Jimmy Parisi- A Chicago Homicide Trilogy

by Thomas Laird

  I’ve exceeded my limit, he explains. He’s the only friend I’ve got. He’s called me a cab. Is sending me home before I get my pension in trouble with a drunk-driving rap. The cabby comes into the bar and hails me.

  I wave to the Greek and stagger out into the icy wind. The breeze takes my breath away momentarily, but I’m able to get myself inside the Checker cab.

  *

  Eleanor is away for two days, visiting her mother in Indiana. They live in some hick heaven called Oxford.

  ‘Anybody home?’ I bellow out. I know there’ll be no reply.

  I walk up those twenty-six stairs and head toward the guest room, my bedroom.

  ‘Nobody home? You sure?’

  I smile with the sound of silence. This is the way it ought to be for Chicago’s most outcast copper. There are policemen at headquarters who make a point of ignoring me. The only guys who talk to me are the captain and my partner, Eddie. Fuck the rest of them, I figure. Times like these reveal who your real friends are. I was never all that close with my fellow Centurions.

  I lie down on my bed. It is hard and uncompromising, this mattress, the way I want it. Helps relieve the bad back I got, sleeping for two years on the ground in Europe during the Second World War. Nothing eases the pain except this boardlike bed of mine. Eleanor refuses to sleep with me here anyway.

  I close my eyes and I see the photographs of the seven nurses. I see the terror in Andrew Callan’s sister’s eyes. I see the dread in Theresa Rojas’s blank stare. And I see the actual corpses I encountered on the floors of those dorm rooms. There is nothing quite like the real thing. The authentic dead body.

  They haunt me every night. I cannot drown them out with the booze. Sleep doesn’t stop them from invading the surreal territory of the land of dreams. They’re with me all day and every night. I’ll need a shrink if the booze doesn’t do me in first.

  Eleanor. When was the last time her warm presence made contact with my own flesh? I can’t recall. I love her in spite of her disloyalty. She made me a cuckold and tried to tell me it was for my own good, it was so that we could have the family that I couldn’t give her. Nick was simply providing the seed of our happiness, she tried to convince me. Why couldn’t I see things for what they really were? She loves me, she says. It was never otherwise.

  Why couldn’t I bend my lofty virtue just once, she pleaded, and let us be happy with our lives and with our son? She digs into her Catholic upbringing and reminds me that Joseph had to live with an immaculate offspring. Well, she wasn’t Mary, Eleanor reminded me. If she were to have a child it would have to be via more conventional means. Meaning Nick. Nick’s seed, Nick’s sperm.

  Sleep is God’s opium. Sleep puts it behind us, it lets us unload all our burdens. But the price of sleep is dreams — more specifically, nightmares.

  I have to close my eyes in spite of that knowledge.

  And when I do, I hear a creaking of the floor downstairs. My first reaction is to bolt upright, here in bed. I grab down for the snubnosed.38 in my ankle holster and yank it out. Then, silently, I get out of bed.

  I do not call out. I don’t want them — whoever they are — to know I’m aware of them.

  So I get to the bedroom door and I walk quietly down the twenty-six stairs. I walk at their far right edge in order to avoid the creaking I heard before.

  When I arrive at the first floor, there are no lights on. I’ve turned them off before going upstairs.

  Dumb fuck, I’m thinking. Trying to boost a copper’s house. How stupid can a thief be?

  But maybe it’s not a thief.

  I work my way slowly through the dark toward the kitchen. My advantage is that it’s home turf for me. Whoever this is, he’s on foreign ground.

  The kitchen is clear. I stand still and listen.

  Nothing.

  I carry on and make my way toward the living room, just the other side of the dining room that I’m now passing through. I hear another slight squeaking of the floorboards. So I stop in place and try to get a fix on the location. The sound is coming from the kitchen. I hear another faint noise coming from there.

  The son of a bitch is following me.

  I carefully step back toward where I began, in the kitchen. There’s no way he can avoid me if he’s still in there. I’m pointing the .38 in front of me like a flashlight. One movement and someone is going to be splattered across my walls.

  The weariness is still with me. The alcohol makes the room move eerily in the darkness. I try to fight off the effect of the booze. There is only a swinging door separating me from the kitchen and the intruder inside.

  Crouching, I rush through the door, the .38 in my hand moving back and forth to cover the room. There is silence and nothing else. This time I hear the movement coming from back out in the living room. I shove back through the kitchen door and hurry toward the source of this latest sound.

  It’s the same in here. I hear the noise coming from back in the kitchen.

  Fuck him. I’m going to turn on the light. I flip the switch and the brilliance of the bulbs blinds me slightly. But there’s no one in here with me. So I walk through the dining room and I flip on that switch. The overhead flares on and I’m still on my own.

  I throw open the door to the kitchen, and I fumble until I’ve switched the light there on. Still there is no one to be seen. I hear the noise in the dining room. I peer through the crack in the swinging door and I see the backside of someone dressed in black. They’re headed toward the living room. They’re running a game on me, staying one square ahead, but now the game is going to get deadly.

  I charge into the dining room at a dead run, hurl myself through the still-lit living-room and finally catch sight of the black-clad figure making his way out of my living-room window. I pump five shots at the fleeing figure, and I know I’ve only hit with one. I think I’ve caught him in the buttocks as he bent over in order to get out the window.

  If I’d been sober, I would’ve killed him. My eyesight is 20-20, and I’m a better than fair marksman.

  The five shots are noisy. When I look out at my front lawn I see lights coming on in the front windows of several of my neighbors’ houses.

  I call in for a squad car to get out here. They respond in under five minutes because the car’s not far from my house.

  The patrolmen want to have a look around, so I show them where everything is. They defer to the fact that I’m a Homicide cop, but I know they can smell the liquor on my breath and maybe even the scent of the fear I’m spreading all over my own house. They’re polite — Adams and Lefferts are their names — but I can tell they’re thinking I might have hallucinated, me being bombed the way I am.

  ‘I’ve been drinking,’ I tell Lefferts. ‘I’m not, however, all fucked up, Patrolman.’

  ‘Yessir.’ Lefferts smiles. He goes to find his partner who is searching the upstairs storey now.

  I make them some coffee. Mostly I make it for myself. My hands are shaking as I put the grounds into the pot.

  ‘There’s no blood anywhere that I can see, Lieutenant,’ Adams tells me when he and Lefferts come back into the kitchen.

  ‘I know I hit him once,’ I tell the tall, good-looking kid.

  ‘Could be he didn’t leak until he got to his ride,’ Adams says. ‘But there was a set of footprints on the wet grass.’

  ‘We need to get a cast made,’ I tell them. He goes out to the squad car to ask for some on-scene help.

  ‘Five shots?’ Lefferts asks. ‘You’d think he would’ve bled a little, even if you did only hit him once.’

  The electric coffee pot begins to perk, and the noise makes me jerk upright.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  [April 1999]

  The night in 1968 went something like this. It was after 8.00 p.m. The seven student nurses were in the dorm for the night because they didn’t speak English very well. They hadn’t been in El Norte long enough to pick up on the directions and whereabouts of things. The girls were pretty much homeb
odies because this city was big. So big that nothing but Mexico City or Havana in the Hispanic countries compared to this foreign place.

  There were Mexican men in Chicago, but not of the same class that the girls were used to. These seven nurses came from educated families, some better off than others. But all of them came from the middle classes. On the West Side of Chicago, there was stark poverty. There was a large black population, and there was also a growing Hispanic community. But the Hispanics lived on the edge of poverty in these barrios. So the girls might not have felt comfortable mixing with the established Spanish-speaking residents. It wasn’t necessarily because of snobbishness. These folk were adjusted, more or less, to El Norte. The student nurses were still only visitors to this part of North America.

  Chicago could be intimidating. The students knew something of the city from the cases they studied at County Hospital. Gunshot wounds, stabbings, stranglings, poisonings. They’d seen it all come through Emergency. So they might have been a bit scared to venture out into the world immediately around them.

  So it was early evening and they had settled in to study or watch television or just hang around and generally be lonely. After a couple of hours the boredom or the weariness had worn them out and several of them were preparing for bed. Since they were all Catholics, they prayed before going to sleep, and perhaps a few of them said the rosary as well. (Later, cops found the beads by three of their beds.)

  Carmen Espinoza was the last one out of the dorm, around 10.00 p.m. Everyone else was socked in for the night.

  It must have been that last nurse out who made it possible for Anglin to get into the dormitory. The safety door probably swooshed closed just a hair too slowly after her departure, and Carl Anglin was in the alley, just waiting for someone to give him his chance. It came — and he was in.

  Anglin began with the first nurse, Angela Trujillo. He bound her with her own sheets and silenced her with a balled-up pillowcase that nearly choked her to death. He moved on to the next room and subdued the two room-mates, Maria Colota and Juana Martinez, by punching both of them unconscious with his fists. The ruckus must have lasted only seconds because the other girls down the hall never heard him coming.

  He continued in a similar way until he had all seven girls tied up.

  He returned to the first room and spent some time with victim number one. When he had raped her several times, he cut her throat twice. Very skillful cutting. Like someone who had done that kind of knifing before. She bled to death very quickly. Her mouth was stuffed with pillowcase, so there was no audible screaming.

  Anglin moved on to the pair of student nurses in room two. He sodomized one of the young women, and then he raped the roommate in a more usual fashion before he also anally assaulted the second girl. He cut their throats, one after the other, and then he disemboweled both women, leaving them split open like butchered cattle at the stockyards.

  All this was done without disturbing the student nurses on the floors above or below. There were three floors in this dormitory.

  Anglin finally finished the carnage around 1.00 a.m., it was estimated by the Medical Examiner. Give or take an hour either way.

  My father arrived on scene early that morning. He told me before I went to Vietnam that he had never seen such savagery, such an absence of pity for the victims, in his entire career. He told me the details of the case before I left for Asia because he wanted to dissuade me from joining the police. I saw some things in my area of operations that might have rivaled in brutality what Anglin did to the girls, but then, I was in a war. Anglin had taken the unbelievable violence of combat and transferred its ugliness into the dormitory where the seven young females perished. My father’s story frightened me because of the matter-of-fact way he told it. It was as if this was nothing new, this incredible carnage. But he had seen savagery before, in the streets and in his own war.

  So he did not convince me to do anything other than become a policeman. I came back from Vietnam after two tours with a box full of decorations that I stopped wearing as soon as I could find my civvies. I signed up for the remaining hours that I owed for my bachelor’s degree, finished up that work and graduated and promptly signed on at the Police Academy. My first assignment was a beat on the West Side — patrolman, of course. Several years later, I had my shield and worked in Burglary/Auto Theft. Finally I landed where I am today: Homicide. That was my own personal evolution. I grew up in the police with the Anglin murders already a matter of history. I saw my father turn gray with the weight of the nurses’ deaths. Then he died and I was left alone with this burden. The CPD put Anglin’s file in their ‘inactive’ section and hoped he’d go away.

  If I compared Carl Anglin to Evil, I’d be accused of sounding philosophical or even theological. I knew he was a man with two legs, two arms, and all the other usual equipment. Carl was human. It would be facile or naive to explain him away as something supernatural. No, he was one of us, more’s the pity. It would make us more comfortable with ourselves to categorize him out of the human species. It’d make things easier for us, more bearable. The presence of evil in men had long been a subject of study and dispute for men far more intelligent than yours truly, so I wouldn’t tarry, as they said. But there was a dose of something in Carl Anglin that made all those tales of a horned beast with a tail and a pitchfork just a little more credible to us believers who had no trouble embracing notions of angels and the God of Abraham. Still, the bad guy was undoubtedly less acceptable, the product of medieval ignorance, even if Jehovah was okay in some intellectual circles. To me it made no sense to exclude the Devil because there was a helluva lot more evidence for the Beast in action on earth than there was for the presence of this Essence of Good. I was a Catholic, as I said, and we still had that little embarrassment known as the Rite of Exorcism in our book, so I guess modern man hadn’t dismissed Old Scratch entirely.

  It was difficult to deal with Carl Anglin if I didn’t try to see him as human rather than demon. He had the same weaknesses any other perpetrator had, I told myself. He’d escaped punishment because of a glitch in history, not because he was the son of Satan. To think any other way would be ignorance and superstition.

  But when I went over in my mind the crime scene my father had encountered thirty years ago, I was left there in my office, alone at 3.30 in the morning, feeling a chill creep up my backbone.

  I rose out of my chair and looked out the window at the lake. The sun would not rise for a few hours, but I was feeling an urgent need for the rays from the east to touch my window here sooner than that. All the lights were on in headquarters, but it wasn’t bright enough. Only natural sunlight would drive this dank feeling out of my bones.

  *

  Doc Gibron was married to a baby-doctor, a pediatrician. She was Indian and outrageously beautiful. Far too good for the likes of my partner. They had adopted an African-American girl who happened to be blind in one eye. The girl was the heart of their happiness. Doc was in his sixties, as I said, and Mari, his wife, was in her early fifties.

  They were a unique couple. Doc had his PhD in Literature from Northwestern University in Evanston, not far from where I sat. He kept threatening to quit and chase the coeds, but he said Mari’d slap the shit out of him and he couldn’t bear having her angry with him. Besides, he was a father now.

  As was I. But I hadn’t seen any of my three offspring in thirty-six hours. It was time to go home and leave Carl Anglin for the next shift to worry about.

  *

  ‘You ready to call it a day?’ Doc grinned.

  ‘I was born ready.’

  I tried to sound as enthusiastic as I could after a day and a half of overtime. The extra hours had turned out to be fruitless. There seemed to be no progress on either of the two homicides. The old adage held true. With a murder, the longer it went, the worse it went.

  Doc and I took the elevator down and walked over to the corner cafe where we bought coffee or soft drinks whenever a break was called for. I boug
ht the Tribune from a newspaper vending machine before we went inside the cafe.

  At 4.00 a.m. the joint was half full. It reminded me of that painting, Night Owls.

  We ordered a coffee for my partner and a Diet Coke for me. I took the caffeine-free soda pop. Because of my blood pressure.

  ‘We can’t shoot him,’ Doc said.

  ‘What?’ I laughed, looking up from the Tribune’s sports page.

  ‘We can’t just whack him. But you know some people who could.’

  ‘Quit screwing around.’

  I eyeballed him, and he too finally broke out laughing.

  ‘It might just be an option, Jimmy. Tell one of your Sicilian cousins to put one behind his fucking ear.’

  ‘I don’t deal with that side of the family. Not anymore.’

  One of my underworld cousins had been murdered by the Farmer, Marco Karrios, in that case we’d just finished up last year. The poor son of a bitch had been butchered like some of Carl’s victims. Killing Marco Karrios hadn’t made me feel any better about the loss of my cheap-thief relative.

  ‘Yeah. I almost forgot about that,’ Doc lamented. ‘I’m sorry I brought it up, Jimmy.’

  ‘Forget about it. He was a big boy. He understood the danger. If you lie down with dogs, right?’

  Doc knew it was a sore spot, so he let it go.

  ‘You know how much trouble and money would be saved if someone popped a cap on the son of a bitch…’

  ‘We don’t do murders, we solve them,’ I recited. It was like a Homicide cop’s Pledge of Allegiance.

  Doc grinned.

  ‘You did homicides, justifiable though they were, with that other uniform on…Anyway, it’d be a sweet way to bring closure to our current caseload.’

  The night sky seemed to be turning just a little bit lighter. I was looking out the plate-glass window. Perhaps the lights inside here were playing tricks on me.

  ‘I’m going home, guinea. It’s my little girl’s birthday. I’ve got to be at Walmart when they open. Got a $500 budget. Mari says not to spoil her…You coming over tonight for the cake and crap?’