by Thomas Laird
I tap at my heart.
“Don’t hesitate. Plunge it in as far as it will go. It’d take a little training to teach you how to cut his throat—“
“Please, don’t.”
“I’m sorry. I got carried away. Just think about it being self defense. We can’t watch him every day, and he knows it. He still doesn’t know where you are, so that’s good. You’ll probably never have to do anything like I said. But I know from experience if you hesitate, he won’t. He’s killed a lot of human beings and he doesn’t have any pity in him. Please believe what I’m telling you, Mary.
“I know the Y’s got self defense courses for women. Take one. Ask about it when I drop you off. Will you?”
She nods.
“Thanks, Detective.”
“My name’s Jimmy. You can call me that when it’s just the two of us. Now that I’m your big brother.”
We pull up to the curb outside the YWCA building. She opens the door and then she peers in before she shuts it.
“Thanks for everything…Jimmy.”
“Remember what I said about hesitation, and sign up for that self defense thing. Tonight, Mary.”
She nods and closes the car door, and I pull away from the curb.
The snow is coming down a little heavier, now.
Chapter 28
Louise, 1980
My legs ache from the arthritis in my knees and in my left hip, and I’m not even forty. I’m going to have to leave these streets and find something else before I crash and burn altogether. It’s the cold weather that bothers me the most, that and the humidity along with it when it rains or sleets or snows.
I’ve been thinking all the time about calling that Detective Parisi, but I can’t let go of the notion that you don’t squeal on guys who can hurt you. They let loose of McCaslin once before, the papers said, and if I talk to Parisi and he skips again, I’m dead, sure as hell. Guys like him make it a point to get to you before you get to them. Look what he supposedly did to some guy named Mick O’Brien. Word out here is that he cut him bad before O’Brien died. That’s the kind of prick McCaslin is, somebody who likes to kill you up close so he can see your eyes as they fade.
It’s the holidays, and they’re usually slow. Christmas is next week, and all the johns would suffer too much from a guilt trip if they bought pussy around this time of year. After they get done with their family obligations and all that church shit, they’ll be back out here, looking for trouble.
It’s about midnight, and I’m giving it another hour, just in case some drunks from Rush Street got shot down by all the non-pros in the bars over there. Then they’ll come looking for a sure thing, namely me. We’ll dicker on the price, and then I’ll settle for two twenties for an hour just to get out of this wind. They call it the Hawk because it comes off the lake and swoops down on you and freezes the blood in your veins.
It’s twelve-thirty by my wristwatch when a Chevy comes rolling up the boulevard and stops by me at the curb.
“Lookin’ for a date?” I ask as he rolls down the window.
He opens the door for me, but I can’t see his face yet because of the swirling flurries out here. Then I plop myself on the passenger’s seat of the Chevy, and by the time I want to begin bartering we’re away from the curb and he’s moving fast.
When we stop at the first stoplight, I can only see his face in profile. And he’s got a stocking cap, navy blue, pulled down over his ears, and he’s wearing fucking sunglasses at one o’clock in the morning. I don’t really know what color he is because so much of his face is obscured, and the light ain’t great in the car, either.
“Fifty sound good?” he asks.
The voice sounds friendly, but I’m not dumb enough to go by their voices. They can sound sweet at first and then out comes the blade, and then they want to cut you just for fun.
It’s ten more than I would’ve settled for, and Christ, I need the money, that’s for sure.
“Sounds like it’s all good, honey.”
“Don’t call me honey, okay?”
“Anything you say.”
It takes fifteen minutes for him to get his old Chevy to his apartment building. He never comes around to let me out of the car, but I don’t get that kind of manners much. I get out and we walk to his door, and then he gets us inside and into his apartment. He flips on a light, but he’s still got the stocking cap and shades on.
“Want a drink? I got beer.”
“Sure,” I tell him. Maybe the alcohol will thaw both of us out.
When he comes back with two cans of brew, the cap and the shades are gone and I see the face I saw with the two girls before they wound up slit open and thrown in Lake Michigan. This is the guy in the drawing. This is the guy Parisi and that Gibron want. This is Casey McCaslin, the guy who was sprung from Joliet because the cops served bad papers on him.
Can he know about me? Only if Parisi or Gibron told him. Why would they give up a potential witness to him? They wouldn’t. The only way he could know who I am is through someone else, and that street was deserted except for him, the two kids, that bag lady, and me. I’m sure of it. There was no one else. I haven’t told anyone about him, so no one could’ve ratted me out for a payday with McCaslin. Could they?
“You look all wound up,” he says. “You in a hurry?”
“Time is money, yeah.”
“Who you going to service at this hour? You ought to be in bed. So how ‘bout it?”
Maybe he really doesn’t know who I am. The odds are he doesn’t. So if I fuck him and get it over with, maybe I’ll survive the night. He doesn’t look like the type who responds well to the word ‘no.’
We finish the beers and then he points the way to the bedroom. I go in first, and I’m anticipating a knife in my back about now, but nothing happens, except he drops his jeans to the floor, and then his boxers, and he turns around toward me and I see he’s already raring to go.
“What’s the delay? Remember? You ought to be home in bed. I can’t afford an overnighter.”
So I take off my sweater and blouse and my bra.
“Nice tits. Very nice,” he smiles.
He comes up to me and his thing is pressed against my belly button. I take hold of it and he smiles.
“You can do better than that,” he says.
“Blow jobs are an extra twenty.”
“Ten,” he counters.
I get down and take him in my mouth. He takes off his sweatshirt and dago tee.
He grabs me by the hair and starts yanking my head back and forth on him, and then he abruptly stops.
Now I’m thinking he knows. Somehow he knows who I am and what I saw.
“I don’t want to finish just yet. Take off those blue jeans.”
So I get up and drop them. The roots of my hair are still stinging from all that yanking.
“You don’t have to get rough,” I tell him.
“What’s your name?”
“Betty,” I lie to him.
“You don’t look like a Betty.”
“Who do I look like?”
“A Susie. Maybe a Jill.”
“Well, I’m still Betty.”
I’m wondering where his Mustang went. Maybe he’s got another ride. I never would’ve got in that Ford. I remember it and the plates too well, even now.
“Get on the bed, Betty. What are you waiting for?”
He doesn’t even take the time to get me ready. He jams himself inside me like he’s a jackhammer, and I have to cry out because I’m still a little dry and I didn’t even have time to put lubrication in me. I need the lub more, lately, than when I was new at this. Getting old. Wonder if I’ll get any older than I am tonight.
He rams it in me again. He’s not all that big. I’ve had bigger. But he’s thick and he’s steel rod hard.
Then he rolls over, and I’m stinging inside, now. He takes hold of my head and guides it to his crotch and he starts me up again.
“You’re dry as hell. Haven’t you g
ot anything?” he stops and asks.
I reach over into my purse at the side of the bed, and he slaps my ass hard, hard enough to bring tears to my eyes.
“I do better if you take it easy,” I explain.
“You’re getting paid. Shut the fuck up. This ain’t prom night.”
I put the Vaseline inside me, and then he grabs my head and pushes me hard back on his joint. Once he’s had enough, he gets up on top of me again and he starts whaling away at me. It isn’t as painful because the lub is working, and he continues to ride me like he’s trying to poke it all the way through me.
Then he stops, turns me over, and whispers in my ear.
“Put some of that goo in your other end.”
“That’ll cost you another twenty.”
“Ten, you cunt. And hurry up about it.”
“You don’t have to talk to me like that.”
I feel the shock of the blow on the back of my head. He hits me again, open-handed, it feels like.
“Please. I’ll throw in the anal free.”
He stops hitting on me and lets me apply the Vaseline in my backside.
Then he enters me there and begins to pound away like he did in my pussy.
“Please, you’re hurting.”
He ceases altogether.
“I can’t cum. What’s the matter with you?”
He rips me over on my back again. He’s got himself just outside me, the head against my labia. I can see the strands of muscle in his arms. You can see how powerful he is just by looking at his arms and shoulders and his chest. Then he stabs himself deep inside me, once more, but he doesn’t move once he’s in.
“You a snapper?”
I squeeze him with all I got.
“You ever take a beating for anyone, Betty?”
“What are you talking about? Isn’t this what you want?”
“I asked you a question. You ever take a fucking beating for anybody?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
He slaps me in the face. Once, then again. I think I’m bleeding. He’s still inside me, but I had to relax on him from the shock of the whacks he gave me.
“Get a hold on me again, bitch, or I’ll use my fists.”
So I clamp hold of him again, and then he raises up and slugs me, in the cheek, all while he’s still inside me.
“Please don’t.”
I almost went out, but it was a grazing pop he gave me. Just something to get my full attention.
Then he begins again inside, and I try to get him to finish. I come back at him as hard as I can, trying to get him to cum and get off me and stop hitting me.
He finally has his climax, and he collapses on me so heavily that I have trouble breathing. But I’m too scared to tell him to get off.
Finally he rolls over.
“Tell me why I shouldn’t cut your throat.”
My eyes widen, and I get frantic. This prick knows who I really am. He has to.
“I asked you if you ever took a beating for anyone, and you didn’t answer.”
“Please, just let me leave.”
“Answer me.”
“No. No, I never took a beating for anyone. I took my own beatings lots of times.”
“You’re a fucking whore. Why wouldn’t you get your ass kicked once in a while? You’re not in bad shape for your age.”
“Let me go home.”
“In a minute.”
“Please let me go—“
“You ask me one more time and I’ll throw you off the fucking roof.”
So I stay quiet.
“I had a whore. A lot younger than you. I took her off the streets, fed her and gave her this apartment to live in. And you know how she repaid me? By taking up with some young kike she met at her job. Can you imagine that?”
I nod my head and the tears course down my eyes. My left cheek is throbbing now from where he poked me, and my ass and my hair are still singing from the damage he did them.
“I had a mother who wasn’t a whore, but she might as well have been. I still want to take her by the neck and squeeze. I had the chance, and then I let go of her. When you don’t finish, it’s like not coming. You understand?”
I nod my head again, and he puts a fingertip on one of the droplets running down the bruised or broken cheek.
“That hurt?” he smiles.
“It’s all right.”
Then he slaps me on the other cheek.
“Didn’t I tell you not to talk?”
He gets on top of me again, and he tears into me and I’m dry again and I can’t help crying out, but he flops me on my stomach and works me over there once more, too. Finally, he gets me to me feet on the edge of the bed, and then he forces me to my knees, and he grabs my hair with both hands and does that to me, as well.
When he finishes on my face, he punches me dead square on the nose, and I fall to the floor, and then somebody turns all the lights out.
*
I find myself lying on a sidewalk in the general vicinity of where he picked me up in that old Chevy beater. I’m fully dressed, but I can’t remember how I got out of his apartment or out of whatever it was that got me here. I can barely see my wristwatch with the green glow, but it looks like the oversized numbers say it’s almost four o’clock. The sun won’t be up for a few hours, and it’s way below freezing.
I struggle to sit up on the sidewalk. There is no one coming from either direction, here or across the street. I try to stand, but I can’t. Lucky it’s cold or I’d really be feeling the beating he gave me.
Then a squad car comes slowly down my side of the boulevard, and the copper stops at the curb, rolls down his passenger’s window and yells out.
“Are you okay?”
When I can’t answer him, the uniform on the passenger’s side who called out to me gets out and walks over to me.
“You’re hurt, aren’t you.”
He tilts my head toward him.
“Can you get up if I help you?”
“I…I don’t…know.”
Somehow he gets me to my feet, and he gently gets me to the car, and when we’re inside, in the new, sudden warmth, his partner tells me they’re taking me to Emergency at St. Luke’s.
*
“Hello, Louise.”
I open my eyes and there’s Parisi and Gibron.
“We were here about a homicide, and Doc saw them cart you into Emergency. Small world, huh?” Parisi smiles.
“How you doin’, Sweetie?” Doc asks.
His voice sounds gentle, like he meant it to.
“What happened, Louise?” Parisi asks me.
I try to shake the cobwebs away, but they won’t clear out altogether.
“It was him.”
“It was who?” Gibron asks me.
“It was McCaslin.”
“Casey McCaslin?” the Italian cop asks.
I nod.
“What’d he do to you, Louise? Tell me now so I can go cuff the prick,” the shorter cop queries me.
Then I tell the two of them everything I know, and I don’t leave anything out until I’m too tired to talk anymore.
Chapter 29
Jimmy Parisi, Present
Casey McCaslin finally became his own worst enemy. He was like a magician who started to believe he could really create magic and disregarded the truth about illusion. Whatever really went on inside him before he came to the end of his trail, no one knows, and I didn’t much care. He left a wake of blood behind him, and he helped make me think there was little or no mercy coming at us from whatever it is that’s in control.
I don’t want to believe that it’s indifferent Nature, in charge. All the evidence points to it being that way, but fuck it. Give me my illusions, then, at the tail end of my life. Let me go out with a grin on my face, thinking there were things that make human beings worthwhile instead of paying attention to the TV cop’s, Joe Friday’s, “just the facts, ma’am.”
There is a mystery going on,
out there, and after all these centuries, no one has come up with any definitive truth. The priests in high school always talked about the Greeks, like Socrates and Plato, and how they doubted the man who had all the answers. Those two big brains said that there were only questions, not answers, in this life.
Maybe in the next life, if there really is one, we’ll find out just what the hell is really going on around here.
*
Jimmy Parisi, 1980
“We don’t want him for rape,” I tell Doc as we’re speeding toward McCaslin’s. “We want him for the murders.”
“Nice to have backup, however. Let them throw the rape in, too.”
“His lawyer, Fred Whatthefuck, I never remember his last name, will tear us a new ass aperture about the sex thing. Louise is a career prostitute. The jury won’t buy it.”
We wheel through two or three intersections, and the third one is a bit tense and we almost get sideswiped by a CTA bus. Doc is driving because I refuse to do high speed chases and because Doc thinks they’re some kind of grand adventure. My partner is a little nuts, as I say. But if we get there too late and lose this cocksucker yet again, I will be very disappointed. “Disappointed” doesn’t quite capture the queasiness in my stomach as I think about him becoming elusive one more time.
We didn’t have to argue with Judge Clanton very much about granting us the warrant. He wasn’t the guy who issued the bogus search papers, all those months ago, but he knew it was Doc and I who made that request that came back to bite us both in the ass. Still, he felt that an eyewitness was an eyewitness, and Louise being a hooker or not did not prevail on the public safety, so he let us have the warrant to come put the irons on McCaslin.
Doc nearly gets clipped by a station wagon full of kids at the next stoplight. We hear the screech of rubber as the mommy behind the wheel heaves on the brakes. It looked like she was standing on them, with the brief glimpse I had of her terror-filled face.
There are four squads with uniforms coming at McCaslin’s building from four different directions. He’ll have to have a helicopter to get away from us.
We finally get there in less than twenty minutes in moderate, non-rush hour traffic. There’s also a team of SWATs positioning themselves on rooftops from buildings opposite him. It feels like maybe we have a chance to grab him, this time. I feel a pulse of hope in me that just wasn’t there, even when we had him temporarily walled up inside Joliet.