I smiled and my face took on a far away look as I recalled my early days, back in the early thirties.
“It was June 18, 1934,” I said. “It was a month before my twenty-third birthday. I can recall it all so vividly. Back then I still lived in Chicago. My brother, Phil helped me land a job on the Chicago Police Department alongside him. Those were exciting days.”
Monday, June 18, 1934 – Chicago, IL
I stood there in line, waiting for my name to be called during roll call that first day as a policeman. My big brother, Phil stood next to me, both of us in our newly starched, freshly pressed blue uniforms. We stood at attention as the duty sergeant called off the names of the men from our precinct.
Sergeant Nicholas Burns read from the roster, “Abernathy,” he said.
“Here,” Stan Abernathy said.
“Baker.”
“Here.”
“Bullock.”
“Here.”
“Cooper.”
“Here,” Phil and I said in unison and then turned to look at each other.
Sergeant Burns looked back down at the roster and said, “Cooper, Philip.”
“Here,” Phil said.
“Cooper, Matthew.”
“Here,” I said, my first day on the job.
When Sergeant Burns had finished with roll call we all sat and listened as he handed out the assignments. Phil drew traffic duty with his partner, Alvin Crenshaw. As a rookie, I was assigned to ride with my training officer, Roy Heller on routine patrol on the south side. Roy slid in behind the wheel and I sat next to him, focused on his every word as we rode the streets of Chicago.
We’d been riding for twenty minutes or so before I worked up the nerve to open my mouth. I turned to Roy and said, “What am I supposed to be doing, Mr. Heller?”
“It’s Roy,” he said, “and you aren’t supposed to be doing anything. You just sit there and observe for the next few days and you’ll learn a few things about being a cop. Think you can do that?”
“Sure,” I said, and turned back to face out the windshield of our 1933 Ford patrol car. It was a two-door sedan, mostly blue with white doors and rear quarter panels. It had a single gumball machine-style red light in the center of the roof directly over our heads.
Roy drove past four men crouched just inside an alley. It looked like they were shaking dice. I could have sworn I saw money exchange hands between shakes.
“Aren’t we going to…?” I said.
“No we’re not,” Roy said. “Lesson one – it’s a penny ante game and we’ve got more important things to do than roust a few guys shaking dice. Lesson two – what would happen if we were needed as backup to a serious crime and we were tied up breaking up a craps game? The other officers’ lives may depend on us getting there fast. See how it works, kid?”
“Yes,” I said meekly.
“You remember last March when President Roosevelt came to town?” Roy said.
“Sure,” I said. “Who doesn’t?”
“And you remember what happened to our own Mayor Cermak, who was riding in the car with him?” Roy said.
I nodded. “Uh huh.” I said.
“Now imagine the two of us on our way to join the motorcade,” Roy said. “On our way there we see four guys shooting craps in an alley. Suppose we’d stopped to roust them and then something happened to our mayor. How do you think we’d feel?”
“But something did happen to him,” I said. “Whoever was trying to shoot President Roosevelt, shot Mayor Cermak instead. Everybody knows that.”
“Okay,” Roy said. “Bad example. How about…?”
“I get it,” I said. “It’s all about priorities.”
“Good,” Roy said. “Now can we get on with our patrol?”
I didn’t answer, but went back to observing. Out my window I could see deteriorating neighborhoods and businesses that had fallen to neglect and vandalism. I remembered these places from my youth and it made me sad to see what had become of them. I turned to Roy.
“How long have you been doing this?” I said. “I mean, how long have you been a cop?”
“Well,” Roy said. “Let’s see now. This is my eighteenth year on the force so that would make it somewhere around nineteen fifteen. Yeah, it was just about this same time of year.”
“Do you remember your most exciting case?” I said.
“Exciting case?” Roy repeated. “Well, we really didn’t get cases like the detectives did, but there was a week back then that none of us will ever forget. It was July 27, 1919. I’d been on the force just four years and was on patrol on the south side, pretty much like we are today. A whole lot of blacks moved into the neighborhood and the Irish element around here didn’t really roll out the welcome mat, if you know what I mean. It was hot that July and the beaches were overcrowded. While it was never posted, or on the books as an actual law, the beaches were unofficially segregated back then. Some of the blacks wandered over into the white part of the beach and one thing led to another and before you knew it, someone had thrown a rock and hit one of the blacks in the head, killing him.”
“Ooh,” I said. “That couldn’t have ended good.”
“That’s the understatement of the year,” Roy said. “It started a race riot that lasted a week. The national guard had to be called out and by the time it had ended, more than five hundred people were injured and thirty-eight people were dead, including one of my fellow officers, John Simpson.”
“Wow,” I said, impressed by Roy’s war record.
“Believe me, kid,” Roy said. “You better pray something like that never happens again, especially while you’re on duty.
“What about all those stories about the gangsters?” I said. “Ever run up against any of them?”
“So far I’ve been lucky,” Roy said. “I’ve never crossed paths with any of ‘em and I hope to keep it that way.”
“You mean to tell me that with Prohibition still going on, that you never had occasion to tangle with any gangsters?” I said.
“I was talking about the well-known ones,” Roy said. “I’ve tangled with a few minor players over the years, but nothing that I couldn’t handle. Besides, from what I hear, the government is planning on repealing The Volstead Act. And it can’t be soon enough for me, let me tell you. That one law has caused more problems than it solved.”
I rode with Roy on patrol for the next three weeks and learned quite a bit from him. The most important thing I learned was never to take chances when confronting a suspect. It was the beginning of my fourth week as Roy’s partner and he’d pulled over a black Oldsmobile for speeding within the city limits. It was supposed to be a routine traffic stop. I stood at the rear of the passenger side of the Olds while Roy approached the driver’s side. The front window was already down and Roy had no sooner stepped up to the window to ask for the driver’s license when three shots rang out in rapid succession. Roy fell dead there on the street before he’d even had a chance to draw his weapon. The driver got out and turned toward me, but I’d already had my .38 trained on him. His shot went wide, mine didn’t. I hit him in the left side of his neck and blew out his jugular vein. He fell to the pavement and bled out in less than a minute. The passenger who’d been riding with him gave up without a struggle.
Monday, July 23, 1934 – Chicago, IL
I’d been with the Chicago Police for a little better than a month and was working with my new partner Ben Lockwood. Prohibition had been repealed last December and the crime rate had dropped since then. The captain had held a special meeting during roll call that morning.
“Men,” the captain said. “As you may or may not have heard by now, last night the FBI eliminated the country’s most wanted man, John Dillinger. He was shot to death late last night shortly after coming out of The Biograph Theater in the twenty-four hundred block of North Lincoln Avenue. Mr. Dillinger has been a thorn in our sides ever since he’d robbed the Unity Trust And Savings Bank last December and got away with more than eight thous
and dollars. Well, I’m happy to say that we can now focus our energies on other felons, so keep your eyes open during your patrols.”
Ben and I had been assigned patrol duty in the area between South Kedzie Avenue on the east and South Central Park Avenue on the west and between West Cermak Road on the north and West Thirty-First Street on the south. Our patrol covered more than sixty square blocks in this south side neighborhood.
It was shortly after nine-thirty that Monday night when we’d passed a Mom and Pop store near the corner of Twenty-fourth and Kedzie. The lights were on but as we passed the store the shade was being pulled down over the front door. I knew the neighborhood and I knew the people who ran this particular store. They never closed up shop before ten p.m. Ben pulled to a stop around the corner and we got out to have a closer look.
“Cover the back door,” Ben said. “I’ll take the front.”
I walked around to the back and Ben eased himself up to the corner of the store’s large front window and peeked around into the store. He could see Pop Kwaznewski standing there with his hands raised. His wife cowered behind the counter. Holding a large handgun on Pop was a kid, probably no older than twenty, with a three-day stubble of a beard and a denim jacket with some sort of homemade insignia drawn on the back. As Ben watched, Pop opened the cash register and withdrew the bills from the drawer and handed the stack to the kid. Ben couldn’t hear what the kid said, but whatever it was made Pop kneel in front of him. This was never a good sign. The kid leveled the gun at Pop’s head.
Ben kicked the front door open and put a bullet directly into the kid’s right ear. It exited out the other ear and the kid fell dead on the spot. Pop collapsed, his hand gripping his left arm. His wife hurried out from behind the counter and knelt at her husband’s side. Pop’s face was pale and his lips were turning blue. Ben grabbed Pop’s phone and called for an ambulance and then turned his attentions to the man lying on the floor. Ben looked down at his wife, who was cradling her husband’s head in her lap.
I came in through the back door, my .38 drawn and scanning the room. Once I saw that the immediate danger had been dealt with, I holstered my weapon and squatted next to Ben. Ben loosened Pop’s collar and then began going through his pockets, beginning with his shirt. He found a small tin and popped it open. Inside were a dozen or more small, white pills. Ben plucked one of the pills from the tin and stuck it under Pop’s tongue. Within a minute Pop’s eyes opened and he looked up to see his wife crying. Then he looked over at Ben and smiled.
“Don’t move, Pop,” Ben said. “An ambulance is on the way.”
I looked at Ben in amazement. “How’d you know about the nitroglycerin pills in his pocket?” I said.
“This is my neighborhood,” Ben said. “And Mom and Pop are old friends. I’ve spent enough time in this store talking with them both and on several occasions I’ve see Pop use the pills. He told me about his heart condition so I knew he must have had the pills on him.”
The ambulance arrived and loaded Pop into it on a stretcher. Mom rode along in the back with him to the hospital. Ben told her not to worry about the store and that he’d lock up after the shooting team had finished with their investigation and had taken the kid’s body away. Ben knew where they kept the keys and two hours after the whole ordeal started, he locked the front door and dropped the keys in their mail slot on the front door.
Monday, January 21, 1935 - Chicago, IL
Ben and I were sitting in the coffee shop during our break that morning, having coffee and sweet rolls. Ben was reading the paper and I was stirring my coffee, lost in thought. It had snowed Saturday night and had kept snowing until we found ourselves in a blizzard. We were there in the coffee shop to warm up as much as we were there for the coffee.
“Hey, look at this, Matt,” Ben said, folding the paper and sticking it in front of me. “Last Saturday some company called Cooper’s, Incorporated sold the first pair of men’s briefs. Hey, maybe you’re in line for the company fortune. You think so?”
I took the paper from him and quickly read about the men’s underwear that they’d dubbed The Jockey, since it offered a level of support only found in jock straps up until now. The first pair was sold downtown at Marshall Field’s.
I handed the paper back to Ben. “Nope,” I said. “No relation. Looks like I’ll have to keep working for a living.”
“Too bad, Matt,” Ben said. “I was gonna offer to be your manservant. And speaking of working for a living, we’d better hit the streets again and start earning our paychecks. Let’s go.”
I hurriedly stuffed the last morsel of sweet roll into my mouth and took one last drink from my coffee cup and followed Ben out to our patrol car. We’d had the patrol car fitted with snow chains so we wouldn’t end up contributing to the traffic mess that was already clogging Chicago streets that January day.
Around three that afternoon the sun started to poke its head out from behind a cloud. The fallen snow was so bright I could have used a pair of dark sunglasses. Ben and I parked the patrol car on Twenty-Sixth Street and patrolled the next few blocks on foot. As we passed Goldblatt’s Department Store a woman came running around the corner with a man chasing her. She rushed right by Ben and me and a moment later the man followed. When he saw us he skidded to a stop a few feet from us and turned and ran in the opposite direction.
Ben gestured toward the alley and I ran through it to the other side of the block while Ben ran after the man. The man had run around the block and was widening his lead on Ben when I stepped out from the alley and grabbed him by the arm, spinning him around. He fell at my feet just as Ben caught up to him. Ben grabbed the man by the arm and lifted him to a standing position.
“You’re in big trouble, boy,” Ben said to the man.
“What are you talking about?” The man said. “I wasn’t doing anything.”
“Yeah?” I said. “The woman you were chasing didn’t seem to think that way.”
“Woman?” The man said. “That was no woman, that was my wife. We were running for the bus and you made me miss it. She’s probably wondering where I disappeared to.”
“Your wife?” Ben said. “Then why’d you run the other way when you saw us?”
The man hesitated for a moment and then said, “I don’t know. I just did, that’s all.”
“Okay,” Ben said. “Break out some I.D. Come on.”
The man plucked his wallet from his back pocket and opened it to his driver’s license and held it up for Ben to see.
“Would you take it out of the wallet?” Ben said.
“Sure, sure,” the man said, sliding the license out. “Here, ya happy now?”
Ben read the name off the license. “Harold Snider, is that right?”
Snider nodded. “That’s what it says, ain’t it?”
“Don’t get smart with me, boy,” Ben said. “You understand?”
Snider said nothing.
“You understand?” Ben repeated and then accented it with a tap to Snider’s knee with his nightstick.
“Yeah,” Snider said.
“Come on,” Ben said, pulling Snider by the arm back toward Twenty-Sixth Street.
“Where are you taking me?” Snider demanded.
“Just shut up and come with me,” Ben said. When we got back to the patrol car, Ben got on the radio and called Snider’s name and stats in to the dispatcher and waited.
A moment later the dispatcher came back on the radio. “Harold Snider is wanted for seven outstanding traffic warrants.”
Ben looked at Snider and smiled. “Gotcha.”
Snider rolled his eyes and sighed. “Of all the dumb luck.”
“Let’s go, Snider,” Ben said and then looked at me with a knowing glance.
“You see, kid,” Ben said to me. “It’s all in the experience and knowing what to look for.”
“How’d you know?” I said.
“Maybe it was his wife,” Ben said. “And maybe they were running for a bus, but an innocent man doesn�
��t run the other way when he sees two uniformed officers. I just knew he was hiding something.”
We booked Snider in and placed him in a holding cell pending bail. Ben finished the paperwork and we were back on the street in an hour, cruising the rest of Twenty-Sixth Street. When we got to South Central Park Avenue, Ben turned south toward Thirty-First Street. There was nothing special happening along the way and when he got to Thirtieth Street, Ben turned east, back toward Kedzie Avenue.
“Where are you going?” I said.
“Down to Sawyer,” Ben said. “I want to drive past McCormick Elementary School. It’s up on Twenty-Seventh.”
“I know,” I said. “I went to school there myself. Why did you want to ride past there?”
“I don’t know,” Ben said. “Just to break the routine of heading up Kedzie again. Why, you in a hurry to get someplace?”
“No,” I said. “Go ahead.”
When we got to Twenty-Seventh Street Ben circled the block, looking at the school from all four angles. “Okay,” he said. “Now we can get back on the main streets. That’s all I wanted to see.”
Ben drove back to Kedzie Avenue on Twenty-Seventh Street. On the northeast corner sat a filling station. Traffic was clear on Kedzie and Ben could have easily driven onto it, but he just stayed where he was, watching the filling station.
“Reminiscing again?” I said.
Ben held up one hand and said, “Shhh. Wait a minute. I thought I saw something strange.”
I looked toward the filling station and saw a maroon sedan sitting alongside the station, its engine running and a man sitting on the passenger’s side. Through the plate glass window I could make out the figure of a man rifling the cash drawer. A moment later he hurried out of the station, got into the maroon sedan and sped away, south on Kedzie. Ben hit the lights and siren and followed after him. The maroon sedan sped through the next two red lights with Ben hot on his tail.
The Complete Cooper Collection (All 97 Stories) Page 135