by Thomas Laird
“It’s about like the last time you and Doc were called out here. This woman, Karen Nathan, and her adopted ‘daughter’ Keesha were just trying to get on home. They got as far as mid-street and your old friend Chaka laid into them when they blocked his aim at Lamont Rogers — Lamont’s dead, too. He’s over there, on the sidewalk.”
Gray points to the dead man who lies twenty feet away from where we’re standing. The paramedics are still working on the little girl, and it appears they’re about ready to take off in the ambulance.
Doc insists that he ride with her to County Hospital.
“You think it’s a good idea?” I ask him, remembering how it went with those two other girls all those years ago.
“I think it’s a terrible idea. But I’m going anyway.”
He gets in the back with the Emergency people and they pull away from us.
“How’d you hear it was Chaka again?” I ask Gray.
“That security guard saw him. That guy Wendell, inside. A couple of uniforms already talked to him. They’re waiting for you right now in there.”
I take another fast look at Karen Nathan before they wrap her in the body bag. For a moment I think I hear the shushing of helicopter blades over some rice paddy ten thousand miles away. But I know it’s a trick of the ears. It can’t be. I don’t have flashbacks anymore.
At least not so you’d notice.
I walk into the lobby and I find Wendell at his usual post. There are still three patrolman standing with him at his desk.
“How can this be possible?” Wendell demands.
“You saw Chaka pull the trigger.”
“Yes. But how can it be possible? How can he be loose? How can he have the opportunity to come down here and do the same damn thing all over again?”
“Tactical was cut loose on him. All those weeks passed and we had to let go. He outwaited us,” I explain to him. The speech sounds just as lame to me as it does to Wendell. The Captain wasn’t happy either about having to reassign the surveillance that was on Chaka for over two months.
It’s September. The weather is unusually hot and the White Sox are still in the penant race. It’s been a very strange year all around.
“I’m very sorry you had to witness this murder. But I also assume you’re willing to put the finger on Julius Johnson in open court.”
“Who?”
“That’s Chaka’s real name. You are willing to testify, aren’t you?”
“Of course I am. Just go catch that little prick!”
His face softens and then he apologizes.
“I know it wasn’t your fault. I read about it in the Tribune. That guy Martinson’s column. I read about how your witnesses disappeared.”
“Got bought off. They’re still in the hood. But now it’s different, isn’t it.”
“You goddam right it’s different. You just find him and I’ll be there for you.”
He’s got that same face of rage that disturbed me previously. I can’t put a proper name to the exact kind of anger that he’s displaying. ‘Rage’ isn’t really strong enough a word.
“I wanted to ask you, Mr. Wendell.”
“Ask me what?”
“You seen Celia Dacy lately?”
“Not since she moved. Why?”
“I just wondered if you ever had a more personal relationship with her than you told me about the first time I asked you.”
“I told you, Lieutenant Parisi, that I only said hello to her on her way in and that I took her groceries upstairs for her a few times. I don’t know what you’re trying to say, but I’m damn near old enough — Hell, I am old enough to be her daddy, so if you’re thinking I was involved with her in some kind of romantic way, you’re dead wrong.”
His stare is the best he can do for ‘icy.’ It’s supposed to convince me he’s clean when it comes to Ronnie Jackson and Antoine Omarr. And I have to admit the glare is pretty good, too. It’s about on the same level as the look most coppers have to use when they’re on the street and when they want to convince people they mean what they say. It’s one of those ‘up against the wall, motherfucker’ visages that you learn to fashion in front of the bad guys. It’s an act, but it better be Oscar caliber every time you use it. The street people have to believe when you pull it out on them.
“No. You’re right. You’re a standup guy. I believe you’ll be there for me. And I’ll catch him. You just be there, like you said.”
He watches my eyes carefully. I still believe he’s lying about something, but I don’t know if he’s the guy who did the two throat-cut bangers. There’s something mighty evasive about this guy Wendell.
I better get down to County with Doc before he goes wayward the way he did with the two young girls a few years ago.
*
“She going to make it?” I ask my partner after I meet him at County in the waiting room.
“The man doesn’t know. This kid had nobody but that dead woman, Jimmy. Keesha lived with her since the little guy was six months old. She didn’t know anyone else. And now she’s half blind and maybe bled to death. The bullet tore out the left eye but didn’t lodge in her head. It just kept going off into the sidewalk. We’ve got the slug.”
Gibron looks suddenly weary.
“You all right?” I ask.
Doc smiles at the lameness of my question. We sit down on the couch in the waiting room.
The surgeon appears and comes toward Doc as if he’s family for three year old Keesha.
“I think she might make it. Twelve hours and we’ll know better. But she’s stabilizing. We’ve got the shock under control and the bleeding has ceased. She’s lost the left eye, but we can fix her up with a prosthetic that’ll at least make her as pretty as she was.”
He shakes hands with Gibron, nods to me, and then walks off.
“Did you make the call for the Department of—”
“They’re on the way,” he explains. “I never did much like those people... Jimmy, if I catch him I’m gonna kill him.”
“No you’re not.”
He smiles.
“I won’t let you do it. I’m the best man. And you’re not a murderer and that’s what you’d be.”
“Don’t give me that ethics crap. This kid’s a dog. He’s slobbering with that disease. You got to shoot him on sight.”
“Who do we shoot after Chaka?”
He stops and seems to take hold of himself.
“I swear to Jesus Christ if I’m there when this kid goes down that if he blinks or farts I’m going to save Cook County a half million dollars in court costs. One round and we’ll save the citizens all that cash.
“You go home and get some sleep.”
He droops his head.
“What’s this kid gonna do now? She goes into a shelter, that’s what. No one wants to adopt a black kid who’s missing an eye, Jimmy. She just got herself condemned to life in the system.”
I wish I had something to tell him.
“This motherfucker went out and did it all over again. He waited until he was free from us and he picked up his piece and he couldn’t wait until he had a clear shot at the son of a bitch he was supposed to wax and he just let loose and killed that girl’s guardian and he might as well have done her, too.”
“You could try to adopt her, Doc.”
I’m sorry I said it as soon as it slipped out.
“At my fuckin’ age? A kid? And Mari’s got grown ones of her own. Out of the question.”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to—”
“If I were younger. If I were black. If the world weren’t the fucking litter box it is.”
“Go home, Doc. You’re frightening me.”
He looks me in the eyes and sees that it’s true. There’s fear on my face. Apprehension that he’s traveling a dark road he’s been down before.
“I’m going home. You’re right, Lieutenant. I’m tired. I’m going home.”
He pats me on the arm and he walks down the corridor.
I get up and walk toward the intensive care unit where Keesha lies. I see the nurse, I show her my I.D. and she whispers that the girl is unconscious but that she’s responding much better lately. They really think she’ll pull out of trouble soon. Her vitals are all encouraging, the nurse informs me. I tell her I won’t bother Keesha, that I just want to take a look at her since I didn’t get too close to her on the boulevard where she was hit by that Uzi slug.
She is a pretty girl. She would’ve been beautiful if Chaka had stayed the hell away from her and her ‘mother.’
Chaka is evil and I don’t give a shit how melodramatic it sounds in my head at the moment. He’s not a human being. He’s a predator in human form. He has the two eyes on the front of his face and all he’s missing is fangs and claws. But he’s no person. Chaka is evolution reduced to the primitive. He’s a hunter and a killer, but he doesn’t survive off his trade. It’s not the money he gets for the jobs he does. It’s the pleasure of the killing that spurs this guy on.
And if I want to cut the head off the snake, I go straight to Rashaan Abu Riad, who’s been backing Julius Johnson all along.
*
Doc and I convince a not-so-liberal judge to give us a search warrant for Bobby Wells’ house. Rashaan is very irate when we serve the papers. He and his three bodyguards lurk behind us as the six patrolmen and Doc and I toss his home. We come up with nothing, but we expected as much. It’s fairly certain that Rashaan stores his ordnance at several local safehouses in the hood. He’s got weapons at houses where the owners are ordinary folks who are afraid not to let him stash his wares. Intimidation is what he’s all about. He’s a territorial wolf. He’s got his piss scent all over the boundaries of this barrio.
“We’ll be back, Bobby,” I tell him as we leave. He doesn’t have a rejoinder.
And we are back. We bust up eight of his drug deals in two nights. Narco and Tactical are all over him like white on rice. We have his dockers dropping their pants on street comers while the Drug guys are laughing and having an amusing evening with them. There are minor arrests, but the annoyance factor soon registers because the Captain gets a phone protest from Reginald Abdullah, another of Riad’s counselors. This time, however, the redheaded boss literally tells Abdullah to go fuck himself. And he tells him in just those words. I overhear the call while we’re in the Boss’s office, and it makes Doc and me laugh outloud. The Captain shoots us a quieting stare since he’s still on the line with Reginald Abdullah, attorney at law.
*
I go home after my shifts, after another afternoon and evening of harassing Bobby Louis Wells to the best of my abilities. We are looking very hard for Chaka. He is still the key to Creel and perhaps even to the head of the cobra itself, Rashaan Abu Riad. I don’t think there’d be any massive allegiance between Julius Johnson and his employer. It’s not like Chaka’s got a spiritual bond with Riad. I think he’d flop if we offered him the right deal, I’m saying. But first we have to catch the little shit.
Grandma Eleanor watches the kids. She stays with them until eight or nine, depending on how much fun I’m having with our favorite gangbanger honcho. She watches them at my house, and then I drive her home after my shift is through. She suggests that she move in, but I don’t want another woman in the house. I’ve lost Erin and Celia, and I know she’s just trying to help out, but I like it alone, lately.
I’ve picked up the phone to try and call Celia a hundred times, but I can’t forget the finality in her voice the last time we were together. And she’s dropped out of Doc and Mari’s wedding. Mari got the call from her. Mari says it’s because she doesn’t want to run into me again.
So I have to leave her be. Celia has enough pain to bear. She doesn’t need me hanging around to give her something extra to lug around in her heart. It’s finished, and like the man said, I have to resign myself to it.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
There was a fingerprint on the eyeball of the dead mutt in Bobby Louis Wells’ backyard. That beheaded pitbull Doc and I were compelled to take a look at. And since the owner of the fingerprint had been both an Army veteran and a police officer, the print comes up on the FBI’s list.
It’s Wendell.
*
“Here we are again,” Doc smiles at him.
Wendell’s partner excuses himself when he figures out we want to talk to the man himself. “Your name came up just recently,” I inform him.
“How’s that?”
“Well, it’s either us or the ASPCA. They don’t like people who cut the heads off canines. And I’m a little bit confused why you’d wreak your revenge or whatever it is on a mean old pooch like Bobby Wells’ doggy.”
“Lieutenant, I —”
“Your print was on the goddam dog’s eye, Wendell,” Doc tells him. And Gibron’s not smiling anymore.
It shuts Wendell down. He’s got nowhere to go. He looks at me and then he scans Doc, but there’s no sympathetic face to appeal to.
“I could lose my job and my retirement too,” he moans.
“You were trying to throw a scare into Rashaan. Is that it?” I ask.
“Yeah. That’s it. Nothing was going down on him and I couldn’t bear to think he was going to get away with being the son of bitch who was behind the murder of little Andres.”
“You poisoned the dog and that made your statement,” Doc says.
Wendell nods, his head down.
“I’m not here to bust you for the hound. I want to know where the knife is.”
“The knife?” he asks me.
“The knife you used to do the mutt,” Doc replies for me.
Then it all comes to him. If he hesitates or says the blade’s been tossed in the Lake or into a sewer, then he knows I’m going to have the feeling that he might’ve used the same knife on Antoine Omarr and Ronnie Jackson. But he doesn’t wait that extra beat.
“It’s in my car. Out front... Hey, Pete! Come on back here and cover for me for a minute,” he yells at his partner, standing by the entryway.
Pete comes on back and then Wendell leads us to his Chevy out front. The knife is underneath the front seat, and it’s a jagged edge blade. The kind you’d use for hunting.
“We’ll need it for a little while,” Doc tells him.
“I thought you weren’t coming after me for the dog,” he says to me.
“We aren’t. We need the blade anyway.”
A look of recognition crosses his face.
“You think I did those two cocksuckers who were involved in the shooting.”
“This’ll tell us what we want to know. That’s all,” Gibron concludes.
“Then I got nothing to worry about,” Wendell smiles.
“Is that right?” Doc queries.
A frown replaces all that light on the security guard’s face.
We walk to the Taurus, and Wendell returns to his desk inside Cabrini. He never looks back at us as we pull away from the project.
*
There is canine blood on the hunting knife and it matches the dearly departed savage that guarded Abu Riad’s backyard. We could charge Wendell with destruction of property or some damn minor beef, but neither of us feels like going to bat for Bobby Wells. Because there isn’t a trace of blood other than the dog’s on that piece of jagged steel. If we thought we had a way to clear up Antoine and Ronnie, we just lost it. The print on the eyeball was the first decent piece of luck we’ve had and now it’s gone south, too.
“Maybe he’s got a second weapon,” Doc suggests.
So we get a search warrant to toss Wendell’s apartment on the far southside. It’s in a neighborhood called Beverly Hills. It looks nothing like the chic neighborhood in LA, I’m positive. But it’s a reasonably well kept area. It’s an all-black neighborhood these days, but it used to be a middle classed white hood before everybody with a pale complexion migrated to the burbs.
“You are welcome,” Wendell smiles as he lets us in. There are two uniforms with us to help us in the search.
“You’re an ex-copper and you don’t own a pistola of any kind?” Doc asks Wendell.
“I never liked firearms. Never carried one unless I was on the job.”
We give his bedroom a second sweep, but we both see it is pointless. He is either innocent or he has been clever enough, as Bobby Wells certainly is, to hide his knife elsewhere. He probably figured on this search warrant, and the old dude probably tidied the place up just for us.
We tell the uniforms we’re through, and they take off on a new call that just came through as we reached the cars.
“Let’s go get lunch,” Doc says.
*
I take the call at home at 2:35 A.M. on a Thursday morning. I’ve only been in the rack for thirty minutes, having just got off shift.
It’s Celia.
“You got to come see me right now. Can you do that, Jimmy?”
There’s genuine urgency in her voice. Grandma Eleanor has stayed the nights now that I’m working nights, so there’s someone with the kids when I’m not here. They’re not that grown up yet that they don’t need an adult in the house with them.
“I can do that.”
I throw on my clothes. I go to the hall closet and retrieve my guns. Unlike Wendell, I carry my firearms on and off duty.
She is visibly shaken when she lets me in the front door.
“What’s going on, Celia?”
She sits me down at her new kitchen table. I notice everything about the details that surround this beautiful woman. I also notice I’m having an anxiety seizure because I can’t hold her and kiss her and consummate what happens after the foreplay.
“I’ve been getting calls.”
“Calls? From who?”
“Don’t know. But ever since those articles about Andres have come out — You know, the Tribune pieces? Ever since those columns came out I been getting ugly calls at night.”