Back in the pressroom, I called the city desk and dictated a few graphs to a rewrite man on the press conference for our outstate edition, even though the deadline was nowhere close. Packy watched me all the while, drumming his fingers on his desk and rolling another one of his ugly little smokes. I never understood how a guy who had been making his own cigarettes for all of his adult years couldn’t do a better job of it.
After I hung up with rewrite, I leaned back, feet on the desk, and lit up myself — a real cigarette, a Lucky — closing my eyes and struggling to keep from laughing. The Daily News, also a p.m. paper, had roughly the same schedule of editions as Packy’s American, but Anson Masters always seemed unconcerned until minutes before deadline. So while Packy fumed about my inactivity, Anson pored over the Ely Culbertson bridge column in his own paper from the day before, trying to figure out how a guy in a tournament someplace in Europe managed to take all the tricks in a deal even though he and his partner were missing an ace and two kings.
Elsie Dugo looked up from her typewriter, blinked once, and gave me a toothy grin as I eased into her six-foot-square alcove, which guarded the inner sanctum of the chief of detectives. “That grand old fellow on the premises?” I asked, returning her smile.
She nodded, pressing a button and pronouncing my name into a box on her desk. “You know the way, big boy,” Elsie chirped after getting what was to me an unintelligible squawk out of the box. “Be warned, however, that he’s not in the best of tempers.”
“Thanks for the heads up on his frame of mind. Knowing him as I do, I never would have guessed it.”
To call Fergus Fahey’s office dingy would be to pay it a compliment. It did have a carpet all right, albeit edging toward threadbare and of a shade somewhere between dirty brown and dirty gray. And there were two padded, semi-comfortable but unmatched chairs, each of which had arms. These were the only concessions to refinement in a room that looked like a Trappist monk had decorated it. Banks of gray filing cabinets lined two gray, pictureless walls, and on the wall behind Fahey’s desk, a single window that hadn’t been washed since Coolidge first took the oath of office looked out on the Elevated tracks.
The man himself slouched behind a battered, brown wooden desk that seemed to function primarily as support for stacks of paperwork. He dipped his chin almost imperceptibly in acknowledgment of my presence.
“Well, and a nice warm hello to you, too,” I said, sliding into one of the guest chairs.
“Got a Lucky?” he snorted, knowing I always did.
“Yeah. Got coffee?” I responded, knowing he always did. This was a ritual we had fallen into sometime back. The coffee in his office, brewed by Elsie in her anteroom, was the best in the building. Fahey hit the intercom buzzer three times — the coffee signal — as I handed my pack of smokes across and he pulled two out. He never took just one.
Elsie clicked in on her high heels carrying a steaming mug of caffeine juice and set it on the corner of the desk, one of the few spots not covered with stacks of papers.
“I’m pretty sure I love you,” I said, hoisting the cup to her in salute and getting a dimpled smile in response before she stuck out her tongue at me.
“You two could do a lot worse than each other,” the chief observed dryly, looking from her to me and back again. “Elsie, what did I tell you when I came back from that damned press conference?”
“You said that Snap — Mr. Malek — would show up here at 10:25.”
“What time is it now?”
She looked at the clock on the wall behind Fahey and grinned in my direction. “It’s 10:27.”
“And how long has our Mr. Malek been here?”
“Two minutes?” It was a question, but tentatively posed.
“Right! I’m just trying to confirm patterns of predictability. Thank you, Elsie.” She did a graceful about-face and left the room, which instantly reverted to its drab state.
I drank coffee and crossed one leg over the other. “Okay, now that you have flushed all that bile out of your system, want to talk about Lloyd Martindale?” I asked.
“Not particularly.”
“Force yourself, open up. What’s your opinion? Off the record this time. I’m feeling generous.”
Fahey lit up and leaned back, blowing smoke and running a hand over the gray fringe of hair that formed a semicircle around that ruddy scalp of his. “Christ, what do you think, Snap? If I was in the syndicate, I’d be looking for ways to get rid of the guy, too. Off the record, of course.”
“Of course. No question it was them?”
“Or one of them. Or somebody in their hire.”
“Why?”
“Oh, come on, you know the answer to that question as well as I do, probably better,” the chief sighed, taking a long drag on his cigarette. “He looked like he was headed for the mayor’s office.”
“You really think he would have won?”
He shrugged. “Don’t know for sure — maybe not. But the possibility was definitely there, which may have been enough to scare the boys. Things are fairly comfortable for them as long as Kelly sits in the big office with Pat Nash’s power backing him up. But Martindale figured to turn the town on its ear, even if he was a pompous, posturing, publicity-hungry ass. He would have made life miserable for a lot of people who don’t like being uncomfortable.”
“And you really figure that they’d kill him rather than risk his getting into the Hall?”
The chief shrugged again and threw his arms up. “You know as well as I do that they’ve done it for a lot smaller stakes.”
“So now what happens?”
Fahey furiously ground out his butt in a ceramic ashtray bearing the name of a Wabash Avenue steak house. “You know the answer to that one, too. What happens, of course, is that the heat is on the department, which is to say, yours truly, thank you. Altman had his ‘we’ll-leave-no-stone-unturned’ speech a little while ago, as you heard. At 11:00, Courtney gets his chance to chest-thump down at the County Building about this horrible crime and how the city desperately needs new leadership, which — though he won’t say so outright — is none other than himself, of course. And what are you willing to wager that by 3:00 this afternoon, Hizzoner the Mayor, with puppet master Pat Nash nodding soberly at his side, holds his own press conference in which he’ll rail about how he doesn’t get enough support in his ongoing, unrelenting war on organized crime.”
“What war on organized crime?”
Fahey actually started to grin before catching himself. “Just so. But he’ll make it sound good, damn good, and some newspapermen are dumb enough, or gullible enough, to take the bait. Present company excluded, of course.”
“Of course. You sound a touch on the acid side,” I chided.
“More than a touch, Snap. And what really pisses me off is that Martindale will come out of this looking like a goddamn martyr. Hellfire, the last couple of years, he’s been all over the department about our inability to nail any of the post-Capone syndicate biggies. Never mind that he had no specific suggestions on how to do it. What a pain in the ass he got to be, for all of us. If I wasn’t so sure who was behind his killing, I’d guess it was somebody high up in the Department who got sick of hearing him carp. But I never said that, did I?”
“Nah. And I never heard it. Although I noticed at the press conference that the good commissioner is a little thin-skinned on that particular subject. Okay, I need some quotes that I — and all the other clowns in the pressroom — can use.”
“That’s right, you’re here as usual representing that syndicate of your own, right? Including that jackass Farmer; tell him to go — oh, the hell with it. Okay, pull out your notebook and your pack of Luckies and I’ll buzz Elsie to bring more coffee. This could take a while.”