After the ceremony for the award of my detective’s shield, I took Erin back to our ginchy apartment in the Old Town District, and we made love standing up in the middle of our living room floor. Then I took her out to dinner at a Czech joint about five blocks up the street from our residence. We walked together in the sweet air of spring, with a breath of Lake scent wafting toward us from the east. We were only a half-mile from Lake Michigan. Here I was, a young cop with a beautiful bride on my arm in a city I loved. My war was over. I had survived it. I had survived the last half-dozen years as a patrolman, doing duty on the West and South Sides, the real shit beats in the city, and I had attained the goal my life had been aimed at. Now there was only one more step upward. Homicide. Where the best of the best live. The pinnacle of copperdom. But I was definitely on my way.
My wife was an exceptional educator. She was a natural with children. They love her. I’ve talked to some of her co-workers, and I kept hearing it over and over. Erin was a natural.
Eleanor, my mother, was at the ceremony where I received my shield. My father, Jacob, has been gone all these years, and I regret his absence. I miss him.
He didn’t survive my second tour. The accident happened just as I was leaving a hospital in Japan. I’d been there for the third whack I took. Shrapnel in the lower back. Got it while we were deep in the bush. After that hit, I was reassigned as a Rear-Echelon Motherfucker, an REMF. I had fulfilled my combat obligations, the Army informed me, so I spent the rest of my tour in country lecturing to newcomers to the war about how to survive the first two weeks. Everyone believed that if you made it past the first fortnight, your odds of making it home alive had somehow increased dramatically. That was the legend, anyway.
I had to make myself cold and remote to look into their innocent eyes and tell them that this was no joke, this war business. I could see death prefigured in some of those fresh faces, but I hoped I was wrong in my forecasts. I figured some of the wisdom I handed down to them might come in handy in their next twelve months.
I came home, I got married, I became a cop, and now, a half-dozen and more years later, I had the gold badge I had been aiming at for a lifetime. Aiming at to show Jake Parisi my worth. And then he goes and trips and falls down twenty-six steps at our home, and when I get back for the funeral, via a special dispensation from our Uncle Sam, I find out there is a mystery about his demise.
Did my mother shove the old man down those stairs? Was it, as it was finally decided, an accident?
My mother answered no questions. I went into therapy, at the Department’s expense, to come up with answers of my own.
Detectives solve mysteries, as everyone knows. That is what they do. They look into the heart of matters and discover the truth or what passes for the truth and they bring matters to closure. Closure. That dramatically necessary word and concept.
My father left Carl Anglin hanging in Jacob Parisi’s conscience. My dad could very well haunt our family home, there in the northwest part of town. He left matters unresolved. It’s like an ended love affair in which things are left unsaid, incomplete.
My job right then did not entail Carl Anglin and his seven murders. I had a caseload that revolved around stolen vehicles. I dealt with boosters. But if I could distinguish myself quickly, I might be able to reach the top level, Homicide. The cream of the coppers.
I listened to the Homicide cops talk about Anglin. For some of them, that decade-old case was not history, it was not closed. My father’s partner Eddie still worked in Homicide. He talked to me quite often and told me all the old details about the nurses’ murders. Eddie knew where I wanted to be someday. I asked him all the routine specifics about what Homicide cops did do during each shift. Eddie Lezniak told me I’d be moving up soon. The word was already out that I was a comer, a surefire big-league player. I hoped he wasn’t saying nice things just because I was his erstwhile partner’s son.
*
Anglin was out of the news. He wrote a book ten years ago, the last I heard, and tried to peddle his story to the movies. But he’d disappeared from the daily media. He didn’t show up on the evening news denying everything as he always used to. There were no magazine interviews with this creature who fascinated the public — How could anyone human do what the murderer of those seven women did? It was like watching a hooded cobra do its thing. There was something magnetic about someone that evil.
Some said he’d disappeared and gone out West. New hunting grounds. Chicago had focused too intensely on Anglin. Wherever he went, coppers recognized him. He was no longer just the drifter, the ex-Navy killer, that no one had known before 1968.
My father never found out why Anglin was under the wing of someone extraordinarily powerful in the government, or the ‘G’ as it was referred to by the police. Jake’s cousin Marty was blown up in a car, and that branch of the family never forgave my old man for involving one of its crew in the Anglin mess.
I have cousins in the Outfit. I wasn’t proud of those familial ties, but there was nothing you could do about blood. It came with your equipment.
In fact I talked to Marty’s nephew, Petey Mancari, after I arrived Stateside. Petey was still pissed, seven years later, about his uncle’s death too. I talked to Petey about a month ago, right before the beginning of spring when there was still snow on the ground.
We met at Presto’s Pizza in the far southwest part of town. Presto’s has the best thin-crust in the city. It’s like eating pastry, the crust is.
‘You catchin’ all them boosters with the fine rides?’ Petey smiled.
Petey had movie-star looks, even though he was a small-time member of the outfit who collected bets. He was a bagman, I mean.
‘From time to time,’ I told him.
‘I hear you’re really hot shit, Jimmy. The terror of northwest Chicago.’
He wanted me to get on with it. He knew this was business, that I didn’t have anything personal to do with his side of the clan.
‘Don’t your people wonder about why Marty was blown to hell?’
I put it as straight up as I could. Petey was no genius.
‘Yeah. There are some hard feelings. Some of which were aimed at your dad for involvin’ my uncle with that rapist — whatsisname.’
‘Carl Anglin.’
‘Yeah, yeah — I know his name…There was talk about reciprocatin’ the blast, but it died down after about a year or two. You was still out of the country. Hittin’ someone over Marty didn’t make good business sense, Jimmy. That’s all.’
We took a few bites out of our pizzas and a few tugs at our beers. Presto’s Pizza had the green and blue Christmas lights still strung up all over the restaurant and bar areas.
‘You tryin’ to get me zapped, cousin?’ Petey asked. He was dead serious about the question.
‘No. I don’t want you hurting yourself…But I got unfinished business with Carl Anglin.’
Petey took another sip of his draft. He was a killer with females. His looks more than offset his natural stupidity. But he was clever enough to survive within his crew. He had smart instincts, at least.
‘It’s bad business, like I said, Jimmy. You’re a car-thief cop. Stick with it. You can grow old and get a decent pension and not face jail or pissed-off Outfit guys, like some of my associates.’
Maybe he wasn’t as dumb as he looked.
‘He killed your uncle, indirectly, Petey. He made my father…he hurt my old man the worst way you can. With his pride. The son of a bitch is trash and we allow him to walk the streets like any other man. I don’t give a shit what you do for a living, Petey. That’s not my job. But you can do something right if you can aim me at who’s helping Anglin piss on our feet.’
‘You’re takin’ all this far too personal, Jimmy…All I know, all I heard, is that this guy is connected to the government. He did them a favor. He did a job for them, and then he was smart enough to hand over the story to somebody who can hurt the Feds if Anglin takes the heat for the girls’ murders. You�
��ve heard this story before.’
I nodded. I’d made him edgy. He started tapping the table with his forefinger.
‘I need a name, Petey. Somewhere to start.’
‘It ain’t your fuckin’ business, Jimmy! I told you. You can get people hurt. Includin’ yourself. I can’t help you. Not with this. It’s over my head and out of my league.’
I’d come to the end of the line with him. The avenue to the illicit side of the familia was closed. If they wanted vengeance, I was out of the loop.
But I knew they hadn’t forgotten Marty Genco. They didn’t allow hits on made men unless there was absolute justification for the whack. Somebody’s personal safety or fortune must have been on the line.
I did some homework on my own. I hit the libraries and the archives in my spare time. Finding traces of Anglin after his military duty became very difficult. But there was the Freedom of Information thing that opened one tiny door.
Anglin had been officially demobilized in 1960. Then he disappeared into the miasma of the Far East. But IRS records showed that Anglin was in the States from 1962 to 1965, at least. He worked as a fisherman in Key West during those years. At least, that was what his income tax returns said.
The suspicion was that he was CIA or CIA-affiliated during all of those post-Korean War years. The CIA denied any connection to Carl Anglin. It was old news. If he’d worked for someone in Washington or Quantico or Arlington, they’d have had no official name for themselves.
I tried to find out if Anglin had any politics. I found that he was a registered Democrat but had not voted in more than two elections since his return from Asia. He had not shown allegiance to anyone, particularly. He’d been a member of the National Rifle Association, but he’d stopped paying dues in 1964.
On my own time I contacted the police in Key West and asked for information about Anglin during his residence there. Some deputy sheriff let me know that Anglin had been arrested three times on suspicion of armed violence, but that each beef had ended in a dismissal of charges. A lawyer waltzed him right out of the shithouse on all three occasions.
Then he gave me the name of the lawyer — Preston Ramsey. I knew I’d heard the name, but I couldn’t place him. I asked for more information about Ramsey from the deputy in Key West, and he filled in the missing piece. Ramsey had been involved in the investigation of the John Kennedy assassination. He’d been in the middle of all the accusations when the conspiracy theories abounded in the early 1960s. But Preston Ramsey came away free and pristine, and his name faded away, just like that Congressional report about the President’s demise.
They got the guy who did Kennedy. And then someone got Oswald’s killer. Old news. Case closed. Books and movies tried to resurrect the mystery of the killing of JFK, but Oswald remained the lone gunman. The FBI supposedly proved that no single man could have shot as quickly as Lee Harvey Oswald was supposed to have shot. No one could’ve hit the target with such deadly accuracy, either.
I felt a great chill come over me. I had a notion I could not share with anyone. Not even with my wife. Nearly fifteen years had passed since this country had mourned the loss of its leader. Wounds were supposed to have healed, time was supposed to have distanced us from the trauma of what had happened. Theories about FBI or CIA involvement…Ideas about the Mafia carrying out a whack on the President…nothing ever came of any of it. There was just one strange ex-Marine who pulled off some of the fanciest marksmanship in history. Grassy knolls.
Jesus. A chill hit me again when I remembered the Zapruder film. The top of Kennedy’s scalp being blasted off by the bullet.
Picture Anglin as another of the shooters. Envision this pride of the Navy, now gone bad, taking big money to hit any target. As long as the price was right…Carl Anglin. One-time war hero. Now a mercenary. He was the sniper out in the weeds. He was the man with the real ability to pull off a kill like that. He wasn’t some lame loser who’d almost defected to the Soviets. He could actually have pulled it off. He’d got the skills.
Again, the cold crept up my back. Leave it alone, I told myself. It’s silly and scary. Kennedy’s dead. The burden of proof selected Lee Harvey Oswald, and there were no more boogeymen to pursue. Let the damned dogs stay lying and sleeping.
It grasped me and wouldn’t let go. But I could never speak of it to anyone else. It would be like spotting a UFO and reporting it. You’d have to be crazy. No one’d think of you as a serious human being ever again.
And how would I make the last move upward in the CPD if people heard my theory about the murder of a US President? I’d be back on the street in uniform, watching out for parking offenders.
I had to bury the idea so deep inside myself that I couldn’t even come back to it in dreams. If Anglin really had been in Dallas that fall, I didn’t want to know about it. This city was a big enough territory. I was a local copper trying to keep tabs on my own turf. Dallas, Texas was too big, too distant. I’d begun my career and I’d got a new wife and we were about to create a family of our own.
I left the archives and I promised myself I’d stick to car thieves. Boosters. I could deal with them.
I could deal with them. I couldn’t deal with ghosts and grassy knolls and snipers who couldn’t hit a cow in the ass if that sniper were standing right next to that goddamned bovine beast. It was only a fantasy, a set of coincidences, I told myself.
I’m a lowly car-thief copper, I told myself. I’ll stick to the job they gave me. And I’ll think about Carl Anglin no more.
CHAPTER TWENTY
[May 1999]
The surviving Regals, lords of 111th Street in the southeast part of town, right over by the Lake, were angry. And there were plenty of them still around. The word from Tactical and Gangs was that there was going to be payback. They were not frightened that one of their higher-ups had got waxed with his girlfriend on their own turf. Like most gangs, they were brain dead and didn’t learn easily. Striking out at an opponent was SOP. Trouble was that they hadn’t isolated their target. They knew Anglin had something to do with the shooting, but they knew also that it was likely more than one shooter had done Wayne Jackson and his significant other…Who to pop? That was the question.
Anglin had changed his residence. He was living somewhere in the New Town District. It was where the wannabe yuppies lived before they got married and headed off to the burbs with their brats in tow.
We knew where he was, and if we did, the Regals had their intelligence too. I wasn’t worried about Anglin’s safety, but I wanted him to go down by the numbers. I didn’t want any outside influence affecting him. Not the Feds or the Regals or that mysterious outfit hiding somewhere behind the Spooks of D.C.
I had shared my suspicion about Anglin’s target, my JFK theory, only with Doc. I had not talked about it with anyone else, not even with either of my two wives. It was too crazy to share any more widely. Anyone except Doc would think that this investigator had become overly obsessed with catching this particular killer, and that with the JFK idea I was making him some kind of super-villain —
Wasn’t he already that, with seven victims, perhaps ten? Was the explosive secret of Kennedy’s assassination worth more than the sum of all their lives?
I had to back away from the notion. It scared me, as I said. I had to concentrate on Anglin as a murderous psycho in his own right.
Carl had plenty of problems besides me. There was a large group of African-American male gangbangers who would dearly love to use his entrails as lawn cover. So Anglin had better watch his back. Whoever was shepherding him had better keep a close watch on their boy.
And finding out about that guardian angel of Anglin’s still depended on Special Agent Mason. The tap had been on his phone for two weeks, but we’d come up with nothing to stir our interest. Like most agents, he understood how easily he himself could become a target for surveillance. Paranoia was the Bureau’s watchword. It was a legacy from J. Edgar Crossdresser.
But one night Mason might becom
e overly confident that no one was listening out there. Someone might call him on what he — and the caller — thought was an ordinary unsecured home phone. We had to hope he thought we thought he was beyond reach.
That lucky call happened on a Thursday evening. Ralph the Techie was on hand. He was sitting in a station wagon with his tape running, just 100 yards from Mason’s residence.
Early on Friday morning, Doc and Ralph and I were listening to the recording at my office in Homicide.
‘Yes?’ Masons voice.
‘I have the document.’ Female voice.
‘This is an unsecured line.’
‘I understand.’
Pause.
‘What the hell,’ Mason went on. ‘What have you got for me?’
‘Are you sure?’ the female voice asked.
‘I don’t feel like going all the way downtown to my office to find an encrypted — ’
‘Okay, then…The Major says that group with the royal name is planning to take our boy into a downward spiral this very weekend. You had better provide security. You know how our man is about his personal safety — ’
‘You’d better stop right there and tell me the rest over a secured line. And don’t call me at home again.’
‘This is considered a One Priority. Time is a factor, Mason.’
Female voice hung up, and so did Mason.
‘Major?’ Doc asked.
‘Major Motherfucker,’ Ralph quipped.
No one smiled back at him.
‘Ralphie, do you realize the deep shit you’ve just waded into with the two of us?’
Ralph the Techie looked over to Doc.
‘What? I just record messages. That’s all I…What deep shit?’
‘You’re listening to an FBI guy who has another master, other than Louis Freeh. You follow me, dummy?’ Doc told him, glaring at him in a deadly serious manner.
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