by Thomas Laird
Nearly one thousand names are read, in the middle of the memorial, by the Mayor of Chicago. Greta Hansen’s name is one of them, and so is Cathy Van Dyke’s. Marty Van Dyke walked up to us at the beginning of the ceremony and stood next to us. Somehow he found Spencer and me out of this huge crowd.
The Mayor reads each name. Finally he says just a few words of condolence for the survivors of the Anderson Building, but he doesn’t go on very long. There is a hint of a breakdown for His Honor as he reaches the end of the long list of victims, so he can’t seem to get rolling into a photo/media op kind of speech. It’s the first time I think I’ve ever heard the Boss become emotionally frazzled. So after just a few select words, he moves away from the mic. Then a priest and the Arch Bishop of Chicago come to the podium. The priest assists while the Arch Bishop does a benediction. The two Roman Catholics are followed by a Protestant Minister and a Jewish Rabbi. A Muslim cleric is the final prayer leader, and the service is concluded, but none of the crowd moves away from the open hole in front of us. It’s as if they are mesmerized by the gaping void that Alexei Grodnov and Wade S. Hansen and Raymond Crealey have wrought in the middle of their city.
The wind is out of the northeast, and it has that constant flavor of Lake Michigan. Soon the water will turn iron gray, and soon there might even be an ice cover to the surface. It becomes noticeably colder, the longer we all stand together around this pit.
They are going to rebuild the Anderson, Glamour Properties has announced. Construction begins next week. I’m wondering if the new place will be haunted. I’m hoping all those souls are at rest, however. One Holy Ghost is plenty, as far as spirits are concerned.
Then I remember Grodnov’s last words:
“I am…the devil.”
It’s not that I believed he was Satan, but I figure there was a good chance that he was working for the son of a bitch.
We take lunch at the Hub, a bar notorious for newspapermen and media people. It’s down on Lake Street, so it’s walking distance for the three of us—Spencer and Van Dyke are still with me.
They’re a copycat bar of that Saturday Night Live thing—“cheesebugga, cheesebuga, Pepsi, no Coke!” They have the guy at the grill doing the John Belushi lines as you order, and all they offer is cheeseburgers and fries, Pepsi no Coke, and a full bar for the boozers.
We get a booth. It’s pretty quiet in here. The crowd at the Anderson must have all scattered back to work. It’s after one o’clock. Tommy is taking some personal time, he told me, and Marty Van Dyke apparently works on his own clock. I am officially a man of leisure, but I have an appointment next week about a teaching job at the Academy. Apparently the position is mine if I want it, Earl Jackson, the head of the Academy has already informed me.
“I heard you lost somebody in a shooting, Jimmy,” Van Dyke asks, after we make our order to the waiter, who also did the cheesebugga bit for us.
“Her name was Celia Dacy. She lost a kid in a driveby at Cabrini Green some years back. She went a little crazy and tried to get in the face of the head gangbanger who was responsible. She was carrying a toy pistol when she approached him, and the bodyguards shot her. It was a justifiable shoot, they decided. Celia died right in my arms. She’s the only person who ever did that on me, so far.”
“Are you still bitter about it?” Van Dyke asks.
“Sure. They got the banger, eventually, but that didn’t bring Celia back.”
“How serious was it?” Spencer asks.
“I was going to marry her.”
“Oh,” Tommy says.
“It’s okay…My daughter Mary was just telling me that I got a second chance. Natalie came around about a year and a half later. I never thought I’d love anybody again, after losing Erin to cancer. And then losing Celia to…Losing Celia.
“But my kid was right. I got lucky. I have Natalie. And two daughters and a son with her, and two grown kids with Erin. You might say I’ve been very lucky.”
“You are indeed,” Van Dyke says, and he lifts his stein of Old Style to me.
“What about you, Marty?” Spencer asks.
“Me?”
“Yeah, you. Life goes on, brother.”
“Does it, Tommy? Does it really?”
“What do you suppose Cathy would want you to do?” Spencer asks him. “Sit around and wither? You really think she wants you to be lonely and unhappy?”
“I just can’t see me going back into the mainstream, getting to know people, dating, all of that shit. Christ, I can barely endure telephone conversations with the people I work with.”
“You didn’t answer my question,” Spencer continues.
Van Dyke looks at me, and then he looks back at my partner.
“I tried putting the blue steel in my mouth a few months ago. I couldn’t hack it.”
“That’s good,” I tell him. “Maybe you ought to talk to somebody about it.”
“I don’t think I’ll ever try it again. I’m too mean to die right now.”
Marty attempts a grin at us.
“You must meet women at work,” Spencer suggests.
“Yeah, but I’m not ready for it, and I don’t think I ever will be.”
“You’re not dead yet, Martin,” I remind him. “And who’s to say you haven’t got a second wind in you too?”
This time Van Dyke manages a smile. Then we proceed to eat those world-famous cheeseburgers—Pepsi, no Coke.
*
Mike has been gone since September first, when he began basic in Georgia. We receive mail from him, but it only now starts coming because they wouldn’t allow the new troops to write until the fourth week of basic. It’s part of the breaking down of their connections with our world and the introduction to their new environment. A week ago we learned that he’d been accepted into the Rangers’ training program. Mike says he scored in the upper five percent of all those who applied to that elite airborne unit. The Rangers were at Normandy in World War II and they appeared in various hairy situations in Korea and Vietnam and Desert Storm. So it is very likely they’ll be prominently involved in this new thing with Iraq. Hussein will not comply with the UN—but then who does comply with that outfit? We’ll be attacking them before long—six months, maybe a year. But you can smell this one coming.
Mike will soon begin his Ranger training, and it is one of the most disciplined crews in the Army, so it’s not a sure thing he’ll make it, yet. But my money is on my son because I know exactly how hard-nosed he really is. He’s not the type who’s joining up because he likes to blow shit up, which is why a lot of young men actually do sign up for Special Forces, believe it or not. I thought his little speech about doing something for his country was heart-felt and genuine. And my kid’s no dummy. He wouldn’t fall for GI propaganda. The young man can think independently—it’s the way he was raised by Erin and me.
How do you tell your kid his country’s wrong? And what if I’m the one who’s incorrect about Saddam Hussein and his WMD’s?
My intuition was on the mark about Wade S. Hansen, but I’ve been wrong a few other times, especially on the job. People have fooled me. Nobody’s feelings about other human beings are always on the money. I’m trying to see it from Mike’s point of view, but I was in Vietnam, and I just can’t hack it. This thing with Iraq has an odor…
Maybe it’s my age and my cynicism. Maybe I’m just jaded by hearing all the lies I’ve heard in a lifetime of homicide investigations. I got so used to hearing lies, I never expected anyone to speak the truth at me.
This Army thing is Mike’s truth. He has to come to learn all by himself if he was right. I suppose that is the sad fact that every parent arrives at: Your children can never ride the bike unless you release them. Mike is twenty years old. He’s got two years of college behind him, and he’s made this decision on his own. I’ve told him how I feel, and now I have to start praying that these stupid bureaucrats don’t get my boy killed.
The sad truth is that a number of fathers and mothers are goin
g to lose their kids very soon. What the numbers are don’t really matter. One loss is too many. One loss is a holocaust.
I remember breaking the news about Barak Muhammad to his mother, back when all this began. I recall the look of helplessness on her face when I pronounced those words in front of her.
“Your son is dead.”
Delivering that speech has always been the absolute worst part of my livelihood. Walking up to a door, knocking on it, and relaying that message to a stranger is far more horrible than viewing any corpse I have ever had to examine as a detective. Saying those few words has always been more terrible than any other task I have been compelled to perform on this job.
“Your son is dead.”
I come to St. Monica’s when I need to clear my head. I either go to the Church or the beach for that kind of personal therapy, and it’s the Church when the weather turns cold.
I sit in the pew after kneeling and saying a decade of Hail Marys, one Our Father and one Glory Be. Occasionally I go to confession, but I have a hard time confessing to any priest after what happened to my son Mike with the pedophile priest. I know my Church teaches me to forgive, but I haven’t found it in my heart to let go all the way yet with what happened to my son when he was an adolescent.
Natalie is about to return full time to the job. My mother will be the full time sitter as long as her health holds up, and she seems to be fine. You’d never know she was seventy-nine. She looks ten years younger. When she isn’t living with us, she lives with my Uncle Nick, my biological father, as I said. They’re at the age at which other people think it’s cute that they’re living together. It seems if you’re in your seventies or older, the rules about cohabitation get themselves relaxed—which is great by me. As long as they’re finally together, I figure justice has been served.
We’ll be spelling my mother with a sitter who’s much younger, however, in a few months. Even if she looks young, a newborn boy is a handful, and Natalie and I are going to relieve her with an in-house nanny in a few weeks. My mother needs to take care of Nick and herself now. And there are the two girls, Maggie and Leigh, to look after until they’re out of pre-school and into full time school in a year or so.
I begin at the Academy on Monday. My expertise is on crime scene routine. I’m going to train rookies how to leave a scene for the investigating detectives. I’ll be teaching them how to avoid polluting the crime scene so that the ME and the lead investigator can work without a first year jamolk muddying up the area.
I called Tommy on the phone and checked to see how he’s doing, and I try to help my mother and Natalie with the baby and the girls. Mike is in basic, as I say, and Mary is back at Med School, finishing up. She comes over every chance she gets to help Natalie too and to get her hands on her little brother.
I’m alone inside St. Monica’s. It’s not far from the house, here on the northwest side. Fr. Robert is the parish priest. He’s new, so the jury’s not in yet on what kind of padre he is yet. But he seems all right. I’m still just a little gun shy of priests.
I’m fifty-eight years old, retired, and about to start a teaching career. Tommy insists I’ll be back on the job in six months. The Captain has already left the door open for my return. He gave me the speech about the scarcity of good detectives. He said they could rehire me immediately. All I’d have to do is ask.
That scenario seems unlikely, at the moment. I rather enjoy getting up when I want to. Natalie is bottle feeding Jimmy Junior, so I get to help with his feedings. And since I don’t have a set schedule yet, I can take my time holding my son and talking to him as he takes his bottle. He is so light that I can hold him and walk with him almost indefinitely.
Jimmy Junior is quite bald with only a small tuft of light brown hair on the back of his head. I am tempted to call him Kojak, but I’m afraid the nickname will take hold, and I hate nicknames.
I remember feeding Mike and Mary when they got off the breast with Erin. I remember doing some of this with Maggie and Leigh as well. I’ve never minded shitty diapers either. I’m not fond of the smell, but I can tolerate changing my kids, and I’ve always helped with it. I may not be totally liberated, but I figure I owe half the work on raising them. It never works out that way because Erin and Natalie were too inclined to take most of the labor upon themselves.
I get up out of the pew here at St. Monica’s, I kneel in the aisle and cross myself. Then I make it to the baptismal font and dip my fingers into the holy water.
*
They look so goddamned young that it frightens me to speak to them, at first. They’re all in their twenties, fresh out of high school and maybe a year or two of junior college. There is no gray in their hair, no pooch at their bellies. They are muscular and firm and…Shit.
Young.
I make it through the lecture. A young woman approaches me. There are stars in her eyes as if she’s approaching some celebrity.
“Lieutenant Parisi?”
“Yes.”
“I just wanted to say…”
“What did you want to say…Collins?”
“Jeanette Collins. Yessir.”
“What was it you wanted to say?”
“I wanted to say…It’s an honor, Lieutenant, to be learning from you.”
She blushes, smiles, turns, and takes off.
Then I get a male student.
“Lieutenant?”
“Yes?”
“How long did it take you to become a Homicide?”
I look at him and smile. Then I tell him.
“All my life.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
Nadine Grant is waiting for me at the end of my lecture on residue from gunshot on a Thursday morning one week before Thanksgiving.
She is beaming with a smile that makes me return the warmth from my own face.
“You look great, Nadine.”
“I’m feeling a lot better, yes…Can I take you to lunch?”
I was planning on digging up Tommy Spencer and heading out to Garvin’s, but those two can spare me, I figure.
She takes me to an Italian place on the southwest side with which I am very familiar. It’s Vito and Nick’s, one of the premiere pizza joints in Chicago. It has the finest thin crust pie I’ve ever had, and I take my crew out here frequently. It’s a landmark pizzeria.
We go to the old place—there are three locations—on 84th Place and Pulaski. It’s a cash only enterprise. They take no checks and no plastic. Nick never believed in credit or credit cards, but his other two locations take the plastic. Some things bend with the times.
She orders a large sausage and mushroom, my favorite. I want to ask her if she’s a mind reader.
“How’s your mom?” I ask.
“That’s why I’m here. She’s getting released from Elgin next Wednesday, and I wanted to know if you could be there when they release her. She remembers all the times you visited her, even after Grodnov was dead, when you didn’t have to come any longer.”
“I’d still visit her, whether he’s dead and his woman is dead or not, Nadine. I like your mom. She’s strong. I could see it even when she was deep under, that she was fighting to come back out. I never had a doubt she’d make it, and I’m very happy you’re here to tell me she’s coming home.”
“Someone else has been out to see her frequently.”
“Yeah? Who?”
“Your partner, Tommy Spencer.”
“He has?”
“Just about every weekend, usually on Sundays or his day off. He brings her things: flowers, candy, books…I think they’re fond of each other. When she began to recover, you could see how she looked forward to him coming to see her. And now when she’s getting ready to leave Elgin… I think something deeper is going on. I really do.”
“Deeper?”
“I think they’re falling in love, Lieutenant.”
“Well, there you have to be careful. Sometimes people confuse concern with love.”
“You ever talked to Tomm
y Spencer about it?”
“No. This is the first I’ve heard.”
“Then trust me. They’re gaga. It almost makes me…”
“Nadine. Come on, now. It’s okay.”
“I know it’s okay! That’s why I’m…”
“You really think something’s going on between them?” I ask.
“Nothing’s going on, on the outside, I mean. She’s still in treatment. He only comes during visiting hours, and the only place they can go is out on the grounds…But I think there’s something real happening.”
“Does that worry you?”
“Ever since daddy…Ever since daddy died, you could see the hopelessness on her face. Even when she began to come up out of that deep secret place she was in, daddy’s suicide seemed to hold her back. But she’s so strong that she recovered in spite of everything that monster did to her, and to me. It was as if his death angered her, more than anything.
“But then Tommy Spencer began to show up regularly, and the hope began to rise back with him. I think it’s love, Lieutenant. I don’t know how else to explain it.”
“Maybe you’re right,” I tell her, just as our pizza arrives.
We don’t speak because we’re too busy devouring this food of the southside gods. We’re in fact burning up our palates because this hot feast is too good to wait for it to cool down. We guzzle the soft drinks, but the damage has already been done. The flesh on our palates will become stringy in the morning from the minor burns. But the pain is worth it, here.
“I heard the Russian woman tried to steal your baby. That must have been awful, terrible.”
“My wife sort of stopped her.”
“She did?”
“Natalie has a way of getting someone’s complete attention.”
“Well I’m glad everything turned out all right.”
“Now that you’re here, it looks like things did work out. Except for the loss of your dad.”