Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 48, No. 1, January 2003

Another truth is that I originally got into mall security by accident. One spring day in 1977, when my one-man operation, Carr Investigations and Security, was suffering an all-time record absence of new clients, the family bank balance got me desperate enough to head out with the idea of soliciting business. Through luck or fate or divine intervention, I hadn’t been driving for more than three or four minutes when I found myself cruising by a new shopping mall that was being built about eight blocks from my office. The place was called Speedway Mall because it was located on the site of a long-defunct half-mile race track, and when I saw a sign reading “Grand Opening September 1977. Mall Office Now Open,” I dropped my plans to cold call an industrial complex out in Niles, made a U-turn and followed the arrows through a curbed but unpaved lot to a temporary entrance, parked the car, and strolled inside.

I expected to find half-completed chaos and a cigar chomper using a construction crate for a desk, but instead I discovered that this particular portion of the mall was all but finished, and the mall offices, lining one side of a brick-and-glass walled corridor, were filled with modular furnishings and a staff of at least five, four of whom were using telephones as I walked in the public entrance. The fifth was a long, slim blonde wearing a youthful, intelligent expression and a cornflower blue dress. I handed her one of my business cards across the service counter and said, “Hi. I’d like to talk to someone about your security program, or if no one’s here who deals with that subject, I’d like to arrange an appointment.”

She looked at me slowly — without fear, you might say, since I’m oversized and not handsome — then she stood up and walked to the door of an interior office, commenting over her shoulder, “I’ll see what I can do.”

That’s how I met Judy Pilske, and even though she didn’t play any further role in my getting around a pair of skeptical supervisors and into directing the setup of security at the mall, I judged her to have assessed me positively when she took that first look, or I would never have made it past the counter. So to some degree I owed my entry into mall security work to her, and when she was promoted to office manager a few years later at the ripe age of twenty-two, I was pleased to see her sitting in with the security chief at Speedway when I came by every couple of months to review the mall’s records and procedures.

Judy was a graceful and reasonably attractive young woman, and like a lot of Northwest Side girls she was a live-at-home Catholic looking hard for a husband. Husband material in the late seventies and eighties was in as short supply as ever — even for long, slim blondes — so, before she finally did get engaged and then married, after all this happened, she spent half her time in the mall office fending off passes from the usual gang of suspects, some of them higher-ups in the Speedway Corporation. Being a Northwest Side girl, however, meant that she could handle it.

Over time we got to be fairly good acquaintances — I guess that’s the real point — enough at least so that we knew each other’s stories. I put up with her cigarettes at our review meetings, and she put up with whatever I did that was irksome. I enjoyed dealing with her because she was smart and hardworking, unlike a couple of the security chiefs Speedway had in those early years.

Exactly none of this was on my mind, of course, the evening in December, 1983, when I got back to the three-flat a good hour ahead of schedule from a one-day job up in Wisconsin. Ginny had taken the kids to her sister’s place in Niles, and so, being on my own for once, I decided to dial up my office answering machine for messages, something I hardly ever did back in those primitive, pre-voicemail days. The first couple of calls didn’t amount to much, but then this one came on:

R. J., this is Judy Pilske at Speedway Mall. Something strange is going on here that we need your help with. Please call back today if at all possible, and only talk to me. I’m on from twelve to nine today, so if you don’t hear this till evening, I’ll still be around. Thanks.

After listening to the message a second time, I decided that I didn’t care for the “only talk to me” portion very much. It probably meant that Frank Malin, the acting security chief at Speedway, thought he could handle the problem alone, whereas he struck me from the beginning as the kind of guy who would rather perform an appendectomy on himself than see a doctor.