by Thomas Laird
So I got a job with my cousin cutting meat. He’s going to pay me union scale, too, because he’s being nice about it. I can cut as good as a real butcher, and he knows it. I watched my cousin work, and I’m a fast learner.
Shea is sitting alone at The Pig’s Ass on a Wednesday night in late August, and when I touch his shoulder, he turns around and damn near jumps off his stool.
“The fuck’s the matter with you?” I demand.
“Nothin’.”
His face is as red as his noggin.
“Let’s go sit at a table, over in the corner, away from all these fuckin’ drunks.”
The Pig’s Ass is packed with bikers and gangsters and a few middle aged hookers who can’t find johns anywhere else. We walk over to the corner table behind the pool table that no one ever plays on.
“You just surprised me, is all,” he explains.
I wave for the bartender to bring us two beers. He comes over quickly so he can return to all the other paying customers.
When he leaves the beers, I take a swallow out of the draught.
“I did O’Brien. I won’t lie to you about it,” I tell the redhead.
“We all thought you did.”
“He was about to go at me. Did you know that?”
“He never said anything,” Shea says.
The color in his face has lessened, now.
“Cocksucker was a killer. He wanted my place, and I couldn’t have that.”
Shea looks up at me.
“You’re not like O’Brien, are you, Andy?”
“Hell no, I’m not.”
“You wouldn’t try to come at me, would you?”
He studies my face.
“You got no lean and hungry looks, do you?”
“The fuck’s that mean?”
“You’re not someone who wants to run the show, take over, are you?”
“Look, Casey, I don’t know what you’re getting at, but I never wanted to run this crew. I just like doing scores with you and the guys, that’s all.”
“You know what, Andy? I believe you. You could’ve ratted me out before, but you didn’t. I’m hoping my trust in you isn’t misplaced.”
“You lost me again.”
“They say that stupid fuckers are the happiest people in the world.”
“Why’d you have to say something like that, Casey?”
“You let me do the thinking and everything’s gonna be fine, just like it was before all this shit. They got nothing on me for those kids. Remember that. They’re just barking, but Parisi and the big cop are on a leash. Keep your mouth shut, and we don’t have a problem. Okay?”
“I never squealed. You know that. But Mick never gave you up, either. Makes me wonder what you’re thinkin’. That’s all.”
“I explained Mick, didn’t I? But would I be here if I meant you any harm? No. I’d crack into that shithole where you live, and I’d cut your throat to the bone, and the cops would have to use an extra little body bag to pick up your head and then the rest of you. You see what I’m saying? I’m working to set things straight. You need to pass the word to the other guys. I’m done taking scalps as long as everybody does the right fuckin’ thing.”
He nods at me.
“Now finish your beer. Relax. We’ll be back in business before you know it.”
*
The weeks go by, and we’re into September, but the weather stays torrid. There’s no air conditioning in the apartment, and all I’ve got is a fan to blow the hot, humid air around with. Mary walks around in her thong, and that’s all. It gets my attention.
She got a job working the counter at a bakery in the neighborhood. She doesn’t make much, but she makes her spending money, and she has enough left over to buy herself the clothes she wants. She’s what they call frugal when it comes to letting go of a buck, and she’s become quite the little home maker, as well. But no house pig I’ve ever seen looks like her. The body is in full bloom. Her face still looks a few years younger than Mary really is, but that’s a plus, too. I can’t help getting hard whenever I’m around her, and the more I want her, the more she comes right back at me with her own desire. She’s insatiable, you know, the teenaged boy’s wet dream. She’s always hot and ready, I mean. I don’t get any of this ‘I’m tired’ shit or ‘I’ve got a headache’ crap. Whenever my nature calls, her nature responds.
I know it’ll wear off. People get bored with anything. Look at all the Hollywood assholes. They get incredible looking pussy, but in a few weeks or months, these guys are looking for something strange.
I’m looking for the moment that she doesn’t create that pressure against my zipper, but that time has not shown up, yet, and I’m beginning to wonder if it will ever happen at all.
I haven’t thought about grabbing her by her hair with her mouth covered up and her hands and feet strapped together. The image of that helpless look on her face as I show her the razor has not reoccurred for a long time, now, and I can’t feature it happening at all, currently.
She’s making me all domestic. I go out and cut meat for eight or ten hours a day, and all I can think of is ripping off her sexy underwear and having us flop on the floor or the bed or standing up in the wash of the shower easing myself into her, and those creamy thighs wrapped around my waist, and feeling her strong grip. I never had anything to look forward to, before, and it made my life seem stretched out, long, and boring as hell.
Maybe I killed all those girls out of sheer boredom. Maybe it wasn’t the old lady, after all.
I’d have to hate Mary, suddenly, to kill her. I know I don’t love her. But I want her. Shit, maybe I even need her. All that shit is weakness. When you depend upon others to satisfy you, it’s just fucking frailty. Love is being a limp dick. I don’t really depend on her for anything except for being there when I get home.
If she was gone, I know I’d have the power to go out and find someone or something else to fill in what would be missing. I can’t let her take over. There are a million young skunks out there waiting to be found, but the fucked up thing is, I don’t want any of them.
Chapter 20
Louise, 1980
I keep telling myself it ain’t none of my business. Every girl who works these streets takes the same chance. It’s a pity that they was so goddam young, but they was smart enough to understand that it’s dangerous out here.
I saw that sketch in the newspaper when the second pair of them was found in the lake. I started thinking I should call the cops, but then they might get cute with me because of the work I do, and then what would I do to eat and pay the rent? They got hundreds of cops looking for the guy in that picture, and just because I seen him and those two kids get into his Mustang on that night late last spring don’t mean I’m the one’s got to help them put him in the clink. If he found out that I put the finger on him, if they didn’t get him put away quick enough, I might be the one who winds up in the drink next. The idea of one of them body bags that the paper talked about don’t appeal to me as a way to wind my life up. It’s hard enough dealing with these stiffies who want a poke, and then they want a little bit extra, like kickin’ your ass or stickin’ their whackers in the wrong end of you and hurting you and making you bleed.
Maybe I ain’t the solid citizen I ought to be, but I heard it on the street that the old lady who fingered the guy in the picture got herself put to sleep permanently because she contacted the coppers. I don’t trust the law, anyway. They either roust you or they want some free action so’s you can stay out here and make a living.
No one needs to tell me that if I don’t say that I was in the alley havin’ a smoke when I saw this guy pick them up in his fancy muscle car I’ll be allowing this son of a bitch to do it again.
But I guess I shouldn’t be worried because all six of them was kids—I’m thirty-seven years old, and it’s hard to compete with those young chickens, but at least I’m not his type, at my advanced stage. My clientele is startin’ to dwindle because the life too
k away any looks I had when I was eighteen, say. There are lines in my face, and my tits are beginning to sag, and I haven’t got money for surgery to make them stand up and bark at the johns. I still have an ass and legs, though, so I’ve been working steadily. It’s just that the numbers are startin’ to thin out, sorta like an old man’s hair. I’ve been putting money in the bank because I know when I hit forty, no one will want me, out here.
I live in an apartment not far from where I operate, and I have a cat. I suppose I should realize that I haven’t got a lot to lose if I drop a dime on this murderous prick, but the little I have is all I got, and if I lose that, I lose everything. It’s everything to me, anyways.
My parents died when I was seventeen. They got killed in a car crash on the Interstate, the one that goes to Wisconsin. I was an only child, so I had to live with my uncle and aunt, and by the time I reached legal age, eighteen, I was tired of my Uncle Frank’s hands on my ass and tits as I passed him in the hall on the way to the bathroom. I had to get out before he tried to get the whole menu from me.
“Louise,” Uncle Frank would say while he was pawin’ me, “you certainly are growin’ up fine.”
Then I’d shove him away and he’d just laugh. I’d tell Aunt Alice what he was doin’, and she’d say to keep quiet or I’d find myself out in the street.
So I hit the streets before he started waving his weenie at me with a purpose in mind.
I feel bad about all those girls. No one deserves to die, but especially not when you’re as young as they were.
And I tell myself I might not be able to make a positive ID of the guy in that sketch. I only seen him once, and the street light was bust, and there was only the dim light of the other street light across the street to see him by.
But I have to admit that I got his license plates. I have this thing about numbers: telephone numbers, street addresses, anything with a numeral attached. I have like total recall of them. Some of my associates on the street told me I ought to go to Vegas and play blackjack or one of those games where my ‘gift’ would be an advantage. I sure don’t have the jack to pay for any flight to Vegas or anywhere else. In fact, I never been outside Cook County in my life.
It’s starting to keep me awake at night, now. I see those two kids’ faces in the dim wattage, that night. I’m standing in deep shadow so no one will bother me while I take that smoke. I see his long hair and his good-lookin’ face, and I try to tell myself that it’s none of my business.
Then I think of Uncle Frank and his big fat meat hooks creepin’ over my body, and I get angry. I mean I get really pissed. And I remember all the insults I’ve taken from all these nickel dicks on the street, all the rough stuff, and sometimes a few beatings, here and there. I want to get even for all of it, maybe join a nunnery, for crissake. The nuns would have to feed me and give me a roof, at least.
They wouldn’t want me. I’ve come all this way, and the sad fact is that no one ever wanted me except for one reason. It’s not enough, havin’ men want you for that one thing. Not nearly enough.
Now these young girls, mostly the two I saw getting’ into that Mustang hotrod, give me the insomnia. I tell myself I’ll call anonymously, but I know that won’t work. The cops need a witness, but being a witness can lead to an early fatality in this neighborhood.
And who’d feed Jasper, my cat, if this goon ever caught up to me?
*
Jimmy Parisi, 1980
I pick up the phone and say my name and rank, but no one answers.
Finally I hear a female voice. It sounds hoarse and husky, like a lifetime smoker.
“I saw the guy who killed all those girls. I saw him from the alley when he took two of them away. He was driving a Mustang.
“Are you going to protect me?”
“Of course we—”
She hangs up.
So I have the call traced. Apparently she spent enough time saying nothing before she finally opened up to me for our guys to find the number from the telephone company.
Doc and I drive to the location to find a pay phone inside a booth on the corner of 83rd and Loomis. I had the feeling it would end up like this, but I’m not prepared to shrug my shoulders and just drive back to headquarters downtown.
“Why don’t we do a little canvassing?” Gibron says to assuage my frustration.
“A little walk is good for us, from time to time,” he grins.
It’s mid-September, but the break from the unbearable heat has not left us, yet. It’s in the lower nineties, and the humidity is thick enough to slice with a switchblade.
We get out of the Ford and hoof it in the area of the phone booth. There are pedestrians coming at us, and we ask all of them if they’ve seen a woman using that payphone in the last half hour or so. The answer is negative from everyone we stop. We show them the badges, and the police ID puts a grim frown on most of their faces. Cops are not good guys for most of them in this neighborhood. It’s a mixture of poor whites and penniless blacks. The neighborhood has indeed been busted, and what remains is poverty, and poverty means criminal behavior. If we asked these men and women, black and white, young and old, if they were on probation, there’d be a whole lot of scattering going on, and Doc and I don’t feel like doing any sprints in this heat.
So we return to the car and phone in for some uniforms to help us with the questioning of the folks in this barrio.
After four hours of wandering around asking questions, we, and the other six uniforms, give it up. We get three squads to drive by the phone booth, just in case our lady decides to complete her aborted call.
*
Where would we go at four in the morning if there were no White Castles? McDonald’s has regular hours of operation. Most of those fast food joints go from dawn until late evening, but they do close down. The Castle is a twenty-four hour repository for the homeless and for the night owls and for the late shifters who live in Chicago. The sliders are tasty, but they remain with you for days with the taste of salty fried onions resonating somewhere between your bowels and your palate. You never ate these things before or during a date unless you wanted to procure a medieval kind of birth control for yourself. Certainly no woman would dare kiss you with that aroma on your breath. If she did dare, the result would certainly be stupification. Almost like mustard gas, but not quite as paralyzing.
We are not called upon to kiss our clientele or the perpetrators who create those dead bodies, thankfully, so we don’t have to worry about the resulting stink from those onions. Doc and I are used to body odors of all sorts, having done a great number of surveillances together in the limited space of the Crown Victoria that we share for many hours on end.
We watch that payphone booth for four hours after the uniforms have called it a day. We’re sitting at the curb near 83rd and Loomis, but word must be out that the police are watching that booth because no one even ventures close to it.
“We both know we’re wasting our time,” Doc says.
“Would you rather be doing nothing at all?”
“You already know that answer.”
“I wasn’t trying to be a wise guy, Doc.”
“I’m aware of that. But have you had enough?”
“Yeah. I was thinking she’d call back. I’ve got all my calls being recorded.”
“You would’ve heard if she’d tried again, by now.”
“Start her up.”
At least when he’s driving we can use the air conditioner. The cold air swoops at both of us from the vents, and I think maybe I can stop sweating out those goddam onions. It’s really too bad that sliders are as addictive as they are. They really have a downside to them.
*
We’re awaiting the end of shift, back at my office. I’m peering at the ascending sun through my window that overlooks the Lake.
“Where else could you get this view?” Doc says.
“You’re thinking this one’s going to stay a red tag, aren’t you.”
“Jimmy, failu
re is part of our scenario. I don’t think I’ve ever known a detective with a 100% solved list. It’s just not the way it is in this racket. You can’t get them all.”
“You ready to throw in the veritable towel?”
“No. Not yet. But I’m just saying there’s a chance that this may be one of those times you just come up empty, no matter what you do.”
“You think the FBI is any closer than we are?”
“If they were, there’d be a headline in the Tribune and the Times before either of us gets home today.”
“So he’s found the one eyeball witness and he’s subtracted her from the mix. Now a new player almost gets entered on the scorecard, and she removes herself from the game before McCaslin can go out looking for her.”
“She’s a hooker,” Doc says.
“Because she was in an alley?” I ask.
“Because she was there at night in an alley alone, I’m thinking. What are the odds she’d be a normal civilian out there like that if she weren’t a working girl?”
We scour the area looking for prosties who are working solo, the next night shift. We locate three, in all, and when they finally trust in our badges that we’re not Vice, they talk to us. All three of them seem cooperative when we explain that we’re looking for the man who killed the teenaged girls. They all know the case. Most of them were that young when they began their tours of the neighborhood.
The last one’s name is Grace. She’s in her early twenties, we find out, but she looks more like forty-something. Erosion works swiftly, in their line of work.
We ask her if there are many more regulars working this territory, and she says maybe two or three.
“Do you know their names?” Doc asks her.
“Yeah. We all pretty much know each other. There’s Teresa—she’s a Mex. There’s Audrey, she’s colored.”
“You mean black?” I ask.
“Yeah, that, what you said. And the only other one I know around here is named Louise. She’s a lot older than the rest of the ladies who work these parts. Louise is getting ready to hang it up, I heard. She’s getting of the age, you know?” the brunette smiles at both of us.