Shadow of the Bomb (A Snap Malek Mystery)

by Robert Goldsborough

  "Well, I have talked to a handful of his colleagues, but with about the same success as you've had. There's one thing that came out, though, although it may not relate to the killing. Maybe your men heard it, too."

  "Oh? Try me."

  I helped myself to a Lucky from the pack. "There seems to be a suspicion among some of his colleagues that some sort of secret weapon could be in the works right down there on the Midway. You'll remember I mentioned something similar to you right after the murder."

  "Yes, I remember. But our men haven't heard about anything like that from the people they've talked to. Besides, that's outside of my jurisdiction. If this is confidential war-effort stuff, we're not about to mess with it."

  "Even if it's related to Bergman's murder?"

  Fahey leaned back and drew in air. "I'd have to know more about it. Are you telling me everything you've got?"

  "Cross my heart."

  "Well, there's a switch, if true. Newshound tells all to copper."

  "That's me, Fergus. Honest to a fault."

  "Yeah, right. Let me give you some advice, Snap."

  "Shoot."

  "It may have been his idea, but I know damn well that you let this MacAfee kid pull a swap because you want to sniff around down there at the university. Don't bother denying it and don't get in our way. But be careful. The Bergman murder may be strictly a private thing, but if there is a connection to some kind of weapons development–notice I said if–you could find yourself in far deeper trouble than you bargained for."

  "I appreciate your concern."

  "I mean it, Snap. This war has changed the rules, changed everything. You've seen it everywhere. Places that are all of a sudden 'off limits' to civilians. The Number One priority is winning the war, period. It's more important than putting mobsters behind bars, than catching kidnappers, than nailing murderers. That doesn't mean we're going to stop doing our jobs, not by any means. But there's been a shift of priorities, and sometimes we have to go along with the war effort. Quote me and I'll deny I ever said any of this. But by God, Snap, be careful–it's a new world out there."

  "Thanks for the advice, Fergus. I really mean that." If only I had followed it.

  Chapter 12

  In my years at Headquarters, I had forgotten what it was like to be without a home base, an office. And at the beginning, I missed it. The first week on the South beat, I dutifully visited each of the precincts in the area, introducing myself to the district commanders and, more important, to the desk sergeants, the ones who really kept the operations going. After a few days, I settled in and made the Hyde Park station my home base, much as MacAfee had.

  There were three reasons: (1) the proximity to both the Illinois Central rail line from downtown and to convenient restaurants; (2) the ongoing Bergman murder investigation in the neighborhood; and (3) the presence of Mark Waldron as desk sergeant at Hyde Park.

  Waldron was a "desk sergeant's desk sergeant," a gentleman copper who, unlike many of his brethren, actually seemed to like newspaper men and always let us use the police phones to call other precincts. Some of the less-friendly desk men barred us from the free phones, which meant we dropped our nickels into the pay phones to call other stations or the newspaper. I remembered Waldron from years earlier, and I was delighted to see him when I walked into the station house on Lake Park Avenue my first day on the beat.

  "Well, if it isn't Snap Malek in the flesh," Waldron proclaimed from behind the front desk. "Haven't seen you in some time, but you haven't changed much. Including that snap brim hat, which if memory serves is how you landed your moniker, correct?"

  "Correct, Sergeant. And I must say you're looking well yourself. I assume you credit that to clean living?"

  "Lord knows I try, and I get a lot of help on the home front. What brings you down our way?"

  "I'm filling in for MacAfee. His wife's having a rough pregnancy, so we agreed to switch beats for a few weeks."

  Waldron leaned his elbows on the counter and nodded. "He's a good lad, hard-working, and I've heard a bit about the troubles at home. Nice that you're filling in."

  "How are things here nowadays?"

  He took a sip from his coffee cup and shrugged. "About the same as ever. Quiet most of the time, but a little busier Friday and Saturday nights, as you'd expect, mostly because of booze. A guy in a bar or at a fraternity party gets a snootful, and the next thing you know, punches are thrown and we end up tossing somebody, or a bunch of somebodies, into the lockup. You know the drill."

  "I do. Although you also had that murder down here the other night."

  "Oh yeah, the U of C prof. Doesn't sound like the boys downtown have gotten very far toward solving that one."

  "That's what I've heard. Then there was that concern about a lot of foreigners hanging around the neighborhood."

  Waldron smiled and leaned forward, lowering his voice. "This didn't come from me, okay?"

  I nodded.

  "We got three different calls about what they termed 'strange looking men' in the neighborhood, and the man in the big office here–"

  "Grady?"

  "Uh-huh. He got concerned about it and apparently mentioned it to higher-ups in a meeting."

  "That's gotten around."

  "Sure, you'd know, being up at 11th and State at the time. Anyway, the lieutenant, as you may be aware, tends to be a bit quick on the draw sometimes."

  "I'm aware of it."

  "Well, in this case, he didn't look carefully at the reports. Here's what happened: Three different people called the station and reported seeing 'strange-looking foreigners.' It turns out that all three were women, two of them widows, and all three living in big old houses on the same block of Dorchester north of the Midway. The 'foreigners' turned out to be only one guy, an exotic-looking fellow wearing a turban. He was a visiting professor or scholar or some such from India, and every day he walked down their block from where he was staying, on his way to the campus."

  "Much ado about nothing."

  "To be sure. And to top it off, only one of the women had seen him originally. Then she called two neighbors and suggested that all three of them call us."

  "Just what you need."

  "True, but it's hard to be too critical of them. These ladies, and there are thousands of them peeking out from behind their lace curtains on the streets of the city's neighborhoods, are like a second police force. I'll take them any day, even though sometimes they overreact."

  "Good point, Sergeant. How is Grady going to change his tune about all this?"

  "Oh, I suspect he'll find a way. You might ask him yourself what the current status is concerning suspicious-looking people in the precinct."

  "Now that sounds like a capital idea. Thanks for the suggestion."

  Waldron smiled wryly. "Just as long as the good lieutenant doesn't know where the suggestion came from."

  "He won't. And thanks."

  "Don't mention it. And I really mean that."

  Being back on the streets again after years at a desk in the 11th and State press room was something of a novelty at the beginning, but I'd rather it had been during the warm-weather months. Although I spent most of my time at the Hyde Park station, I dutifully made the rounds of the other South Side precincts periodically, and they're widely separated. This meant hitching rides in squad cars or resorting to taxis, which were not always easy to find on biting and windy November days.

  All that aside, the work itself was a change of pace, akin to my pre-Tribune days as a young police reporter for the City News Bureau. In my first week on the beat, hijackers broke into a boxcar sitting in a rail yard and hauled away 220 Scott deluxe floor model radios; they were caught three days later selling them at half the retail price out of a garage in an alley behind Cottage Grove Avenue.

  Later that same week, a masked robber barged into the basement meeting room at a church on

  Archer Avenue one night with a shotgun and forced a dozen men–the church trustees–to stand along a wall
. A second masked thug, brandishing two pistols, then took a bag containing $880 off a conference table and they both scrammed. The dough was earmarked for church maintenance and for charity, and the meeting had been called to dole it out. It smelled like an inside job to me, like maybe one of the trustees set it up and was going to get a three-way split with the hoodlums. Maybe that's my cynicism at work again, but in any case, the swag was never recovered. Both of these were pretty good stories, and before the war, they would have gotten nice play, maybe even at the bottom of Page 1. But both ended up as three-paragraph items somewhere back around Page 19. War news now dominated the paper, which was of course as it should be, but it was nonetheless frustrating to know that it was damn near impossible for a police reporter, particularly one out in the field, to get a story on the front page.

  Because I was at the Hyde Park station most days, I started making it a habit to grab lunch at the University Tavern, which served good hamburgers and club sandwiches and a passable beef stew. I usually parked at the bar to eat, but always had coffee rather than beer. I was, after all, at work. I continued to try keeping my alcohol intake down; drink had messed up my life enough.

  Chester the bartender, who began referring to me as "Mr. Java" because of my coffee consumption, became somewhat more friendly than on my first visits, although far from chummy. After he learned that I was a Trib reporter–I made no effort to hide the fact–he asked almost every day if there were any developments on the Bergman murder.

  "None yet," was my usual and truthful reply. I had asked MacAfee to stay on top of the case with Fergus Fahey and report any breakthroughs to me. So far there were none.

  "The professor, he was a good man," Chester grunted, running a thick hand through his close-cropped salt-and-pepper hair. "Wouldn't a hurt a flea. Strange what happened."

  "Indeed. Do you have any theories?"

  He shook his head. "No idea. Other than chatting with folks at the bar–usually people he didn't know–he didn't seem to have a lot of close friends. Or if he did, they never came around here. Oh, once in a while, one of the other profs from his department would drop by and they'd exchange a few words. Hey, speaking of the devil…one of them just came in." He pointed across the big, dark room, where Nate Lazar was stepping in the door and shucking off his overcoat.

  He waved to me and came over. "Mr…Malek, right? I didn't expect to see you here," he said, shaking hands.

  "I'm stationed in this part of town for awhile," I told him. "And I often have lunch here."

  "Ah, are you here because of…Arthur?"

  "Not really. Just swapped places with another reporter for awhile."

  "Really? Well, welcome to the neighborhood," Lazar said heartily. "I drop in occasionally for lunch, especially when I'm in the mood for a really good hamburger, and they're excellent here, as you have no doubt found. Also, from time to time I feel the need to escape the campus. It can tend to be a bit on the stifling side sometimes."

  "Well, pull up a stool, unless you prefer more elegant seating," I said.

  "Stool's fine, although I'm usually at a table. And I just want lunch, no cocktail."

  "Same as me," I told him, holding up my coffee cup. "Have you met Chester?"

  "Seen you, but never been introduced. Name's Lazar, Nate Lazar," he said, reaching across the mahogany surface and pumping the bartender's broad paw.

  Chester mumbled something that sounded vaguely like "nice to meet you" and handed him a menu. "Just a hamburger plate for me," Lazar said. "Medium rare…and coffee, black."

  "With us here drinking coffee, Chester is going to wonder if his long row of stools is gradually turning into a teetotalers' hangout," I said as the bartender lumbered off to place the order. "What's the talk around the campus now about the Bergman killing?"

  "Ever the reporter, eh? Well, there's been all sorts of speculation, of course, some of it pretty wild. One theory–I've heard this from a couple of people in the department–is that Arthur was a German spy who'd infiltrated the department and the so-called nuclear project that a lot of us think is being conducted in the Metallurgy Lab. The spy stuff is total hogwash, of course. Arthur was a patriot if there ever was one. He was from Minnesota, studied at MIT, had never even been to Germany as far as I know. And he volunteered for military service a month after Pearl Harbor, which is more than I can say for any of his colleagues in the Physics Department, present company included. He was turned down because of his eyesight. Without those Coke-bottle-bottom lenses, he couldn't see five feet in front of him."

  "Okay, let's scratch the spy theory," I said. "What's some of the other speculation you've heard?"

  "That he was keeping a hoard of money in his apartment, hundreds of thousands of dollars left to him by his mother, who died last year. But that's ridiculous, too. Arthur was nothing if not practical," Lazar said as Chester put a cup of coffee in front of him. "If he had been left a large sum by Mama up in Minneapolis, which I seriously doubt, he would have banked it where he could get the highest rate of interest."

  "Anything else–maybe an angry husband? Or…some other man?"

  Lazar frowned. "I'll take the latter question first," he said in a disapproving tone. "If you're suggesting that Arthur was a homosexual, you're completely off base. He had a lustful appreciation for women, attractive women. He married two of them, one of whom was at the funeral. You may have seen her. And I'm told that both of his marriages broke up because of his roving eye and his roving habits."

  "Yes, I noticed the ex-wife at the funeral. A real knockout. I would have figured having somebody like that at home would keep a guy from straying."

  "You'd think so, all right. And Irene is more than beautiful, she's a very bright, extremely personable woman. Arthur was crazy to cheat on her. She has two degrees in English from Chicago and she's had a historical novel published, plus I believe she's working on another book now. And she's a physical fitness enthusiast–belongs to a group called Sokol."

  "Yes, I know of the organization. The word is Czech for 'falcon.'"

  "That figures–she's of Bohemian extraction, as I suppose you are with your name."

  "Yes, I am."

  "When they were still married, Vera–that's my wife–Vera and I would get together with them occasionally for dinner or bridge. We both liked Irene a lot. Which brings me back to your first question. To my knowledge, Arthur was only interested in single women. We were having lunch a couple of years ago, and in a rare moment of candor, he mentioned something about never wanting to get into a situation with a married woman. There was one–a married one, that is–at a physics conference who made some obvious overtures to him, and he ran away from that situation like it was a plague. And I know the woman in question–she's beautiful."

  "Okay, I'll concede the point," I told him. "But if he was supposed to be such a ladies' man, why did he hang around this place so much?"

  "That's been a relatively recent development," Lazar said as Chester delivered his hamburger. "His divorce from Irene seemed to hit him pretty hard, although he'd behaved disgracefully to her. Apparently, he felt she'd never pack her bags and walk out. He figured wrong. After their split, he fell into a depression, and from what I've observed, mostly at a distance, I don't think he ever fully came out of it. The increased drinking–most of it right here–was probably a manifestation of that depression."

  "Do you know any more about what his role might have been in, well…weapons development?"

  Lazar shook his head. "The lid's really screwed on tight. Something is definitely happening over at the Met Lab, no question, and it's a fair bet that Arthur was involved in it. He was easily the most brilliant among us, and he wasn't teaching much this term, as I think you know. Several of us in the department asked him what he was working on with all that free time that he had. Now that I look back on it, his answers were always vague, or maybe evasive is a more accurate term."

  "Didn't that set off warning bells in your head?"

  He took the last
bite of his hamburger and swiveled on the stool to face me, wiping crumbs from his mustache. "Mr. Malek, we are all terribly busy with our own teaching and research and writing and families and heaven knows what else. I, for one, really didn't spend a lot of time wondering about what Arthur was up to, and I suspect none of his other colleagues in the Physics Department did, either. It's only now that we're trying to recall details, things that he said that might throw some light on what's happened."

  "Well, if the cops have gotten anywhere, they aren't talking about it, at least not to the press."

  "With all the security and government restrictions around here these days–you've seen uniformed soldiers standing guard in front of boarded-up campus buildings–the police themselves may be stymied by the hush-hush nature of this place. Sorry to say, but in the grand scheme of things, Arthur Bergman's death, tragic as it is, pales in significance to what's being done to knock off the Axis."

  "Agreed. Except that maybe his death had something to do with what's being done to knock off the Axis."

  Lazar nodded somberly and contemplated his empty coffee cup. "Well, I've got to head back to work, Mr. Malek." He reached for his check, but I snatched it. "This is on me."

  I got a grin out of him. "All right, on one condition," he said. "That I buy you lunch over on the campus, at Hutchinson Commons. I don't want to be in your debt. You've bought drinks once, and now lunch. Next one is my treat. And I'll see if I can round up some of the others that you met at the funeral. Who knows–maybe something will come to light. How about Friday at noon?"

  "You've got yourself a deal," I said. "One more thing: Do you know where I can reach Irene–the former Mrs. Bergman?"

  "I'm not sure what you'll be able to learn from her that will help, but you're the one doing the investigating. As far as I know, Irene's still in the Powhatan, where she and Arthur lived before their divorce. It's one of those tall apartment buildings with Indian names that cluster together along the shoreline on Chicago Beach at around 50th Street. You can walk there in about fifteen minutes. I assume she's in the phone book under 'Bergman.' I'm pretty sure she kept the name after the split."