Daley nodded. “You said you want a favor.”
“Yeah.”
Another nod. The shadows thrown across his face by the streetlamp made him seem older and more careworn than earlier. “All right, I’ll hear you out, as long as it doesn’t involve anything illegal.”
“Thanks, it doesn’t. I need to know if somebody — anybody — in the Democratic Party was in any way involved in Martindale’s killing.”
Daley jammed his hands into his pants pockets. He was working to control what I later learned was a high-octane temper. After two deep breaths, he responded. “I can tell you now that I’m not going to find anything.” The words were spaced, and uttered with a quiet intensity.
“But you’ll make an honest effort?”
His body tensed under the well-fitting, pin-striped suit. “Mr. Malek, that is the only kind of effort I ever make,” he said, and coming from him, somehow those words didn’t sound stuffy.
“Thanks again. And at the risk of pushing my luck, I have one more favor to ask you — but this one’s really of your father.”
“Huh?”
“The Killer — Mr. K, that is... most of his customers called him the Killer — keeps hoping that maybe sometime your father will stop by his watering hole. If maybe you could say something...”
This time, Daley’s nod was accompanied by a full-fledged smile, which looked good on him. He should try it more often.
Chapter 8
A week passed, then another, and more, with no word from State Representative Daley. Not that I really expected to hear anything; I figured the guy had tolerated me — even humored me — down in Springfield because of my role in helping the Killer sweep that larcenous police lieutenant out of his life. But I was far too much of a realist to have illusions that Daley would do any serious poking around inside his own party in search of the murderer of a potential Republican mayoral candidate.
The calendar now claimed we were in April, although a snowstorm the first week made it feel more like February. Interest in the Martindale murder, both in the Police Headquarters pressroom and around town, had dwindled so that it ranked somewhere between curling and field hockey. The prevailing opinion was that the syndicate had been responsible, which meant by logical extension that the case was effectively closed — or permanently open if you viewed it from the Police Department’s perspective, based on their past successes at solving mob rub-outs.
The Crime Commission made periodic grumblings, but that was hardly news. And I was still intrigued myself, in large measure because of my enforced joyride with Monk and Mel and the hoarse-voiced hood who seemed to be their leader. But there was plenty else keeping me occupied, both on the job and in the world at large.
Like for instance the pissing contest between the Police Department and the State’s Attorney’s office. It started when two detectives from the Town Hall station house on the North Side gave a pair of suspects a “pass” — let them go free in the holdup of a driver of a horse-race handbook — because, as the dicks later claimed, “we didn’t believe they were guilty.”
Courtney, the State’s Attorney, blew his stack because he had to learn about this in the papers, not from the police. He countered by subpoenaing four of the city’s top cops, including John Prendergast, chief of the uniformed force, and Commissioner Allman himself, to explain why they allowed bookies to operate freely.
Courtney, already angling to take on Ed Kelly in the Democratic mayoral primary in ’39, wasn’t about to stop there. To further embarrass the Police Department, he got his own force to raid downtown handbooks. Among his catch were John “Chew Tobacco” Ryan and Hymie “Loud Mouth” Levin, the latter a long-time hood who’d been one of Capone’s bagmen before Al got sent off on his federally funded vacations in Georgia and California.
All this, plus Allman’s limp denial that the police frequently gave passes to suspects, kept the pressroom crew at Headquarters busy filing stories that more often than not ended up on the front pages of our respective papers — sometimes as the headline story. But that kind of play was soon to end, courtesy of one Adolph Hitler.
The Fuehrer’s troops had marched into Austria, seized Vienna, “annexed” (Hitler’s word) that land to Germany, and begun the Nazi harassment of Austrian Jews in what later was recognized as the de facto beginning of World War II. And, although nobody knew it at the time, that invasion — along with the Spanish Civil War and Japan’s takeover of China — marked the rise of international news to the extent that local stories, particularly those about police and crime, would never again command the headlines and dominate the front pages as they had over the previous two decades.
But to those of us who covered the police, the courts, and other areas of city government, such faraway events seemed as inessential and transitory as they appeared in the grainy newsreel footage on Movietone News preceding the feature films in the theaters.
“Hell, this’ll all blow over now that Hitler’s got Austria,” Anson Masters pronounced, dismissively tapping the front page of his own newspaper, which shrilled the invasion in three-inch capital letters. “That tin-pot Napoleon just wants all the heinie-talkers together in one country. Seems reasonable enough.”
“Following that line of reasoning, he’ll also be wanting chunks of Switzerland and Czechoslovakia — they’ve got German-speaking regions, too,” said the City News kid, who as the weeks passed had grown bolder and had started challenging the wisdom and the pronouncements of his elders.
Masters waved the comment aside. “Not likely, my young friend. The guy may love uniforms and parades and be power-hungry, but he’s not stupid. He knows when to stop pushing.”
I wondered if the kid wasn’t right, however. I’d read an article somewhere, maybe in Time magazine, about Hitler’s interest in Czechoslovakia. The writer suggested that his intentions went well beyond that little country’s Sudeten German population. The Fuehrer was said to covet the Czech industrial might, not all of which lay in what was being termed Sudetenland. I thought about my father’s sister over there, Aunt Hana, who he wrote to every month and whose sepia bridal photograph from the ’20s or earlier was framed in oval on the mahogany table next to the Tiffany lamp in the living room of my parents’ Pilsen apartment. And there were my mother’s cousins and nephews and nieces in Brno to whom she sent money and candy every Easter and Christmas.
But to be honest, I didn’t think long about them. To me, what was going on over in Europe was only mildly troubling, like reading about an earthquake in Japan or a revolution in Central America. I was swept up in my own life — seeing Peter on weekends, trying to figure out whether there was any way to get back together with Norma, and taking my enjoyment where I could find it, which more often than not was on a barstool at the Killer’s.
One Friday, Leo Cahill from the Trib sports copy desk rang me at headquarters to say that he had an extra Annie Oakley in the fourth row for the heavyweight title fight at the Chicago Stadium between the new champ, Joe Louis, and some pug from Minnesota named Harry Thomas.
I’d never been much interested in boxing, but there was a lot of excitement centering on Louis — the “Brown Bomber” as the sportswriters had tagged him — and what a fighting machine he was. Plus I’d never seen a championship bout, so I shoveled down a fast supper at a Pixley & Ehlers cafeteria in the Loop after work and met Cahill at one of the Stadium gates.
Leo and I were a long way from being close friends — if he had any close friends, I wasn’t aware of it. He was a needler, always looking for ways to rile people, particularly Cub fans (like me), Republicans (unlike me), suburbanites, and Protestants. He was that relative rarity, an Irish teetotaler, a member of a group that called itself the “Pioneers” — Irishmen who had taken the pledge. Leo knew about my own drinking history; nothing about private lives on a newspaper ever stays confidential for more than forty-eight hours. And he found frequent occasion to bring up what he liked to call my “little Achilles heel,” always in a patronizing manner laced with pity and overly solicitous sympathy.