by Thomas Laird
“I know.”
“But that was mostly Carlo’s fault. All I asked was that he keep an eye on the Russians. Then they started trading whacks, and now my cousin…”
“You’re right. It’s Carlo’s fault, not yours. And I am armed.”
She takes the nine millimeter out of her purse. It looks almost obscene, lying on her expansive lap.
“Put it back before you scare the shit out of the waitress…I’m going to take a walk out into the parking lot.”
“Jimmy—“
“Don’t worry. Be right back.”
Instead of coming out the entrance to the White Castle, I walk behind the serving bar and then into the kitchen. The grill man looks up at me and there’s some shock there in his eyes.
I show him my badge and ID.
“There a backdoor out of here?” I ask.
“Right there,” he points behind me.
I thank him, open the door, and then I walk out back. I circle my way slowly around the building until I see the black car parked in the lot, about a half dozen spaces from our Plymouth Voyager. There’s no one sitting inside the rice burner, as my wife calls it. It’s an expensive looking ride, recent make, four doors. Just short of being a limo.
I circle back farther until I walk into the restaurant again. Natalie sits at the bar, working on her heavy order of edible Ready Mix—it’s like pouring concrete into your vascular system, after all.
There is a brunette with big hair and a black leather jacket sitting in the booth some thirty feet away from my wife. I walk up slowly behind her. I’ve got the Bulldog drawn, but the barrel is pointed at the floor.
“Get up,” I tell the woman.
She jerks her head around, and then she sees the gun.
“Oh my God!! “ she bleats at me.
It isn’t Vonskaya. And it isn’t a woman either. I can tell it’s a male because of the adam’s apple and the light five o’clock shadow. It’s a cross dresser, perhaps a transsexual, but it is not Karin Vonskaya.
“I never heard you apologize that profusely before,” she tells me on the ride home.
“I never had to say I’m sorry to a six foot three inch cross dresser at three o’clock in the morning at a White Castle before, if that’s what you mean.”
She snores lightly the minute her head hits the pillow, as soon as we’re back in our bedroom at home.
*
The bit about someone following us has me spooked. The CPD provides a man to sit outside the house, round the clock, but they can’t afford a twenty-four hour tail on either of us. So I tell Natalie to stay close to home until after the baby comes. I don’t want her taking unnecessary chances with this killer Russian broad on the loose, especially now that even Grodnov’s not sure what he let loose on the world and on us.
I get the call from Rush Memorial at six the same morning. I’ve hardly had time to shut my eyes. I drive down to the hospital, leaving Natalie under the care of my mother and the uniform sitting out in his squad at our curb.
The ER surgeon, Stan Manning, greets me when I arrive. Tommy Spencer meets me here. He looks pooped as well.
Manning takes us into the ER recovery room. There lies Nadine Grant.
“It took us two hours to get her stomach pumped. She took half a bottle of Tylenol. Didn’t do too much damage, since we were able to clean her out…Her roommate found her unconscious with the half bottle on the floor next to the bed.”
Manning leaves us with Nadine.
Her eyes are blinking as if she’s awakening. I take her left hand.
“Daddy…Don’t be mad at me,” she whispers.
I remember the description of her father’s suicide. The man dressed before killing himself.
“Daddy…Don’t be angry at me,” the girl whispers again.
Tears sting my eyes, so I look away from her and Tommy. The tears are replaced by anger, anger at Grodnov. He’s destroyed a thousand people in that building, and now he’s working on taking out a family, one member at a time.
“Nobody’s mad at you, Nadine.”
“Don’t tell Momma. Please don’t tell Momma.”
“Don’t worry,” I say. “It’s just between you and me.”
“Thank you, Daddy…Please don’t be mad at me.”
She begins to weep, and then Dr. Manning comes back into the room.
*
We go to the beach, mostly to clear my head of the fatigue and the anger. We go to the Lake to prevent me from taking this Bulldog and blowing big fucking holes in Alexei Grodnov. If I did what I feel like doing, my wife would lose a husband and my children their father. So we go to the water.
What did Ishmael say at the opening of Moby Dick? When you feel like knocking people’s hats off in the street, you find your way to the water. I read all these classic books after college because it was my old partner Doc Gibron who kept insisting I was a functional illiterate. Doc insisted I needed to read a list of these great books, and he prepared the list for me. I used to read all those paperbacks while we were doing surveillance on some suspected killer. Doc listened to his jazz and I read from his ‘classics’ list.
Ishmael was headed toward the Atlantic Ocean, of course, so the nearest big body of water I have is Lake Michigan.
“Mussolini had the right idea.”
Here we stand. Two middle aged men at the point where the lake water licks the sand. Here we stand fully clothed while thousands of sun worshippers lie on blankets in various states of semi-nudity. Today, however, neither of us has the heart to check out the babes. Hearing Nadine call me her dead ‘Daddy’ has stabbed me to the quick. All the fatigue I’ve acquired in the last few months is turning into something else. Rage is the word.
You’re never supposed to take it personally. You can’t allow them to get into your head, but they do from time to time, of course. No matter how professional you may be, you see a six year old lying splattered on a street corner from a drive by shooting, something basic, primal, takes over. You want revenge. The vendetta. You want to even up, you want justice, and simply arresting a perpetrator and seeing him walk off in chains and shackles doesn’t always do the trick.
You want to lay hands on them, from time to time. You want to feel their bones snap under your fingers and grip. You want to see the look of terror on their faces, instead of encountering the look of horror left on their victims’ visages at the crime scenes.
“I love the water,” I tell Tommy as we stare out at the water works building, a few hundred yards from us here at the water’s edge.
“This is where they ought to baptize everybody,” Tommy smiles.
“I want to kill him myself. I know better, but I want to shoot him in his fucking blond head, Tommy.”
“We talked about that one, Jimmy. You’d disappoint a whole lot of people by leaving them. Me included.”
“I know. I told myself that. I told myself we just arrest them. It’s not our job to punish them or cage them—I know the whole speech.”
“So? What’s next, Lieutenant?”
I squat down and take a palm full of lake water in my right hand.
“We keep Nadine and her mother alive. They’re our only witnesses. We might try that crazy maintenance guy at the Anderson Building—Crealey? We keep on breathing down the necks of Gary Merton and Wade S. We locate that crazy skank Karin Vonskaya and we have her tailed until she becomes deep bosom buddies with her surveillance. We get someone to put the hammer to the Russian, and then I see this whole fucking house of cards falling on top of Alexei and all his little friends, including Wade S. and Gary Merton and whoever else let this shit happen on nine one two.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
Gary Merton was naked, and he held a razor sharp letter opener to his secretary’s, Glenda Morrison’s, throat. The first cops who arrived used a negotiator to try and calm Merton down, but Gary would not allow the negotiator inside his thirtieth floor office in the Youngman Building. All the blinds were closed in the office so that
snipers could not see inside the place to pick out a target. If the SWAT people burst in on Merton, Roy Braxton, the Negotiator, thought Gary would actually cut Glenda’s throat.
One of the uniforms, Paul Mangotti, remembered he’d been along for the ride with Jimmy Parisi and Tommy Spencer when Parisi had interviewed Gary Merton about the Anderson Building.
“Let me get Parisi down here, Sarge,” Mangotti suggested to Braxton. “He might be able to reason with this asshole if it’s about the explosion. I mean if that’s why this asshole’s gone nuts.”
Braxton was a big man, six two and muscular, a regular weightlifter with a Master’s in Clinical Psychology from the University of Illinois Chicago. He didn’t usually farm out for help from anyone. When he was in charge, he was in charge. But the business about the Anderson Building had him thinking that Parisi just might help loosen the naked, letter-opener-wielding crazy into letting Glenda go. Nothing Braxton said had softened this guy in the last thirty-five minutes. And time was short for Glenda if someone didn’t get through to Merton.
“Call him, Mangotti,” the big Negotiator said.
They got Merton to pick up his phone.
“Gary, this is Lieutenant Parisi. Let me come in and talk to you.”
“Talk to me about what?” the frazzled voice asked.
“Talk to you about staying alive…First thing you need to do is let Glenda go.”
“I’m not going to hurt Glenda.”
“Then why are you threatening her with that letter opener? She talked to Sergeant Braxton, remember? You let her talk to him. You’re scaring the hell out of her, Gary. Let her out, and I’ll come talk to you.”
There was silence on the line. Parisi waited.
“You’re going to hurt me.”
“No I’m not, Gary. I’ll leave my weapons out here. I promise.”
“Why should I believe you?”
“Because I know why you’re the way you are.”
“You do? How do you know that?” Merton asked. He sounded very near hysteria, to Parisi.
“I know you’re not a bad guy. I know you got a threat from Grodnov. He tried to extort money from you about the buildings, and that was why he blew the Anderson Building—“
“He’ll kill me, Lieutenant! He’ll kill us all!”
“So let Glenda go and we’ll talk about it.”
There was more silence on the line. Parisi waited again.
And then the office door opened slowly. The police and SWATS were all crouched near the door, ready to spring, but Jimmy Parisi halted them with an opened hand.
Glenda walked out slowly. Braxton grabbed her. The woman was numb, not even able to cry, and a female uniform led her out past the waiting room where all the police were gathered for a rush at Merton’s office.
The door remained opened, just a crack. Parisi again signaled that the other police wait, and then he walked through Merton’s door and shut it behind him.
Gary was wearing his royal blue blazer and nothing else, and he was standing by the blind-covered windows that overlooked the Loop and the Lake.
“You’re going to catch cold, Gary.”
Merton didn’t smile.
He held the letter opener like a dagger in his left hand, and the blade was pointed at his own chest.
“You don’t want to hurt anyone.”
“I wasn’t going to hurt Glenda…Tell her I’m sorry…about all this.”
“Tell me what you’re sorry about.”
“You know, Lieutenant. You already know…I lied to you. Grodnov threatened to blow up one of our properties. He asked for two million and I refused him. So I’m the one responsible for all those people dying.
“But I can’t go to prison. I cannot. I can’t do it—“
“No one said you’re going to prison, Gary. The way it looks now, worst case scenario is that you’d go off to take a rest somewhere.”
“I’m insane.”
“I’m no shrink, but I don’t think so. I think you’re all tired out. I know how that feels. And you’ve been carrying this load since September 12th. That’s a long time to feel guilty for something you didn’t do.”
Merton’s eyes became sharp and interested suddenly. He stood behind his desk, the bottom of his blue sports coat barely concealing his genitals.
“How is it not my fault?”
“It wasn’t your fault that Grodnov blackmailed you and that he blew up the building. And I think Wade Hansen was far more involved in all this than you ever were.”
“Hansen?”
“Yes, Gary. He had this thing about his wife, about Greta. She was poking somebody he really didn’t like. And he’d been really understanding about his wife poking a lot of other men up until that one guy. Somebody who really got under his skin…You wouldn’t happen to know who that would be, would you, Gary?…Put that letter thing down. Please?”
“I don’t know who Hansen’s wife has been fucking…What about me? I’ve got a wife and two little boys. What about me? Their father helped killed a thousand people. And for what? For money. So I paid him the two million later so he wouldn’t blow up another property with a thousand more people inside it!”
“It wasn’t your fault. I think Wade had him blow the Anderson Building. I think Grodnov didn’t mention that he’d been blackmailing you. I think Hansen’s offer was sweeter, and he used Greta’s life insurance to pay for the murder, hers and everyone else’s. I don’t think it was your fault, Gary. But you can help nail Grodnov if you tell a grand jury that he had intentions of blowing the building all along, with or without Wade Hansen.”
“I didn’t mean to hurt anybody…Tell Glenda I’m so sorry.”
“Put your pants on, Gary.”
The pants and underwear were lying in disarray on the plush carpeting.
“He thinks I’m a clown. That’s what he thinks,” Merton mumbled.
“Who thinks that?”
“Wade thinks I’m a fool. He thinks he can do whatever he wants around here and…Tell Glenda I didn’t mean to frighten her. You’re wrong, Lieutenant. It’s all my fault.”
He dropped the letter opener on the floor. Parisi went over and picked it up.
“Put your pants on, Gary. It’s time to go.”
“He’s useless,” Spencer told Parisi.
“I know it,” the Homicide replied.
“Guy’s a section eight and his testimony is worth doodly.”
“I know.”
“We’ve got all these worthless witnesses, Jimmy. Why are we so fucking lucky?”
They had Nadine and her mother, one was recovering from an overdose of Tylenol, and the other was semi-catatonic at Elgin. The father was all the way out of it courtesy of a necktie and a low ceiling beam.
“What about Crealey?” Tommy asked. “You know the janitor at the Anderson Building?”
*
They took the long ride back out to Orland Park on a Saturday, a day off for Raymond Crealey.
“They were going to fire me long before Merton went and did it,” Crealey told them. The three men sat on lawn chairs in Raymond’s wooded acre of a yard. It was a pretty lot with plenty of shade on this hot, late June day.
“He was?” Parisi asked.
“I know you called him to take me back on. He called me and told me it was you. He didn’t want to mess with the police, he said, so he gave me back my job even though he wanted to fire me twice.”
Crealey smiled. He looked like he was in the same age bracket as Tommy and Parisi were in—mid fifties.
“You ever have any contact with Alexei Grodnov?” Spencer asked.
“Who the hell—You mean that Russian they’ve been trying to pin—“
“Yes,” Parisi answered. “That is he. Alexei Grodnov, head dragonmaster of the Russian Mafia in Chicago, Illinois.”
“Christ, no. Never met him. Never saw him except in the newspapers.”
“So Merton wanted to can you before he actually got around to it in September,” Tom
my Spencer continued.
“Yes. That’s right.”
“Why?” Spencer went on.
“We just had…a personality conflict.”
“Cut the bullshit, Raymond. I’m not in the mood,” Parisi threatened.
“Your wife’s been dead a long time, no?” Tommy asked.
“What about my wife?”
“You never date?”
His face colored, just noticeably to Parisi.
“No. It’s too soon. I’m too fucking old.”
“Only people too old to get it on are corpses,” Spencer smiled.
“What are you talking—“
“What with all these pecker pills…”
“I don’t have that problem.”
“I didn’t say you did. Sorry,” Tommy smiled.
“There was no timing device in that explosion. The FBI never found one,” Parisi said.
“Yeah. So?”
“So, Raymond, someone might have intentionally set off the blast with some kind of fire. As in arson?” Tommy grinned.
“You accusing me of starting a fire that caused that barrel to—“
“Nah. I think it was Grodnov, me. I don’t think you’re a mad arsonist-bomber, are you, Raymond?” Tommy continued grinning.
“You think I could kill all—“
“You better not be lying about not seeing or meeting this Russian, Raymond, because if I find out one more person is lying to me about the Anderson Building…I’ll be very unhappy if that’s the case, Raymond.”
“I told you the truth, Lieutenant…Can I get you two something to drink?”
Parisi nodded.
“Diet pop, if you have it,” Parisi said.
“Same here,” Spencer smiled warmly.
Raymond Crealey retreated back into his modest ranch house. Parisi figured he must have bought this property when Orland Park was still part of the sticks.
“You have the feeling Raymond’s not being perfectly candid?” Tommy asked his partner.
“I don’t think he blew the building or torched the room where the fertilizer barrel was, no. I think there’s still something wrong with this guy, but I can’t put my finger on it yet.”