Chapter 17
It has always puzzled me that the outfit chose to expend so much time and manpower trying to monitor my activities during nonworking hours in the spring and summer of 1938. But whenever I looked around, there they were... each morning the car idling at the curb on Clark with two figures inside, each evening the same. I assumed they eventually figured out that when I got home, I entered the building through another door, but they made no attempt to intercept me for another of those “rides.” And for my part, I continued to defer any attempt to see Nicolette Stover, either at Harding’s again or up at her apartment on Grace Street, for fear that I might lead the goons to her.
My next contact with the syndicate was totally unexpected. I was working a crossword puzzle one July morning at my desk in Police Headquarters when my phone rang.
“Mr. Malek,” the hoarse, familiar voice pronounced. It was “Mr. Left” of the night rides.
My hand tightened on the receiver. “Yes?”
“Have you read your own newspaper today?” he rasped. “The Three-Star Final?”
“More or less. Why?”
“Page 18, lower-left-hand corner.”
“Hold on,” I said, pressing the receiver to my left ear with a raised shoulder as I started flipping pages. “Uh, yeah, here it is,” I said.
“Could be that there’s more here than meets the eye, Mr. Malek,” he said in his sandpaper voice, spacing the words.
“Could be, eh?”
“A lot more than meets the eye, Mr. Malek. Do I gather that you did not write this?”
“You gather right. Not only did I not write it, I’m embarrassed to say I didn’t even notice it on my first pass through the paper. It probably came from the City News Bureau and then was sent to all the dailies, which is not uncommon. Items like this usually come from City News.”
“Far from complete reporting, whoever did it,” came the dry response. “Have you made any progress on the matter that we previously discussed?”
“None at all, I’m sorry to say. The press of my day-to-day work — you know how it is.”
“Good-bye, Mr. Malek,” he said in that voice devoid of all emotion. The line went dead.
I turned back to the item he referred to. It was tucked away at the bottom of a column. At the Trib, a one-paragraph article like this one is referred to, for reasons unknown to me, as a “5 head.” “HOODLUM FOUND SLAIN,” it read. “Joseph Pariello, 37, a hoodlum with past convictions for bookmaking, was found beaten and shot to death yesterday in the Caldwell Woods forest preserve northwest of the city by a passerby. Cook County Sheriff’s Police theorized that the crime syndicate was behind the killing of Pariello, a one-time driver for the imprisoned mob boss Al Capone. The victim was shot once in the head with a.32 caliber bullet, according to the sheriff’s police.”
Pariello of course figured to be the one that Mr. Left had mentioned to me earlier as the stooge the police were trying to hang the Martindale killing on. I turned to the City News reporter. “Hey, I’m sure we must have got this item from your guy on the North beat.” I circled the paragraph and tossed the paper on his desk. “See if you can get his full file, will you?”
He nodded. “Sure, okay. You thinking of doing something more on it, or what?”
“Uh-uh.” I waved the question away as I would a housefly. “Just curious. I went to grammar school with a guy named Joey Pariello, who would be exactly that age, and I figured maybe the full version of the story had more detail on him.” City News, which covered most of the grittier crime news in town for the dailies (and the radio stations), usually gave the dailies more than they would ever use on this kind of story — when we printed the stuff at all. The kid started working the phone and came back to me a few minutes later.
“Okay, this Pariello was found in the Caldwell Woods yesterday morning around seven or so by a guy in the neighborhood who was walking his dog,” he read from notes he had just taken. “The Sheriff’s coppers said Pariello had been dead maybe twelve or fourteen hours. Single bullet went clean through the heart. He was also pretty badly beat up, too, according to the report. He musta done something that really pissed off the mob.”
“He sure pissed off somebody,” I allowed.
“Yeah. No details on his background, though, other than his record and that bit about his being a driver for Capone. Do you think this is the one that you went to school with?”
“Could be, but there’s not much to go on. If I was to guess, I’d say it was him,” I improvised.
“Hey, Snap, what kind of guys did you go to grammar school with, anyway?” Eddie Metz brayed, grinning through clenched teeth that gripped a cigarette.
“Guys who were a lot like you, Eddie, except maybe a little bit smarter,” I responded, feigning irritability. “But I still don’t know for sure that it really was the same Pariello.”
“Come on, Snap, how many Joe — what was the name? — Pariellos do you think there are out there?” Packy Farmer put in. “Was the stiff your age?”
“Just about,” I shrugged, pleased that I had established a personal reason for wanting more dope on the dead mobster. It looked like Mr. Left had it figured about right. The Chicago cops, pressured to solve the Martindale hit, had one way or another fastened onto this Pariello as their patsy. Chances are they took him someplace nice and private and worked him over, maybe for days, trying to wring a confession out of the poor, luckless bastard. Apparently that didn’t work, so they got frustrated, shot him, and then dumped him in a forest preserve, outside the city limits of course, making no attempt to hide the body. But then, why should they?
When he was found, the Sheriff’s men, probably not privy to what their city brothers had been up to, made the logical assumption, given Pariello’s background, that he had fallen out of favor with the syndicate for some reason and had paid the ultimate price, which was hardly uncommon. It seemed like this was a good time for me to make another visit to the chief of detectives.
I got the usual toothy smile from Elsie Dugo and also the usual smart crack — this time a line from a movie. “Is that a pistol in your pocket, or are ya just glad to see me?” she quipped.
“Anybody ever take the time to tell you that you’ve got yourself a salty mouth, sister?”
“More than once, brother. I just tell ’em that I got that way from listening to the newspaper men who hang around my boss’s office pretending to act tough.”
“Huh. Well, at least you’re a darn sight easier on the eyes than Mae West. Is the big cheese by chance hiding behind that closed door?” I made a gesture toward Fahey’s office.
“He is indeed. And you’re almost as easy on the eyes as Cary Grant — but not quite, to be totally candid. By the way, the man himself is grumpy, so enter at your own risk.”
“You’re all heart,” I shot back. “And let the record show that Mr. Grant’s real name, the one he was born with, is Archibald Leach. How, I ask you, how can any woman be interested in a joe who has a label like that?”
She gave a toss of her head and turned back to her typing. “A rose by any other name...”
“Yeah, yeah. But can he hit a curve ball?”
Elsie started to deliver another comeback, but I pushed on through to the sanctum, which gave me the last word in this particular sparring match. Fahey looked up and grimaced as I loomed over his horizon. “I see she’s letting anybody get past her now.”