Three Strikes You're Dead

Chapter 4

Either it was false modesty or Helen Hayes had sold herself and her troupe short: The single matinee performance of The Merchant of Venice was pronounced an unqualified success by the only theater critics in Chicago who counted — Collins in the Tribune and Lloyd Lewis in the Daily News. For what it’s worth, if anything, I liked it, too, although this was the first time I had seen any Shakespeare since high school, when the junior class performed Hamlet and the cardboard set of the castle fell over on Billy Murakowski, who was playing a sentry. He crawled out from under the fallen citadel and bowed to the audience, easily getting the biggest applause of the evening.

True to her word, Helen Hayes left two tickets — ninth row center — in my name at the Erlanger box office for that Saturday performance in late January. I took Peter, figuring a little culture couldn’t hurt him. Actually, although he seemed to have as much trouble as I did with some of the language, he came away impressed by the experience.

“She was really good, Dad,” he said as we walked out of the theater. “And so was that guy who played Shylock. I guess Shakespeare didn’t like Jewish people, huh?”

“Why do you say that?”

“Well, I couldn’t understand a lot of what they were saying, but it seemed like it was very important that Shylock was Jewish. Remember, somebody said he was a devil in one place, and almost everybody in the play called him ‘Jew,’ like it was a bad word.”

“To be honest, I struggled with some of the phrases, too. But I thought Shakespeare gave Shylock some sympathy when he had him talk about how Jews bleed when they’re pricked and die when they’re poisoned, and so on like that.”

“Yeah, I suppose so. Do you like Jewish people, Dad?”

“I haven’t known very many, Peter. Almost none.”

“Mr. Baer is Jewish, I guess.”

“I assumed he was. That’s often a Jewish name.”

“Oh. I didn’t know. Well, one day a few weeks ago, he and Mama picked me up from school in his red car, and the next morning, James Keller, he sits right behind me in class, told everybody that I got a ride from a kike. That’s a word for somebody who’s Jewish, isn’t it?”

“Yeah, and not a very nice word,” I said, recalling how often I’d mouthed it myself over the years. I remembered how a bunch of us in the fifth grade shouted it as we chased Sammy Horowitz, the grocer’s kid, home after school, throwing stones at him all the way to the store. “I hope you never use it,” I told Peter.

“I won’t, Dad. I promise.”

On Monday mornings, the day side reporters in the pressroom at Police Headquarters invariably spent the first half hour or so recounting their weekend escapades. At least a third of the stories may have held some kernel of truth.

“I ran into the goddamndest broad Saturday night at the bar in the Chez Paree. A blonde with hair like Jean Harlow, you know, real smooth and soft, almost white, and like cotton candy. She was a looker in this red, silky, low-cut job that stuck to her like flypaper.” It was Eddie Metz of the Times, all five-feet-four of him, disheveled and semi-shaven as usual, sitting on one leg at his desk and sucking an Old Gold between slurps of coffee. “She was dy-NO-mite, a real prize.”

“As in booby prize, Eduardo? That’s about where you’d come up to on her,” cracked lanky Dirk O’Farrell of the Herald and Examiner, who was a master at pulling Eddie’s chain. “You’ve got to switch brands of smokes — those things are making you hallucinate, for God’s sake. No Harlow look-alike would go within a furlong of you unless — wait, I take it back, I take it all back, my apologies. Now I see.” O’Farrell snapped a suspender and threw his hands up in mock surrender. “She probably wanted to use the top of your flat head as a table for her highball.”

That brought the expected horselaughs, and before a flushed Eddie could begin to mount a counterattack, Anson Masters of the Daily News, the dean of the city’s police reporters, ran a hand over his freckled, balding pate and weighed in. “Edward, Edward, you shouldn’t be wasting your time on these lamentable floozies who drape themselves across the bar at the Chez. How often have I counseled you about the high-quality women who can be found...”

“Oh, Christ, Anson, not that old go-out-and-get-yourself-a-classy-call-girl spiel again,” jeered Packy Farmer of the American, the town’s other Hearst paper... as if we needed two. Packy, who like Masters had long been divorced, leaned back, stroked his thin moustache, and grinned. “Bear in mind, Anson, that I’ve met some of those ‘quality women’ of yours, like that one you introduced me to with the gold tooth who drank scotch and Coke — and drank it through a straw, yet. And who insisted on being called Nefertiti or some crap like that, even though her name was Agnes... or was it Maud?”

“Now, Cyril,” Masters parried haughtily with Farmer’s despised middle name, “you fail, not surprisingly, to appreciate true individuality and uniqueness in a woman.”

“Yeah, Farmer,” Eddie Metz jumped in relieved he was no longer the target. “If your name was Agnes or Maud, you’d change it to Nefertiti, too.”

At his junior-sized desk in the corner, the kid from the City News Bureau, the local reporting service owned by the daily papers that also supplied police news to the radio stations, looked wide-eyed from one speaker to the next. He was a skinny redhead no more than 20 whose name none of us knew — City News shifted its young, underpaid reporters around like chessmen — and he was new enough on the beat that he likely thought he was seeing the flower of Chicago journalism indulging in witty repartee. He’d realize soon enough that all these flowers were wilted, and that their repartee wore very thin very quickly.

Each pushing sixty, O’Farrell and Masters were solid reporters who knew their beats — and the city — well; but both were simply playing out the string. Farmer had worked on papers across the country, leaving — so the talk went — a trail of bad checks and angry women in his erratic wake before he landed in Chicago just after the Fair in ’33; Metz, who had the Headquarters beat only because his older brother was an assistant city editor on the Times, would never go anywhere on the tabloid, a loud and scrappy little imitation of the New York Daily News that itself didn’t seem to know where it was going.

Then there was me, the youngest of the five regulars and the most talented, at least as a writer. But my battles with the bottle had cost me the assignments I once had and sent me to this gray room in this gray building at 11th and State on the dingy southern fringe of downtown, which might rate as okay duty for some reporters, but not for me.

Would I ever break out? I asked myself that question every day. In truth, I’d blown a lot of assignments in my partying days and I knew I had a lot of atoning to do. Bob Lee, the managing editor since Beck’s retirement in ’37, told me when he sent me to Police Headquarters that “If it hadn’t been for that Capone piece that Mr. Beck and the Colonel had liked so much, you’d be out the door.” And I got the clear message that if it were up to Lee, he’d be the one pushing me out that door.

“What about you, Snap, you’ve been awful quiet,” O’Farrell drawled. “Do anything interesting over the weekend?”

I should have let his question pass, which would have been easy, but discretion has never been my strength. “Went to the theater with my son. We saw Helen Hayes in The Merchant of Venice.”

“Hot damn!” Metz slapped his thigh. “That’s Shakespeare, now, isn’t it? This boy here’s up and gone Shakespeare on us. Whaddya think of that, Dirk?”

O’Farrell did a practiced eye-roll. “Perhaps you do not understand, Mr. Metz. Colonel McCormick, suh, expects all of his loyalists to be cultured, and don’t you forget it. Comes with any job in that grand Gothic citadel on North Michigan Avenue that we ordinary folk know as Tribune Tower. None of that low-life stuff that we lesser minions engage in. In fact,” he leaned forward and lowered his voice, “it wouldn’t surprise me one bit to learn that our Mr. Malek here has white tie and tails squirreled away in his closet for such events as the noble Tribune expects him to attend.”

“Ah, the secret and exciting life of Steven Malek, bon vivant and boulevardier, first-nighter and swell,” Farmer intoned between drags on a misshapen cigarette that he had rolled. “And to think, we all toil side-by-side, cheek-by-jowl, with this social lion.” Anson Masters delivered a bass rumble from deep within. “Much as I hate to disrupt this enlivening badinage, we have a public that clamors, yea demands, to be informed. Let’s get to work.” As senior man in the pressroom, he was its unofficial — and self-anointed — chairman of the board. He also liked to view himself as its conscience, which was amusing, since he was easily the laziest among us. Nevertheless, pressroom reporters were slaves to form and habit, and far from the cutthroat competitors that some novelists and playwrights — including Hecht and MacArthur — liked to portray Chicago journalists.

The hoary practices in all the pressrooms in town, including Police Headquarters, was share-and-share-alike, or sink like a rock. Consequently, almost every story to come out of the building at 11th and State was pooled. For example, a reporter would get the particulars on the arrest of a suspect in the strangulation of a prostitute and shuffle back to the pressroom, where he’d mete out the details to his scribbling “competitors.” Each then would phone his respective city desk to dictate the story, and nobody would get into trouble with his editors for being scooped.

Occasionally, though, a young buck, in most cases a newcomer to the beat, would play Lone Ranger like I did my first week at City Hall back in ’30 when I phoned in an exclusive on an alderman who told me that he planned to run for city clerk. The morning my story ran, I was met with silence from the other reporters in the pressroom. After an hour of being pointedly frozen out of all the usual banter, I went to the men’s john, and the Examiner reporter, a stocky grouch named Clyde Crockett, who’d been around since before the Columbian Exposition in ’93, followed me in and bellied up to the urinal next to mine.

“Malek?”

“Yeah?”

“What you did, that was jackass stupid, you know?”

“That so?” I answered, hoping I sounded tough.

“That piece of yours on Considine running for clerk.”

“But...”

“Shut up and listen, hotshot.” He didn’t turn his head or raise his voice, but he didn’t have to; each word sliced like a knife. “You try that once more, Malek, just once more, and by God, we’ll freeze you out of every fucking story worth having that comes out of this building, right down to a press release announcing the replacement of an assistant custodian. Your high-and-mighty starched-collar bosses up in that damn tower of theirs will think you’re sitting in some bar all day getting plastered instead of working, and they’ll fire your ass inside of two weeks. Understand what I’m saying, or do I have to repeat myself?”

I looked straight ahead and nodded.

“Good,” Crockett rasped. “Don’t ever forget it.” Thus I was indoctrinated into the sharers’ club.

At Police Headquarters, the responsibilities were divvied up. I had got the Homicide Division for two reasons. First, I had an in with its top dog, the curmudgeonly Chief Fergus Sean Fahey, because I’d done a long Sunday feature on him that he liked back in ’35 when I was a general assignment reporter. Second, and more important, as low man in seniority among the reporters for the dailies, I was nominated for that beat because nobody else wanted it — too much work. A lot of news came out of Homicide, and the others preferred to let me dredge it up and deliver it to them on a plate, which I more or less faithfully did.

Besides, as Eddie Metz had said with irrefutable logic, “You should have that beat, Snap. Your paper has the biggest news hole in town, and we all know that Homicide generates the most stuff. It’s only fair — as long as you deal us all in, of course.” And deal them in I did, of course.

As we started dispersing to make our rounds of the building that January Monday, Packy Farmer stopped us with a bellow. “Wait! We’ve got to do a pool on Martindale, remember?”

“What’s that all about?” the City News kid asked, wrinkling his nose in puzzlement.

“Oh yeah, you’re new, you wouldn’t know,” Farmer said, not unkindly. “We decided in December that we’d each toss in a fin — you don’t hafta, of course, not on your salary — and guess what date this year the good and great and noble Lloyd Martindale announces that he’s graciously consented to run for mayor of this here burg. Whoever comes closest takes the pot.”

“Martindale? Why would he want to be mayor? Isn’t he a millionaire?” The kid’s face was still a question mark.

“Who the devil else the poor Republicans gonna run?” Anson Masters snorted. “Right now, the best they can do is Dwight Green, whose claim to glory was putting Capone away, which any second-rate prosecutor could have done given the caliber of Scarface’s defense. The only other possibility is Big Bill Thompson, horrible to say, and this town had more than enough of him in City Hall when they tossed him out on his fat ass in ’31. That pathetic old fraud doesn’t know when to quit.”

“Kelly’d knock either one of those two off easy,” O’Farrell put in. “City’s solid Democratic now; about the only way the Republicans can win is with a reform candidate, which is what Martindale purports to be, whether you buy that or not. So he’s probably their logical choice. As far as his being a millionaire, kid, you’re right, but don’t hold that against him. He never earned a cent of that himself. It was his grandfather and then his old man who built up the family steel business. I doubt if Lloydie himself has ever even been inside that big mill out in South Chicago. He’s not one to get his hands dirty. In fact, he’s what you might call a dilettante — heavy into culture, opening night at the opera with his society wife, stuff like that.”

“The guy’s pretty damn pompous too,” Farmer weighed in. “I don’t see that side of him playing well with the hoi polloi; the rank-and-file voters in this town don’t have any use for snobs. Hell, when Martindale was out in front of this building last fall blowing hot air around, I went up to him afterwards and asked if he had his eye on the mayor’s chair. And you know what his answer was?”

“I believe we’ve heard the story before, but I don’t suppose that will stop you from regaling us with it yet again,” Anson Masters snorted.

Farmer ignored the sarcasm. “Here’s what he said, and this is verbatim: ‘I am here to serve my city, and if at some future time it is the wish of the populace that that service be in elected office, I have no choice but to accede to those wishes.’ Talk about somebody who stuffs his shirts.”

“Agreed, the guy’s stuffy and arrogant, and probably more than a little naïve, too. But look at what he’s got going for him,” O’Farrell countered, holding out a hand and ticking off reasons on his nicotine-stained fingers.

“First, he’s tall, wavy-haired, and I suppose handsome in a nose-in-the-air kind of way, while Ed Kelly’s short and dumpy and always looks like he’s slept in his suit. So stuffy or not, right there Martindale’s got a lotta the women’s vote, right?

“Second, unlike the mayor, he’s articulate, even if he is spewing bilge most of the time. Hell, he’s big-time college stuff, Harvard and then Yale Law, isn’t it? That makes him strong on Lake Shore Drive, Astor Street, plus Sauganash and Beverly Hills, at the very least.

“Third, although he’s Episcopal — what else? — his wife is a Catholic, same as Kelly, so the mayor don’t get too much of an edge on that count out in the parishes, right?

“Fourth, even though he’s not active in the steel company, the guy is part of a successful family worth millions, and some of the smarts of the previous generations figure to have rubbed off on him. Stack that up against a mayor who’s been in office for what — five years — and hasn’t proved he can run anything well.

“Fifth, and most important, Martindale appears to be as clean as a nun’s habit on Easter morning, while Kelly — well, calling Ed shady doesn’t even begin to describe the man.”

“Yeah, Dirk, but offsetting everything you said, Kelly’s got the machine behind him,” Eddie Metz piped up. “And it’s his own damn machine, his and Pat Nash’s, with Nash pulling all the strings that make our dear mayor dance. You said yourself the city’s solidly Democratic. With all the pork they can hand out, that’s gotta be worth thousands of votes.”

“Pork?” It was the City News kid, frowning again.

“Patronage,” Metz said impatiently. “As in city jobs, handouts, and shit like that.”

O’Farrell waved a hand dismissively. “I still say Martindale can counter that. Kelly’s not all that popular, even with a lot of the old-line hacks in his own party. You know damn well the only reason he’s got the job at all is because Tony Cermak caught that bullet supposedly meant for FDR down in Miami.”

“Yeah, our martyred, grand, and glorious late mayor, rest his soul,” Farmer hissed.

“Admit it, Cyril, Cermak was really an okay guy — a little dumb and maybe just slightly crooked, but okay,” Masters said. “If he’d lived, he would have turned out to be a decent mayor — not brilliant, maybe, but decent. You’re just cynical about everybody.”

“And you’re not?” Farmer retorted. “And what’s this ‘just slightly crooked’ crap? You got a short memory. If Cermak had been in City Hall much longer, people woulda started wishing Big Bill was back.”

Masters cleared his throat, as he always did when he was about to place himself above the fray. “Mine is a measured, healthy cynicism, Cyril, born of years as a passionate observer of the human comedy. And I—”

Farmer pushed back his chair and stood. “Oh, shove it, Anson! You are as sour as I am, probably sourer, and you damn well know it. Are we going to do this pool, or not?”

“Well, it’s your show, Packy,” I said impatiently. “Let’s get going before our city desks start wondering how we’re justifying these princely salaries.”

“Okay, here’s how we’ll do it,” Farmer said, reaching for a pad of half-sheets of copy paper. “Everybody put down their name and the date they think Martindale’s going to announce, and we’ll save the sheets until the big day, when the one of us who was closest gets twenty-five Washingtons.”

“What happens if Martindale never decides to run?” Metz asked.

O’Farrell threw up his arms. “Eddie, for God’s sake, what the hell d’ya think happens? Then there’s no wager, of course — no pool, no money, no nothing. Do we have to spell everything out for you in words of one syllable or less?”

“Cut the jawing and give us all the damn ballots, will you,” Masters sighed, “before it’s time to break for lunch.”

O’Farrell passed them around and everybody scribbled, each of us looking around furtively as we did. Then we all gave the folded sheets to the City News kid to lock in his drawer, seeing as how none of us completely trusted any of the others, and with reason.

For the record, I put down October 28, which was four months to the day before the primaries. I still think it was a good guess, but of course, we will never know.