by Thomas Laird
Preface
Mary O’Connor, 1978
It’s a cold night by the lake. I try to stay out of neighborhoods where there are working pimps because I know they’ll try to recruit me because I look younger than I am.
I wander east toward Lake Michigan knowing the traffic isn’t heavy enough for a john to take notice of me, and maybe it’s because I really don’t want a date tonight that I wander out this far from the territory where I know I’ll encounter some business. I made enough cash to feed myself for about a week, two nights ago, but I know I’ll run out of bread before a week passes. I’m sort of rationalizing, I think you’d call it.
The last guy hurt me, he did me so hard. He was big and he must of thought he had something to prove, the way he thumped away at me, and even when I cried out in pain he didn’t stop. He made me bleed. I had to go into a gas station on Belmont and use some toilet paper to stanch the flow. It still hurts today, and that’s probably why I’m just pretending to be working. I’ll go somewhere to crash in a few minutes because the Hawk off the lake is very bitter, tonight. It bites into me because my winter coat is more like a jacket for fall. I left all my winter shit at the old lady’s apartment, and I swore I’d never go back to her. I’ve been out here for three weeks.
Then a Ford pulls up to the curb next to me, and I can see by the make that it’s a cop ride without it being marked ‘police.’
He rolls down his window real slow, and I stop in my tracks and I give him a hard stare as if I’m telling him I’m not afraid of him. But my knees are knocking whether I want them to or not.
“You lost?” he smiles.
He’s a good looking guy—I can see his blond hair and his handsome face because we’re both right underneath the street light that Daley put in so you can see the muggings more clear.
“I’m not lost,” I say. My knees are still clacking.
“You look cold.”
He smiles those pretty teeth at me again. I begin to think he wants a free pop. The Vice guys are like that. Three weeks on these nasty Chicago streets and I’m getting used to what these pricks are up to.
“I’m all right.”
“Get in the car, little girl.”
“I’m legal.”
“The hell you say,” he laughs.
“You’re a cop, right?”
“Yeah, lucky for you.”
I could run, but that’s like a red flag or something for these bulls. They like the sport of running girls down, these Vice creeps.
I decide on getting inside the car. I should’ve made him show me ID, but I’m too damned frozen to care what he does to me. He might be some clown pretending to be a copper, and this might be my last night ever on the streets, and right now I really don’t care. Might as well get it over with. It happens to every girl on the street, sooner or later. Our life span is about like a lightning bug’s, in summer.
“You think I’m gonna hurt you?” he says as he turns to me. I’m sitting on the front passenger’s side. I got my hand on the door handle, like a reflex or something.
“You don’t need to bolt. I’m not going to harm you. I am a cop.”
He shows me the badge.
“I’m with Vice. I assume you already knew that.”
His face goes serious.
“There’s no action around here, so why you walking alone in this neighborhood?”
“I like to walk.”
“Maybe I should bust you for solicitation. What’s your name?”
“Alice.”
“Sure. Now what’s your name? Lie to me again and you’ll be in juvy in a half hour.”
I look at that dead solemn face, and I know he isn’t bullshitting me.
“My name is Mary O’Connor.”
“Where do you live, Mary O’Connor?”
“Around.”
“You mean on the streets.”
I don’t answer him.
“You don’t sound like a dummy to me, Mary. Let me drive you home.”
“You aren’t a social worker.”
“You getting snotty, Sis?”
“No. I didn’t mean to be.”
“You don’t need to apologize.”
“I wasn’t gonna do that, either.”
He laughs out loud. Funny thing is, I like the sound of it.
“You have ID that says you’re of age?”
“No.”
“No driver’s license? Nothing?”
I shake my head.
“How long you been out here, alone?”
“You mean tonight?”
He smiles and shows me those big teeth again. They’re white and straight, like some kinda movie star.
“You got a mom?”
“Yeah. If you want to call her that.”
“Sounds like no love lost.”
I don’t answer him. I’m not about to start in on the sob story of my life with this copper.
“I’m trying to help, here, Sis. You get it?”
“I don’t need any help.”
“You need all the help you can get,” he says with that toothy white light-show of his. I’m thinking about why I can’t get good looking johns like him if I have to do this shit for meal money. Maybe he’s really trying to help me out. But I think he’s figuring where he’s going to unload me, tonight.
“I can take you to a shelter. They’ll try to do something for you, maybe get you something more permanent. Because believe me, you’ll be dead in a few days if you stay out here. I’ve been on Vice for six years, so I do know a little something about your line of trade. Someone’ll kill you, sure as the earth turns around. They’ll kill you just for fun because these guys you’re dealing with are mean. They’re evil. You read me, Mary O’Connor?”
I’m trying to end this sermon before he really gets going.
“I’ll take you to the shelter, but I won’t go in with you. If you want to take off once I stop the car, go ahead. I’m not your nanny. I could hand you over to Social Services, but you’d take off on them, too, wouldn’t you?”
I look out the windshield.
“Hard case. I hear you.”
“I didn’t say nothing,” I tell him without looking at him.
“Okay. I’ll drop you off there. At least it’s a warm place to crash for a night or two. After that, you do what you want to.”
I look over at the cop, suddenly.
“What’s your name?” I ask him. “I didn’t catch it when you flashed the badge.”
He laughs loud again.
“You really want to know?”
The smile fades, and he pulls us away from the curb.
*
Lieutenant Jimmy Parisi – Retired. Present
In the dream the sparrow is a caramel colored brown, his eyes the brown of all those woodland birds, and he has landed lightly on my right index finger, and his bird legs have clamped tightly on my finger tip. But the pressure is not painful; in fact it’s making me feel peaceful, at rest, somehow, and I don’t want him to fly off, and he doesn’t. I want to pet him on the head, the way you’d stroke a cat or a dog, but I know you can’t do anything like that with a bird that’s so frail and skittery. But the dream then ends, and the sparrow is gone, and I’ve never in my life had that night vision again. Without getting all Freudian about it, I expect the sparrow is the dream’s way of letting all those helpless homicide vics into my sleep. You can’t get a more vulnerable bird than a sparrow. Hawks and bigger winged things live off them. I’ve been retired from Chicago Homicide for a few years. My kids are grown and out of the house, and my wife Red and I share the same house we’ve lived in for over fifteen years. Now I do the occasional lecture at the Academy, but I spend the rest of my time writing what I call journals. Someone might call them memoirs—and some might even deem them fiction. But I know the words I wrote are mostly true, if my memory didn’t fail me from time to time.
There were cases that were a lot more dramatic than others, so I might have embellished from time to
time. However, I tried to maintain the integrity of what I wrote. The cases came from the era I was partnered with Doc Gibron, who has now passed.
Indeed, I’ve dealt with weird human beings, here and there, but most of my cases were far more mundane. Usually some poor soul was robbed of his or her life and Doc and I found them pretty quickly, and most of these perpetrators were lame sons of bitches who weren’t all that bright and who were easily apprehended.
My partner Doc gained his name quite naturally. He was an academic who spent his professional life being a policeman instead of a professor. He really did earn a PhD from Northwestern University in Evanston, right next to Chicago, here, but he never wriggled free of the police.
And he never released himself from me. He was my best friend and my mentor. He was a great man and an even better policeman. He wasn’t Sherlock Holmes, and neither was I. We just kept after these murderous assholes until we caught up with them. We were successful in our fidelity to the dead, you might say. I always say that we’re the ones who speak for the departed, but I have no idea where I got that line. I know I didn’t create it, but it seems appropriate for what Doc and I did for all those years together.
I’ve got lots of time to think about my career, in retrospect, and maybe I’ll try to get those memoirs published, but I’m not sure I want anyone to read them.
*
Casey McCaslin, 1979
They always wind up in this same spot, Old Town. It’s where all the runaway kids head to when they’re running away from their parents or from no parents. They’ve got reasons, I know, but I don’t much care what they are. I just know they’re easy pickings. It’s as if they’re the lame members of the herd, and I’m like the lone wolf who picks them off at my leisure.
I hunt at night. It’s too easy for witnesses during the day. Too easy to make the license plates on my Mustang. It’s this car that attracts these girls. They’ve seen them in movies and on TV, and a muscle car gets to them, these young bitches. They think the brand of ride means that I’ve got money, and most of them are hustlers or would-be hustlers, and they think they can talk their ways into a few bucks by offering blow jobs. They don’t want the usual thing, a lot of them, because they’re quick enough to not want to get knocked up or get a dose of something. But they’ll hop right in.
Some of them have razors in their panties. But they never get a chance to grab them and then slash me and consequently relieve me of my wallet. I’ll turn to them in the car and slam my right fist right into the top of their noses, stunning them or knocking them out altogether.
I don’t even give them the time to scream. I haul them out of the Mustang after I see that there are no eyeballs on the post-midnight sidewalks in front of my building, and I lug their limp asses into my first floor flat. I’ve become pretty proficient at this modus operandi.
When I get them inside, and when they’re awake, they find themselves in handcuffs—hands and feet bound in steel. They find that their mouths are covered in duct tape.
I’ve removed all their raggedy assed clothing, just like the little brunette, tonight. She’s perhaps fifteen years old, give or take a year either way. No tits. Hardly any pubic hair. Maybe she’s only thirteen. It doesn’t much matter. She’ll wind up in the lake in a body bag, one way or the other. It only takes about an hour to do what I do with them, and then I get the remains out of here, and we head to the east to the lake.
I’ve got plastic on my living room floor. Maybe it’s that cover on my carpet that gives them a sense of impending finality. Their eyes go wide when they feel the plastic under their feet.
There’s got to be that look of recognition, of pure fear, before I use the straight razor on them. I don’t cut anything major until I’m ready. I only make them bleed a little at first, and then when it’s time, I’ll pull the young brunette off my couch, which has a plastic cover over it as well, and then I’ll drag her out onto the middle of the covered living room floor, and I’ll finally cut her carotid artery and watch her lights dim in her eyes. She’ll stop the thrashing not long after the blood surges from the wound and comes spouting outward onto the floor. Her knees will give way and I won’t have to hold her by the hair any longer because there won’t be any fight left in her.
I never talk to them. They certainly can’t respond, anyway, and the fact is that I don’t really want to hear them speak. I just want to watch them die.
This one’s down on the plastic-covered carpet, and the writhing is coming to an end. Her eyes widen, the way they always do when they’re revived enough to figure what’s happening to them. The brown-haired kid just gives out, at last, and then I have to get her into the body bags I’ve stolen from a mortuary, and finally I have that short ride to the lake shore. I have to make sure it’s late enough for me to carry them onto the dock at the north side beach. Because they’re young and because most of them are frail and under-nourished, they’re not all that heavy.
The brunette probably doesn’t go for more than 90 pounds. I clean the living room up, get her in the zippered bag, and then I carefully place her body in the trunk of my Mustang. The streets are deserted because it’s well after two in the morning. This is a working class barrio, and most of these people have to get up at five or five-thirty to haul ass to some factory job.
The drive to the lake is uneventful. I’m always concerned that I’ll get pulled over for some petty beef, but my luck has held so far. This makes four, I think. Pretty soon I’ll have to find a new pier to dump the bags off. Some fucking fisherman might snag the body bags. You never know how deep the water is, but I think it’s pretty far down to the bottom where I’ve been dispatching them. I’ll find a new spot anyway. No use taking stupid chances.
On the way back to the apartment, I begin to think about my favorite parts to all this, and the answer comes to me immediately.
I know I should feel guilt about killing these little cunts, and the thing I like best about cutting them and watching them bleed out is that I don’t feel bad at all about any of it.
In fact, after it’s finished, I don’t feel anything at all.
Chapter 1
Jimmy Parisi, 1979
He comes right up to me at my locker.
“Harold Gibron.”
He extends his right hand to me and I shake his outstretched hand.
“They call me Doc, but you can call me anything you think is appropriate.”
“You’re my new partner,” I say, disingenuously.
“There it is.”
He’s a bit too old to be a Vietnam vet, but he has probably read my jacket. I’ve read his, and I know he’s Korean War vintage. But he doesn’t appear to be decrepit. His eyes seem humorous, bemused or amused. I can’t figure exactly what his mood might be.
“We’re on in about twenty minutes,” he tells me.
It’s the midnights’ shift, the tour that my wife, Erin, hates the most because we barely ever see each other. She’s a school teacher, so she has standard hours of employment.
“I know.”
“I thought I’d come down here and get to know you a little before we head out.”
We’re going to be looking at some body bags that were just dredged out of the lake, about an hour ago. I think the Lieutenant said they found four bodies, so we need to get out to the crime scene in a hurry.
“We’ll have to talk in the squad,” I tell Gibron.
“So you gonna tell me what the hell you want me to call you, Detective Parisi?”
“Anything but Wop, Guinea, Goomba, or Greaser. My name is Jimmy. How about that?”
*
It’s a warm August Tuesday, just after one o’clock by the time we get to the beach. They’ve set up some klieg lights to illuminate the sand so that we can view the four bodies. We wait until the medical examiner has had his time doing the prelims, and then the photographer gets his time with them.
The ME comes up to us when everyone else is cleared away. His name is Jack Michaels. He’s got a
perpetually red nose, when it’s light enough to see it. He looks the classic Mick cop.
“They weren’t drowned, Jimmy, Doc.”
I’ve worked three other cases with Michaels. Doc Gibron apparently knows the Irishman, too.
“Throats cut from ear to ear, and it’s the probable cause of death, but I’ll get back to you with a final analysis, of course. There are several other non-lethal slashes. This swinging dick liked to watch them bleed before he finished the job. I have the feeling that this one’s not a friendly individual.”
Then he walks away from us.
We walk over to the illuminated portion of the beach where the victims lie.
Doc points a flashlight on the portions of exposed flesh on the four girls. The bags are all opened down to their torsos. These four are all kids. You can see their immaturity in the undeveloped breasts. They can’t be more than fourteen or fifteen, any of the four.
“This makes me very unhappy,” Gibron laments.
“You know any of them?”
“No. Hell no. We’re going to find out that they’re all homeless. Broken homes or no homes. They were all discarded.”
“How do you know they’re all homeless?” I ask my new partner.
But I know he’s right before he answers. Kids with real parents don’t usually wind up in the lake and they don’t wind up like this, unreported. If they had mothers and fathers, Missing Persons would’ve received numerous hysterical phone calls long before now.
We finish up. I write a few notes in my notebook, but Doc doesn’t write anything down at all.
“You’re the record keeper, Jimmy. I can just feel it.”
We walk back to the parking lot, but I have to look back, over my shoulder, one more time, like Lot’s crazy fucking wife.
*
We take our first meal break at the White Castle on 22nd Street, not far from the Loop. Doc orders coffee and six sliders, and all I ask for is a Coke. I have to have my caffeine, especially on midnights, but I can’t stand coffee. It leaves a filmy thing on my palate.
“A cop who doesn’t drink coffee?” he grins. “What’re you? A commie?”
I explain to him about the filmy residue.