Jimmy Parisi Part Two Box Set

by Thomas Laird

  I grab him by his shirt collar and haul him half across the counter.

  “My wife is almost five months pregnant. If she hadn’t been wearing a vest…”

  “Please let me go, Lieutenant.”

  Suddenly four men appear out of nowhere.

  “These are my friends, Lieutenant. Please let me go.”

  “You threaten me or any of mine again, and you’re going to have an accident. And none of your lawyers will ever be able to prove it wasn’t an accident. Do you hear me, Alexei?”

  “Please let me go, Lieutenant.”

  I can see his associates moving closer to us. I let him go. I pull the .44 Bulldog from my coat pocket. Alexei blinks. His friends take several steps backward.

  “It is against the law to threaten a police officer in this city, Grodnov.”

  “I never made such a—“

  I cock the .44 and put the barrel on his forehead.

  “I don’t care if you’re protected by the FBI or the INS or the Treasury Department. I don’t care. If I find out you killed all those people in the Anderson Building, I’ll be there the day they give you one thousand life sentences without parole. I’ll be there the day they put you in a cage. The Feds may have cut you a huss, Alexei, but you better learn to fear me. Are you listening to me?”

  I can see the beads of sweat that circle the imprint of the Bulldog’s barrel.

  I pull back the pistol, and I safely and slowly release the hammer. Then Tommy and I back our way out of Kirkov’s Sprinkler Systems.

  The blond has lost the smirk on his face.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  We bring Grodnov in for a lineup and Nadine Grant doesn’t show up. So we kick Alexei loose, and then Tommy and Natalie and I drive the navy blue Taurus out to Palatine, where the girl’s parents live. It’s five in the afternoon, and the traffic on the Interstate is miserable. Palatine is a northwest burb, not far from the Arlington Race Track. It’s fairly affluent, and when Nadine’s mother opens the front door to their expensive Tudor style home, I see where Nadine inherited her good looks. Mom’s a stunner too. Natalie sees me staring, and then she nudges me. Tommy turns toward me with a grin and waits.

  “Mrs. Grant?”

  “Yes?”

  “I’m Lieutenant Parisi, Chicago Homicide.”

  “Oh my God!”

  “No no. It’s all right. We were just wondering where your daughter Nadine was. She was supposed to show up for a—“

  “She’s in the Caribbean now, I’d think. Oh my, you frightened me!”

  “She’s where?” I ask.

  “She won this trip to some island in the—“

  “When did she leave?” I ask.

  “About 5:30 AM.”

  “Won what trip?” I ask again.

  “It was some radio station she listened to.”

  “Which radio station?”

  “She didn’t say.”

  “Do you know which flight she took?”

  “It all happened so fast, Lieutenant…She said she had to leave right away—“

  “You don’t know which line she flew?”

  “I’m sorry. She said she’d call on her cell phone when she arrived.”

  “Can I have her cell number, please?” I asked.

  The tall blonde woman gave me the number and I wrote it down in my notebook. We thanked her and left.

  I tried the cell number with the squad phone. We got Nadine’s voice mail, so I told her to call me immediately, day or night.

  We drove out to O’Hare and we tried every company that flew to the Caribbean. We finally located her line and found out it was flight 321 to St. Thomas and the nearby islands. There was no word as to where she was staying, so we drove back to the Loop and Natalie got on the phone to make the inquiries.

  I knew who got to Nadine. I just hoped that they weren’t going to make her disappear in those islands. They might have made her an offer to forget that she’d seen the Russian near the Picasso exhibit. Perhaps they wouldn’t play rough with her—But my heart sunk suddenly at her prospects. We hadn’t put her under police protection, and that was my fault. I didn’t think there’d be a leak so quickly here downtown, but the Russian’s intelligence was better than ours, so far.

  Maybe they wouldn’t think they’d need to kill her. Murders were an expense. That was the way the Sicilians looked at it.

  Then I got a call from Nadine. I was sitting in my office with Tommy when it came.

  “Lieutenant Parisi?”

  “Yes.”

  “It’s Nadine. You asked me to call.”

  “You need to come home now, Nadine.”

  “I…I can’t. I just won this trip. It’s only for a week and…”

  “We can send someone to you immediately. We can have the local police look after you until we get you home.”

  “I don’t…I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “I know that the blond Russian got to you. I don’t know how he moved so fast, but I know he flew you out.”

  “Blond Russian?”

  “Grodnov. The guy you ID’ed by the Picasso—“

  “Listen, about that…”

  “He might have had a thousand people killed at the Anderson Building, Nadine. And he will kill you if he thinks he needs to.”

  “I’m sorry, Lieutenant…I shouldn’t have allowed you to have me put under. God knows what I said. All I know is that I was going by that Picasso on my bike and I was moving too fast to be able to identify anybody. They say hypnotists use the power of suggestion—“

  “Nadine. He’ll kill you if he feels like it. You can’t trust him—“

  “Goodbye, Lieutenant. I’m sorry. I’m really very sorry.”

  It sounded like she was about to weep.

  Then she broke the connection.

  “I’ve got the ID for the phone,” Tommy said.

  “Call the locals. Tell them to put her under 24 hour surveillance…It’s what I should have done here…And put her parents under watch for the same. I think he might have threatened her. It’s hard to tell, over the phone, but have the parents watched.”

  Tommy left to get the surveillance set up here. I called St. Thomas and talked to a local Commander. I told him the story, and he was very cooperative. He told me he’d get back to me, and an hour later he called and said Nadine Grant was under police protection until I told him otherwise, and the locals were checking passports to see if they could find a Russian near Nadine anywhere. I told the Commander—his name was Bryte, Darby Bryte—that we’d send someone down to retrieve her in the next couple days. He said they’d keep her safe until then.

  Tommy was busy with the local surveillance on Nadine’s parents in Palatine. Natalie was occupied with intelligence from our Tactical Squad regarding the Russian Mafia in Chicago, so I had to go home to check on my mother and kids. I was considering moving my younger daughters and my mother to a safe house—my Uncle Nick’s—but I didn’t want to think Alexei Grodnov would threaten the family of a cop. That was not the way the Italians did things, at least. They didn’t mess with civilians. But the Russians didn’t seem to play by anyone’s rules, Natalie informed me after she’d done some research on the Soviet mob. They made up their own rules as they went along.

  I was about to open the door to the Taurus when I heard something behind me. It was just after dark and the parking deck was lit but lit dimly.

  I spun around and found a man in a trench coat standing behind me. If he had a porkpie hat on, he could’ve passed for Mickey Spillane. But he was much younger. I saw the youth in his face and eyes, even in the dim illumination of the parking deck.

  “Who are you?”

  “We need to talk.”

  “Talk about what?” I asked the younger man.

  “The Russians. The Anderson Building. Killers with blond ponytails.”

  “You are?”

  “Please, Lieutenant. We need to get the hell out of here. Now.”

  So I got in on
the driver’s side, and he got in on the passenger’s.

  “Where to?” I asked when he was seated.

  “Take a drive. Let’s use the Outer Drive. I like the view.”

  “We don’t move until I know who you are, youngster.”

  He showed me the ID. He was FBI.

  “You’re not my favorite kind of people,” I told him.

  His name was Josh Kelvin, according to the ID. It had his photo, but it’s a little bit dark to be sure the pic fit the man sitting next to me.

  “I know,” Kelvin said. “But don’t shoot all the dogs because some of us got fleas,” he smiled.

  “You work for Donlan?”

  “Not directly. But I’m in the Chicago office.”

  I pulled the Taurus out into traffic. We rode silently until I got to the Outer Drive. The Lake was a gray-black patch to our right. We headed north.

  “You talked to Donlan,” Kelvin said.

  “Yeah. We had a chat.”

  “You fought.”

  “Sort of. We always do.”

  “You know that we’re after the Russian.”

  “He intimated as much,” I confess.

  “He doesn’t want you disrupting ten years of surveillance. Five months on Grodnov alone. Ten years on their organization…Can I call you Jimmy?”

  “No.”

  Kelvin laughed.

  “I’m not trying to muscle you. I’m working on the Russians. They’re my expertise. I speak Russian. I lived in Petersburg when it was still Leningrad. I know these people. I’ve been trained to infiltrate their organization.”

  “You want me to play hands off.”

  “No. If they were responsible for the Anderson explosion, then they’re murderers, not just mobsters. Donlan is into this personal crusade. That’s the old FBI, Lieutenant. He’s a dinosaur. Everything revolves around personal successes, not around team play. It doesn’t matter to me how Grodnov goes to ground as long as he does. I just don’t want us to be competing at cross purposes.”

  “Is that another way of telling me to lay off?”

  I can see sheets of gray ice near the water line. The Lake looks forbidding and I get a chill up my spine. This guy might be an assassin. I feel like checking his ID a little closer.

  I yank the Taurus off the road into a park service parking lot. The lot is empty because this beach won’t open for months.

  I’ve got the .44 pointed at his forehead.

  “Please, this isn’t necessary,” he says.

  “Give me the ID.”

  He hands it over with his left hand. I’ve got the Bulldog aimed squarely at his noggin.

  I turn the overhead light on and I check the identity card. Kelvin seems to match the face on the ID. It seems he really is an FBI agent. But I call with the car phone and I get Tommy and tell him to check on an Agent Kelvin of the FBI. I rest the pistol on my thigh, and we wait.

  Twenty minutes later, I have confirmation from Spencer. Kelvin is for real.

  “This Russian stole my witness. I had him eyeballed at the Picasso sculpture…You know, the explosion the other day?”

  I pocket the Bulldog.

  “Sorry, but I have to play it close with new faces. There are so many new players I’ve run out of scorecards.”

  “I know,” Kelvin says. “I’m here because I want you to work with us instead of against us.”

  “What about Donlan?”

  “He’s going to be reassigned.”

  “And you know this how?”

  “I’m the guy who’s replacing him. There’s a new Director. Haven’t you heard?”

  “I heard. I didn’t think it would change anything. You guys are like the Catholic Church. You bury your mistakes.”

  “He’s a mastodon, like I said.”

  “What does ‘working together’ mean?”

  “It means cooperating and not stepping on each other’s’ toes…And I want to extend you an act of faith. I’ll retrieve your little girl in the Islands. I’ll hand her over to you the minute she steps on the tarmac at O’Hare.”

  “I’ll believe that when I see it.”

  “Fair enough, Lieutenant. I wanted to start a new relationship with the CPD. Cops everywhere are going to have to come together for a common purpose, or we won’t survive another decade—the country as a whole, I mean…Can you drop me off in the Loop now, Lieutenant?”

  “You’re going to retrieve Nadine for us?”

  “An act of faith, as I said.”

  “You’re too young to be the new honcho in town.”

  “I’m forty-two, Lieutenant Parisi. I have youthful genes,” he smiles.

  I take the Taurus out of the parking lot near the Outer Drive and I head south this time.

  “Are you going to be my own Deep Throat?” I ask Kelvin.

  “I never liked a code word that suggested oral sex. Let’s just say we’re in this together now.”

  “We’ll see.”

  “I don’t blame you for doubting me. We have a pretty bad history.”

  “My old partner, Doc Gibron, could give you chapter and verse.”

  “That’s why I’m here. There’s a new sheriff in town.”

  He has me drop him off on Michigan Avenue, by the public parking. He disappears into the depths of the parking deck in seconds.

  “You don’t trust him?”

  “He said he’ll go fetch Nadine for us,” I tell Spencer, back at my office. Natalie is still deep into the archives regarding our Rusky buddies.

  “Believes it when you sees it,” I smile.

  “I read the file that Natalie prepared for us so far. It reads like a horror story.”

  “The Russians play rough,” I concur.

  “They have no fucking souls, Jimmy. At least with the Guineas, you had some kind of idea what they would and would not do. These guys have no bottom…And the Vietnamese gangs are every bit as savage.”

  I sat looking out into the darkness. We were working our way toward another Christmas. This was the first time I ever remembered worrying whether we’d make it to that holiday. It was like the early ‘50’s and the Atomic Bomb hysteria. Someone was going to drop the big one. It was simply a question of when. Fifty years had passed and no one had yet done a Dr. Strangelove on the world, but in the current climate who knew what might happen? Anthrax scares. Nukes being smuggled out of the old Soviet Union. Some catastrophe didn’t seem likely—hell, it was a sure thing. End of the earth scenarios were rising back onto the public consciousness.

  My wife was with child and we already had several siblings out there in the world. I was after a madman who had no problem cancelling over a thousand futures. The FBI said it wanted to play nice with us, suddenly, and I had my only witness against the ponytailed blond out there in the bush somewhere.

  And some historians thought Vietnam was a paranoid era.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Marty Van Dyke got a hold of the Russian Mafia angle from some of his sources at the Chicago Police Department’s Tactical Squad. The Tacticals were the specialists with the cops, and Marty had three contacts there since his days in crime reporting. Terry Kiel was the Tac working the Russians currently. Terry was also angry about the whitewashing of the Russians just to keep the heat on Bin Laden’s Arabs and Al Qaida. Kiel didn’t appreciate the stonewalling from the FBI and the Feds in the Capital any more than Jimmy Parisi did, but Terry had been more vocal—vocal to the point where they threatened Terry Kiel’s livelihood. When they threatened to can him, he went to the Union. The Union decided to stand with its own, Federal pressure or not.

  So Terry decided to talk to Van Dyke, and his ‘anonymous’ views about the Russian Mob’s connection to the Anderson Building appeared in Marty’s articles in the Herald. The stories sold copies, and Marty Van Dyke already had local sympathy for the loss of his famous movie critic wife. Phone calls inundated the CPD and City Hall. And the calls began to find their ways to Donlan’s office at the FBI—hence the meeting between Jack D
onlan and Jimmy Parisi and Tommy Spencer. Parisi had informed Marty of the Fibbies’ new stance on the perps for the Anderson Building, and Van Dyke wasted no time getting that bit of news into print.

  Van Dyke was scheduled to meet Parisi again. They had to meet in public places where it would be difficult for the FBI to record their conversations. The recorders were state of the art with the Federals, so the best places to go to talk would be out in the open where bugging devices would be difficult to conceal.

  Jimmy Parisi’s favorite open space was Chicago’s Art Institute on Michigan Avenue. The place was relatively difficult to bug, and the plus was all the artwork they could stare at while they conversed. There was no way to insure their privacy—not with satellites and boom microphones that could pick up static from miles away. But at least they made Donlan’s boys work for their intelligence.

  They met at the French Impressionists, Jimmy Parisi’s favorite spot in the Art Institute.

  “A new Manet?” Van Dyke asked. He brushed some light snow off the shoulders of his peacoat.

  “Coming down?” Parisi asked.

  “Yeah. We’ll have to keep it brief or we might get snowed in here. Six to twelve is the forecast.”

  It was December 23rd. This was the first real snowfall of the season. All there had been previously was quickly melted slush.

  “This is my first Christmas without her since…Since five years ago, I think. I’m terrible with anniversaries,” Marty said.

  “Me too. Let’s sit a minute.”

  They sat on the bench in front of the Manet.

  “Kiel told me all about krysha.”

  “I think it means ‘roof’, right?” Parisi asked.

  The Homicide cop was wearing his usual bomber’s jacket with the fur collar. Marty hadn’t seen him wear anything else during these cold months.

  “Yeah, it means ‘roof.’ It means shelter. It means cover. The Russians use it to mean the extent of what they can get away with too. They’re very dangerous men, Jimmy. Kiel likes them for the Anderson Building also because extortion’s their thing.”

  “What does extortion have to do with this job?”

  “Terry thinks the Russians, Grodnov and friends, tried to get the owners of those properties which include the Anderson to pay protection. Kiel thinks wherever there’s big money, the Russians appear, and then they offer to keep your building undamaged for a percentage.”