Madman: A Diamond and Doran Mystery Page 3

  Some of the younger constables sniggered.

  “That’s enough! Get on with your work.” Sergeant Nolan motioned Diamond to him. He put a steadying hand on the rookie’s shoulder. “Come with me, son.”

  On weak legs Diamond followed the desk sergeant into the back office behind the booking hall.

  Nolan pulled out a chair and Diamond sat, waiting for the reprimand he feared was coming. Nolan gave Diamond a long look across his untidy desk. Clearing his throat the sergeant sniffed and pointed his stubby finger at a black draped photograph on the office wall. “Know who that is, boy?” Diamond shook his head. “His name was Mattie Degan; blown to bits in the Haymarket two days ago; been on the job less than two years. He was a young man, like yourself, barely thirty four years old, and a widower with a young boy; Frankie.”

  Diamond swallowed. His palms were sweating.

  Sergeant Nolan looked straight at Diamond now. “Mattie Degan’s funeral is this afternoon. Doran is Frankie Degan’s godfather.”

  Diamond felt the blood drain from his face. He stared at Nolan, clasping his hands together to stop them trembling. “I didn’t know.”

  Nolan shook his head. “No way you could have known. You only just got here. We’re all in shock, but Doran has taken the loss harder than most. He has to arrange for the boy to go to an uncle or some such, so he hasn’t just lost a good friend, he’s lost a little lad he treated like the son he never had.”

  Diamond clenched his jaw. Now he understood what Lieutenant Flanagan had meant when he said Doran was very close to the bombing. “What should I do?”

  Nolan smoothed the ends of his moustache. “My advice would be to tread carefully; at least until the demon that did this,” Nolan jerked his thumb at Degan’s photograph, “is caught.” He checked his pocket watch. “It’s nine o’clock now. Get off home for some breakfast and sleep before Doran comes back for another crack at you. Be back here by six o’clock tonight for your next shift.”

  Billy Doran closed the street door of the cramped house on South Canal Street and headed home with a heavy heart. He had just buried his best friend.

  Mattie Degan’s funeral was a meagre affair. Barely half a dozen people including Doran, Mattie’s distraught brother John, and Degan’s now orphaned son, Frankie were there to say prayers over Degan’s body.

  The priest made short work of the service. He had a christening and a confirmation to rush off to. Dispatching a dead policeman was his least appealing duty of the day.

  In spite of his own grief Mattie’s brother had agreed to take Frankie home with him and raise him as his own. Doran would miss his godson greatly, but as much as he wanted to he could not offer the lad a home. In the two gruelling days since the Haymarket disaster he already had too much on his plate for that.

  Burdened with the extra workload created by the absence of dozens of his wounded colleagues, Doran was now also responsible for a damned rookie. Not just a rookie, but an English rookie getting in his way and under his skin.

  He stepped into the hallway of his house on Green Street with a sigh, shook off his jacket and unbuttoned his collar stud and waistcoat.

  Doran was relieved to be home to his warm, tidy house filled with the flowery scents and chattering voices of his bevy of daughters.

  “I hope you were planning to hang that up and not just drop it on the chair, Dar.” Bridie Doran nodded towards his jacket and patted her father on the arm. “Sit down and I’ll make you some tea. You look all in, was it a bad night?”

  “As bad as it gets and you know I can’t talk about it.”

  Doran’s eldest daughter gave him a sidelong glance. “Did I ask you to?”

  Doran smiled and held her hand in his gently. “No, and you never do, just like your mother. God rest her soul.”

  “We all miss her, Dar. It will be four years tomorrow since the typhoid took her from us.”

  Doran nodded. “I know it. I was reminded of it at poor Mattie’s funeral.”

  “Oh, Dar. Was that today? I’m so sorry. I should have remembered.”

  Doran squeezed Bridie’s hand. “What’s done is done, my girl. No amount of being sorry can bring back those we love. Not Mattie, not your blessed mother.”

  “What about young Frankie?”

  “His uncle John will take him in. He will be just fine.”

  Father and daughter fell silent for a moment, respecting the memory of their lost loved ones. It was Bridie who broke the silence. “Mary has an extra shift at the hospital, what with all those poor policemen injured. The twins should be back from the factory anytime now.”

  Doran swallowed the last mouthful from his teacup. “What about Maeve?”

  Bridie refilled his cup. “She didn’t say this morning that she would be late, but Captain Black always has some legal document or other that can’t wait for the morning. Maeve says she wishes sometimes that she’d never seen the Remington typewriter, let alone learned to use it. She shouldn’t complain. The captain pays her exactly the same as the men he has working as typewriters when he doesn’t have to.”

  Doran nodded. “She’s bright enough, that girl. She knows when she is well off.”

  Bridie finished clattering cups and plates onto the table, and pushing a tendril of unruly black hair away from her forehead with the back of one hand, went back to stirring the stew pot that bubbled on the cast iron stove. “Well, let’s hope so. She will be home from the office soon, if she doesn’t have to work over or miss her street car. I should get the supper on the table or they’ll say I’m slacking.”

  Doran smiled at his eldest daughter. “I’ll get washed up. I’ve to be back at the station for six.”

  Nolan sent Diamond home for the rest of the day to sleep. But Diamond had not slept. He sat up for half the morning staring at the peeling, damp walls of his gloomy lodging house room, not so different from the squalid conditions of the Metzger apartment.

  He knew his meeting with the lieutenant had been a mistake. He knew he should have resisted Flanagan’s request to circumvent Doran, but Diamond had been tired and green, and if he was truthful, thrown by all the flowery words and confusing flummery Flanagan had met him with.

  Diamond cursed his own stupidity for excluding Doran, and wondered if he would still be working with the sergeant when he got back to the station for his shift that evening. He knew he needed to gather more information on the Metzger case, if Doran was to be persuaded to keep him on. Nothing else would have compelled Diamond to go back to the slum that was Carville Street so soon.

  In spite of his plain clothes most of the residents he revisited that morning were just as uncooperative as they had been the previous evening. Diamond made one last attempt to uncover something useful. He pulled back his jacket to make his Chicago Police department star more obvious, and knocked on the door of the last apartment tucked into the corner of the Metzgers’ landing.

  The same tiny, dark eyed woman he had tried to speak to the previous night peered out from the crack of the opened door. “What you want?” Seeing the badge her eyes widened.

  “Do you remember me, Mrs?”

  “Tomsk.”

  “Ma’am we spoke last night about your neighbours.” Diamond indicated the Metzger apartment with the end of his pencil. “I want to ask you a few more questions.” The frightened woman attempted to push the door shut as she had the night before. This time Diamond was ready for her and wedged the toe of his boot into the crack. Gently he pressed forward, opening it wider.

  “Like last night; I don’t know nothin’.”

  Diamond ignored her denial. “How well did you know Mrs. Metzger, the lady killed in the apartment?”

  The woman hesitated, her face crumpling with grief. “She was good woman. Work hard. He was pig.”

  “Mr. Metzger? Are you talking about her husband?”

  The woman nodded. “He beat her, bad. Shave her head, she show me. She cry. I go now.” The woman attempted to push her door closed once more.


  Diamond held fast. “Did you know Mrs. Metzger’s son?”

  Angry now, the little woman nodded, “He good boy. Try to protect his mamma, but he beat boy too.”

  “Mr. Metzger?” The woman nodded again. “One more question. Did Mr. Metzger have work?”

  “He used work at Union Stock Yards, same as my husband.”

  “Used to?”

  The woman was pushing on the door again. “You go now.”

  “Thank you, Mrs. Tomsk.” Diamond allowed the woman to close her apartment door. Pocketing his notebook he went in search of the Chicago Union Stock Yards and Transit Company.

  Doran was on the prowl. He checked his pocket watch. It was six fifteen. Looking around him he saw Callaghan dragging a flailing boy down to the cells below the booking hall. The boy attempted to bite Callaghan and the constable had a hard time holding onto the ragamuffin’s filthy, frayed collar. Doran nodded to his officer. “Where’s English?”

  Callaghan tightened his grip on his squirming charge, lifting him off the floor. “I haven’t seen him this afternoon, sir.”

  “If you see him before me, tell him to get his ass back here pronto.”

  Callaghan nodded then yelled out. The urchin’s boney bare feet cracked against Callaghan’s shin. Doran reached across and gave the boy’s ear a hard twist and got a loud howl in response. Callaghan grinned at Doran and hobbled away, dragging the still howling child behind him.

  The lumbering freight train bore down on Diamond. Nimbly he jumped over the tracks as the locomotive’s engineer blew the whistle in warning. He picked a path over the collection of rails.

  The watery May sunshine made him shield his eyes from the late afternoon light glinting up from the steel tracks. All around him the stockyards was alive with the clamour of penned up cattle in their thousands, men bellowing instructions to one another and the ear piercing screams of hogs on their way to the machines that would render them into everything from a pork chop to bristles for tooth brushes. The accompanying stink reminded him of his first experience of Carville Street.

  Diamond wondered how anyone could live and work in such conditions. He threaded his way past sheds and storage huts towards the low grimy brick building that had been pointed out to him by the track worker he had asked directions from.

  Peering through the soot caked windows Diamond thought at first the office was empty. He reached for the brass door knob, but jumped back when the door unexpectedly opened.

  A short, pink cheeked man in wire framed glasses and a harassed expression squinted out at Diamond. “Yes? What do you want? I’m very busy.”

  Diamond revealed his star.

  Immediately the man’s attitude changed. “Oh, police is it? You’re here about the thefts I suppose. Come in, come in. I’m Rudy Lomax, yard manager here. Sit, sit.” Lomax moved a mountain of papers from a dilapidated looking chair in the middle of the ramshackle office. Before Diamond could speak Lomax was chattering again. “Where did I put that list?”

  Diamond took the opportunity created by Lomax’s frenetic search to open his interrogation. “Actually, Mr. Lomax I am here on an entirely different matter. If you could spare me a few moments?”

  Lomax emerged from behind a stack of papers and pulled out his pocket watch. His hand fluttered through his dishevelled hair, clearly irritated at Diamond’s request. “This won’t take long will it? Only it’s nearly five o’clock and I have to report on the progress made on the thefts to my superiors before they leave for the day. I was hoping you would have some news for me by now.”

  Diamond decided to delay asking about Metzger and follow Lomax’s lead, “About these thefts?”

  “The explosives, yes, four crates in all. They were part of a shipment going out west. The customer was very angry. There is a considerable amount of pipe work gone missing too. Though lord knows what one would want with lead piping. I doubt it has much value beyond what we use it for here and it seems unlikely the thieves would be able to sell it to anyone.”

  Diamond had his notebook out now, scribbling. “How long ago was this?”

  Lomax sighed. “Don’t you people ever talk to one another? It would have been around the end of April I think. I reported it to my superiors as soon as I discovered it, and then when there was that awful explosion I just knew that I had to report it to the police, so I reported it to one of your patrolmen the day after. But I suppose you were too busy with other things to bother filing a report or looking into it.”

  Diamond let the accusation go. “Did you have any suspects?”

  “Isn’t that supposed to be your job?” Lomax sighed. “No, though I did have cause to fire someone just before the end of April. These damned troublemakers. They come here begging for work and when you give it to them they do nothing but foment trouble. Now what was his name? Wretched fellow. Germanic I think, heavy accent, very bad attitude. He was always talking about unionisation to the other workers, stirring them up. He didn’t like to do the menial work, but he wasn’t qualified for the work he kept saying he could do.” Lomax rifled through the piles on his desk once more.

  “Was the man’s name Metzger, by any chance?” Diamond waited.

  Lomax stood still and cleaned one lens of his glasses with the tail end of his waist coat front, thinking for a moment. He snatched up a pile of papers from behind his desk and flicked open a brown folder buried among them. With a cry of triumph he looked up at Diamond, nodding, “Yes, yes it was. Erwin Metzger.”

  Assuring Rudy Lomax that he would look for the reports on the stockyards thefts, Diamond took his leave and strode out for Randolph Street station house. He was already late for his night shift.

  Doran handed out sketches to the large group of patrolmen around him. He spotted Diamond at the back of the group. “‘Bout time you showed up, English.”

  Turning back to the constables, Doran finished doling out the likenesses of the victim’s husband, Erwin Metzger. “Now get goin’ and don't come back in until you have some fresh leads!”

  Diamond straightened his waistcoat and stepped towards Doran, a little warily. “Why the sketch of Metzger, sir?”

  “Because the son of a bitch has skipped, English. I went back to talk to him about where he thought his son might be holed up and the neighbours said he’d done a bunk. They also said that all the guff he gave us about the kid being violent was never witnessed by them. They did say they saw the boy and the wife beaten black and blue more than once.”

  Diamond nodded. “The neighbour, Mrs. Tomsk, told me the same thing this afternoon. So, I’d have thought it more likely that the boy would be angry with his father than his mother.”

  Doran glared.

  Diamond flushed. “Sorry, sir. I should let you do the thinking.”

  Doran wondered if this was sarcasm on the part of the rookie or an act of atonement for his earlier transgression with Flanagan. He let it pass. “Tomsk was the name Metzger gave me of the Union Stock Yards worker that came to tell him his wife was dead.”

  “Not possible, sir.”

  Doran grunted.

  Diamond took out his notebook. “According to the stockyards manager, Metzger was fired from the yard a week or so before the Haymarket riot. He was up to his neck in the trade union, but the manager gave me the impression that a lot of the workers are sympathetic to the union cause.”

  “Bloody eejits. If they’d a grain of common sense they’d realize they can't win. Once the bosses have their boot on your neck there it stays. I’ll guarantee you one thing, English; there won’t ever be an eight hour bloody day in the Chicago Police Department in my lifetime or yours.”

  Diamond held his tongue.

  Doran sighed. “All right, English; as you’ve been working all day and there’s nothing more we can do here until we get some fresh information, write up what you have so far, then get off home and get some sleep.”

  Diamond hesitated.

  Doran sighed. “What else?”

  “Lomax said there was a
theft of explosives and lead pipe from the yard at the end of April. I would like to dig around and see if I can find out whether a report was filed on the yard manager’s theft complaint before I’m done.” Diamond noted the frown registering on Doran’s brow. “If that’s all right with you, sir?”

  “Do what you have to, English. Just get back here smartly in the mornin’. You’re a bloody detective now and I need you fresh.”

  It was almost nine o’clock when Diamond emerged from the basement of the Randolph Street station house. He had rifled through every report filed in the previous month and a half, but didn’t find a single complaint from Lomax or anyone else from the Union Stock Yards. Four cases of dynamite and two lengths of five inch diameter lead pipe had gone missing from a number of storage sheds at the stockyards, and not a word of it was on file. It was possible no complaint had been received, but Diamond thought it more likely the patrol constable Lomax reported the theft to, worked out of another station. He pushed the last box back onto its shelf, extinguished the lamp, and closed the file room door behind him.

  Diamond strode through the city to his lodgings on West Madison Street, aware of the fear the Haymarket atrocity had created on the streets around him. Diamond had no doubt tensions around the city were rising. With the arrests of the Haymarket ringleaders already made and trials about to start, political tempers were flaring. Men hurried through the streets with their caps and derby’s pulled lower; their shoulders hunched higher. Everyone quickened their pace a step or two. No one made eye contact, even when strangers bundled into one another on the sidewalk. Chicago was no stranger to turmoil, but a bombing was a new outrage.

  Daily, funerals were being held. The most badly injured officers were slowly coming to terms with the reality that their careers were likely over. Even with anarchist ringleaders in custody, the whole city seemed on the edge of violence; alive with suspicion and whispers. And now there were four crates of dynamite and an amount of lead pipe somewhere in the city, unaccounted for. Diamond felt a slight shiver run through him. He rounded the corner of West Madison Street, briskly stepped into the lobby of number 111, and put a foot on the worn staircase of his lodging house, about to head for his room.