Hard City

by Clark Howard

  In addition to throwing himself into his studies with vigor, Richie also got out the short stories he had written in longhand in Korea, and typed them up to see how they would look. He also began to buy The Writer and Writer’s Digest to study market requirements for freelance short stories. He bought every magazine on the newsstand that contained short fiction, and read them all voraciously, studying each story to see what he could learn from it. It did not matter to him who wrote the story, whether the author was well-known or unknown; the story was published, and that, to Richie, was the primary gauge.

  Sometimes, on a weekend when there was no school, Richie would find himself becoming restless for something to do besides study, read, or type. He was tempted several times to call Linda and invite her to a movie, but reminded himself that he had promised not to bother her. Once, during the week, he tried to call Grace Menefee to see if she would like to meet him on the weekend for lunch, but he was told she no longer worked for the welfare department; she had gotten married and moved to California.

  Inevitably, when he needed to get out and do something different, Richie would find himself drawn back to the West Side neighborhoods where so much of his life had been lived. Taking a bus out to Madison and Kedzie, he strolled up Walnut Street, down Carroll Avenue, stood looking at Biedler or Calhoun or Grant elementary school and the schoolyards he had so dreaded. Once in a while he would sit in the Senate or Kedzie Annex theater for a couple of hours, or wander through some of the stores where he once shoplifted, remembering. The thing that amazed him more than anything else in his rovings was how small everything seemed to have become. Streets and alleys where he had once run and hid were incredibly narrow; schoolyards were like postage stamps; the great, cavernous movie houses were small and claustrophobic, their seats inadequate and uncomfortable.

  How the world shrinks, he thought, as a person expands.

  One Saturday afternoon, Richie went out to Cascade Bowling Lanes and watched some people bowl for a while, then walked over to Midwest gym and watched a few fighters working out. He walked through Garfield Park, tossed some pebbles into the lagoon, and poked around behind the wild hedge where Toni had shown him the broken-down cardboard box that they used to make love on. It was hard for him to believe that the two of them had actually stripped naked and had passionate, lengthy intercourse right there in a public park. But then, it was becoming increasingly difficult for Richie to believe a lot of the things he had done.

  On impulse, he decided to walk over to Maypole Avenue and see who might be hanging around Jo-Jo’s these days, thinking that maybe if Toni were still around, or Marcella, he might invite one of them to spend the weekend with him in his apartment. When he got there, however, no one was around. The dwarfish little Jo-Jo was still on his high stool near the cash register, but he did not recognize Richie.

  Richie bought a Coke and leaned against the counter drinking it. “What happened to all the kids who used to hang out in front?” he asked.

  “Who knows?” Jo-Jo said, hunching his sloped little shoulders. “Kids come, kids go. Who can keep track?”

  Finishing his Coke, Richie walked up Maypole and cut down Pulaski Road. He was very close to Linda’s block now and wondered if he should just stroll by and maybe run into her. But he decided against it. He was yearning to spend more time with her, to try to make up to her for some of the bad experiences of her marriage, show her how to have fun again, but he respected her need for privacy and was determined not to intrude in her life. Walking past the Paradise Theater, he forgot about Linda and recalled the usher he had so brutally beaten up summers earlier. Thinking about it now made him feel ashamed.

  When he got to Madison Street, Richie turned down toward Cascade again, having made a complete circle from where he started. Before he realized it, he was outside Solly’s Poolroom and a voice was saying, “Well, well, look who’s back.”

  Richie saw Bobby Casey standing there, leaning against the doorframe, smoking a cigarette. He had the same tightly curled hair and unfriendly eyes. Wearing a one-button-roll suit and dark sport shirt buttoned at the neck, he looked older, smarter, more confident. When Richie stopped, Bobby did not offer to shake hands.

  “Where you been this time, bigshot?” he asked snidely. “Alcatraz or Harvard?”

  “Korea,” Richie said. “I’ve been in the Marines.” Bobbing his chin at the door, he asked, “Stan inside?”

  Bobby fixed him in a flat stare. “Stan’s on Death Row, man. Waiting to go to the electric chair.”

  Richie felt the color leave his face.

  54

  At the main branch of the public library, the massive building in which he had once spent so many hours of refuge from truant officers, welfare investigators, and just plain cops, Richie sat at a microfilm viewer scanning old editions of the Sun-Times. Turning the handle of the machine, he kept going to front page after front page until he found the headline he was looking for. It read: COP KILLED IN HOLDUP. A sub-head said: Killer Wounded, Captured, One Other Escapes.

  The story that followed was what Bobby Casey had told Richie at the pool hall. Two armed men had abducted a currency exchange owner on his way to work and accompanied him to his business on the Northwest Side. As they were cleaning out the safe of some six thousand dollars in currency and rolled coins, an off-duty policeman, who lived in the neighborhood and was on his way to work, became suspicious because the exchange was late in opening. Driving around the block, he returned just as the two holdup men were leaving, each of them carrying a large briefcase. Pulling over, the officer identified himself and attempted to stop them for questioning. Both men dropped their briefcases and drew guns; the officer drew his own weapon. In the ensuing gunfight, the officer was killed, one holdup man wounded in the right shoulder and side, and the second holdup man escaped down an alley, leaving the money behind. The wounded holdup man, identified as twenty-one-year-old Stanley Klein, was in serious condition in Cook County Hospital jail, but was expected to recover.

  Subsequent editions of the newpaper told the rest of the story in headlines: KLEIN RECOVERED, READY FOR TRIAL; KLEIN REFUSES DEAL WITH DISTRICT ATTORNEY; KLEIN ON TRIAL FOR MURDER, D.A. SEEKS CHAIR; KLEIN WILL NOT TAKE STAND; KLEIN GUILTY; KLEIN SENTENCED TO DEATH.

  The deal Stan had been offered was a life sentence in exchange for a guilty plea and identification of his accomplice, who had not been caught. Bobby, Richie thought. It had to be Bobby.

  Going back to the West Side, Richie found Bobby Casey in Solly’s again. Bobby was sitting on a raised spectator bench in the back, smoking a cigarette, drinking a beer, studying a racing form. There was no one nearby when Richie sat down next to him.

  “It was you, wasn’t it?” he said quietly, a statement as much as a question. “You were the other guy.”

  “What’s it to you?” Bobby replied. “You a cop now?”

  “I thought you were Stan’s friend.”

  Bobby grunted. “Better friend than you ever were.”

  “Then why are you letting him go to the chair when you can save him by turning yourself in?”

  Bobby looked at Richie as if he were an idiot. “You are so fucking stupid I can’t believe it sometimes.” Glancing around to make certain no one was near enough to hear, he lowered his voice anyway and said, “If I was the other guy, and I did turn myself in, all’s they’d do would be put me on trial and I’d end up right where Stan is. Then we’d both fry. What the fuck would that accomplish—except maybe make you happy.”

  “The paper said the district attorney offered him a deal—?”

  “That was before the trial, you asshole. Jesus, you’re dumb. Look, he’s been tried and sentenced; the only way he can beat the chair is with an appeal or if he gets commuted to life.”

  “There must be some way to help him,” Richie said fretfully.

  Bobby Casey took a deep drag on his cigarette and studied Richie through the smoke he exhaled. He seemed to be weighing a sudden thought against some long-held premise
that conflicted with it. After several moments, as Richie leaned forward and began to restlessly chew on a thumbnail, Bobby said quietly, “There’s a way we can try to help him.”

  “How?” Richie asked, turning toward him eagerly.

  “If we could raise the dough, we could pay this lawyer named Ned Fields to handle Stan’s appeal. Right now, the fucking public defender is handling it, but they ain’t gonna do no more than they have to. But this Ned Fields is a top criminal lawyer. I already had Solly call him and feel him out. He said he’d do it, but he wants his dough up front. Seventy-five hundred.”

  “Jesus,” said Richie. He had a little over a thousand saved from Korea, and from the retroactive combat pay he’d recently received. But a thousand was a long way from seventy-five hundred.

  “There’s a way to get it,” Bobby said quietly, continuing to study Richie closely.

  “How?” Richie asked again, suspiciously now, already knowing what was coming. Bobby Casey only knew one way to get money.

  “Before the currency exchange job,” Bobby confided, “Stan had figured out a new heist that he told me all about. Sticking up the spade drug dealers in the projects. It’s a snap; they operate out of apartments where nobody can spot what’s going on, and they can’t call the cops after it’s over. Stan figured we could get a grand or fifteen hundred off each one.” Bobby took another long drag and shrugged his shoulders. “You and me ain’t never been friends, but I’ll hand you one thing—you always had balls and you never chickened out on nothing we ever did. If you and me was to throw in and knock off these niggers—”

  “Forget it,” Richie said emphatically. “That kind of shit is behind me, man. I’m in college, for Christ’s sake. I’m trying to make something of my life.”

  Bobby drew away, his eyes and expression turning cold and contemptuous. “Forget I asked,” he said scornfully. “I should of knowed better.”

  Rising, Bobby walked out of the poolroom.

  The maximum security visiting room at Cook County Jail had two-inch plate-glass windows in each booth, with a speaker system activated by buttons on each side. Because of its size and criminal population, Cook County had its own electric chair and death row. Annually it put to death more men than the chair at Joliet Prison, which served the rest of the state. When Stan Klein was brought to the other side of the window, in handcuffs and a waist chain, wearing bright yellow condemned-man coveralls, he smiled at Richie in pure delight. Pressing the button, he said, “I couldn’t believe it when they told me who my visitor was! Where the hell did you come from this time?”

  Smiling back, Richie said, “Korea. I was in the Marines. Been back a few months now. I’m going to college out at Northwestern.”

  Stan shook his head in amazement. “I’ll be goddamned. Well, it shouldn’t surprise me.” For a moment his expression turned serious, his thick eyebrows meeting above his nose. “While we’re talking,” he said evenly, “you don’t mention no names unless I mention them first, understand? None of us in here know if the screws can listen in on visits or not, but we don’t take no chances.” Sitting back, smiling again, resting his cuffed hands on the ledge of the window, Stan said, “So tell me all about what you been doing since you left. The Marines, huh?”

  Richie went over his last year in Lamont, his job at Sam Levy’s, his involvement with Jennie, his enlistment in the Marine Corps, boot camp at Parris Island, South Carolina, infantry training at Camp Pendleton, California, weekends on the beach or in Tijuana, Mexico, and finally being shipped out to Korea, making the landing at Sok-cho-ri, and ending up trapped in the Punchbowl.

  “Jesus,” Stan said, “you sure manage to do a lot of living, kid. And now you’re in college?”

  “Yeah.” Richie explained about the G. I. Bill and how he hoped to get a degree either in English literature or journalism. Stan made a sour face at the latter.

  “Stay away from that,” he advised. “One thing I learned in here—newspaper reporters are the scum of the fucking earth. The biggest fucking liars in the world.”

  Finally, quietly, Richie asked, “How does it look for you, Stan?”

  “Just a matter of time. The public defender will go through the motions, lose the appeal, the fucking governor will turn down my request to be commuted to life, and one fine morning they’ll strap me down to Old Sparky and my worries will be over. Just a matter of time.”

  “Suppose you had another lawyer? A good lawyer?”

  Stan shrugged. “Takes a lot of dough. Anyway, even if I had the best, my chances of beating the chair, even for a life sentence, are very slim. I’m a cop killer, Richie. In Chicago, cop killers go to the chair.”

  When Richie’s time was up, he promised to come back in two weeks, when non-family visitors were allowed, and on his way out left twenty dollars in Stan’s account at the jail commissary. As he was getting his receipt at the commissary window, he found himself surrounded by four men in suits. Three of them had their hands under their coats.

  “We’re police officers,” one of them said. “Will you come with us, please?”

  Taking him into a nearby office, Richie was asked to identify himself, then questioned about his relationship with Stan Klein. “I’ve known him since we were kids,” Richie said. “We went to grade school together, lived in the same building. I put all that on my application for a visit. What’s this all about?”

  “Klein’s stickup partner has never been caught,” said the detective, who was older and seemed to be in charge. They all stared somberly at Richie, who finally nodded in understanding.

  “Sorry to disappoint you,” he said, taking out his wallet, “but I’ve been in the service. I was in Korea when the holdup took place.” He showed them a photostat of his discharge.

  “We’re going to have to check with the Marine Corps to make sure you weren’t on leave or anything like that,” the detective advised. “Nothing personal.”

  “Sure.” They took his address and wrote down that he was attending Northwestern.

  “You seem like a nice young man,” the older detective said. “Marine veteran, college. What are you doing visiting a killer like this?”

  “He wasn’t always a killer,” Richie replied evenly. “There was a time when he was just a kid, and the only place he fit in was on the street. That’s who I’m visiting—that street kid.” Unflinchingly meeting the detective’s gaze, he asked, “Can I go now?”

  They let him go, but he knew they were watching him all the way down the hall.

  In the creative writing period, Mr. Crane reviewed the papers and grades of an assignment that had been turned in several days earlier.

  “The assignment, as you know,” he said, “was to rewrite a number of sentences in order to make them stronger. Overall, you did very well; a few of you did excellently; one or two did not do well at all. Our veteran, for instance,” he handed Richie his papers, with a large red D on the front, “did nothing more than take each sentence and simplify it. You did understand that the object was to strengthen the sentences, did you not?”

  “Yes, sir,” Richie said. “But I thought that simplifying them, making them easier to read and understand, did strengthen them.”

  “Sorry, but I don’t agree,” said Crane. “I think that often by simplifying sentences, we make them weaker. If a reader is not challenged by a sentence, it can easily float right past that person’s mind. But when a reader has to work at a sentence, when the mind has to digest it, then it, or at least its thought, remains permanently.”

  “I can see where that might apply to sentences written to teach,” Richie argued. “Textbook writing and such. But this is ‘creative’ writing, which I thought was to entertain, possibly enlighten, but not actually to educate, as in a math or science book, for instance. If we’re writing to entertain, shouldn’t we keep it as simple as possible?”

  “For what purpose?” Crane asked,

  “So that a greater number of people can enjoy it.”

  “My, my, that
sounds almost communistic,” Crane commented. He smiled at the class. “I thought our veteran fought against Communism in Korea.”

  The class laughed as Richie felt himself turn red. No matter what he said in class, Crane always made him look not only mistaken but foolish. Richie had yet to receive a grade higher than a D. And Crane never addressed him by name, referring to him only as “our veteran.” Had it not been for the fact that he was getting an A or B in every other class, he might have begun to harbor serious doubts that he was college material. As it was, he only wondered why he wasn’t learning anything in Crane’s class.

  After classes that day, with his D paper in his canvas book bag, and with troubled thoughts of Stan Klein on his mind, Richie stood just outside one of the doors watching rain come down in torrents. He had a two-block walk to the streetcar and did not want to get his books and papers wet. As he was standing there, Linda came up beside him with her own book bag and an umbrella.

  “Hi,” she said. She was opening the umbrella.

  “Oh, hi.”

  “Wouldn’t you be closer to the dorm going out the other end of the building?” she asked.

  “I don’t live in the dorm. I’ve got a little apartment a couple of miles from here.”

  “I didn’t know that,” Linda said, surprised.

  Shrugging, Richie said, “How could you? We never talk about anything personal.”

  She colored slightly. “That’s right, we don’t.” Looking around at the pouring rain, she said, “Would you like a lift home? I have a car.”

  Now it was Richie who was surprised. “I didn’t know you had a car.”

  “How could you? We never talk about anything personal. Listen, you hold my books, I’ll take the umbrella, go get my car, and pick you up.” Without waiting for his concurrence, she handed him her book bag, put the umbrella over her head, and dashed away through puddles toward the student parking lot.

  While she was gone, Richie thought of Stan again, sitting in a cell wearing yellow coveralls, waiting to go to the electric chair. He knew Stan was guilty, knew he should be punished for killing the policeman. But in Richie’s mind there was mitigation: the policeman was also trying to kill Stan. Granted, that was his job, but Richie knew how it felt to kill under the pressure of fear; he remembered the Chinese woman with the white flag.