Political Poison

by Mark Richard Zubro

  “The Fifth Ward is different,” she said. She gave them a brief history of the ward. Before being annexed to Chicago in various stages in the nineteenth century, the Hyde Park area of the ward was a well-to-do suburb. A major reason for its history of unconventional politics came from the prodigious influence of the University of Chicago. The ward had a long tradition of liberal independent aldermen. “Getting votes for the machine candidate in the Fifth Ward can be difficult.”

  “What about having a Democratic party committeeman,” Fenwick asked.

  “The party managed to keep its thumb on the real power. The aldermen could do what they wanted. Party politics at the precinct level was another matter. The party’s control wasn’t as great in the Fifth Ward as in other places, but it was still there.”

  “What about the election when Gideon Giles ousted Mike McGee?” Turner asked.

  “Mike McGee.” She spoke the name wistfully, almost sadly. “I grew up on stories about Mike McGee. He was one of the most loved and hated men in my house. We had regular arguments about him. One time my dad banished my older brother and sister for three months for speaking well of him. My dad had his loyalties and he thought his kids should share them.”

  “What were the arguments about?” Turner asked.

  “Some of it was class-related. McGee was lace-curtain Irish. We were dirt-poor back-of-the-yards. He was also a liberal. He’d oppose the mayor at critical times. Even criticized the first Mayor Daley. My father idolized Dick Daley. In the sixties my dad thought the only thing standing between revolution and anarchy was Richard J. Daley. My dad saw the criticism as betrayal.”

  “What about yourself?” Turner asked. “How did you see him?”

  “I thought McGee was an opportunistic politician like most alderman. Ready to make a buck or a deal. I’ve never understood him.” Eliot herself had gotten a job and put herself through law school, then slaved in democratic precinct politics for a long time. She moved to the 43rd when she realized she’d never get higher up in the patriarchal politics of the southwest side. She wasn’t bitter about that. “I understand the people and sympathize with many of their causes. I believe that all politics is local. Pick up the garbage. Get them city services in a timely way. Keep the pot holes filled. My dad’s connections got me started in the Forty-third. After the 1991 remap the Forty-third Ward opened up. I ran and won.”

  “How well did you know Giles?” Turner asked.

  “Not very well. I found him offensive. For him everything had to be shrill, had to be on fast forward, had to be now. He had no sense of compromise. Worse, he didn’t have a good sense of what the ward needed. You can cater to the shrill social-welfare crowd only for so long. People in his ward went without because he was an idiot.”

  “What about beating McGee for committeeman? What happened there?” Turner asked.

  “You can have two stories. The current political wisdom or the Irish grapevine.”

  “I’ll take both,” Turner said.

  Eliot hesitated then said to Turner, “I’ll trust you for three reasons. One, Ian set this up, and I trust his judgement. Two, you’re gay. Three, after listening to you, I trust you.”

  Everybody paused, sipped coffee. Eliot continued, “Conventional wisdom. Mike McGee got too old. He offended almost every group in the ward. The black politicians finally got fed up and abandoned him in the primary. If they’d been able to unite in the general election, they could probably have beaten Giles in the runoff.”

  In Chicago all the candidates run in the same primary regardless of party. If no candidate won fifty percent plus one vote, they had a runoff between the top two vote-getters.

  The waitress refilled their coffee cups. When the waitress left, Eliot continued, “The inside gossip says that somebody moved in with a ton of money. Enough to buy off all of Mike McGee’s major supporters.”

  “How did Giles get their support?” Turner asked.

  “The Irish grapevine says he had to promise them something,” Eliot said, “but I haven’t heard what. I’ve tried to figure it out. He hasn’t had a pattern of appointments that raise eyebrows. He hasn’t voted for any particular utility or money interest. In fact, he’s always against them. He just rants about causes. I figure there’s got to be a pattern somewhere. It just hasn’t been discovered yet.”

  “How would we find the pattern?” Fenwick asked.

  “I don’t know. If some of the wiliest politicians in the city haven’t been able to, it could be impossible to find. And it’s not for lack of trying. I’ve heard several aldermen and the mayor’s office have had squads of people digging to find his source of money.”

  “So the guy’s very clever,” Fenwick said.

  “Maybe there’s nothing to find,” Turner said.

  “Got to be,” Eliot said. “The idea that somebody got paid-off is too current to be totally false.”

  “Who could we ask about it?” Turner asked.

  “My father,” Eliot said.

  Turner looked at her over her cup of coffee and raised a quizzical eyebrow.

  “Yeah, he has trouble with my being a lesbian. He’s also secretly very proud of what I’ve accomplished. All the other kids in the family have dead-end city jobs. I’m the only one who made a name. He might be able to give you a lead or two.”

  She used the pay phone to set up the appointment. She came back to the table. “My father’s officially retired, but you’ll find him in the ward office. Can’t keep him away and can’t shut him up. Be careful or he’ll tell you a million stories of his wild Irish youth in the heart of Chicago’s south side.”

  They thanked her and left. Fenwick and Turner took Lake Shore Drive to the Stevenson Expressway, to the Dan Ryan. Chicago expressways had generally understandable monick-ers, named for reasonably famous politicians: the Eisenhower, the Kennedy, the Stevenson, and then there was the Dan Ryan. Everybody knew who the first three people were. Nobody knew who Dan Ryan was or how he got an expressway named after him. Old Dan was a relatively obscure party functionary, son of an obscure party functionary. Nothing like loyalty to the old Chicago machine to get you immortalized in concrete.

  They took Thirty-fifth Street past the new Comiskey Park and turned south on Halsted to Exchange. This was the mayor’s ward, the Eleventh. They passed frame houses and brick bungalows and numerous aging Roman Catholic churches. The neighborhood came about in the 1830s when Irish immigrants arrived to help construct the Illinois-Michigan Canal. They built houses south of the Chicago River. In those days it was often referred to as “Cabbage Patch,” because residents grew cabbage in their gardens. The name changed to “Bridgeport” because a bridge across the river at Ashland Avenue was too low for barges to pass under. Traders would unload on one side of the bridge, and then reload their materials on the other side. Perhaps the most famous part of the neighborhood was the old stockyards. The Union Stock Yards came from a merger in 1865 of many smaller companies. For years, vast herds of cattle, sheep, and pigs set off a memorable stench as they came there to be slaughtered.

  The ward office turned out to be an unprepossessing one-story brick building. They walked up to the front counter. People strode about a twenty-by-thirty room with purpose in their steps. Some sat at computer terminals quietly typing. Ringing phones were answered promptly in soft voices. A smiling young woman greeted them cheerfully. She took them to corner room in the rear of the office.

  A man behind a large desk rose to greet them. He was immense, tall as well as broad, with white hair and a red face, but when he spoke it was with a soft Irish burr. Brendan Eliot smiled at them. He said, “The alderman said I could use his office this morning. A courtesy to an old man. My daughter spoke most highly of you.”

  Turner and Fenwick sat in two comfortable leather chairs facing the old man who sat in a high back swivel rocker. The walls were covered with sports bric-a-brac related to the White Sox. Crammed amid the jock heroes were photos of the mayor and the alderman with various politicians,
and pictures of the alderman with his family.

  While Turner was sure Mary Ann had told her father the purpose of their visit, he went over it again.

  “Gideon Giles,” Eliot murmured when Turner finished. “A man who could have done a lot for the people of his ward or the city. Never knew how to get things done or get along.”

  Turner said, “We were wondering about his race with Mike McGee. How did Giles manage to win?”

  At the name McGee, Brendan Eliot’s face turned nearly purple, but his voice remained soft. He said, “Mike McGee was a traitor. His lace-curtain ways.” The sneer in his voice left them no doubt that “lace curtain” was a bad thing to be. He told them of how the “lace curtain” Irish were those who got enough money and moved out of the Eleventh to the Nineteenth Ward, the Morgan Park and Beverly areas. “For years those fools fought us for control of the city. Used to call them ‘the Irish turkeys of Beverly.’ They lost every time they tried to beat us.”

  “But McGee was in the Fifth Ward,” Fenwick said.

  “The man was odd. Never knew what was good for him. His family moved out of the old neighborhood, but old Mike was a bit of the rebel even then. Did you know he graduated summa cum laude from the University of Chicago? Took a lot of money. He had to work very hard. Thought he was better than the rest of us. That independent streak went over real well with all the pointy heads in that neighborhood. We knew him for what he was: shanty Irish trying to thumb his nose at the rest of us. That’s why he opposed the mayor when he did. Wanted to cause trouble. I bet he never believed in one of the causes he fought for or against.”

  “How could Giles have beaten him?” Turner asked.

  “Money. Lots of it.”

  “From where?” Turner asked.

  Eliot shrugged. “Somebody had to cut a deal with the other politicians in the ward. Mike McGee had that ward under his belt. He never should have lost.”

  “Who could tell us where the money came from and who made the deals?” Turner asked.

  The old Irishman smiled. Turner’s cop instincts told him a lie was coming. What he got was an enormous evasion. Somehow Eliot managed to tell them a fifteen-minute story about his boyhood without revealing another thing about Chicago politics.

  In the car Fenwick said, “Charming old liar.”

  Turner said, “Storyteller is more polite. I think we should at least try the other politicians in the ward. If they abandoned McGee, they might at least tell us why.”

  “In this city? Getting the truth out of anybody in ward politics is going to be tough.”

  “Let’s try.”

  They stopped at Area Ten headquarters. Carruthers and Roderiguez weren’t around. No one had any other news on the case. None of the other detectives in the Area Ten knew enough about Fifth Ward politics to help them find out who had the real power. They called the Prairie Avenue police district, which included Hyde Park. An old buddy of Fenwick’s was a sergeant. Fenwick talked to him for fifteen minutes, scribbling an occasional note.

  Fenwick hung up and said, “I got it.” He showed Turner a list. “My buddy is fairly sure that these are the most powerful people in the ward.”

  Turner didn’t recognize any of the names.

  They took Lake Shore Drive south to Hyde Park. Their first stop was on the west side of Washington Park. They took Fifty-fifth Street to State, then south on State Street, a sharp right on Fifty-seventh, and half a block to their destination. They got out of the car and Turner saw Fenwick pat both of the weapons he carried. The neighborhood wasn’t the best and the structure they approached was as unsavory as any in the city. Iron grillwork covered the windows on the first and second floor of a five-story building. Windows within the grillwork had been covered from the inside with uneven boards. Graffiti ran along the graying cement brick facing. Turner recognized some of the gang symbols and identification marks. The upper stories seemed to be mostly intact, but badly in need of a cleaning and a paint job.

  Several surly teenagers eyed them suspiciously as they approached the door. The youngsters said nothing and averted their eyes as the cops passed. They swung open the ground-floor door and entered a vestibule. It smelled of disinfectant, and while most of the surfaces were dirt encrusted, someone had obviously tried to keep the trash picked up. New bronze mailboxes gleamed on their left. The address they had indicated a third-floor office. An inner door that may have at one time needed to be opened by a tenant from their apartment, yielded to Turner’s twist of the knob.

  The first two flights of stairs continued the motif of the entryway, clean and neat but in need of repair.

  At the top of the second flight of stairs they met a barrier of newly walled plaster and an unvarnished wooden door.

  “This can’t be right,” Fenwick said. He checked the piece of paper he’d written the address down on, shook his head. “I wrote it right. Can’t believe some big-time politician lives or works out of this place.”

  Turner knocked on the door. They waited through several moments of silence. Turner raised his arm to knock again. The door swung open on silent hinges.

  A youthful African-American male in a dark-gray suit, white shirt, and tie greeted them gravely. They showed him their identification, and he moved aside to let them in.

  The room they entered took up the entire third floor. Turner could see out the windows on every side to the grey sky outside. A nicked and scarred grand staircase in the center of the room led to the floor above. Around the room people sat at old wooden desks. Turner heard the sounds of computer keys clicking, and a printer to his left scrolled out copy. He saw fax machines and numerous computer screens. Telephones buzzed softly instead of ringing.

  Fenwick asked to see Martha Chambers, the person his sergeant contact recommend they start with. The person who opened the door asked them to wait for a moment. He retired to a nearby console, spoke softly into an intercom. He returned and said, “Ms. Chambers will see you now.”

  “The Chambers name rings a faint bell,” Turner murmured as they crossed the room.

  Fenwick shrugged. “Doesn’t mean anything to me.”

  The young man led them up the grand staircase. For all the modernity Turner saw around the room, he was struck by a sense of age and permanence. Luxurious Persian area rugs around the room were old and discolored. Prints of early Chicago, one a sketch of Fort Dearborn, were faded in their frames. Up the staircase they found a hallway lined with a rose-colored carpet and with enclosed offices both to left and right. Turner caught glimpses of well-dressed men and women going about their tasks. At the end of the corridor the young man opened a solid oak door.

  Turner and Fenwick entered a small room with floor-to-ceiling bookcases along the entire south wall. A window opened to the west. A large map of the city covered the center of the north wall. In the middle of the room two faded velour couches faced each other. Between them was a coffee table made of a wooden door standing on legs of bricks.

  A woman Turner guessed to be in her thirties rose to greet them. She shook hands solemnly and indicated they should sit. The young man who led them in exited quietly. Turner explained that they were following leads in the Gideon Giles murder, and that they thought if they could understand the political situation in the ward, they might find someone who might have a motive for murder.

  Martha Chambers wore a grey blazer, matching skirt, and white blouse. She nodded gravely and spoke quietly. “I’m not sure how my small business here can help you.”

  The two detectives sat on the couch facing the window. Ms. Chambers sat on the other.

  Turner said, “We understand that powerful political forces pulled out on Mike McGee. We’d like to know why.”

  “Did you ask Mr. McGee?” she asked.

  “He’s old, and I think out of touch,” Turner said.

  “Your analysis is correct,” she said. “But why come to me. I’m not a politician.”

  “A contact gave us your name,” Fenwick said.

  She smil
ed. “If you had called, I could have saved you a visit. I have a small business here that has been doing work in the African-American community since my great-grandfather was elected alderman in 1920. He was one of the first African-American alderman in the city. We provide services to those in need: day care, jobs, housing.”

  “Do you know who might have enough power to sabotage Mike McGee?” Turner asked.

  “Sabotage?” she asked. “He simply lost an election.”

  Fenwick said, “Yes, ma’am, but we’re trying to find out why.”

  “Because his opponent got more votes.” Her smile took some of the sting from the comment.

  Turner said, “We understand that. We need to check to see if there is a political motive for his murder.”

  She said, “I’m sorry. We have no political connection. I suggest you try the mayor’s office. That’s where the political power is in this city, not in my small business here.”

  As they descended the stairs to the outside door Fenwick said, “This may all look old and outdated, but I bet that woman has more say in this ward than half the politicians. I wonder what’s in the rest of this building. It can’t just be her ‘little business.’ I’m suspicious.”

  Turner sighed. “We’ll have to research it when we get back to the station.”

  They grabbed some lunch and then for the next three hours they drove around the ward visiting a liquor store, an illegal betting parlor, a dry cleaners, and a rib joint, all of whose owners they found on their list of movers and shakers in the ward. At two of them they didn’t find the owners in. The others repeated Martha Chambers’s words that McGee lost because he was out of touch with his ward, but that none of them had enough connection or power to cause him to lose.

  “Double fuck,” Fenwick said as they drove north on Martin Luther King Drive back to the station. “They were lying,” Fenwick said. “I can feel it.”

  “What we need is an inside connection in the mayor’s office,” Turner said.