by Thomas Laird
Cabretta and Fortunato nodded, but both men thought Rossi’s wariness to be unwarranted. They’d done this kind of job in multiples, and no one had caught them yet.
“Don’t give me those bullshit stares. They’re going to know who did this, like I said, so you have to be meticulous.”
Fortunato raked his fingers through his shaggy dark brown mop of hair.
“We’ll take care of it, Boss,” Cabretta tried to assure him.
“I’m not going down with you two clowns because you were careless. If you fuck up, I’ll kill you both before they throw away the key on me. You understand?”
Neither man nodded. They sat stonily still.
“I didn’t hear what you two said. Speak up.”
“We done this a thousand times, Boss. We’re not going to leave any trail of crumbs behind us. You gotta trust us,” Cabretta argued.
Rossi smiled. But it wasn’t a look of pleasure on his face.
“You two never had kids, did you.”
“You know we didn’t,” Cabretta answered.
“So you got no idea of what it’s like. This guy Johansen stole from me, and you saw what happened to Stevie, that puke. And that was just about money. This fuckin’ Scandinavian prick took my life because he took my kid. Do you understand?”
“It was an accident, Boss,” Fortunato finally chimed in.
“And if I shoot you both in the head right now, will that be an accident, too?”
“I was out of line, Ben. I’m sorry,” the squat soldier apologized.
“Get out of here and get on it. And don’t disappoint me.”
The two gunmen rose out of their metal folding chairs and left the office.
When they were gone, Rossi looked at the picture of Carmen, his son, and himself that sat across from him on the desk. Then he placed it face down because he couldn’t bear to look at his dead boy’s handsome face. He sat staring at nothing in particular, and he remained thus for a very long time.
*
Vince and Manny waited for Johansen to pull up on his driveway. The middle-aged father of two girls worked the afternoon shift at Nabisco on the west side and he never returned home until after midnight, closer to 1:00 A.M. The guy was like clockwork, and the two Outfit soldiers couldn’t believe that the Cicero cops didn’t have anyone watching his house.
But it wasn’t too surprising because they both figured that Rossi had fixed it with the police—everybody had a price tag, and no one made moves like Benny Bats. This was a fix, all right.
When the Fairlane 500 pulled up on the drive, they waited until he got out of the car. He never used the garage. It was too full of kids’ crap and boxes to park anything inside.
They were on him before he could turn around and see what was coming up behind.
Manny sapped him with a blackjack, and down Johansen went, in a dead heap. But he was unfortunately still alive as Cabretta hauled him to his feet and hoisted him up over his shoulder and deposited Johansen in the trunk of Fortunato’s Poncho.
It was an easy operation. There was virtually no noise, and none of the street lights worked on this portion of the side street. No one was on the street at this late hour, either, and none of the neighbors had lights on in their front windows—not even Johansen had a lamp on in his front.
It was almost too easy.
They drove him out to the lake. By the time they arrived on Lakeshore Drive, it was already 2:15. No one was on the beach on 22nd Street, and even the kids who roamed the sand after midnight to get laid had obviously departed for the night.
The pier jutted out into the darkness. The water was invisible except for the waves lapping against the concrete blocks that formed the intrusion into Lake Michigan.
Cabretta did the lugging, once more. They had wrapped the still-breathing victim in a body bag that Fortunato always kept handy in the trunk for occasions just such as these.
Vince carried the inert body all the way out to the end of the concrete dock, and then he laid him on the surface. Cabretta unzipped the bag and took Johansen out. He was still unconscious.
Manny took the plastic bag out of his jacket pocket, and then he grabbed Johansen by the hair and pulled him up into a seated position, and then he snapped the plastic over his head and he held the bottom of the bag tight against his throat.
David Johansen awoke with a lunge toward Manny, but Fortunato popped him on the forehead with the sap again with a skull-crushing pop, and then it was easy. Manny held the plastic in place until he saw that the breathing had ceased and that the air was no longer pumping inside the bag from Johansen’s mouth.
“The fuck is gone,” Cabretta declared.
“I know,” the squat ape-like man concurred.
Vince searched the pier for some loose concrete, and he found two suitable chunks that they could stuff into the body bag. When they had finished and had zipped the bag shut again, they kicked Johansen into the deep, black drink.
*
Carmen Rossi could not sleep in the same bed with her husband. She told him she could not bear to be touched by anyone, even by her beloved spouse. There was no consoling her, so Ben didn’t remonstrate with her when she slept in their son’s bedroom. Rossi thought it was a bit morbid to use the boy’s bed, but he didn’t press it. He figured she needed some space, needed to be alone, and he figured it would pass.
Not that his anger would pass. Even when his two crew members told him the job had been completed on Johansen, his rage did not subside. He wanted to kill his neighbor repeatedly, regardless of what nature demanded. You only got dead once. There was none of this religious afterlife that Rome’s pompous celibates, the idiots with the collars, went on and on about, every Sunday at mass. It was all bullshit, and the only time Ben Ross attended was on Christmas and Easter, and it was for appearance. Other Outfit guys used the Church as a front for their phony piety, but Rossi attended twice yearly so it wouldn’t make Carmen look bad in front of the other Outfit wives who maintained their halos by regularly showing up and sitting in the front rows, wearing expensive clothing that was mostly stolen off trucks that their husbands had heisted.
Appearance only went so far with Ben.
Carmen couldn’t sleep anyway, and neither could her old man. But Ben tried a few pills, and they knocked him out for a few hours each night, at least. You had to have your wits if you didn’t want to get whacked, and life was a little bit tenuous in the Outfit, no matter how ruthless and feared you were. He still had a business to run, and he couldn’t be temporarily dazed and confused in order to run it. He still had Carmen to support and he still had ambitions.
He was a Captain, but Tony C still occupied the top spot. It wouldn’t remain that way because Rossi had designs, and that meant Tony Calabrese was living on borrowed time. Ben didn’t have the soldiers to overthrow the Chicago Caesar, but it was only a matter of time.
Calabrese was slowing down. Shit, he was pushing seventy. He was sly, that bastard, but he wasn’t invincible.
Ben lay on the king-sized mattress with the silk sheets and the silk pillow covers, and he’d taken three tranquilizers, but the sleep wouldn’t overcome him. He remembered the sound of the crash and the high-pitched scream of his only son, and the blood pulsed right up to the top of his head. He thought he should have killed Johansen with his own hands, but he knew you had to have a buffer on wet work, and those two knuckleheads were at least competent in making people disappear.
Ben remembered the look on David Johansen’s face as he bolted out of his cheap shit Ford and saw what he’d done to Rossi’s heir. There was horror there when he looked down at the ruined child, and there was terror when he saw Rossi looking down at the mutilated body of the thirteen-year-old.
Johansen was dead, he kept telling himself. But he wanted to resurrect his son’s murderer—not just once, but perpetually.
It was like Judas’s fate in Dante’s Inferno. Satan had the betrayer on a spit in the ninth concentric ring of hell and he was rotated
over flames that never devoured the one-time apostle. Judas suffered forever, but Rossi couldn’t quite grasp what forever meant. It was illogical, that word. Everything had a beginning, middle, and end. That was real life, not this bullshit that the clerics kept spouting from on high in their pulpits.
But now the drugs were kicking in. Rossi felt drowsy. He couldn’t fight it any longer. This ordeal had tested his endurance, and he was losing this battle.
Over in the kid’s room, Carmen was staring at the ceiling. He’d looked in on her from time to time, but she never looked in his direction. The nightlight was on, just as it was before the accident. Every night. His son was afraid of absolute dark, so he didn’t tease Nick about it. The kid was too sensitive, something he’d have to grow out of, because Rossi was certain he’d hand over the family business to him when the time was right. The boy would go to college and learn to use his smarts, but Ben had been building everything so that he could entrust it to Nick, someday. And now there was never going to be a someday. That son of a bitch in his cheap shit ride had smashed it all to death on the street that ran right in front of their house.
*
Carmen lay in her baby’s bed and continued to pierce the ceiling above her with a sustained stare. There was no sleep in her eyes. There was only fierce resolution. She didn’t know that Ben had given the order on the man who stole Nick’s life. She wanted to kill Johansen, herself. Carmen knew she could do it. She could look the man in the eyes and pull the trigger and loose a round that would splatter his brains all over his front lawn. The woman certainly had it in her. She knew she was capable of taking a life for a life.
Religion, the faith, was a sham for her right now. There was no God, certainly, and there was nothing as gentle as Christ on this earth. She wasn’t going to mass anymore, and she didn’t care what anyone thought. If Father Donald came around for consolation, she’d tell him to fuck himself. Hell wasn’t a concern; life without Nick in it was eternal damnation enough for Carmen Rossi.
Ben had no idea who she really was. She played the role of wife very well, but she came from a family that was deep into the Outfit. Her old man ran a crew on the southside, but he died back in the late sixties. She grew up with one sister, Maria, and Maria was now in the nuthouse in Elgin. Her mother died in ’79, and Carmen inherited money of her own from what the old man socked away in his protection rackets involving unions. She had at least nine hundred grand in her secret savings account that Ben didn’t know about. Carmen was smart enough to keep secrets from him. She loved Rossi, but she had finely hewn survival traits of her own.
But Nick’s death had torn her heart out and she’d watched it burn into ashes in front of her eyes. Maybe there were things you couldn’t survive, couldn’t get over.
Ben would do something crazy about this Johansen, and then where would she be?
She told herself that she had to live on, if only to keep Nick’s memory alive. Memory was all she had left of him. They’d put him in St. Cecilia’s Cemetery two days ago. The reception at the wake, at the funeral, and at the house were all unbearable, but she didn’t collapse. She stood at the front of the line and greeted everyone like the dutiful wife everyone thought she was. There was a who’s who of every goddamned gangster in Chicagoland, two days ago at the services.
She told herself that she could handle it. She told herself she had to.
For Nicky. For his memory. For his living image in her head.
Then her eyes closed, and she went to sleep.
*
He made them breakfast. Every day. There was no one else to do it unless his mother, Eleanor, slept over to take care of them when he worked the late shifts at Homicide. Eleanor wouldn’t allow him to hire a live-in nanny. She told Jimmy that she was healthy and that she needed the work. His mother was financially okay because of his father’s, Jake’s, police pension and the house she lived in was paid off. But she needed something to keep her occupied, keep her going. When Jake Parisi tumbled down those stairs to his death at the house, her whole world was suspended in air. And there had been the suspicion that she’d pushed her husband down that deadly flight of steps.
But when Jimmy worked days, he took care of Mary and Mike himself. They were his only connection to sanity. They were his only purpose. Other than to catch thieves who stole life from their victims, as melodramatic as it sounded in his own mind.
There had to be something of value for him after Erin passed. Celia was with him only a very short time, and he knew a second chance at being in love was doomed, almost from the moment he met Celia. It didn’t have a chance from the beginning, but he’d refused to believe it.
“I need lunch money, Dad,” Mary smiled.
Jimmy fished out a bill with a crooked number on it.
“I don’t need that much,” his daughter protested.
“Use it for the next few days, then,” he replied.
Mary was a miniature of Erin. Dark, curly brown hair. She had the same Gaelic features that her mother sported. Twins, her mother and Mary. It made him feel the sting of moisture in his eyes, but he controlled his emotions in front of the two of them.
“How ‘bout me?” Mike smiled.
He was the deuce of his father, Jimmy saw. He’d never be tall, maybe five-nine, like his dad. But he was far more handsome, Jimmy thought. His features were finer, and he was an excellent athlete, much better than the old man had ever been. Mike’s best sport was baseball. St. Rita was thrilled to get him at the school, and he was good enough to start at basketball for the lights, the under six-foot tall players.
“Let’s go. Put the dishes in the sink. I have to be at work by eight.”
Jimmy was the chauffeur when his mother was off duty, but she’d pick them up at school in the afternoons and then take them home and start dinner for them. Parisi tried to get Eleanor to sell the old house and move in with them here, but she refused, saying that Jimmy might re-marry, someday. Parisi didn’t have the heart to relieve her of her illusions regarding his love life. He was trying to learn to live with the idea that it probably wouldn’t happen again. He was pushing middle age, after all.
They finally got squared away, and he dropped Mary off first, and then he headed toward St. Rita and said goodbye to Mike when he arrived at the school.
The ride downtown wasn’t as snarled as it usually was, driving the Eisenhower Expressway.
When he got there, Doc was waiting for him in the cubicle that faced a Great Lake.
“You’ll be amazed to hear what they drudged up out of your favorite body of fresh water,” Gibron said, with a stony looking face.
CHAPTER THREE
“Asphyxiation,” Dr. Gray pronounced. “Might have had a plastic bag over his head. No bruises about the throat, but I’m guessing, at this point.”
The body bag was zipped, the photos had been taken, and the lights were dimmed on the crime scene atop the pier on the 22nd Street beach. Jimmy Parisi and Doc Gibron had accumulated all that they were going to, and the coroner’s people were carting the body off the concrete and they were headed to the ambulance in the parking lot next to the sand.
When Jimmy and Doc arrived at the Crown Vic, they sat in the car for a while before Doc started up the motor.
“Guess who,” Doc said, humorlessly.
“He wouldn’t do it himself. He arranged it. Their infamous buffer zone,” Parisi replied.
“And nobody knows nothing, as usual. Omerta.”
“Yeah, that’ll be their first reaction.”
“And the ultimate answer from them, too.”
“But we have to have a sit-down with Rossi, anyway, Doc.”
“Standard operating procedure. He’ll want to invite his ambulance chaser to attend, naturally.”
“Wouldn’t be any fun unless there’s more than one slimy prick in the interview room.”
Doc started the Ford up, and they drove out of the beach’s parking lot.
*
Rossi indeed had his attorne
y with him, and the big silence dragged on for an hour and fifteen minutes. Gibron timed the proceedings. Parisi called the interview off after a futile hour and a quarter.
“See me when you have a warrant for my arrest, Parisi. You and your girlfriend, here.”
Rossi nodded with a sneer toward Gibron.
“How about we continue all this out in the alley, asshole?” Doc smiled.
“You couldn’t handle me, old man,” Ben Rossi grinned.
“You’re right. The stench wouldn’t wash off my hands.”
Parisi stepped in front of Doc. Gibron loomed over the smaller detective by at least six inches. Doc had a height advantage over the Outfit Captain, but maybe by only two or three clicks on the ruler.
Thomas O’Malley stepped in front of his client and told him to shut up and leave the premises, and the lawyer and client walked away.
Jimmy and his partner remained in the interview room and sat back down on the uncomfortable wooden chairs.
“Why do we bother with this dick?” Doc wondered aloud. “Best legal advice that money can buy. You ever seen O’Malley in action? He’s the best. If I ever shot or stabbed my ex-wife, I’d hire him.”
Jimmy had to laugh and he did.
“How’s your love life, wop?”
“I should sic the Anti-Defamation League on your Polack ass.”
It was Gibron’s turn to chuckle. But it wasn’t much of one.
“Our only shot is to get the guys who did this piece of work to rat on each other and then give Rossi up, which is unlikely on all counts.”
“But we have to try, of course,” Parisi lamented.
“They won’t pay us if we don’t. I gotta think about retirement.”
“It’s probably his two goons, Cabretta and Fortunato.”
“Shall we roust them, just for fun?”
“I suggest we tail them one at a time and see if we can make them nervous.”
*
Cabretta was their first target. He was easy to find when he wasn’t at the beck and call for Ben Rossi. With Cabretta it was the ponies and the whores. Parisi and Gibron tailed him to Arlington, to the track, and after the races, on that fine, hot, August Thursday afternoon, they followed him to an Outfit hot house on Sheridan Road, just a ways from the lake, on the far north side.