Black Widower

by Thomas Laird

  “You know as much about her as I do.”

  “I think you’re right about that, Derek.”

  “You’re starting to annoy me, Parisi.”

  “Some people say that. But it’s mostly in a professional situation. You know what I mean?”

  “You’re beginning to really piss me off, now.”

  “You wouldn’t want to slug a cop, would you, Derek?”

  “I told you your badge doesn’t mean shit.”

  “You mean my homicide star?”

  “This conversation is over.”

  He stands up.

  “How long is the statute on missing persons, Derek? I forget.”

  “I’m telling you to leave.”

  “I was just about to, anyway, Skotadi. You have a nice evening. Say hello to the redhead for me. I’m sure she won’t disappear on you, at least.”

  I get up slowly, watching his hands. They’re balled up in fists at his sides, currently. I don’t turn my back on him until I’m a good distance away from him, near the front entrance to the Garvin Inn. Then I turn and open the door, and I walk out to the Crown Vic.

  Doc insisted on sitting outside, here, in the dark, with the windows opened in case he heard a sudden explosion of noise from inside the bar.

  “So he didn’t belt you,” my partner beams in the illumination of the car’s dome light.

  “You didn’t think he’d be that stupid, did you?”

  “I guess not, but I was kind of hoping.”

  “You were hoping he would lay me out?”

  “Nah, I was hoping he might try and that you might kick him in the nuts for his trouble.”

  “He’s got a lot of poundage on me, brother. And inches, too.”

  “Yeah, but you guineas are street fighters. I call the odds even.”

  We wait for Skotadi to emerge from Garvin’s, and he only makes us wait thirty minutes. He gets into his ride, the lights come on with the motor, and then we’re escorting him back to his home where I assume the redhead’s waiting for him.

  “I could do his new date,” Doc smiles.

  “You better catch her while she’s still warm,” I say with a straight face.

  “You think he’ll do another one?” Doc asks.

  My partner is the wheelman. He knows I don’t like to drive. We stay a respectable distance behind Skotadi, but we’re close enough for the Vice cop to know we’re behind him.

  “You think we’re making him nervous, Jimmy?”

  “That’s the plan. When you have no cards, it’s all bluff.”

  “We couldn’t win an ass-kicking contest with a one-legged man, James, and Skotadi has two good feet, far as I can see.”

  Chapter 8

  Plank, Louisiana

  He saw the face now as if the flesh had been restored, and it wasn’t a girl, it wasn’t some bitch who’d strayed too close to the lagoon. It was a full-grown woman, a pretty woman. And she wasn’t there because some drunk-ass townie talked her into sharing a six pack of some swill that was supposed to be beer.

  This gal had been dumped by the water to entice a reptile to meet the dinner bell. This here had been a murder.

  Then the woman opened her eyes, and Leonard shot upright on the army cot like a gator had started nibbling his toes.

  “Jesus fucking Christ!” he muttered in a whisper.

  It was still pitch black outside, and as far as Leonard knew, the head was still in the meat locker. He got up, pulled the chain on the naked bulb overhead, and he padded over to the freezer, opened it, and saw that the plastic bag was still where he’d put it, but now it was frosted over in a glaze of white chill.

  He shut the lid.

  “By Christ, I think I wet myself,” he said aloud.

  It bothered him the whole day, even as he caught two fair-sized man-eaters, shot them, and threw them in the dinghy. A lot of these other stumpjumpers who hunted these wetlands had bigger, more expensive boats, but the dinghy served its purpose.

  After he killed the two alligators, he planned on taking two more alive. There was a gator joint in Princeton, about ten miles from Plank, where they were looking for new attractions for the rubberneckers.

  Leonard caught the first live one just ten minutes later with the net he used, and then he rowed back to his dock to leave the critter in a holding pen he’d rigged so that he wouldn’t have to try and deal with more than one gator at a time in the dinghy. So he dragged the sorry-assed beast out of the boat and secured him in the barred cage he’d erected on the dock, and then he took off and found another predator just five minutes after that. He got the next reptile into his second of three gator cages, and then he figured he’d take the two of them to Princeton after dinner.

  He could hear them grunting and fussing from the kitchen window. He knew he ought to put in proper windows and screens, and he figured he might have the cash to install them by the late fall if the hunt was good, these next few weeks.

  The heat wouldn’t subside until maybe mid-November, Leonard thought. This had been a bad summer, and you could hardly tell this season from the one that came after it. Miserable, thick heat. Almost as bad as back in the War, but not quite so bad. Vietnam’s broiler was turned up just a few notches higher than the heat in northern Louisiana.

  Then he remembered the nightmare about the head in the freezer, and he figured maybe he should dump the goddamned thing back into the lagoon. But there was something that just wasn’t right about the notion. Something in his head told him not to dispose of it, quite yet.

  It was like the feeling he’d get when he had to decide to pull the trigger on a target or not to. It was what you might call intuition. Killer intuition, when it came to pulling the trigger on a subject that he was ordered to liquidate. Liquidate was the fancy word for killing a man. You didn’t liquidate a deer or a bear or a moose or an elk. You just shot them. Killing people was supposed to be different, supposed to feel different.

  Leonard supposed all that was just about right, but he’d never got all emotionally fucked up about taking out his targets in the war.

  This head was beginning to mess with him, though. He didn’t usually have nightmares about much of anything. He had sex dreams, but when he did, he took road trips to the Big Sleazy and got all that out of his system with the aid of professionals. Leonard was aware that no normal gal would want to come to his shack at the tip of the Banning Lagoon, here in Plank. No righteous female would feel comfortable shacking up on an army cot.

  The bad dream spooked him. He had to get right with the idea, even though he had no truck with God or the supernatural or with any of that Freudian happy horseshit. She was just a woman who wandered too close to the swamp, and the swamp took her. And knowing all that should have put an end to it.

  But he had the same vision later that same night, and that goddamned head just snapped open its eyes at Leonard, and he bolted upright in a cold sweat that kept him up the rest of the night.

  *

  Chicago, Illinois

  She keeps bothering me about how long it’s going to take for me to be free of Jennifer, and I keep on putting her off about it. Carrie wants to get married, but she doesn’t say it in those words. She just keeps pestering me about this ‘relationship’ and where it’s going. And every time I feel like just getting rid of her, telling her to get the hell out of here, I see her body and remember how she uses it on me. I know it’s an obsession, and I know obsession is sickness, but her flesh is too powerful, too goddam enticing, to let her loose. If she were gone, I’d think about some other guy having her, and then I’d have to kill them both.

  To top it off, I have an interview with Internal Affairs in an hour. They won’t say what it’s about, but I can guess.

  *

  His name is Philip Kennedy. He has the look of a jock, but he’s stringy and under six feet. I could snap him in two if I really wanted to. Like that little shit Parisi. I would’ve loved to wipe the floor of that slimy tavern with his dago face.


  “Sit down,” Kennedy tells me.

  It isn’t hard-assed; it’s just matter-of-fact.

  “So, what’s this all about?”

  He’s got that blond hair that is thinning as we speak. He might be in his mid-thirties, and I’m betting he was a grunt in our recently lost war.

  “This is an inquiry into a complaint from a prostitute named Gail Evans. You know that name?”

  “Yeah, I picked her up and took her off the streets a few weeks ago. She was soliciting, so I dropped her off at a shelter for women on State Street.”

  “No shelter has any record of her being there on the date in question. We checked.”

  “Maybe she just boogied off after I dropped her there. How the hell do I know?”

  “We’ve also got a complaint from a woman named Irene Wentworth, and I know you know her.”

  “She’s my sister-in-law, and the nutty bitch thinks I offed her sister, my wife, Jennifer.”

  “We know that Missing Persons is trying to locate Jennifer, and I’m sorry to hear about her disappearance.”

  He doesn’t look sorry to me. I’m thinking he’d like to unleash Parisi and Gibron on me himself, and he just regrets they haven’t got a goddam thing on me. And neither do they have anything on me with this coon whore.

  “Gail Evans says you punched her in the face and then forced her to perform oral sex on you. Is that right?”

  “I wouldn’t allow her to touch me in any way. I already told you what really happened. Are you guys taking the word of a hooker over a Chicago policeman’s?”

  “We have to investigate them. I’m not a judge, just a detective, like you.”

  “Do I need a lawyer or my rep?”

  “We’ll let you know if we decide to pursue either complaint. I think that just about does it.”

  He stands up, but he never offers his hand, so I turn from the interrogation table, and I leave the IA room.

  *

  I tell her it’s good just to live together. For some reason I can’t let go of her yet, and I know she doesn’t want out.

  We wear out every carpet and every surface in my house with the couplings. We do it in every conceivable position, and then we start all over again, and the heat never seems to cool. I don’t think I even like Carrie, let alone love her, but she’s got a hold on me, and there’s no denying it.

  I think about asking her for some time apart. I can’t take her to Louisiana to resolve anything the way I did with Jennifer because that would create a coincidence that Parisi would pounce on like a jungle cat, body or no body. And I can’t marry this one because I’m not shed of the first one, yet.

  It’s definitely a dilemma. I can’t talk her out of here because the words just won’t emerge from me. And I can’t take her clinging to me for much longer, either.

  The only thing I can think of is accidental death. But it has to be a flawless plan because they always look at the husband or the boyfriend first. It’s Standard Operating Procedure, just like in the military. A husband or wife goes down in a suspicious manner, you look to the spouse.

  But there are accidents in the home that happen daily. There are falls—but then they’ll suspect someone shoved her down the stairs or wherever she took the tumble.

  There are accidents with firearms, but I’m the only one packing, here. She doesn’t know which way to aim the barrel.

  There’s electrical accidents, but I’m no electrician, and I’d have to research it, and that means going to the library. Maybe they’ll make computers cheaper, some day, and everybody can have one in their house, and then there’ll be no need to go to the library. If you go there and take out books, there’s a paper trail. And I don’t like being in them for very long. They seem like mausoleums without the bodies. Books, instead.

  Then I start thinking with the little head, once more. I’m remembering how aroused she makes me even though I can’t stand the sound of her voice. I can tolerate her brief shrieks, and I don’t care if the neighbors can hear her. Her own arousal just gets me crazier to have her just one more time, and the just one more time never stops. It goes on in a cycle, in a circle, and I can’t get the hell out.

  She’s bright, but she’s no genius, and I think she likes to do me as much as I like to do her. Maybe it’s a mutual trap.

  Then she starts in about all the domestic bliss we’re missing out on by not being able to get married, and I explain to her that I still have a wife and that it’s illegal to double down on marital bliss until you remove the bond of the first. Sometimes I just want to tell her I fed my wife to the alligators so it’ll scare her the hell out of here, but that’s obviously a very flawed plan.

  There have been times when the thought of having a kid entered my head. Then I remember what it was like with my old man. He was a hard case. No nonsense, for him. Work hard, play by the rules. Never ever let anyone see you cry, because this was a world for predators, he used to tell me when I was little. The chain of food. Little things got eaten by bigger things, all the way up the line. You had to be tough. You couldn’t show pity because it’s a sign of weakness.

  When I came home with a bloody lip when I was ten, he demanded to know what happened. I told him another guy gave me a fat lip, so I came home. He asked if I returned the favor to the other boy, and I said no. So the old man clouted me right in the eye and blackened it.

  “God got no pity,” he warned me.

  *

  I don’t hear from IA in the next few days. But I’m not confident things will remain as they are. Internal Affairs are very persistent bastards. Ask any cop. They’re like gila monsters. They get their fangs into you, and they never let go, no matter how you try to pry them off you. They are all very stubborn, intractable, and they’re very big on convictions and dismissals of policemen. It’s their jobs, I suppose. I imagine Parisi would make a great IA investigator if he ever wanted out of Homicide, but I’m sure he’s happy where he is. They’re the high profile coppers. Their cases make it to the front page. Vice is kind of an afterthought, with the media. We do the sleazy jobs with the sleazy individuals that no one really wants to know about. We deal with whores and drugs and twisted pretzels of all flavors. We deal with the true garbage of humanity, and we’re supposed to be tainted because we lie down with flea-bitten dogs.

  When I arrive at work at 7:30 A.M., Parisi’s waiting for me. He won’t come inside my cubicle, here in Vice, however.

  I sit down at my desk and leave him standing in the doorway.

  “Your sister-in-law got an interesting little message taped to her door, yesterday.”

  “Oh yeah?”

  “Picture of a dog with a hangman’s noose attached. Rather childish, don’t you think?”

  I muster the best smile I can.

  “Probably some little punk in the neighborhood who doesn’t like poodles. They’re high-strung, neurotic little fuckers.”

  “I don’t think the message was for the dog.”

  “Of course not. Dogs don’t work that way.”

  “Someone might be trying to frighten Irene Wentworth.”

  “And why would they want to do that, Detective Parisi?”

  “Go ahead and dance, asshole. But if anything like this re-occurs, I’ll be around to make you a very miserable asshole.”

  “You really think you have the firepower to accomplish that, Detective?”

  “Make sure you’re not the cause of her anxiety, Skotadi. It wouldn’t be a boxing match, with you and me. I wouldn’t fight fair. I’d come up from behind you. You’d never hear me coming, either.”

  “Was that a threat, just now?”

  “ Take it any fucking way you want it.”

  Then he turns and walks away as quickly as he appeared.

  *

  I’m having trouble catching my breath. She’s been on top, and now I’m in the missionary, over her, and I can feel the literal life pouring out of me. It’s pain and pleasure intermixed, and our bodies are slick and the heat is incredible. />
  Finally, I roll to my side, and then I look over at her glistening form with its arches and its depressions, and I can’t breathe I can’t—

  “Are you all right, Derek?” she whispers.

  When I finally catch some oxygen, and before I can stop her, she’s moving face first at my middle, and I don’t even have the strength to make her stop.

  Chapter 9

  We check with Jennifer Skotadi’s mother. Her family name is Turner. The father, Nicholas, has been dead for ten years. She lives on the far southwest side, out by 95th and Kedzie. It’s a ranch type house that doesn’t quite fit in with the bungalows made of brick that surround Karen Turner’s dwelling covered in aluminum siding.

  “Non-conformists,” Doc smiles as we pull into her narrow driveway that is adjacent to the left side of the home. “Wouldn’t want to back up on this thing and slide into the house in winter,” he adds.

  We get out of the Ford and move to the front door. I ring the bell or buzzer or whatever it is. She knows we’re coming. Karen Turner sounded a little confused when I told her Doc and I were Homicides, over the phone. She said she thought this was just a Missing Persons deal, but I explained that there was some question about what really happened to her daughter, and she blurted out an “Oh my God!” I tried to calm her by saying it was just a routine check to make sure no foul play was involved with Jennifer’s disappearance, but I could hear the anxiety in her voice, and so we got over here as fast as we could.

  She opens the door on the third ring of the bell. She motions for us to come inside, but I show her my ID first. She says for Doc and me to sit down anywhere, and I plant myself in a straight-backed chair while Doc sits across from her on the sectional couch that is plush and seems to be made of a velvet-like material.

  “Did that man kill her?” she demands before either of us can begin.

  “As of this moment she’s still missing,” Doc explains. “We became involved because of a report from her sister, Irene.”

  “Irene is nuts,” the honey-blonde says straight-faced.