by Thomas Laird
I can’t see Shea deserting my ship any time soon. He’ll go down with me and the rats in the hold, just like in some fucking pirate flick.
We make it to the back fence, and then Shea climbs the eight foot chain link and snips the concertina wire they’ve rigged on top of the fence. When he climbs back down, his long sleeved shirt is shredded, and I see black ooze seeping out of the elbow.
“You’re bleeding, you dumb dick.”
“It ain’t shit,” he smiles back at me in the dim light of the chemical plant.
We go up and over the fence where he’s cut the concertina wire, and the copper pipes lay in a six foot high pile. We’re going to steal every goddam piece. We start tossing them over the fence, two by two. The whole pile is on the other side in less than twenty minutes. Andy’s a strong motherfucker as well as a mean one. He gets two-thirds of the pipe over the chain link by himself. When it comes to strength, I’m his retarded little brother.
We scale the fence and then load the prize into his shit beater pickup, and then we pull the tarp over the load. The ends of the pipes stick out maybe eighteen inches, but I tie them together and then tie that rope to the sides of the truck. They ain’t going anywhere after I hook them up.
“Don’t move!” we hear behind us.
It’s a security guard we didn’t know they hired, and as we turn toward this guy who must walk really lightly, I see he’s not carrying a piece, and before he can raise his can of mace, I hit him in the chest with a nice downfield tackle. He’s a fat, balding, middle-aged man who’s probably a retired cop or factory guy, and I’ve surprised him. He must have expected us to just wait until he ran back inside and phoned the LaGrange Police. At minimum wage, he’s getting the worst of all this, especially when I begin pummeling his face into a mushy red goo.
The first blow broke his nose. I could hear the crunch. The subsequent pops knocked him out.
But I don’t stop slugging him.
“You really want to kill this guy?” Andy warns.
So I stop and look at the gore on my knuckles.
“I’d probably be doing him a favor.”
“We—I mean you don’t really need any more heat right now, do you?”
“You’re probably right. For a dumb shit, you’re probably right.”
I get up off the security guy. I can hear him breathing heavily, but he’s still sucking air.
“He’ll live,” I tell Shea.
“Maybe not for long.”
“You can phone in an anonymous tip, you stupid faggot.”
“I don’t like being called—”
“You might want to get in the truck and get us the fuck out of here.”
The veritable light bulb, low wattage as it is, goes off in his thick skull, and we drive the speed limit over to the Outfit dago with the garage.
He wants to undercut us and fuck us in the ass, price-wise.
His name is Frankie Amalfitano. He’s a made guy, so he thinks he can get away with that shit.
Frankie is five foot four, and he’s that wide, too. He’s got the greasy black guinea locks that make him look like a poster boy Italian gangster, but I’ve never feared the guineas. And they know I don’t run scared among them; I have a rep for being a snake that bites when provoked. They don’t like to do wet work if there’s no profit in it, so they give me a wide berth because what I’m selling them is highly marketable and not nearly as high profile and dangerous as drugs and all the other shit they’re into.
“You’re going to give me two thou for the pipes, Frankie. I just left some poor slob on the sidewalk who’s never going to look pretty ever again. I can do the same for you, and I don’t care if you’re a made cocksucker. I don’t care if you put out a contract on me, either, and you know it. I’ll kill your assassin-boy and mail his balls to you, first class. You can show his nuts to your old lady and the kids.”
“You don’t have to get all crazy with me, Mac.”
“Don’t call me Mac, you fat fuck. You’re gonna double the price on this shit when you sell it.”
Frankie doesn’t have any backup with him, and although Andy is still sitting in the truck, Amalfitano knows Andy’s rep, and he’s been looking at the blood all over my knuckles. It’s already turned black, by now, but Frankie knows what blood looks like when it’s dried up.
“All right, all right. Two grand.”
He pulls out his wad with the gold clip and he counts out the money and hands it to me in hundreds and fifties. Any lower denomination is scorned by the wops.
“Don’t ever threaten me again, you cocksucker,” Frankie spits.
I smile at him, and then Andy pulls into the oversized garage behind the tub of guts in front of me.
“I don’t like doin’ business with you, McCaslin,” Frankie says, his eyes all dead and black.
“Lot of money in that copper pipe,” I remind him, and he doesn’t reply.
Andy unloads, but I let him do it alone because it’s faster that way.
“I don’t like it how you talk to me..”
“All right, I’ll keep it in mind,” I tell him, and Andy’s finished so we back up in the driveway, and then he heads us to my building, down into the alley behind my apartment.
*
Jimmy Parisi, 1979
“Some security guy got beaten to death behind a chemical plant in LaGrange, a Robbery dick told me. They boosted some copper piping. Expensive shit. I was thinking—”
“Yeah, Doc. Our boy likes to steal pipe. It’s one of his things.”
“Two of our guys were on him that night, weren’t they?”
“Apparently he went out the back way because they probably didn’t take a ride down the alley, and they probably didn’t look for that fucking Mustang, and they probably went to sleep, holding hands.”
“I think it was Mendel and Garrity.”
“I rest my case, Doc. The Boss has got to get those fucks out of our business. It’s embarrassing.”
“We have our bottom feeders, just like any profession.”
“And now this security guy is dead, if it was McCaslin.”
“There’s no one to say it was him.”
“Funny how there are never witnesses. And the one eyeball we had is among the missing,” I say.
“He’s lucky,” Doc says.
“He makes his own fucking luck, and we both know it.”
“Don’t overrate him, Jimmy. He’s sly, but he’s not intelligent. If he were really smart, he wouldn’t be a thief and a kiddy killer.”
“Yet he remains at large.”
“Give him time to fuck himself up.”
“How many more little girls and security guys is he gonna go through before then?”
“I hear you.”
“Let’s take a ride,” I tell my partner.
“You want to go tuck him into bed?” Doc asks.
“I want to see who’s on him tonight.”
We take the elevator down. I see on my watch that it’s four-thirty. It’s still pitch black, and it will be for a while.
The cops in the unmarked squad are awake. Doc pulls up next to them, and it’s not the two incompetents who were on the evening the security guard was mauled to death. It’s Jack Wyman and Terry Strangley. They’re two professionals. Doc and I know them both pretty well. They’re state of the art Homicides.
“You guys cruise his alley?” Doc asks through the passenger’s window. I’m driving again, tonight.
“Three times,” Strangley retorts.
Doc waves and then I drive down to the end of the block and then turn into the alley.
“We should have two cars for this surveillance.”
“Manpower and money. Same old song,” Doc laments.
“Tell that to the security cop’s widow and kids.”
“What can I say, Jimmy?”
Nothing happening in the alley. Looks like our killer is in the rack. No lights coming from any of the three floors.
“Who lives in the
other two apartments?”
“I don’t know. But I can find out.”
“We never see lights in the other two flats at night.”
Doc looks over at me.
“You think they might be vacant?”
I stop the car midway to the end of the alley, and I throw it into park.
“The IRS got Capone. Jail is jail. If we could catch him with some shit, his parole is terminated, and he goes into the shitter for ten years. That would give us sufficient time to find something in the area of homicide on the motherfucker which would in turn put him in the pen for life, thus stopping his murder spree.”
“Sounds too good to be true, Jimmy. You really think he’d stash his stuff in the apartments?”
“Let’s find out who the other tenants are.”
*
We check out Records at City Hall and we find out that Casey McCaslin is indeed the owner of the three flat apartment building in the heart of blue collar land—my own southside.
We drive over there with a fresh search warrant which a very helpful and friendly judge signs after scouring Casey’s arrest record. I don’t expect to find that copper pipe in his building, but anything illegal will do, and that will get McCaslin off the streets until we can nail him for something far more major.
This time we have eight squads—four in the front and four in the back. I rap on his front door on the first floor because the entry door is unlocked.
He pulls his entry open. I wave the search warrant in his face, and then our troops go through McCaslin’s flat first, and then he escorts us upstairs.
“So you’re a slum lord,” Doc smiles at him as he unlocks the second floor apartment.
“Eureka!” Doc exclaims as he views the array of electronics in the room.
“Of course you have receipts for all this,” I grin at him.
“I want my lawyer.”
“He can come hold your hand at County because you’re under arrest,” I declare.
We book him, and he’s processed within an hour. He whines some more about his lawyer, but he knows the probation and the contraband in the second floor flat have sunk his fleet. He’s in the pokey for a decent stretch, and it’s just a matter of how long he will partake of the County food before he’ll be transferred to a big boy’s prison, perhaps Joliet, maybe even Menard.
*
We work the six murders even harder, now. It’s a relief that he’s behind bars and that he can’t kill more children for a while, but a robbery rap is not satisfactory to either of us. We’re not Robbery detectives, of course, and seven lives have been snuffed, and he’s only looking at a decade or two. It’s not nearly enough. Life wouldn’t be sufficient. We still cool them permanently in Illinois, but you can never tell with juries. They’re funny about frying them or gassing them. There’s always talk about getting rid of capital punishment, and I used to be a fan of smoking them, but I think now that it’s being too lenient on the pricks. I’d rather they feed them so that they’ll know that they’re never going to walk out into the sun again and they’re never going to get laid again, unless it’s to fuck their bunkmate. If I had to face a lifetime of incarceration, I think I’d be looking for a belt to hang myself with.
Casey McCaslin doesn’t deserve the luxury of an easy out. He deserves a very small cage with bars that were made just for him to thrash his skull against, morning, noon, and night.
*
We find the bag lady’s body where you’d expect. She’s horribly decomposed, but they find her in a landfill. Some junkmen were prodding the mounds of debris, and one of them stuck his shovel into her remains. After he was done retching, he called the police. We IDed her via her dental work.
The ME called the cause of death extreme loss of blood. There were striations on her neck bone that suggest a very keen blade—perhaps a straight razor. There were no traces of evidence a court of law might use, but I’m convinced, as is my partner, that it was the handiwork of our prized suspect himself.
Chapter 6
Jimmy Parisi, 1979
The New Year is coming soon. They say Reagan will defeat Carter easily. I don’t know what a “B” grade actor is going to accomplish as the most powerful man in the world. Maybe he just thinks this is his most memorable part. He was supposed to be Rick in Casablanca, but at least he never got the chance to fuck up that part.
It’s December 26th. Christmas is done, and Erin and I are broke from buying presents for both sides of the family. It’s a relief, but we won’t be finished with the holiday anxiety until New Years’ is over, too. Then perhaps life can settle in to some kind of predictable rhythm.
With the old lady from the street’s death, his tally is eight—eight that we suspect him for. He could have them buried in the basement of his apartment building, but the CPD dug around down there and they took the canine unit with them, and nothing new turned up. Casey McCaslin is in Joliet, at least, and the only murders he can do will be the inmates there, if they don’t top him, first. Doc and I are not at all concerned about his welfare in the hole. We only care about the injustice he’s getting away with by not getting caught for at least eight homicides.
It’s not that we’ve quit trying. We’ve continued to scour Old Town for any clues that would tie him to any one of the girls or to the bag lady or the security guard. Then, on this day after Christmas, we get word from Robbery/Auto Theft that the guy Casey runs with most frequently is Andy Shea. McCaslin never ratted him out, but Robbery thinks Shea might have been with him the night the security man got himself beaten to death. The guard never said a word in the hospital. He was in a coma from the moment the ambulance guys delivered him to St. Matthew’s Hospital in LaGrange. The CPD was never able to interview him. He died of a cerebral haemorrhage.
He left a family behind him, and that thug stole them from him, too.
We brace Andy Shea at his job at the lumberyard where he works in Cicero. We’re outside the city, but the Cicero PD knows we’re here in regard to the multiple slayings of the girls and the other two, so we have their OK.
It’s cold and it’s flurrying. The temperature must be in the lower twenties. Shea works out in the yard doing muscle work, stacking two by fours.
He sees us coming from across the open yard that is now covered with about an inch of pure white snow.
I can see in his eyes he’s looking for an exit, but then whatever reason he has is telling him it’s impossible to flee from us. We show him the badges, and then we escort him back to the car, and then we’re on our way downtown to a frozen lake that looks like the world’s largest ice skating rink.
*
We take Shea into the interview room. Some call it the interrogation room, but those days are over. Those were the years that my dad, Jake, would bring in a telephone book. The suspect always seemed to understand the book wasn’t for reference to telephone numbers. Now their civil rights preclude any rough stuff. But shit happens once in a while, anyway. Cops are a bit more clever, these days, about leaving bruises or marks of any kind. Me? I don’t whack them around. I just try to stay with them until they hit the fatigue mark—or until they lawyer up.
I don’t think Shea has the fucking brains or the money to get himself an attorney. He thinks he’s a tough guy and that he’ll outlast us.
I sit opposite Shea, and Doc sits to his right. Gibron is six-three, so it looks like my partner is doing a better job of intimidation because Andy keeps glancing to his right.
“Look at me,” I tell him. “I won’t tell you again.”
“Yeah?”
He tries his best to sneer. It’s pretty much a flop. It’s more like an idiot’s grin.
“Did you hit the old guy or did McCaslin do all the work?”
“I don’t know what—”
Doc shoves Shea’s chair with a jolt that almost knocks this twenty-something punk off the seater.
“You have to pay better attention,” Gibron smiles.
“All right, all right.”
/> “You need to change your tone, asshole,” Doc warns.
“The fuck does that mean?” Andy whines.
He’s afraid of Doc, and my partner knows it.
“Look at me,” I tell him again.
This time he diverts his eyes toward mine. He doesn’t want to try and stare Gibron down anymore.
“You were with that cheesedick the night he killed the security guard at that plant where the two of you stole all that copper. We have your fingerprints on a lot of that electrical shit you had housed in McCaslin’s three-flat. Did you know that, Andy? You don’t help yourself here, Robbery is going to have their turn with you the second you walk out this door.”
“I get a lawyer, don’t I?”
“Sure you do. But as soon as you bring him in, our deal, our offer, is void, bogus. You understand?”
“What deal?” Shea wants to know. “You ain’t said shit about any deal.”
“You help us nail McCaslin for the guard, and we’ll talk to the judge when they bring you up on enough theft charges to put you away for at least twenty years.”
“Bullshit. If you had anything on me, you would’ve dragged me here a long time ago.”
Doc shoves his chair again, almost toppling Andy Shea onto the carpet.