Shadow of the Bomb

Chapter 2

I’d like to report that I followed up quickly on Fergus Fahey’s request about Hyde Park, but when I got back to the press room, Dirk O’Farrell was beginning to brief the others about a hot item he picked up from the Vice Squad, one of his beats.

“... so yesterday they broke up this high-priced call girl ring, and is it a doozie,” he said, savoring the limelight. “Seems that these, er... ladies operated out of an apartment on North Lake Shore Drive, up around Belmont Harbor. And their clientele — listen to this.” Dirk then proceeded to read off a list of names. It included two top trial lawyers, one divorce lawyer, a senior vice president at one of the city’s biggest banks, a well-known radio personality, a Cubs pitcher, a society band leader, a North Side Protestant minister, and three men I would term “socialites,” given that their pictures are on the society pages every week.

“Now I call that an all-star lineup,” Eddie Metz said approvingly, smacking his lips and slurping coffee.

“Indeed it is,” Anson Masters intoned. “But other than general details, the name of the madam and some quotes from the puffed-up commander of the Vice Squad, where does that put us? My editors certainly will not print the names of these now-tarnished luminaries, names which of course our readers crave. And in point of fact, one of the lawyers on that roster — I’m not at liberty to say which — plays golf regularly with my managing editor at an exclusive North Shore country club.”

“How ’bout you, Eddie?” Packy Farmer said with a smirk. “As the only tabloid we’ve got in this town, your rag will print just about anything, right?”

Metz looked uncomfortable. “Uh... I don’t think I could get these names past my brother and onto the page,” he muttered. Tom “Hotshot” Metz was the bombastic city editor of the Times, surely the sole reason Eddie had a job on the paper.

“Well, well,” Masters said, looking around the room. “It would appear that no one of us will print the names. What about our young lady from City News?” He dipped his chin in Joanie’s direction.

She colored slightly. “I don’t think so,” she replied softly. “None of you would print them anyway, and I don’t believe any of the radio stations would choose to use them either, do you?”

“Certainly not the station whose guy got caught with his trousers down around his ankles,” O’Farrell guffawed, swiveling toward the City News desk. “I bet they didn’t prepare you for this in the hallowed halls up at good old Northwestern now, did they, Joan?”

“Not really. They never taught us how to write whorehouse stories in Crime Reporting 101,” she deadpanned, eliciting a round of laughter. Even though she got a good deal of teasing in the press room, we’d all come to like Joan in the weeks she’d been with us, to the extent of taking a somewhat paternal interest in her. And she was learning to give as well as she got in the office banter.

Even without names, the call-girl story got big play in the afternoon editions of the Daily News, Herald American, and Times, as well as in the next morning’s Trib and Sun, with banner heads in all five papers and photos of both the Vice Squad Commander and the Police Commissioner. It even bumped the war news down to second position on every front page, if only for one day.

But all the papers did list the lines of work of the men whose names were listed in the madam’s little black book, although the Cubs pitcher simply became “a major league baseball player” in print. It wasn’t hard to imagine all the speculation going on around town as to the identities of these customers, and it undoubtedly led to guessing games at water coolers and poker games and cocktail parties over the next several weeks.

I got pumped myself by the regulars at Kilkenny’s, the saloon on North Clark Street near my apartment that was my favorite hangout. But I chose to play dumb.

“Aw, come on, Snap,” Morty Easterly pleaded from his semi-permanent stool at the far end of the bar. “You musta learned who they were from the cops.”

“Nope, sorry, Morty,” I lied, “they only gave us their professions. Your guesses are as good as mine.”

He and the others kept after me, even throwing out names as possibilities, but they tired of getting no response from me after a couple of nights of badgering, so the subject died down, both in Kilkenny’s and in the newspapers as well.

For us local reporters, though, it had been fun to grab some headlines, if only briefly, from the war correspondents in Europe, Africa, and the Pacific. Only after the call-girl story had run its course did I remember Fahey’s query about Hyde Park. It was an area I had covered on occasion in my early days as a City News Bureau reporter, although that was well over a decade ago.

The few times I could recall being in Hyde Park for reasons other than work was when I ushered at football games at Stagg Field back in my high school days. We didn’t get paid, but we got to see the games, back when the Maroons, as they were called, were a football powerhouse. That was long before the school’s administration decided it wasn’t interested in being up there with the big boys, schools like Michigan and Notre Dame and Southern Cal.

I started by phoning MacAfee, the Trib reporter on the South Police beat, which meant he covered all of the precinct stations in roughly the southern third of the city.

“Hello, Mr. Malek,” he said in a polite tone when I’d gotten hold of him at the Hyde Park precinct station. Al MacAfee was one of the paper’s youngest reporters, earnest, hard-working, and eager to please.

“Just wondering, Mac, if you’ve heard about anything unusual going on in Hyde Park. I’m checking out a tip from an informant.”

“Hmm, interesting to hear that. Seems that Grady, the precinct commander, is concerned as well. Says that he’s gotten reports about so-called strangers prowling the neighborhoods around the university. But I tend to discount a lot of what he says — he’s a good cop but something of a worry-wart. Did your tipster have any specifics?”

“Not really. Pretty much the same thing Grady said. More strangers around than usual, some of them maybe foreign.”

MacAfee exhaled. “Well, from what I’ve seen of the university, a lot of the professors look pretty strange themselves. And a lot of them are probably foreign, too. But other than that, I don’t know of anything out of the ordinary. Actually, it’s a pretty quiet area most of the time. Oh, you’ve got the occasional drunken campus party, of course. And there are house burglaries from time to time, but it’s usually pretty routine stuff. Very few murders. Other sections of town have lots more crime, as I’m sure you know.”

I told him thanks, signed off, and thumbed my dog-eared address book for the number of one Charlie “Pickles” Podgorny, a small-time grifter and the only person I knew well who lived out south, although he was in Englewood, not Hyde Park.

Pickles owed me a favor. Back in ’39, the cops hauled him in for running a crap game just two blocks from Police Headquarters in the back room of a saloon over on Wabash. I was impressed with his balls for gambling in the very shadow of the law, and I went to his hearing to see what kind of guy would pull such a stunt. I liked him instantly — short, squat, swarthy, bow-legged, and with a collection of colorful stories about con men, gamblers, and the shadowy world of the city’s nocturnal underbelly that would have endeared him to Damon Runyon. While I was interviewing him for a possible feature (which never ran), he asked me for help, and I hooked him up with a lawyer I knew who got him off with a modest fine and a judge’s Biblical admonition to “go, and sin no more.”

As far as I know, Pickles may have continued to sin in any number of ways, but apparently he hadn’t got caught at it. And because of his gratitude to me, I on several occasions asked him to do some legwork for me on stories. He seemed to know every two-bit bookie, hustler, fence, and small-time gambler south of Roosevelt Road, and at least twice he steered me toward a source that helped me flesh out a piece, particularly a Sunday feature on some aspect of crime.

Surprisingly, I reached him right away. “Pickles — what are you doing at home in the afternoon? Resting up for some action with those little six-sided cubes that have dots on them?”

“Snap, old compadre — nice to hear your voice, my good man! But surely you jest. I’ve put my evil days behind me, and now I content myself with an occasional game of pasteboards with some friends right here in the neighborhood.”

“Uh-huh. Perhaps as in five-card stud with table stakes?”

“Perhaps,” he chuckled. “And sometimes even seven-card stud. But it’s just a friendly game, call it a pastime.”

“Right. And a pastime which usually finds you with a fatter wallet at the end than at the start.”

“Oh, from time to time I am able to depart the table with what might be described as some modest earnings. Of course, the real joy for me is the companionship of kindred souls, not the transfer of legal tender. But Snap, as dear a friend as I know you to be, I sense that you haven’t called simply to inquire as to my recreational activities.”

“You sense correctly, old timer. I hear rumors about something going on in Hyde Park, and it occurred to me that you, too, might have heard rumblings.”

“Cannot say as I have, Snap. As you know, it’s a quiet community, extremely intellectual, of course. How specific are these rumors you hear?”

“Not very — just that something seems to be in the air. Could be the result of hyperactive imaginations.”

“Tell you what, newshound. I’ll go up there and poke around. Shoot, that neighborhood is almost next door to me anyway, and I know a hangout on 55th Street called the ‘U.T.’ — stands for University Tavern. Students, locals, all sorts hang out in there. It’s a lively spot, serves food as well as drink. I’ve been there a few times for a refreshing libation, and I might just pick something up. Nothing like a public house to learn what’s going on in the environs. But I don’t suppose you’d know that, would you?”

“Don’t be too sure of that, Pickles. I, too, sometimes go out in search of a refreshing libation. And by the way, I will reimburse you for any of the liquids that you might happen to consume at this Hyde Park watering hole.”

“Words I was hoping to hear. We shall stay in touch.”