A President In Peril

Chapter Five R₁ E₁ P₃ U₁ G₂ N₁ A₁ N₁ T₁ (adj) distasteful, objectionable, or offensive

Monday morning, as I rode into the city on the El with my copy of the Trib’s three-star final, I read that a young Chicago cop had been shot dead the night before on a sidewalk while walking into a coffee shop from his squad car, which had been parked at the curb on Western Avenue near 41st Street.

The patrolman was only twenty-three, with just two years on the force, and there was no apparent motive for the shooting. His partner, who was sitting in the squad car, gave chase on foot, but whoever pulled the trigger had a big head start on him and disappeared into the darkness.

Not surprisingly, our press room bull session that morning centered on the killing. “Too damn many guns floating around this town,” Packy Farmer snorted. “Cops should be the only ones with ’em.”

“And in England, even the cops aren’t armed,” O’Farrell chimed in. “Ain’t that the case, Snap? You were over there during the war, you should know.”

“You’re right, Dirk,” I told him. “The Bobbies, as they call them, don’t carry guns except in unusual cases, and even then they have to get some sort of official permission, as I understand their laws.”

“I’m sure our Mr. Malek will find out more about this unfortunate occurrence and fill us all in after he talks to the chief of detectives,” Anson Masters interposed soberly. “Speaking of which, it’s time for each of us to earn our keep.” As usual, Anson was playing his longtime role as stage manager of the press corps, decreeing that each of us head to our respective beats — me to the Detective Bureau, Masters to the Crime Lab, Farmer to Vice, and O’Farrell to the Bunco Squad and Missing Persons.

I was the last one out of the press room. Just as I stepped into the hall, the hunchbacked old fellow who delivered the mail — and also ran a bookie operation on the side — came around the corner with his wheeled mail cart.

“Hi, Charlie, anything for us newshounds today?” I asked.

“Just one letter, and it’s yours, Mr. Malek,” he said, handing me an envelope addressed in ink with capital letters. I probably thanked Charlie — I don’t remember — and went back to my desk, heart pounding.

As I slit the envelope, I noticed there was no stamp, meaning of course it had been hand-delivered, probably to the reception desk downstairs and that my name was still misspelled. The single sheet inside likely was torn from the same notepad as the earlier missive. I pulled in air and began reading.

As was the case before, little swastikas adorned the corners of the sheet. I let out a string of curses to the empty office, put the latest piece of repugnant correspondence in my pocket, and walked down the single flight of stairs to Fergus Fahey’s office.

“And a glorious morning to you, young and gorgeous mother,” I told Elsie in a happy-go-lucky tone belying my mood. “May I be permitted an audience with the lord and master?”

“First, I’ll give you ten minutes — well, maybe fifteen — to stop talking like that to me,” she fired back with a smirk. Her expression then quickly changed. “I’ll announce you, but be aware that the man behind that door is not in the best of moods.”

“Then the two of us will get along just fine today,” I said as she spoke my name into the intercom and got the usual unintelligible squawk in return. She nodded that I should go in.

I pushed open the door only to behold a chief of detectives who was slumped in the chair behind his desk, wearing an expression that I put somewhere between defeat and despair. His vest was open and his hair more rumpled than usual.

“Good morning, Fergus,” I said quietly, setting a pack of Lucky Strikes on his desk as was my modus operandi. He did not look at it.

“Anything that you want to talk about?” I asked.

The chief looked worn. “You’ve read your own paper today,” he said tonelessly. “You know what’s on my mind.”

“Yeah, I have, and I do. On that subject, you had better read this. It apparently got dropped off at the reception desk downstairs this morning. No stamp on the envelope.” I handed the note over.

“Those sons of bitches,” he murmured after reading it. “Those miserable sons...” He flipped the sheet onto his desk blotter as if it were contaminated.

“God, Fergus, I—”

“That young man who got shot last night — and for no earthly reason, I might add — was named Timothy Reagan. Which won’t mean anything in particular to you... no reason it should,” Fahey said. “But it means plenty to me. His late father Roger and I were partners years ago down south in the Gresham district. I was the boy’s godfather.”

I started to say something, but Fahey cut me off with a piercing glare. “Roger died a little over a year ago of cancer. Lived just long enough to see his son join the force. He was in a wheelchair at the ceremony, but Lord, was he proud of the lad.”

I thought for a moment he might crack, but he went on.

“I sat with Roger a day or two before he died, and he asked me to keep watch on Tim. ‘I don’t want him to ever think he’s getting a pass because his dad got to be a captain,’ Roger told me. He asked me to make sure the lad was doing his job, which wasn’t a problem. Tim had all the makings of a first-rate cop. But I didn’t do much of a job of watching over him now, did I?”

“Fergus, for Christ’s sake, you couldn’t be with the kid every hour of every day. Stop talking like that.”

He acted like he hadn’t even heard me. Fahey was shaken like I’d never seen him, and I didn’t know what else to say, except “Have a cigarette.”

“Thanks,” he muttered, lighting up. “What’re you going to do about the story now?”

“I don’t know, call my bosses, I guess. Now they’ve got to know what’s going on. And just so you’re aware, I haven’t bothered showing these two little hate messages to my pals in the press room. I suppose you want to have this note, too.”

“You’re damn right I do,” he snapped, holding out a hand.

“Okay by me. Just let me copy the wording down like I did with the first one.” I did so, then passed the note over.

“I suppose nobody noticed who dropped this off, huh?” Fahey asked.

“No. I went down there to check, and the patrolman at reception said it just appeared on his desk, and he passed it along to Charlie to deliver to me in the press room. Said it must have been left there during a flurry of activity. You know what a madhouse it can be down front. I also asked Johnston, the fellow who runs the cigar stand, on the off chance that he might have seen the guy, but no luck there either.”

“Maybe reception will pay more attention next time,” he snarled.

“Except that next time, if there is a next time, the creep will probably go back to using the mail.”

“You’re right, of course,” Fahey said. “By the way, there were no prints on that first note except yours, which were all over the thing.”

“Well, aren’t you glad you had them, Fergus? My prints, I mean. I had to get printed when I went over to Europe for my short-lived stint as a foreign correspondent.”

Fahey snorted. “You know, it’s just possible that these morons didn’t have anything to do with Tim’s killing, that they saw the piece in the Trib and then claimed they did it.”

“Possible, Fergus, but if I were to guess, I’d say not very likely.”

“Yeah, who am I kidding?” he conceded. “We’re going to comb the city for any known Nazi groups or individuals. Of course we’ll have to share those notes of yours with the Secret Service and the FBI.”

“Be my guest. In the meantime, I’m going to debrief myself to the brass up in Tribune Tower.”

I returned to the press room, reported to my colleagues that there was no news to speak of from the Detective Bureau, and then went to a pay phone in the Headquarters lobby, where I put in a call to the Tribune city desk.

“I need to talk to somebody about a very sensitive story,” I told Hal Murray, the day city editor.

“Won’t I do?” he snarled.

“No offense, Hal, but this is damn sensitive business, and it involves the president’s visit here late this month or early in November.”

“So do you want to take it all the way to the managing editor?”

“Yes, as a matter of fact, I do. Trust me on this. It’s really, really serious, and I need a policy decision from him.”

The snort on the other end of the line came through clearly over the clatter of typewriters and the other ambient noise in the big newsroom. “Okay. I’ll get the word to Maloney that you want to see him. Then I’ll call you back.”

I returned to my desk in the press room and was listening to Packy Farmer relating details about a call girl ring the Vice Squad had just broken up in a Lake View building that had once been a convent when my phone rang. It was Murray.

“Okay, Snap, Maloney can see you at eleven,” he said. “He wanted to know what it was about, of course, but I told him your lip was buttoned to anybody but him. I don’t think he was all that pleased, but what the hell, that’s your problem and nobody else’s, far as I’m concerned.”

I thanked him sarcastically and rang off. “Well, boys, I’ve been summoned to the Tower,” I announced to the others. “Could be that I’m being rewarded for my sterling work here and given a bonus or maybe even an all-expenses-paid vacation to the Wisconsin Dells or the Indiana Dunes.”

“Yeah, or it could be you’re getting read out by the brass for being a twenty-four carat wise ass,” O’Farrell brayed.

“Not a chance, Dirk. I’m beloved by everybody in the grand old Tribune family. Be a pal and cover for me while I’m gone. I’d do the same for you if you ever had the good fortune to be allowed into the head office of your publication.”

The office of J. Loy ‘Pat’ Maloney adjoined the two-story ‘local room,’ as the Trib called its city room, and was separated from it by a glass wall. That way, the managing editor had a panoramic view of his large and frenetic news-gathering operation.

As usual, he was dressed in a natty three-piece suit. Also as usual, he was on the phone when I appeared outside his office. He nodded me in and continued talking as I took a seat in front of his desk.

“Yes, yes, of course I’ll tell the Colonel,” he said into the mouthpiece. “No, no, don’t do anything on it until you hear back. Yes... right... definitely. Probably sometime this afternoon. Certainly no later than tomorrow morning.

“That was Martin calling from over in Ohio,” he told me as he hung up. “Says he’s getting reports that Dewey’s in big trouble over there. There’s apparently a clear trend toward Truman, according to some local poll. Wants to know if he should write about it. I’ve got to talk to the Colonel soon. Now what’s this hush-hush business of yours that Murray mentioned?”

“I’ve been on the receiving end of some death threats toward Truman,” I told him, taking out my notebook and reading him the wording of the two messages.

Maloney’s frown deepened as I read, and he pulled in air and tugged on the points of his vest. “Mr. Malek, you seem to have a faculty for finding trouble — not that I’m criticizing, mind you. But I remember those murders down in Hyde Park back in ’42 when you came close to getting yourself killed. Do you have any idea why you were on the receiving end of those...” He waved a hand in a circular motion, but couldn’t find a word to describe the notes.

“No, sir, I don’t, other than for good or ill I guess I’m the embodiment of the paper down there at Police Headquarters, and this... this hatemonger seems to think that I have some authority or influence over what runs in the paper.”

Maloney made a face and ran a palm across his forehead. “What really riles me is that whoever wrote those pieces of trash actually thinks that the Tribune would oppose Truman’s election on the basis of his decision to recognize Israeli statehood. And that, by implication, we as an institution are anti-Semitic.”

“I agree completely, and I felt insulted to be the target of the notes. So what do I do?”

He banged a fist on his desk blotter. “Nothing! Not a thing. Although I’ll check with the Colonel, of course, I’m sure he would agree. This individual, or this group, whoever they are, wants publicity from us and they’re not going to get it. All we need is to start an anti-Jewish panic in the city, to say nothing of stimulating copycat groups to begin spewing ethnic filth of their own. I assume you turned the notes over to the police.”

“Yes, sir, I did.”

“Good. That’s as it should be. May I also assume that your competitors in the Headquarters press room know nothing about this?”

“Just a little about the call I got, my first contact with the bigot,” I said. “They heard my end of it, of course, and wanted to know more. So I filled them in on what was said, and to a man they brushed it off as the work of a crank.

“Of course there’s a chance that this low-life will give up on us and start calling one or more of the other papers. If that happens, one of them might choose to write about the threats.”

“Yes, I considered that possibility as you were filling me in,” the managing editor said. “But the Tribune doesn’t need scoops badly enough to give ink to people like that.”

“For what it’s worth, I totally agree. Although if I keep getting calls from this low-life, the others in the press room are going to know about it sooner or later. They’ll be trying to pry it out of me. There’s not a lot of privacy there, as you know.”

Maloney shrugged. “I wouldn’t worry about them learning more about what’s going on. As I said, I’m not as interested in a scoop here as I am in the police nailing this bastard. Mr. Malek, keep me personally informed of any further developments. For now, we will do nothing, pending orders from the Colonel; assuming the police or the FBI or the Secret Service get to the bottom of this, then we will of course cover it.”

“I’ll keep you posted,” I said as I rose to leave.

“And Mr. Malek...?”

“Yes, sir?”

“Do not do anything rash. You tempted fate down in Hyde Park years ago. You are an aggressive reporter, which I applaud, but I do not want to read your obituary in our pages. You are much too young. Do I make myself clear?”

“You do.”

“Good,” he said with a curt nod. He turned to his phone, presumably to call the staunchly Republican Colonel McCormick and get marching orders on how the paper would cover Ohio’s inexorable drift toward Truman in the impending election.