Jimmy Parisi Part Two Box Set

by Thomas Laird

  “I didn’t kill Carl. I’ve never harmed anyone except as a soldier in wartime.”

  “You don’t know of anyone who might have held a grudge against him from the war until now?”

  He shifts his ebony gaze toward Rita again. It’s not that he’s trying to intimidate either of us, I don’t think, the way he sits there stoically, like a slab of granite. It’s just that he’s a man who knows how to slow his own heart rate just before he pulls the trigger on a sniper rifle, and he knows how to send a bullet for a headshot that ends the life of his target. He knows the coldness of killing, whether it’s justified slaughter or not.

  “You heard the names, Mr. Johnson,” Rita says. “You can’t think it’s coincidental, all of them dying the same way, and both of them being in your elite crew of operators at the same place and time in the war.”

  “It doesn’t matter what I think. They’re just dead, and I’ll be dead, too, soon enough.”

  He sits there, immoveable. Like a piece of Stonehenge. As if he’s been that way throughout time. Unchanging, unchangeable.

  This interview isn’t going to lead us anywhere, and Rita has to know that by now. All the Green Berets, Rangers, and Seals that I came across in the war were just about like Cal Johnson. They all bought into the Rugged Individualist scenario even though they were trained to be team players. Johnson thinks he’s up against this, whoever it is, alone.

  “Something happened to all of you,” Rita chimes in. “Didn’t it? And don’t hide behind that classified pose. You did something way out of bounds, and now someone is calling for all of you.”

  Finally, a grin shows some brilliant white teeth. Maybe it’s a grimace. It’s impossible to tell in his sculptured black face.

  “You may be right, but I still have nothing to tell you.”

  “You may be next, if you weren’t the shooter on all of them. You can help yourself by cooperating, Cal,” I tell him.

  “There’s nothing to do. And I’ve seen the world. It ain’t nearly what it’s cracked up to be. Yes, I’ve seen the world, thanks to the United States Army. And if there are no more questions…”

  We rise when he does, and then he opens the door and shuts it behind the two of us.

  *

  “How can you eat pancakes for dinner?” I ask Rita.

  “I can eat pancakes twenty-four seven, but my dress size won’t let me. How can you eat those goddam sliders five or six times a week?” she demands.

  “Force of habit, and I’m too lazy to make a lunch. And then I wouldn’t get to eat with you, chicana.”

  “Don’t call me that. I’m third-generation American. Everything’s gringa except my skin and my eyes. Those are mestiza, Gringo.”

  She gets the cakes and the sausages and the eggs and the toast, and suddenly it sounds so good that I change my order here at IHOP from some chicken sandwich on the lunch menu to a duplicate of Rita’s.

  “You are capable of change, James. That’s a sign of true maturity.”

  “I’ll never grow the hell up.”

  “Please don’t.” She smiles.

  This sexual tension business is for the tiny winged warriors—the birds, that is. It’s been building since the initial encounter with Rita in the locker room, and now the tension on the wire is intolerable.

  “You ever break your rule about not shitting where you eat?” I ask.

  *

  We’re two hours off shift. It’s two in the morning, but my kids are covered since my Aunt Maria sits the kids and stays overnight with them when I work late hours. She has the spare bedroom in the house, and I called her and told her I wouldn’t be off the job until the morning hours. So Maria will hang there until I get home. She’s used to my hours—Homicides don’t have set hours. I’m fortunate my widowed aunt loves my kids and is kind and gracious to me since Erin died.

  Rita’s apartment is in Evergreen Park. It’s in a small cluster of apartment buildings on 99th and Damen. She turns on the lamp in the living room and shuts the door behind us, and then she begins stripping me. It’s a novelty. I’ve never experienced the like. I was always the instigator in my amorous episodes, previously.

  Then she stops abruptly when I’m down to my Jockeys.

  “You sure it’s not too soon?” she asks.

  “Are you going to let me return the favor, or what?”

  I start unbuttoning, and then she raises herself until her lips clamp onto mine. Fiercely. Aggressively. Throw in passionately.

  It can’t be alcohol because we just got done at a pancake house.

  She leads me by the hand into her bedroom, and I’m almost self-conscious about the protrusion at the flaps of my Jockey briefs. She urges me flat onto my back, and then she tears off her underwear, black bra and black bikini panties, and then she slides my briefs down past my feet, and then she mounts me.

  Rita is warm and fluid and perfect. It’s as if she was designed to fit me exactly, precisely.

  There is no talk. She occasionally bends over to kiss me, and I feel her tongue lancing against mine, and she glides above me, pulses against me, and it goes on and on for a long time, for longer than I can gauge.

  And then she throws her head back and moans finally escape her pretty, oval, pink mouth. I can see her face courtesy of the lamp light from the living room that pierces the dark of her bedroom. Then I’m flowing, erupting. It’s been longer than I can remember, since my wife was ill for a protracted length of time. It seems like forever since I loved Erin.

  But the image of Erin disappears, and all I can see now is Rita above. All I can feel is her wet and her heat, and all I can want is Rita. She’s alive and she is here and she is joined to me as if there were never anyone else.

  Finally she rolls to my side, but she lets her left arm dangle across my chest.

  Then I roll over and face her. I put my arms around and beneath her, and I draw her to me tightly.

  She embraces me reciprocally. I feel her nipples, taut against my chest. They are purple and small and pointed like tiny fingertips. I look down at her patch. It is matted with sweat and is black and thick but in the perfect shape of an inverted triangle.

  We stay entwined for a very long moment. I don’t think my mast has ever descended, so I roll atop her and I begin everything all over again and her legs become wrapped about the small of my back, and this time things proceed until the sun sends yellow daggers through her slightly opened blinds.

  *

  “Are there birth control issues?” I ask her, sitting across from Rita at the kitchen table in her small nook.

  “I’m on the pill. Not because of concerns about babies. It’s about my cycle, and that’s all you need to know at breakfast.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “But thanks for asking. Very thoughtful of you, James.”

  “I could see having a kid with you.”

  She spits up a spray of her orange juice.

  “I’m just saying I am concerned about you, Rita. Don’t have a hernia. I’m not planning on a new family just yet.”

  “Well when the time comes, you’ll let me in on it, won’t you?”

  She’s wearing a Blackhawks’ tee shirt, and I’m back in the Jocks. I get up and carefully clear away the items, the dishes, on the kitchen table, and when the top is vacant, I pick her up and place her gently aboard, and then it all begins again.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  San Francisco, 1983

  The idea of killing all of them, all of my fellow soldiers who helped destroy one forgettable village in Vietnam, came to me months after I’d landed in California. I thought I had enough of killing with my original Outfit and with the Hmong, but the nightmares became daymares—the images of that hamlet named after hell would not leave me.

  I read up on post traumatic stress syndrome because I could not chance a visit to a psychiatrist. I know they keep things confidential, but I know I would never be able to go into detail about my past, and then the therapy could never launch itself into the t
ruth. So I carry my burdens by myself.

  One of the burdens is the murders that took place in Quang Tri Province. I feel responsible because I made no attempt to stop them. They were not the first killings we’d done in the war by any means, but prior to that village we’d kept to task. We took out our targets and let the civilians alone.

  There was some kind of blood lust thing going on when we murdered all those people. We were losing that war, and we all knew it. Everything we’d done amounted to nothing more than senseless slaughter. We weren’t going to accomplish peace in our time or peace in anyone’s goddam time.

  Then we would be sent back Stateside, and medals would be handed out for valor in the field, and all of us would proceed back to what we called normalcy. Except that we’d all be carrying the stains of dozens of deaths perpetrated in a meaningless conflict. We came home as killers of children, and some of us were. Most of us simply followed orders, just like the Krauts in World War II, and everybody else in every other conflict where people were shot, stabbed, and blown up.

  There would never be justice for what we did on that one particular day in a place no one has ever heard of in a war that began as a pissing match between us and the equally loathsome bastards in North Vietnam.

  I feel no remorse for the three VC we executed on that day. It was the others who haunted me, the innocents who were in the wrong place at the wrong time. Their blood is with us, with me, so I decided to mete justice since no one else would. We seem to think Americans can never be war criminals because we’re the good guys; we’re always on the side of right and freedom. Collateral damage just falls under the category of “shit happens.”

  Frank Miranda got his name in the paper because he was opening a new tax service in San Fran. He now operated a string of them across California. He was a multi-millionaire, and he was a veteran and a decorated soldier, and his American Dream story was published throughout the state. I read the article and found that Miranda was in San Diego, the origin of his wildly successful business doing people’s tax returns. He was second only to H & R Block, I read.

  I took the train to San Diego. I paid cash, of course, for the ticket. I live off cash. My business is taking care of problems for individuals who can’t go to the police. In other words, what I do is highly illegitimate. But it is also extremely profitable. I made my way when I got home to the States by making acquaintances of a number of unsavory elements in San Fran—mob types, in other words. I’m now a cash-only hitman for the West Coast’s version of Cosa Nostra, or the Mafia, as it is called in New York. I will always and only be an associate of theirs because my mother was Greek and my father was Arabic. I could pass for an Italian, but when they hear my given name is Evan and my surname is Azrael, they know I’m no Sicilian.

  My credentials spoke for themselves, however. I am a trained killer, and my skills involve a flair for the clandestine—in other words, I’m very talented at getting away with it, which is the idea in the first place.

  My on again off again sense of right and wrong is not offended by killing the kind of people I do away with. They are scumbags, much like the scumbags who hire me. I do my work without theatrics and without high drama, but my targets always wind up in the morgue. I have the Army to thank for my very special skills.

  So I have money and I have lots of free time on my hands, and I decided it was time for the Reaper to meet up with this insanely successful entrepreneur. I took the train. I stalked Frank for a few days.

  He had gained a little weight, but he looked tanned and fit. He had that aquiline nose and Spaniard’s good looks, and I found out that he was unmarried and childless, which further convinced me to break into his home (which had a very cheap security system that I bypassed in less than ten minutes) whereupon I smacked him in the forehead in mid-snore as he lay on his back.

  He never saw me. He never came out of that last sleep. He was in a straight-backed kitchen chair in that same kitchen when whoever it was found him, in his shorts, tied to the chair, with a single bullet wound at the base of his skull. The way we did so many “enemies” in the war Frank and I shared together.

  It was a very workmanlike operation. I left nothing for the police to find: no fingerprints (I wore latex), no fibers (I wore a San Francisco Giants ballcap), and no shell casings. I used a .22 short that runs amok when it enters the body. The placement of the bullet insured that there was no chance of survival. The mini-blast tore his brain into ground beef.

  The only downside was that I knew I was nowhere finished in my task. I had all the others to find and to reckon with, because that was what this was. A reckoning. In a world with no justice at all, there would be at least these few examples of answering for your sins.

  It was my humble gesture of noblesse oblige.

  *

  Chicago, 1984

  I spend a lot of time at Rita’s. It’s getting to the point that my Aunt Maria is beginning to wonder about all this “overtime” I’m working. So I took her to lunch when the kids were at school and I told her I was seeing someone. I didn’t tell her it was my partner that I was seeing.

  “It’s good you get out, Jimmy,” Maria told me at Frank’s Pizza on Ashland Avenue on the south side, not too far from where she lives. I knew she liked Frank’s. “Erin would not want you to be alone. Being by yourself is unhealthy. I oughta know.”

  Maria was a widow, and she was traditional. She wore black even though Carlo, her dead husband, had been gone now for seven years.

  She dribbled a few tears, and I felt myself mist up a little.

  “You’re a young man, so you can’t waste it all on being alone.”

  So I had my babysitter when I needed her, and I could stop lying about the “overtime.”

  *

  It got steamier every time we were together, and it got better because we became more aware of what the other wanted. And Rita kept surprising me every single time we hit the sheets. She was never demanding because I wanted everything she threw my way.

  And the time together outside her bedroom was equally exciting and stimulating, I guess you’d call it. I could tell her anything, and I really thought she was being straight and up front with me. She smiled more, now, on the job and off, but we had to be careful that no one at the CPD, no one at Homicide, suspected that we were together. We had to keep our hands off each other, and we always drove separately to her place to avoid suspicion. Cops live by their instincts, and they can tell by the way people look at each other if some shit is going on between the two. We’re trained to notice body language.

  I didn’t know where it was leading, and it never occurred to me that it would ever end or change or develop into something other than what it seemed to be.

  I was happy. Happy the way I was with my wife. But I made sure I never talked about Erin in front of Rita. I didn’t know how she’d react, but if I was a woman, I don’t think I’d want to hear about another woman even if it was my beloved spouse.

  It wasn’t a problem because all that mattered, then, was Rita and me now.

  When it was work, it was work and no bullshit. She was every bit as professional as I was, and she kept her cop face on until I got inside her apartment.

  I closed the door behind me, and it became a race to see who could shed all our clothes first. This time we never made the bedroom. It started on the floor and ended up on the couch. Then she led me into the boudoir and we flopped on the mattress with her blue silk sheets, and we lay facing each other.

  “You want to meet my kids?”

  Her face became solemn.

  “What?” I asked.

  “Don’t go fast, James. Let’s keep things the way they are.”

  “Sure. Okay.”

  “You look disappointed. I don’t want you to ever be disappointed with me.”

  “How the hell can I ever be that with you, Rita? You just saved my life, these last few weeks, you know.”

  “What’re you talking about? You’re talking crazy.”

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sp; I stroke her sides with my fingertips and she shivers and groans quietly.

  I have to kiss her, and when I do, it all breaks loose again, and I mount her and begin slowly, and then the rhythm quickens, and we’re both spent faster than I want it to be over. I roll back onto my side, and then Rita begins to lick my chest and my stomach, and then she descends further until she’s got me aroused all over again, and then she mounts me and demands a slower progression, and finally we finish, this time together.

  Then she dismounts and lies beside me.

  “You did. You saved me, Rita.”

  “How?”

  “I wanted to die when I lost her. That’s how bad it was. And then you showed up, all hardassed and GI, and you made me want to stick around.”

  “But you have children, James.”

  “Yeah, and wanting to leave them made me worse. I felt like I was trapped into living, and I knew that was a rotten way to be because they need me and they’ll need me for a long time, yet. So I wasn’t going to do anything stupid, I suppose, but it was like a state of mind where you’re breathing and moving but you’re dead here.”

  I point to my chest. She licks the spot when I take my finger away.

  “Is this all there is?” she asks.

  She’s pointing to her silky blue sheets.

  “You know it isn’t.”

  “You’re going to have to show me, James. I ain’t no rebound, sweetness.”

  “You’re not. Don’t go thinking that. You know how much I care about you. Jesus, you have any idea what a struggle it is not to touch your hand or your face when we’re downtown or on a call?”

  She smiles and kisses me again.

  “I had a bad time once. Just before I went into the Marines. I was only eighteen, and I loved this boy. His name was Ricardo. He told me he loved me, and we were together since junior year in high school. And then he got a scholarship to play baseball at the big university in Arizona, and then he got drafted by Philadelphia. And then I never saw him again. He stopped calling on the phone, and he stopped writing all those beautiful letters he used to write when he was at school. I was like you, James. I wanted to die. So I joined the Crotch, instead. So it’s going to take time to convince me you’re really not going anywhere else.”