Praise for
THREE STRIKES
YOU'RE DEAD
"Goldsborough, best known as the heir
to Rex Stout via his half-dozen Nero Wolfe novels, creates a prewar
"
MURDER IN E MINOR
"Goldsborough has not only written a first-rate mystery that
stands on its own merits, he has faithfully re-created the round detective and
his milieu." –
"Mr. Goldsborough has all of the late writer's stylistic
mannerisms down pat." –The New York
Times on Murder in E Minor
"A smashing success…" –Chicago
Sun-Times
"A half dozen other writers have attempted it, but
Goldsborough's is the only one that feels authentic, the only one able to get
into Rex's psyche. If I hadn't known
otherwise, I might have been fooled into thinking this was the genius Stout
myself." –John McAleer, Rex Stout's
official biographer and editor of The Stout Journal
Also by Robert Goldsborough
Snap Malek Mysteries From Echelon PRess
THree
Strikes You're Dead
Nero WOlfe Mysteries from Bantam Books
Murder in E Minor
Death on Deadline
Fade to Black
The Bloodied Ivy
The Last Coincidence
Silver Spire
The
Missing Chapter
Echelon
Press Publishing
This
is a work of fiction. Actual names,
characters, places, and incidents are used fictitiously with the utmost
respect. With those few exceptions, any
other resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living
or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Echelon Press
Publishing
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www.echelonpress.com
Copyright © 2006 by
ISBN: 1-59080-491-0
All rights
reserved. No part of this book may be
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First Echelon Press
paperback printing: October 2006
Cover Art ©
Nathalie Moore
2005 "Best in
Category" Arianna Award Winner
www.GraphicsMuse.com
Printed in the
To my good friend Marvin
Green, whose experiences as a
Prologue
Lord, he was exhausted. This had been his longest day yet in what he had come to call "the basement." When he finally got out, he was too tired to even drop in at the U.T. for a nightcap. The unrelenting deadline pressure was bad enough, but the damn secrecy made it even worse.
It seemed like everybody he knew on the faculty was asking questions, always more questions. He knew many of them were jealous, of course. That was obvious–and understandable. But he couldn't go anywhere now without the probing, nosing, snooping.
"What is it you're really working on?" became the standard opening query, and when he gave his stock reply about it being "just a metallurgy lab project," he got the eye rolls, tongue-clucking, and arch comments, such as, "Yeah, sure, that's why we never see you in your office." "That's why you're not teaching now." "That's why so many buildings on the campus are boarded up, with those armed soldiers out in front–even at poor old Stagg Field, for God's sake." "Don't give us that met lab crap. Something big's going on, isn't it?"
He wanted to scream, "Yes, dammit, something big is going on, the biggest thing that's ever happened in the history of warfare, and it's happening right under your prying noses. End of discussion–now leave me alone."
But of course, such behavior
was out of the question–even though on a couple of occasions he had told some
strangers at the U.T. bar that they need not be concerned about how the war
would ultimately end. That at least
stopped their whining about the pounding we were taking in the Pacific and
He was almost sorry that he had been one of the chosen. But then, he was all too aware of his own brilliance and would have taken great offense if he'd been left out. At first, it was both exciting and patriotic, being a part of history. But now, after the long days and sometimes nights in that dank, gray, windowless pit under the old grandstands, the excitement had morphed into tedium, and each day he felt himself to be an ever-smaller part of history.
True, it was a privilege being around the likes of Fermi and Szilard and other physicists whom he admired, some almost to the point of hero-worship. But his role was so small, and they tended to look down upon him–he could feel it, even though nothing ever was said.
Well, he was home now. He pressed his palms against his eyes and lay his head down on the desk, almost too tired to go into the bedroom and pull on his pajamas.
The knock startled him, but
then he figured it must be that garrulous old spinster down the hall, come to
borrow of cup of sugar, or maybe flour.
She seemed to always be running out of something, although more likely
it was an excuse to chat. She was
lonesome, although he wished she would find someone else to chatter to about
the weather or her leaky kitchen faucet or her darling twin nieces in
"Well, this is quite a surprise," he said as he pulled open the door. "I didn't hear the buzzer."
"I didn't have to use it," his visitor replied with a thin smile. "Somebody was just leaving and held the door for me down in the foyer. Very nice of him. I happened to be in the neighborhood, and I thought you wouldn't mind my dropping by. So this is your place? Pleasant. Hope I'm not catching you at a bad time," the visitor said, stepping inside without waiting for an answer.
"No, not at all, I just didn't expect you–or anybody else, for that matter. Yes, this is simple though comfortable, like I think I've mentioned to you before. Small but efficient kitchen, and as you can see, plenty of room for a desk, which I refer to as my off-campus office," he said, gesturing to a corner of the living room. "And in there is the bedroom." He pivoted and turned his back to his visitor. "Can I get you something to–"
What came next was child's play–akin to a steer being roped by a veteran cowpoke. In an instant, the looped and knotted cord dropped over his head. He got his hands under the garrote as it tightened around his neck, but it was too late to even yell.
He thrashed about, gasping and grasping, as the struggle moved across the living room in the direction of the bedroom. His visitor had the element of surprise and the leverage, however, steadily increasing the pressure. He tried to retaliate, jabbing backwards ineffectively with one elbow and then the other. In desperation, he lunged in an attempt to break loose before taking his last agonizing breath…
Chapter 1
"Looks like those Limeys
and their tough bastard of a general, Montgomery, have ol' Rommel on the run in
Anson Masters huffed and
passed a hand over his freckled bald pate, possibly hoping to locate a
surviving hair. "Sad to say that's
wishful thinking, Cyril," the dean of the Police Headquarters press corps
countered, using the given name Farmer detested. "We're in this mess for years and
years. Don't count on the Germans and
their wehrmacht to go away anytime
soon."
"Oh, hell, what do you
know about it, Antsy?" Farmer shot
back. "You've never been closer to
warfare than the time you ducked behind a squad car on
"Hey, don't go making
sport of our fine Mister Masters," Dirk O'Farrell of the Sun cut in somberly. "The old gentleman here was just doing
his job–covering the news of this great metropolis–and I salute him for the
effort." The amazing thing was that
he spoke those words without the slightest trace of sarcasm, indicating that O'Farrell
had a promising future as a dramatic actor or a politician.
At this point, allow me to
step forward and set the stage. The
individuals who have been speaking, along with myself and one Eddie Metz of the
Times (you'll meet him soon enough,
but don't hold your breath–he's not worth it), comprise the press corps, as in
reporters, at Police Headquarters,
Farmer, with his thin
mustache and black hair parted in the center and slicked down with
brilliantine, looked like
Me, I'm with the Tribune, one of the five big papers in
this town, and with the largest circulation by far. And, as I realize from looking at the words
above, you don't know that Anson Masters' employer is the Daily News, the second-best paper in the city next to the Trib or the best, depending on your
perspective.
There is one other desk in
the dismal press room with its dirty, peeling, pea-green walls, and grimy
windows facing the elevated tracks. It
belongs to the City News Bureau of Chicago, more commonly known as City Press,
a local news service that feeds police, government, and courtroom news to all
of the daily papers as well as the radio stations. It serves as a journalism training ground in
that its woefully paid reporters are usually young, many fresh from college and
in some cases even from high school, and they get rotated from beat to beat
around town. Many later end up on daily
papers, as I myself did.
One change wrought by this
war is that City Press began hiring young women to fill the ranks depleted by
enlistments and the draft. One of them,
a young redhead named Joanie, just out of the journalism school at Northwestern,
was at least for now a member of our press room crew, ending its all-male
composition. She seemed very bright and
eager to learn, and her presence has had the effect of cleaning up our language
to some degree.
It was a typical morning in
the Headquarters press room–coffee, cigarettes, and spirited badinage, all
suggestive of work avoidance. We each
had reached the stage where we were essentially putting in our time, although
as the best writer by far in this crew, I still had aspirations.
"Hey Snap, anything new
on your request?" O'Farrell asked as he leaned back, feet on his
desk. He was referring to my ongoing
appeals to Trib management to be made
a war correspondent.
"Of course not," I
grumped. "Again last week, the
assistant managing editor gave me the old litany: Cromie, Noderer, Gallagher,
Korman, Thompson, and so on."
"Well, you do have to
admit that's a pretty damn strong lineup," Farmer put in. "Especially Bob Cromie dodging Jap
bullets at
"A bit of showboating,
if you ask me," Anson Masters proclaimed.
"Anything for a headline."
Masters' Daily News was the
only other local paper with a major investment in war correspondents, so if you
choose to read envy into his comment, be my guest.
"Shame you can't enlist,
Snap," O'Farrell said with genuine sympathy. "You're getting up there, but you're
still of an age where they could take you if you hadn't…"
"If I hadn't had
rheumatic fever on my medical records," I said, completing Dirk's
sentence. "Even though that was
back when I was thirteen."
"Hell, Malek, you can't
go blaming the good ol' U.S. Army. They
wouldn't want you croaking of a heart attack in the middle of a battle, would
they?" Eddie Metz wheezed between
puffs on a Spud, one of the low-grade wartime menthol smokes. Eddie, all five-feet-four of him, if you
include the unkempt mass of hair crowning his flat head like a floor mop, was
usually the last one to jump into any press room discussion, and as usual he
had the least to contribute.
"No, Eddie, the country
certainly wouldn't want me croaking on the battlefield," I said to him in
a world-weary voice. "Heaven forbid
I might die from something other than a gunshot wound or a hand grenade."
O'Farrell leaned forward,
palms down on his desk. "Now, back
in the first war–"
"Aw, come on, Dirk,"
Packy Farmer cut in, "not the same old stories about your so-called
exploits as a doughboy with Black Jack Pershing's American Expeditionary Force
in France in '18. We've heard all we
want to about your bravery under fire, although we have yet to see a medal."
O'Farrell shrugged and threw
his hands up. "All right, since you
boys don't choose to learn from history, I'll just keep my valued war
experiences to myself. You all will be
the poorer for it."
"We will try to live
with that deprivation, Dirk," Anson Masters said dryly. "May I suggest that it's time we get to
work and earn our keep?" As the
senior member of the press room, he invariably called a halt to our morning
bull sessions and signaled the true start of the work day. For me, the least-lazy member of the
Headquarters crew, that meant my daily trip to the office of the Chief of
Detectives, Fergus Sean Fahey, very likely the savviest man on the force.
I had drawn the Detective
Bureau years before. It is by far the best beat in the old
building, and when I got transferred–or demoted–to Headquarters after problems
with the bottle that cost me my marriage and very nearly my job, my fellow
press room habitués strongly suggested I take on the homicide beat. The reason they gave was that because
homicide generates the most news and the Tribune
has the biggest news hole by far of any paper in town, I was the logical
choice. The reality, however, was that
none of them wanted a beat that entailed real work. As we all shared each other's information
anyway, making a joke of the phrase "competitive journalism,"
whatever news I got from Fahey and his crew would become theirs as well.
As for my drinking, I've
never totally quit, but I now limit myself to beer, and only a modest amount of
that. Most of the time anyway.
I sauntered into Fahey's
small anteroom and was greeted by the smiling and easy-on-the-eyes face of one
Elsie Dugo. She had been guarding the
chief's door almost as long as I had been making frontal attacks on it.
"Well, if it isn't
Steven 'Snap' Malek, intrepid boy reporter and man about town," she said,
batting her eyelashes with exaggerated coquetry.
"Aw shucks now, little
lady, ah just came ridin' into town this very mornin' and thought ah might get
a few minutes with your local
"Well, cowpoke, shake
the trail dust off your chaps and I'll see if our local marshal is available." She spoke into the intercom and got a
crackling reply that sounded vaguely like "send him in."
Fergus Fahey, stocky, gray of
hair, and ruddy of face, sat behind his battered brown desk, shuffling
papers. He didn't look up as I eased
myself into one of his two ancient and unmatched guest chairs.
"Good morning, sir, so
nice to see you again," I said, tossing my pack of Lucky Strikes onto his
blotter. "Just remember, now that
it's white instead of green, we're helping the war effort." I was referring to the fact that Luckies had
recently switched their package color from green to white because they said
green dye was needed for the war effort.
"You really believe that
hooey?" Fahey asked as he pulled out a cigarette and fired it up.
"Nah, but it makes for
a good radio commercial with that tag line, 'Lucky Strike green has gone to
war.' And you can't beat the publicity."
"I suppose," the
chief said absently. "And I also
suppose you want some of Elsie's coffee."
"You suppose right. As you know, it's rumored to be the best in
the building."
"That's no rumor,"
he said, hitting his intercom button three times, the coffee signal. Within seconds, Elsie came in and set a
steaming mug of her brew on the desk. I
blew her a kiss and got one in return.
Fahey leaned back and
interlaced his hands behind his head. "Now,
what can I do for you, Snap? Or did you
just come for the coffee and to ogle Elsie, as I suspect is usually the case?"
I tried to look hurt. "Fergus, how can you say that? You know I am drawn to this office every day
because of your warmth, your engaging personality, and of course your sense of
humor."
"Right. Which is why Fred Allen and Jack Benny are
probably shaking in their boots for fear that I'll get a comedy show opposite
one of them on another network. Now that
we have that out of the way, there must be some case you want to ask about." It was clear Fergus wanted to get rid of me,
and go back to his stack of paperwork.
"Not really. I thought maybe you had something for me and
for the hundreds of thousands of readers out there who love nothing more than a
good juicy murder."
Fahey stubbed out what was
left of his cigarette and reached into my pack for another. "Things are awfully quiet at the
moment–not that I'm complaining, mind you.
But there is something…"
"Yeah?"
"Well, it's not really
in my bailiwick, but at the commissioner's weekly meeting, where all of the
department heads and the precinct commanders get together, Grady–you know him,
the lieutenant who runs the Hyde Park station–feels like something's going on
down there, but he can't seem to get a handle on it. Anybody on your paper heard any rumblings?"
"Not that I know of, but
I'll nose around. Let me get this straight:
you're asking me for information? Now
there's a switcheroo."
"Why not, given all the
stuff I've fed you over the years?" the chief snapped. "And if you didn't have that
story-sharing crap in the press room, you'd have had a pile of exclusives for
your paper."
I grinned. "Point taken.
"Sure. And why not?
It's mainly filled with quiet old houses and those nice, sedate
apartment buildings and hotels along
"A Rosenwald by any
other name," I deadpanned, waiting for Fahey, a rare cop who reads
Shakespeare, to react. He did.
"One more remark like
that and I'll have Elsie revoke your coffee privileges," he muttered, cupping
a hand to his mouth to hide a grin.
"You do and it's no more
Luckies," I countered. "But
back to the subject: Exactly what makes
Grady uneasy about
Fahey furrowed his ruddy
brow. "He wasn't very
specific. But apparently little old ladies
in those big houses north of the Midway, along streets like Kenwood and
"Maybe those ladies
haven't changed much over the years, but they're the exception," I
said. "The war has altered things
almost everywhere else. For instance,
the other day we had a photo in the Trib
of sailors drilling right there on the Midway.
You wouldn't have seen that before
"Yeah, you're right,"
Fahey agreed. "Things are different
damn near everywhere now. And to be
honest–not for the record, of course–Grady tends to be something of a
fussbudget, overreacting to residents' complaints. I was actually a little embarrassed for him
at the meeting. When he came out with
his comment, there were some looks exchanged between precinct commanders."
"Well, as I said, I'll
do some nosing around anyway."
"Hardly high priority,"
Fahey muttered dismissively. "It's
probably nothing."
"Probably," I
agreed, rising. "Keep the pack of
Luckies."
"My lucky day,"
Fahey said with a poker face, undoubtedly expecting a groan from me. He got it.