“And a fine morning to you, too, sir,” I responded, slumping uninvited into a guest chair and lobbing my just-opened pack of Luckies onto his desk blotter. “You got five minutes for me?”
“Do I get a choice?”
I shrugged. “Hell, yes you do. You can call any one of those cretins down the hall who masquerade as sergeants. And then you can have one of them throw me out on my ear — which would no doubt result in a page one expose by none other than yours truly on how the Chicago Police take delight in bullying and otherwise intimidating duly authorized and certified representatives of the fourth estate, otherwise known as the press. Or... you can take relaxed and satisfying drags on some of my fine Virginia cigarettes — no charge — while we have an enlightening discussion about newly deceased mobsters.”
Fahey’s thick gray-white brows dropped low over his eyes as he considered me. “Meaning?”
“Meaning one Joe Pariello.”
He lit one of the Luckies from my pack and flipped the matchbook aside absently. “You talking about that Capone wheelman found out northwest in the preserves? What about him?”
“Fergus, I’m real interested in Pariello, real interested,” I replied with a smile as Elsie whisked in and set a mug of coffee on the corner of Fahey’s desk for me. I nodded my thanks as she pivoted to leave.
“Hell, what’s to be interested in?” Fahey snarled, taking a drag and leaning back, lacing his hands over his ample midsection. “The guy was strictly small potatoes, never anything more than a driver and lackey and a two-bit bookie, so far as we could tell from his record and from what we hear. May have been a numbers runner, too. Capone liked him, yeah, but so what? Al’s long gone to the Rock — and apparently off his rocker, too, from what we gather — and Nitti and his boys call all the tunes now, you know that as well as I do, maybe better. We figure Pariello crossed one of ’em some way, most likely holding back dough. Happens all the time, you know that, too.”
I sipped coffee, watching the chief. I’d known Fahey for almost ten years and liked to think I could read him. And if I was reading right, he was being straight with me on this. Still...
“So, if I were to suggest that someone other than the mob was responsible for Pariello’s one-way trip to slumberland...” I let it hang in the air.
“What somebody?” Fahey said warily, grinding out his butt. “Like a jealous husband, maybe?”
“Maybe. Or maybe somebody who was trying to get him to talk.”
The chief came slowly forward in his chair, resting on his elbows. “So you figure he was crossing the mob somehow, and they found out and made an example of him as a lesson about what happens to double-dealers, eh?”
“That’s one possibility, yes. But here’s another one — purely hypothetical, of course. Let’s say for the sake of argument that somebody wanted Pariello to confess to a crime he didn’t commit.”
Fahey’s eyes narrowed to slits. “Go on.”
“Okay, our hypothetical somebodies work the hood over — maybe for days — but he won’t spit out a confession. So they finally give up and croak him. They dump the body in the woods out to hell and gone, figuring it will look like it was a syndicate hit. But like I said, all this is purely hypothetical.”
“And the hypothetical people who rubbed him out?” Fahey responded with a scowl.
I turned my palms up. “You fill in the blanks.”
He snorted. “Sometimes I can be a little dense, but I get your drift, Malek.” He only calls me that when he’s sore at me.
“What drift is that?”
“Cut the crap. You’ve got a real fixation with the Martindale killing, don’t you?” He lit another cigarette. “I think you dream about that murder. You’ve known me for what, ten or twelve years now? I don’t claim to be a choir boy, and I’ve done more than a few things on this damn job that I’ve gone to confession about, but I’ve never — never — ordered anybody worked over. Got that?” Fahey slapped a fleshy palm on the desktop for emphasis.
“I didn’t mean to suggest it was your doing, or that you even knew about it,” I responded calmly.
“Well, thank you very damn much for that,” he huffed, the veins in his square, map-of-Ireland face standing out. “I’m so relieved to hear it. But I’m really curious about what in God’s name makes you think that anything like you suggest ever even happened.”
“I’ve got a source — and it is not somebody on the force.”
He made a deprecating noise. “Care to name this source?”
“Can’t. Sorry.”
“I’ve got a source, I’ve got a source,” he mimicked in a rusty falsetto. “That’s the tune you newspaper guys are always singing. You hide behind that damn phony line and act like you’ve all got secret information. Well, I think ninety percent of the time, maybe more, what you’ve really got is a load of bullshit and that you’re on a fishing expedition to find out what we know.”
“Fergus, I’m not going to quarrel with you except to say that I’m reasonably sure this belongs to that other ten percent of the time.”
The chief appeared angry, but I felt that pose was at least in part a façade masking his concern about what I had told him. He was by all accounts an honest cop, most of the time, anyway, and he hated suggestions that not everybody on the force played by the same rules he did. Also, for all his blustering to the contrary, he had known me long enough to realize that my sources usually tended to be solid.
I now was virtually positive Fahey had no knowledge of how the minor-league mobster had met his end. But I wanted to be sure. “You ever hear of Pariello before this business?” I asked.
“Godammit, no!” he fired back, punishing his desk top with his fist again. “Like I said, he was small potatoes, a measly damn gopher. No reason I would have ever heard of him. You know, lately it seems like everybody’s moaning about how we beat confessions out of people. Take for example that hammer moron who just got locked up.”
“The one they say raped fifty women?”
Fahey lit another Lucky and made a face. “Yeah, and he used a hammer on some of ’em, too. In the courtroom he, or maybe it was his damn public defender, said we forced a confession out of him. Used the rubber hose and all, the whole business.”
I nodded, recalling the case. “That claim didn’t do him a hell of a lot of good, though, did it?”
“For once, no it didn’t, thank the Lord!” he said. “But what if the jury had bought it?”
I drank the best coffee in the building and set the cup down, choosing my words. “Well, Fergus, you have to admit it has happened before — beatings by the force, I mean.”
“Yeah, but dammit, never on my watch, at least as far as I ever knew,” he said. “Not that I wouldn’t mind seeing a few of the goons and morons and perverts we nail get the shit kicked out of ’em during, shall we say, an ‘interrogation.’ That’s not my style, though — even when we’re holding a suspected cop killer. Guess I must be turning into a softy, huh?”
“Many’s the time I’ve said that very thing about you, Fergus.”
He shrugged. “Well, I know more than a few around here — he made an arc with his arm as if taking in the whole building — who think I’m too soft for this job. Hellfire, they may be right. Mind if I keep these?” he asked, holding up the pack of Luckies.
“Why do you think I brought them in? I’m something of a softy myself, to say nothing of the bad habit I’ve developed of trying to curry favor with various public officials by supplying them with smokes.”
“Get your butt out of here and do something productive like flirting with Elsie, will you? I’ve got work to do,” he muttered, putting his head down and riffling through a six-inch-high stack of paperwork.