Three Strikes You're Dead

Chapter 23

Back in the ’20s when I worked for the City News Bureau, another police reporter, Doherty of the Tribune, referred to me as having “street smarts.” I don’t remember the context in which he made the remark, but at the time I took it as a high compliment, especially given the source. And in the years since, I have flattered myself that those two words captured my defining characteristic as a newspaperman. I was glad Doherty wasn’t looking over my shoulder the last week of July to see just how far off the mark he had been in his appraisal of me.

I had been home from work that Thursday night for about an hour and was having scrambled eggs and tomato soup at the kitchen table when the phone rang.

“Mr. Malek?” a vaguely familiar voice asked. “You may not remember me... I’m Preston. I work for Mrs. Martindale. I’m the one who answered the door when you were here at the house awhile back.”

“I remember you,” I said coolly.

“Well, Mrs. Martindale got to feeling badly about declining to see you when you came to the house, and also about that call she made to your newspaper to complain.”

“Oh?”

He made the same throat-clearing noise I remembered from our meeting at the front door of the Martindale house. “Yes, well, she wants to make it up to you now. She wishes to talk to you about her son... for that feature of yours.”

“Really? And why the change of heart?”

“As I said, she feels badly about what happened, and she is interested in seeing an article that talks about what her son was really like, from her own perspective. She would like to see you tonight — if it is convenient, of course.”

“Why didn’t she telephone me herself?”

More throat clearing. “Well, sir,” he said in a lowered voice, suggesting that he might be overheard, “to be honest, sir, she is embarrassed about her behavior. She asked me to make the call.”

“But she won’t be embarrassed to talk to me?”

“No, sir, I do not believe so.”

“Uh-huh. And she can see me tonight, you say?”

“Yes, sir. I should not be speaking for her, of course, but I believe I can honestly say she feels that the newspapers have not written enough about her son’s life and his contributions. She has so many remembrances of him. Her moods, sir, have been, well, up and down, shall we say, which I am sure you can appreciate. And right now, she feels talkative.”

I thought about my probation at the Trib and hesitated. If I came up with a strong interview, how could Bob Lee possibly be angry, especially with that interview coming at Beatrice Martindale’s invitation? And maybe, just maybe, there was a way of getting at the subject of Lloyd Martindale and the children who once lived next door, although that was a real long shot. “All right, where should I meet her?” I asked.

“At the house, of course,” Preston said, his tone suggesting that any other location was unthinkable. “I can pick you up at your place and drive you here.”

“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 well: 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.

“Name’s Preston. He works for Mrs. Martindale, the mother, that is,” I replied numbly.

“Better let me have that,” he ordered, prying the gun from my hand and wiping the handle with his handkerchief. “The way you’re shaking, you could blow your goddamn foot off. Good thing we kept watching you, huh? And good thing I decided to be part of the tail tonight.”

“I didn’t see any tail.”

“When I’m the one doing the tailing, nobody ever does,” he said without a hint of bragging in his voice. “And this clown here” — he motioned to the groaning Preston — “he wouldn’t know how to spot one. We were never more than two blocks behind you. Call it a hunch that I showed up, and then you getting into a limousine, that was a tip-off of something, shall we say, unusual. Now what’s with him?”

“He telephoned me at home, said that Mrs. Martindale was willing to talk to me about her son. I had tried once before to see her, but they wouldn’t let me in the house.”

“How’d you expect to find out who killed the guy from his mother?” the Brother asked, eyes narrowed.

“I have hunches, too,” I said, feeling slightly dizzy.

The Brother’s laugh was satanic. “We figured it had to be an inside hit.”

“Huh?”

He ignored my puzzlement and knelt on one knee next to Preston. “You got him, didn’t you. Mac?”

“Please, my knee, my leg,” Preston sobbed. A dark stain was visible on his pants.

“Yeah, your leg, right,” the Brother mimicked, pressing an automatic similar to the one that had been aimed at me against the wounded man’s temple. “Let’s hear your story. I’m feelin’ real twitchy.”

“What, what...”

“Cut the shit! You were ready to blow this man away. Why’d you off Martindale?” He jabbed Preston’s sweat-soaked forehead with the silencer-equipped barrel of his gun.

“Madam, she...”

“Who’s Madam?” the Brother demanded.

“Beatrice Martindale, Lloyd’s mother,” I put in.

“Go on,” the hoodlum prodded Preston.

“She got a call a few months back... from a woman...” He paused, grimacing. “This woman... she said Lloyd had fooled around with her... when she was just a little girl.”

The Brother looked up at me and scowled. “Shit, the guy was a pervert? Did you know about this?”

“This was my hunch,” I said, leaving it at that.

“This woman,” Preston went on laboriously after another sharp nudge with the gun, “she said that... if Lloyd ran for mayor, she would tell all the newspapers what he did to her back then.”

“Why didn’t she say that to Martindale himself?”

“She... wanted to punish Madam too... because she said that Madam had known all along what Lloyd liked to do. But I don’t believe that... I don’t believe she ever knew...” Preston, who was now lying on his side in a fetal position, groaned again, louder, and kept clutching the injured leg.

“So why didn’t you kill this other woman instead of Martindale?” the Brother asked, continuing to shine the beam of his flashlight on Preston’s contorted, sweating face.

“Madam wouldn’t tell me her name, and all this happened years ago... before I worked for the family. I asked her more than once... who it was. But all she would say was that if it got out... about Lloyd... she was going to kill herself.”

“And you believed her?”

“Oh yes... she would have,” Preston mumbled, again pleading for help.

“And why’d you want to kill this guy?” the Brother asked him, jabbing his automatic in my direction.

“Because he was poking around and I think he would have found out... about everything.”

The gunman turned and looked up at me. “You know who the girl was that Martindale fooled with?”

“No,” I lied, unblinking. “I never got that far.”

“Then where’d you get that ‘hunch’ of yours?”

“An old-time newspaperman, he’s long retired, said he remembered hearing that Martindale liked little kids... that way. But he didn’t have any specifics.” The second lie is always easier.

“You got paper and something to write with?” the Brother asked me.

I nodded and handed him my spiral-bound reporter’s notebook and a pencil. He tore out a couple of sheets from the middle and used the cardboard cover as backing. “Now, Mac,” he ordered, giving the paper and pencil to Preston, “you’re going to take some dictation from me, got it?”

“My leg... oh my God! My God!”

“We’ll take care of that leg, but first, you’re going to write. Malek, go sit in the car with Mel — you remember him, from when all of us took a couple rides around your neighborhood together.”

“But, I...”

“Goddamn it, go and sit in the car!” he commanded. Still shaking, I walked gingerly through the darkness for a couple of hundred yards to where the Cadillac was parked, its lights and engine off.

I opened the front passenger door and started to climb in. “In the back,” Mel muttered.

I was in no condition to argue. I slid into the back seat of the big car, where I had been before, although this time I had it all to myself. “Okay, Mel, where were you guys watching me on Clark tonight? Just curious.”

“Don’t be curious. Bad habit.”

“Okay, all right.” We sat in silence and darkness for maybe fifteen minutes. When the single shot sounded, I jumped, but Mel was impassive. “Jesus Christ,” I shout-whispered.

“It’s copasetic,” he said, yawning and grinding out his cigarette in the ashtray. “The Brother’ll be along now.”

And he was, within seconds. He slid in next to me, adjusting the knot on his silk tie. “Let’s roll,” he calmly ordered.

“And what about Preston?” I asked, knowing the answer.

“His leg doesn’t hurt him anymore,” the Brother said.

“So... just like that?”

“Hey, the fucker was about to kill you, Mr. Newspaperman. Also just like that.” He snapped a finger and a thumb.

“He really did shoot Martindale then, didn’t he?” I said as the reality began to sink in.

“Goddamn right. Showed his loyalty, and probably his love, for the old lady by knocking off her son.”

“And he figured that you guys — well, the organization — would get the blame, eh?”

“Goddamn right again.”

“Wait a minute. I heard the shot, but your automatic’s got a silencer.”

I thought I detected a fleeting smile on the Brother’s face as we passed under a streetlamp. “You’re not as dumb as you sometimes act, Malek,” he said. “The poor depressed bastard plugged himself with his own.32.”

“The one I picked up after you shot him in the leg. That means—”

“That means nothin’, except that when they dust the roscoe he’s still holding, the only fingerprints they find on it will be his.”

“But what about the shot in his leg? Done with a different gun — yours. How will that get explained?”

“You’re filled with questions tonight. So happens, call it good fortune, that my friend here” — he tapped the bulge in his suit coat — “is also a.32. Seems it took Preston two shots to end it all. He was so nervous the first time that he plugged himself in the leg.”

I leaned back and exhaled deeply as Mel drove north up Stony Island.

“You gotta be philosophical sometimes,” the Brother said, smoothing the sleeve of his suit coat.

“Yeah? How’s that?”

“Well, you lost yourself a scoop here, now didn’t you? I mean, you can’t very well write about what happened here tonight, can you?” His tone was not threatening, just matter-of-fact.

“Not if I want to stay healthy,” I observed ruefully.

“But that isn’t really so bad, is it? We took away your scoop, but we gave you something in return.”

“Yeah. My life.”

“Strikes me as a pretty fair swap,” the Brother observed, gazing out into the dark waters of Lake Michigan as we slid onto the northbound Lake Shore Drive.