Though Murder Has No Tongue by James Jessen Badal

since the lawsuits Charles Dolezal brought were still being litigated and the integrity of the sheriff and his office clearly hung in the balance. And why did the sheriff wait almost six full months after Lyons’s January arrest before writing this token of support to his former special deputy?
    Pat Lyons’s account of the events that precipitated Frank Dolezal’s arrest is sketchy enough to suggest that he is, indeed, hiding or at least glossing over something; and the behavior Merylo describes and attributes to Lyons in his report to Ness—if true—would easily explain Lyons’s seeming evasiveness. One must also consider the nature and ultimate purpose of the two manuscript accounts Merylo left behind. Though they were never published, both sets of his personal memoirs were intended for public consumption; therefore, his relative and somewhat uncharacteristic reticence to name names and provide specifics could be read as reflecting his desire to protect the reputations of those involved. The report of April 2, 1940, however, was an entirely different matter. It was an official police document specifically requested by his superior, Eliot Ness; and as such, it would probably never have been seen by anyone aside from the Ness circle and Chief of Police Matowitz. Every little detail had to be nailed down and fully explained. The chances that anyone else would ever see it were virtually nil. The notion that a detective of Peter Merylo’s reputation and stature would lie knowingly in an official report to his superior—even though he did not particularly like Ness—is untenable, especially when the details of that report could have been so easily checked. But Merylo was repeating what others, specifically Helen Merrills, reported to him; and it is possible that the good proprietress of the Forest Café was simply misinterpreting some of what she was seeing.
    On the one hand, the suggestion that Lyons was drunk when he cameinto her place of business appears a couple of times in the Merylo report, and some of the behavior Mrs. Merrills described could only be attributed to intoxication. The charge of intoxication was obviously also central to Lyons’s drunk driving arrest in 1940. And there were at least two other arrests for intoxication in his past—one in 1918 and another in 1933. Coincidentally, the later incident also involved charges of perjury on the part of the arresting officers. On the other hand, it is difficult to believe that anyone with a drinking problem could have conducted the sort of calculated investigation Lyons and his team had, while also keeping it out of the papers and away from the attention of the police department for so long. In his memoirs, Lyons states that he was careful never to say he was a policeman; he always went simply by his first name, as did the sheriff’s deputies working with him. (In his report to Ness, however, Merylo does write that Helen Merrills saw a gold badge.) He adopted this strategy essentially for two reasons: outright fabrications and falsehoods can come back to haunt a careless investigator; and the people from whom he was trying to extract information lived in the destitute, run-down neighborhoods on the fringes of society and—given the nature of their lives, experiences, and color—were not about to trust the police. Thus, Lyons walked a thin line—presenting himself as an authority figure of some sort who was also a “regular guy” who could be counted on to spring for a round of drinks. It is possible to read at least some of the boisterous behavior that Mrs. Merrills reported to Merylo as a heavy-handed attempt on Lyons’s part to ingratiate himself to the poor, black regulars that hung out at the Forest Café.
    The Pat Lyons who survives in old newspaper stories and official documents, both public and private, is an imperfect reflection of the father and grandfather his family remembers. It was