Jimmy Parisi Part Two Box Set

by Thomas Laird

  “I hear you.”

  “There comes a time…Aw, shit. You know what I’m saying?”

  “Yes sir. You want me to retire while I’m still not a section eight.”

  “You know I didn’t mean anything like that.”

  “I’m sorry, sir. Of course you didn’t.”

  I look over at Tommy Spencer, and his head is down. He won’t or can’t look at me. I get up and walk away from the two of them. I walk down the hall toward the men’s room. When I’m inside, I feel as if I’m going to be sick. I bend over a toilet inside a stall, but nothing surges upward. The feeling of nausea leaves me.

  I go to the sink and I run some water.

  This cannot be happening to me. First Doc goes down with Alzheimer’s, and then his heart gives in and he’s gone altogether. Now I’m told by my Captain that my intuition has become Cream of Wheat, like the rest of my brains and that I should bug out of Homicide and copperdom because my mind is addled and that I need to retire before they buy me a sway-back horse and a cardboard set of armour. I’ll be tilting at windmills next, and then Natalie can set me up in the laughing academy at Elgin.

  Christ, have I really gone crazy? Did it sneak up on me when I was in this weakened state of mental exhaustion?

  Maybe I need a leave of absence to clear my soul and my head. Maybe I should take all those vacation days I’ve got saved up and try on retirement and see how it fits.

  The anxiety attack hasn’t quite left me yet. How could all this happen so quickly? One moment I was a competent investigator, and the next I’m the department’s middle-aged loon who needs to be talked into retirement before he embarrasses everybody around him.

  I wash my face and hands in cold water and I look into my brown eyes in the mirror above the sinks. It looks like me. I haven’t changed drastically into some kind of pathetic clown overnight, have I?

  I look deep into myself. Who do I see? Isn’t that Jimmy Parisi still standing there before me?

  CHAPTER NINE

  Marty Van Dyke thought that his wife had been murdered by a man who was hiding behind the terror of September Eleventh, but he got no backup from the Chicago Police Department or the Federal Bureau of Investigation. They both ignored Van Dyke and told him that they’d keep him apprised of the situation, just like every other surviving victim of the tragedy. The survivors were the husbands, wives and family and friends of the dead, and Marty Van Dyke was just another name on a long list, as far as the cops were concerned.

  He tried to talk to Lieutenant Jimmy Parisi at CPD, but he got his partner, Tommy Spencer instead. It was a cold November morning. The temperature had dropped to a more usual fall number. It was in the low forties, and there was a slight chance of snow showers. The Lake appeared gray and cold from Parisi’s office, which Spencer and Van Dyke sat in on this chilled Thursday morning in early November.

  “There is nothing new?” Van Dyke asked.

  “Nothing, I’m afraid,” Spencer told Van Dyke.

  “Where’s the Lieutenant?”

  “He’s on leave.”

  “Leave?” Van Dyke queried. “In the middle of all this shit?”

  “I hear you, but yes is still the answer.”

  “What’s going on in this goddam city? I get the cold shoulder from the FBI and Donlan, which I fully expected, but I thought you guys would give me a break and let me in on what’s really happening.”

  Spencer looked at the window that faced the Lake.

  “I’m not supposed to reply to any queries on Lieutenant Parisi, but I’ll tell you this. He doesn’t agree with your Special Agent in Charge, Donlan, and that’s a bad stance to take right now around here. We’re looking for a six and a half foot Arab, but he isn’t in Chicago, if you catch my drift.”

  “You don’t think it was Al Qaida.”

  Spencer stared at Van Dyke. The redheaded man turned a fire engine hue on his cheeks. It was apparent to Spencer that Marty was about to blow.

  “I’m sorry about your wife. I can’t get her face out of my memory either, and I never even knew her,” Tommy admitted. “She looked like all the dead we encountered in the war in Vietnam. Like those wax impressions Jimmy told you about. It’s an image you can’t shake…Look, Parisi will be back, but we’ve been reassigned. Jimmy is close to retirement and the Boss thinks he’s had it. He thinks the Anderson thing has pushed him over the line. And all of that is off the record. You know how it works: You quote me on this, we never talk again. Ever.”

  “I hear you. Okay…But Parisi thought it was someone—“

  “I can’t talk about it.”

  “He did think it was someone other than Bin Laden. And that’s why no one wants to talk about it, here or at the FBI. This is all some giant fucking pissing match, right? It doesn’t make any difference who really killed my wife and all the others…”

  “Look, Marty. You better back off. Jimmy told you he’d be in touch when he knew something for real, and he never breaks his word—to anyone. Give it a few weeks—“

  “A few weeks? Christ, I go home to a life that’s been cut in half. You ever loved anyone like that?”

  “No. I haven’t.”

  “Then you can’t imagine what a cold nothing this fucking world is, Detective Spencer. You can’t have a clue what all this has done to me. In the papers she’s just a number on a list, and the only thing that distinguishes her is that she had some fame on television with me. I miss her because she was the only thing on earth that made me care. Care about anything. Can you imagine what a miracle it was for a woman like my wife to care anything about a broken apart cynic like me? I worked crime on a few papers, and it made me a lot like you guys, like you and Parisi. It made me scab over, and the healing made the skin tough. Too tough, too unfeeling. I thought I was becoming some kind of functioning zombie. Nothing touched me, nothing mattered to me. I was the hardened cynic who never let a case get to me. Even when it regarded dead children, I hardened my fucking heart and told myself that this was the way the world really was, Detective Spencer. A place where kiddie molesters dismember children. A place where crazed mommies and daddies lock up their kids in closets and starve them to death. Then my wife comes along, and I begin to think I’ve been in a nightmare that I’m just now waking out of. Can you imagine it? It was like a for real re-birth. Like Christ on Easter—except I’m no son of God. A son of a bitch, sure.You can’t keep me on the outside, Spencer. I won’t stay there because I’m back in my old world. The one where I’m calloused and hard and I don’t give a shit about waking up just one more day. You see what I’m saying? I’m going to be there at your ankles, one way or the other. I’m not going away.”

  Spencer stared again at the dim light that snuck into Parisi’s cubicle in his Homicide office.

  “I’ll let you know if anything comes up…Jimmy was looking at a possible perp before he was…before his leave of absence. The guy didn’t sound likely to me, but Jimmy was hot for him. No, I won’t name him, but yes I will look into the prick. Just remember, Mr. Van Dyke. I said he wasn’t likely. But because Jimmy zoned in on him, I figure he’s worthy of another look…If I catch you following me, Mr. Van Dyke…I’ll be very unhappy.”

  “That a threat, Detective Spencer?”

  “Go to the movies. Let me do my job without giving me another weight to drag around. They took my partner away. That’s how it’s really going, Mr. Van Dyke. End of interview.”

  Marty wanted to ask another question. He felt like Colombo or the detective in Crime and Punishment. He had just one more query, but he could see Spencer was finished with him.

  *

  Van Dyke talked to the other crime reporters on the Herald , and he called some friends at the Sun Times and the Tribune. They had nothing to tell him. They were all on the outside looking in because of the complete job the federals had done on muting the press on the Anderson case. There was nothing leaking out, and there were only the official releases that Donlan allowed the media to read and then print. It
was tighter, some of the older guys said, than the security regarding World War II and D-Day. Nobody knew anything, and Marty was enraged.

  He’d had the Colt .45 automatic since his father handed it down after World War II to his son Martin. Gregory Van Dyke had been in the first wave, along with the Army Rangers, at Omaha Beach. Gregory told his son Martin, as he handed him the War relic pistol, that the evening after the assault on Omaha had been the exact time he’d stopped believing in God. He told his son he saw nothing but dead Americans and Germans littering the sands the next morning, and the sight further confirmed his end of faith. His dad never went inside a church again, he told his boy.

  Gregory Van Dyke won the Bronze Star, the Silver Star, and he’d been nominated for the Medal of Honor but was refused. He came home a Major and was honorably discharged in 1946. Marty kept his father’s medals from the War, and he kept the .45 and a clip of live ammunition. He told himself the gun was for protection, but he and Cathy lived in a very upscale northwest side suburb. They owned a condo with an excellent security system, and they’d never even been threatened by a thief or a mugger where they lived.

  Cathy knew about the pistol and it angered her to have a weapon in their home, but it was Marty’s Dad War memento, she figured, so she tolerated it. Marty kept the clip of bullets locked in his desk in the small study they both shared to write the script to Van Dyke and Van Dyke. The problem with co-authoring that weekly review of current flicks was that Marty frequently allowed his horns to get in the way of their writing collaboration. They’d find themselves on top of the desk, or coupled on the wheeled chair, or they writhed together on the cramped floor space in the tiny study. It frequently forced them to struggle with deadlines.

  She wanted a daughter. She wanted someone to pass their names down to. She wanted a young Cathy. The name came from Wuthering Heights, and she in fact thought of her husband as her very own Heathcliff. He was the same kind of hardened character that Bronte had created—they both loved the Laurence Olivier version of the book. They owned it in DVD. They’d watched it just before—

  Marty unlocked the desk drawer in the study. He found the clip and then snapped it into the handle of the Colt automatic. He wasn’t going to think, he was going to react. So he sat in the swivel, wheeled chair where he and Cathy had made love more than a few times, and he turned the pistol toward his head and took the barrel into his mouth. He felt the pressure of the trigger…And then the taste of the metal Colt made him gag.

  He couldn’t do it. He told himself he’d be allowing Cathy’s killer to obtain yet one more victim, so he couldn’t allow that murderer the satisfaction of another name to the list of a thousand.

  He told himself that he didn’t have the guts. He told himself that killing himself was the coward’s way out of all this. He bought the second argument. There’d be no more inane attempts to snuff himself out. He was in this thing for the duration.

  Parisi. Parisi was on leave. Knowing what he did about the Homicide Lieutenant from the cases he’d covered involving the Italian cop, he knew Parisi didn’t quit a job either.

  He looked up Parisi in the phone book, and miraculously he found a J. Parisi on the northwest side, not far from where Marty Van Dyke now sat.

  Lieutenant James Carl Parisi, of the Chicago Homicide Division, answered his own door.

  “Aren’t you—“

  “Marty Van Dyke. We met at the hospital when I identified Cathy, my wife.”

  “Yeah…You want to come in?”

  Van Dyke was shocked at the welcome, but he walked right through the door.

  There were two young girls—perhaps four or five—playing in the living room.

  “You guys head into the basement for a while, okay?” Parisi asked the two.

  “Sure, Daddy,” one of the blondes replied. They headed for the kitchen first.

  Parisi and Van Dyke sat in the living room on a pair of comfortable leather chairs that had the look of wear upon them. There were pictures of the two young girls along with photos of a college aged boy and an adult daughter on the mantel above the fireplace. There were lots of pictures of Parisi’s four kids throughout the living room. There were a few of a redheaded woman that Van Dyke guessed to be Parisi’s current copper wife.

  “Beautiful family,” Van Dyke smiled.

  “I’m still very sorry for your loss.”

  “Thank you.”

  Marty looked once more at all the photos of the Parisi clan. He felt a dead thud in his middle. Cathy wanted a little Cathy to carry on their names, but they’d been too busy to get it accomplished.

  “I hear you’ve been reassigned off the Anderson case,” Van Dyke said.

  “Yes. I have.”

  Parisi looked down at his brown, leathery-from-the-sun hands. The fingers were short and thick. The palms, however, were large.

  “I talked to Tommy Spencer.”

  “Good man, my partner is.”

  “He told me some stuff off the record.”

  “He shouldn’t be talking at all.”

  “I know…Can I call you Jimmy?”

  “Sure. You’re Marty?”

  Van Dyke nodded.

  “He said…He said you thought the killer or killers were local and that was why you were reassigned. You were going against Department theory, against the FBI’s theory, and he intimated that they were shutting you up by shit canning you from the case.”

  Parisi simply studied Van Dyke’s face, but he remained mute.

  “Is it true? Did you have someone in mind?”

  Parisi sat silent.

  “Please, Jimmy. Don’t wall me. Everybody else has stonewalled me, so please don’t join in with the fun.”

  “I was told to keep my mouth shut. I’m just a soldier in the ranks, Marty.”

  “That’s a lie and we both know it.”

  Parisi’s face colored at the word ‘lie.’

  “It is a lie. Yes.”

  “Then you were looking at somebody.”

  “Not anymore.”

  “But you must have had reasons for liking him for the Anderson thing.”

  “Yes. I had and I have. But I will not share them with you.”

  “He killed my wife and he murdered everybody—“

  “I have no proof that a prosecutor could use to even indict him or her on the charges. I’m sorry, Marty, but my hands are tied.”

  “You ever have someone you loved murdered?”

  “Yes. I have.”

  Marty Van Dyke was surprised by Parisi’s confession of loss.

  “I was in love with a woman who was shot to death. She actually died in my arms. Just like in a romance novel. But there was nothing at all romantic about watching the life ebbing out of her eyes as I watched her go, Marty.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “If I could help you I would. You need to believe that. If anything changes, you’ll be the first to know. I swear it to you.”

  Van Dyke stood, and then Parisi got up.

  “She was all I had in the world, Jimmy. There is no one and nothing else. Nothing else matters. Nothing ever will.”

  He turned and walked out of Parisi’s home.

  CHAPTER TEN

  The first week I’m at home watching the kids seems to bode well for my full retirement. I’m about ready to pull the trigger and sign those papers and walk out into my golden years.

  “You’re out of your mind, Jimmy.”

  That’s what I hear when I express my feelings to my wife Natalie.

  “You’re the best detective in Homicide and you’re nowhere near the end of the line. I have a suggestion.”

  “What, my darling better half?”

  “I suggest I take my three weeks’ vacation and we look into the Anderson case together.”

  I look over at her to see if there’s a smile on the next beat, to see if she’s yanking my chain, but no sign of amusement or bemusement arrives.

  “Are you serious, Red?”

  “Dead.”<
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  “Thanks, but I don’t think—“

  “You don’t have confidence in me?”

  “I’d get you in trouble.”

  “Not if it’s on our clock and not theirs.”

  “That’s not the way they look at it.”

  “Do it anyway. You believe it’s still an outside job, that the Arabs aren’t responsible?”

  “Yes.”

  “You read the papers, I presume. You’ve seen the crime rate against Middle Easterners is up 200%.”

  “I read the newspapers, yes.”

  “And no one seems to believe you except me. Is that also correct, Jimmy?”

  “Yes. That’s right…Except for Spencer, and I’m not sure about him. I didn’t want to hang his ass out on the line alongside mine, so I never got in his face and asked him to commit to my point of view.”

  “Then let’s go ask him. Your mom has the girls when they get back from school. This is my day off, and I’ve got tomorrow too, and if you wake the hell up, Jimmy, you’ll let me take my three weeks and we’ll go after them, Spencer or no Spencer. I don’t give a damn what the Department says. If we have to go after them as private citizens…”

  “Take it easy, Red. Let’s go talk to my partner.”

  I call him on the phone first just to make sure we’re not intruding on one of his magical moments with a female. Tommy never dates female cops. He says he prefers physical therapists who don’t mind working off the clock on his sore back that he received compliments of a mortar round in Vietnam that lifted him off mother earth and threw him twenty feet onto his aching backside.

  “Hello, Mr. And Mrs. Parisi,” Tommy smiles.

  His red parrot is fussing and cackling to himself in his cage by the bay window here in Tommy’s Clark Street apartment. This area is known as the Bohemian section of the northside. The stranger elements of humanity are Spencer’s neighbors, and he says he loves it here.

  “My wife wants to take a three week vacation and work the Anderson case with me. We want to know if you want in too.”