by Thomas Laird
“No. Fuck no. I ain’t kidding.”
“That mean you want another blow job?”
She smiles.
“You don’t have to do a goddam thing.”
I feel the blood rushing to my cheeks. I remember Parisi telling me he understood why I killed all those others.
“Don’t get mad. I just…like you,” she says.
“Yeah, well, I’m getting a little fond of you, too.”
“You don’t have to let me stay over. You can just drop me back where you found me. I’ll be all right.”
“I want you to stay. If you want to.”
“It is kinda late. So, okay.”
She bends over and kisses me.
I can see the blood jump out of her throat after the razor makes its cut.
Then she kisses me again, and I take her hand and lead her to the bedroom.
“What’s your name? Jesus, I never asked.”
“Mary,” she answers.
*
In the middle of the night, about four, I get up and go to the closet in the living room. I reach for the razor, and then I grab the roll of duct tape. Then I walk back into the bedroom where Mary is out like a broken bulb.
I walk to the bed, bend down, and then I look at her strawberry blonde tresses. I flip the razor open. I look at her white throat, all exposed for me.
Then I turn abruptly, walk back into the living room, open the closet, and I stash the razor and the duct tape back where they were.
Chapter 10
Jimmy Parisi, 1980
We haul Casey’s crew in one by one. There are a dozen member punks, including Andy Shea. Shea’s gone underground, lately. No one’s seen him, even though Robbery is putting the full court press on McCaslin’s crew. They’re pretty much lifetime thugs, all of them. They are all high school dropouts, except for Casey, who actually took two years at a city junior college, and who then turned full-time thief (and murderer). They all have records the length of a Louisville Slugger, and they’ve all spent time inside. But they keep getting sprung because most of their arrests were as juvies. Juvie is a swinging door situation. They’re so overcrowded that they have to let these punks go free, after a while. I worked Robbery-Auto theft for a year before I became a Homicide, and I know what those coppers are dealing with. It’s almost a joke. They catch the little pricks, and then the justice system hauls them in for a little while, and then they’re back roaming the streets.
The Irish crews are incorrigible. They’re huge on recidivism. In and out and over and over again, and maybe they wind up dead in an internal feud or in a beef with the Italians or the Blacks or the Latinos. But you can be certain that they’re not going to find Jesus and become good fucking citizens.
We take Mick O’Brien for a ride downtown for an interview. We sit him in the interrogation (interview) room for a talk. He’s a tall, skinny, gaunt looking twenty-three year old, a product of juvenile detention. He’s hard and sinewy, with coal black eyes, tattoos on his arms and throat, and scraggily black hair that looks like it’s never been shampooed. Not the guy you want to see dating your daughter.
“You guys are homicide. The fuck?”
Doc laughs out loud at him.
“You’re here on our dime, junior. Shut the fuck up.”
O’Brien eyeballs my partner but chooses not to respond in kind.
“Your jefe, Casey, is a contender for serial killer of the year. You’re a known associate of his, and I assume you know what happens to known associates of criminal types, of which you are a member, no?” I tell him.
“I haven’t seen him in months, not since before you guys illegally dumped him in Joliet. Nice move, on that one.”
“We gave him a temporary change of scenery. Perhaps you’d like to be our next contestant to go to that luxurious spot?” Doc smiles.
“Why you two got a hardon for me? I been working construction with my cousin for nine months.”
His black eyes are like a shark’s, dead.
“Your cousin has a fine rap sheet, also,” I say. “Does your probation officer know you’re working with him off the books?”
“How’d you know that?” he asks me.
“We’re not here to talk about that. We want to hear what you know about McCaslin’s extra- curricular activities,” I tell him.
He attempts to bore those pieces of anthracite into my eyes. I keep a steady gaze at him, and neither of us blinks. And then he looks over at Doc as if he’s going to get help from my partner.
“Answer Detective Parisi’s question, you fucking knob.”
O’Brien’s cheeks flush just slightly, and he looks back at me, this time without the thousand yard stare.
“We don’t have anything to do with each other’s personal shit. I don’t know who he fucks, and I don’t care. If you think he’s the guy who whacked those girls, all you gotta do is prove it.”
He smiles wanly at both of us.
“You aren’t being cooperative,” Doc warns him. “Don’t you have any idea what a huge shit we can lay all over your forlorn ass?”
“What do you think I’d know about him or about those kids? You really think he’d open up about erasing the six of them?”
“You’re familiar with the count, huh?” Doc queries.
“It’s in all the papers.”
The coal eyes are back on me.
“You want to continue, it’ll be with my lawyer here with us.”
“If you lawyer up, it’ll take hours to set all that up,” Doc grins.
“I got a job on the northside. I’m way late already.”
“What are you boosting today?” Doc asks, his face not humorous at all.
“I don’t gotta take this,” he spits.
“You’re right,” I tell him. “Get the fuck out. We’ll be in touch real soon. Spread the word to your fucking ant-brained crew.”
He gets up and leaves, and Doc looks over at me.
“Well?”
“Lunch,” I tell him.
We go to the joint that was made famous on Saturday Night Live by John Belushi, the Billygoat Tavern. It’s not far from our HQ, so we drive over for the now-famous cheese bugga, cheese bugga, no Coke, Pepsi. The place was originally a hangout for the newspaper guys from the Tribune and the Sun Times and The Daily News and The Chicago American, but now it’s popular with the tourists and all the kids who watch that TV show. If you don’t go early, as we do, it’s 11:30 A.M., you wait in a line out down the block. We arrive at just the right time and we get a primo booth by the bar. We order the expected, and Doc gets himself a beer to my Coke. He doesn’t usually drink on the clock, but I’m not going to complain. I’ve never seen him loaded.
“I just need one. Don’t get your Jockeys in a knot,” he smiles.
“No, I’m cool with it. Everything’s smooth.”
“We keep spinning our wheels with this cocksucker, McCaslin, and now he’s gone underground.”
The bar and grill suddenly begins to swell with patrons, and the grill man goes into his cheese bugga cheese bugga routine for all the customers. I’m waiting to see the goat loping out from somewhere, but he’s been dead since the Cubs’ curse began with Sam Sianis.
It’s getting more crowded and noisy as the minutes pass. The place is suddenly packed, but our drinks and food arrive quickly. Doc thumps the bottom of the ketchup bottle, and the red goo splatters onto his burger and all over the rest of his plate.
“This shit never happens at the White Castle,” he says.
Then he drains half of his Old Style draught, and he shouts at the waiter to draw him a Coke.
“So much for the libations,” he explains to me.
“So what’s the plan?” he wants to know as he bites into the cheese burger.
“You fucking tell me,” and I bite into my own order.
As we finish our food, the noise gathers into a roar. There are an equal number of young women and men in here, now. The tourists must have arrived, and after they’ve received their bee
rs—this is mostly a blue collar crowd or a group that wants to seem blue collar—the volume rises to a primal shriek. So we finish our meals and Doc takes the check without regard to my protest. We leave and get back in the Ford, and he drives us to the beach. We have a half hour before we’re back on duty, and Doc likes to cruise Oak Street Beach.
We pull into the parking lot, and he stops us in a place where we can see the water and the talent on the sand.
It’s warm and fragrant out here. We have the windows open so we can take a whiff of the heat and the cool lake water. Lake Michigan’s water has its own special, indescribable scent.
We only have a few minutes, but it’s a nice, if brief, break from Casey McCaslin and his gang of morons. I find it strange that Casey would ally himself to the imbeciles we’ve been interviewing, his crew. I say so to Doc.
“Probably gives him a feeling of alpha dog. All he wants is their allegiance.”
“Maybe,” I tell my partner. “But you take a big chance when you surround yourself with stupid motherfuckers.”
“You remember the Army?” he asks.
“Point taken, point made,” I respond.
“He knows none of them are bright enough to out-think him, so he feels secure. He likes the power, too. And maybe there’s one guy who might be able to give him a challenge,” Doc adds.
“O’Brien?” I ask.
“Sure. He’s a sly little prick, as far as street smarts go. He’s no genius, but you can tell he’s got enough juice to not let us corner him into saying anything about his beloved honcho’s penchant for adolescent females.”
“You mean his hatred for them,” I say.
“Whichever. His thing for them, then. O’Brien might be a threat, and Shea sure as shit isn’t.”
“Agreed. Kid’s a fucking turnip.”
“You see the black eyes? Did you take a good look?”
“Yeah, he tried the stare-down.”
“Shows cunning. Shows a little initiative. The others we’ve been talking to are about as impressive as one of those garden vegetables you mentioned, but O’Brien might be the Richard the Third of the bunch, the assassin who wants to steal the throne.”
“Never read the play.”
“But you get my meaning?”
I nod.
“Tyger, tyger, burning bright…”
“Say what?” I ask him.
“It’s a poem by William Blake. ‘The Tyger in the Forests.’ He spells tiger with a ‘y,’ though.”
“And?”
“The thing’s about why God would create a fierce animal like a tiger and allow it to roam the earth in the presence of man, who is essentially more like the lamb than the tiger.”
“You lost me.”
“Why is this planet so fucking violent? Why are there predators and prey?”
“Okay. I think I follow. The tiger is McCaslin.”
“Yeah, Jimmy. He’s the wild beast. He’s the Darwinian alpha monster.”
“And O’Brien is the heir to the throne.”
“Could be. Might possibly be.”
“And you think we just discovered where McCaslin might be vulnerable.”
Doc doesn’t reply. He pulls the car out into traffic and we head out to the streets to try and bring in someone who shot a bartender to death in the parking lot where the victim worked, on Rush Street.
*
Casey McCaslin, 1980
I’m taking her to buy some clothes. Mary hasn’t got anything to wear except the threads on her lanky body. I asked her how she kept the duds clean, and she said she washed them in a bathroom sink at one of the gas stations near where she hung out. She almost looked pitiful as she explained all that to me.
I take her to a discount joint. This time we ride in the Mustang. I made sure we weren’t being followed, and if they are behind us, they’re all invisible men.
She’s impressed with my number one ride.
“Why do you drive that Chevy?” she asks.
She has her hand on my crotch, but I don’t make her move it. I like her to touch me for some reason I’m absolutely unaware of. I like her feel. I keep wondering why I didn’t kill her last night, and my head’s telling me I’ll have to cut her, eventually. But not now. Not just yet. I want to see where it’s going, with Mary.
I didn’t think about names, with the other six. They were just meat, young meat. They weren’t even real, somehow, but this one is different, and I can’t say why.
I know it won’t last. Nothing ever has, before. She’s just another little cunt, I try to tell myself. Something inside keeps struggling against the idea.
Her name is Mary.
She has a name.
Chapter 11
Jimmy Parisi, 1980
We still cruise Old Town when we get tired of tailing Casey McCaslin all over the city. He knows we’re behind him, but we never see him out on the streets at night.
“He must have a new hobby,” Doc quips.
He smiles at me sadly.
“I know. Not all that funny, no?”
“That’s your cop black humor, correct?”
“My man, it seems as if you’ve been listening to me, after all.”
The only places he seems to go to are auto parts stores, where he’s apparently getting parts for that fucking Mustang he tools the city with. We’ll see him working on the car in his garage, behind the apartment building.
“We haven’t checked out that garage,” Doc adds.
“We had a little problem with a search warrant, a while back. Excuse me if I’m gun shy.”
McCaslin’s made his trip to that parts place, and he drives directly back into his alley and then into the garage where he begins to jack up the front of the Mustang.
We hear him yell out “Harassment!” as we slowly pull by his garage door. He plays this game every time he knows we’re in earshot of him, but he’s never put the hammer down regarding the threat. Doc and I figure he’s hoping for us to just give it up so he can go off the radar.
We’re back in Old Town once again, figuring this prick has got to return to the scene of the crime eventually, but so far all we’ve perused is the usual assortment of pot seekers and the small time dealers who supply them and a number of high school kids who just want to soak in the atmosphere of this hippy dippy shithole.
It’s May, and the weather has turned fair and comfortable, in the low 70s. It’ll be beach weather by the end of this month, and I remember how long it’s been since I took Erin and the kids to Rainbow Beach on 76th Street. I love the beach, but I never seem to have time for it, and Erin is always busy with the kids and with her schoolwork. She grades papers until around ten, every weeknight, and she’s always jammed up on the weekends, too. I’m going to insist we take a Sunday afternoon at the water, in spite of everyone’s schedule.
“It appears as if we’ve struck a dry socket once again,” Doc says as he turns the channel on a jazz station.
We’re on the late shift tonight. It’s around midnight on a Friday night. We just began our tour, and even for a weekend night, the neighborhood’s dead. Not much action at all. It’s cooled off considerably from the comfort of the afternoon, and now we have to put on the jackets we always carry until the heat of the summer sets in. It’ll be in the low fifties by the time the sun comes up and we’re off shift.
As we roll past Blackmore Avenue, we see two figures on the street corner. As we get closer we see that it’s an adult male and a teenaged female—maybe she’s younger than thirteen—it’s hard to tell in the dim illumination of the street lights.
Doc pulls the Ford over to the curb, about a quarter-block from the two dark figures. The male appears to be a few inches over six feet tall, and the girl can’t stand much over five-two. She’s gaunt and frail, it looks like from here.
We wait until the man coaxes her into his ’77 Fairlane, and when he pulls away from the curb, we follow. He heads east toward the lake, and it’s then that Doc calls in for assistance. We don�
�t want to lose this guy. He might be up to the same MO as our boy, Casey. Perhaps we’ve found a copycat killer. There’s been so much publicity about our “unsolved” cases for the six kids that it had to happen eventually that some asshole would try to mimic the murders and get his name in the newspapers.
We get the call from three other Homicide detectives that they’ll help us tail this clown. We tell them our location and the direction the guy in the Fairlane’s headed, and they say they’ll be waiting for us to appear. We tell them it looks like he’s going toward Lake Shore Drive North.
When he gets on the Outer Drive, he’s going north. I don’t think he’s made us, and I haven’t even seen the other three vehicles, but they’re likely up ahead, waiting to triangulate this sweetheart in the cheap Ford.
Now I see one of our guys on the Fairlane’s right—the Drive is four lanes, here, and he’s a lane over from us and the guy we’re pursuing.
“What if McCaslin didn’t do those six kids?” Doc asks.
“No chance. We know it’s him. We put him to bed a long time ago, so this is another voice heard from.”
“It makes you wonder if we’ve been after the wrong cutter from the beginning. Maybe Casey’s just a thief, and that’s all he is.”
“You really believe that?” I ask.
“No,” he smiles. “Casey’s our guy.”
The Ford pulls off toward the Oak Street Beach parking lot, and now I can see our other two cop rides. We have this prick surrounded, front to back, side to side, and the man in the Fairlane slows down to a crawl as we enter the beach’s parking lot.
The other squads let us take control of the scene as we get out of the cars. The guy in the Fairlane stays in his vehicle along with the girl in the passenger’s seat.
We’ve got our weapons out, and so do the other six Homicides. We’re all standing outside our rides, but there hasn’t been a move from our quarry or the girl.
“Get out with your hands in the air!” Doc orders.
We don’t have to wait long. The tall man pops out of his junker car, and his hands are toward the night sky.
Doc positions him on the hood of the Ford, and he cuffs him.
The two closest homicides on our right get the female out of the car. They escort her to us. They cuff her, too, just in case.