Death Sentence Page 3
After lunch they had left the club and Spalter, burly in his topcoat, had ridden with Paul as far as the hotel. Paul had declined Spalter’s dinner invitation, pleading tiredness after his flight. When Spalter was gone he had crossed the street and prowled the arcade of the John Hancock complex until he found a magazine shop where he bought Chicago maps and guidebooks and all three local newspapers and a New York Times which had a page 40 column about the police department’s continuing unsuccessful search for the vigilante who had used the same revolver, according to ballistics reports, to kill seventeen people in the streets of New York over a five-week span. Of the seventeen victims of his retributive vengeance, fourteen had criminal records and two others had been found dead with stolen property on or near their bodies. It was possible he had saved a score of innocent lives.
In his hotel room he had found a printed card from the management:
We urge your use of the Safety Deposit Vaults available at no charge at the Front Office. Please DO NOT leave furs, jewelry, cameras, money or ANY VALUABLES in your room. Illinois State laws relieve the hotel from liability for loss, excepting when valuables have been properly placed in a safety deposit vault.…Please use the DOUBLE LOCKS on your guest room door. We wish you a most enjoyable stay.
That night he’d slept with his wallet inside his pillowcase.
4
¶ CHICAGO, DEC. 17TH—The bodies of two men, shot to death, were found early this morning on the sidewalk in the 2000 block on North Mohawk.
Discovery of the homicide victims was reported to the police by Philip Frank, 43, a passing motorist.
A police spokesman identified the dead men as Edward A. Smith, 23, of 1901 Washtenaw, and Leroy Thompson, 22, address uncertain. According to the police, both men had criminal records for assault and robbery; Thompson was serving a suspended two-year sentence at the time of his death.
The shattered remains of an empty wine bottle were found near the bodies. A police spokesman said one of the dead men, Smith, was found with a knife lying near his-hand.
Both victims were shot twice. Police report that ballistics investigation suggests the same .38 revolver was used to fire all four bullets. “But we’re not absolutely certain,” the police spokesman cautioned. “The bullets recovered from the bodies are badly misshapen and fragmented. They’re almost certainly hollow-point bullets, and we’re going to need further laboratory examination before we can be positive they all came from the same weapon.”
No motive has been put forth for the homicides. District detectives are investigating.
The two homicides raise this year’s number of gunshot deaths within Chicago’s city limits to 856.
5
AT THE BAR, men ruminated secretively over their beer, looking up at newcomers and looking away again. Toward the back a group of hearty men shouted across one another. The room had dark wood, poor light and a lingering aura of tobacco smoke and grain whiskey. Specks of dust twirled under the lights.
Paul found a space at the bar. “I’ll have a beer.”
The bartender named half a dozen brands; Paul picked one. While he waited for it he studied the crowd and decided the noisy group at the back contained his men.
The bar was a block from the Tribune Tower and equidistant from the Daily News and Sun-Times pressrooms. Paul had chosen it because it was likely to be the informal headquarters of the city’s news reporters and he suspected it might be the best source of information about the unfamiliar city. He needed to know about Chicago: he needed to know how the city worked, where its stresses were, how the police operated.
He carried his beer toward the back and hovered at the edge of the loud group. There were nine or ten men and women roughed up by alcohol and cigarettes and the cynicisms of insiders’ experience. It was only half past six but they’d been at their drinks long enough to be doing more talking than listening: insistent assertions roared cacophonously back and forth. They were talking about the mayor and the machine but he couldn’t sort out much at all in the babble.
At the edge of it two men observed without participating and Paul maneuvered himself closer to them. One stood against the bar, wincing at the racket; the other was a moon-faced bald man with a drink in his hand. “Don’t flatter yourself, Mike. You didn’t invent the hangover.”
“The hell. I’m going to take out a patent on this one.” Mike waved angrily at the oblivious bartender.
The bald man said, “When he comes I advise you to make it a double. This joint serves thimble-size shots.”
Paul was between Mike and the bartender; he turned and managed to attract the bartender’s eye. The bartender came along the slot: “Yes sir?”
Paul gestured to the man behind him. “This gentleman wants a drink.”
Mike turned, reached an arm past Paul’s shoulder and slapped his palm on the bar. “Double Dewar’s straight up.”
The bald man said, “Wish I could afford that.”
“Try not to get fired so often then.” Mike smiled through bad teeth at Paul. “My friend, you’ve just saved a life. Name’s Ludlow, there, buddy. Mike Ludlow.”
“Fred Mills,” Paul lied. “Nice to meet you.”
“A new face,” said the bald man. “Christ you must have wandered into this crazy farm by mistake, Mr. Mills. My name’s Dan O’Hara. Don’t believe a word this man tells you—he’s a no-good drunk.”
Ludlow reached for his drink when the bartender set it before him: he raised it carefully to his lips. “Not a drunk, O’Hara. An alcoholic. You’ve got no subtlety, you stupid mick, you don’t understand vital distinctions.”
“He’s a drunk,” O’Hara confided. “Don’t listen to him.”
Ludlow swallowed most of the drink and closed his eyes. “Listen. Shoot their mouths off all night long until the beer runs out and nobody listens to a word of it.” Paul had to lean forward to catch his words; the crowd’s racket was intense.
The bartender put a bill on the bar in front of Ludlow and Paul picked it up, doing it quietly but knowing O’Hara saw it. Paul turned it face down and put a five-dollar bill on it and waited for the change.
O’Hara had a mild brogue. “All right, Mr. Mills, what can we do for you?” He said it amiably but he’d made the connection immediately.
“I’m from New York, my company transferred me out here. I don’t know a damn thing about Chicago.”
“And you’ve come to the fountainhead. Smart lad.”
Ludlow drained his glass and put it down. “I’ll buy the next round. Thanks for the drink, sport. What line are you in?”
“Security systems.” Paul had it pat on his tongue. “Burglar alarms for the home, electronic security—everything in the gadget line. We’re a new company, just breaking into the Midwest market.”
“And you want to get to know your new turf.” O’Hara put his beer glass down beside Ludlow’s. “I’ll tell you what, Mike, why don’t we take Mr. Mills around the corner where we can hear ourselves think. Can’t give the man serious advice in this heathen bedlam.”
Paul gathered his change and left a tip on the bar. Ludlow gave him a friendly touch on the shoulder and steered him toward the door in O’Hara’s broad wake.
A few snowflakes undulated into Rush Street but it was nothing that would settle; the pavements were hardly moist. O’Hara turned up the sheepskin collar of his bulky cloth coat. “Another bleedin’ slush Christmas, I predict.”
“Always bitching about the rain.” Ludlow had a harsh laugh. “This bastard was born in a country where it rains twenty-four hours a day.”
They turned a corner and went under the El tracks into a sandwich parlor with chrome-and-formica booths; the lighting was bright but there was a bar along the near wall and the place was nearly empty. Paul sat on a stool and found himself bracketed between O’Hara and Ludlow. O’Hara had inky fingernails: he held up a hand and beckoned the barmaid. “Dewar’s straight up, darlin’, and a Miller’s for my cheap friend. What’s for you, Mr. Mills?”
Ludlow put his money on the bar. “Well now, where do we start?”
O’Hara coughed. “Let’s find out what it is our friend wants to know.”
“We know what he wants to know. He wants to know what kind of place Chicago is.”
“I’ll answer that in a sentence. When derelicts go slumming, they go to Chicago.”
Ludlow said, “O’Hara don’t know what the hell he’s talking about. He writes think-pieces, he’s a political reporter. Every six months they fire him because somebody from the Cook County machine leans on his editor. Me, I stay on the news beat, I’ve been a crime reporter eight years in this town. I’m the one you want to pump. Forget this ignorant mick.”
“Watch it now, Mike.”
“I’ll give you some facts,” Ludlow said, more to O’Hara than to Paul. “Fact, O’Hara. There’s a robbery in this town every three minutes around the clock. Fact, we had eight hundred homicides last year and we’re way above that record this year. Crime’s up fifteen percent overall. Fact, O’Hara—less than one per cent of Chicago’s crimes are solved, in the sense that some joker gets tried and convicted and sent to the slammer.”
O’Hara drank and spoke in a voice made breathless by the beer. “Statistics.”
“Here’s a statistic, Mr. Mills. An infant boy born in Chicago today has a better chance of being murdered than an American soldier in World War Two had to get killed in combat. If the crime rate keeps increasing the way it’s going now, one Chicagoan in every fifteen will be a homicide victim. Dead, dead.”
“Crime rate.” O’Hara made a sound: it might have been a sneeze. “Listen to this fool.” He turned and poked Paul’s sleeve. “I’ll give you real facts. We’re living in an occupied war zone. The city’s chopping and slashing itself to ruin. It’s what the ecologists call a behavioral sink. An intolerable overcrowding that leads to the inevitable collective massacre.” He pronounced the polysyllables with exaggerated precision.
“Yeah,” Ludlow said obscurely. “Yeah, yeah.”
“Chicago,” O’Hara said in a mock-wistful voice. “It’s watching the lake shore and waiting for some scaly grade-B monster to loom out of the sludge and step on the whole thing—the buildings and the people and the rats that bite the people. And in the meantime the cops go right on vagging prostitutes and shaking down storekeepers while a sniper picks off four drivers on the John F. Kennedy Expressway.”
“Twenty-six homicides last weekend,” Ludlow said. There was no perceptible emotion in his voice. “Sixty hours, twenty-six murders.”
Paul said, “Why?”
“Why what?”
“It shouldn’t be like that,” Paul said. “People shouldn’t have to be afraid.”
Ludlow only laughed off-key.
O’Hara said, “Listen, I talked to a guy in Cicero—he’s eighty years old and he’s grateful because it was only the third time his apartment got knocked over.”
“Why does everybody put up with it?”
“We’re all sheep,” O’Hara said. “Sure. Last weekend there was a mugger working the Christmas shoppers down in the Loop. Wearing drag, but it was a guy. Transvestite. He got pissed because a dame refused to hand over her handbag. The guy in drag shot the woman to death in broad daylight right in front of the bus terminal on Randolph.”
“Sweet Jesus.” Paul had the glass in his hand; suddenly it felt cold.
Ludlow sang sotto voce: “Chicago, Chicago, it’s my kind of town,” confusing two songs, possibly deliberately.
Paul said, “The mugger in women’s clothes—was he caught?”
“That one they caught,” O’Hara said: “Of course for every one they nail, there’s a hundred they don’t.”
“You’ll do a fantastic business in this town,” Ludlow told Paul. “Not that it’ll do any good.”
“Why?”
“The police won’t answer the alarms half the time.”
“Apathy,” O’Hara said. “Two guys got hit last night over on Mohawk .38 revolver, four shots fired right on a residential street. Nobody phoned in a report. Everybody who lives on that block must have heard the shots. But it had to wait for some guy driving by to spot the corpses and report it to the cops, and they took their time getting there.”
“You try to walk in this town, you hear footsteps behind you it’s like the sound of grenades. A walk in Chicago after dark is a combat mission.”
“It’s politics, bloody politics.”
“Listen to him. Everything’s politics to the mick.”
“There was a time when the Cook County machine was good for something. You got ripped off, the clubhouse would provide a meal and even a job for you, and a lawyer for the guy who ripped you off. It was all part of the community in those days. Now it’s a political battlefield. The big shots have drawn back, there’s just no contact at all between the politicians and the communities. The machine answers criticism by closing ranks—there are no lines of communication any more. The cops are on the take or they’re not on the take, but either way there’s no old-fashioned dedication there any more. It’s just a job to those guys—you put as little as you can into it, you take as much as you can out of it. If they start busting heads they’re accused of police brutality and if they don’t bust heads they’re accused of corruption—you can’t blame them. The judicial system’s fucked up beyond belief because nobody knows how to treat crime any more. You kill somebody on the street, you cop a plea, the judge lets you off with jail time served and a year’s probation. The rewards for crime keep increasing while the cost of committing crime keeps decreasing. The chances are you won’t get caught, and if you get caught the chances are you won’t get tried, and if you get tried the chances are you won’t get convicted, and if you get convicted the chances are you won’t go to prison. The crooks have got the odds of a thousand to one in their favor. The rest of us are torn between retribution and compassion—we don’t know what we ought to do, so we don’t do anything at all.”
“The people know zip about crime,” Ludlow said.
O’Hara said, “Let’s have another drink. Mr. Mills is buying.”
6
BEFORE HE LEFT THEM the two journalists had consumed prodigiously and their bickering had lost its amicability: they were threatening each other like blowhards in a Western saloon. The bartender intervened but it only persuaded O’Hara and Ludlow to take the quarrel outside into the night where they started feinting like boxers in the drifting snow.
Paul faded into the darkness. He had never understood men who fought for fun.
He had nursed two beers for hours and come away with valuable items of information and innuendo. He knew something of the organization and disposition of the police—their districts and patterns of patrol, their levels of diligence and indifference. He had gained a rudimentary idea of the organization of the force’s homicide detectives and captains—it was somewhat different from the vertical structure of the New York department—and he’d learned something about the Chicago Crime Commission. He’d been told demographic and commercial facts that didn’t appear on his street maps—Old Town, New Town, the Lithuanian and Polish and Italian and Chinese neighborhoods, the hardcore centers of the four police districts in which nearly half of Chicago’s violent crimes were reported. He’d learned that police surveillance was highest and most efficient in the First Ward—because it was the home ward of the city’s venerable political machine and because it included the showcase Loop—and that it was thinnest in the west and southwest districts.
He’d learned a great many details, some of which might prove inaccurate; nevertheless it had been worthwhile and the two reporters had played nicely into his hands. They’d had to: ask a man to talk about a topic on which he considers himself an expert and he will happily oblige.
He found his way back along Rush Street to the open lot where his car was parked. He ransomed it, declined a receipt and drove south toward the inferior regions of the city.
> He was hunting again. At first in New York he’d tried to rationalize it. He’d walk down Riverside Park late at night with his hand on the gun in his coat pocket, and he’d convince himself he was only doing what any peace-loving citizen had a right to do—walk unafraid in a public park. Any predator who might attack him was asking for whatever happened: It’s not my doing, he can leave me alone if he wants to. But he couldn’t delude himself forever. He wasn’t strolling in those parks at two o’clock in the morning for exercise or enjoyment. He was prowling for a kill and any other description of it had to be rationalization. The gun in his pocket wasn’t there for self-protection. He wasn’t defending himself, he was attacking: setting a trap, using himself as the bait and closing the trap when the predator entered it.
He’d asked himself why. He took no pleasure from watching a man die. There was no perverted thrill in it. Inevitably his reaction afterward was painful nausea. He did not feel particularly cleansed or particularly triumphant. Relief, sometimes, that he had come through again without injury; but it wasn’t a challenge that thrilled him, it wasn’t anything he had to prove to himself—it wasn’t macho. He’d spent months thinking of nothing else but there were some things you could analyze to death without ever being able to explain them. It was—what? A sense of obligation? Not a compulsion, not a perverse addiction, no; it wasn’t something he felt compelled to do. It was simply something that ought to be done. A job, a duty uncertainly defined; he couldn’t get closer than that.
When he was deep inside the urban ferment of the South Side ghetto he chose a boulevard lined with shabby stores and drove slowly through the sparse traffic until he saw an open pawn shop. He cruised past it, made the next right turn and had no difficulty finding a place to park; it was not a neighborhood in which you parked your car overnight on the street with any expectation of finding it intact in the morning.