“A great president.”
“For a Republican,” Daley said, his smooth face creased by a slight smile. “I’ve gotten interested in him since being here the last couple of years. There’s something Lincoln said about this town that I like so much I memorized it: ‘I believe that a man should be proud of the city in which he lives, and he will so live that his city will be proud that he lives in it.’ That’s how I feel about Chicago.”
“I guess I do too,” I agreed, figuring his comment begged a response, “although I’ve never thought about it.”
“Where’d you grow up?” he asked.
“Pilsen.”
“What parish? I’m Nativity of Our Lord — always have been. That’s in Bridgeport.”
“St. Agnes,” I said without missing a beat, although my parents had stopped being active Catholics years before, and I hadn’t been inside a church since a year or so after Norma and I were married.
“Mm, 26th Street, isn’t it?”
“You know the city well — 26th and Lawndale.” I didn’t bother to tell him I’d moved up north, because he’d surely ask what my parish was now. And unless I had misread this man, he gauged others at least in part by their involvement in the church, specifically of the Catholic variety. It was not an area where I could stand much scrutiny, and at the moment I felt it was important to have Daley’s good opinion.
We walked for the next few minutes in silence through residential streets before Daley spoke. “You wanted to talk to me. About what?”
I drew in air and let in out slowly, choosing my words with care. “You’ve been following the coverage of the Martindale murder?”
“Of course I’ve read about it, just about everywhere I’ve turned. You can’t avoid it. So?”
“Well... I’ve got sources — maybe because I’ve been in the news business so long — and they tell me it wasn’t a mob hit.”
Daley’s full face registered surprise. “Who would have done it then?”
“That’s the question. There are several theories floating around,” I improvised. “Now I want to stress that that’s all they are — theories. And...”
“But the police think it was the syndicate, don’t they? That’s what I’ve been reading in all the papers, including yours.”
“The cops publicly say it’s the syndicate because they’ve got no other leads and it seems like a logical explanation. When in doubt, blame the organization; who’s going to contradict you?”
Daley sniffed dismissively. “When in doubt, when somebody gets gunned down the way Martindale was, it usually is the organization. What’s all this got to do with me?”
“Nothing, really, except I need your help.”
“Yeah, how so?” He tossed a suspicious look in my direction but kept up his brisk pace.
“One theory is that somebody in the Democratic organization hired a gun to—”
“That is totally ridiculous!” Dick Daley snapped in a voice that was just below a shout. He stopped in the middle of a residential block and pivoted to face me, chin out. “I should have expected this from the Tribune. Your paper will do anything to smear us.”
I held up a hand. “This isn’t the Tribune, honest. This is me. Nobody on the paper even knows that I’m down here.”
“Huh! I’m supposed to believe that?”
“Look, I’m a Democrat myself, always have been. There’s lots of us at the Trib,” I said, even though only two or maybe three reporters I was aware of consistently voted Democratic.
“If you’re one of us, how can you stand to work for that damned Colonel?” Daley demanded, hands on hips and head tilted aggressively.
I lifted my shoulders and let them drop. “It’s a living. They pay on time, and they don’t tell me how to write, or what to write, no matter what you hear around town. And remember, the Tribune did endorse Kelly for mayor in ’35.”
“Well, sure, but they couldn’t very well come out for that Wetten guy the Republicans were running,” Daley said. “That would have been a joke. Besides, the Colonel and Kelly are cronies, so that endorsement wasn’t politics as much as it was the buddy system working.”
“Maybe so, but the Trib also endorsed Brady for city clerk, and the last time I looked, he was a one hundred percent Democrat,” I persisted. “Now I’m not saying somebody from the party is behind the murder, but it is one possibility.”
Daley dismissed that with the sweep of a hand. “Bull! In the first place, people on opposite sides of politics may not like each other, but they don’t go around knocking one another off. And second, nobody I know or have talked to in the party considered Martindale a threat to Kelly next year. Ed would’ve squashed him like a bug. In fact, regulars I know who have been around forever said they hoped Martindale would be the Republican candidate because they figured he’d be easier to beat than Green or even old Thompson.”
“What do you think?”
“That’s an easy one. Kelly will win against anybody, and win big. Let the Republicans run whoever they want to, it’s not gonna matter. Hey, why are you even talking to me about this? I’m small potatoes — way down the line in the party.”
“Seamus Kilkenney said you were a comer, someone to watch.”
Another wave of the hand, this one not dismissive. “Well, Mr. K’s a friend of my folks, a wonderful guy. He’d say things like that.”
“Maybe, but I know him pretty well, and he only says what he means. I want a favor from you.”
We were under a streetlamp at a corner, facing each other in its cheery circle of light. Daley looked down at his well-polished shoes, then at me. “After Mr. K called me the other day and said you wanted to see me, I phoned my father. He doesn’t know you — never met you, but he says you bailed Mr. K out once.”
“People help their friends.”
“Sure. This was a big one though... the way I hear it; they were going to put him out of business.”
He was referring to the time just after I’d moved to Clark Street that a district police lieutenant had been shaking down the Killer for big bucks — so big that, as Daley said, he was close to shutting down.
“That greedy bastard,” I said. “One of the slimiest cops this town’s ever known, and that takes in a lot of territory. He was bleeding businesses all over his district. Somebody had to do something.”
“And it was you.” A hint of respect had crept into Daley’s tone.
“Being a reporter has its ups and downs. One of the downs is the wages, which are okay at the Trib — I’m not griping, mind you — but it’s still not the kind of money that’ll ever get me a house in Winnetka or Park Ridge or Elmhurst. One of the ups is that you get to know people — famous people, interesting people, strange people, and sometimes disgusting, dishonest, disreputable people — it comes with the job. And because I happen to work at Police Headquarters, I know cops — lots of cops. And I was damned if I was going to let some greasy-palmed stooge with brass on his uniform shutter my new favorite saloon because its owner wouldn’t help finance that stooge’s cottage at Lake Geneva and the swivel-hipped floozie he kept in some Drake Towers duplex.”
“So you got the cop tossed out on his ear, and off the force.”
“You could put it that way.”
“I just did. You saved Mr. K and his bar.”
“Sort of.”
“Not ‘sort of.’ You did.”
“All right, I did. But being with the paper helped. Brass on the force listened to what I had to say. If I had just been Joe Blow, who knows whether I’d have gotten anywhere.”