by Thomas Laird
“Harold was a good man. A fine man,” John pronounced, and then he left us our Diet Cokes and walked away. He had a habit of saying his brief piece and then moving on.
“You still like the insurance angle?” Tommy asked as he looked out my window at Headquarters in the Loop toward Lake Michigan. It was Halloween and it was dark. It was the evening of Doc’s funeral, October 31st, and the time was dwindling for us and we knew it.
“Yes. I believe in human greed. It’s the international religion,” I told him.
“I know. But we’ve talked to all the big policy holders and they all sound like the sincerely bereaved.”
“I want to go back and look over the last twelve files. I want to see if any of them has a boyfriend or girlfriend. I want to know if any one of them had a reason to get rid of their significant other, Tommy.”
“Okay…They’re hitting Afghanistan hard, Jimmy. They’ve sent in the Special Forces, the Rangers and the Green Berets and the Navy’s got the Seals somewhere in country. Rumor is that Delta Force is lurking around too.”
“They locate Bin Laden, cuff him, and he cops to New York and Chicago, and we can all go back to our regular load.”
“It troubles me, Jimmy. I have to admit it troubles me looking for a perp who would slaughter a whole building full of people just to collect on a policy.”
“Let’s look for someone deep in debt. I can make a call to my friends in the Outfit.”
I was talking about my relatives in the Chicago version of the Mafia. It was called the Outfit, in Chicago. Not Cosa Nostra or The Black Hand or Our Thing. Simply The Outfit. Capone was one of the Founding Fathers, and he left a legacy of blood in this town.
*
Carlo Ciccio was one of the few remaining Capos the FBI and the IRS and various other Feds had not sent to prison. The Outfit, like the Mafia in New York, had had its numbers cut drastically by some government successes in breaking what used to be called ‘omerta.’ There was no honor and no silence among these current thugs. That was all back in the forties with the ‘mustache Petes’, the old time soldiers who made the Mafia resemble the Roman Legions. They were a police force for guys who wouldn’t deal with real cops. They were the local wise guys who solved problems that businessmen in the neighborhood couldn’t get solved by using the legitimate police force. When the FBI gradually began to understand what the Mob was really all about, they found the weak chinks, the broken links, and they infiltrated and they knocked the Sicilian gangsters into second rate status behind the Russian and Vietnamese gangs, currently ruling the underside of our cities.
Carlo Ciccio was my cousin on my mother’s side of the family. My father Jake had been a Homicide detective, like me, and he’d been completely honest, as far as I knew. The old man was a drunk, but he’d been on no one’s pad. I grew up with my cousins on the north side of the city before they made their ways into the brotherhood of full-blooded Sicilians. They’d turned their way, and I went the way my father had opted to turn. I didn’t take money, but I had been offered, plenty of times, coming up in the ranks. A lot of those cops were disgraced, now, or they were still in prison, but Homicide prided itself in staying for the most part straight. Which was one of the reasons I remained as a policeman all these years. In Homicide we got the best of the best and only occasionally did we see a mutt in our ranks. And a crooked Homicide didn’t have much of a mortality rate around here. Our Captain had a nose for shit, and he’d ferret them out eventually.
I only talked to the mobbed up section of my family if I felt things were desperate. If it were life and death in an investigation, I could lower my dignity temporarily and then connect with my cousins from the north side. I think they liked it that I came to them for help. They didn’t like it that I never offered them anything in return—unless the Prosecuting Attorney authorized me to make such ‘deals.’
I met Carlo at his titty bar called Angel’s on Kedzie Avenue on the southwest side. Tommy went with me. I didn’t fear for my safety, but he was a witness to what I said and what Carlo Ciccio said.
It was the lunch rush. The place was full of business guys who took clients out for lunch and a drink and maybe a lap dance as well. I wasn’t here to bust Carlo’s girls for the laying on of hands, lips or other body parts.
“Jimmy! Jesus! How long’s it been?”
He gives me the perfunctory guinea reception of a kiss on each cheek. Carlo’s still a handsome guy, in his mid-fifties. Looks a little like the actor, Dennis Farina. Tall, a few remnants of acne with the scars on his cheeks, but a full head of salt and pepper hair that he’s got brushed immaculately back over his ears. You can see he goes to a hair stylist—no stray strands. His hair is perfect.
I introduce Tommy Spencer. Carlo sits us down in a booth, Tommy and I across from him.
“You still married to that cop?” he asks me.
“Yes. We have two kids.”
“That’s wonderful…You married?” he asks Spencer.
Tommy shakes his head.
“Good. Great. Then you can appreciate your surroundings, then, no?”
Carlo laughs and pats Tommy on the forearm. Tommy stares at his forearm, and then he gazes up at my cousin, who’s still grinning conspiratorially.
“Check out the ass on the black bitch,” he says and nods toward a black stripper who’s currently stuck to a pole on stage, off to the left of us here in the booths, right across from a long bar that has other naked lovelies strutting atop the slab, squatting down to pick up the loose bills the patrons leave for them on the bar.
“I’m here for business, Carlo.”
“I thought you’d ruin the party,” my cousin grumbles. His face turns serious suddenly.
“I’m not here to roust you. I just want to ask you some things about your loan business.”
“I don’t have a loan business, Jimmy P.”
“I’m not here to hassle you about it, Cousin. I’m just looking for information about the Anderson Building thing.”
“That was not one of our things, Lieutenant,” Ciccio smiles.
“I know it wasn’t…I’m looking into somebody who might have owed your crew big money. Something six figures or better.”
“What would that have to do with that building?”
“I’m thinking someone might have needed big money. Maybe they needed money to pay off a large loan, the kind where the interest is prohibitive.”
“Man, you got the wrong fucking tree. Nobody gets that deep with the people I know. I didn’t say I had anything to do with loans, remember? That kind of shit is illegal.”
“Carlo, if I find out you were holding out on me, since the deaths of a thousand people are involved—“
“Jimmy, Jimmy. Would I do something stupid like that?”
“You’d want the money if someone assured you this was the only way to go for you to collect.”
“You really are talkin’ to the wrong number, Cousin. You don’t think we was all shocked by what that Arab cocksucker pulled in New York? You don’t think we didn’t have friends who went down in that Tower—or at the Anderson place? We got some pride involved here too, Jimmy. We want that prick dead, also.”
“What if he didn’t do the Anderson Building, Carlo?”
“Is that where this is going? You think a local jamolk topped all those people just so he could prevent his fuckin’ knuckles from being busted?”
“Something like that, yeah.”
“Jimmy, you been overworked lately?”
The smile fades when he sees that I’m not grinning back at him.
“Like I said, Cuz. You barkin’ at the wrong tree. We don’t deal with people who like to draw big attention to themselves by whacking a thousand people to pay off a fuckin’ debt. You gotta be kiddin’. I think you need some of the services we offer right here in our humble establishment.”
“I’m married, Carlo.”
“I forgot.”
“Don’t fuck with me either, Carlo. You know about someon
e who owes large…I’ll give you a list of names. You read it very carefully.”
Carlo stares at me, but he accepts the sheet of paper with the names.
I see his eyes flutter just subtly when he’s one third down the row of names our computer geeks came up with.
“You see something you like?” I ask.
“No. Nothing, Jimmy. Like I told you. We knew of a guy making a deal right by killing all those people, we’d deliver him to you on a fuckin’ plate. Haven’t we had enough heat lately as it is?”
“Yeah. You have. And they’re not done with you. The Feds have simply diverted their attention overseas. If they sniff out what I mentioned to you…The Gotti arrest’ll look like the salad before the main meal, and you will be the main bill of fare, Cuz. Talk to me now and you’ll be cooperating—“
“I don’t recognize anyone on that list. I’d of told you if I did, Jimmy, no shit. You think I want trouble like you’re talking about?”
I look over to Tommy, who has been stone silent throughout all of this. He nods for us to take off, so we get up and leave the booth.
“Maybe you both need some nice companionship, then, huh?” he says as we walk toward his front door.
But when I turn toward him, just as we’re about to go out the door, I see there’s no look of amusement on his good-looking, pock-marked Sicilian face. He’s recognized someone on that list, and I want to go back and have at him again. But I know it won’t work with Carlo. Muscle never has worked with him. The only way he’ll give anything up is if he thinks it’s to his personal advantage, and apparently he’s still convinced we can’t make the connection between him and someone on that sheet.
“He knew one of those names,” Spencer concurs.
“There are only twenty-four names on that list. It was somewhere midway.”
I look at the list: Johnson, Paul; Merrimann, Harold P; Richmond, Roger M; Garfield, Greta S; Thurmond, Reggie F…It’s somewhere here in the middle. We’ll have to re-interview at least some of these people.
It’s three weeks into our thirty-one day deadline. We’re getting blanked by all the Feds, my cousin in the Outfit has gone deaf and dumb on me, and we’ve got a crazed theory of my making to float our boat.
The Titanic probably went down slower than our good ship seems to be sinking. The waves won’t take long to cover us all, it looks like, right about now.
CHAPTER SEVEN
I went to the kid Barak’s funeral a few weeks back—he was the boy who’d had his skull crushed with a lead pipe. We nailed all four of his killers because of the general stupidity of the perpetrators. They’re all awaiting trial in the lockup with no bail, courtesy of the troubled times we’re enduring. The funeral was small. There was no religious ceremony, and Barak’s mother wept. There were only about eight of us present, counting Tommy Spencer and me. Going to funerals is part of my job description, and it is the worst part of that write up. I’ve never liked going to anyone’s last words over the hole, and I will never acquire a taste for it. But it does help solve cases, from time to time. Murderers like to show up at these things if we haven’t already nabbed them. They like to gloat in the misery of others. It helps them re-live the agony they caused. It’s part of their pathology, I suppose a shrink might explain.
They put Barak to rest, but his mother would know no peace for a long time, perhaps never. How do you cancel out your ten year old being murdered simply because he was the wrong race at the wrong place at the wrong time? His death will never make any sense, not to her and not to me and not to my partner. This kid had no chance to offend anyone so grievously that they just had to kill him. He wasn’t old enough or evil enough to ignite such rage toward himself. All that anger was inside those four kids who stripped him of his existence.
So they buried him and we walked away from his site. I’d probably never occupy this ground again. Only the mother would do that. She would carry him around the way the grave supported his tiny tombstone.
We saw no one suspicious at Barak’s service. All of his killers have been run aground.
But for the murderer or murderers who slaughtered a thousand innocents at the Anderson Building…That son of a bitch ran loose with all the other mad dogs in this city or its environs. We were no closer to grabbing him or them than we were the moment the explosion disintegrated all those thousand lives.
The FBI insisted it was Middle Eastern terrorists, but by now Bin Laden and Al Qaida had only taken credit for the holocaust in New York and for the hit on the Pentagon and for the misfire on the ground in Pennsylvania. There was no mention of Chicago, but Jack Donlan proceeded as if there were a signed confession on Bin Laden’s part.
The Arab community was being handled in a fast and loose way. The new Patriot Act had already gotten rid of some rights that all Americans used to be proud of. Now if you were brown you were fucked, to put it bluntly. They could spirit you away, usually at night, and you were usually incognito for as long as the Feds desired. There were prison camps in the southern states that reminded some of us of the barbarity of Vietnam. Some older guys were reminded of internment camps for the Japanese in World War II. The Constitution was being ignored and sometimes overridden in the name of National Security, and the American public seemed to accept it all and sometimes they even seemed to cheer it on. It’s that classic good guys and jerks dichotomy that Ernest Hemingway talked about. It was that lovely, simplistic planet on which only two kinds of creatures human existed—good guys and bad guys. It cut things down to the bone and made things easy. You could hate now and you were a patriot. If you didn’t hate, then you were against your own kind. And everyone knew what that was called. You had to support what the President of the United States was doing, otherwise you were a traitor—as Jane Fonda had been during the Vietnam War.
I remembered Ms. Fonda’s commercials for the North Vietnamese and I remembered her applause at the sight of a downed American bomber. I just can’t care enough about Jane Fonda to come to hate her. Besides, there are lots of killers and thugs who I have positioned much higher on my hate list. She’s just a professional phony who has recently apologized to vets, now that the War has been over for more than thirty years and now that she and Ted Turner are finished and now that she has to go back to acting in front of an audience that’s much more friendly to Vietnam Vets than the crowds at the cinemas were three decades ago.
Racism has been a thing in this country since we were created. We dragged Africans in chains here for centuries , and when they were freed in 1863, we moaned that these newly freed blacks were lazy. We were the very people who took away their dreams and motivation, and they were the only ethnic group who was taken here in chains. Now Hispanics have become the biggest minority. Perhaps another color or race will displace the Hispanics. And on and on it goes. Put people in colored packages. Keep the races distinct from one another. Disparage a race that doesn’t assimilate to the majority. Say that their heads are thicker, or that they occupy too many cells in our prisons or that they can only play basketball, or that they’re by nature more prolific than we are. Or whatever. Keep the burners on, underneath the loathing. Look for a way to incite us against each other. It’s no nefarious plot of Osama Bin Laden. We had all this racial pus and blister long before he ever entered our consciousness. Bin Laden has made it more facile to hate, and he’s winning. You can see his victories in the streets. Little boys named Barak, ten year olds with crushed skulls. Little girls being abused verbally, sometimes physically, just because they’re on their ways to school. They come home in tears and don’t want to return to those same schools. All these kids, and adults too. They get shoved into a corner because of the color of their skins or because they pray in a mosque and face the east in the dawn and dusk…
I’ve told Red, my wife, that I might very well hang it up after this Anderson thing is put to bed and concluded. I thought I knew Chicago and the people who inhabit it, but it seems I have been mistaken. This city has become like every other city
. Hate makes it do the things it does. Hate allows children to murder each other, having watched its elders perpetrate the same violence. I’m becoming sick of them. I’m becoming finally worn to the bone just trying to care what happens to them. I think I want out. I’m two years past legal retirement, and I think they’ve finally punched the exact buttons.
Doc got out when Alzheimer’s forced him to quit. I’m not waiting for my marbles to dribble out of my head. I’ve thought about teaching at the Academy. There are things I could do besides hunting down murderous animals, young and old. I’m tired of going over all this in my head, and I don’t want to lay it on Natalie either.
She’s missed her period and thinks I may very well have knocked her up for the third time. She is flying high on the notion that she’s carrying another Parisi for us, so who am I to deflate her balloon? The notion of another little guy has me excited too, as a matter of fact. It takes my mind off the mood of this city, it takes me away from the killing streets of the barrio. Temporarily, of course, but it occupies me enough along with that retirement business that I’ve been putting off too long now.
It’s difficult to resign yourself that you’re about to do something for the last time. Like having a child. I thought the two girls with Natalie were definitely the finale for that part of my life. I’ll be sixty soon, and I thought my johnson might give up on me too, but the family doctor has me using the ‘weekend warrior’ drug for penile dysfunction, and it has me feeling like a horny nineteen year old when I use it. There are times when nature works well enough, but when I feel tired or overly depressed, I pop forty milligrams of that pecker enhancer and I’m the lover I was when I was in my early thirties. So at least I won’t be saying bye bye to sex with my wife for a long while.
I thought about what a ‘last case’ would feel like. I know what kissing a dying wife felt like. I know what her cancer did to me, making me know that I’d never see her or touch her again. I’ve lost a father before the wife, and now I’ve lost my only and best friend (although I’m spending off hours with Tommy Spencer now. Natalie is conspiring to get him married, and I’m the guy in the middle. I think Tommy likes being alone with his pet parrot.)
