The Color of Fear

by Thomas Laird

  “I want you to come home to meet my kids.”

  She shoots a gaze at me and we stop bucking at each other. Everything comes to a shocking halt.

  “I don’t think so, Jimmy. I mean I think it’s way too soon.”

  “I don’t. I think I want to stop making Franky rich by all these trysts we’ve been having here and I want to take you home to see my family.”

  “We can’t do none of this at your house, fool,” she laughs.

  I thought she was going to separate us, but she hasn’t. We’re still together and I’m as deeply embedded as I was when we started up again.

  “We can still come here. Or we can go somewhere better. I mean if you want to go somewhere downtown... Or maybe up in Wisconsin — “

  “No. This is fine. This is perfect. But I don’t think I’m ready to say hello to your babies. It’s on account of Andres, baby. It ain’t got anything to do with your boy and girl. I might take one look at those two beautiful children of yours and I might fall right down on the carpet like a swept-aside sand hill. You know what I’m trying to say?”

  “Okay. So we’ll take it slow. But I want you inside my house. And I mean I want you inside my house. I’ll figure a way to lose those two to grandma’s or whatever.”

  “We don’t need to sneak anything. I think I feel better about it here. For a while, anyway.”

  “I love you, Celia. Teach me a way to say it where you’ll know how it feels inside me when I say it. Show me how to show you what’s there for you.”

  “Don’t be mad that I don’t want to see your kids yet,” she whispers to me.

  “When the hell have I ever been angry at you yet?”

  “We don’t know each other long enough, Jimmy. Everybody gets into fights.”

  “I don’t want to brawl with you. It’s like there’s not enough time when I’m around you. There’s too much else I want to do with you.”

  The crack about the lack of time makes her face go serious. I have the feeling she’s about to take off on me and go wherever it is she goes.

  “Someday maybe it’ll happen,” Celia promises. “Some day all this business will be over, I pray to Jesus. Someday you’ll catch those killers and make them pay for what they did to my baby.”

  “And for what they did to you. Andres is with God. You’re a Christian. You got to believe he’s there with Him.”

  “I used to be a Christian, Jimmy.”

  There’s something terrible and final about the way she says ‘used to.’

  But I don’t ask her to explain. I’ve got my hands in her soft, plush, black hair while she’s licking the circle above my bellybutton. And just when I think she’s wasting her time, she looks up at me and illuminates this whole dingy motel room. She’s holding me, but I really don’t need her assistance.

  *

  There’s nothing to tie Wendell to the killings. Just because he craves her we can’t bring him downtown. I’d be the next in line for interrogation if having a ‘thing’ were grounds for questioning.

  I’m wondering if Marcus Dacy, Celia’s ex, might have heard about the murder. I’m thinking even though he’s never even seen the boy’s face he might be angry enough to go out and get even with the people who murdered his flesh and blood. Maybe she’s not telling me everything there is to know about Marcus. Perhaps he’s been watching his son out there on the periphery without letting Celia know he was out there. I know it’s a stretch, but I run it by the Doctor.

  “I get very faint vibrations on the ex-husband, Jimmy. It’s 35-1 or better. The dark horse is pitch black on that guy as a perpetrator.”

  “A knife means extreme prejudice. It’s got to be something personal. Something deep and painful. That’s why I have trouble picturing Chaka or any of Bobby Wells’ boys doing the killings. Especially Antoine’s.”

  “Come on, Jimmy. Don’t mistake viciousness for personal vendetta. We need to go after this Creel. I’m telling you, he’s not as swift as the head man, Chaka. He’ll fuck up and we’ll be there waiting for him. If we can make him drop the dime on his street boss then we’ll have something almost as good as hard evidence. Of which we have none. As in zero. No Uzi, no shells. All we got is the slug in Andres and a few mashed up, worthless slugs that lodged in Ronnie’s ride.”

  He’s right. We need to catch the two remaining members of the trio who plodded across that prairie the day Andres went down off the tips of Celia’s fingers.

  We close the door of my office-cubicle and walk toward the elevators. Once inside the lift, Doc pushes the number one before we make our descent.

  *

  There’s no sign of Creel or Chaka. We have tactical combing the Green and its close environs for the two of them, but we find no trace.

  I knock on Rashaan Abu Riad’s door. Doc stands behind me. It is a warm spring day, so I wear a light cotton jacket to conceal the .38. The .44 bulldog is held in a specially made holster on the inside of my right leg near the ankle. It’s hidden beneath my pants’ leg.

  “I ain’t goin’ for no fuckin’ walk with you, Parisi,” Rashaan warns through the crack of his door. He has the chain attached inside.

  “Just step out on the porch. I didn’t come here to put any heat on you.”

  He looks at me with an unbelieving sneer.

  “You a crazy motherfucker and I don’t trust you.”

  “I don’t like all that vulgarity aimed at my partner,” Doc informs Riad. “I take it personal. And I might even start to think I see a weapon on that couch in your living room. I might begin to think it’s aimed at me and my partner. Then I’d have to immediately defend myself. And you never know how many people might get shot. By the way, Rashaan, if you’ve got a wire on, I don’t give a shit. I’m close enough to take my early retirement.”

  Bobby Wells closes the door, unlatches the chain, and walks out onto the porch.

  “Ain’t nothing more I can do. Look, those two — Chaka and Creel — they’ve gone to earth. Can’t no one find them. I mean I’ve tried. Things are all fucking backed up. Can’t nobody do any business, and I want things to go back to the way they was. I’m telling you the truth. I can’t find these two motherfuckers, but I’m still trying. Give me some time. And you better stop fucking threatening me or—”

  “Or what?” I demand.

  “I told you. You want to hear any other goddam thing from me, you better haul my ass downtown and you better have a good goddam reason why. I’m not takin’ your shit no more.”

  He walks back into the bungalow then. Doc and I don’t stop him because he’s not a stupid man. We’ve pushed him to the limits and there’s nothing left to do with him except to take him downtown. And he’d be sprung in a half hour and we’d be stuck with a false arrest. Nobody knows the law as well as Mr. Abu Riad. He’s had more than enough contact with it.

  We walk toward the unmarked car, down by Riad’s curb.

  “What’s our next step?” Doc asks.

  It’s more like he’s thinking aloud. He doesn’t really think I have any answers for him.

  And he’s right.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Marcus Dacy lived on the southside but moved to Gary, Indiana. Then the dude pulls back to the southside, and we make him because he’s working and we put his social security into a computer and out pops his new address. It’s on south Harvard, in the middle of Blackstone Ranger Territory.

  “Is this as scary as the Green or what?” Doc asks.

  I nod and we walk up to the three flat on a gray day in early summer. Chaka and Creel have still ‘gone to earth’ the way Bobby Wells put it. We have no leads. Just a bunch of Tactical coppers keeping their eyes out for when the two of them surface. With nothing much else on the plate, Doc and I are trying anything to get a new scent in our nostrils. The trail is becoming more and more hopeless. It looks like a dead ender, the way so many of the murders at the Chicago projects wind up being. Even the Captain no longer asks me if we’ve got anything new on the Andres Dacy murder
and the murders of Ronnie and Antoine.

  Maybe Chaka and Creel actually took off and disappeared.

  We ring the doorbell for the top floor apartment, but we get no answer. So Doc rings the other two and someone buzzes us inside the main entrance. It turns out to be an older black woman on the second floor.

  She sticks her head out of the door boldly and asks us who the hell we are.

  Doc flashes the shield and ID, and now she doesn’t appear quite so hostile.

  “Who you lookin’ for?” the short, squat woman demands.

  “Marcus Dacy,” I tell her. I can’t help smiling at her give-a-shit, outright anger. We probably interrupted her from watching Oprah.

  “He up there.”

  “He didn’t answer—”

  “Shit. I hear him movin’ around up there. Heard his foots hitting the nekked floor he walkin’ on up there,” she explains to me.

  I look at Doc and then I look back at the elderly woman.

  “You go on back inside now and lock your door. Then you call 911 and tell them there are two police officers on scene at this address who want back up sent out here right away. Can you do that for me, honey?” Doc asks.

  “Ain’t your honey, but I reckon I can do what you say.”

  She slams the door in our faces.

  “You want to wait and see if she makes that call?” I ask.

  He huffs out a breath and draws his.38 from underneath the light cotton jacket he’s wearing.

  “Let’s go,” he commands.

  We walk up the steps slowly, but we can’t avoid the creaks from the ancient wooden staircase even when we walk on the outside edges of the planks.

  It’s only a dozen and a half steps up, and then we’re at Marcus’s door.

  Doc slams three times loudly and announces just as loudly who’s out here waiting to be let in.

  Then we hear a door slam from inside the apartment.

  “Motherfucker’s just bolted out his rear door.”

  Doc crashes in the front entrance standing before us with one vicious kick. We bust on through and head toward the back end where the sound came from. Marcus has left the backdoor wide open and we tromp down the same steps he’s just used as his escape route.

  We run toward the still opened back gate of their tiny backyard, and then we’re headed down the alley.

  “I got the same bad feeling we had when we took off after that prick Chaka,” he bellows at me as we sprint side by side.

  Marcus is gaining on us. The distance spreads from a block to a block and a half between us now.

  Then Dacy seems to crumple and collapse all at once. He goes down on the surface of the alley and I can see him grabbing hold of a kneecap. When we finally get up close, we hear him whimpering in pain.

  “Goddam sonofabitch,” he murmurs. He hasn’t got enough oxygen to yell any longer.

  “You’re under arrest,” Doc manages, once his own air is collected. I’m bending over, looking down at the writhing Marcus Dacy.

  “Go get the car, Doc,” I tell him.

  He turns and walks toward the location of our parked car.

  “Going to have to cuff you,” I tell him, the .44 bulldog pointed his way.

  He doesn’t argue with me. He lets go of the knee and lies on his belly while I put the jewelry on his wrists. Then I turn him over gently.

  “You want us to take you to the hospital?” I ask.

  “Naw. It locks up like this. Sometimes. Then it loosens back up. It’s happened before lots of times.”

  “Well, you’re under arrest for resisting arrest.”

  Then I read him his rights.

  “What you fucking with me for?”

  He sits up now.

  “We want to ask you some questions about the murder of two brothers down by the Green. They had something to do with the killing of your boy.”

  “I know about Andres. I can read the newspapers.”

  “That’s what we thought.”

  “What you mean?”

  “We thought you might be getting even for what they did to your son. You know. Like in revenge.”

  “How I know who the hell they are? This is as close as I been to Cabrini Green since I left Celia, my wife.”

  “I know your ex-wife.”

  “You do?”

  “Talked to her several times.”

  “And you think I’m some kind of avenging fuckin’ angel.”

  Doc pulls into the alley. I help Dacy up, and then I get him into the Ford as gently as I can. He doesn’t cry out, so I figure his leg must have loosened up the way he said it would.

  He sits in the back. We sit in the front. Doc checks him out in the rear view mirror every so often as we make our way downtown.

  *

  “You know how to use a knife,” I suggest.

  “I know how to use it to spread some goddam mustard on my hotdog. Yeah. Sure.”

  “Nah. Coming from the hood you came from, you must know how to handle a blade,” Doc smiles.

  “I didn’t have nothing to do with what he said I did,” he points at me.

  “You mean Detective Parisi suggested that you might have done Ronnie and Antoine because they were involved in Andres’ murder.”

  “That’s bullshit and you know it’s bullshit,” he returns to Doc.

  “We toss your apartment and we’re not going to find a bloody straight razor or hunting knife or anything like that. Is that right?” I ask him.

  “I ain’t got nothing but an old carving knife that can’t hardly cut bread.”

  “I hope you’re telling us the truth, Marcus, because if you’re telling us a story I’m gonna tell the prosecutor you were not at all cooperative. He hears that, it’ll add on the years at some lovely hole where you can play pick up the fucking soap with any number of dudes name of Bubba who’ll love that tight sphincter of yours. Shower time’ll turn into prime time during that two or three decades you’ll be living in close quarters with Junior or Whoever-the-fuck.”

  “You go toss my crib. Uh huh. You go on back there. You see.”

  “Fuckin’ right I’ll see,” Doc warns him. “You ain’t going anywhere. We’ll be back when the fun’s over at your place. Then I’ll come back and stuff that bread knife of yours up your ass.”

  Doc’s angry, so I try to hold him back a bit. We lock Marcus up in the cage and we get a uniform to babysit him for us. Dacy appears absolutely sullen as we leave him standing there behind that fence. He stares at us like he knows something’s not right between Celia, his ex-wife, and me.

  I tell myself he can’t know about us. But I still don’t like the heat in the stare he throws my way as we depart for the southside again.

  *

  Marcus didn’t lie. There’s nothing to tie him to the Green killings. Just that dull blade that he uses to spread his mayo on his lunch. We spend an hour tossing the apartment, but there’s nothing even faintly incriminating.

  We go back downtown and question him briefly before we pop him loose. I ask him if anybody could make him on scene at the Green by looking at a photo, but he’s just as cocky-confident about his innocence.

  The only thing that bothers me about cutting him away is his arrogance. And the fact that he ran from us. But most dudes in his neighborhood might bolt away from two white guys arriving unannounced. There’s only his connection to Andres. He was his father, afterall.

  “How’d you feel about reading that your son was shot?” I ask him before we spring him.

  “How would you all feel?”

  There’s a sort of numbness across his face as he answers.

  “I’d feel angry. Very angry,” Doc adds.

  “I was angry. Hell yes. But what’m I supposed to do? You know the kind of cold cocksuckers who did Andres. You think I’m gonna do people like that? Shit, I never even held a fuckin’ gun that wasn’t a toy.”

  “But this guy used a knife, like I told you,” I remind him.

  “I ain’t into no stabbings.�
�

  “It was more like slashing,” Doc explains.

  “I don’t know nothin’ ‘bout that neither.”

  “It was my kid I’d want to put hands on the sonsofbitches who did my little boy,” Doc says.

  “I’d put hands on them my own damn self if I knew who it was you were talking about. I told you. I told you over and over that I haven’t been near the Green since I left my wife. That’s the only sin I got on my heart. I left her alone. I left my son alone in that terrible motherfucker, and now I got to grieve on my own. But I ain’t no killer. I didn’t go hunting them sonsabitches down at no project and you can’t make it be the truth no matter how long you keep bothering me about all this.”

  I get the sense that he’s right. The interrogation’s over. When I tell him we’re done, he looks genuinely surprised.

  “You for real letting me go?”

  “I’ll drive you home. Sorry for the inconvenience.”

  “You ain’t gettin’ me for obstruction nor nothin’?”

  “No,” I tell him. “Come on. Let’s take you home.”

  On the way over to the southside three flat, no one of the three of us says anything. I’m driving, this time, and I check the mirror to see if anything’s passing across Marcus Dacy’s face. But I can’t find a track on that dark brown visage. As soon as we get to his address, he’s out the door without a word.

  “Now what? Where do we turn?” Doc laments.

  “We could try that Wendell guy again. Or we can assume that Bobby Wells has put out the contract for all of them, and that it’s just that we haven’t found the remains of Chaka and Creel. That would be just like that dick Abu Riad. Lie to our faces. Real convincingly. Tell us he’s trying to clean up Dodge City, too, just like the po-lice. But pity the poor man, he can’t find none of that Chaka J. Gangbanger or none of that Creel Hitman stuff neither. He’s in the same boat with us... I don’t like mysteries, Doctor. I hate whodunnits. Shit, we don’t get to figure it all out just before the last set of commercials like that dame on the cable reruns.”

  “Is there some player we’re missing here? Somebody who hasn’t surfaced?” Doc asks out loud.

  “Let’s try using Wendell instead of accusing him for a change. He’s an ex-police. Maybe he knows who might be carrying a Bowie knife on the Green.”