Black Angel

by Thomas Laird

  “You could wait until you don’t have to babysit the three of us any longer.”

  “Are you serious? Or are you just teasing me?”

  I think they call it an impious grin. She shows me that glimmer of a smile that is teasing, but not mocking. She gets up and walks to the opposite side of the room as if she’s trying to size me up better. I feel almost lonesome when she walks away from me.

  “Why? Because I’m so much older than you?”

  “You’re not old. I’ve never thought you were anything but.… beautiful.”

  “My. What a lovely thing for a homicide detective to tell me,” she grins.

  She starts floating my way. I don’t see her steps, but I know she’s somehow closing the distance between us. It’s like a magic trick, like levitation. I’m trying to figure out if it’s an optical illusion. She’s the sorceress, and I’m just the bewildered audience.

  “I’m not.… I’m not just saying it. I mean it. If I weren’t on the job.…”

  “When you’re free, when you can maintain your professional detachment,” she smiles, “you know my phone number. And you know where I live and work. I don’t see a problem. Do you?”

  I want to touch her now. I want to embrace her and kiss her right where she sits, three feet away from me. Somehow I find some self-control, just before my rocketry explodes.

  “Who are you, Will?”

  I gaze up at her, and I’m befuddled. I don’t understand the language she’s throwing at me. It doesn’t sound like English. It sounds like some mysterious concoction of musical notes that I can’t read.

  “Excuse me?”

  “What do you like to do? Where’ve you been—other than the Middle East?”

  “I like reading. True crime. Crime fiction. I like historical stuff too.… Never been anywhere except for Illinois and California, where I did boot camp in the military. Never seen Europe. Flown over it. Seen the Atlantic from 25,000 feet. That’s it.”

  I blush like a schoolboy whose teacher just asked him to recite what he did on his summer vacation. I have no idea what to tell her, next.

  “What’d you do in school?”

  “High school?”

  She nods. I have the strong urge to come right over the top of this table to her.

  “I played baseball and football. I had a scholarship for football, but I hurt my ankle and knee my freshman year at college.”

  “Did you date much in college?”

  She’s grinning mischievously once again. She’s playing me like a keyboard. Her fingers are running up and down me, but she’s never laid a glove on me. This trick is all done with her brown, intense orbs.

  “No. Sports and school didn’t leave much leftover time.… But I wasn’t a monk, either.”

  “Nothing serious, at the University?”

  She’s smiling again, and I think I’m coming unglued.

  “Nothing very serious. A few girls, here and there.”

  “When did you meet this federal cop?”

  I’m being slyly interrogated, now. She ought to work with Jack and me, downtown. She’s very bright, very sly. She’s toying with me, and I’m loving every damned second of it.

  “About six weeks after I got on Homicide.”

  “She works for which branch?”

  “FBI. She’s a special agent out of the Chicago branch.”

  “You really in love with her?”

  That was a subtle, but penetrating slice. She knows she’s stuck it into me, and there’s almost a look of glee on her face. It’s not malicious. She’s just…She’s simply probing, until she finds that lump or mass that she’s seeking.

  “I’m starting to wonder.… I mean, she has such different dreams from mine.”

  “What do you dream about, Will?”

  “That’s a line from Red Dragon,” I laugh.

  “Pardon?”

  “Thomas Harris. The guy who wrote The Silence of the Lambs. He wrote Red Dragon too. It was the first of the Dr. Lector books, I think.”

  “You read a lot of crime stuff?”

  Her interest seems sincere. The playful look has become sober.

  “I read serious writers, sometimes. Cormac McCarthy, F. Scott Fitzgerald—And I’m a huge fan of William Faulkner.… I’m boring you.”

  “No. No you’re not. I find you absolutely fascinating.”

  I believe every word she utters. She can make no false moves. Maybe she’s hypnotized me, and the next thing I know I’ll be barking like a fucking dog, as if it were some Vegas act. But there’s nothing false in her inquiry. She’s genuine, the real deal, and I find myself opening up in front of her like some time-lapsed blossom.

  “I think you’re very interesting too.”

  “Why don’t you sit next to me?”

  I stare at my hands on the table top.

  Then I rise and sit on the chair next to her, on her right.

  She leans over and kisses me and puts her hands behind my head, and then she kisses me again. Her lips are as firm and as pliant as I knew they’d be.

  “We shouldn’t.”

  “You’re right,” she smiles sadly. “But you’ve been very good to the three of us. And I am way too old for you.”

  I kiss her this time.

  “Bullshit.”

  Then I kiss her again. And I hear Jack Clemons tromping toward us from the living room.

  I hurriedly re-take my chair opposite Hannah Menke.

  “Everything copacetic?” Jack grins.

  I know there’s Hannah’s cherry red lipstick on my mouth, but I don’t dare to try and wipe it off.

  “We’re excellent,” Hanna tells him without turning around toward him.

  Jack smiles at me and turns and heads back through the swinging kitchen door toward the living room.

  “We’ve been caught,” she grins slyly.

  “Not much gets past him.”

  “If you’re embarrassed by me…”

  “Don’t you even say that.”

  “Okay.”

  “I’ll call you.”

  There is bemusement on her lovely face. It’s as though she’s heard this somewhere, several times. The notion that she thinks it’s a line, that it’s all bullshit, enrages me.

  “Good.”

  “You don’t believe me?”

  I feel the flush of anger surge toward my face. I try to control it, but I can’t resist it. I know she’s reading my anger, and I see it tickles her to push every goddamned button I have.

  “No, Will. This is just a brief encounter, just an infatuation with an older woman,” she smiles.

  “Bullshit. Again. You’re wrong. Wait and see. I’ll call.”

  “You will?”

  “Wait and see.”

  She smiles again, and I want to jump at her once more, but this time my better sense takes over.

  *

  “You’re not supposed to become involved with case people, Will,” Jack grins.

  “Yeah. Right.”

  “You going out with her?”

  “Mind your own fucking yard, Jack.”

  “Absolutely… White Castle?”

  “Why not?” I tell him.

  *

  It’s one of the frequent hangouts for police in the city. They’re open twenty-four, 365, which makes them popular on that count alone.

  We frequent the Castle on Fullerton, not far from the Outer Drive. In September you can smell the lake and the dead fish on some of the beaches.

  He orders six cheesesliders and a coffee; I prefer the Diet Coke with my five cheeseburgers. They’re called “sliders” because they slide in one way and they slide out the other way. You don’t eat the damn things when you’ve been partaking of alcoholic beverages, but after getting drunk they’re irresistible. This dawn, however, I’m quite sober.

  Jack doesn’t ask me about my magic moments with Hannah Menke, and I know he doesn’t give a shit about the question of professional detachment when it comes to my on job behavior. Getting
involved with people does happen from time to time, no matter what kind of a hard case you might think you are.

  I know I shouldn’t call Hannah, but it was that bemusement in her eyes when she told me she knew I wouldn’t. She thought I was taking her as a lightweight, as someone who was offering herself out of need.

  But I knew that wasn’t the truth of the matter. She touched me somewhere deep. It sounds like maudlin romance, I know, but she just got to me.

  Maybe it was just her immediate availability, maybe it was her brown eyes.… Who the hell knows? But when you really feel something electric happening that deep down--

  I have to call her anyway, just because she thinks I won’t. And I know how bad that sounds, but it matters to me that I don’t disappoint her.

  She’s got two almost-teenaged girls. A ready-made family. We’ve got no chance to make it work. Two different worlds. And she is a decade older than I am. There’s that to think about even if I told her age didn’t matter.

  It didn’t matter when our lips connected. There was more of a connection than just our mouths.

  I have to think this out rationally. I’ve got Mary. She expects me to keep showing up at her place, and she’s even shown signs of softening toward the relationship business. But why should I have to work so hard to talk her into it?

  I was never interested in casual connections not in high school or college or now. I’ve never liked to be around anyone who didn’t know exactly what they wanted in life. Love, work… It didn’t matter.

  I knew I wanted to enlist in the Marines after the university. I knew I wanted to join the NCIS and become a cop. And when I wanted out of the G, I knew I wanted to come home and be a homicide detective. I could see my life unwinding clearly. I never had difficulty with goals and knowing where I was headed.

  Then Mary clouded the whole issue. She kept me at arm’s length, telling me to slow down and savor whatever it was that we had together.

  And now Hannah enters the scenario. She seems more serious. She seems like she knows exactly what she wants as much as I do. Which makes her very appealing to me. And her ten years on me makes no difference to me at all.

  When I’m fifty, she’ll be sixty, of course. Will it matter?

  The answer rings out immediately:

  No. It won’t matter. I can see myself in the future with Hannah, although I know it’s all extremely premature.

  Maybe she’ll shoot me down if I do call her. I shouldn’t. Not while we’re still babysitting her and the kids.

  Then I’ll wait. I’ll assuage my professional dignity and I’ll wait.

  Wait until we collar Carl Thomas and Philip Brandon and the phantom in northern California, too. When we’ve got our creatures of the night behind bars, I’ll give Hannah Menke the chance to send me to earth in flames.

  I can’t think of a prettier way to go.

  13

  Missing in action are the men who are the walking dead. Some men stay missing. Their bodies are never found. Some others find ways of reappearing when you least expect it. They’ll walk up to your front door and surprise you by saying: “I’m home.” They simply reappear, like that.

  Sometimes these walking dead don’t come home at all. They take circuitous routes back to their native soil. They might make their ways home by way of foreign continents, foreign countries, alien cities and ports. As Mark Twain said it—the reports of their demise were highly exaggerated. All it takes to vanish is a plan. All it takes to pop back to life again is money and smarts. If you’ve got both of those, you can outwit almost anyone. They think you’re dead; it’s the world’s oldest con. Again, it was my favorite writer, Mark Twain, Sam Clemens, who had his boy Huck Finn pull that scam on Pap. All it took was a little hog’s blood and a few hanks of Huck Finn’s hair. Then the whole town figured Huckleberry was history. That he’d tanked it forever.

  Granted, some disappearances are more difficult to achieve than others. You have to have red herrings to pull the gag. You have to employ misdirection to achieve the desired results. It’s the oldest smokescreen in the business; nothing is ever as it seems. The magician has you looking in one direction, and you’re leaving yourself wide open for one hellacious sucker punch.

  You don’t even have time to duck.

  14

  Mary keeps talking more and more about getting serious. Then I have visions of spending serious time with Hannah Menke. With Hannah there is an upside and a downside, and it’s the same thing: She has a ready-made family, two teen aged daughters, already there, already with a father in this world. What would I become for them if I married Hannah? I know I’m way ahead of myself because we haven’t even gone out yet. I haven’t even called her.

  It might also become a little obvious to Special Agent Mary Janecko, lying next to me here, that something is brewing on a new front. Much I can’t get past this bright federal cop. Not much at all. I have no poker face when it comes to dealing romantically with women. I can keep a straight face with females when I’m on the job, but when it’s on my own time, I tend to be a little too much of an open book. They can read me, I mean.

  The FBI continues the chase in California for the as-yet-unnamed perp who wiped out that family near Auburn. Gerald swears he doesn’t know the West Coast guy’s name. He knows Brandon and Thomas because they actually met up in Milwaukee. It was a setup from the Internet, once the other two killers had returned from Desert Storm. The three of them actually planned the killing in Chicago while they were in Wisconsin before Gerald took off for Vermont and did his thing in the Northeast.

  There is no trace of Carl or Philip. They have gone to earth. Neither the FBI nor the Chicago PD can get a handle on either man. They leave no paper trail because neither man is using a credit card with his right name on it. Thomas’s sister is no help. The local police near her have interrogated her twice, and the second time she lawyered up, and now we’re “harassing” her if we try her once again.

  The surveillance at Hannah’s has come to a halt, now that it’s the third week in September. We don’t have the manpower or the overtime pay to continue, according to Captain Pearce. Pearce is more than disappointed that we have to pull back on Hannah and her two kids. I’m a little distraught myself. Now I have no official excuse to head over there.

  I was becoming fond of her girls, also. They’re not the little princess types. They both have their shit squared away, it seems to me. They look you in the eye, and neither of them is catty to the other—or to me or to their mom, either. They seem well-behaved and respectful. I sometimes see myself being able to handle daddy-hood with two nearly grown stepdaughters. It’s a fantasy I envision, from time to time.

  Then I come back to reality, shacked up here with Mary, sharing a sweaty bed with my FBI lover, the same lover who has warmed toward the notion of taking all this to another level.

  “I want you to meet my parents,” she offers.

  “Meet who?”

  “Mommy. Daddy. You know? The heads of my clan?”

  “Sure. Yes. Why not?”

  “Don’t sound so brazenly enthusiastic, Will.”

  “I am.… Enthusiastic, I mean.… You want to meet my dad?”

  “Let’s see how it goes with Adventure Number One, with my mother and father. Okay?”

  “Sure. Absolutely.”

  Then before I can generate any more false energy, she starts it up with me. And I have no defense against her. She’s unrelenting. In fact, she’s always been sort of the instigator or aggressor in bed. I rather liked it when we first started making love, but now I like it to be my idea when we couple at least some of the time.

  *

  “You aren’t coming here again,” Hannah Menke says. Her eyes are filling.

  “Not officially. No.”

  “Unofficially?”

  “I don’t know, Hannah. I really don’t.”

  “Why don’t you know?”

  “I’m involved with someone.”

  “Oh.”

&
nbsp; She looks away.

  “But it might be going down for the count.… I’m not sure.”

  “So maybe you’ll give me a call if this other thing doesn’t…”

  “Hannah. Please. You have no idea how this is tearing me up.”

  “You don’t look torn up.”

  “I don’t show what I’m thinking. Not when I’m on the job.”

  “I thought you were no longer an official presence here.”

  “Please, Hannah.”

  “You’re right. I have no right to talk to you this way. I want to thank you for all you’ve done for the three of us, Detective Koehn.”

  “Hannah…”

  “You need to go now. You really need to go.”

  And her Oakbrook door shuts in front of my face.

  *

  I get the call from Jack Clemons at three in the morning. I race out the door at my dad’s house, I jump in the Cavalier, and I take off to meet my partner.

  *

  My heart has quite literally risen in my throat as I enter Hannah Menke’s home. I walk past three other Homicide detectives as I go into her house here in Oakbrook. I see the splintered front door.

  When I reach Jack, in Hannah’s kitchen, I ask him.

  “Where are they?”

  “Upstairs,” he answers.

  I turn and run up those stairs to the upper level where the bedrooms are. I walk into Hannah’s master bedroom.

  No one there.

  I walk into Bethany’s bedroom next door. Still no one.

  All that’s left is Barbara’s room.

  Hannah is sitting on the bed holding a daughter on either side of her. The three of them are quivering as if they’re lapsing into shock.

  But they’re all three alive.

  The female detective, Joan Georgopolous, smiles at me and then leaves the bedroom and shuts the door as she leaves.

  Hannah looks up.

  “I heard him break in. He kicked in the front door. The security system went off and the signal went right to the Oakbrook Police and they were here in three minutes. Whoever it was must have heard the alarm, and he took off.

  “I’m buying a gun,” she tells me.

  “Don’t,” I answer.

  “Will you live here with us and protect us?”