Death Sentence

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?”

“Beer’s fine.”

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.”