by Thomas Laird
‘Oh yeah! I seem to remember reading about it. Sad, that.’
He never took his stare from my face.
‘You ain’t blaming me for the old man too, are you, Lieutenant?’
‘It’s comforting to know there are people out there who want to get close to you.’
Now Anglin’s smirk began to fade.
‘I heard there was something strange about the way your old man checked out. I heard — ’
‘It was an accident. It was over thirty years ago. Back when you were able to do more than one girl at a time. Back when you weren’t a sad old bastard who had to screw female sewers like Dolores to make you think your little cheesedick still works.’
The grin was completely gone. He moved closer to me, and I stepped up to him. Doc edged his way between us.
‘Gentlemen,’ Doc murmured placatingly.
‘Your old man laid hands on me once. He got away with it,’ Anglin hissed.
‘If I ever lay hands on you, I’ll break you piece by piece.’
‘You think you’re badder than that homey I wasted?’
‘Gentlemen,’ Doc said again. He was still keeping us apart.
‘You’re real expert at killing hundred-pound females and one crack cocaine addict who should’ve stuck you and forgot about slashing the sewer…No. We’ll handle this by the numbers, Anglin. You got me provoked, but this is as far as it goes. Next guy to talk to you will be the County Prosecutor.’ I stepped back, but I didn’t lose eye contact with him. This was one pissing contest I wouldn’t back down from.
Finally Anglin turned his gaze toward my partner, the referee. ‘My attorney is just slobbering over the chance to do you two.’
‘Maybe you ought to hire a counsel with two legs instead of four,’ Doc said, grinning.
‘I assume you think you’re quite the badass too,’ Anglin told Doc.
‘If I ever got really mad at you, Carl, I’d use a baseball bat. See, the guinea there believes in coming up on a guy from the front. Me, though, I don’t have any problems busting animals like you from behind. I mean, why would I want to make a contest out of it? I’m too old and impatient. No, if I came for you, Carl, the first thing you’d know about it was when you were picking splinters out of the back of your skull. But now, with aluminum bats, you probably would never be conscious long enough to wonder what it was that laid you low in one swipe.’
We were through threatening Anglin. He was through baiting us. It had gone to the brink. Someone was about to get hurt. You could smell it in the atmosphere, there in the waiting room at the hospital where Anglin’s paramour was getting stitched from cheek to chin.
‘You have anything else you want to say?’ He was looking at both of us. He had assumed the stance. He’d learned karate and judo during his hitch. Standard training.
‘The Lieutenant’s a black belt. Which degree was it, Jimmy?’ asked Doc.
I didn’t answer him. I was waiting for Anglin to move.
‘Same training I had, I bet.’
‘My father was a Ranger in 1944-45.1 didn’t want to disappoint him.’
I was waiting for the first kick, the first jab, but it never arrived.
Finally Anglin turned his back. I was relieved. I was fifty-two, Anglin was well into his sixties and Doc was only a bit younger than him. I could just see hospital security breaking up a bout between three geezers our age. It was an embarrassing image.
‘We’ll look into this Regals thing,’ I said.
‘But I think you’ll have made them even more pissed off with you this time.’
*
We took a ride to the far southwest part of town. Regal Territory. Gangbanger Central. We found Wayne Jackson on the street with several of his bros. It was a bright, clean day, there on a playground in bangerland. The bros were engaged in a trash-talking marathon game of hoops, while Wayne, Renee Jackson’s brother, watched at the sidelines.
‘You the two Homicide Ds ain’t caught shit with this Anglin motherfucker.’
The brother seemed bright, in spite of the homey dialogue.
‘We’re the two,’ I responded. Doc watched the ongoing trash-a-thon. There was not much basketball going on, however.
‘He kill ten fuckin’ women and he been walkin’ the streets for over thirty motherfuckin’ years, and you here gon’ tell me about somebody tried to nail that cocksucker.’
I nodded and he laughed.
‘You think I’m the dude behind the hit?’
I nodded again.
‘So you roustin’ me or what?’
‘I want you to let us take care of Carl Anglin. He already killed your sister.’
Doc turned toward our conversation now. ‘You know my sister?’ Wayne asked.
‘I’m investigating her death. You know I never knew her.’
Wayne was a tall, very black African-American. Very good-looking, very athletic-looking. Which made me wonder why he wasn’t out there on the court.
‘We wasn’t close. I mean I love her because she my sister, but she had her way and I got mine. She was a school girl. Always in her books. Momma love her, but she got no use for me, and hey, I unnerstan’. Momma believe in makin’ your dream come true. Renee her dream. It was comin’ true, too. Girl was gon’ graduate, be a nurse, all that fly shit…Now she as dead as…We wadn’t close, but we was blood. Renee never look away when I come around. She still care about what I do. Told me to go to school and shit like that, but she never could get it in her head that me and her…We was the same blood, but we was different.’
‘Call it off, Wayne. He’s not worth your death as well.’
The young black man looked at me oddly, like he couldn’t follow my words.
‘That motherfucker is dead.’
Now there was no trace of his homey accent. He’d simply made a straight-up statement.
‘That motherfucker is dead,’ he repeated.
‘Then we’ll put you in the hole and your sister’s still gone,’ Doc explained.
‘You all come get me when you ready. You know where I lives.’
He turned away from us, and the conversation was over.
*
The apartment was in the federally subsidized complex, there in the far southwest part of town. It was 4.29 a.m. The sun wouldn’t rise for an hour and a half. Doc and I had plenty to fear, being two white spots in an all-black hood. So we took four black patrolmen along with us. They were a little nervous, as well.
The call came through 911. Sounds of gunfire. Which wasn’t unusual for this area. But a good citizen called it in and a patrolman found the body in the bedroom. The cop didn’t see the other body in the bathroom until he went to squeak a leak in the toilet.
Wayne Jackson had a hole in the back of his head about the size of a baseball. He was lying on the mattress in the bedroom. There were fragments of skull and bits of gray matter sticking to his pillow and the wall behind the bed’s headboard.
The female in the bathroom had been shot similarly. One hole, the size of a hardball, in the back of her noggin. The shooter had done Wayne and then caught the female taking a dump or a whiz in the head and dispatched her soul along with Wayne’s.
‘High-caliber. Big hole,’ Dr Gray, the M.E., told us. He’d beaten us to the scene. I couldn’t help wondering how come he’d got here so quickly. But he probably just wanted to get in and out before the sun rose and all those friendly neighborhood faces could welcome him.
It was a tense scene. No one felt comfortable there.
‘Not a gangbanger job, do you think?’ Doc asked.
‘If it were, I’d expect some more violence to the bodies. Doesn’t look like anger. Looks like a professional execution.’
Doc knew it was Anglin’s associates. You had to hand it to them for balls, coming into a black enclave, here in the southwest part of town, and doing a tap on a honcho banger while he was balling his old lady. Real brass balls, it must have taken.
‘We better get this show on the road
before Wayne’s troops and the media show up,’ I told my partner.
It was a very quiet crime scene. No one was cracking wiseass jokes. No one was making snide remarks about the girl getting hers in the shithouse.
‘They’re out of control, Doc. Nothing stops them. These people are insane. They shield a murderer. They hit a gang leader in his own crib. This goes beyond nuts. These guys don’t care who they have to kill.’
‘You think they’d go this far to protect Anglin?’
‘Look at their track record. He gets them to remove anybody who’s a threat to him.’
‘And what about us, then?’
‘It has to have a side story. No, the papers can call this business with the Regals something internal. Inter-gang warfare. There’s no conspiracy here. Nothing you can grab hold of, at least…And who knows? Maybe they’re going to be right. Maybe I’m reading this all wrong, just like my old man did. We got this common obsession, and it’s fried both our brains. Carl Anglin has become the fucking boogeyman. There’s a monster in everybody’s closet. Maybe I need to go back into therapy, Doc.’
‘Then I’ll be in the next chair, sitting right beside you.’
We got through with the on-scene investigation in another half-hour. The sun was just barely up in the east as we pulled away from the complex.
Wayne Jackson joined his sister on a list that Carl Anglin had been composing for the last three decades.
*
The key was Mason. I told Doc that more than once, and even though he was nervous about going after a federal agent, I couldn’t see any other way to get to the roots of the Anglin problem. He was like a weed. You had to get him all the way out of his soil or he just kept popping back up.
We couldn’t do this with the blessing of the Chicago Police Department. It was going to be Doc and me on our own against him. On our own time.
We watched Mason’s house when we were off shift. We did the surveillance in Doc’s Chevy Celebrity. It was an old beater like that some teenager would use to drag his ass to college. Didn’t look like a cop vehicle. The thing was painted mauve, for Jesus’ sake. It stood out so badly that it didn’t stand out, for our purposes.
Mason lived alone. We saw no trace of the lovely assistant.
‘I’ll bet she’s gay,’ Doc snickered.
‘Then life as we know it would not be worth living,’ I replied.
We were listening to Doc’s all-night jazz station on a portable battery radio that my partner always dragged along on stakeout.
‘You think anyone funny’ll show up here?’ Doc asked.
‘That’s why we’re here,’ I moaned. I hadn’t had enough sleep lately. Natalie had been questioning me about all the ‘overtime’.
‘We need to tap his phone,’ Doc concluded.
We got one of our own technicians to do the illicit deed for us. He owed Doc big time on a woman my partner had set the technician up with a few years ago. The blind date became his wife. His wife was a major babe, so Ralph Krenski could hardly refuse Doc’s request.
‘I’m tapping a freakin’ Fed’s residence?’ Ralph gulped.
They’ll never get us to squeal on you,’ Doc said to the tech.
‘Jesus, we could all go away for a long freakin’ time — ’
‘Think how lonely you were until I helped you out,’ Doc reminded him.
‘If you really don’t want to, Ralph, I understand,’ I told him.
‘This is about Anglin, Doc tells me.’
I nodded.
‘The varmint who killed all those nurses?’
‘Yes.’
‘My beeper goes off and I’m comin’ out of there like the speed of bleedin’ light.’
Doc got out of the Celebrity.
‘Where’d you acquire this ride?’ Ralph asked.
They walked toward the darkened house of the FBI agent. Mason was not due home for three hours. We’d made sure he was at his headquarters before we’d come to this northwestern suburb. We were not far from Arlington Race Track.
Doc had his magic bag with him, and in moments Ralph the Techie was inside.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
[April 1978]
Erin clutched hold of me and kissed me. My young wife cried as we shared the award of my detective’s shield. All the years prior to this moment had finally come to fruition. This was the moment for which I’ve been waiting all my professional life as a police officer. Detective James Parisi. And it didn’t stop with my assignment at Burglary/Auto Theft. I was headed to Homicide. It was clear in my mind as my wife’s lovely face was as she stood near enough to me to make me go cross-eyed.
I held her at arm’s length to look at her properly. Erin Galagher, now Erin Parisi. Schoolteacher. Lover. Wife. The mother, someday, of my children.
I’d left her to go to Vietnam. I served two tours in spite of her begging me to come home after twelve months. Explaining how the second tour would pay our bills for my schooling didn’t seem to stop her pleading. She wanted me out of Asia. Erin didn’t care about our finances. But I knew that lack of money would become a factor adversely affecting our ability to get married as soon as I returned home, so she more or less gave up the battle over my second hitch in Vietnam.
The war was part of my preparation for my career. I looked at it that way so I could endure the heat, the mosquitoes, the lunatic lifers — all the horseshit attendant on the misery that ended a few years ago. When I returned Stateside in 1970, the war was already lost. The will to defeat the communists was long gone. The country wanted to shrink back inside its borders and refused to become the superpower watchdog of the so-called free world. It was a time, I suppose, much like the 1920s. It was a decade of reaction against sacrifice, brutality, and loss. I understood why people began to turn inward. They wanted this nation to reject the notion that we were conscience and copper to the world. Music, sex, drugs, booze, property. We became the nightmare antithesis of anti-materialism.
All these things that I heard about in college turned out to be pure politics. The world I came back to was interested primarily in the pleasures of the groin. Life was meant to become painless. The Big Aspirin was the cure-all of an ancient malady.
That was the big lie of the 1960s and 1970s. At least it was the bullshit that my nose got a whiff of when I came back, when I arrived home in 1970. The war didn’t make a philosopher out of me. It made me more resolute. I was going to get the bad guys. It was as simple as the plot of a Hollywood western. Good prevails over the shitheels of the world. There is a God, He is just, and we are His instruments. Just like in Catholic grade school. Very simple and straightforward.
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.