Three Strikes You're Dead

Chapter 17

It has always puzzled me that the outfit chose to expend so much time and manpower trying to monitor my activities during nonworking hours in the spring and summer of 1938. But whenever I looked around, there they were... each morning the car idling at the curb on Clark with two figures inside, each evening the same. I assumed they eventually figured out that when I got home, I entered the building through another door, but they made no attempt to intercept me for another of those “rides.” And for my part, I continued to defer any attempt to see Nicolette Stover, either at Harding’s again or up at her apartment on Grace Street, for fear that I might lead the goons to her.

My next contact with the syndicate was totally unexpected. I was working a crossword puzzle one July morning at my desk in Police Headquarters when my phone rang.

“Mr. Malek,” the hoarse, familiar voice pronounced. It was “Mr. Left” of the night rides.

My hand tightened on the receiver. “Yes?”

“Have you read your own newspaper today?” he rasped. “The Three-Star Final?”

“More or less. Why?”

“Page 18, lower-left-hand corner.”

“Hold on,” I said, pressing the receiver to my left ear with a raised shoulder as I started flipping pages. “Uh, yeah, here it is,” I said.

“Could be that there’s more here than meets the eye, Mr. Malek,” he said in his sandpaper voice, spacing the words.

“Could be, eh?”

“A lot more than meets the eye, Mr. Malek. Do I gather that you did not write this?”

“You gather right. Not only did I not write it, I’m embarrassed to say I didn’t even notice it on my first pass through the paper. It probably came from the City News Bureau and then was sent to all the dailies, which is not uncommon. Items like this usually come from City News.”

“Far from complete reporting, whoever did it,” came the dry response. “Have you made any progress on the matter that we previously discussed?”

“None at all, I’m sorry to say. The press of my day-to-day work — you know how it is.”

“Good-bye, Mr. Malek,” he said in that voice devoid of all emotion. The line went dead.

I turned back to the item he referred to. It was tucked away at the bottom of a column. At the Trib, a one-paragraph article like this one is referred to, for reasons unknown to me, as a “5 head.” “HOODLUM FOUND SLAIN,” it read. “Joseph Pariello, 37, a hoodlum with past convictions for bookmaking, was found beaten and shot to death yesterday in the Caldwell Woods forest preserve northwest of the city by a passerby. Cook County Sheriff’s Police theorized that the crime syndicate was behind the killing of Pariello, a one-time driver for the imprisoned mob boss Al Capone. The victim was shot once in the head with a.32 caliber bullet, according to the sheriff’s police.”

Pariello of course figured to be the one that Mr. Left had mentioned to me earlier as the stooge the police were trying to hang the Martindale killing on. I turned to the City News reporter. “Hey, I’m sure we must have got this item from your guy on the North beat.” I circled the paragraph and tossed the paper on his desk. “See if you can get his full file, will you?”

He nodded. “Sure, okay. You thinking of doing something more on it, or what?”

“Uh-uh.” I waved the question away as I would a housefly. “Just curious. I went to grammar school with a guy named Joey Pariello, who would be exactly that age, and I figured maybe the full version of the story had more detail on him.” City News, which covered most of the grittier crime news in town for the dailies (and the radio stations), usually gave the dailies more than they would ever use on this kind of story — when we printed the stuff at all. The kid started working the phone and came back to me a few minutes later.

“Okay, this Pariello was found in the Caldwell Woods yesterday morning around seven or so by a guy in the neighborhood who was walking his dog,” he read from notes he had just taken. “The Sheriff’s coppers said Pariello had been dead maybe twelve or fourteen hours. Single bullet went clean through the heart. He was also pretty badly beat up, too, according to the report. He musta done something that really pissed off the mob.”

“He sure pissed off somebody,” I allowed.

“Yeah. No details on his background, though, other than his record and that bit about his being a driver for Capone. Do you think this is the one that you went to school with?”

“Could be, but there’s not much to go on. If I was to guess, I’d say it was him,” I improvised.

“Hey, Snap, what kind of guys did you go to grammar school with, anyway?” Eddie Metz brayed, grinning through clenched teeth that gripped a cigarette.

“Guys who were a lot like you, Eddie, except maybe a little bit smarter,” I responded, feigning irritability. “But I still don’t know for sure that it really was the same Pariello.”

“Come on, Snap, how many Joe — what was the name? — Pariellos do you think there are out there?” Packy Farmer put in. “Was the stiff your age?”

“Just about,” I shrugged, pleased that I had established a personal reason for wanting more dope on the dead mobster. It looked like Mr. Left had it figured about right. The Chicago cops, pressured to solve the Martindale hit, had one way or another fastened onto this Pariello as their patsy. Chances are they took him someplace nice and private and worked him over, maybe for days, trying to wring a confession out of the poor, luckless bastard. Apparently that didn’t work, so they got frustrated, shot him, and then dumped him in a forest preserve, outside the city limits of course, making no attempt to hide the body. But then, why should they?

When he was found, the Sheriff’s men, probably not privy to what their city brothers had been up to, made the logical assumption, given Pariello’s background, that he had fallen out of favor with the syndicate for some reason and had paid the ultimate price, which was hardly uncommon. It seemed like this was a good time for me to make another visit to the chief of detectives.

I got the usual toothy smile from Elsie Dugo and also the usual smart crack — this time a line from a movie. “Is that a pistol in your pocket, or are ya just glad to see me?” she quipped.

“Anybody ever take the time to tell you that you’ve got yourself a salty mouth, sister?”

“More than once, brother. I just tell ’em that I got that way from listening to the newspaper men who hang around my boss’s office pretending to act tough.”

“Huh. Well, at least you’re a darn sight easier on the eyes than Mae West. Is the big cheese by chance hiding behind that closed door?” I made a gesture toward Fahey’s office.

“He is indeed. And you’re almost as easy on the eyes as Cary Grant — but not quite, to be totally candid. By the way, the man himself is grumpy, so enter at your own risk.”

“You’re all heart,” I shot back. “And let the record show that Mr. Grant’s real name, the one he was born with, is Archibald Leach. How, I ask you, how can any woman be interested in a joe who has a label like that?”

She gave a toss of her head and turned back to her typing. “A rose by any other name...”

“Yeah, yeah. But can he hit a curve ball?”

Elsie started to deliver another comeback, but I pushed on through to the sanctum, which gave me the last word in this particular sparring match. Fahey looked up and grimaced as I loomed over his horizon. “I see she’s letting anybody get past her now.”

“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.

I did, and I did.