by Thomas Laird
And then a hooded figure appeared behind the dog.
‘Fritzy! Sit. I said sit!’
The pitbull plopped its ass on the carpeted floor.
‘Police,’ I told the figure in black.
My hand held the .44 against my right thigh.
‘Really?’ the cloaked figure asked.
We rushed toward the living room, past the robed figure and the nasty-looking, but now quiet, pooch.
The other robed figures had their hoods down, now, and the well-endowed naked ‘victim’ was sitting up on the table.
‘Are you guys really cops?’ she smiled.
She got up off that same table, and as she did, Jack and I watched as her melon-like, perfect breasts bobbed like buoys in the ocean.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
The night, tho’ clear, shall frown —
And the stars shall look not down
From their high thrones in heaven,
With light like Hope to mortals given —
But their red orbs, without beam,
To thy weariness shall seem
As a burning and a fever
Which would cling to thee for ever.
The third stanza of Poe’s ‘Spirits of the Dead’ was attached by tape to the toe of Marilyn Gurk, another drained-to-almost-the-last-drop loner who had just yesterday appeared on our updated list of missing women, aged thirty to thirty-five. We hadn’t even had the chance to go to her apartment and check on her. The smell from her small studio attracted the nostrils of the building’s superintendent, and he called the police. The uniforms who broke down her door telephoned homicide.
The small studio apartment was where Jack and I entered Marilyn Gurk’s final chapter. She was attractive, had no immediate family in the Chicago area, and was generally known at her place of employment — August Realty — to be a very private person. She didn’t date, didn’t seem interested in relationships.
How did Samsa find her? She wasn’t a member of the health club where our vampire-killer worked and where Samsa found his first two victims. He might have stalked her randomly, out in the street, perhaps, following her about to and from work. He might have observed she was on her own, almost always. Whatever it was, I didn’t think we’d get a break like the health club connection because Samsa was too bright to leave us another pattern to connect his dots.
We’d had too many close calls with this guy. He was becoming a sort of legend in his own time to some of the homicides downtown. I’d get these sad headshakes from a number of my homicide brethren when I encountered them at headquarters, from time to time. It was almost as if they were suffering with me, because everyone knew what those rare kinds of cases felt like — the unsolved cases. The killers who remained free from incarceration. They were a definite minority, statistically, but they hurt like hell. It was like an incurable ailment, something no MD could diagnose. There was no cure for that depression that came with an unsolved jacket. You carried it around like a cancerous lump that no chemo or radiation could touch and cure. It was worse than ulcers that ached without remedy. It was a pain so deep inside that no surgeon’s knife could extract it.
Samsa was already legend, as far as the media was concerned. There was something on TV almost nightly regarding him or other self-proclaimed vampires. Sadly, teenagers were beginning to see Samsa as some kind of renegade anti-hero. The next thing would be the movie and its sequel.
The coverage on him was almost nightly. I hadn’t heard as much material on the occult since The Exorcist movie came out. Samsa was a colourful Satan, the way they on the tube portrayed him, and he was only slightly less romanticized in the newspapers and mags.
Kids were mimicking him with Dracula masks, and it was far from Halloween. The Easter Bunny had been supplanted by this supposed shape-shifter. His legend grew daily. He was becoming Chicago’s version of Charles Manson. All Samsa lacked were the murderous female acolytes.
Maxim Samsa had emerged from the minors, all right. He’d gone from bush league killer to the show — the major leagues of murder.
His fifteen minutes of fame had extended beyond all of our expectations. He wasn’t high ‘profile’ any longer. Maxim Samsa was full frontal, and his face never left the palate of the media. He was their fair-haired renegade bloodsucker, and Chicago now belonged to him.
*
We drove to Joellyn Ransom’s apartment building. She had appeared on a missing person’s list just two days previous, so she wasn’t our case — yet. Not until she turned up dead, that was.
We knocked and there was no answer on the ground level entry door. Jack rang the second-floor apartment, they buzzed us, and we went inside. Jack flashed his badge at the middle-aged black woman who scowled when she opened her door and saw two white guys in her hallway.
‘Po-lice,’ she spat as she slammed her door shut.
We went up to Joellyn’s flat and knocked, but there was no answer, as we expected. We tried the knob, and the door was unlocked.
We drew out our weapons, and then Jack pushed the door open wide.
‘Police!’ we announced ourselves.
Not a sound from inside.
‘He’s done her, Jimmy,’ Jack declared as we stood with our guns pointed at nothing we could see.
‘Just because she’s a missing person?’ I smiled.
We both knew that the longer she was missing, the better the chance that Joellyn Ransom was dead.
The electricity had been turned off, so the only light we had came from our flashlights. We made our way from room to room, but the place was bare. There wasn’t a piece of clothing or a remnant of a tenant to this apartment. The place had been stripped to the bone marrow, from what we could see.
‘If Riad killed her, we won’t find her unless he wants her found. He performs pretty much the way the Ciccios do their thing, when it comes to killing.’
Jack knew the Ciccios were the renegade side of the Parisi clan. He’d been with me for two of the encounters I had with my family on the sinister side. We’d gone for information a couple of times, and the Ciccios had obliged.
‘There’s nothing here, Jimmy. It’s as if she just evaporated. Vanished.’
‘That can’t happen. Someone knows. Someone saw her after she left this place. The two yos missing their faces in that alley wouldn’t have seen it. But their remaining partner from the trio might have seen something. He’s always somewhere close to Abu Riad, our guy in Tactical said.’
We made one last sweep of Joellyn’s residence. It was a place where a seventeen-year-old girl became a partner in murder. It was where she learned about betrayal, something not on her course lists in high school.
Her schoolmates might be a place to begin looking for her, I thought. But I didn’t say anything to Jack. We had both been reminded, numerous times, that Arthur Ransom and Dilly Beaumont were not considered high profile; they weren’t prime-time players. Just two more statistics from the West Side. The West Side was not a source of highly solved cases. These were jackets that never found frequent closure, as it was called. You had to learn to let go, in these barrios. Nobody knew nothin’.
And now Joellyn Ransom had disappeared before we could tie her to the murders of the two oldsters, and perhaps to the two de-faced gangsters we found in an alley. Low profile. Negative recognition from the public as far as the media was concerned and as far as some of the upper echelon in the CPD was concerned, as well.
We kept our pistols in hand until we had locked the doors of the Taurus and pulled away from the curb.
*
Writers called it writer’s block. The everyday mope called it constipation. Guys with limp johnsons called it impotence. It was a feeling of helplessness. Which I had never thought would overtake me. I couldn’t go soft on the streets. I couldn’t hit brick walls and bounce off without making a fragmentary impression.
But it was the way it actually was. No shrink could soft talk it into something else. No one could explain it away by telling me I was
delusional. Every time I walked by my board, the board I shared with Jack Wendkos, I saw those red names. The unsolved murders. The uncollected perpetrators. The red words gnawed at me and kept me awake at night. Kept me awake so often that I had to sneak out of the bedroom and lie sleepless on our front room’s couch. I couldn’t roll around all night and keep Natalie awake. The Redhead had to go to work too. And she had no red names on her board, the one she shared with Terry O’Mally.
O’Mally was her age. Just recently divorced. Very attractive. Very popular with his male and female counterparts.
I thought I was beginning to hate O’Mally for being as attractive as he must seem to my wife. Being married doesn’t make you go blind or deaf and dumb. Natalie came home nights telling me all these hilarious tales of her partner’s lightning sense of humour. Women loved men who could make them laugh, and frankly I’d become an absolute drag for the last several weeks. Natalie noticed it, but she tried to avoid the conversation about it. My son Mike asked me, at breakfast the other day, what the two-ton monkey on my shoulder was doing there. This from a kid who was about to lay the wood to a paedophile priest in open court.
The black dog was becoming more like a black elephant. I could hear the creature scampering about when I tried to lay my head on the pillow to go to sleep at night.
Natalie caught me when I moved to the couch, one evening. ‘What, Jimmy? What?’ she demanded.
‘I can’t sleep.’
‘Why? Because that phony bloodsucker is still on the loose? Come on, lover. You need to be a little more of a pro about this, Lieutenant. You know all about the occasional big fish that never wind up in the boat. It happens to everyone, and you know it.’
‘It’s not just him.’
Natalie sat on the couch next to me and began to stroke my head and hair with her gentle, thin fingers.
‘Then who is it, Jimmy? What is it?’
‘I’m too old for my job. I’m not competent at it anymore. This fuckin’ goon is playing with me, and I got the feeling that ten years ago I would’ve hauled this piece of shit by his cheesedick balls into the lock-up. He wouldn’t have slipped away, Natalie. I wouldn’t have fucked things up. I wouldn’t be running a lap behind this prick, the way I am now.’
‘You want to retire, Jimmy?’
She kept stroking my hair softly.
‘I could, in six months. I’ll have my thirty years in, then.’
‘Do you want to, I asked you.’
I took hold of her hand, and I kissed it.
‘No. I’d die if I didn’t have the work. You know me, Red. No hobbies, no sidelights. And you’re on the job and the kids — except for the two girls — will be on their own soon. Hell, in a few years the little guys’ll be in pre-school. Shit. What’ll I do? Watch fucking television?’
‘Get a security job. Lots of cops do when they retire.’
‘I don’t want to be a retired cop. It’s like getting sent to the minors, Natalie, it isn’t police work. It’s ...’
She bent down and kissed me.
‘Then you answered your own question, Lieutenant. Retirement is definitely not on your agenda.’
‘It’s all cut and dried, the way you put it.’
‘Are you going to sit around and troll for pity, Jimmy? Well you’re trolling at the wrong fish, bub. You’re not a pity person. Self-pity or pity from another source. So faggeddaboutit, guinea. This is a temporary setback. You’re going to nail this bad guy, Jimmy. I can feel it in my bones. And you know about us Gael women and our natural intuition about things like this.’
‘You won’t even give me the courtesy of an “Aw, Jimmy, I know how you must feel”?’
‘Hell no, Lieutenant. Getcha ass up and back into our bed.’
She took me by the hand and pulled me to my feet. She led me back to the bedroom, got me in the horizontal position, closed and locked the bedroom door, pulled off the T-shirt that covered all by its lonesome all that lovely flesh, and then she started to perform her magic act on my tired but willing body.
*
Doc returned to work that following Monday. Without warning, without calling me on the phone. Nothing.
‘What are you doing here? Thought you were definitely retired.’
‘Ran out of vacation days, accumulated sick and personal days, and I got lonely for the view from your office.’
‘No. Come on. Tell me what really made you come back.’
‘Loose ends.’
‘Like what loose ends, Doc?’
‘Arthur Ransom. The little old lady across the street. I hear you were looking at his granddaughter as a possible accomplice to Mr Riad.’
‘Where’d you get all that intelligence?’
‘I talked to Jack in the lounge before I came up here ... They’re going to keep him with us on Samsa and all the other unfinished business on our board. I convinced the Captain I’d make him miserable if he didn’t assign me back to our terrible trio.’
He stared out my window toward Lake Michigan.
‘I never get tired of seeing that water. I tried a dozen times to get started on that novel I’ve been avoiding for the last twenty years, but I just don’t have it in me, Jimmy.’
‘Sure you do. It’s just coming out slow. Sometimes it takes years. You always told me that story —’
‘Maybe. But I do know that things aren’t finished with me and you and those little fellows on our unfinished business list.’
‘So Mari kicked your lazy ass out of the house? Is that the real picture?’
He pointed his finger like a gun barrel right at my face, and he snapped his fingers.
*
The family doctor made clucking sounds.
‘It was one-fifty over one hundred, Jimmy. Not good. And don’t tell me it’s the pain from your sinuses driving that bottom number up. I think I can smell stress in these nostrils.’
He upped my dosage on one of my beta blockers, but I never told him about the black spots I’d begun to see from time to time.
The spots were getting bigger and bigger.
And one day I figured they’d cover all the landscape before my eyes.
*
We interviewed the entire crew from that little black magic get-together in Highland Park. No one had a clue about the current whereabouts of Maxim Samsa. No one knew where he hung out, now that every cop in northern Illinois was looking for him. Nobody knew nothin’ — it was remarkably similar to the response we received on the West Side.
But this was the big-time case. This was the magna profile jacket that everyone talked about. It was the source of pressure that Jack and Doc, now, and I felt pushing us along, like the cold hawk blustering off the Lake in January. It drove you from behind or it pelted you in the face, but that force was always there.
No one mentioned Arthur Ransom except for our friends in Tactical, but those guys didn’t give two shits about who or what made headlines. The Prosecuting Attorney’s Office never gave us heat about Ransom’s demise or about the disappearance of his granddaughter, Joellyn. It was Samsa. Always Samsa.
He had delivered his third slice of Edgar Allan Poe, and the newspapers were filled with it. The paranormal, the supernatural, always sold newspapers, even if Samsa was nothing but flesh and bones. It grabbed the city’s attention. They couldn’t get enough of vampires and vampire cults and shape-shifters in general. The book Chicago was reading was Bram Stoker’s Dracula, even if it had never been featured on Oprah’s Book Club.
My son Mike was asking me questions about how the Samsa case was going. The Redhead knew better than to inquire. I was fielding phone calls and e-mails from all the slick magazines and talk shows in the United States. I refused them all.
The Captain had to get cops to work security around me when I went out in public, otherwise a dozen microphones would be pointed at my chin while a dozen remote TV cameras followed close behind.
‘We need to find Joellyn Ransom,’ the regenerated Doc Gibron pronounced in my offic
e while Jack Wendkos stood sipping at a can of lemonade.
‘The West Side’ll be the only goddam place these assholes from the media will leave you and us alone,’ Doc grinned.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Doc was back with a vengeance. His earphones and jazz collection was now, once again, a staple of CPD equipment in the Taurus.
Where we went, his bebop accompanied Jack and me and him. It seemed to lift me, having him back. I wondered if he had talked with my wife before he decided to return to the job, but it seemed like I never had a chance to ask him.
‘Rico Perry. He’s the odd man out,’ Doc pronounced as we drove toward the West Side. This time there were no accompanying uniforms. Doc called it ‘security.’ It seemed Riad knew all of our moves before we made them, so we weren’t going to announce our visit to the hood by letting one of Riad’s ears on the CPD catch wind of our visit.
Rico was the guy we needed to squeeze, Doc told Jack and me. Rico was aware that two of his fellow yos had had their faces removed via a street cannon and that Joellyn Ransom was now missing in action. We wanted to see if Rico felt the heat of his being on scene when Arthur Ransom bled to death, along with his unfortunate cat.
We found him walking down the block where he lived. We pulled over to the curb.
I rolled down the window. I was riding shotgun, Jack was in the back and Doc was behind the wheel of the Ford.
‘Rico!’
‘Oh!’ he answered.
‘Talk to us here or talk to us where it’ll be a lot more secluded. Your call, Rico.’
The tall, thin black looked up and down the block. No eyes to see him talking to us, he observed.
He got into the back seat of the car with Jack. It was dusk and it was too dim for anyone to observe him talking to five-oh.
‘We’re taking you to a special place, Rico,’ I turned and told him.
‘Y’all tryin’ to get me waxed?’
‘No. Not at all ... You’re a made man anyway, aren’t you?’ Jack smiled.
‘You five-oh always fuckin’ wid me. Why?’