LOWELL B. KOMIE
THERE WAS A LITTLE TAVERN that I remember on California Avenue near the Criminal Court where they served blood red Polish sausages from a huge communal jar while you played “bumper pool” and people passing on the streets would pause by the tavern window and watch your game. That is the place, “Anton’s Tavern,” that is freshest in my memory. And when I think about my friend Casimir Zymak, I remember him best at “Anton’s” by the pool table, standing there with cue stick in hand, very formally turning to you with a bow and a smile, drinking his cognac down, his tiny eyes glistening with pleasure.
Casimir Zymak was perhaps a great criminal lawyer. Few members of the Chicago Bar remember him other than as a drunken old man, lurching through the courthouse corridors, muttering and cursing to himself. He was so pathetic, perhaps even mad, that those of us who had known him and admired him grew afraid of him and abandoned him. Occasionally a friend would slip a ten or a twenty into his pocket and try to talk to him about the old days, but Zymak would stumble away like a punch drunk fighter.
In his last days before his death, his skin yellowed and grew taut on his face, and where once smile lines had etched the eyes and corners of his mouth, the skin cracked into overlays. His clothes grew filthy and his teeth rotted. He spent his last few months hanging around the Traffic Court, trying to cadge fifty dollar cases. Zymak, who had tried more than one hundred murder cases and had been one of the defense Bar’s most courageous and skillful practitioners, was then brought before the Chicago Bar Association to answer a disbarment proceeding. Fortunately, death intervened and the proceeding was dismissed. I remember his funeral procession. On the way to the cemetery the cortege passed the Criminal Court Building and the hearse stopped for a moment of tribute. I think he would have liked that. He was, in many ways, a curiously formal man. He believed in rite and ceremony and he would have regarded the stopping of the hearse as proper and not maudlin.
I believe I first met Zymak in 1954 or 1955. I had been just admitted to the Bar and was working for a firm that had a very broad general practice, including some criminal defense work. Occasionally, I was sent out to the Criminal Court at 26th and California to argue some minor motion. Often, I’d stop at “Anton’s” and have a beer and sausage sandwich for lunch. It was a friendly neighborhood tavern. Anton was a fat, bald ex-cop with a loud voice who would run a tab on a young lawyer graciously and with the same coarse humor that he reserved for the cash customers. He thought nothing of bellowing out, “Hey, fat ass,” to a friend in the crowd at his bar, mostly minor pols from the court
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building, bailiffs, stenos, defense lawyers and a few cops. It was a good crowd and if you lingered over your beer or cognac long enough into the afternoon, there would always be plenty of action in the back booths where the shadows fell.
Out of these shadows, late one afternoon, stepped Casimir Zymak, lipstick smeared across his face, flushed and excited, drink in hand, a rather fat, older woman blowing kisses to him from one of the booths. I was introduced to him as a young lawyer who had just passed the Bar examination. I remember that he was very grave and rigid despite the lipstick smears. He shook my hand and smiled and told me that I had chosen an honorable profession, the greatest of all for service to my fellow man. “But one word of advice . . . young man . . . get yourself a jockey. Right off . . . get yourself a jockey or you’ll never be a success.” With those words, he ruffled my hair, clapped me on the back and went back to the booth and the fat lady and a round of fresh drinks.
Some months later, I learned what Zymak had meant when he told me to “get myself a jockey.” He meant a “runner” someone who would chase after cases and deliver clients to the lawyer for a percentage of the fee. I had thought that “ambulance chasing” was a practice limited to certain members of the personal injury Bar, but I soon learned that many of the criminal lawyers I met employed “runners.”
Very often, the “runner” would also be the lawyer’s banker. Sometimes the “runner” would virtually own the lawyer. The lawyer would borrow from his man or fail to pay him his full cut on a case and soon the lawyer would only be working to pay off his jockey. It was typical of Zymak that when we first met he would tell me in a loud voice to go out and “get myself a jockey.” He had contempt for the score of “runners” that he owed, many of whom hung around “Anton’s,” and in his own way he liked to defy them. He knew though that the jockey would end up riding the man.
Zymak was ridden principally by a jockey named “Petey.” He had other jockeys all looking for a cut of the action, but “Petey” was his principal jockey.
Petey was a short, fat, pop-eyed little Greek with a flushed face and a long nose. He was also very good with his belly. He and Zymak would stroll into the saloon about four in the afternoon, Petey always waddling a few steps ahead, and Petey would move up to the bar and stick his belly out and yell “Fill’er up, you foul mouthed Polack.” It was a routine. Everyone would laugh and Anton would snort, “The Greek’s here, cover up behind, all you finks, watch the lousy Greek.” Then Zymak would come up to the bar, nodding his way with curt, serious greetings, shaking hands limply with friends.
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After Zymak’s death, I lost touch with Petey. I heard though that he had trouble finding himself another man and that he hung around the tracks a lot, running bets and touting. Maybe Petey had always dreamed of becoming a real jock, but by then he was too old and too sad. When Zymak went down, they say he was into Petey for twenty grand.
The last time I saw Petey was in a little Greek grocery store out on Harrison Street down the block from the Kringas-Marzullo funeral home. I’d been to a wake and afterwards stopped in the grocery to buy some bread, cheese and black olives for a midnight snack. Petey was playing cards with some old men at a table at the rear of the store next to the freezer where the racks of lamb were hanging ready for the Easter customers. He saw me and gave me a wink but he didn’t get up to say hello. He was very thin and when he looked at me, I knew I made him remember Zymak, so I just paid for the groceries and left without going over to him. A lost jock, without a mount, his colors struck, I’ve never seen him again.
In addition to Petey the “runner,” Zymak was always accompanied by a bodyguard, a man named Rettig. Rettig didn’t have all his marbles. A great, ham-fisted, square headed man, his eyes shone with docile madness. He was always in and out of Chicago State, and when he was out, he was with Zymak. He was the kind of man who would wear a white hoodlum’s fedora perched on the top of his huge head and stand around, his tongue catching the spittle ebbing from a corner of his mouth. Rettig was built like a pro tackle but couldn’t be trusted to return with change from a cigar stand. He was just there, always ready at Zymak’s side. I was told that Rettig wasn’t really Zymak’s bodyguard. That many years ago, after Rettig’s mother had died, Zymak had himself appointed as Rettig’s conservator. Rettig had been left a small income from a six flat on Thomas Street and Zymak handled the money and gave Rettig an allowance. Anyway, when I met Zymak, he and Rettig were living together in the six flat on Thomas Street. Rettig slept in the back sun parlor and kept house, washing Zymak’s socks and in the mornings, frying bacon and eggs. I remember picking Zymak up, on the way to court, and there would be Rettig in his Fedora and underwear, bent over the stove. I always stayed out on the porch because I was afraid of taking the big fellow by surprise.
Zymak’s wife had divorced him early in his career and Rettig, although a poor substitute for a good wife, was regarded by Zymak as a much better deal than the former Mrs. Zymak. Whenever Rettig had a spell and became unmanageable, Zymak would move out and call the cops to take him back to Chicago State. Then with Rettig in the hospital, Zymak would move in with Petey or just sleep in the office. When Zymak died, I was told that Rettig was put away for good. Rettig too had
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probably lost a bundle on Zymak, but he never knew it and had he known, the huge bodyguard would have been beyond sadness.
Casimir Zymak was a Pole. He had a round face, high cheekbones, a ruddy complexion, it was a very mobile face. When he was lost in thought, his forehead would crinkle into pensive lines. When he laughed, his face would shine with delight. He was a young man in appearance, although when I met him he was already in his mid-fifties and died before reaching sixty. His hair remained untouched by gray, a flaxen color, fine and closely cut and his voice was deep and strong and richly accented. He was a short, solid looking man. He had the appearance of being strong and assured, always looking to me like a mill hand or tool and die maker dressed for a Sunday outing. When you shook his hand you would expect to feel the hand of a working man, but his hand was as smooth as an old stone.
Zymak and I became friends, largely because I enjoyed shooting pool. Many afternoons we would shoot pool at “Anton’s,” while waiting for his jury to come out with a verdict. He would lecture me on points of law. He enjoyed our discussions as much as I did and it gave him someone to talk to other than Petey and Rettig.
He was a good pool shot. He liked to shoot with a cigarette hanging from his lips and squint at the shot through the smoke. Then he’d place his hand in a careful bridge and slowly aim the shot, drawing his cue, back and forth, back and forth until he stroked. It was great relaxation for him. We became good friends. I was his pool playing friend and student. He was my professor. After the games, often we’d break for a sandwich or a glass of wine. If his case was going well, he’d be in an expansive mood and ask Anton to mix up a punch bowl cocktail that was mixed with Southern Comfort as its base and colored with grenadine. Anton served these drinks in thin-stemmed, fragile glasses he reserved for Zymak’s special cocktail. Petey, Rettig, Zymak and I would retire to a table and Anton would bring the drinks through the crowd, carrying them high on a platter, and serving us with serious dignity. Then Zymak would toast us all and talk about how after his case he would head for the Wisconsin lake country. He always pronounced it “Visconsin.” There, in “Visconsin,” by a lake, he would get away to relax and enjoy the sun and the clear air. It was always his dream “to take a little holiday,” and I was to be his traveling companion.
After I had known Zymak for about one year, he asked me to help him with some of his cases. If he had a point he wanted researched or a motion to type that involved a legal argument, I’d work in his office after hours. The next morning, before court, I’d leave the papers for him.
Then one night he threw a murder indictment on the desk and asked me to assist him in the trial. I had never seen an indictment before.
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Zymak had been carrying the document around with him for several days. It was crumpled and worn, stapled in a blue cover, with a half moon of a coffee cup staining the first page. Zymak put his glasses on, down forward on his nose, and in a quiet, formal voice read the indictment to me.
I did help him with the case. The defendant was a young man from Texas who had been charged with the murder of his wife. After an extensive trial, he was found guilty by a jury and was sentenced to life imprisonment. The jury had been qualified by the prosecution to render a verdict of death by electrocution. Zymak had no defense to the murder charge, but he saved the young man’s life by asking the jury for mercy. I remember he spoke to them about the plea made to Pontius Pilate to give mercy to Christ.
I only remember fragments of the trial. The blue prison-made suit of the defendant and his maroon tie. The way the defendant would get down on his haunches in the prisoner’s cell, as we interviewed him, he would smoke and look up at us and then blow the smoke down through his cupped hand holding the cigarette. His fingers were stained heavily from nicotine. Occasionally he would grunt a few words to us, but he wasn’t at all verbal and had little to say in his defense except that he refused to admit his guilt. He killed his wife because he was drunk. She had been running around with other men, and one day after drinking all afternoon he killed her in a drunken rage. He told us that he just didn’t remember what happened. It wasn’t a novel case and the young man had no apology or remorse for his action. So he hunkered down in the prisoner’s cell and traced intricate patterns with a fore-finger on the damp floor and listened as we plotted out strategy. There were no witnesses to the killing. The State’s case was entirely circumstantial. They had the neighbor woman downstairs who heard screaming and shots and heard the dying wife calling her husband’s name in wild shrieks. The prosecution found the gun next to the body and traced it to the defendant’s ownership. Witnesses were produced who testified to other violent arguments between the young couple. Friends of the girl testified that she had long feared for her life. One of the bartenders at a tavern where the young man had been served testified that the defendant had shown him the gun on the afternoon of the shooting and told him that he was going to kill his wife.
Zymak had no defense to this testimony except skillful cross examination. We had a list of the State’s witnesses that had been given to us with the indictment. We went over the list with the defendant in the prisoner’s lockup and asked him about the witnesses and what they would say. He would try to tell us and Zymak would listen and determine points for cross examination and discuss them with me. Then
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the young man would look up and ask us, “Do I have a chance?” or “How’s it goin’?” Zymak would reassure him always.
I remember the high-backed, leather counsel chairs. The murder weapon, a pistol, tagged and marked as an exhibit with a red cardboard tag. One of the prosecutors, playing with the gun in front of the jury, twirling the empty chamber on its sprocket and testing the tension of the trigger. The bullets were referred to by Zymak as “pellets” and were all tagged with similar red tags, and placed on the prosecutor’s table. I remember after the end of each day’s session, walking down the long, empty halls of the Criminal Court building and out the main entrance into darkness, the sudden feeling of relief to be out in the night air and the surprise of neon light and movement on the streets. In the morning, coming into the building, coffee from the blind vendor’s stand at the right of the elevators. The sound of cell doors closing and the rattle of keys as the defendant was brought into the courtroom. Bailiffs in blue jackets, coats open, showing side arms. Families sitting on the back benches of the courtroom, waiting for the morning trial call, sitting solemn and frightened. The morning call of cases and the prisoners brought from the lockup, unshaven, pale, shuffling to the bench for continuances. Police officers dressed in blue sweaters sitting in the first few rows. The way the jurors averted their eyes from the defendant when they returned to the courtroom after their deliberation.
After the jury came in with the verdict of guilty, Zymak and I returned to “Anton’s” and met Rettig and Petey. Zymak was very quiet. He felt that he had failed the young man although he had saved his life. We all sat with our drinks and Petey tried to crack a few jokes, but we were bone tired. Anton brought out a bottle, a very strong yellow drink that had little seeds in it, a liqueur, Zymak called it “Polish dynamite.” He said the seeds were caraway seeds and that his father and his uncles would drink it after a hunt. Then he talked about his life as a young boy in Poland and about the towns and the noblemen and the castles he had seen. Petey, Rettig and I listened as he talked. He mentioned the Radziwill family and their long history as Polish nobility and their skill as great huntsmen and soldiers. I remember how Rettig’s eyes had glistened. Then Casimir turned to me and raised his glass and promised me again that someday, when all this was forgotten, the two of us would go together and stand at the edge of the lake in “Visconsin” and listen to the birds diving and calling to each other in the sunlight.
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