The Color of Fear

by Thomas Laird

  “Okay okay. I get it. I’ll keep my profile low. I’ll write about something else for a few months. Will that help?”

  “It ain’t your fault,” I murmur.

  He looks at me quizzically. Doc is still staring out the window at the brackish water of the Lake. Then Martinson gets up and leaves the office.

  Doc picks up the brief case. We’ve already had it thoroughly examined. The slugs have been removed from inside the case.

  The bullets tore through the mounds of paper inside the briefcase. We found the three balls of lead just shy of the inside, opposite wall of the carrier. He was lucky, just as he said.

  Doc looks at me. I haven’t seen him this angry in many years.

  “Let’s go,” he says.

  I get up and walk out the door with him.

  *

  “Come on out and play, Bobby,” I yell into the door.

  “Take it easy, Jimmy.”

  Now I’m the one with the bug up his ass.

  Rashaan comes to the door.

  “Listen carefully, asshole,” I tell him.

  He blinks as if he’s amazed at my presence.

  “Anything happens to Martinson or anybody else who’s connected to the Dacy case and I’m coming to get you. And I’ll let Narco and Tactical off their leashes and you’ll be the saddest motherfucker in the hood.”

  I turn around and bolt away from him. Doc stands there momentarily as if he has something to add, but he’s behind me in a few seconds.

  *

  “I’m sorry, Jimmy. I’m sorry for everything.”

  I have difficulty believing it’s her voice at first.

  “Celia?”

  “Jimmy, I love you. I don’t know how I could’ve said the things I did... Can you come over?”

  I want to tell her no. I want to end this thing painlessly over the phone, but the words never arrive.

  “I’ll be right over.”

  *

  I finally get out of the van and make my way to the building. She buzzes me right upstairs. I’m about to knock on the door, but she beats me to it by opening up before my knuckles hit the wood.

  She’s crying. I see the moisture on her cheeks.

  She shuts the door behind me, and then she presses up against me.

  “Can you forgive me, baby? Can you?”

  Celia kisses me before I can properly repond. But I’m the one who is quickly responding, now.

  “Jesus, Celia. Jesus, I missed you.”

  We’re headed toward the bedroom, and I have great difficulty remembering what it was that I was afraid of before entering her apartment.

  *

  She kisses me when it’s over. She bends down and her nipples brush my stomach. “Jimmy. Jimmy.”

  Her eyes are glazed, it looks like.

  “I missed you, baby. Don’t ever go away again.”

  “I won’t if you don’t kick me out.”

  She smiles and then she slides down and begins her magic again.

  *

  “I love this couch. I never got the chance to tell you.”

  My fears have returned. I can feel my stomach tightening.

  “Somebody took shots at that guy Martinson from the newspaper.”

  “They did what?”

  “They almost killed that guy who interviewed you about Andres’ murder.”

  She doesn’t ask me again.

  “Hadn’t been for his briefcase, he’d be with the ages.”

  Celia’s eyes seem to cloud over. But she’s not taking off from me the way she has in the past.

  “I want to try and make us work, Jimmy. I want to try. Things are different now. I’m thinking if we can make it past the next few months... Who knows? Maybe we could do the things you said we could do.”

  She doesn’t say the word ‘marriage.’ It’s as if she’s avoiding it. And I’ll be damned if I bring it up.

  I tell myself one more time that she couldn’t do it. It was more likely a hunting knife that made all those lethal incisions. It was probably Mitchell or Wendell. Maybe there’s another player we haven’t come around to spotting, yet. There are all kinds of ways to explain those three murders that don’t end up with Celia’s name at the top of the page.

  “I want to marry you, Jimmy. But I want us to be sure. I want us both to be together when we make a decision like that.”

  “My mother told me not to give a damn what anybody thought about us, Celia.”

  “She did?”

  “Yeah. You think she might have a little wisdom, after all her years?”

  “I’m not promising anything, Jimmy P. We’re gonna have problems. Maybe in a month you’ll want to throw me out.”

  “Not likely.”

  I take hold of her tightly, and suddenly my stomach relaxes. She’s no killer.

  Then I want to get up and take a look in her kitchen cabinets. I want to check under her sink. I want to see her drawers. I want to be sure that knife doesn’t exist.

  My belly is knotting again, but I can’t bear to get up and assuage my doubts. I’ll stay away from her stuff because it isn’t Celia. You have to trust someone sometime in your life. It’s the only way relationships endure. You have to shove all the dubious crap into a dark comer. You have to believe in Celia, I tell myself.

  That’s what faith is. Believing without knowing.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  “Jimmy. Jimmy. Jimmy. I have something I want to tell you. Something I have to tell you. Jimmy. Jimmy.”

  She reaches out to me and I expect to see bloodied hands, but her flesh is clean. There is nothing but the perfect, soft skin that has touched me a thousand times and a thousand ways. I’m expecting her to come gliding up to me with those gory fingertips, but she stands still. She tells me again and again that there is something she wants to tell me, something she wants to confess. That she wants to tell me all about the three killings, that there’s a surprise explanation that will alleviate all my fears for her and for us, that it’s somehow going to be all right, all right, all right.

  Then she evaporates as the dawn pokes itself into my bedroom. I wake and I see that she’s not here, that I’m in my own bedroom in my own house.

  I haven’t slept over at her place for a few weeks. Celia wonders why, but I can’t explain it to her. I get up after we’ve made love and I tell her I’ve got to go home, that I don’t like Eleanor being stuck alone with the kids all the time. She says she understands, but there’s a slightly hurt look on her face as I leave her at her southside apartment, the last few times we’ve been together.

  I can’t shake my suspicions no matter how hard I try. I keep looking into Doc Gibron’s face for a trace of my partner’s doubts about Celia, but I haven’t seen anything yet. We’re too busy with other cases. We’re too occupied trying to pin something substantial on Bobby Wells.

  Does Doc think I’m sleeping with a killer? If he does, he’s hiding what he may think. He never lets friendship get in the way of our business, as I say. He’d show something if he suspected Celia. I know he would.

  It’s just three weeks before Christmas. Celia wants me to spend Christmas Eve with her, but she has to spend Christmas Day with her mother. Apparently the reconciliation between mother and daughter took.

  She is happier than I’ve seen her since the day we met. It wouldn’t be difficult to improve on her attitude since the day Andres was murdered, but she seems to have unloaded some of the burden that losing her son placed on her shoulders. Celia smiles more often. She doesn’t faze out on me anymore. Now that Chaka’s about to go before a jury and now that the other two thugs are departed, she seems to be free. Or at least more free than she’s been in our few months together.

  All I really have to do is let go. Pretend that I never saw what I saw — or pretend about the knife I did not see.

  No, now I have Celia reaching out for me with her lovely, immaculate hands. She’s extended herself toward me to tell me something that is crucial, that is drastically importan
t. But I never last long enough to get to find out what her monumental secret is. I always wake up too soon.

  Celia’s it. Last crack, last shot. If I blow it with her, it’s blown.

  *

  “It’s all right. It was beautiful, baby. Just beautiful. It was fine.”

  But I still see the faint disappointment in her eyes.

  “I’m thirsty. I’m going to the kitchen to get a pop. You want one?”

  I brought my own supply of decaffeinated soda pop. She drinks iced tea.

  “No. No thank you, honey.”

  I walk into the kitchen, resolved I’m going to actually search for the knife this time. But I always find a way to avoid the cutlery drawer or under the sink or wherever she might keep a carving knife. The one that filled the empty hole in that wooden block, back in the locker at Cabrini.

  I switch on the overhead light in the small kitchenette. I walk directly to the refrigerator and I open the door and take out a can of the diet soda. Then I turn and attempt to walk back toward the light switch and toward Celia’s bedroom. But I only make it halfway across the tile.

  I spin around and head toward the sink area where the spoons and knives and forks drawers are. I pull out the drawer and I peer inside.

  “Lookin’ for something, baby?”

  She’s standing behind me, naked, by the light switch at the entrance to the kitchenette.

  “You scared the living hell out of me, Celia. Goddammit!”

  “You mad at me, Jimmy P.?” she grins.

  She stretches a leg out toward me. It’s one of her seductive stances she uses on me all the time when we’re alone and about to make love. It isn’t sleazy or necessarily sexy, the way she stands. It’s just a natural way of holding herself that makes me mad with lust. She knows how well it works, of course.

  Holding my chest in mock melodrama, I walk toward her. I’m not wearing anything either. She sinks to her knees before I can stop her, if I had the mind to stop her, and when she begins, I drop the opened diet pop can to the floor. There is a cracking sound, and then we hear the soda spilling out onto her tile. But it doesn’t stop her. I’ve got my hands behind her soft hair and I’m urging her.

  *

  I lie in the dark watching the minutes pass on her digital, bedside clock. The numbers appear in big, red numerals. She’s convinced me to stick around until dawn, when she has to get up for work anyway. Since Eleanor is now a resident, and since my mother never questions where I’ve been all night, I stay the night.

  But I cannot sleep. I peer over at the fascinating, beautiful, dark skinned woman who I can never find uninteresting or dull, and I touch her face.

  The sun makes its appearance from behind her green draperies. I can see the emerald color of the fabric as the light prods its partial way through the cloth window covering.

  The sun isn’t the only thing that’s come up. I groan. Not out of wanting, but out of desperation.

  “Celia, I want to go home.”

  She grins and then she explodes with laughter.

  Then she turns back to where she began, and she’s in command once again.

  *

  “You look all tuckered out,” Doc pronounces.

  “You don’t look too energetic yourself,” I tease.

  “Naw, I’m serious. You been up too late, lately?”

  “You might say.”

  “Shit. You’re young. You don’t know any goddam better.”

  “And you’ve been sitting around reading romantic poetry to your lovely new bride and that’s all. Right?”

  “Not exactly. But with a three year old in the house, you don’t try position 689, hanging from the lighting fucking fixtures, either.”

  “I take it your love life is fully booked, then.”

  “You really do look all wearied out, Jimmy.”

  “I’ll survive.”

  He studies my face for an elongated moment.

  “You sure about that, James? Are you really sure?”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  “This has to do with an ongoing homicide investigation.”

  The clerk in records reads the note I hand her from her boss.

  “Okay. It’ll take a minute to drag it up from the computers.”

  She walks away toward the office behind us. I’m here at Christ Hospital on the southside on one of Celia’s days off. I’m supposed to go over to see her in an hour. It’s just a little after noon. We’re scheduled to go out for lunch.

  I hadn’t planned on showing up here until I found myself in the hospital’s parking lot.

  The short, stocky, brunette clerk returns to me.

  “Here it is.”

  She shows me the paper. I find the blood type. It’s ‘AB’ and my heart tumbles into the basement of my torso.

  “Thank you,” I murmur.

  After I give her back the file and the sheet, I walk away from the records office.

  *

  “I’d like to paint the apartment. Do you want to help me, Jimmy?”

  “What? Oh, sure. I’ll help.”

  “Don’t sound so enthusiastic, lover.”

  “I’m a good painter. Of course I’ll help you.”

  “We could do the living room in a bone white and the bedroom in a light beige. Don’t you think?”

  I find myself staring at the parking lot outside this expensive hamburger joint that caters to people who can afford better than the usual fast food places.

  “What?”

  “You’re doing my old thing, Jimmy P. You’re taking off on me and you’re leaving your body behind.”

  “I’m sorry, Celia. I’m just tired. We’ve had a load, the last few weeks. Two more killings of kids. This time on the northwest side. Two Hispanics and one white kid. Gang stuff. It’s starting to wear me out.”

  “Why don’t they put you back on those mobster killers? Wasn’t that what you got all that publicity about?”

  She’s talking about my distant cousins, the Ciccios, who Doc and I put away a few years back.

  “A killer’s a killer. We don’t get to select the brand, Celia.”

  Her face goes serious.

  “A killer’s a killer? What does that mean?”

  “It means that I’m very democratic about people who do murder. They’re all equal to me. My job’s to get all of them, not just the ones that are easy to despise.”

  “You’d go after someone you knew personally the way you’d go after a serial killer or a rapist-murderer guy?”

  “Like I said, I don’t pick the ones I want to catch. You break the law by taking a life and I’ll be after you. It’s a no brainer, Celia. What’s so hard to follow about that?”

  “Nothing. It’s just that some people have compelling reasons to kill someone. What they call special or extenuating circumstances. You’ve had people like that in your investigations, haven’t you?”

  “Yeah. And the courts deal with all those compelling motives. I just catch them. That’s what I do.”

  The waitress returns and fills up our coffee cups. I don’t look over at her, but I can see her watching me.

  “There’s never a case where you’d lay off because of those special circumstances?”

  “I can’t. I told you. It’s not my job to judge them. I just snag them. The guys with the robes take care of the rest of that business.”

  “I’m glad you’re not after me, Jimmy Parisi.”

  Now I’m looking straight at her eyes. Those stunning, outrageous, brown eyes.

  “What makes you think I’m not on you?”

  “You’re not on me at the moment, but it’s a different story when we’re alone.”

  “Everything with you is sex. That’s all I’m good for, ain’t it.”

  I attempt a mild smile.

  “That’s better. I thought I was losing you again. You looked like you were drifting off... Look, no more talk about your work. We’ve got an apartment to re-decorate.”

  “We do, do we?”


  I’m smiling a little broader now.

  “I’m a good painter. I can cover a wall with the best of them.”

  She’s not convinced by my turnabout in attitude.

  “You’re one ferocious po-lice, Jimmy P. I believe you. It don’t matter whodunnit. You’re still going to be there.”

  I take up my coffee cup and take a drink. My eyes never leave hers. I think I see just the slightest wink flash at me from her left eye, but it happens so quickly I can’t be certain if that eyelid fluttered or if it was an involuntary shudder.

  “I’m a vicious copper. Yes I am.”

  *

  “I thought you were on your way out in September,” I remind Doc.

  “The teaching market is a little slow at the moment. And like I said, I want to make Rashaan Abu Riad’s genitals on your office wall my little going away present for you.”

  “You don’t need him, Doc, if teaching’s what you really want to do.”

  “I decided I could finish my novel while I’m still on active duty. There’s something about this work that gives me the motivation to write things down. If I was caught up with bundles of termpapers, I might not have the energy to write. So until I get my tome out onto pulp, I think I’ll stick all this out a little bit longer. If it’s no inconvenience to you, Detective Parisi.”

  I shake my head and laugh.

  “What’s your book about?” I ask.

  “Life and death and a homicide Lieutenant whose story is what they call a roman a clef. A ‘novel with a key’, it means.”

  “What’s a roamin’ a clay got to do with me?”

  “Nothing. Not really. It’s fiction, Jimmy. I just made all this shit up.”

  His smile withers and departs.

  “Seems like you’ve been far away from me, the last few weeks. Why is that?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “When something’s bothering you, you usually come out with it. That’s what our partnership is based on. I throw all my shit at you and you throw all your shit at me and then we sort our shit out. I kinda like the setup, but it seems like you’ve wandered off on your own lately. I don’t understand. Our slate is pretty caught up, the perps are in the cages. What’s troubling you?”