by Thomas Laird
JIMMY PARISI:
A CHICAGO HOMICIDE TRILOGY
Part II
THOMAS LAIRD
Copyright © Thomas Laird 2018
The right of Thomas Laird to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.
First published in 2018 by Endeavour Media Ltd.
Table of Contents
THE LONG MIDNIGHT
IN THE FORESTS OF THE NIGHT
THE LAST SLEEP
THE LONG MIDNIGHT
Table of Contents
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER NINETEEN
CHAPTER TWENTY
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
CHAPTER THIRTY
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
EPILOGUE
CHAPTER ONE
The sky blew into shards of cobalt black on the morning of 9/11. The world saw it on TV, and so did I. All the cable stations covered the carnage and the horror, from the first impact of the first jet to the unthinkable conclusion with the next plane, knifing into the New York Tower. The networks and the cable stations covered it all until it became like a nightmare that no one could wake themselves from. I kept telling myself that it couldn’t be, that this was simply some Hollywood scenario from some disaster film that wouldn’t come to an end.
Then the jet crashed in Pennsylvania. Word of the hit on the Pentagon came through, and the United States was under siege.
I had never been as scared throughout my twelve month tour in Vietnam as I was at this moment. The jungle had never been as frightening as the scenes I beheld on the tube in my office in Homicide, in the Loop of Chicago. I expected the Sears tower to go next, and then perhaps the Merchandise Mart and then the Tribune Building and then all the other landmarks that comprise the downtown. But we remained unscathed, here in northern Illinois. Calls for homicide kept coming in, and my world of the dead kept on going, body after body, as if the murder of over 3000 in New York wasn’t enough for one day or for one lifetime.
On the next day, September 12th, Chicago received the blow which I had anticipated on the previous day. The Anderson Building, in the heart of the Loop, all thirty-five stories of it, exploded at approximately 9:17 AM. The paranoia of the day before hadn’t sunk in, apparently. Or it hadn’t spread fast enough for the employees of the Anderson Building to make a thorough search of the premises, and so the security people there must have missed the barrel of fertilizer. It was much like the explosive that blew up the Oklahoma federal building, the blast that caused the nation to fear terrorism within its borders for the first time in recent memory. They didn’t sweep the building, in any case, and 619 Chicagoans and 324 assorted citizens of the world perished.
I was called in to take a look at the killing ground, ground zero for us here in our city. It reminded me of photographs I’d seen of Berlin in 1945. The Anderson Building was no more. There was a pit of twisted steel and pulverized concrete dust instead. There were shards of thin glass across the street from the windows that had been blown out by the power of the explosion at the Anderson Building. The blast had done massive damage to all the edifices within one city block. Workers in neighbouring structures had been injured by the flying glass, and some had temporarily lost their hearing from the unbelievable roar of the explosion.
Our bomb squad inspected the area, along with the Federal inspectors. I could see the grimness and the anger and the tears on their faces. All the while emergency crews tried to get their equipment through the rubble in order to discover the inevitable—there were no survivors.
Tommy Spencer is my current partner in Homicide. We felt as if we were the odd men out at the scene because the FBI and their Federal Brethren were all over the scene just minutes after we arrived. I could hear the sound of the blast from our building, about two and a half miles away from the Anderson Building. It shook our offices as if we were experiencing a low number earthquake on the left coast.
*
We have a large Arab community in Chicago, large enough that the calls came flowing in about seven that same night on 9/12. Harassment, physical and verbal, dominated the calls, but there were serious instances of violence, and for the first time in my career as a policeman, I thought my city, my beloved Chicago, was out of control. The word ‘anarchy’ immediately came to mind.
The Governor called in the Guard, and Chicago became a hostage to fear and hatred. I had a vision of my own that reminded me of the West Side in the late Sixties when Martin Luther King was assassinated, and when that same West Side went up in flames. There was talk of a race war then, and now on this date in September, that spectre reappeared.
*
Tommy Spencer, my new partner since Doc Gibron retired to battle Alzheimer’s, sat in my cubicle. It was 11:14 PM on the longest day and a half the United States had endured since maybe Normandy in 1944. I wondered if there would even been another day for any of us. All the Loop and most of the city had feverishly searched the buildings we inhabited and laboured in. Security measures were as tight as a strangling collar on a starched shirt. Everyone was treating the situation as if the enemy had literally invaded the country.
And the Arab community hid behind tightly locked doors. Anyone of their race who had to enter the mainstream of the workforce on 9/13 was likely to take a personal day or a sick day. It was the same kind of hate that seethed toward the Japanese after Pearl Harbour. It was the same kind of overt racism that we showed particularly toward Asians, all those decades ago. The Germans fit in easier because they looked Anglo, of course. But anyone who resembled what was then called an ‘Oriental’….Let’s say the Melting Pot became a little less all-inclusive after December 7th.
And so it was in Chicago, Illinois, on September 12, 2001. This time it was our brothers from the Middle East, all of whom seemed to be agents of that six foot six inch Arab, Bin Laden. At least that’s the way the fires of ignorance worked. The newspapers and television, all the media, pleaded for tolerance and calm, but the streets had been ignited. Like that famous painting “The Scream,” the whole city was stricken with palpable hysteria.
“I don’t like the Feds all over our yard, but I understand it,” Tommy said.
Spencer was a Vietnam vet like me and a brother Homicide as well, but he had the shaggy long blond hair and the general stance of a leftover from the late Sixties. He was a hippy out of sync with the rhythms of the 21st Century. He was the Yin to my Yang. We were totally different kinds of cops and men, but I trusted him completely and I considered him a friend, on and off the job.
“They’ve shoved us aside. Yes.”
“They seem to think it’s cut and
dried. It’s the work of that tall motherfucker Bin Laden and friends. They’ve already got it looped to the same perps who did the job in the Apple,” Tommy lamented.
“They seem to be on the right wave length, don’t you think?”
Spencer sent his fingers through his long, dark blond hair.
“It’s what everybody thinks, in this burg. If your name is Muhammad, you better duck when you hit daylight. We’ve already had seventy-two cases of assault, Jimmy.”
It was incredible and true. We had scores of attacks on Muslims and Arabs on the streets, in theatres’, in restaurants, in the public parks…Everywhere in the city limits where an Arab-American was unfortunate enough to be isolated or outnumbered, there was a police report.
The Mayor instituted a curfew of dusk to dawn on the City not long after the racial incidents began to pop up everywhere. The city was on lock down, and the only people it suited were the Feds and us. It let us begin the investigation of the Anderson Building bombing with fewer distractions to deal with, but the city looked dead after the light grew dim. There was no vibrancy, no electricity, as there had always been in my Chicago. It was like a nuclear aftermath, except that there were far more survivors.
Tommy and I left the office the next morning at 5:32 AM, September 14th. We’d been on duty for forty-seven hours, then. I hadn’t seen my wife Natalie, also a Chicago Homicide detective, since the ordeal began. She was home with our two daughters. They were both down with the flu. Natalie wanted to come in and help out, but our Captain told her to stay with the kids now that the Guard was patrolling the streets and now with the Curfew. Things seemed to be calming down slightly, and since the FBI had seemed to take primary control of the bombing investigation, there was no need for extra manpower in the streets at the moment. It relieved me to know that my wife was stuck in our northwest side home, a good distance from the Loop and the Anderson Tragedy.
*
At four on the afternoon of the fourteenth, I was released from duty. I stopped at Doc Gibron’s house before I went home to take forty-eight hours with my family.
Mari, Doc’s Indian wife, greeted me at the door.
“I cannot go to work at the hospital,” she told me when I got inside.
“Why?” I asked.
Then my stupidity struck me and enlightened me.
“They can’t think—“
“Anyone who looks Arabic or Muslim.”
“Of which you are neither,” I said.
“Makes no difference. They seem to lump us all in one pot. My boss at the hospital told me to take a leave of two weeks.”
“That’s absolutely bullshit.”
“Doc is in the basement, reading,” she said quietly.
I followed her downstairs. They had a comfortable home in a northwest burb, not too far from my city-bound house on the northwest side.
The basement was more like a library with a slab of bar beside it. Doc sat at the bar on top of a tall four-legged stool with a back on it. He was pouring over some lore or other. It was a leather-bound edition of Keats, I saw, when I got next to him.
“Jimmy,” he smiled as he saw me standing next to him. Mari smiled at me sadly and went back upstairs.
“They won’t let my old lady go to work. They think she’s a Mid-eastern spy,” my ex-partner grimaced.
“I know. She told me.”
The intelligence was still there. Mari told me over the phone that he’d had memory lapses, but that his medication seemed to be working even better than they’d hoped. He was lucid most of the time, his paediatrician wife had informed me.
“It’s like somebody blew a big gaping hole through the chest of this city,” I told him.
“I’ve seen the TV.”
“It’s worse in the flesh, up close and personal. I never saw anything nearly as ugly in Asia. And I saw plenty of butt ugly there. You expect savagery in the jungle, I suppose, but shit, not in the middle of the fucking Loop, Doc.”
He took my hand.
“You want a drink, Guinea?”
“I want a big drink.”
He poured me a beer taken from his small fridge. The glass was tall and elegant, like my old partner. I wasn’t ashamed to admit I loved the man. I was relieved to see he was still mainly the guy I rode the streets with. He was still primarily intact.
“It’s ugly, in the city,” I told him.
“It’s going to get uglier,” he said.
“I don’t know. The Guard is in the streets. There’s the curfew.”
“Can’t keep the lid on with guns. Jesus Christ, Jimmy. Haven’t you been listening? They’re turning this into a new Crusade. It’s us against the fucking Saracens, the Infidels! It’s our jihad, our Holy war. They’ll take your shields away soon and replace them with red crosses on your Kevlar vests.”
He wasn’t smiling when he said it. He was solemn. It was the old Doc, the brilliant investigator, the guy who surprised you with his sophistication about things unrelated to the streets, like music and literature and world events. He was the only street investigator I ever knew with a PhD, but he talked the talk when we cruised the city together, speaking for those whose voices had been stolen by the perpetrators we pursued.
“Did Bin Laden’s boys do this shit?” Doc asked.
“It’s the current wisdom on the streets.”
“God help us if it’s true, then.”
He clinked his bourbon tumbler against my beer glass, but again he didn’t smile.
The FBI and friends let us search the rubble with them, after the smoldering cooled and after the greater number of bodies had been retrieved. The medics and the firemen and the other assorted personnel worked feverishly to get the job finished. There were families who still didn’t know if their loved ones were buried in this concrete coffin. Not everyone was accounted for at the moment. But the inevitable was coming shortly when those same families had to resign themselves that a father or mother or sibling or spouse was never coming home from the Anderson Building again.
The Curfew was extended indefinitely, and the number of assaults dropped steeply. Arab-Americans gradually returned to work after politicians appealed to fellow Americans not to blame our own for what an alien element had brought about. And it seemed to be working. Tolerance became a buzz word, replacing the venom and hate of those first few days after the explosion. People were being reminded of the bile that had been spewed against the Jews by Hitler’s crew, and Chicago became just a little bit ashamed of itself.
But no one was being accepted with open arms. There was still something bubbling beneath the surface, something I didn’t think would evaporate soon. It was a presence, an emotion that gripped the city and would not retreat altogether. So the Arab-American community went back into the mainstream—but carefully. You didn’t see them out much at night outside their own particular enclaves. They stayed among themselves and watched. They watched and waited to see what the verdict would be from their trusted government. What the city cops had to say about anything, nobody seemed to give a damn, in the media and in the general population.
The FBI was Captain America and Crew, fighting to save a country at siege, and so what the Federals said was going to be the engraved in stone final words on the matter. Chicago Homicide was just a bunch of bystanders, going through the motions.
“I want a full crew to go through the files on all of the dead,” I told our Captain, a few days after the holocaust in the Loop.
“Jesus, Jimmy. Why?”
“What if Bin Laden and Company didn’t do it, Boss?”
I thought he’d laugh and throw me and Tommy out of his office, but he remained silent for a while. Then he turned away from his window toward Lake Michigan and faced us.
“Low profile. Six detectives and five computer geeks. Go ahead. Find something. I’ll give you a month. No overtime.”
CHAPTER TWO
Marty Van Dyke’s ears were full of the discharge from a severe sinus infection. He was on the second day of
a ten-day prescription of anti-biotic, but the medication hadn’t kicked in yet. He was about half deaf, he figured, so when Cathy, his wife, said goodbye and left for the office, he didn’t hear her. Cathy was half of Van Dyke and Van Dyke, a weekly movie review show on Channel 2 in Chicago. They were the TV couple that everyone enjoyed listening to because neither of them could seem to agree on what they liked or hated that was current at the cinema. The primary kick of watching Cathy and Marty was the heated arguments over the quality or lack of quality for each flick they reviewed. Occasionally the pair would concur on a film, but the high ratings were due to the near fisticuffs they’d approached in each thirty minute slot on Saturday nights. Chicago tuned in to see the fights as if they were hockey fans slobbering for a brawl on the ice.
Cathy was apprehensive about leaving her husband home sick. They’d rarely been apart for the four years they had been married. Friends told them that they’d burn the marriage out because of the ‘unnatural’ closeness they shared, but the two movie critics were genuinely in love and they grandly ignored what their friends forecast about their relationship. She was worried he couldn’t hear the phone ring, and if she tried to call him he wouldn’t answer, which would in turn make her frantic that something was even more wrong than his sinus induced deafness. Marty told her he’d be fine in twenty-four hours, that his ears always popped when the meds finally kicked in, and that someone had to help with this Saturday’s editing. He didn’t trust Gary Schneider, the director, to get it done by himself. He wanted Cathy there to make certain the best parts of the discussions on the five films didn’t wind up on the editing floor.
So Cathy left for work and Marty took four Benadryl and wound up sleeping until dark.
He turned the TV on when he went to the bathroom to unload eight hours of stored up pee. He was so dead to the world that he had ignored his bladder until now. It was 6:16 PM, the day after 9/11. The pictures of those two planes popped back into his consciousness. He squinted in the mirror and told himself it really all was a bad dream, and he thanked God that Chicago had been spared.
