Shadow of the Bomb

Chapter 7

In fact, Pickles and I put away four more draughts in a small and uncrowded saloon on 53rd Street before we called it a night. I calmed down and stopped shaking before he did, but neither of us had truly unwound until the third stein.

“Geez, Snap, I wasn’t expecting to find that. I’ve seen a few stiffs before, but never one whose face was that color,” Pickles said, shaking his head. “What’s your take?”

I shrugged and took a long drag on my Lucky. “I don’t know. I don’t think it was a robbery, because the place didn’t look like it had been rifled, although we weren’t around long enough to know much.”

“Too damn long for my taste. Think it could have been a homo thing?”

“Possible, but I’d say unlikely. The bartender said the guy had been married twice, although that’s no guarantee of anything when it comes to sex. But if he was queer, I doubt that he’d be a regular at the U.T., which hardly seems like it’s that kind of a joint.”

“Well, with all due respect, Snap, I think I’ll go back to my quiet games of chance down in Englewood. The only violence there is when Benny Kaplan gets pissed off about his lousy cards and throws the deck across the room.”

“I don’t blame you, Pickles. Clearly, this grand university community with all of its gothic buildings isn’t as tranquil as it looks.”

The next morning, my head reminded me of the previous night’s beer consumption as I sat at my kitchen table with coffee and the Tribune. On Page 4, there was a three-paragraph item about Bergman:

It was bare-bones stuff, although I was surprised Ellis was able to get even that much into the home-delivered editions, given that everything happened fairly late in the evening. And at that, he probably had to rouse a university mouthpiece out of bed to supply some background on poor Bergman.

My head was still hammering when I got to the press room a few minutes before nine. “Anything new on that murder down in Hyde Park after Ellis went home?” I asked Corcoran, our overnight man.

“Nope, just what’s in the three-star,” he said dismissively, getting up to turn the Tribune desk over to me. This was typical of Corcoran. He never went out of his way to advance a story or do any serious digging. The words “enterprise reporting” were not part of his vocabulary, which is why he liked working the graveyard shift, when little news occurred.

The Bergman murder never came up during our start-of-the-day conversation, although when we broke camp to go to our respective beats, Packy Farmer of the Herald American stopped me. “Hey, Snap, when you talk to Fahey, make sure you get new stuff on that Hyde Park murder. We’re going to need something fresh.”

“Yeah, and for us too,” Eddie Metz put in. “There wasn’t much in the Trib, and I see the Sun didn’t even bother to run it.” He smirked at Dirk O’Farrell.

“You’re right, Eddie,” O’Farrell snapped. “But the readers of your tabloid rag just suck this kind of thing up. Hand the Times a good juicy murder, and its audience is as happy as a bunch of pigs in shit.”

“Gentlemen, gentlemen — and I use the term loosely — that’s enough bickering,” Anson Masters pronounced. “We all, except of course for our Miss Joanie here, have a newspaper to serve, and we need to get to work. And by the way, Mr. Malek, although the Daily News does not place a high priority on the baser and more sordid crime stories, we too will be interested in any additional information Mr. Fahey can provide about the unfortunate university murder.”

“Okay, Antsy. I’ll give the Times this, though: They aren’t hypocrites, and they don’t pretend to be something they aren’t, like another and somewhat pompous afternoon paper I could name.” I winked at Masters and headed off for Fergus Fahey’s office.

“And a hello to you, Mr. Malek of the Tribune,” Elsie Dugo chirped as I eased into her anteroom. “You look a little tired this morning, if I may say so.”

“I can’t stop you from saying so. It’s a long and complex story,” I said, “and one that I’m not up to recounting at the moment. How’s his nibs today?” I tilted my head in the direction of Fahey’s sanctum.

“He looks better than you do. But I know he’s expecting you; go on in.”

“Morning, Fergus,” I said with forced cheer as I dropped into one of his guest chairs and tossed an opened pack of Lucky Strikes onto his desk within his reach.

“Morning yourself,” he muttered, looking up from a sheaf of paperwork. “You don’t look so hot.”

“Between you and Elsie, I’m going to get a complex. What is it? Did I forget to brush my hair this morning?”

He grunted. “Your hair looks fine. Now about your eyes... ” He was interrupted by Elsie’s entry. She set a cup of coffee on the corner of the desk closest to me. “Here, you poor baby; there’s lots more if you need it.”

“Okay, okay,” I said, holding up both hands in mock surrender. “So I may have slightly overindulged last evening.”

“Slightly?” Elsie laughed, clicking out in her high heels and closing the door behind her before I could mount a response.

“So, what do you think about this Hyde Park business?” I posed to Fahey.

“I was about to ask you the very same question. Funny thing: An anonymous call came in last night about the murder, and not more than fifteen minutes later, my boys tell me that your night man, Ellis, was in here asking for information about the killing. Seems he knew just about as much as we did — and at about the same time.”

“Interesting. Just goes to show that civic-minded citizens know enough to call the Tribune as well as the Police Department.”

“Uh-huh. I’ll agree with the ‘interesting’ part,” Fahey muttered, wrinkling a ruddy and ample brow and running a hand across his jaw. “Why do I have a strange feeling that you’re somehow involved in this business?”

“Can’t imagine, Fergus. Other than the fact that it was you who brought up concerns about Hyde Park to me a few days back. Looks like maybe Grady, your worrywart of a precinct boss down there, had reason to be concerned. What have you found out about this professor’s murder?”

“Huh! You mean in all these many hours since the body was found. Very funny. By the way, you said you were going to do a little nosing around down there for us. Find anything out?”

“Haven’t had the time — sorry. But back to the murder: Anything turn up that wasn’t in our story this morning?”

“Not so far. Of course we’re looking into the possibility that it had a homosexual slant.”

“So you figure he knew his killer?”

“I guess so,” he said, clearly uncomfortable. “That’s a world I don’t have any experience with, and I plan to keep it that way. Of course, it also could have been a burglary — maybe the killer was trying to force Bergman to tell him where his money was.”

“Maybe so,” I answered. “But the place didn’t look like it had been—” I stopped in mid-sentence, but it was too late.

“Didn’t look like what?” Fahey spat, coming halfway out of his chair.

“I mean... ”

“Just what do you mean?”

“Well... I... ”

“Dammit, Malek, you were in that apartment last night, weren’t you?”

Fahey uses my last name only when he’s angry, and this time his red face was a giveaway even before he opened his mouth.

“Uh, I think the caller said something to Ellis about the place not being rifled,” I said, trying to recover.

“Oh, horse shit! You’ve been caught — give it up.”

“Hey, I didn’t disturb anything. I went in, took one look at the body, and got the hell out.”

Fahey’s glower was strong enough to cut through a concrete wall. “And how, if I may deign to ask, did you get in there in the first place? And don’t tell me the door was ajar. I’m not as stupid as I sometimes seem.”

“I had... somebody with me who knows how to work with locks. But Fergus, this was all my idea. He was just doing what I asked him to.”

“And I’ll bet whoever he is, he’s got a rap sheet. Let’s see, we’ve got breaking and entering and disturbing a crime scene, and that’s just for starters. I’m sure we can work up some other charges.”

“Fergus, look at it this way: If I hadn’t gone in there, it might have been days, even weeks, before the poor bastard’s body was found. This gives you an earlier start.”

Fahey leaned back and crossed beefy arms over his chest, considering me. “I’m not sure I ever believe anything you say, which seems a prudent approach. But what the hell, I’ll try it anyway. What made you pick that specific apartment to break into?”

The game was up, and I knew it. I spent the next several minutes telling Fahey how I had visited the U.T. in Hyde Park on a tip — I never mentioned Pickles — and had sat next to a guy at the bar who hinted that he had some sort of mysterious inside information on how we were going to win the war.

“Sounds like a crackpot,” Fahey growled. “Universities are full of them, you know, particularly that one.” He tilted his head in the general direction of Hyde Park.

“I don’t doubt it, although I’ll have to take your word for it; I never made it past high school. Anyway, this Bergman disappears — doesn’t show up at the bar for days, even though he was apparently an almost-every-night regular. I found out his name from the bartender and got curious, so I went to his place.”

“Tell me about the guy who picked the lock.”

I held up my hands, palms out. “Uh-uh, Fergus, no can do. He’s a regular source for me, and if I gave you his name, he wouldn’t be any more.”

“Breaking and entering, Malek. Breaking and entering.”

“We steered you to a murder. That has to count for something. And besides, I didn’t touch anything in the apartment.”

“But you wiped your prints off doorknobs and light switches, I’ll bet.”

“Yes, but—”

“‘Yes, but,’ my ass. When you wiped those down, you could also have erased the killer’s prints.”

“Fergus, did you find any prints other than Bergman’s in the apartment?”

He scowled. “Way too early to tell. Our guys are still going over the scene.”

“You know darn well you won’t find any. Whoever it was surely used gloves.”

“You’ve got an answer for everything, don’t you?”

“No, I don’t. For starters, here are three questions that need answers: Did Bergman really know about something, about some weapon maybe, that could win us the war? And if he did — granted, that’s a big if — was he killed because of it? And if so, why?”

“I think you’re reading more into this killing than it warrants,” Fahey insisted.

“Okay then, let’s hear your theory. I think we’ve already disposed of the burglary idea, unless your boys find out differently as they comb the apartment. But I’ll bet you a crisp fin that they’ll find Bergman’s billfold undisturbed. And, no, before you say something, I did not take a peek inside his wallet. After less than a minute in there, I was ready to throw up. I couldn’t get out fast enough.”

“Serves you right. Okay, I’ll concede the point on burglary, or technically robbery, since it was face-to-face. The guy didn’t figure to be loaded, not on an associate professor’s salary and living in a three-room flat.”

“Okay, Fergus, next, let’s go back to the possible homosexual angle. Except for his shirt, Bergman was fully clothed, and he even had an undershirt on. Hardly seems like your typical queer sex crime.”

“Could have been just the work of a deranged sadist,” he said, pulling a Lucky out of my pack and firing it up.

“Could have been,” I agreed. “But why was Bergman the target?”

“Snap, you’ve been around the police world long enough to know that a lot of killings don’t make any sense whatsoever. Maybe the killer saw Bergman in that bar and followed him home. Maybe a student in one of his classes had a grudge. Maybe it was a husband whose wife was having a fling with the professor. Give me twenty minutes and I can come up with a lot more ‘maybes.’ You know damn well there are hundreds if not thousands of people in this town who don’t have all their marbles, and all they need is some minor event to set them off. Maybe it’s a snub, an insult, an unintentional jostling on a sidewalk, you name it.

“We had a case several years ago where two guys in a bar on Dearborn Street got in a shouting match over whether there were any buffaloes left in the U.S. One of them snapped. He whipped out a revolver and shot the other one dead, right there on his barstool, like it was the goddamn Wild West. Some actions simply can’t be explained.”

“Maybe not. But I still think there’s a more complex reason for this killing.”

“Just don’t try to do our work for us, okay?” Fahey growled. “You’ve muddled things up enough already.”

“Come on, you know me, Fergus.”

“That’s exactly what I’m afraid of.”