by Thomas Laird
“What about his parents?” Doc asks as we both watch the gentle flurries descending down upon Lake Michigan outside my big rectangle of window.
*
There is an uncle on the northside, the brother of Casey’s mother. We knock on his door on a late afternoon at the tail end of this frigid February.
When he sees our IDs, he lets us into his brick bungalow.
His name is Grant Samuels. His sister’s maiden name was Doris Samuels. There was another brother who died in Korea, he tells us, early on in the dialogue. We sit across from him on a three-seat, beige couch. He sits in a recliner that is not presently reclined.
Grant Samuels has very little hair, a bit on the sides and completely chrome-domed up top. He tells us he’s been retired from GE on the west side for six years. His wife still works there, he says, but she’s retiring this July, too.
“You’re here about her goddam kid, I suppose,” Samuels tells us.
I nod at him.
“What’d the little cocksucker do, this time?”
“We’d like to know a little bit about his history,” Doc tells him.
“The history of his family life, to be a little more particular,” I add.
“You don’t know?” he tells us.
“That’s why we’re here,” Doc smiles.
He looks at us and his face turns almost grey.
“He was always a thief, the little prick.”
“How’d he get along with your—”
“He almost killed her, that’s how!”
“I didn’t mean to upset you,” Doc apologizes.
Samuels seems to exhale and relax some.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to blow off at you,” he tells Doc. “It’s just that he almost killed my sister. He beat her so bad she had to have plastic surgery and dental work. He knocked all her front teeth out, and he hit her so hard that a bottom tooth went through her lower lip. She damn near bled to death.”
“Did the cops get called?” I ask.
“No. She didn’t like cops. Look, she was no choir girl or maiden or virgin or any goddam thing. She drank and she married a bum who was an alcoholic, but nobody deserves the licking that fucking kid gave her. She tried to smack some decency into him, but he’s no damn good. What’s he done, anyway?”
“We’re investigating the murders of the six girls they found in the lake. You read about them?”
“Yeah. But he’s in Joliet for robbery, right?”
“He wasn’t there when they were murdered. And we’re looking at him for a couple of other homicides,” Doc explains.
“Look, I know the kid is fucked up. But a murderer? All those kids?”
We wait until it settles in.
“Why do you want to know about McCaslin and my sister and all that?”
“Because we don’t want him getting away with it,” I tell him.
I’m looking him straight in the eyes, and I see something like a gathering horror accumulating there.
“I’d never have thought….What else can I tell you? My sister took off, and I haven’t seen her in fifteen years. I’ve got two letters from her. That’s all.”
“Where is she?” Doc asks.
“A little place called William’s Bay, Wisconsin. She sobered up and got remarried. Apparently the bastard’s old man got drunk and plowed his car into a train and it cut him and the car in half. He was too drunk to feel much pain, the papers said.”
“You have an address?” Doc asks.
“Yeah. Let me go get it,” Samuels replies.
He rises and then goes into his kitchen.
He brings back two envelopes.
“You mind if we take a look?” I ask.
He nods.
“Go ahead.”
The letters are mostly chatty. They seem positive, hopeful. Apparently her second marriage is working out, she’s making regular meetings at AA, and she’s seeing a counselor in a nearby town called Delavan.
I hand the letters over to Doc for his perusal.
“You really think he could have done those things?” Grant Samuels asks us both.
“I think he could have, yes. But we’re just looking into it, like I said,” I answer.
“He was always mean, that kid. But he never hurt her until that one time. And that was enough. He almost killed her. I’m surprised, now, that he didn’t finish the job with her.”
*
You take 55, south to Joliet. On a good day, it might take an hour and a half from the Loop. Today is a good day. The snow has stopped and the pre-spring thaw has begun. We stop at a gas station to pee, just before we get off at our exit. We buy a couple of Cokes, but neither of us is hungry.
If the weather holds, here and in Wisconsin, we’ll take a ride to William’s Bay to see the mother tomorrow.
We drive to the prison, and when we approach it, it looks like a mini city of reddish concrete. The walls seem to be as high as the walls of Troy in Homer’s epic. We show our ID, and we’re let through the gates. We made the appointment with the warden yesterday as soon as we got done talking to Grant Samuels. Two guards escort us to an interview room. We’ll be on one side of a plexi-glass wall. There are holes cut into the plexi-glass so that you can hear each other.
Out he comes, smiling. He sits down on a folding chair. There are cuffs on his wrists and shackles on his ankles.
“I don’t get visitors,” he leers. “But I’ll be getting out, soon.”
“Maybe. We talked to your uncle,” I say.
Doc leaves his porkpie hat on. We’ve still got our leather jackets on, as well. Our weapons are back at the entry.
The snide sneer is off his face, momentarily.
“You did, huh.”
“He told us about your mom,” Doc says. His face is blank when he says it.
“What about her?” Casey asks with a still somber glare.
“I know why you did it, now,” I tell him. “I know why all those girls are dead.”
Chapter 8
Jimmy Parisi, Present
When I do lectures for the Academy recruits, I hear myself plagiarizing Doc Gibron, all the time. But he always handed out his pearls gratis, he once told me. He was only passing on what other coppers had given to him when he was green. I was his best student, he told me a few months before he died. I think that was my proudest moment as a policeman.
These young men and women in the Academy are brighter than I remember my fellow cadets in my day to be. These people all have some college behind them, some with a bachelor’s degree and even a few with a master’s. They come in knowledgeable about criminology from their studies, but most of them don’t come on to me like know-it-all’s. They seem a little intimidated by my years in Homicide, and they also seem to really want to learn instead of trying to come off as prized pupils. It makes the classes fun for me because they make me feel as if I’ve got something very important to tell them, something that might really matter when they go out on the streets.
My age doesn’t seem to work against me, here. I keep reading about ageism and how people are inclined to want older workers to move aside so that the younger men and women can take their spots. Technology has a lot to do with all that. My peers seem hardly fluent in computer-speak. Part of the problem is that geezers like me aren’t as adaptable as twenty and thirty-somethings. We get stuck in our ruts and refuse to see that Darwin knew all about change and adaptability, two centuries ago.
On the other hand, these punks don’t recognize the importance of the human factor. Machines are only as good or as bad as their assemblers and creators. I remember HAL in 2001: A Space Odyssey. HAL and his like could never seem to grasp the creativity of the human brain. They didn’t have the gut feelings or the sensitivity that human beings do. Which is why machines will always be inferior to people, I think. Every time I see some teenager hunched over his phone or pad or whatever the fuck, I pity them. They don’t know how to talk to each other. They don’t know the pleasure of privacy, now
that landlines are the way of the mastodon. It’s too bad.
I try to tell these recruits to watch what people do instead of listening to what they say. They’ll look at me quizzically, sometimes, when I say that, but the brighter ones get it. You have to be a student of human nature. You have to know lies and recognize liars when you see and hear them. It’s called intuition. Computers don’t have our kind of intuition, our kind of insight, and I don’t give a shit what Steve Jobs or any of those little pricks thinks.
I’m antiquated, I suppose. And I’m glad I’m off the streets. I’ve lost my legs. In any activity when you lose your pegs, you’re headed for the pasture.
I don’t look my age, many of these cadets have told me, and I don’t think they’re all sucking up to teacher. I don’t give them grades anyway. That’s for their full time instructors to do. Others have commented on my “youthful” appearance, and I guess I’m flattered by all that. But I knew my time had come when I hung up the badge and the nine millimeter. I got out when it was the right time, and I’ll never second guess my move.
After I give them an hour on proper use of firearms on the job, a young woman in the second row raises her hand.
“Yes?” I ask her.
I can’t see her face at all because they have these stupid stage lights glaring up at me.
“Can you tell us about the Casey McCaslin case?”
“Yeah. It’s over.”
There’s some nervous laughter.
“What exactly do you want to know?”
“How’d you finally get him?”
*
Jimmy Parisi, 1980
McCaslin’s lawyer gets a new trial in March of 1980. They’re going to attack the evidence on the grounds that we obtained it illegally. Doc and I knew it was coming. Our prosecutor, Dan Jennings, is very sharp, one of the best we’ve got. I have faith that he’ll do the best he can to keep him in Joliet, but anything can happen, the cliché goes, with twelve honest jurors. And it isn’t a cliché, brother; it’s a fact.
They expect this new trial to go two or three months because Jennings is coming after McCaslin and Fred Something with all he’s got in the Cook County arsenal, which is quite a lot. But the way it ended for our judge is not a positive for us. The guy is now in a nursing home with severe dementia and Alzheimer’s.
I fear the worst case outcome, and so does Doc.
*
It’s late March and Fred the Criminal Law Genius has all the momentum. It looks like their side is going to be a winner, and all indicators are negative for us. When April is halfway over, it’s over for us already.
Casey McCaslin sits at the table with his defense counsel, and he is appropriately smug. His lawyer is already talking about a civil suit against us for big money for false imprisonment, and we all smelled this coming. We were counting on having a new case against him for at least one of the murders, but nothing has shaken loose.
On the twenty-second day of April, the jury finds him innocent of all charges, and the judge directs the marshals and the Cook County guys to free McCaslin immediately. He walks out the door without his shackles and cuffs.
We are told by our captain that we are not to harass him in any way. They are indeed preparing a civil case against Cook County and Doc and me, so we have to be on our best behavior, the captain informs us.
I look over at Doc as we sit in the boss’s office, and I can see him seething beneath an attempt at a calm demeanor. His attempt is unsuccessful. My own cheeks burn with anger, and the captain is aware of my coloration.
“You can’t go after him, Jimmy. Not now. Maybe not ever again. The FBI is still looking at him. Figure it that way. He’s not going to get away with it forever. He’s not that smart,” the boss says.
“I understand,” I tell him. But I’ve made him no promises, and he’s aware of it.
“Don’t make me take a giant dump all over you two, please.”
His look is sincere. I don’t doubt his honesty.
“You have a full load. Get back to it, okay?”
We get up and leave his office, and we take a walk down the hall, Doc and I, to my cubicle. I sit at my desk and look out at the lake. It’s the constant source of my renewed calm. But it’s not working, at the moment.
“We both know we’re not letting it go, so why not let all that nuclear fission loose on me.”
“He meant it, Doc. He’ll relieve his bowels all over us if we get caught.”
“I’m used to the smell of shit by now.”
*
The civil suit doesn’t achieve McCaslin’s desired result—our firing. The County agrees to pay him two hundred grand in restitution, and rather than elongate the litigation, he settles for the two hundred K. Doc thinks he wants to go back to business as usual, meaning grand theft, and perhaps he wants to get beneath the public radar so he can return to the hunt for new prey.
Doc says it so matter of fact that a chill races up my spine.
He stands in front of my window, blocking the view.
We don’t hear from the captain, so it appears there will be no reprimand for either of us. Using that loco judge for a search warrant might have been cause for him to extend his wrath toward us, but he lets us slide.
We watch McCaslin on our own time, which is also not kosher in Homicide, but Doc and I manage to throw a few hours a week at keeping tabs on him. We don’t surveill his three flat because that would be asking for it, but we keep constant communication with the Robbery detectives, and no one has told them it’s hands off on this killer. They’re free to bust him back to his home in Joliet.
It’s unfortunate someone didn’t slit him open in the slammer, but I never figured he’d get shivved in the shower there. No such luck.
The talk with his mother a few months back didn’t provide us with anything new. We could see the remnants of the scars her son left on her face when he assaulted her, back when Casey was sixteen. Plastic surgeons can’t avoid leaving scars. It’s just that their scars are less noticeable than other surgeons’ handiwork. She has lines around her mouth that look like they didn’t come with the original package. She has false teeth, looks like. She smiled once or twice as we talked to her.
But there were no smiles when she described in detail what her boy McCaslin did to her. It was as savage a re-telling as I’ve ever heard, and I’ve heard some very ugly accounts before.
“I’ve come to terms with what I did,” she tells us.
Her new husband stood in the doorway of the kitchen, acting as a sort of backup for her.
Doc and I sat on a faux leather couch made of some cheap plastic that sort of stuck to our flesh. The marriage wasn’t all that prosperous this time, either. She told us about her alcoholism and about that of her ex-husband. Doris told us how she took a belt to McCaslin and how it enraged her even more when he refused to fight back. He’d simply put up his arms to fend off the belt buckle. He didn’t seem injured, and he never cried out, she said. Doris knew that beating him was the wrong thing to do, but she didn’t know how else to cope with a kid who was definitely wrong from the beginning.
“That child is evil. He always was. I should have drowned him in the bath tub, but I just couldn’t do it. I know that sounds horrible to you, but look what I coulda done to stop what he was gonna do. But I didn’t have the guts.
“When he beat hell outta me, that was God’s justice for me being a coward. He’s no good. He came out of me no good. Say what you want, some children are bad from the get go. I never shoulda had children with that man, my ex-husband, but I was too lazy to go to the drug store, and so was he.
“So what he’s done is part way on me, and I have to live with it. I’m trying to make things right with him.”
She nods toward her current spouse standing in the doorway.
“No one deserves what you got from him,” Doc says.
Then we get up off her sticky couch and head to the car and back to Chicago.
*
Things go s
ilent with McCaslin. Robbery has nothing to tell me when I make my regular weekly call to them about his status.
He’s got Cook County’s two hundred grand to live off for a while, and it might take him some time to spend all that loot, being the punk bastard that he is.
We have no evidence that Casey indulges in dope or alcohol. He doesn’t seem to like women, and we’re convinced he hates young women passionately.
“Some shrink will say,” Doc says to me, “that he’s punishing his mother by cutting the girls.”
“What the hell have the kids got to do with the mother and what she did to this asshole?”
“It’s like a reverse Catcher in the Rye.”
“Yeah, you had me read that last summer. So?”
“Holden Caulfield, in the book, wanted to be the catcher in the rye, which meant that he was going to catch all the kids before they jumped off a cliff that symbolized their entering adulthood.”
“I still don’t see the link up.”
Doc smiles at me.
“You really don’t think our boy is sane, do you?”
“You can’t call all murderers nuts, and you know it.”
“But some of them really are, no?”
“That’s an easy way out, Doc.”
“I’m not looking for an explanation. It’s just a theory, and I’m not a fucking shrink, but it seems like he has to have some excuse for killing very young females, and the way he prevents them from becoming just like his mommy is to tie them up and cut their throats and dump them in the lake. That same psychologist might make something of the water as their resting place.”
“How about he gets wood by murdering innocent girls who can’t fight back? How about this yellow cocksucker gets a stiffy when he watches their eyes close for the last time?”
“You have a theory, too. So now we have two theories and one free as a bird cocksucker who’s at liberty to do it all over again. And you know he’s not finished, Jimmy. He thinks he’s getting better as he goes along.”
“Yeah, I read that book you gave me, too. The one by the profiler at Quantico.”