IN YOUR PAPER SO PEOPLE CAN KNOW ABOUT US . WE DON'T MIND. IN FACT WE INSIST. THE COPS CAN'T STOP US SO WE DON'T CARE. TRUMAN DIES! DEWEY WINS! JEWS LOSE! WE WILL WRITE YOU AGAIN. SOMETHING WILL HAPPEN TO SHOW WE ARE SERIOUS.
THE NEW REICH
As if the sign-off wasn't enough, small swastikas were neatly printed in black ink on all four corners of the sheet. I crumpled the paper and started to toss it into the wastebasket but checked myself, smoothed it and slipped it into my desk drawer along with the envelope. I made no mention of it to my press room colleagues.
When I went down for my daily visit to Fergus Fahey later that morning, I took the note along. After the usual pleasantries with Elsie, which included getting a mug of her superb coffee, I entered the chief's office, plopped into a chair, tossed my pack of Luckies on the desk, and slid the note and envelope across to him.
"What kind of crap is this?" he growled, looking from the wrinkled sheet to me and back again, then studied the envelope.
"Just got it this morning in the mail. I started to throw the note in the wastebasket, where trash like this belongs, but then figured you'd better have a look at it. Real sweet stuff, isn't it?"
"Damn. You'd think after what we found in all those Nazi death camps at the end of the war, this sort of garbage would have been eliminated forever."
"Apparently not the case, Fergus. Sad to say, there's no moratorium on hate. And what really irks me is that whoever this slimy bastard is, he thinks the Tribune would buy into this sort of bigotry."
Fahey leaned back and pressed his palms against his eyes, groaning. "The lowlife who sent that is itching to get publicity. What are you going to tell your editors?"
"Not a damn thing, at least for the moment. I'd sooner quit my job and become a press agent for a used car lot than give this piece of dirt any ink."
"Can't say that I blame you there."
"You want the note?"
"Yeah. I'll have it dusted for prints, for what that's worth, and run a check on any known Nazi-sympathizing groups, although I'll be surprised if we find much. In the three years now since the war ended, there hasn't been much anti-Semitism here, at least of an overt nature. That's not to say that stuff isn't going on all the time…"
"Well, these creeps seem to have it in for Truman for no other reason than he got the U.S. to be the first country to recognize Israel."
"You know, Snap, I can't honestly say that I've been the most fair-minded person in town over the years. As a kid–and dammit, even as a young man and a middle-aged man, for that matter–I suppose it's fair to say that I've said things I shouldn't have, at least in private, about Jews. Shame on me for that, especially after Iwo Jima."
"Oh? And just what does Iwo have to do with all this?" I asked, surprised.
Fahey lit a Lucky and flipped the match into his battered metal ashtray. "You've heard me mention my son Kevin a few times off and on. He's married now and lives down in Homewood in the south suburbs with his wife and a new baby girl who redefines the word adorable."
"Spoken as only a grandfather can speak. Yes, I remember you've talked about him. Came back from the war quite a hero with lots of medals and citations, as I recall."
The old copper nodded and interlaced his hands across his stomach. "That he did, and made us all proud, of course. But he might not have come back at all except for a sergeant in his company."
"Now that I have never heard," I responded, taking a healthy swig of coffee and leaning forward in my chair, elbows resting on knees.
"Kevin was a first lieutenant, and his company, so he tells the story, was moving up a hill on Iwo under heavy fire from the Japs above them, who were really dug in, some of 'em even in caves, mind you, ready to fight to the death. Which a lot of them did. Anyway, a grenade gets lobbed down Kevin's way and one of his sergeants, a guy from Philadelphia named Gutterman, yells, 'Look out, sir!' and snags the grenade right out of the air like a damn White Sox outfielder making a one-handed catch. This Gutterman then starts to toss the grenade away, but it goes off just as he's getting rid of it."
I swallowed. "And…?"
"And Gutterman survived," Fahey said hoarsely, "but lost his right hand. He gave me my son, though. And as I'm sure you've figured out, he's Jewish. As I said, Snap, shame on me."
We sat for close to a minute in silence. "You've got no reason to beat yourself up, Fergus," I told him. "Hell, growing up in that all-Irish neighborhood of yours on the South Side, you probably never even knew anybody who was Jewish."
"No, as a matter of fact, I didn't, not until years later. But that doesn't excuse me. Not one bit."
"Well, it makes me worse than you, though, because when I was growing up over in Pilsen, there was a Jewish kid or two in the neighborhood and, truth to tell, I wasn't all that nice to them."
"We've all got things we'd like to do over, I guess. Anyway, fact is, like it or not, we've got a Jew-hater on our hands," Fahey grumbled. "Whether he's also a threat to the president is a different matter altogether. If I were to guess, I'd say no."
"I hope you're right, Fergus. Christ, what's the world coming to? I thought it would all be better once the war was over."
"I ask myself that question every night when I walk out the door of this miserable place. If there's a job in the whole goddamn universe where you see more misery than… Oh, never mind, dammit. Forgive the ranting of an old coot who's feeling sorry for himself and who's hung around for too damn long," Fahey said heatedly, grinding his cigarette butt in the ashtray.
"Maybe we've all hung around for too long," I told him, meaning it.
There was a time, in what now seems like the last century, when I spent my weekday evenings in one saloon or another, particularly Kilkenny's place a couple of blocks south of Wrigley Field on Clark Street. But that was when I was
between marriages and had nothing better to do–or so I told myself–than to eat steaks and baked potatoes, swap stories with the other bar regulars, and suck up drinks, lots of drinks, before pouring myself into the sack in my one-bedroom, third-floor flat overlooking Clark and its clanging red streetcars. Looking back, I'm amazed I functioned as well as I did as a reporter in those days.
Now I am the true stereotypical suburban husband, commuting by El train on the old Lake Street Line, arriving at home every night at six P.M. and at the dining room table for supper with Catherine by about six-thirty. It may not be exciting, but it's a life I've grown comfortable with. Chalk it up to rapidly advancing middle age, or maybe to a happy realization that my life has turned out better than I deserve–a whole lot better, in fact.
On my birthday in August, Catherine gave me a brand-new, just-on-the-market board game called 'Scrabble,' which now occupies our post-supper evenings at least a couple of times a week. For those of you who don't know, this is a game in which you string together tiles with letters on them on a board to form words. Each letter has a numerical value, with the least-used ones–like Z and X and Q–having higher values than, say, E and S and A.
Now I like to fancy myself as something of a wordsmith. After all, it's presumably at least part of how I earn a salary at the self-styled 'World's Greatest Newspaper.' Also, I've always fancied myself as having a larger vocabulary than my fellow scribes and most other people. However, Catherine has been beating me most of the time. For instance, yesterday I felt I had the game won until she laid down tiles to spell QUIXOTIC. For the record, it means 'extravagantly chivalrous or romantic; visionary, impractical, or impracticable.' Also for the record, she won yet again, and as usual was too polite to crow about it, although her expression was what I would term serene satisfaction.
I do beat her on occasion, although without question she has the superior vocabulary. "Must be because of all those years at the library," she would say in self-deprecation. "And all those years reading best-selling novels and biographies and having to look up words I didn't understand."
"I read some of the same best-sellers you did, but I didn't bother looking up words I didn't know," I conceded. "Would you say the hens and their roosters are now coming home to roost?"
"Darling, you tear through every book as if you're on some kind of a deadline," she said, deftly dodging my question. "It has to be a carryover from all these years as a reporter."
"Thanks for trying to let me off the hook, but the fact is, you probably absorb far more than I do as a reader. Anyway, let's play one more game before bed. I'm feeling lucky. And I want to see if I can get 'quixotic' this time."
"Never happen," she said with a gentle laugh as we turned back to the Scrabble board.
Chapter Five
R1 E1 P3 U1 G2 N1 A1 N1 T1
(adj) distasteful, objectionable, or offensive
Monday morning, as I rode into the city on the El with my copy of the Trib's three-star final, I read that a young Chicago cop had been shot dead the night before on a sidewalk while walking into a coffee shop from his squad car, which had been parked at the curb on Western Avenue near 41st Street.
The patrolman was only twenty-three, with just two years on the force, and there was no apparent motive for the shooting. His partner, who was sitting in the squad car, gave chase on foot, but whoever pulled the trigger had a big head start on him and disappeared into the darkness.
Not surprisingly, our press room bull session that morning centered on the killing. "Too damn many guns floating around this town," Packy Farmer snorted. "Cops should be the only ones with 'em."
"And in England, even the cops aren't armed," O'Farrell chimed in. "Ain't that the case, Snap? You were over there during the war, you should know."
"You're right, Dirk," I told him. "The Bobbies, as they call them, don't carry guns except in unusual cases, and even then they have to get some sort of official permission, as I understand their laws."
"I'm sure our Mr. Malek will find out more about this unfortunate occurrence and fill us all in after he talks to the chief of detectives," Anson Masters interposed soberly. "Speaking of which, it's time for each of us to earn our keep." As usual, Anson was playing his longtime role as stage manager of the press corps, decreeing that each of us head to our respective beats–me to the Detective Bureau, Masters to the Crime Lab, Farmer to Vice, and O'Farrell to the Bunco Squad and Missing Persons.
I was the last one out of the press room. Just as I stepped into the hall, the hunchbacked old fellow who delivered the mail–and also ran a bookie operation on the side–came around the corner with his wheeled mail cart.
"Hi, Charlie, anything for us newshounds today?" I asked.
"Just one letter, and it's yours, Mr. Malek," he said, handing me an envelope addressed in ink with capital letters. I probably thanked Charlie–I don't remember–and went back to my desk, heart pounding.
As I slit the envelope, I noticed there was no stamp, meaning of course it had been hand-delivered, probably to the reception desk downstairs and that my name was still misspelled. The single sheet inside likely was torn from the same notepad as the earlier missive. I pulled in air and began reading.
TRIBUNE MAN MALIK,
NOW YOU KNOW WE ARE SERIOUS. REAL SERIOUS. THAT POLICEMAN WHO GOT SHOT LAST NIGHT ON WESTERN AVENUE WAS KILLED BY ONE OF US. YOU HAD A LITTLE STORY ABOUT IT IN YOUR PAPER THIS MORNING. IT DIDN'T MENTION US, BUT THAT'S OKAY BECAUSE YOU DIDN'T KNOW FOR SURE WHO DID IT. NOW YOU DO. WE EXPECT ANOTHER STORY IN TOMORROW'S TRIBUNE SAYING THE POLICEMAN WAS KILLED BY US. OR ELSE THERE WILL BE MORE OF THE SAME. DEATH TO THE JEW-LOVER TRUMAN!
THE NEW REICH
As was the case before, little swastikas adorned the corners of the sheet. I let out a string of curses to the empty office, put the latest piece of repugnant correspondence in my pocket, and walked down the single flight of stairs to Fergus Fahey's office.
"And a glorious morning to you, young and gorgeous mother," I told Elsie in a happy-go-lucky tone belying my mood. "May I be permitted an audience with the lord and master?"
"First, I'll give you ten minutes–well, maybe fifteen–to stop talking like that to me," she fired back with a smirk. Her expression then quickly changed. "I'll announce you, but be aware that the man behind that door is not in the best of moods."
"Then the two of us will get along just fine today," I said as she spoke my name into the intercom and got the usual unintelligible squawk in return. She nodded that I should go in.
I pushed open the door only to behold a chief of detectives who was slumped in the chair behind his desk, wearing an expression that I put somewhere between defeat and despair. His vest was open and his hair more rumpled than usual.
"Good morning, Fergus," I said quietly, setting a pack of Lucky Strikes on his desk as was my modus operandi. He did not look at it.
"Anything that you want to talk about?" I asked.
The chief looked worn. "You've read your own paper today," he said tonelessly. "You know what's on my mind."
"Yeah, I have, and I do. On that subject, you had better read this. It apparently got dropped off at the reception desk downstairs this morning. No stamp on the envelope." I handed the note over.
"Those sons of bitches," he murmured after reading it. "Those miserable sons…" He flipped the sheet onto his desk blotter as if it were contaminated.
"God, Fergus, I–"
"That young man who got shot last night–and for no earthly reason, I might add–was named Timothy Reagan. Which won't mean anything in particular to you…no reason it should," Fahey said. "But it means plenty to me. His late father Roger and I were partners years ago down south in the Gresham district. I was the boy's godfather."
I started to say something, but Fahey cut me off with a piercing glare. "Roger died a little over a year ago of cancer. Lived just long enough to see his son join the force. He was in a wheelchair at the ceremony, but Lord, was he proud of the lad."
I though
t for a moment he might crack, but he went on.
"I sat with Roger a day or two before he died, and he asked me to keep watch on Tim. 'I don't want him to ever think he's getting a pass because his dad got to be a captain,' Roger told me. He asked me to make sure the lad was doing his job, which wasn't a problem. Tim had all the makings of a first-rate cop. But I didn't do much of a job of watching over him now, did I?"
"Fergus, for Christ's sake, you couldn't be with the kid every hour of every day. Stop talking like that."
He acted like he hadn't even heard me. Fahey was shaken like I'd never seen him, and I didn't know what else to say, except "Have a cigarette."
"Thanks," he muttered, lighting up. "What're you going to do about the story now?"
"I don't know, call my bosses, I guess. Now they've got to know what's going on. And just so you're aware, I haven't bothered showing these two little hate messages to my pals in the press room. I suppose you want to have this note, too."
"You're damn right I do," he snapped, holding out a hand.
"Okay by me. Just let me copy the wording down like I did with the first one." I did so, then passed the note over.
"I suppose nobody noticed who dropped this off, huh?" Fahey asked.
"No. I went down there to check, and the patrolman at reception said it just appeared on his desk, and he passed it along to Charlie to deliver to me in the press room. Said it must have been left there during a flurry of activity. You know what a madhouse it can be down front. I also asked Johnston, the fellow who runs the cigar stand, on the off chance that he might have seen the guy, but no luck there either."
"Maybe reception will pay more attention next time," he snarled.
"Except that next time, if there is a next time, the creep will probably go back to using the mail."
"You're right, of course," Fahey said. "By the way, there were no prints on that first note except yours, which were all over the thing."
A President In Peril (A Snap Malek Mystery) Page 4
