by Thomas Laird
“Why don’t we put a sign that says ‘child molester’ on his front door?”
“That would be a breach of his civil rights or some shit,” I reply.
“Fuck his civil rights.”
“Sing it loud to the choir, Trooper.”
“I have a throw-down in the trunk.”
“That would be murder, Doc, and he’s not worth me having to arrest your sorry ass for homicide.”
“You’d pinch me for shooting this bag of diarrhoea?”
“As sure as the sun rises.”
“Jesus, Jimmy, you really are as straight as I thought you were.”
Casey has not wandered out at night, not for as long as we were on shift, anyway. Our Captain, Jack Donahue, is not happy that Casey McCaslin is shitting all over our lawn, but he knows as well as we do that we have nothing to arrest him for, and bringing him in for interrogation will likewise be fruitless because Casey is a veteran of the ordeals. Other coppers who have pinched him or brought him in have told us that he lawyers up immediately, and then they make his bail, and then the party’s over. You have to have this guy cold, or you’re just leaving tread marks beneath you.
Captain Donahue is so displeased with Mr. McCaslin, however, that he has assigned a trio of surveillance cops, including Doc and me, to watch him twenty-four seven.
Until the money runs out or until this Irish asshole does something very stupid. Which is not likely.
I have faint memories of McCaslin from grade school. He was a loner back then. But even when someone shoved him, he’d hold back until the bully had sufficiently riled him, and then the instigator paid the full measure. Casey had to be dragged off his tormentors those few times he was bullied, and the tormentor paid for his sins in extremis. Broken noses, split lips, missing teeth, and once there was a torn off earlobe. I don’t know how this Mick stayed in that Catholic grade school, but he made it through to graduation. Perhaps it was because he never started any of the carnage. He just finished the battles with extreme prejudice. We never came into contact all that much, except on the playground, and I never had a beef with him personally.
We’re on midnights’ once again, and the radio is playing Miles Davis. Davis is also an acquired taste for me, but there is something sad, elegiac, about this man’s horn, and midnights’ is just the right time to hear him mourn this sad life.
“He can’t stay inside forever,” Doc says. Then he yawns.
“You can zee for a while. I’m not tired,” I tell him.
“Nah, I’ll stay awake. If I crap out, it’ll make me even more pooped out when the sun comes around. I’ll keep the watch with you.”
He stays alert for the next four hours, and then our shift is over, and Casey remains out of sight.
*
Casey McCaslin, 1979
Enough is enough. They’ve got me boxed up tight. And I can’t do any business with a full time tail on me. The only time I go out is when I have to buy groceries or when I go to a fast food dump. But I can’t very well hang with my crew because I am on probation, and if they catch me with my “associates,” I’ll go away for several years.
And I can’t do business on the phone because I figure the FBI is after me by now, as well, and they’re sure to be tapping my phone. If they haven’t, the Chicago cops have. Even if neither of them is listening in, I can’t take the chance. So I’ve stuck myself in limbo. I don’t know why I jammed it in their faces with the last two girls, but I couldn’t help myself.
When I got them out of that guinea’s Camaro, I slugged one, and she went down, and before she hit the sidewalk of the empty, early-morning street, I smacked the other one in the temple, and she was out before she hit the cement next to the first one.
I dragged both of them by the ponytails up to my door and tossed them inside the doorway to get them out of sight. There was no moon, so visibility was almost non-existent. Then I hauled them by their manes up the steps to my first floor flat. I don’t have to worry about noise because I own this three flat apartment building, and the upper two apartments are always kept vacant. This is where we store the shit we steal, in the upper two flats. I keep nothing in my own place, and I suppose the cops could find out that I’m the landlord around here, but there is always risk in my line of work. I’ll never keep a body on my property because a murder rap can mean execution; thievery just means a trip to Joliet.
I duct taped their mouths and their hands and their ankles and prepared them on top of plastic throwdowns, and I used gloves to keep them both fiber free. So far I’ve been very meticulous about not leaving my friend Parisi and his partner anything evidentiary to work with.
But I have to lay back this time because I’d really be asking for it if I ventured out anymore for a long while. The cops will again tire of keeping watch on me, and it’ll become a grim economic reality that they won’t be able to afford round the clock surveillance after a time, and then things will loosen up and I can return to my brothers to resume business as usual, which is the collecting of items that we relocate for the purposes of our own profit.
Copper pipes are good, but the Robbery cops are keeping their eyes on our sources. They know where the real treasures are lying around to be taken, and so we have to broaden our vistas to steal other shit.
I’m going to have to limit my lust for these girls. This last time was far too chancy. I would have thought they’d be watching that pier. And maybe they had been, but I caught them after they’d given up on the surveillance.
They were very gratifying, those two. The added attraction was watching the other twat’s face as I cut the standing one’s neck to the bone. The other kid’s eyes got big as baseballs when she watched that blood spatter on the plastic beneath them. I watched the survivor as I let go of the dead girl’s hair, and I could hear the silent scream from beneath her taped mouth. I almost wanted to pull the duct tape off so I could hear her shrieks, but that would’ve been insane.
I pulled the second one to her feet. She tried to look down at the body on the floor, but I yanked her upright, and then I made the first incision across the top of her small, childish breasts, and I could hear the bleating beneath the tape, and so I made another red line across her stomach.
I thought she was going to pass out, so I slapped her, and the shock of the blow revived her.
Then I cut her throat as deeply as I had sliced the first little cunt, and then I let go of her hair.
*
Jimmy Parisi, 1979
Doc is working on his first novel. While he watches McCaslin with me on yet another midnight dreary, he tells me all about it.
“It takes place in France at the end of the Second World War. This French girl has lost her husband to the war, but she doesn’t know if he’s really dead. She hasn’t heard from him since ’39, when the Krauts invaded Poland and started the whole thing. She’s struggled to be faithful to the old man, but she meets another guy and falls in love with him. She can’t marry the new guy because she’s not sure the husband’s dead, and she loves both of them and fidelity is a big deal with her. However—”
“There’s always a however. I have a feeling your heroine ain’t going to get laid until the end. Who pops her? The husband or the new boyfriend?”
“You are a gross—No, no. You are a grotesque, Jimmy.”
“Why’re you writing about that war? Why didn’t you write about Korea, instead?”
“Fuck Korea. Being there was enough. Fucking Chinese bugles. World War Two was the romantic war. Like that movie Waterloo Bridge with Robert Taylor and Vivien Leigh.”
“I hated Gone with the Wind. Erin made me sit through it at the Oakbrook Theater. We had to sit in the front row to see a forty year old movie that lasts four fucking hours, and I got a sore neck from staring up. She cried when Olivia DeHavilland croaks, and I started laughing, and everybody in our vicinity started booing me. Can you believe it?”
“I’ll do anything to stay awake. Jesus Christ, what a vulgar young savage you
are!”
“I think your book sounds interesting, though. Everybody’s a sucker for World War Two romances. You’ll make a million bucks while I’m sitting outside some hillbilly killer’s apartment at three in the morning. You’ll be in bed in Hollywood in La La Land with some fucking young starlet who learned how to give head in Thailand.”
“You ought to write this thing. It sounds better than mine.”
“No it doesn’t. I’m just bullshitting to keep us both awake.”
“Let’s go get something to eat.”
“That prick’ll probably pull out the minute we blow away from the curb.”
“We gotta eat, Jimmy. Fuck him. He’s probably up there pumping his happy guy while dreaming of his next adventure by Lake Michigan.”
We pull away from that curb, but this time I’m driving.
One of the reasons we keep going to White Castle is that it’s a 24 hour operation. Doc excuses himself and goes to the head.
I order for both of us because we get the same thing every time: six sliders apiece, coffee for Doc and a large Coke for me. The coffee and Coke are saturated with caffeine.
The White Castle looks like that Hopper painting, “Night Owls.”
The waitress has gone for our orders. She’s a chubby brunette with perpetually sore feet.
Then Casey McCaslin sits down at the far end of the bar. We’re the only two patrons in the place at 4:10 A.M.
He smiles at me, but I don’t return the smile.
“You must really like this place,” he calls over to me. “I thought I’d reverse roles and tail you two, for a change.”
“You must be really stupid, Casey. You keep shitting where you eat.”
“The hell’s that mean?”
“I’m sure you wouldn’t get it.”
“I remember you, Parisi.”
“I remember you, too.”
“How? How do either of us remember that far back?” he insists.
“You’re hard to forget. And I won’t forget you any time soon.”
The waitress comes out, and Casey orders a coffee to go. She brings it right back to him, and just after McCaslin departs, Doc returns from the can.
“What’s wrong?” he asks.
Then he goes to the window and sees the green Mustang pulling out from the lot.
Chapter 5
Mary O’Connor, 1978
Another week out here, and I’m starting to worry about frostbite. I haven’t got enough cash to buy a new coat and some new gloves because it takes most of my money to buy three meals a day at fast food restaurants. I’m copping between ten and twenty for each trick—ten for a blow job and twenty for all the way. Some of these creeps want anal, but I’m not doing it. If they want the standard piece of ass, they gotta wear a rubber, too, and no exceptions. That’s where I get real stubborn about it. A lot of these assholes want to ride bareback, but I’m not having it. And if they claim they don’t have a skin, I supply one from the shelter. They’re handing rubbers out freebie.
I sleep at the shelter on the outskirts of the Loop when there’s space, but I have to take a bus there because I usually work the Old Town district. You get lots of drunks from the trendy bars on Rush Street who get lost or who come looking for young pussy when all they can find is seasoned pros on Rush. Some of those girls haven’t been girls for several decades, so if they want fresh cuts, they come looking in Old Town.
I try to be selective with my clients, but sometimes economics gets in the way. I have to eat, and I have to have bus fare to get a warm bed for the night. There have been evenings when the shelter is overflowing, and then I try to find a customer who likes the comfort of a cheap hotel or some sleazy-assed motel in the suburbs. At least if I do an overnighter, it costs them double, forty bucks, and the cost of the motel. Some of the better johns buy us a pizza or we go out for fast food on his ticket. But I can’t always come up with guys who are human. Civilized types don’t truck much with whores.
I don’t think of myself as a prostitute, sometimes, but I know I’ve become one. I probably wasn’t cut out to be the marrying type, anyway. I never got asked to the prom or any of that shit because I quit school too soon. I couldn’t have afforded a dress and all the other stuff that you wear to one of those things. Just as well, I guess. Sometimes it gets to me, though, and I’ll have to muffle the noise at the shelter with one of their skinny-assed, well-used pillows.
I don’t think I’ll ever get off these nasty-assed streets. I’ll die pretty soon. There are plenty who’ll be willing to throw me in the Chicago River and watch me sink to the bottom without a trace. It’ll be like I never lived, never was alive, never knew anybody or loved anybody or mattered to anybody at all. I have to bury my face in the pillow about all that, from time to time.
I’m in Old Town tonight, and it’s past ten o’clock at night, and I’ll probably be too late to get a cot at the place where I go. So I’ll try to entice one of these hardons to get us a room. I don’t care how cheap it is as long as it isn’t out in the open air. It’s in the low thirties already, and it’s supposed to go down to the low twenties, later.
About ten-thirty, a guy in a Camaro pulls up at the curb. There’s little to no action out here in Old Town because it’s a Monday night and because it’s cold. Too nippy to be standing out on a curb. Everyone’s in some bar, but I look way too young to get into one of those dives.
The Camaro is black, and the picture of a hearse pops into my head. But this is a hotrod with white racing stripes on either side.
He rolls down the window.
“You don’t look old enough to be out past curfew,” he says.
I can’t see his face because it’s too dark, and I’m nowhere close to a street light, and he hasn’t stuck his face out toward me.
“You lookin’ for a date?” I ask.
“Are you a cop?” he laughs.
I still can’t make out any features or even if he’s got a mop of hair or if he’s bald.
“Are you?” I shoot back at him.
“I’m no cop. You want to party?”
“Depends on how much fun you’re lookin’ for.”
“How about a little service in the backseat?” he laughs again.
“There’s no room, back there.”
“What kind of party’d you have in mind, girl?”
“All night. Somewhere warm.”
“Nah. It’s either my backseat or goodnight fuckin’ Irene.”
“Say goodnight to Irene, then, asshole,” and I begin to walk away from him.
I get about five steps away when I hear him rev up the engine. That’s when I start to trot. Then I hear him burning rubber, and I take off at full gallop. As I run, I turn back my head toward him and I see him spinning his wheels in place, and then the Camaro takes off and he jumps the curb and starts to come right at my back.
I look frantically for something to hide behind, but he’s only about thirty yards behind and closing faster than I can duck away from him.
Finally I see a light in a shop across the intersection where he’s almost on top of me, but I get across the street and he suddenly jams on his brakes with a squeal that sounds like a pig that’s been stuck with a knife.
When I get to the store front, I wheel around and see the Camaro at the intersection. A cop is coming up behind him in a squad car, but the cop doesn’t put his lights on. The traffic light turns green, and the Camaro and the copper take off and I don’t see them again.
I walk a block to the bus stop, and I wait twenty minutes, shivering, on that corner.
When the bus finally arrives, I take it and two transfers to the shelter. It takes another half hour, and when I finally get there it’s midnight, and when I walk into the shelter, they tell me they’re full up for the night.
I find an alley two blocks south, and in the alley is an empty cardboard box that was the cover for a washing machine or some shit.
I put the thing over me like I’m a hamster, and this is my home
for the night.
I’m afraid to fall asleep because I figure I’ll never wake up. They say that’s what happens to you in the Arctic or Alaska. It isn’t that cold here, but I can’t stop shivering anyway.
It doesn’t matter, I keep telling myself, if I croak here tonight. At least I won’t have to fear the next son of a bitch who rolls down the window of his car, and I won’t have to be scared of getting frozen solid in some goddamned cardboard box, ever again.
*
Casey McCaslin, 1979
I park the Mustang three blocks west and one block south. Then about three-thirty in the morning, I sneak out the kitchen window and hop the fence. I walk down the alley at a slow pace so I won’t rustle up the hounds in this shithole southside ‘hood, and all the pooches must be dreaming because I don’t spark a whimper or a yelp.
I reach the Mustang and get in and quietly pull away from the curb. I think Parisi and his pal might not be on duty tonight, but then I see a car parked under a busted street light not sitting right in front of the apartment building, and I think it could be them.
Getting to the hovel where Andy Shea lives is quick work at this hour. He’s my right hand booster. We do all the big jobs together. He mails me his boo hoos about us being short of spending capital, so I’m sliding out under this moonless sky tonight. We were getting short of jack, too. It was going to be tight just to buy beer and food. So we’re stopping by a chemical plant out by LaGrange where they’ve got some tasty copper pipes that we can sell for a few grand to the guineas who fence that shit.
Andy’s got a beater pickup that the cops don’t seem to pay attention to. It’s white and damn near rusted out, so the coppers probably think it’s the ride of some ignorant hillbilly who’s been out to the bars all night. We have a tarp to cover the booty, and the Italians aren’t far from the chemical plant, and they’ll hide the copper in an oversized garage they have behind an empty lot on 36th Street. It’s right in the middle of dago heaven, and so the cops have been paid to live and let live.
Andy Shea is a Mick like me. Dysfunctional family, the shrinks would call it. He’s been on the streets longer than I have, and he’s not carrying high wattage above his chin, but he’s loyal and he’s one vicious son of a bitch in a pinch. Knife, gun, ball bat—they don’t come any more feral than Andy Shea. And I can trust him. He’s been pinched by the police more than a few times, but when they brought him into the station for a batting around with a phone book, as the Robbery pricks are wont to do, he never squeals a fuckin’ syllable. You couldn’t ask for a better field guy. He’d take the drop for me any time. I’m sorta like his hero. The other four guys we hang with are incognito at the moment since the heat’s on me for the girls. I understand. They don’t feel comfortable around a murder rap because they’re really just boosters, not killers. When the heat fades, I’m sure they’ll be back on the prowl with me and Andy. He doesn’t give a shit about the stuff they’re looking at me for. He’s faithful like a mutt who’s attached himself to his master for better or worse.