“Not necessary. I could catch the Rock Island and...”
“By the time you got downtown and then on and off the trains, it would be much too late for Mrs. Martindale, sir, given that she prefers to retire quite early. I can be at your residence in a short time. I took the liberty of getting your address from the telephone directory.”
“Uh, well, okay, sure.” I told Preston that I’d be waiting out in front of my building on Clark Street.
About half an hour later, a simonized dark blue Packard limousine with Preston at the wheel rolled up to the curb in the summer twilight. He got out and walked around the car, opening the front passenger side door for me in the manner of a well-trained chauffeur. And he looked the part as welclass="underline" dark, perfectly tailored suit, white shirt, dark tie. He must have been somewhere in his fifties, although there were no traces of gray in the slicked down black hair resting atop the triangular face that tapered to its pointed chin. He was maybe an inch taller than me, but his slouch made him seem shorter.
“Would you mind riding up front, sir?” he asked flashing an engaging smile. “I would like the company, if you don’t mind.”
“Not at all,” I told him, deciding that he wasn’t such a bad sort after all. “I’d feel funny sitting in the back, what with that glass panel and all,” I said eyeing the light blue velvet seats and padded foot rests.
As Preston turned left into Belmont, then east and onto Lake Shore Drive, I snuck a few brief glances over my shoulder and saw no indication of a tail. Apparently the mob had given up on shadowing me. We rolled south along the shore past Grant Park with its picnics and softball games just winding up in the near darkness and the dramatic backdrop of the downtown skyscrapers lining Michigan Avenue to the west. I broke the silence as we approached the hulking, colonnaded silhouette of Soldier Field.
“I was surprised to get your call,” I said with a vague but growing unease that I could not explain.
“Yes, sir,” Preston replied, hands kneading the wheel and eyes fixed firmly on the road.
“What exactly were Mrs. Martindale’s words when she asked you to telephone me?”
The chauffeur, or butler, or whatever his roles were in the old Martindale mansion, frowned and screwed up his face as if searching for a reply. “As I said to you on the telephone, sir, she told me she was sorry — that’s the word she used — sorry if she caused you any grief with her call to your superiors at the newspaper. And she also said that she was willing to give you an hour or so of her time. I believe that was it, sir.”
It was totally dark as we turned off Lake Shore Drive and wound through Jackson Park past the Rosenwald Museum, or the Museum of Science and Industry as they were now calling it, and then over to Stony Island Avenue. Another few miles of driving south, and we were in the suburban atmosphere of Beverly Hills. We crossed the Rock Island tracks and, at Longwood Drive, Preston made a right turn.
“I thought the house was to the left,” I told him.
“But we are not going to the house, Mr. Malek,” he answered with a quiet and well-modulated firmness as he produced an automatic and pointed it in my direction while steering with his left hand. I reached for the door handle but found that it wouldn’t budge.
“Don’t bother trying to get out, Mr. Malek,” he said sharply. “You can’t, not from the inside. I took care of that with a screwdriver and a wrench.”
Now my so-called street smarts kicked in, about an hour too late. The questions that had been festering in my subconscious now burst through to the surface, where they should have been all along: Why didn’t Beatrice Martindale call me herself? Why was Preston so intent on picking me up? How did he get to my apartment so relatively quickly if he was phoning from Beverly Hills? There were probably others as well, although I was too busy gauging my chances of wrestling the gun from him.
I slid my left hand slowly along the plush surface of the seat, but Preston must have had good peripheral vision, because he slammed the pistol down on my fingers while never turning his head in my direction. “Please keep your hands in your lap, sir,” he said in the same tone he likely used every day when asking Beatrice Martindale if she was ready for her afternoon tea or her ride in the limousine around Jackson and Washington Parks. The pain was momentarily searing, but I was damned if I was going to let him know it. I rubbed my fingers, none of them apparently broken, and asked where we were going.
“We’re almost there,” was the non-answer as we left the residential area and the car’s headlamps knifed into thick woods that I later learned was a forest preserve. We drove perhaps a quarter of a mile on a twin-rutted path to a grassy clearing, where Preston eased to a stop. There was no light and no sign of anyone within shouting distance. He had picked his spot well. Wordlessly, he got out and walked around to my door, pulling it open and gesturing to me with the automatic.
“What the hell is this all about?” I barked, hoping my burst of anger would somehow throw him off stride.
“What this is about is nosiness, Mr. Malek,” Preston said tightly as we faced each other about twenty feet apart in the wedge of light thrown by the Packard’s headlamps while he kept the gun leveled at my chest. “You insisted on poking around.”
“Poking around? How?”
“Huh! Your visit to that prying old Warburton biddy across the street from us,” he snapped, his voice rising. “She couldn’t wait to call Madam and tell her a Tribune reporter had called on her. And your tale about doing a feature on Beverly Hills — hokum! That sounded fishy enough by itself, but when the Warburton hag told Madam that you had asked a lot of questions about the family and about Lloyd, I smelled something. I called the Tribune switchboard and found out you were a police reporter — that was easy. Mr. Malek, I’m no Albert Einstein, but I do know enough about newspapers to realize that police reporters rarely if ever go around writing cute feature stories on quiet neighborhoods where nothing ever happens. If that visit to the Warburton place had been the last of it, though, I might have let things drop. But then you came to the house, and I knew what had to be done.”
“I guess I don’t understand,” I said, figuring that as long as I could keep Preston talking, I was buying time. “Since when is being curious a crime? As you said, I’m a reporter.”
“It’s what you were curious about,” he said tightly, keeping the automatic leveled at me with a steady hand.
“Oh... you mean Lloyd Martindale’s murder, don’t you?” I responded with what I hoped seemed like genuine surprise, hoping to divert him with my ingenuousness. “Well, sure, I was curious about it, who wouldn’t be? I never totally bought the theory that the syndicate boys killed him, did you?”
Preston’s jaw tightened and he drew in air, still holding the automatic steady. This time, there was no Dizzy Dean in the wings preparing to fire a beanball. “For a while, I actually figured the Democrats might have shot him,” I jabbered, groping for ways to keep the conversation alive, one-sided though it was. “What do you think of that?”
“You really are pathetic, Mr. Malek,” the dark-suited man chuckled dryly. “And I’m getting...”
The next sound from Preston was somewhere between a scream and a cough as he toppled over on one side, dropping the gun and clutching his left knee with both hands. His face was distorted and he was drooling as I covered the distance between us in long strides and picked up his automatic from the grass. He looked up in pop-eyed terror, but his eyes weren’t focused on me. I turned to see a familiar figure, revolver in hand, stride into the clearing.
“Who is he?” the Brother snapped, motioning his gun toward the writhing butler-chauffeur.