by Thomas Laird
It’s just that I can’t stand this cocksucking Harp, O’Brien, and I’d rather kill him than see some old dude die doing a part time job or whatever. I never knew I had a sentimental side, and I don’t much like it. It’s a dangerous attitude to have, if you’re me. I wasn’t sentimental at all when I clocked my old lady, back when I was sixteen. And I was hardly soft hearted about those six girls I cut and threw into the fucking lake.
I don’t really feel bad about them. I’d probably do it again. It’s not like I feel remorse. I am what I am, like fucking Popeye.
I’m going to hell, if there is one. Otherwise, and more likely, I’ll just come to the end and all this shit will stop.
It’s not like I’ll miss anything, after all.
Chapter 14
Jimmy Parisi, 1980
Kacyznski’s Trucking gets knocked over, and we have a security guard who’s in bad shape. I have the feeling that Casey McCaslin’s crew has moved from copper pipe to trucking outfits with big payrolls in shitty safes without reasonable security on the outside.
Kenny Stockowski is an ex-painter who retired a year ago and figured out his Social Security wouldn’t cover his bills, his and his old lady’s, Wanda. He lives in a paid-for brick bungalow on 88th and Kedzior on the southwest side, and he’s pushing seventy. So to make ends meet, he became the night watchman at Kacyzinski’s. And now he promptly gets himself cracked in the head by some punk’s boots, and his survival, the doctors tell Doc and me, is very tentative. His age is working against him, they say.
I cajole the head medico to let us see him for a brief interview, and after a brief bout of convincing, the ER doc allows us two minutes of Kenny’s time.
He is awake and mostly alert. Wanda sits next to him in his private room—which the truck outfit is paying for, we found out from his doctor. Wanda says she’s going out for a cigarette. She doesn’t want to hear the details of her husband’s misadventure. I can’t blame her. Kenny looks like the victim of a gang attack.
“It was just one guy,” he says softly. “He sucker punched me, and I never knew what hit me. But I did get a good look at his face.”
All this, the moment we showed him our IDs.
“You guys are Homicide, yeah?”
“Yes,” Doc tells him. “But we think all this might have something to do with one of our cases. You read about the six kids that wound up in Lake Michigan?”
“Yeah, I read about it in the Sun Times, I think.”
“The guy we’re looking at is a thief, but he’s a killer, too,” I say. “And he got off the hook for a robbery he committed. He knocked over a plant that had some pipes by the back fence. When we busted him, the court threw out the evidence because the judge didn’t like our search warrant.”
Kenny looks very tired and very beat up, but he’s listening.
“I know this doesn’t have anything to do with the way you feel right now,” Doc says, “but you might help us nail the guy who did the girls. We think he’s involved in the heist at your place, last night. The Robbery detectives think one of his associates is the man who did this to you. We heard the description you gave the guys in Robbery. It sounds like our guy’s right hand man. His name is Mick O’Brien. He works with an Irish gang that’s headed by Casey McCaslin, the thief we think murdered all those young girls.”
“We interviewed this punk ourselves, a while back. We had a sketch artist do a rendition of him. We’d like to see if you can identify him. If you can, the Robbery detectives will pick him up, and we might be able to convince him to testify that McCaslin is behind the robbery at the trucking outfit,” I tell Kenny.
“So how’s that going to help you with the murders?” Stockowski asks us.
“We don’t have any direct evidence against him, with the kids. All we have is a description of him by someone who saw him with one of the dead girls on the date of her murder. If we can’t get McCaslin for the killings, we can at least get him off the streets so he can’t do anyone else.”
I show Kenny the sketch. His eyes widen a bit.
“The only reason I remember him is because of those eyes. I only saw him for a few seconds before he waylaid me, but I remember those black eyes. They scared the shit out of me.”
He closes his own, and then his head sinks back into the pillows.
“You all right, Kenny?” Doc asks.
“I just need something for the pain.”
“I’ll call the nurse,” I tell him, and then I push the button by his bedside.
“It was that man,” Kenny tells us, his eyes still shut.
“You’re sure?” Doc asks.
He opens his eyes, now, and raises his head off the pillow a few inches.
“You ever look into the eyes of the devil?” the old guy says, dead serious.
“Rest, now,” I tell him. “Lay your head back down.”
It’s the cue for the nurse to come in, and she tells us politely to get the hell out.
*
The Robbery detectives arrest O’Brien that same night. They invite us to sit in on the initial interview. The detectives are Bill O’Banion and Jack Cunio. I knew them when I was a member of their unit. The four of us sit at the rectangular table with Mick O’Brien.
He gives off the same vibes he did when it was just Doc and I. Very detached, very calm. Almost lifeless. It’s as if he’s bored with the whole proceedings.
“What’re they doing here?” he asks the Robbery cops.
“They’re our guests,” O’Banion tells him.
O’Banion has red hair and freckles. He has a young looking mug that belies his real age and the fact that he was a sniper in Vietnam with the Army Rangers, and from what I’ve heard he was very successful in long distance shots. But you won’t hear any war stories from Bill O’Banion. He likes to talk about the White Sox and the Blackhawks, and that’s the extent of the conversations I’ve ever had with him.
Cunio looks the role as a policeman. He has dark blue eyes that almost match the gloom of O’Brien’s. But he’s a joker and a prankster, and he nailed me more than once with his locker room capers. He’s not mean spirited, though. Just an off duty clown. During the shifts I shared with him, back in Robbery, he was all business.
O’Banion goes after O’Brien immediately. He tells him that we have the watchman as an eyewitness, and he tells Dark Eyes that he’s fucked, that we have him on ice, dead cold.
Mick doesn’t bat an eyelid. He stares straight ahead into his clasped hands on top of the table.
“You’re going to go away for a very long time,” Cunio chimes in. “You, like all your dumb cocksucker buddies in your little Harp band of thieves, are going inside for a vast epoch. A gigantic era. Our two friends from Homicide would like to make you an offer, however. If you were to give it up about your jefe, your boss, McCaslin, you might shave some time off your imminent incarceration.”
“What kind of deal are they proposing?” O’Brien asks in a pure monotone.
“That’s up to the prosecutor,” Doc tells him. “You’re in no fucking position to barter, asshole.”
“I have to know what my options are.”
“Here are your options,” I tell him. “You turn on Casey or you sit on your ass and become a senior citizen before you ever see free sunlight again.”
“I want a lawyer,” he replies to all of us.
“Done,” Cunio says.
All of us except Mick O’Brien get up from the table, and then a uniform comes in and takes the guy with the satanic stare out of the interview room.
*
We don’t hear from the Robbery cops for a few days. O’Brien’s lawyer is apparently playing stall ball to see just how much we want McCaslin, but the Robbery detectives have played that game a few times, too. They tell the lawyer that if we don’t hear from him and his client by week’s end, there will be no deal and his client will take the total fall, as far as time inside is concerned. Cunio and O’Banion thought they detected a little anxiety, maybe some d
esperation, in the attorney’s voice during the last telephone conversation, but it’ll all be up to Dark Eyes, finally.
*
I spend the Fourth with my family. We go out in the afternoon and have a picnic in the woods out by Fishermen’s Slough, way out near 95th Street. There’s a little lagoon and picnic area, and Erin makes potato salad and baked beans, and I grill some burgers and hotdogs on the barbeques the Park District provides out here. I had to bring the charcoal and the starter, of course, but everything else is here already. The woods are pretty, in full green bloom of early summer, and the kids play down by the lagoon.
After we eat, we watch them throwing pebbles in the water. I sit close to my wife on the park table’s bench, and I put my arm around her.
“Doc was wrong.”
“What, Jimmy?”
“Doc was wrong. Life is very, very precious.”
“Where’d all that come from? The job getting to you, again?”
“It comes and goes. You know how it is.”
“No, I don’t know how it is. You ever get married again, you better marry a cop. She’ll understand exactly what you mean. Not me.”
“You better never die. I don’t want to go through all that mating and dating shit again. ‘Hi. What’s your favorite color? What kinda movies do you like?’ I can’t do it, ever again. Don’t you dare die on me.”
“I’ll try not to. Seriously, Jimmy. How long do you think you can deal with all this death? How long?”
Chapter 15
Jimmy Parisi, Present
This same young woman who questioned me about the McCaslin affair introduces herself to me on the way out of the lecture. She reminds me of Red, Natalie, my second and current wife, except her hair is dark brown, closely shorn, and her face is a bit rounder than Natalie’s.
“My name is Karen Quinn,” she announces. “May I buy you coffee?”
Her tone is so direct, so in-my-face, that I find myself saying okay.
There’s a cafeteria in the Academy not far from the lecture hall, so I tell her I’ve got a few minutes. We sit down at a table, and I see that the place is sparsely inhabited by a few candidates. I’m the only old guy in here, so I get a few glances.
“I’m not stalking you,” Karen smiles. “I’m really not.”
“My ego ain’t that big, kid.”
“You’re married, right?”
“You’re young enough to be my—”
“I know. But I’m just really fascinated by the Casey McCaslin case. I’ve read everything there is in the newspaper accounts and by that journalist who wrote the book about it.”
“Some guy named Zagnarelli.”
She smiles. The waitress comes over, and she orders two coffees.
“I don’t drink coffee,” I tell Karen. “How about a Diet Coke?”
“Make it two,” Karen Quinn tells the waitress.
The waitress is young, also. I feel like a relic in this fucking place.
“What’d you want to know, Karen?”
“I won’t keep you long. I promise.”
“I have time. How much, at this point, is another question.”
“You don’t look your age,” she grins.
“How old am I?”
“Late fifties?” she asks.
“I’m sixty-seven.”
“You must have retired really late. You’ve been gone how long?”
“It’ll be five years soon.”
She looks up as the waitress brings us the soft drinks.
“I always hated coffee,” I explain.
“I can drink either.”
“All right,” I say as the waitress departs. “What’d you really want to know?”
She takes another swig from her Diet Coke, and then she looks up at me.
“Why’d you persist? I mean why didn’t you leave him alone after your superior officer told you and your partner to back off? Why’d you take the chance to nab him after they told you to just let go? It would’ve been easy, wouldn’t it? I mean, there was nothing to go on except that artist’s sketch. That was about as lightweight an excuse to keep going as there is, no?”
“I knew him when we were kids. In grade school. He went to a different high school, and that was that, until the killings. You can call it intuition or gut or whatever you like, but as soon as I saw that rendition from the bag lady’s memory, I knew Casey was the one who murdered them all. When something resonates inside you, when you know a thing, it’s hard to be dissuaded by people and you can’t explain the feeling to anybody else.”
“But your partner, Gibron, he went along with you all the way, right?”
“He always had a nose for the smell of shit. Maybe he was just humoring me. I was young. I wasn’t nearly as experienced as he was. Maybe Doc thought if I fell on my face with McCaslin, it’d be a learning experience. But if he felt that way he never told me about it. I think he was as sure about him as I was.”
“What was it that got him caught? How’d it finally happen?”
I take up my drink and look at the droplets that are coursing down from the glass.
“It was a woman,” I smile at Karen Quinn. “Isn’t it always a woman?”
*
Jimmy Parisi, 1980
Some empty-brained judge allows Mick O’Brien to post bail set at $250,000, and the prick comes up with the ten percent, and he’s back out on the street awaiting trial. Our prosecutor nearly had a fucking Holstein cow when that judge let him skip off that cheap, but the only thing I could think of was that he let him loose because Kenny the watchman is recovering and will be out of the hospital soon. I hate to think it, but if the security guard had croaked, we’d still have him hanging in the shithouse. Our little offer of getting time off his sentence doesn’t seem quite as possible as it did when he was facing attempted murder and grand larceny. Then the court would have had to keep him under lock and key.
As for our primary piece of shit, the Robbery guys say they’ve seen McCaslin in the company of a very young-looking girl. They’ve been to a couple of restaurants, and the Robbery detectives have made him at a shopping mall with her.
Cunio thought we might have a shot at busting Casey for statutory, but they’ve only scoped them together in a public place, and Cunio says the way it’s going, with our luck with him and his crew, it’ll wind up the girl is his fucking niece or some goddam thing.
Our luck has been rotten, and I can’t afford any more false arrest charges against me and Doc, so I’ll have to look into the girl very quietly. If I can catch him bringing her home, that might be another thing, but for now, she’s a new variable.
It occurs to both of us that Mick O’Brien is now a potential thorn in the ass for McCaslin. I know they were there, the whole crew, when they knocked over the trucking outfit. It just makes sense that he got his gang together for a major score after all of McCaslin’s downtime. It was either make a strike or watch the crew disintegrate. He’s still a thief. Boosting is his living. Killing young girls is his obsession.
It doesn’t click that he’d be seen walking around with a young skunk and the young skunk is still among the living. It strikes both of us as odd that there haven’t been more body bags emerging from the lake. All we’ve had is the one pseudo copycat thing with the ex-Marine who’s still in the Cook County nuthouse. This kind of serial murderer doesn’t stop unless you catch him or kill him. Casey can’t just call it off, Doc said, and I agree. Anybody who’s ever gone after one of their kind knows that the desire is too great. Nothing is the final act except for the killer’s death. You don’t have to be a graduate of Quantico to understand all that.
The Captain hasn’t come at us about our unofficial pursuit of Casey McCaslin because we’ve been very cautious. We keep our distance from Casey, as well. There are no drive-bys down his alley. We keep a big interval between us and him when we watch him on the street. And Robbery is constantly behind him, anyway, so we get most of our intelligence from them. They seem to have a far great
er chance to grab him than we do. There really is only that ID from the now dead bag person.
He has more than the six girls to answer for, and that’s all we need to keep coming.
We wonder if he’ll try to whack his right hand man, O’Brien. Mick might still like to enhance his chances of dying outside prison by handing us his boss on the trucking outfit job. But he didn’t squeal the first time we approached him, and I’m wondering if McCaslin thinks Mick will honor the code one more time.
In either case, we have been instructed to keep our distance from this psychopath. There is nothing to gain by infuriating our captain. The shit does flow down to him first, and I haven’t been a Homicide all that long, and I have a family to support, and I sometimes ask myself if the prick is worth losing all that.
The uncomfortable answer is always yes.
*
Casey McCaslin, 1980
She sleeps like the dead. Not a whisper, certainly not even a feminine snore. I wonder if she’s using, but I’ve searched her purse and the rest of my apartment, and she comes up clean all the time. You’d think a street bitch like Mary would have a few wrinkles, like drugs or booze, but she never even asks me for a swig out of the occasional brew I drink at home or at a restaurant.
I know the Robbery cops have seen us together out in public, but I don’t think they’re concerned about nabbing me on a morals charge with an underage cunt. That’s somebody else’s department. Parisi and Gibron haven’t shown up on the radar recently, so I guess Mary and I are safe for the moment. I couldn’t keep her locked up in this place. Someone her age, especially, wouldn’t be able to live within these confines forever.
I know she’s a liability, but I also understand that I can’t get rid of her, yet. Yet. There’s something about this silly gash that won’t let me do what I know I’ll have to do, eventually. Why I haven’t felt pushed out the door to find another young twat to cut, I don’t really fathom, but my head tells me it’s got everything to do with Mary.