Black Widower

by Thomas Laird

“Go where? I’m still asleep, you crazy bitch.”

  “I told you. I don’t like that word.”

  “Excuse the fuck out of me.”

  “Why do you have to talk so mean to me?”

  “You’re right. I don’t have to talk to you at all.”

  She rolls over and I get a panorama of her delicious body, and I lose, again.

  “I’m sorry, Carrie. I won’t talk mean.”

  She puts her hand over my heart, so I remove it.

  “I told you. I don’t like to be touched there.”

  So she lowers her hand to my groin.

  “We’re never going to get out of bed today, are we,” I tell her.

  “Fine with me,” she smiles in a bleary haze.

  *

  We go out for lunch at a fast food place in Brookfield.

  “You know the zoo’s not far from here,” she says.

  It’s hot outside, and she’s dressed appropriately—I mean appropriately in a sexual manner of speaking. Halter top that accentuates her upper body strengths, and tight jean shorts that highlight a very well rounded and perfect ass. I ask myself how in the hell I could possibly be bored with a woman put together in such an irresistible fashion.

  She chomps into her double cheeseburger. The Burger King is crowded and noisy, but it’s easy to say anything with all this white noise around us. There are kids in profusion, here. Noisy little brats, as I say.

  “You ever done it outside?” I ask with a grin.

  “The zoo is a little too public, don’t you think?”

  “But that’s what would make it more exciting.”

  “I’m not exciting enough?” she pouts.

  “You’re a thrill a minute.”

  “Are you being sarcastic, Derek?”

  She’s not stupid, but she likes to come on that way when it suits her.

  “Yes, I’m being sarcastic.”

  We finish our burgers and fries, and we get up to leave this maelstrom of sound.

  “You wanted to go to the zoo?” I ask her as we get into my Malibu.

  “Yeah. That’s if you’d like to.”

  “Why not?” I smile.

  I have to keep her spirits up. At least for the time being.

  *

  The zoo isn’t all that bad. There are worse places to visit in the Chicago area. In fact, this is one of the best animal enclosures in the country, I’ve read. I haven’t been here since I was a teenager, so I figure what the hell.

  We visit the Monkey Island first, and Carrie laughs when she sees all the males abusing themselves.

  “You’d think they’d train them not to do that in front of all the little kids,” she says.

  The sun is still pretty high, even though it’s late afternoon. We’re standing at the circular barrier that surrounds the primates who gallop up and down their stony, pocked hill. There are little ones in the embrace of their mothers. All very cute, I suppose. It tickles the hell out of Carrie. I almost enjoy watching the pleasure on her face as she watches these little apes carousing on their concrete mini mountain.

  “They do what comes natural. We just like to do it in the dark, where most things are fun to do. In the dark, I mean. Nothing is amusing in the broad daylight. You have to think you’re getting away with something to really enjoy it.”

  “You really believe that?” she asks.

  I don’t know how to answer her. And it begins to bother me. What the hell does she want from me?

  I’m beginning to sweat from the sun and the unnatural warmth of this late September afternoon. It reminds me of Louisiana—except the intensity of that heat is much worse than the Midwest.

  Her face is solemn. I think she’s letting her real smarts seep out where I can see them.

  “You want to see some other animals before it gets too dark?” I tell her.

  We head toward the lions and tigers, the big, lethal cats.

  They aren’t too distant from the monkeys, and we see the moat that encompasses their areas. There are two enclosures, one for the lions and one for the tigers, of course. I don’t see them getting along if they were thrown into one place together.

  The lions are more regal in appearance. They have some kind of primordial dignity to them that’s a rung or two above the Bengal cats with the stripes.

  We arrive at the six -foot fence that separates the spectators from the moat and the island where the royal animals walk about slowly in these tropical dregs of summer.

  She leans up against the fence, and I wonder if they leave the cats out at night or if they take them somewhere inside until re-opening time in the morning.

  There’s no way I could get her in here after sundown, say at two or three in the morning. There’s no way I could convince Carrie to come here in the dark. No chance at getting her over this six-foot chain link so that I could let the lions have her.

  And then there are likely security people here at night. I’d never be able to hoist her body toward the moat and hope that gravity would take over as she’d tumble down into the water, and there is no possibility that those creatures would be out there in the pre-dawn to drag her out of the water to make her disappear.

  They might leave identifiable parts of Carrie as leftovers that the coppers could use to identify her. They might not eat the head and all.

  Sounds like a bogus plan.

  What if she had an accident right now, in the brightness of this muggy afternoon? If I just had a lower fence in front of me right now and if I got her to lean over the top just a little, and if she somersaulted over this imagined barrier and rolled down into the water straight at those waiting beasts, would the park guards be able to save her from their jaws? Would they arrive in time to prevent such a horrible accident?

  Sometimes I wonder why I want her dead. I wondered, occasionally, what provoked me to kill Jennifer, too. But the urge was uncontrollable. I am what I am, just like Popeye in the cartoon.

  And what happens if and when I actually make this one disappear, too?

  She’s gone and you can’t have her again, and you want to do the same thing with this lovely collection of parts. You’re not done with Carrie, yet. If you hadn’t disposed of the first one, you could’ve had them both any time you wanted them.

  But you still have Carrie, and she makes you crazy with desire, with want, and all you can think of is dumping her into that den of felines, into the mouths of those deadly lions.

  Crazy. Maybe you really are insane. Wasn’t insanity the cause of choking Jennifer in the shower and delivering her to those million- year- old remnants of prehistoric reptiles?

  “Thank you,” she says, and she kisses me lightly on the lips.

  “For what?” I ask, stupidly.

  “For taking me to the zoo, naturally.”

  Chapter 7

  Plank, Louisiana

  Leonard Tare knew gators, and the gators never got to know him because Leonard was a natural hunter. He’d killed plenty of VC and NVA in the Vietnam War because that was his job as a Seal sniper. He’d had sixty-nine confirmed kills, every one with a single headshot. He never missed. Leonard was so deadly that even his brother snipers were in awe of him, a rare feat in that branch of the Navy.

  But all that was history. He’d done his two tours, and he’d come back in 1971 and retired to the bayous where he was born and raised. He caught gators for zoos and shows, and sometimes he killed them and ate them. The gator business seemed to be steady enough to support Leonard, who had no wife or children or kin who were still alive, and he lived in a screen-less and unheated shack just off the swamp near Plank, which was close to Farmersville, in the heart of northern Louisiana and bayou territory.

  It was all he knew, this primordial miasma of water and vegetation and very user-unfriendly critters who could snap you into the drink if you didn’t keep an eye on them all the time. Leonard never minded sleeping with one eye opened at night, and he left a .45 auto next to his pillow on his army cot just in case something decided to
slither into his shack in the night time. He’d popped a few snakes on his floor in the darkness, and he’d shot dead a foolish gator who’d decided to roost on his doorstep at dawn. Probably the gator was waiting to be asked for breakfast, but the reptile son of a bitch turned out to be Leonard’s lunch.

  But just as Leonard Tare was gutting the gator on that same porch, as he opened it up, out fell something very peculiar.

  A human head.

  The flesh was all gnarled away, but the hair was long, and Tare figured it was a woman—before she’d been eaten, anyway.

  “Jesus Christ,” was all he could mutter as he held the woman’s head by her hair.

  He couldn’t figure out what to do with it, at first. He thought he might call the State Police, but he’d had run-ins with those bitches before, so he decided to put the head in a big-ass storage bag and throw it in his meat freezer. Leonard wasn’t stocked with too many electrical appliances, but the freezer was required to keep his kills fresh. He had electric lights, but not much else. No TV. He didn’t give a Kentucky fuck what happened in this world anymore, not since he got back from that shithole called Vietnam. He had no truck with vets or any of that nonsense, either. Leonard figured he was born with delayed stress syndrome, anyway.

  No, he couldn’t call the cops. And she might very well have been one of those stupid shit local coonasses who tried to party a little too close to the bayou, and then the bayou partied on her and her coonass buddies. Nature’s birth control, Leonard Tare thought. They were too stupid to breathe.

  So the head was in a plastic freezer bag in his meat locker, and he figured to put her out of his mind, directly.

  *

  Chicago, Illinois

  I don’t have time to be in love. Love is very inconvenient, and I’m not certain that’s the way I feel about Jackie Bishop. She wears me out, every single time, and the problem is there’s no singularity in our romantic encounters. It winds up being all-nighters, and I feel uncomfortable putting my mother through the babysitting chores that I did when I was with Rita. It must be getting old for her. Eleanor is headed toward her mid-fifties, and I want her to have a life of her own, which means she sees Mary and Mike on her own schedule, not mine.

  But she never complains.

  “Jimmy,” she says as I drive her home on this Sunday morning in late September, “I’m glad you’re not alone. I like doing what I can to keep you from living the way you were after Erin died. And then this mess with the police woman, what’s-her-name.”

  “Rita. Her name was Rita.”

  I’m taking her back to her house that my old man Jake bought for us after he got out of World War II. They lived there ever since the late forties. I grew up in that house, her house, now. It’s mostly city traffic from where I live, where Erin and I bought our home.

  “Yeah, okay. Whatever. I just don’t want you to stay heartbroken over all that bad luck. You never deserved all this hardship. Is this girl any different from the last one?”

  It’s still torrid at the end of September. She doesn’t like that I turn the air on in the car, so we’ve got the windows opened. Luckily it’s still early morning so the heat hasn’t gone up yet.

  The breeze stinks of humidity, though. It feels like a storm is brewing.

  “She’s fine, Ma. I like her a lot.”

  “Is that all?”

  “What do you want? A play by play?”

  She looks at me and smiles.

  “I was in love with your dad. You know the troubles we had, with the booze and with the thing with Nick.”

  Nick was my father’s brother, and Nick was my biological father, something that ate Jake up until he died in the accidental fall down the stairs.

  “I know, Ma. I’m well aware.”

  “I don’t want to bring up old hurts, Jimmy. I just don’t want to see your heart get broken another time. Make sure it’s right with this Jackie before you dive into those waters.”

  “I will. Believe me. I will.”

  “You deserve good luck. It’ll happen. You listening to me? You’re a good man and God won’t let this punishment go on forever.”

  “You light a candle for me at mass, today, Ma.”

  She looks over at me and smiles.

  “You know how many quarters I’ve spent on those damn candles for you?”

  I reach over and grasp her hand.

  We’re home.

  *

  Doc and I sit through yet another surveillance. This one’s off the books, but I get more and more intuition that says Jennifer Skotadi was murdered and that Derek Skotadi did her. Doc is on the same page with me.

  We’re listening to Miles Davis on WLS and the DJ is Daddy-O O’Daly. He plays jazz from midnight until five in the morning on weekdays and Saturdays. This is a Thursday night, and the calendar has turned to October and so has the weather, finally. The chill of autumn is evident. It’s in the low 50s, tonight, and it’s finally comfortable to leave the car windows open.

  “We’re likely wasting our time with this guy,” Doc pronounces with a yawn.

  “You think he buried her in the basement?” I grin.

  “Like in Arsenic and Old Lace? Nah, Skotadi’s too cute. I’m thinking he planted her somewhere remote.”

  “So no habeas corpus shit.”

  “No body. I don’t think so. Water or fire. He’s a Greek, isn’t he? Everything’s water or fire with those Mediterraneans.”

  “You big on mythology?”

  “Not really, Jimmy. More likely the brooding Russians. Maybe the Scandahoovians.”

  “Northwestern gave you a big advanced degree, right, Doc?”

  “I foxed them, Jimmy. Let’s call it a night. Hit the Castle before we go back to the Headquarters’ parking lot. The one there in the Loop. Fuck 95th Street in Oak Lawn. I don’t like the fisheye that blonde Aryan waitress gave us two nights ago.”

  We head back when we get on the Stevenson. It filters right into the Outer Drive—or Lakeshore, as the out of towners like to call it.

  The White Castle is only a few blocks down from work. We come here only occasionally because too many tourists frequent this location. It’s too close to the Loop. The Loop is virtually the only scenic locale in Chicago. To the west is barrio, mostly. But the barrio is close to my heart and always has been. All those concrete acres are home to me. When I got back from Asia, I think the heavy, black-topped stink of it was what I missed the most. Sidewalks looked very good after quadruple canopied greenery.

  When we get inside the Castle, there are maybe a dozen patrons, but I don’t spy any rubber-neckers from out of town.

  We sit in a booth because they’re too many patrons at the bar.

  “You sure we like Skotadi because we don’t like Skotadi?” Doc inquires as the waitress brings our sliders, Doc’s coffee, and my Coke.

  “I think there’s reason to suspect him of murder, yes. If Internal Affairs is waltzing around him and trying to keep us away, then I think this guy is dirty.”

  “No corpse, no crime, however.”

  “That is a concern, yes.”

  “Our Captain is not going to let us off the leash until there is a body, James.”

  I finish off my burgers in a few healthy swallows. They’re more like hors d’oeuvres than regular hamburgers, so you have to have a half dozen to fill up on them. It’s like a rule or something.

  “Can’t blame him. And, besides, we really do have a full plate, and also, Romeo, how’s your love life?”

  “It’s going all right.”

  “That’s all I get, Jimmy? No details?”

  “No details.”

  “I can tell by looking at you that your prostate is in no danger at all.”

  “What about your love life, Doctor Gibron?”

  “That’s a very short short story, I’m afraid.”

  He sips pensively at his black coffee.

  “I’m sorry to hear it. Didn’t mean to—“

  “It’s okay, Jimmy. Things will p
ick up. They always do. There are always cougars on the faculty at NU.”

  Doc teaches a weekend course at Northwestern in Evanston. They gave him a very liberal schedule because of his squirrelly hours with the cops. Gibron’s had a half dozen stories published in what Doc tells me are very high level literary journals, including Triquarterly, the NU literary mag.

  “What’s the deal with IA and Skotadi? Did Donny Malloy ever talk to you about it?” he asks.

  “He only said they suspect him of using his badge to procure himself some off-limits treats with the sidewalk sirens,” I tell him. “And I’m guessing he used muscle to have his way with a few of those ladies. And I don’t mean his badge. I mean physical force.”

  “I don’t recall hearing about any beefs about Skotadi like that before.”

  “That’s because he’s too cute.”

  “He is that.”

  “He’s just too sly, Doc.”

  “So?”

  “I think I might encounter the beast in his lair.”

  John Garvin says it’s Skotadi’s habit to come in for a drink on Sunday night, usually around ten. So I make it over to the Garvin Inn in Berwyn at the appointed hour, and I see an almost empty bar slab in front of me. But there’s one six foot four inch Greek-American sitting about two-thirds down the counter. I walk right up and sit next to him.

  “There’s a whole empty tap room in here, Parisi.”

  “Yeah, I see that. But I’m not carrying the flu or a virus.”

  “What is it you want?”

  “I heard you’re back with that redhead I saw you with in here, a few years ago.”

  “You have a fine memory, Parisi.”

  “It’s workable, yeah. I just remembered her, is all. She was easy to look at.”

  “She is, yeah.”

  “And your wife—what was her name? Jennifer, right? She was quite comely, too, as I recall.”

  “Why don’t you go play with your dick somewhere else, Detective?”

  “I like privacy for that. In the dark, you know, hidden away.”

  “The fuck is this, Parisi? Your badge doesn’t give you liberties to ask stupid questions that are none of your business. Why don’t you go sit somewhere else?”

  “I’m not staying long. Just wanted to hear if there was any word on your missing wife.”