by Thomas Laird
One of my cousins was murdered by The Farmer, a recent series killer that Doc and Jack and I resolved with a boost from my wife, Natalie. The Redhead shot him in our living room, and I made it there just in time to shoot him myself.
Because of that cousin’s death, I felt I owed something to my sinister side of the clan. My head told me it wasn’t a debt and I owed them nothing, but my heart and my gut told me something very different.
Jimmy Ciccio was a distant cousin of mine, but I hadn’t seen him since grade school. He was the blackest of sheep on the Ciccio side because he dealt in narcotics. Prostitution and gambling were crimes, but they didn’t have as much slime associated with them as drugs did.
The old time moustache Petes wouldn’t do drugs or sell them either. The modern Outfit crews made huge profits off cocaine and heroin and other street drugs, so it became commonplace to deal in the illegal pharmaceuticals sometime after World War II.
I hardly recognized Jimmy Cheech. He had become totally bald — the aftermath of a bout with cancer. He was thin, almost skeletal. And he had piercing grey eyes that reminded me of a fierce wolf on the prowl. I called him first to set up the face-to-face.
He met me at one of his Italian restaurants on the Northwest side, not very far from my home. I didn’t tell Jack or Doc that I was meeting Jimmy because I’d said before that I never again wanted to reach out to the Ciccios for information or help of any kind. But we were in that mode of desperation on Samsa, so I made the call.
‘Jimmy? Jimmy, is that you?’ he smiled.
His teeth were white and perfect, a complete, porcelain set. I shook his hand. It was out there and I could hardly refuse it. We were family, I told myself.
We sat at a table at the back of his restaurant called ‘Little Italy’. It was one of the restaurants that served as a front for his real business interests. He knew that the Parisis were aware of his real profession. He didn’t make any excuses for what he did, and he never asked any favours from our side of the family.
I ordered the lasagne. Jimmy ordered nothing but a glass of some very expensive burgundy.
‘Got no appetite, Jimmy. Not after this last batch of chemo. But they say the shit’s in remission or whatever, so I’ll get my weight back up when this shit gets out of my system ... I haven’t seen you since we were kids.’
‘I’m here to try to get some help on locating a murderer named Maxim Samsa.’
‘Yeah, I read about this little vampire prick in the papers. Very dramatic, no?’
‘He supposedly does business with Matt Cabrero, a Mexican who’s in sales in Old Town. Sells to kids and tourists.’
‘And you want to locate this beaner so you can grab Samsa.’
I looked at his grey, wolf’s eyes, and I wanted to get up and bolt.
‘Why do you think I’d know where to find this guy?’
‘He can’t do volume unless he’s got your blessing, Jimmy.’
‘And why would I want to cut off one of my own fingers for you, Jimmy?’ he smiled.
‘If he’s connected to a killer like Samsa, that brings a lot of heat where you don’t need it.’
‘Very astute ... but if I flip the Mexican, then I become a fucking squealer, no?’
‘It’s just good business, Jimmy Cheech.’
‘You’re my namesake. But the Parisis and our clan were never tight. You had your road and we had a different boulevard, but you never asked anything of me before. I know you had dealings with some of our family, but you never tapped my shoulder. And I respect you for it, Lieutenant Parisi.’
The lasagne arrived with his second glass of wine. The restaurant was dark, but not so dark you couldn’t make out the red and white squares of the tablecloths. We were the only two patrons sitting at the tables. It was early. His business came in after six.
‘I’ll keep out an eye for the beaner. I’ll let you know ... Aren’t you going to eat?’
‘I’ll take it home in a bag, thanks. I’ve got to get to work,’ I explained.
‘Fuckin’ vampires. This guy takes their blood, no? I thought only those Polacks from east Europe pulled that kind of shit.’
He got up and sent his piercing, grey stare at me again. I knew Jimmy Ciccio didn’t have long. He was among the walking dead, too. But not because he drained anybody’s vital fluids. His people killed you the old fashioned way, with a .22 slug in the back of your head.
‘Been good seeing you, namesake. You take care, Jimmy P.’
*
I didn’t hear from my cousin of the same first name for three days, so the three of us decided it was time to tour Old Town.
It was a tourist trap, a place where teenagers and out-of-towners came to find the ambience of the Windy City. There were head shops and titty bars and jazz joints that used to headline some well-known musicians, but now the neighbourhood had become seedier, more run down. It became more common knowledge that these joints ripped off rubes who didn’t know where the real action might be in this city.
But people still came here and the merchants still did business and uninitiated young people came down here to see what their parents had searched for when they were young. You could still catch whiffs of the doobies being lit in the alleyways and on some of the darker corners. This was Chicago noir. This was the dark side of the city in a way unlike the West Side and the Southside. The west and the south were the barrios. Old Town was still a hub for the hipsters and the wannabe hip. T-shirt shops, shops that sold bongs and pipes. Pornography palaces. Back alley joints where you could get a massage and a blow job for fifty fazools. It depended on how well paid off the cops were in order for you to find illicit delights in these establishments.
We weren’t wearing suits or blazers or the usual detective attire that was expected downtown. We were dressed casually — polo shirt and blue jeans for Jack. Sports shirts and khakis for the two old men, Doc and me. Our weapons were secured in ankle holsters or beneath the light cloth jackets Doc and I wore.
It shouldn’t have been difficult to sight this white-haired dealer with the Rangers’ ball cap, but we didn’t spot anything remotely similar to Cabrero’s description. The streets were full of kids on this Saturday night. The music blared from the shops and saloons and discos and jazz joints. It almost invigorated me a bit because the sights and sounds and smells were the same as the ones I’d experienced when I was nineteen and twenty, before I went to Vietnam.
‘This place doesn’t change. It just gets a shade grungier every time I return,’ Doc said.
‘I kinda like this neighbourhood,’ Jack admitted.
‘That’s because you don’t have to get up and pee seventeen times every night yet,’ Doc cracked.
‘Well I’ll always have that to look forward to,’ Jack grinned.
Doc slapped him on the shoulder.
‘I’d give my pension to be your age again. So many women and so little time.’
It was one of Doc’s familiar lines. As far as I knew, Gibron had been married twice and had been and was faithful to both spouses. He never even joked about adultery.
‘Hey,’ Jack whispered to us.
There was a man standing in the doorway of a strip bar just thirty feet in front of us. I couldn’t tell if he was just hanging there or if he was some kind of doorman who encouraged clientele to partake of the flesh inside.
We kept our stares purposefully away from the guy in the ball cap. It was a blue hat, but I couldn’t see if it had the Texas ‘T’ on it.
The three of us kept walking slowly toward the man in front of the titty bar. A few customers weaved their ways in and out of the place, but then two college-aged boys stopped in front of him. Then the trio turned and walked away from us. Jack and Doc and I picked up the pace and followed them. They took a left into an alley, but we were closing in. We began a trot to try and catch up. As we made our way into the gloom of an alley with a burned-out street light, we saw the three men huddled together. A transaction was obviously underway.
/> We found our pieces and took them from their ankle holsters and shoulder holsters.
‘Police!’ Jack called out.
The college boys whipped around and raised their hands. The man with the blue ball cap spun around and began sprinting down the alley. Jack took off after the runner.
The college boys appeared to have loosening sphincters.
‘Relax, gentlemen. No one’s going to shoot you if you behave,’ Doc smiled.
Jack was on top of the ball capped runner in less than a block. Wendkos had been a boxer and he still trained and kept in excellent shape. The running drug salesman was no match for our guy. No contest. Jack could’ve caught Samsa too, all those months ago, but he slowed down because I stumbled and almost flopped. His weakness was his loyalty to the senior partner — me.
Wendkos walked the runner back at gunpoint. The drug dealer had his hands up on the way back to us.
‘Go,’ Doc told the college boys.
They looked at Gibron as if he were speaking Russian.
‘I said go, girls!’
Suddenly it registered, and the two young men took off.
We looked at Jack’s collar. He wore a blue Cubs’ baseball hat and he had black hair. He was a Mexican, it appeared — a mestizo, an Indian. But he didn’t fit Matt Cabrero’s description.
We took him back to the Taurus anyway, and then we drove him downtown.
*
‘You know Matt Cabrero?’ I asked.
We sat once again in our interview room in the downtown headquarters.
He was a dark-complected Mexican Indian.
You could picture him in the mountains fighting with Emiliano Zapata. Fighting with a machete.
‘Never heard of the motherfucker,’ he said in perfect Ingles.
We had caught him dirty. He was packing a load of cocaine and crack cocaine. The cocaine was for the rich college boys, and the crack was for the poorer ‘heads’ on the street. He had some heroin, as well, for the more well-heeled clients in Old Town.
‘I guess you win a free pass straight to narco, then,’ Doc concluded.
He looked at the three of us around the table.
‘You all are homicides, right?’ he asked.
‘You win the bunny rabbit, yo,’ Doc smiled.
‘What do homicides wanna do rousting me?’ he asked.
He watched us, but we remained quiet.
‘You want Matt Cabrero bad, no?’
We continued to watch him.
‘What’s in it for me?’
‘Let’s go, tiny dick,’ Jack said and stood up.
‘All right, all right! Don’t get no hardons! Maybe I know this guy. Maybe I know where he can be ... located.’
‘You have exactly one minute, asshole,’ I told him.
‘Don’t get all huffed, Lieutenant ... I know this man you want. You go blind on what happened tonight if I point you in his direction. Is that what this is?’
‘You win yet another bunny rabbit, braindead,’ Doc grinned.
‘Maybe I can help you, then,’ the Indian said.
He looked up at us and smiled like he’d just copped all five numbers on the lottery.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
It was time to put some heat on Abu Riad. Doc loved to call him by his ‘pre-slave’ name, Charles Jackson.
We called him to come downtown, this time, because I felt he was a bit too comfortable in his own neighbourhood, in his own home. He was accompanied by one of Chicago’s finest ambulance chasers, Robert Geldman.
We sat in the interview room, the four of us. Jack was out chasing leads on Matt Cabrero from the information the Indian had given us in exchange for not arresting him on drug possession and sales. Doc and I sat opposite Abu Riad and his attorney, Geldman. Geldman looked the part. Well over six feet, greying sideburns, and a suit that cost the better part of my remaining mortgage.
‘Let’s begin by saying this is nothing more than harassment on the part of the Chicago Police Department, and more specifically the Homicide division,’ Geldman smiled. Perfect choppers, courtesy of thousands of well-spent dollars on orthodontia, I was certain.
‘We’re here regarding an ongoing homicide investigation. You’re here because you told our Captain you were happy to be cooperative. Now that we’ve done the perfunctory bullshit, can we get on with it?’ I asked them.
Neither man was smiling. Only Doc showed me some facial amusement or bemusement.
‘We’ve got a body, as you both know. Seventeen-year-old Joellyn Ransom. We know that this young woman had a relationship with your client —’
‘That’s a lie,’ Riad hissed at me. His face was sombre, maybe even angry. I began to wonder just how personal his connection was to the late Ms Ransom.
‘Can’t keep secrets in the hood, Charles,’ Doc smiled at him. ‘Everybody knows you were planting the turnip with Joellyn Ransom.’
Riad leaned forward toward Doc.
‘You are a vulgar man, sir. I find it strange that a man with an advanced degree like yours —’
‘Ah, cut the crap, Charles. Save it for the NAACP and the reporters. You’re a common criminal. The only thing uncommon about you is the cooperation you get from the people you’re sodomizing in your area of operations.’
‘None of what you’re saying has ever been proved in a court of law, and if you don’t get down to direct questions — rather than personal attacks, Detective Gibron — we shall have to terminate this discussion,’ the grey-sideburned lawyer demanded.
‘You’re almost as slick as your client, Geldman. When I want to smell some more fertilizer, I’ll let you know,’ Doc said. There was a slight hint of authentic anger in his words.
‘Yeah,’ I continued. ‘We know you had some kind of a connection to Ms Ransom. We know she was strangled and dumped in the trunk of a car some local punks decided to light on fire just for grins ... You didn’t torch the car yourself because you wanted the body found. Joellyn was a message, just like Dilly Beaumont and the two gangbangers who lost their faces in that alley. And I know you don’t know anything about any of this, Mr Riad, but bear with me for a moment. You’re being investigated by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Internal Revenue Service.’
Riad’s face showed just a blink of surprise.
‘None of that has any foundation —’
I looked at Geldman, and he shut up.
‘What’s the matter, Charles?’ Doc grinned. ‘Didn’t know that the IRS was looking at you too?’
‘If we could stick to questions about Ms Ransom?’ Geldman interrupted.
The glare between my partner and Riad was palpable. There was a thermal presence between the two of them. I had my personal thing with Riad regarding the murder of a woman I had loved. But Doc had gone beyond my private vendetta with this gang lord.
‘Did you have a sexual relationship with Ms Ransom?’ I asked.
He shifted all his venom toward me now.
‘No. I did not.’
‘You’re certain? Because if we find any remnants of your DNA in her autopsy ... Well, it’d be embarrassing for you, no?’ I queried.
‘You aren’t going to find anything,’ Riad said. His face had now gone to black stone.
‘You must’ve used rubbers, huh?’ Doc cracked.
Riad came up out of his chair and tried to get his hands on Doc’s throat. I jumped up, came around the table and wedged myself between their clutching hands.
‘All right! Everybody sits back down!’ I yelled at them. Geldman was sitting like a petrified hunk of wood in his seat. But they finally let go of each other, and Doc and Riad sat down.
‘It was that deep, huh, Charles?’ Doc grinned at Riad.
‘You don’t know what you’re talking about,’ Riad fumed.
‘And why is that?’
‘Because ... because Joellyn Ransom was my daughter.’
*
Doc was still in a state of near shock an hour after Abu Riad and his lawyer left.
‘Where’d that fucking curveball come from?’ my partner asked as we sat in my office.
‘We can check it out, but I have the nasty impression his story’s true.’
After Riad laid the bomb on us about Joellyn being his daughter, he explained that he was the girl’s biological father. Donald Ransom, Arthur’s son who had vanished into the woodwork of the barrio, had married Ophelia Johnson, the biological mother of Joellyn. Ophelia and Abu Riad had been lovers just prior to the marriage between Donald and Ophelia, but mommy was carrying a one-month-old surprise in her oven when she married Arthur Ransom’s son.
So Joellyn was Riad’s daughter and had no blood tie to Arthur Ransom. She was still tied in to the old guy’s death with the same motive of monetary gain via the old man’s West Side property —
But our entire notion of Abu Riad being her lover and her murderer had just flamed out. We were back to nowhere. We knew Riad had Arthur burned. And Dilly and the two faceless gang members. But Joellyn’s demise was now a bit more than shrouded in West Side mist.
‘Who’s left?’ Doc said.
‘You got me by the shorties, partner.’
‘Did she have a boyfriend?’ Jack asked. He had returned from scouting out Old Town in search of Cabrero.
‘What boyfriend? We thought she was punching her daddy, remember?’ Doc reminded him.
‘So she might have had a boyfriend. Maybe the boyfriend thought the same way we did, that Riad was her sugar daddy, not her for-real daddy. Maybe he was jealous. Maybe he got carried away and squeezed a little too enthusiastically,’ Jack told us.
‘A boyfriend?’ Doc thought out loud.
‘Why not? A crime of the heart,’ Jack said.
*
We arrived at DuSable High School where Joellyn was a student. We talked to the principal, a man named Robert DeMarco, and he directed us to Joellyn’s senior year counsellor, Brenda Shea. Brenda Shea was a thirty-one-year-old African-American beauty. She had dark skin and a natural hairdo that wasn’t long enough to be called an ‘afro’, like the seventies hairstyle. She had brown eyes and a tall, thin, lean body that grabbed anyone’s attention. It certainly took hold of our focus as soon as we walked into her office.