"I'll split it with you," Charlie said, following after me.
"Nope, this one's on me all the way," I replied, unsmiling.
As we stepped out onto the sidewalk, Charlie held out a hand. "Well, Stevie…I guess I'll be seeing you," he said, giving me a tentative smile.
"No, Charlie, I don't believe that you will," I told him, ignoring the outstretched paw. I turned away and headed back south on
State Street to Police Headquarters.
CHAPTER 24
Fergus Fahey and I never spoke about Edwina or Marge or Charlie, not a single word. I didn't want to bring the subject up, and I'm sure he didn't, either. I wondered if he ever hauled Charlie in for questioning after the suicide, but I figured he–and the department–were happy to close the case with Marge's death and written confession.
After all, what could they have charged Charlie with, anyway? He really hadn't done anything but possibly encourage Marge's actions by his rejection of her. If that were a crime, new prisons would have to be constructed every month.
I never saw my cousin again. I did forward Liam McCafferty's hefty bill to him, though, and can only assume that he paid it, since I never heard from the celebrated lawyer. Charlie sent us Christmas cards for a couple of years, but then stopped, probably because we didn't reciprocate.
I learned from another cousin that he had gotten married and was living in a bungalow in some western suburb, Brookfield I think it was, or maybe North Riverside. And then I heard later that he'd gotten divorced and had moved into an apartment in that area. To lift a line from the end of a book by Scott Fitzgerald that I read once, "in any case, he is almost certainly in that section of the country, in one town or another."
Peter got his summer internship at Frank Lloyd Wright's Taliesin up in the Wisconsin countryside. The architect had held true to his promise to make an exception for him after my long interview with him ran in the Sunday Tribune–with color photographs of Wright at work, as well as shots of his Fallingwater house in Pennsylvania and his Johnson's Wax headquarters in Racine, Wis. I even got a handwritten letter from the man himself, acknowledging that my article, which was by no means fawning, "was pretty much on the mark, at least as far as it went."
He did take issue with one line in the story, however, in which I wrote that Wright "was in the very front rank of American architects, along with Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Edward Durrell Stone, and Eero Saarinen."
"I AM the front rank of American architects, period!" Wright fired back the very next day, adding that "None of them is even fit to carry my t-square."
Peter said the Taliesin experience overall was a good one, even though he spent much of his time doing such menial chores as slopping hogs and building a henhouse as part of the regimen at that unorthodox communal enclave, where everybody was expected to get their hands dirty.In the asset column, Wright wrote in the same letter that "Your lad acquitted himself well here and was a hard worker. We can only hope that on his return to that cow college mired in the Illinois cornfields, he will resist the pedestrian design suggestions and theories of his instructors." Wright himself had critiqued Peter's drafting exercises and even complimented him on preliminary sketches he had done of a proposed single-family home, a home that Peter says he plans to build one day for himself and the wife he has yet to meet.
Also on the plus side, the experience earned him some stature when he returned to the architecture school at the University of Illinois the following fall. This despite the fact that some of the professors viewed Wright as unorthodox, eccentric, and even a "charlatan," as one faculty member termed him.
But Peter said that, to a man, his instructors were impressed that he had gotten an inside look at the workings of this singular fellowship and the self-proclaimed "greatest architect in the world" who presided over his pastoral realm like a feudal lord.
The End
EPILOGUE
The preceding is entirely a work of fiction, and any instances in which historical figures interact with fictional ones are solely the products of the author's imagination. The people and events discussed below were researched by the author in regard to specific dates and occurrences. In addition, some of Frank Lloyd Wright's quotes were taken from biographies. The comment by Wright about fellow architect Eero Saarinen was recounted by the author's father, himself an architect, who attended a talk Wright had given. A bibliography of volumes read as part of that research follows this epilogue.
Frank Lloyd Wright (1867-1959) was without question the best-known architect of his era, a period that spanned an amazing seven decades. Early on, in Chicago, his work was influenced by his mentor, the great Louis Sullivan. By the early years of the Twentieth Century, while still in his thirties, Wright made a national name for himself with his revolutionary "Prairie Style" houses, which sprang up in his hometown of Oak Park, Ill., as well as in numerous other Chicago suburbs, and then spread throughout the country.
In the ensuing decades, the flamboyant and controversial Wright saw his career undergo numerous peaks and valleys. His greatest works include Tokyo's Imperial Hotel, which withstood a tumultuous earthquake in the 1920s; his daring 1937 masterpiece, "Fallingwater," cantilevered over a waterfall in Pennsylvania; the Johnson's Wax headquarters complex in Racine, Wis.; and New York's Guggenheim Museum. The Guggenheim, his only New York City building, was completed after his death in 1959, just short of his ninety-second birthday.
Unity Temple, in Oak Park, Ill., is an iconic Frank Lloyd Wright work. Constructed from 1905 to 1908, it is a historic landmark and has been honored by the American Institute of Architects for its design. Built for a Universalist congregation, the temple now serves as a Unitarian-Universalist place of worship, the two denominations having merged in 1961.
World War II War Brides. Following the end of the Second World War in 1945, U.S. servicemen by the thousands brought home brides from Europe and Asia. Although specific figures are hard to come by, it has been estimated that more than 100,000 American soldiers, sailors, marines, and airmen married women from the United Kingdom alone during and immediately following the war. Thousands of other GIs married and brought to this country women from France, the Netherlands, Belgium, Italy, Germany, Australia, the Philippines, Japan, and other nations that had an American military presence during the war.
The Naperville, Ill. train wreck. On April 25, 1946, a
Burlington Route streamlined passenger limited, the California-bound Exposition Flyer, crashed at high speed into another passenger train, the Advance Flyer, which was stopped in Naperville, a suburb some 30 miles west of Chicago. A total of 39 passengers and six Burlington employees were killed, and another 110 persons were injured, making it one of the deadliest railroad mishaps in U.S. history.
The Suzanne Degnan murder investigation was brought to a conclusion in August 1946 with the arrest of 17-year-old University of Chicago student William Heirens. After intense and likely brutal interrogation and an injection of truth serum, Heirens confessed to the murders of the six-year-old Degnan girl and two Chicago women, Josephine Ross in June 1945 and Frances Brown in December. It was in the Brown apartment after her murder that the killer wrote in lipstick on a mirror: "For heaven's sake, catch me before I kill more. I cannot control myself." This resulted in the newspapers referring to the murderer as "the Lipstick Killer."
The confession was part of a plea bargain that guaranteed him immunity from execution. Heirens, who has steadfastly maintained his innocence and has numerous supporters, said that "I confessed to live." A prisoner for 60 years as of this writing, the 77-year old Heirens is an inmate at the Dixon Correctional Center in Illinois.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
As in the previous Snap Malek mysteries, microfilm of old newspapers was invaluable as a research tool. In this book, information about the era was gleaned specifically from microfilm files of the Chicago Tribune from the early months of 1946, the first postwar year. Following are other sources that were used:
Cannon, Patrick.
Hometown Architect: The Complete Buildings of Frank Lloyd Wright in Oak Park and River Forest, Ill. San Francisco: Pomegranate Communications, 2006.
Friedland, Roger and Zellman, Harold. The Fellowship: The Untold Story of Frank Lloyd Wright & the Taliesin Fellowship. New York: Regan, 2006.
Kisor, Henry. Zephyr: Tracking a Dream Across America. New York: Times Books, 1994. (Helpful for details of the Naperville, Ill., Chicago, Burlington & Quincy Railroad train collision of 1946.)
McCullough, David. Truman. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992. (Helpful for information about the labor turmoils in the U.S. in the immediate postwar period.)
Shukert, Elfrieda Berthiaume and Scibetta, Barbara Smith. War Brides of World War II. San Francisco: Presidio Press, 1988.
Wendt, Lloyd. Chicago Tribune: The Rise of a Great American Newspaper. Chicago: Rand-McNally & Co., 1979.
Coming
Fall 2008
TO KILL A PRESIDENT
A Snap Malek Mystery
Book Four
Turn the page to read an excerpt…
Chapter 1
October 1948
"Truman's gonna get murdered next month, absolutely murdered," Dirk O'Farrell of the Chicago Sun Times pronounced as he leaned back with his feet on the desk and blew smoke rings toward the grimy, flaking ceiling of the Police Headquarters press room. "I still stick with what I been saying since summer: the Democrats were nuts to nominate the guy, even if he is the incumbent."
"Afraid I can't agree there, Dirk," rumbled Anson Masters of the Daily News. "The working men, the union men, will all rally to him, and their wives will vote the way they do. Always have, always will."
"Oh, hell, Antsy, you can't be serious," O'Farrell shot back, jabbing his cigarette toward Masters as if it were a midget's fencing sword. "Harry's losing big chunks of Democrats all over the place. You've got them Dixiecrats from down south, as they like to call themselves, who jumped the party and have that Strom Thurmond character from South Carolina running. He'll take votes away from Truman all across the damn South. And then there's that pinko Henry Wallace and his wacky Progressives, they'll eat into his support even more, especially in places like New York. Dewey'll romp home. Take it to the bank."
"What's your take, Snap?" asked Packy Farmer of Hearst's Herald-American, snapping his suspenders. "The way your Tribune is beating the drum for Dewey and hammering away at Harry–no surprise there–one would think by reading its pages that the election's just a formality."
I set the three-star edition of the Trib down on the desk and took a long drag on my Lucky Strike. "May surprise you boys to learn that I agree with my esteemed Daily News colleague," I said, gesturing toward Masters. "Fact is, I believe that Anson's got it right, although this may sound strange, coming from one who takes his checks from the dear old Tribune."
"Indeed!" Farmer guffawed. "And I won't quote you, Snap. I understand that Colonel McCormick fires anyone who doesn't hew to the ol' party line. But honestly, why do you think Truman's got a chance?"
"First off, Packy, let me clear one thing up. The Colonel may be a rock-ribbed Republican, but he's got a healthy share of Democrats scattered around in his newsroom, and I suspect he knows it–and grudgingly lives with it. As to the election: Like he proved when he ran against FDR in '44, Dewey's a stiff. Pompous is too generous a word for him. He works crowds with all the warmth and grace of the maitre d' at the snootiest restaurant in town. And he even looks like a maitre d' for God's sake, with that cute little mustache of his. The guy just doesn't connect with the average joe. And this country's filled with average joes. My paper may have already put Tom Dewey in the White House, but I'm not buying it."
* * *
The above badinage is typical of our mornings in the pressroom at Police Headquarters,
1121 S. State St., Chicago USA. At this point, I should set the stage. The cast of characters–and I'd have to say we qualify as characters, present company included–all have been long-time police reporters on the city's four big daily papers. Anson Masters of the Daily News has been around longer than the rest of us, a fact that he is not shy about mentioning at every opportunity. The long-divorced Masters, with a bald, freckled and ruddy pate, must be pushing seventy now, but if he has any plans to hang it up and go fishing someplace, I've never heard them. My guess is he'll be carried out of the pressroom in that proverbial pine box.
The Herald-American's Packy Farmer, also divorced, is about the same age as Masters, but he wears his years somewhat better. Even with his once-black hair yielding to gray, he still has the look of a riverboat gambler with his center part and thin mustache. And to further the image, he plays a mean game of five-card stud, as I've learned to my regret.
The lanky, white-haired Dirk O'Farrell, who toils for the newly formed Sun-Times, had previously been with Hearst's old Herald and Examiner and then with the Sun, a forerunner paper to his current employer. When the Sun and the Times merged in February of '48, Dirk got the pressroom job, squeezing out Eddie Metz, who had been the Times man at Police Headquarters for years. That was a good call, as O'Farrell is twice the newsman as Metz, which isn't saying a lot. Last I heard, Eddie, who should be in another line of work–maybe slinging burgers in a hash house–was employed in the Sun-Times morgue, where he can't do a lot of damage.
That leaves me, Steve "Snap" Malek, age forty-four. I got the moniker because I wear snap-brim hats, sometimes indoors as well as out, although my late and sainted mother would have been appalled at that breach of etiquette. I've been with the Tribune for almost all of my professional life, the last fifteen years of it on this beat except for a short stint in England as a foreign correspondent in the closing year of World War II. And if you'll allow me to dispense with the false modesty, I'm by far the best writer of the bunch in this pressroom, and the best reporter as well.
So why am I hanging around this dreary room in this dreary building, you ask? Because I'm basically lazy. I've had other opportunities at the paper, including general assignment reporting, where I would have roved all over the city, covering everything from gangland killings to hotel fires to ward elections to airplane crashes and train wrecks. But I've turned down these opportunities, in part because I like the day shift.
Years ago, I preferred working days because it left my evenings open for drinking, something I used to do far too often, destroying a marriage and almost a career in the process. Now I still prefer working days, but for a different reason: I'm happily remarried and commute home every night on the Lake Street Elevated Line to Catherine and our stucco house on a shady street in the quiet near-western suburb of Oak Park.
Actually, it's her stucco house, the one she grew up in and has lived in most of her life, except for the few unhappy years of her own first marriage. I would have preferred living in the city, but Catherine loves the house and the village, where she works as an assistant librarian at the public library.
We have no children of our own, although I've got a son, Peter, from my marriage to Norma. He's in his final year of the architecture program at the University of Illinois in Champaign. Two summers ago, he had the singular experience of toiling up at Taliesin in Wisconsin for Frank Lloyd Wright, the self-professed greatest architect in the world. Peter claims that stint will help guarantee him a job with a Chicago firm after graduation. I hope he's right.
So there in capsule form are my private and professional lives–other than to mention that I have a tendency, as a reporter, to pursue some stories more aggressively than both my wife and the police would prefer. On one occasion, I came close to catching a fatal bullet, on a second I would have been strangled but for an alert college student, and on a third, I found myself trading punches on a Southwest Side street with a burly construction worker while several of his bar habitués looked on–hardly a neutral audience.
For the last dozen or so years, my job at Police Headquarters has been to cover the Detective Bureau, which is the most wide-ranging beat in the building. I was nominated for
this by my fellow reporters, who pointed out that the biggest job at Headquarters should go to the guy at the biggest paper, and which also has the biggest news hole to fill.
But that's only part of the story. Because we all share our news with one another, making a mockery of the term "competitive journalism," everything each of us gets from our respective beats goes to all the others so that nobody gets "scooped" and gets chewed out by their city editor. And although I've already conceded my laziness, I am in fact the least lazy of this pressroom foursome. So I usually get the juiciest news in the building–and immediately have to share it.
So on this morning like all others, I trundled down one flight to the office of Fergus Sean Fahey, Chicago's longtime chief of detectives. I was greeted in the small anteroom by Fahey's secretary, Elsie Dugo Cascio. "Nice to see you, intrepid reporter," she said, looking up from the typewriter with her ever-present toothy smile.
"The feeling is mutual," I replied with a bow. "Is himself on the premises this fine morning?"
"He is indeed." She announced me over the intercom and got a squawk that sounded vaguely like "Send him in."
"Nice to see you, Fergus," I said, tossing a half-full pack of Lucky Strikes on his blotter.
A Death in Pilsen (A Snap Malek Mystery) Page 17