The Vendetta

by Thomas Laird

  And then he found out that the money wasn’t what he was searching for. It was the thrill of the kill. Because killing was what he was good at. Expert at. He could explode a human head at a mile, maybe more, and he could make the shot consistently. Easily nine out of ten times, almost ten for ten. He was maximum efficiency.

  The only reason he even found out about David, poor schmuck David, was that he was perusing a copy of the Chicago Sun Times, reading about his favorite team, the Bears, and for some reason he was leafing through the obituaries to get to the sports page, and there David was.

  His brother was a statistic, a casualty, where Mark came from. And there was a brief article about his murder in that same paper.It wasn’t that they were close when they were young. Mark hadn’t seen his brother since the ex-Greenie was eighteen, about the time he enlisted in the Army. The Army found out he was good in languages, and they taught him Vietnamese. They were amazed at his ability to pick up a difficult tongue such as that poetic, musical language. And he was even better with weapons. Mark made expert on all his training tests.

  So, he was on his way to the Nam, and he became a member of some of the nastiest operators in that cluster fuck of a war.

  But the police action soured, and he came back to the States, and he had to find suitable employment, and he did the thing he did best. Long range liquidations. The market was wide open for someone of his peculiar talents. He picked up new languages by self-teaching. He was a prodigy who never spent a day in a college classroom. The jungle had been his university.

  And there was his brother’s name, sticking out at him like some 3D movie.

  David’s wife was mousey and plain, but he seemed to like her. She was decent. She obviously loved the two girls.And for the first time outside the Army, he felt as if someone needed him. This was different from his band of brothers. This was actual blood, with Marilyn and the kids. There was something spookily genetic about the ties that drew him to the three of them.

  He supposed he loved David because of that simple biological bond. Blood really was blood, and that mobbed-up asshole down the street had stripped Morgan and Elizabeth of a primary connection in their young lives.

  Suddenly there was rage in play, here. Mark never felt anything about his targets in Asia and elsewhere. They were simply marks. That was all. Now it was very personal, regardless of the reality that he and David were never close back when they lived in his father’s house.

  Mark got the list of bills from Marilyn, and the checks were already in the mail. He knew she wanted to seek employment, but he’d convinced her that the girls needed her at home, and he told her he was going to supply them with an income that would meet and surpass all of their needs. And when the time came for college for Morgan and Elizabeth, he’d take of that, also. Marilyn was a bit shocked by how he’d taken over their lives, but she knew it was good for her daughters that he was being so miraculously generous. She asked him how he could afford all this lavish care, but he was extremely vague in answering her questions.

  “It will make me very happy to do this, so please let me,” he’d explained.

  So she did. He was now that fantasy uncle that springs upward out of the earth and brings deliverance along with him.

  He didn’t talk to her about his real motivation. It was nothing as saintly as what he’d told her. It was petty and mean and primordial.

  It was simple, cold revenge for the murder of his brother. But he couldn’t very well tell her that. The less he did tell Marilyn, the better it was for everyone.

  *

  Rossi found a place for Carmen called Lake Vista, a private mental facility in Lake Forest, over on the rich side of town, in a suburb up by the lake. It was extravagant—Elgin would have been much cheaper, but he wasn’t going to allow Carmen to live in that snake pit. It’d make him look weak with the other Outfit honchos, so it was worth it. And everyone would suppose that it was Nick’s death that put her there. No one would ever know about the confrontation in the kitchen, with the knife and so on. All that had happened in private, back at the house.

  When he left her at Lake Vista, Carmen was just about catatonic. Like a piece of marble sitting in that wheel chair in a baby blue robe. He almost didn’t recognize her, and it freaked him, a little bit.

  Back at the house, he wondered if his son would magically appear, restored to him. Nick as a ghost didn’t give him any chills. In fact he’d rather have a phantom of Nick than no Nick at all.

  But spirits were bullshit. That was all the nonsense of the collars up on the pulpits, again. Nick was gone and he was never coming back, and Rossi began to wonder if it wasn’t the same story with Carmen.

  He spent time with his girlfriend, the Friday night version, but that was just sex. She was very good, very sexy, but it was different with Carmen when her mind was all there.

  Ben didn’t know if Lake Vista would or could bring her back home to him.

  He couldn’t go crazy, himself. He had his crew and his designs for much bigger and better things for himself in the Outfit. Rossi was the heir apparent to the lame old man who now occupied the throne and who owned the keys to the kingdom. He had to stay straight to get where he’d been headed.

  It would be difficult, of course, and the other young Turks would start thinking that Ben Rossi could be had, now, in his weakened state. Anybody would be vulnerable with a dead boy and a crazy wife, wouldn’t they?

  Let them come and find out, Ben thought. They’ll be walking right into the double barrels of a lupara, a shotgun. He had the muscle. He had the soldiers. If they thought he was vulnerable, then they could come get some.

  He walked upstairs and opened the door to Nick’s room. Carmen wasn’t there, anymore.

  And there wasn’t a wisp of ghostly presence, either.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Anthony Calabrese, Tony C, was the Boss of Bosses, but Ben knew that it was only a matter of time before the Boss was out of the way. Rossi was the Outfit’s ascending star, and there would be no stopping his ascent. He’d kill the other capos who got in his way if it was necessary, but he preferred to avoid the war. Blood was chancy. The cops were not happy about gang wars because they were high profile, and it was not standard practice to go around whacking made men. The movies got that part right about the Mafia in New York and the Outfit here. Maybe Capone and the other old-timers could go around with Thompsons blazing, but now it was much smarter to take the low profile. Those Thirties guys got away with things that just wouldn’t float in 1991.

  They were businessmen, now, and bloodshed came at a premium because the cost was just too steep. The papers and the general media went crazy with stories of internal warfare, and it was very bad for cash flow.But if it came down to it, Ben Rossi would kill anyone who tried to keep him from the crown that Tony C had worn way too long. It was a young man’s game, now at the end of the Twentieth Century, and the old-timers were relics. They were still into the unions and prostitution and gambling and a number of other interests, but the FBI was always lurking around trying to thin the herd of the Chicago version of Our Thing.

  Everyone knew Rossi had designs, but it didn’t make any difference. He had over four hundred soldiers on the streets, and he could out-gun any of the other captains, and the other capos were aware of the odds of trying to put one in Ben Rossi’s melon. They’d keep their distance unless he showed signs of vulnerability.

  The thing with his son could be read as a weakness, but they wouldn’t come at him quite yet, if they came at all. There was still a sense of etiquette or style about family loss, but it was only temporary. People forget in a hurry, and it was like the baseball axiom of ‘what have done for me lately?’ In other words, the stance of sympathy for Rossi would have a very short life span. The other capos would be sniffing around soon enough, looking for a gateway, a weakness.

  And there was the business with Carmen. The old reasoning was that craziness was a weakness, too, even if it was your old lady who was nuts. Ben kne
w these other hoods would think it was occupying Rossi’s mind, this shit with his wife, and that he might not be watching what was coming up behind him.

  Ben had to see Carmen at least once a week—just for appearances. He loved his wife, after all, but business was business, and you couldn’t allow yourself to become distracted. It wasn’t good for your health.

  What really swayed his focus was knowing that what he was building was meant to have been inherited by Nick. All that was wiped away with the collision out on the street, not two hundred feet from Ben’s own house. There was no one to hand all this down to, and the second thoughts about letting someone else kill David Johansen kept on recurring in Rossi’s head.

  It kept him up at night. It even had an effect on his performance with Maureen, his steady side-cooze. The last time he tried to ball her, it didn’t turn out too well. He couldn’t stay hard, no matter what she did, and she pulled everything out of her amazing repertoire. She’d worked on him for a solid hour, and even half-limp, he couldn’t finish. Maureen asked him if he wanted to watch some porno on TV, but he couldn’t see himself resorting to that sick shit. He told her he didn’t need that kind of half-ass stimulation, and it made her feel bad, and then she started to cry, and he had to tell her it wasn’t her fault, that it was all this shit he was trying to balance, like juggler’s balls in the air, but she kept on crying anyway, and then his dick went totally soft, and they just drank themselves to sleep in front of Johnny Carson on the tube.

  He couldn’t let anyone know he was going soft in the sack. Ben wondered if he shouldn’t dump Maureen, but he knew it wouldn’t make any difference. She’d always made him into a furious pile driver, the way she got him going, and he knew a new broad wasn’t the solution.

  The only answer he could come up with was to get Tony C the hell off the throne. When Ben was the new Boss of Bosses, then his equipment would start running at full capacity again. He was sure of it.

  He visited Carmen on Sundays because, like good Catholics and other religious swinging dicks, Sunday was supposed to be a day of rest. Business was for the other six days, and Ben thought it was a bad idea to be all work and no play. But before he went over to The Green Door, his favorite hangout where all his top shelf associates hung, he had to make the necessary pilgrimage to Lake Vista.

  Carmen wasn’t looking any better than she had the last two or three times he’d gone there to see her. Her face was pale; the eyes were staring and unfocused. The nurse, a big-boned blonde with an enormous set and bird legs, told Ben it was probably the sedatives they had her on, but Rossi thought Carmen had retreated without the shit they were feeding her by pill or into her veins. She wasn’t doped. She was gone. And he wasn’t certain if she were ever coming back.

  “Hello, baby.”

  She didn’t even flinch.

  “I put flowers on his grave, and I had the priest say a mass for Nick’s repose. He’s a good guy, that priest. You used to like him, didn’t you?”

  She never batted a lid. Kept staring out over Ben’s head as if he weren’t even in the room with her. So he stood up and blocked her vision. She had those eyes aimed out the window behind him, but now he was in her line of vision.

  “You need to get better. You need to come home. You’re too strong to let it happen to you like this, Carmen. I need you. I love you. Don’t just sit on that chair like you can’t see me!”

  His voice was raised enough that the nurse with the big balloons rushed in to see what was happening.

  “Everything all right?”

  “Sure,” Rossi told her.

  He thought something might be stirring down south, below his belt buckle. He figured he ought to give Maureen another crack at him.

  “I guess I should be going.”

  The nurse departed the room. There were six vases of red roses scattered throughout. He’d dropped hundreds on all the flowers for Carmen, but he was fairly certain she didn’t notice them. The money didn’t bother him. It was the vacancy in her face.

  “I’ll be back next Sunday. You get better.”

  Tears suddenly welled in his eyes. He hadn’t anticipated all this goddamned emotion. He thought losing the boy had drained him like a vampire. He thought he didn’t have any juice like that still flowing inside him.

  He went over to her and planted his dry lips on her equally dry, and cold, cheek.

  Then he took off.

  *

  Parisi was alone. He couldn’t remember the last time he was with a woman. Not sexually with a woman, he mused. Just with a woman at all.

  Doc was on a leave of absence. He told Jimmy it was because he was exhausted physically and psychologically, but Parisi knew Gibron had been into the bottle heavily enough that it scared the shit out of his partner, and now Jimmy Parisi was frightened, too. Doc had always been able to curb his lust for a drink to temporarily halt the pain. There was his divorce, and there was also the thing with the drive-by on those two young black girls on the west side. The killings had literally deflated Jimmy’s best friend and partner, and Doc was out for twelve weeks with that one. When he came back, he was better, but not full steam.

  It worried Jimmy because Doc Gibron was the strongest soul Parisi ever knew. Even stronger than his old man, Jake, the Homicide sergeant who died by tumbling down the stairs in his own home, the house that the younger Parisi grew up in.

  They gave him a new partner. Her name was Dani Hawke. She told him she was a full-blooded Cheyenne, but she’d changed her Indian name to something easier to spell. It was her family’s attempt at assimilation.

  It was not love at first sight for Parisi and Dani Hawke. She was ten years younger than Jimmy, and this was her first Homicide assignment. She was very attractive in a non-cosmetic way. She didn’t wear makeup, and her black hair was swept back over her head in a very severe ‘do.’

  He wondered why there was such a boundary already drawn between them because he’d had a temporary female partner when Doc had been physically sick with pneumonia, a few months back. Her name was Rita Espinosa, and there was a lot of attraction between Jimmy and her, but it ended badly when she took off for Champaign-Urbana, downstate, to pursue a law degree at the University of Illinois. The parting had hurt badly because Parisi thought it was serious and that it might even end up in a marriage. He’d felt that deeply about Rita, but she didn’t, obviously.

  Maybe he was he was simply sending out bad vibes to the full-blooded Cheyenne detective, but he couldn’t figure out why she was receiving him with all this cold hostility.

  “I don’t want to shit where I eat,” she told him, straight up.

  “Pardon me?”

  “I know you had a thing with another girl who was your partner for a while. I just want to lay out the cards so there’s no misunderstanding, Detective.”

  “Well I guess you laid them out real visibly.”

  “No offense, Detective Parisi.”

  They were sitting across from each other in Jimmy’s cubicle in the Downtown Headquarters by Lake Michigan, so Parisi diverted his eyes from Dani Hawke’s strangely alluring dark brown face. Her eyes were brown and stunning. They came out at you like daggers or lasers or some goddamned thing. He couldn’t figure out which. But they got your goddamned attention.

  “Look, Dani—“

  “Please call me Detective Hawke.”

  He couldn’t help but laugh out loud.

  “Something amusing?” she bristled.

  “I’m sorry. I’ll call you whatever you like, but I won’t call you Johnson.”

  She stared curiously at him.

  “Forget it…Detective Hawke.”

  Then he told her about their case load and her demeanor softened.

  “Can I at least call you by your first name?”

  She froze up again, facially.

  “All right. We’ll keep this strictly professional,” he apologized.

  “I just want to be your partner. Nothing else. It’s only temporary, anyway.”

/>   She told him how she’d been in Burglary before she got her shield, how she’d made it to Homicide in record time—only six years on the CPD.

  “I’m impressed.”

  She looked at Parisi as if she were wondering if he were cracking smart-ass with her, but she relaxed and sat back in the chair opposite him.

  “This thing with the Outfit guy,” she went on. “It’s high profile.”

  “Where’d you get that shit? TV?”

  “No. I mean it’s been in all the papers, on television. That’s all I meant.”

  “There’s something very democratic about murder. I mean I don’t give a flying rat’s turd who the victim is. They’re all equal. I don’t care about headlines and who makes them. I have sources in the media, but I’m not in love with them. Some of them are decent, and some of them are fucking cannibals. I have nothing but a professional interest in their use to me, to us. You want to go after commendations, fine. But if you do, request a new partner.”

  When he was finished, his cheeks were burning, but he didn’t care if she observed his new skin color.

  “I meant no offense, Detective.”

  “Sure you didn’t. We have work to do. Let’s get out there and do it.”

  He rose from his chair, and then Dani Hawke, day one on the job in Homicide, got up, as well.

  *

  They drove by The Green Room. Parisi was aware that it was a hangout for the Capo, Ben Rossi. He also knew that wherever Rossi went, so did Cabretta and Fortunato. He figured he might show himself to these three gangsters to impress on them that the heat was just down the block, and it always would be until the three of them were in a cell of their own.