by Thomas Laird
With really shitty traffic, I’m there in just under an hour. I get off the Stevenson, which is just now opening up all three lanes because of the oncoming winter, and I get on the Outer Drive North. The Anderson Building was only a few blocks away from our HQ—maybe a mile and a half. They’ve got Raymond working on cleanup of the site since I helped get him reinstated. I insisted that Mr. Merton, the big shot of all those Loop properties including the now blown-up Anderson location, not tell Raymond that I had a talk with his Big Boss. So I never got a thank you from Raymond, nor did I expect one.
He was at the rim of the ring of rubble that was left of his onetime place of employment.
“Raymond?”
He turns and looks at me. I’m standing slightly above him on what’s left of a sidewalk. There are barriers set up to keep the civilians out of the crater before me. Raymond carries his shovel toward me.
“Lieutenant…You like to look at dead bodies, eh?”
He smiles craggily. Then he tries to get that single strand of hair back on its proper side. The wind blows it back to the other side of his bald head.
“Got a minute for me?” I ask.
“Sure. I’m supposed to be on lunch but I kept on sifting through the…Sure. What’d you need?”
We walk down the destroyed sidewalk together. It’s cold enough, now that it’s almost Thanksgiving, to keep a lot of pedestrians inside their Loop buildings.
“I wanted to ask you why you weren’t in the building when it blew on the twelfth.”
He stops dead in his tracks. Then he faces me.
“I took a personal day to put some flowers on my wife’s grave in Oak Lawn Cemetery.”
“You have any witnesses who saw you out there?” I smile.
“You lookin’ at me for something, Lieutenant?”
“No no. Of course not. I just have all these little pieces lying all over my crime scene…You ought to know. You’re shovelling them up.”
“No, nobody saw me at the cemetery. It was damn near empty, seeing it was a weekday morning.”
“You ever been out to that place in Mokena? The one that sells the construction explosives?”
“No. Never. We do business by the phone.”
“They said the guy was between 25 and 40—the guy who picked up the barrel of fertilizer. It must have taken him at least an hour to spray paint that ‘stain remover’ or whatever it was that he put on the barrel before he brought it to you…Did you see the man who delivered the drum?”
“No. It was on the dock. It was marked and signed for by one of the other guys, Billy Gleason, I think…Billy didn’t make it. He was there when…it happened on the twelfth.”
“Too bad. Now I can’t talk to Billy Gleason.”
“Yeah. It is too bad, all the way around.”
“The guy at Norton said the man was between 25 and 40. And he had a blond ponytail. But he was struck by the guy’s green eyes…Don’t you have green eyes too?”
I’m looking into those eyes and I see green with hazel flecks in them.
“I’m 52, Lieutenant, and I ain’t nearly blond, as you can see.”
He smiles sadly. I turn us around and walk us back to the Anderson hole. He’s still got that spade clutched strongly in his right hand as if he’s afraid of misplacing it.
“You guys are always lookin’ for fall guys. Aren’t you?”
“No. I’m just eliminating everybody I can until there’s only one left.”
“Eliminating?”
“Yeah. The way you’re sifting through all that dust, Raymond, hoping something solid will wind up on your shovel.”
“It’s a spade, Lieutenant.”
“Yeah, I know it is, Raymond…You have a good day. Try to stay warm out here. I’ll see you again, maybe.”
“Not likely, Lieutenant. They’re bringing in the bulldozers tomorrow. This is my last day in the hole. They’re reassigning me to the Prescott Building on Washington Street. Mr. Merton called me yesterday. At least I’ll be out of the cold. Funny how the last time we talked I was out in the cold for real, with no job at all. Funny how things get turned around.”
“You take care, Raymond. I’ll look you up. I’ll find you.”
The man with the spade looks at me oddly. Then he turns around and disappears into the crater below him.
“You talked to Raymond,” Tommy says when we stop for lunch—at midnight—at White Castle.
Natalie didn’t come along tonight because the girls are both down with the flu.
“Yeah. We spoke.”
“And?”
“He’s got green eyes.”
Tommy’s memory bank goes into override.
“The guy at Norton had green eyes. And a blond ponytail. And he was between 25 and 40. Raymond’s bald, in his middle fifties—“
“Fifty-two. He told me. He volunteered the information.”
I order six cheesesliders, large rings and a large Diet Coke. Tommy orders the same without the Coke. He has black coffee instead. The waitress walks off to fill our order. It’s midnight, and there are four or five other patrons in here with us. It’d be a fitting picture to draw for that guy Hopper.
“The guy at Norton with the cowboy boots could be wrong. And Raymond could have a wig. Want to toss his house?”
“We’d never get a search warrant on Raymond with what we have.”
“I was thinking we’d forgo the warrant.”
“Jimmy…No offense. But it gets weirder every minute. First with Hansen and his coke tootin’ old lady, let her rest in peace. The FBI stages three other bombing attempts, we’re told by our explosives guys…It just gets screwier every second…And now you think the maintenance guy might have knocked off all those people?”
“You can drop me off at the nut house in Elgin—after we toss Raymond’s place. He’s supposed to start a new job at the Prescott Plaza.”
Doc Gibron was an expert at this. Tommy is almost as quick as Doc was at popping a lock. Raymond lives in Orland Park, as I said. His front door is not right out in the open since there are thick fur trees obscuring the neighbors’ eyes from the entrance.
Tommy pops the lock within 45 seconds, so there is no big time lag to getting in. I look behind me before I shut Crealey’s door. Then I peek out the front window.
“Raymond? Are you here? Police.”
I wait about six beats before I allow us to proceed.
No one answers. No dogs, thank Christ. I had the feeling we would have noticed a dog the last time all three of us were out here.
I search his bedroom and his kitchen. Tommy searches everywhere else. After a half hour of looking, and of carefully returning everything to its assigned place, we come up absolutely empty. We get out of Crealey’s residence after 38 minutes have elapsed. I checked my watch when we went in and when we went out too.
It’s cold and dreary again. Thanksgiving moves ever closer, and they’re predicting snow tonight. It is Tommy’s day off, so he was able to break in with me without missing a shift.
We drive into Berwyn for yet another lunch at Garvin’s New Comeback Inn. The red and green and blue lights greet us as we sit at the slab. John Garvin is again working some of his ‘few’ hours a week. I think he’s worried his son is stealing from him, robbing the till, but Tommy thinks the old guy just feels lonely sitting at home with his fifteen year younger wife. The bar is all he’s ever known since his youth and his War experiences.
“Maybe you should drop me off at the Elgin Nuthouse, Tommy.”
“You’re not crazy, Lieutenant…But I think you’re having one of those fatigue spots in life.”
“I couldn’t rest when he sent me home.”
He being the Captain.
“I know. Sometimes you just get so tired of everything…I don’t mean just this case, but everything. Guys in Vietnam got themselves killed sometimes when they hit fatigue, like that. They just sat down and waited for death…You know, like that cannibal in Moby Dick. What was his name?”
<
br /> “Queequeg,” John Garvin answers as he drops off our brats and soft drinks.
“You read the book, John?” I ask.
“Fuck no. I saw the movie with Gregory Peck…Me? Read a fuckin’ book? Yeah. Right!”
When John ambles away, Tommy can’t help but to laugh, and so do I.
“Yeah. This Queequeg just rolls his bones on the deck, and when he sees a certain configuration of the bones…He just stops, and then he asks the carpenter to build him a coffin…I read Moby Dick in Vietnam. They had a nice library at our base. Nobody used it but me and a couple of other oafs. No waiting in line there.”
“You think I’m hitting the end of the rope.”
“Not necessarily. But you’re getting a little bit frayed—wouldn’t you agree, Jimmy?”
“Yeah. I felt like I was coming loose a little, lately.”
“Maybe we should back off for a few days. If we were going to catch this prick quick, we would’ve had him by now. You can feel a long haul settling in, can’t you, Lieutenant?”
“I felt the long haul settling in the day I laid eyes on that hole in the ground in the Loop. They got too many troops, Tommy. We’re outnumbered. The Fibbies. The Wiseguys. The good old boys in DC and right here in Chicago. Christ, Vegas wouldn’t even give us a point, if they were making odds against us.”
“Take a few days. Sleep. You’d be amazed how a few z’s can make a difference.”
I take my partner’s advice. Natalie has to watch our sick kids. Tommy is getting tired from the double duty of his regular shift and the nights he’s been working with us.
I stay home with my wife for the next five days. We make love every chance we get because it seems like this time together is a gift, and we feel like we’ll never get a freebie like this again soon. So we take full advantage. When we aren’t making love, we take turns caring for the girls. But on the third day the girls are better and are back off to school. And on each afternoon, we’re free to crash in the bedroom because my mother watches over the kids until she goes home around seven. All this leisure time feels weird to me.
I have never felt closer to Natalie than I do now. There is no other world, temporarily, no cases to clean up. For a few days it’s just the two of us and the kids.
My leave of absence ends on Monday. This is Thursday. As I said, the girls are back at school. Natalie’s leave is nearly gone too—she’s due back on afternoons this coming Monday.
It’s Friday. The kids are in class. My mother’s not due until 2:30. And Natalie and I have been making love since the moment the girls boarded the school bus. I’ve been making full use of the pecker pills the doctor has prescribed for me, and my wife and I have just about reached the point of sexual fatigue. We’re worn out in a wonderful way, so we sleep for a few hours in each other’s arms.
“You’re closer to me now than you ever have been,” I tell her.
“I know. It’s great, isn’t it, Jimmy? Maybe I should stay knocked up all the time. You say the same thing every time I get pregnant.”
“I do?”
“Yes…It just escapes your memory after I deliver the baby. There’s always a special closeness when you’re pregnant and when you make love then. Didn’t you have it for your first two kids?”
“I must have. You’re right…So how come it only lasts, that intensely, I mean, when your pooch is full?”
“Don’t you normally feel close to me?”
“Yes, Red. You know I do. It’s just when a birth is imminent…It’s just different.”
“Probably all that testosterone going nuts.”
“I took these days off because I thought I was going to have a breakdown.”
“Jimmy—“
“It’s okay. I talked to Tommy about it and he noticed how tired out I was…Look, I think this is really it. This is my last time out. I owe it to all of us to walk away when this is done—“
“Don’t make a decision like that now. Take your time. You can retire anytime you want to, baby, but don’t rush it because you’re feeling a little fried.”
“Okay. I’ll wait until we get this guy. But I’m telling you…Get used to having me around the house. I’m starting to like it.”
I nudge her. She smiles.
“Oh, my,” she laughs. “You are the persistent one, aren’t you, Jimmy P.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
I get the phone call on my first day back in Homicide. This is the short week of Thanksgiving, so my seniority gives me Thursday off. Unfortunately, Natalie has to work until five in the PM, so my mother and I do the big dinner. All the kids, big and little, will be home in the evening together, at least.
“Lieutenant Parisi?”
“Yes.”
“I have information regarding the explosion at that building downtown.”
“You mean the Anderson—“
“Yes. I have information.”
“Would you like to come to my office and—“
“I don’t think so.”
I hear a slight British accent. It could be Aussie or New Zealand, but I think it’s a formal Brit accent.
“Then where would you like to meet?”
“Somewhere very public, Lieutenant.”
“Choose it, then.”
“By the Picasso. The big sculpture. You know it?”
“Sure…But why can’t you come here?”
“Meet me by the Picasso at noon. Don’t be late.”
“How will I know it’s you?”
“I’ll know you, Lieutenant. I’ve seen your picture in the paper.”
“You mean noon today?”
“Yes. Do not be late. You understand?”
“Yes—“
He hung up before I could get Tommy and have him start a trace.
*
“We go together,” Natalie says. “This stinks, Jimmy,” my wife tells me while she sits opposite my desk in my office/cubicle. Tommy Spencer stands next to her. He nods in agreement with her assessment.
“We’re not on the Anderson case, officially,” Tommy reminds us all. “We’re reassigned, and Natalie was never assigned to it in the first place. What’s Grandy say?” he asks Natalie. Bart Grandy is her current partner in Homicide.
“He’s on a three week vacation. I’m all alone at the moment,” she smiles.
“We keep this to ourselves, then,” I say.
“Dangerous, Jimmy. She’s right. This stinks.”
It’s already eleven o’clock. We don’t have much time to make it to the Picasso sculpture. It is the piece of art Chicagoans either hate or love. Picasso wasn’t much for those who sat on the fence.
We take the elevator down to the parking level, we get to the navy blue Taurus, and we take off—But not before Natalie has handed Tommy and me our Kevlar vests, and not before she insists we cinch up before we drive off. She puts hers on while Tommy and I get into ours. Then we take off toward the Picasso.
It isn’t too far from HQ, but the Loop traffic is snarled up on this Monday before Thanksgiving, and we’re twenty minutes into the drive before we go ten blocks. Finally the road clears and we approach the square where the famous work of art lies. I get out with Tommy, and then Natalie emerges out of the backseat. We take just a few steps toward the Picasso sculpture when the explosion literally knocks us down.
My first reaction is to reach for my wife, my pregnant wife. She’s flat on her back and blinking, as I crawl next to her.
“Natalie!”
“I’m all right…Just…Just had the wind knocked out of me, Jimmy.”
She struggles to sit up. Then I hear the screaming from voices closer to the Picasso. I get to my feet, finally, and I see Tommy slowly rising behind me. It seems all three of us have survived the blast. There also seem to be some victims before us who might not have been as lucky.
The good news is that no one’s dead. The bomb expert, Billy Tyler, arrives on scene, examines what is left of a suitcase left on top of a bench near the Picasso. The sculpture its
elf doesn’t seem to be badly damaged. And the pedestrians who went down near the suitcase seem to be superficially wounded.
“It wasn’t meant to kill, Jimmy,” Billy Tyler says. “It was meant to be loud and frightening. No one was killed. The injuries were lacerations. Worst case scenario: A few punctured ear drums from the blast. It was for show, Jimmy, not for any kind of real go.”
“That thing was set for me,” I explain to Tyler.
“Say again?” Tyler asks.
“I was supposed to meet someone with information on the Anderson bombing…At noon. He told me to be on time.”
“You’re five minutes early,” Tyler tells me, looking at his watch. “He didn’t want to hit you. He just left a message for you, right?”
I nod, and then Tyler walks off to examine the scene. The paramedics are already dealing with fifteen or twenty pedestrians who walked too close to the explosion. They all seem to have survived it, as Tyler told us.
I’m still shaken from the blast, and now I’m very worried about Natalie and the unborn baby. So Tommy and I drive her to Rush Memorial while the explosives people deal with the ravages of that suitcase bomb.
“I can’t find any damage,” the ER doctor says. “The Kevlar vest protected her—and you two—very well. Not even a bruised rib.”
“We weren’t close enough. We were early. He never meant that thing to go off at noon. He wanted it to blow before we got there. It was like Tyler said,” Tommy tells the ER doctor, Fred Manske. “It was a message. A warning and a message.”
“What was the message?”
“Don’t play with explosives,” Tommy smiled.
When Natalie got dressed and out of the ER examination room, we left Rush Memorial Hospital.
