by Thomas Laird
*
“You have to let us go back on the Anderson case,” I tell the Captain.
I’ve explained how we went after the case when we weren’t supposed to, when I was on leave and when Natalie and Tommy were off shift. I wait for the Captain to explode, but the boil-over never arrives.
“This bomb thing shows you we were going the right way. Someone knows I’m after them, and that someone is the guy who lit up that goddamned building, Captain!”
“I know.”
“You know?”
“I knew you were right when I made you take the leave of absence.”
“Maybe you better explain, then. I don’t think I’m following.”
My face mirrors the questions on the faces of my wife and Tommy Spencer. We’re all here together in the Boss’s office.
“You were right. The FBI wanted us out of the way. The orders came from above. As high as it goes around here, Jimmy. I was told not to give any explanations. I was told to get you two to back off. I was told in no uncertain terms. But I apologize for lying to you. This whole goddamned deal has been one lie piled on top of another. I came pretty close to resigning, Jimmy. I want you to know that.
“And then I knew I couldn’t make anything right if I left. If I stayed, if I waited, I thought, maybe I could make it right, in the end. I’m sorry I lied to you.”
“I understand.”
“I wish I did, Jimmy. All I know is the Anderson Building didn’t go down by Bin Laden’s hands. You were right from the beginning.”
“I wish I could feel redeemed, Captain, but we don’t have the fucking time.”
He laughs out loud, along with Tommy and my wife.
“No. We don’t have time for a fucking pity party, do we.”
“There was a blond guy in that construction outfit in Mokena I’d like to talk to. We need to find him.”
“The guy with the ponytail?” Natalie asks.
“Yes.”
“You think he’s the sole perp?” the Captain wants to know.
“I think he’s one of them.”
“Them?”
“Yes,” I tell the Boss of Homicide. “I don’t think one guy is responsible. Too much coordination involved. It could be the blond alone, but I have the gut feeling there’s more than one. They knew we didn’t buy the Nine One One cover, and they’re getting a little nervous. Maybe because I’ve been talking to the right people—I don’t know. Walker S. Hansen, now there’s a powerful piece of shit. And I got up close and personal with Raymond Crealey. Raymond doesn’t seem like a player, but you never know. I’ve been nudging someone’s nest, and they’re not happy with me…We got there a little closer to that suitcase when it went off and they might’ve done some damage to us. Especially to my wife and baby, Captain. This shit is suddenly getting personal.”
“I don’t imagine you want me to reassign you.”
“No offense, Captain, but if you did reassign me, I’d just have to shoot the Captain in the head. Friendly fire.”
The Boss nods, and then slowly a smile covers his face. Smiles are very unusual on our Leader’s visage.
“You are not going to be reassigned or redirected or re-anything. You’re our guy. Go get this prick. Go get these pricks…Natalie, I assume you want in with your husband on this?”
“Yes sir.”
“Very unusual to have a husband/wife team. So the three of you need to keep that fact to yourselves. Am I clear? Only I’ll know that you’re hanging with Jimmy and Spencer on this one. No one else needs to know unless I say so. Yes?”
Natalie smiles and nods and we leave the Captain’s office.
*
“They could’ve hurt you. Killed the baby.”
“Quit turning the heat on, Jimmy. The job has its dangerous moments. We’ve always known about it. Don’t patronize me, baby.”
Instead I hug her. Right in front of Spencer in my office.
“Too bad we couldn’t trace the call…You think Hansen or Crealey really are players in this thing, Jimmy?” Tommy asks.
“Longshots…I’m sniffing something better organized than a couple of individuals. Hansen didn’t need the money, but that girl who worked with his wife Greta kept remarking how competitive he and Greta always were…Then Crealey comes off like a spook. There’s something wrong with his act. Sixteen years he’s with the Building…Has he got some personal vendetta against that Merton guy and the company that owns all those properties? And who in blue hell is this blond guy with the ponytail?
“We need to interview anyone close to that blast. Anybody who could’ve spotted somebody lingering, somebody who laid down that suitcase.”
During the fourth interview of bystanders to the Picasso blast, we hear the magic words.
“I was riding my bike around the square a half hour before it went off.”
The girl is eighteen and stunningly pretty. Not beautiful yet, but she will be when she flowers, around age twenty-five. This girl will surpass pretty into astonishing when she’s fully matured. She’s still a bit tall and gangly, and the freckles make her look younger that her eighteen years, but it is apparent already that God has spent way too much time with this breathtaking child.
Her name is Nadine Grant. She is a freshman art student at the Art Institute on Michigan Avenue.
“I saw a man put the suitcase on the bench. Then he sat down next to the suitcase. By that time I’d ridden past him and the bench, out there in front of the Picasso, and I was about to take another lap around the block. By the time I circled back, the man was gone.”
“Can you remember what he looked like?” I ask her.
Natalie and Tommy are sitting in on this interview downstairs from our offices.
“Not really…He was medium height, I think. I can’t be sure.”
“Nadine, would you consent to being hypnotized?”
She smiles her ungodly pearlies at me and I think I’m falling in love with this waif. Then I look over at Natalie, who is pursing her lips strangely, aiming a look in my direction.
“Okay,” she giggles. “I’ve never been hypnotized before,” she giggles again.
We sit in the back of the small auditorium as Dr. Stan Michaels, one of the CPD’s staff shrinks, puts the girl under. It’s the voice, Stan explained to me, not any object he might use to have her stare at. He’s using his Masonic ring for her to focus on, but I’m wondering if his hypnotic voice isn’t putting all of us, Tommy and Natalie and me, under his ‘spell.’
When she’s fully under, when she’s hypnotized and fully relaxed, he starts right in. He asks her general questions about what she observed at the plaza where the Picasso rests, and after about ten minutes into the interview, Stan gets it out of her.
“He was blond. He was wearing one of those fashionable black hats—not quite like a beret—backwards…But I could see his blond hair dangling out beneath the brim of his backwards black hat…It was…I’m sure it was.”
“What, Nadine? What was it?”
“It was a blond ponytail, tied with a short, thin black ribbon.”
“How old was he?”
“It’s hard for me to tell men’s ages…Not old. Not young. And I even saw his eyes because I passed very close to him…They were green. Green with strange, colored specks in them. Yes, they were green, with specks. I’m sure of it.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
The sketch artist for the CPD, Ben Trilling, comes in at the tail end of Nadine’s hypnosis, and she gives our man a reasonable likeness of the man with the ponytail. He’s wearing the black hat in the sketch, and he’s got his blond mane tied with that thin black ribbon.
Ben sends the sketch through the FBI’s files of known felons, and two hours later we have a hit on their computer. The blond is Alexei Grodnov. He is a convicted felon for armed robbery. He served time in Chino in California, and he is thought to be a member of the Russian Mafia in Chicago. Grodnov has been arrested numerous times, but never convicted since his stretch in Chi
no on the West Coast. He is suspected of being murderer for hire, extortion for hire and several other for-hires associated with the Russian mob. Grodnov is a US citizen because of marriage to an American wife—he’s now divorced. He has three children who live with his ex-old lady.
We get the call from Jack Donlan, Special Agent in charge of the Anderson Building tragedy, precisely one hour after we receive the information from the FBI files.
“You will not intrude on an ongoing investigation that concerns the Bureau,” Donlan pontificates from behind his desk at the FBI Headquarters in the Loop.
“The Anderson case took place in the city,” I tell him.
“We won’t argue whose venue it’s in. This is a National Security item, and that takes precedence over any local beef.”
“Nothing takes precedence over murder, Donlan.”
He gives me his version of the thousand yard stare, a look that was perfected in our last few Wars.
“As far as we’re concerned, the Anderson explosion was perpetrated by agents of Al Qaida.”
“Bullshit,” I answer.
Tommy Spencer sits up in his chair but doesn’t speak. He and I are the two Chicago Homicides being grilled by Donlan. My wife stayed away because she was told by the Captain to keep a low profile.
“The newest conspiracy theory is the Russians. Is that correct, Parisi?”
“I can’t comment on an ongoing investigation, Special Agent Donlan,” I smile.
“Bullshit,” he throws back at me.
He swivels his chair toward the window, his back to us. Then he swivels back our way.
“This is all off the record. You will not repeat anything that I say. If you do, if I see any of this in your buddy Van Dyke’s new series of exposes on the Anderson business…I’ll have you both fired. And I have the muscle to do it.”
“I don’t do well with threats,” I say.
Spencer stands when I do.
“Sit back down.”
We both resume the seated position. There is a sort of unusual earnestness about Donlan, suddenly, that forces us to sit back down.
“It’s not Bin Laden and it’s not Al Qaida. We knew it about the same time you did. But the Boss in D.C. wants us to assume the position because we need public sentiment on our side. We need the public so that we can invade Afghanistan. And perhaps some other countries in that region of the world as well…Do you two follow me?”
“They’ve created a lie so that they can blow up Arabs. So that they can blow up the bad guys…You don’t need the Anderson Building to go to war,” I tell him.
“They want the Anderson Building to be a symbol of what terrorists can do. Bombing targets in New York is one thing, but to hit us in the middle of the Heartland? Christ, Parisi! That’s incendiary. It’ll send the public over the top. We’ll have carte blanche to finally pursue these cocksuckers where they live. Don’t you follow? You two were in Vietnam, I’m told.”
“Yes, we were,” Tommy answers.
“Then you both know what happens when the middle class hitches its wagon to a war—or when it denies the military its approval, as the middle class did in Vietnam.”
“So we’re supposed to sustain a lie so we can nuke brown folks in the Middle East,” Spencer grins.
“It isn’t that simple and you know it,” Donlan argues.
“The Russians are our new buddies. You don’t want them to look like the bad guys in all this,” I add.
“That’s part of it,” he allows.
“What’s all of it?” I ask him.
“Grodnov is a big score. We’ve been after him for ten years and haven’t been able to lay a glove on him. He’s very bright. College educated in Moscow. Was in the Soviet Army when he was a kid. He’s no mug. If we can take him down quietly, fine. But we don’t want to upset any apple carts. Do you follow? Bin Laden is still the arch fiend in all this. You can give Grodnov your best shot, but I don’t think you’re going to have much luck.”
“What is it you want?”
“I want you to keep this out of the media. I want you to bust him if you can on anything but the Anderson Building explosion.”
“I can’t promise you that. He killed a thousand people, Donlan, if he’s our guy. What the fuck is wrong with you?” I ask him.
“I thought I explained everything very clearly. In international crime it isn’t good guys and bad guys. That’s the shit you feed the public on afternoon TV. The real world is far more complicated—“
“Shove it up your bureaucratic ass, Jack,” I tell him. Then I stand.
“Jimmy,” Tommy Spencer laughs aloud. “You bad bad boy.”
“Get the fuck out of my office, Parisi. You and your girlfriend.”
Spencer takes two strides toward Donlan’s desk before I grab him and hold him back.
“We’re alone. Like we always were,” Spencer says.
“Not quite,” I say. Then I take the recorder out of my jacket pocket.
“He didn’t search us. His bad,” I smile at Tommy.
“You going to Marty Van Dyke with that tape?” Tommy asks.
“No. It’ll be our little reserve for a rainy winter day. We’ll go after the Russian by ourselves and see how he shakes out.”
*
“One more time,” Tommy grins. “I could get used to this duty.”
We’re sitting in a booth opposite my cousin, Carlo Ciccio.
“You’re gonna get me whacked, you keep comin’ in here. They’re gonna think I’m your bitch, Cuz.”
There’s no smile on the pock-marked face.
“Why didn’t you tell me the Russians are on the playing field?” I ask him.
The black exotic dancer isn’t on shift tonight, it appears.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Alexei Grodnov.”
His eyes flicker briefly.
“You know him?”
“I’m going to live long enough to put one behind his ear.”
“What’s your beef with Grodnov?” Tommy asks.
“It’s territory. Am I telling you guys something you don’t already know? We both know that one-third of our muscle went down when my cousin Danny Cheech went away to Menard. It’s no fuckin’ secret. And the Russians, the fuckin’ weasels that they are, are like the fuckin’ Huns at the gates of Rome. They think they’re gonna take over Our Thing. They think they can smell blood. Them and the fuckin’ Vietnamese. But I’ll tell you what. The spics thought they were going to replace us and so did the niggers. They both found out the hard way, and so is Grodnov.”
“He might have blown the Anderson Building,” I say.
“Yeah, I heard that rumor too.”
“So help me make him and his friends pay.”
“I’m not an employee, Jimmy. I fight my own battles and I only fight for my family. You decided to go with strangers, the cops, and now you can live or die with them. Strangers… You stick with your family.”
“You’re living in ancient times, Carlo. That day has been dead for decades. You can help me nail the Russians, or you can watch the FBI let them off the hook in the name of glasnost,” I tell him.
“What?”
“The FBI wants the Arabs to take the hit for the Anderson blast. They don’t want us screwing around with their new allies, their new buddies, the Ruskies.”
“Nobody believes the Fibbies anymore. Not after all the directors getting shit canned. Not after the public hears that J. Edgar was a cross-dressing faggot. The FBI ain’t got the real muscle anymore. Watch, Jimmy. They’re going to disappear under the name of some other outfit, like maybe the CIA.”
“You can help me nail Grodnov before the Russians do the Feds’ job and wipe all of you Sicilians out. You’re on the way down if you don’t do something about this ponytailed son of a bitch, Carlo.”
He looks at me and then at Tommy.
“What is it you think I can do, Cousin?”
*
I go over Alexei Grodnov�
��s file. I find a current address on him since he has a legitimate job selling sprinkler heads on the northwest side.
I take his picture with a telephoto lens, across the street and through the front window of Kirkov’s Sprinkler Heads on west Fullerton. I’ll show the picture to Nadine and see if she can ID him. After I snap the photo, Tommy and I walk across Fullerton and then into the store.
He’s wearing the black hat backwards, and the ribbon is still six inches from the tips of his hair in the ponytail.
“Can I help you?”
It’s the voice I heard over the phone before the Picasso sculpture got smudged with the suitcase blast.
There is just a hint of a British accent.
“Alexei Grodnov?” I ask.
“Ah, Lieutenant Parisi. And who is this?”
“Detective Spencer,” Tommy tells him.
The store is empty. I’m sure it’s simply a front. They’ve copied the tactic from the Italians. There has to be a semblance of legitimacy.
“How’d you know me?” I ask him.
“The television. I’m a big fan. I’ve watched you on all those big cases…Marco Karrios, Carl Anglin—“
“All right…We’d like to ask you a few questions.”
“But I’m working.”
“We could do this downtown,” Tommy smiles.
“Then I would have to—how do you say it? Lawyer up?”
“You’re used to lawyering-up?” I smile.
“Sure. This is America. What a great country!”
“You have an alibi for September 11th and 12th?” I ask.
“Oh! Those two terrible days! I was right here.”
“I think you were in Mokena, Illinois, on one of those two days.”
“Which day would that be?”
“We have a witness,” Tommy tells him.
“Witnesses lie. Or they misrepresent. Or their memories become clouded after a time. I wouldn’t count on witnesses, Lieutenant.”
“I have someone who saw you plant a suitcase bomb downtown by the Picasso exhibit.”
“Again, Lieutenant, witnesses can be flighty. They can be mistaken. The wonderful thing about America is its legal system. Me? I’ve only been arrested once in this country. I’ve been questioned, I mean, but I’ve never been successfully prosecuted…”
