by Thomas Laird
“You got anything in your pockets?” I ask the gangly punk.
He doesn’t answer. He’s got close-cropped hair, almost a military cut. He doesn’t look the part, close up. He might be an ex-military, for all we know. Looks clean-cut, from what I can see. He’s wearing jeans and a polo shirt and white Converse All Stars. Typical young man, out looking for pussy, I’m thinking.
Until Doc unloads a straight razor from his right front pocket.
*
He says his name is Joseph Taylor. He’s twenty-two years old, and he just got back from four years in the Marines. He also just missed Vietnam. We look at his driver’s license and Social Security card, and what he says is confirmed. We run his name in our files and nothing comes up. He was honorably discharged from the Crotch six months ago.
I sit across from him in the interview room. Doc sits to his left. Popping this kid with a phone book probably wouldn’t have worked in the old days, and I figure it wouldn’t get anything out of him now.
“I killed those six girls. The ones that were in the paper,” he says before we can ask a question.
“No you didn’t,” Doc says.
“Yeah, I did,” he repeats.
“You were copying what the real killer did to those kids, weren’t you?” I say.
“No, sir. I killed them. I really killed all six of them, and I was going to kill that girl tonight, too.”
He says the “no sir” very politely, as if he were addressing his drill sergeant during basic training.
“You were a Marine?” Doc asks.
“Yessir, I was. Got out—”
“We know,” I tell him. “Why don’t you tell us what you were really doing with the girl out there on the beach.”
He looks at me quizzically, like I just don’t get it.
“I was going to cut her throat and get the body bag out of my trunk and then throw her off the pier—just like I did with the others.”
“There was no body bag in your trunk. We looked,” Doc informs him.
“I…I must have forgot it. I would’ve thrown her in the trunk and then gone back to my house and then got it and then I would’ve taken her back and tossed her into the water.”
Doc takes a drink of the cup of water he brought with him to the interview room.
“You live at the address on your driver’s license?” Doc asks.
“Yessir,” he says.
I study the kid’s face carefully. His eyes are a bird’s eggs’ blue. He is tan from being outdoors. He’s handsome, really, but his face is sad. Sad like he’s been to some war somewhere. But I’m thinking his war was fought on the inside of him. This kid needs to be in a hospital, not a jail cell. He seems shaky, but I can’t see him cutting that girl’s throat. I can see him cutting his own.
“I live with my mom.”
“No dad?” Doc asks.
“He died when I was eight.”
It appears as if his eyes are filling up.
“My mom is sick. She has leukemia.”
“I’m sorry to hear that,” I tell him. “So your dad is dead and your mother’s ill and you were going to kill that girl, tonight,” Doc says.
“I killed all of them, the six kids, I mean. You need to stop me. You need to put me in jail where I can’t hurt anyone again.”
“You didn’t kill anyone, and you weren’t going to kill the girl, tonight. You just want to get away, and you don’t have any idea where you can go,” Doc tells him.
Joseph Taylor looks at each of us, one at a time. The tears flow, and Doc tosses him a box of tissues from the table behind him.
“We’re not shrinks, Joseph,” Doc tells him softly. “We’re homicide detectives; that’s all. But we can get you some help, if you want us to.”
“How?”
“You can talk to someone at County Hospital. We’ll give you a ride over there. But first you have to tell me that you didn’t kill those six teenagers and you weren’t going to hurt that girl, tonight,” I tell him.
“I took the straight razor from the house. I thought I could do it, but I knew when I looked her in the eyes I couldn’t cut her. They taught us how to use a knife in the service, but I never had to use one on anyone, or a gun, either. They were trying to make us what they called lean, green, fighting machines, but I don’t know if I could’ve ever pulled the trigger or used a bayonet or a k-bar on anybody. I thought about it and I thought about it, but I still don’t know if I could’ve done it.
“My dad died when I was little, and then my mother’s dying, and there’s nobody left. I don’t have anybody else. They’ll both be dead soon, and then there won’t be anybody left. I’m sorry I lied to you.”
I get up from my chair.
“Come on. Let’s take a ride,” I tell him.
“Yessir.”
“My name’s Parisi. His is Gibron. We were both in the military, and neither one of us knew what we were going to do in Korea or Vietnam until we did it. I lost my old man. He fell down the stairs and broke his neck. Everybody loses people. I don’t think the world needs to lose you. What do you think, Joseph?”
Doc pats him on the shoulder, and we take him out to the parking lot.
*
The girl’s name was Jeannette Mallory, and she’s a whopping fourteen. She prefers no charges on Joseph Taylor. She says he was just a nice guy and wanted to talk. That’s all. Talk, she said.
Doc told her Taylor had a straight razor in his pocket, and Miss Mallory blinked.
She’s a runaway, and we delivered her over to Social Services. It turns out that she’s got nobody and nowhere to return to.
And now I begin to think about a thief and a murderer who’s made it his business to put Social Services out of business.
*
Casey McCaslin, 1980
Mary disappears, sometimes. Mostly it’s during the day. I’ll be in the can, and when I come out she’s gone. And then she reappears a few hours later. I’m thinking Parisi will sooner or later see her coming in here or going out, and then he’ll have me for statutory, and I’ll be back in the can with no way back out, this time. With my sheet, this’ll be all I need.
So when she comes back from one of her little day trips, I brace her.
“Where were you?” I ask.
“Out. Just out.”
“You go out without telling me again, stay the fuck out. Don’t come back.”
Then the little bitch turns on the waterworks.
“You can can that shit. It don’t float.”
“I don’t want to make you mad.”
“You’re underage, you understand? If I get caught with you living here, I’m in deep shit. I mean jail, you follow?”
“Why?”
“Look, I’ve been in trouble. They catch me with jailbait, I’m fucked. I’ll go inside again.”
“You were in jail?”
She gives me her big, innocent eyes. Like a pooch’s big browns, begging.
“I got in a little trouble.”
“For what?”
“Taking shit. You know, no big fucking deal.”
“You want me to stay inside all the time?”
She’s got a few more droplets welling up. It makes me fucking nuts. I should’ve cut the cunt on the first night and put her into the drink.
She comes over to me and takes my face in her hands. I’m starting to waver, the way I always do when she pulls this shit.
Then she kisses me. I don’t know where an ‘eighteen’ year old learned how to slip tongue the way she knows how to.
The heat works its way downward, and the next thing I know is she’s got me out in the air, and she’s got her jeans on the floor, and she’s pulled aside her thong panties, and I’ve got her legs over my forearms and her back is against the living room wall, and I’m pounding her as hard as I can and her eyes are up on the ceiling, but nothing comes out of her mouth, and I’m hoping her bullshit about using the pill she got from some free health service isn’t bullshit like her b
eing only ‘eighteen’ or fifteen or whatever the fuck she really is.
Her face says fifteen, but her body and the way she clamps on me as she goes off electrically are definitely in a different time zone. She does me the way forty year old pros have done me. Her body is way too mature for that face, but I’m out of control the way I always am under her spell, her voodoo magic. We pulse together for a very long time before I let her down from where she was, above me.
Chapter 12
Jimmy Parisi, Present
“How did you finally catch him?” the female Academy candidate asks me again.
I look out into the wash of over 200 young men and women, and it’s hard to see their faces because of these goddam theatre lights that are glaring into my eyes. So I squint, and I can just barely see the young woman in the third row who is apparently adamant to learn how Casey McCaslin was brought to ground.
She seems to have dark, cropped-short black hair, but I can’t make out her features very well. She seems short of stature, from what I can make out, and I wonder how she qualified for the height requirement. But I’m told that they’ve loosened up on the physical traits as long as you’re in fit condition. Lean is more important than tall, these days. I come from a history of fat cops on the force, but they’re not tolerating it much, anymore. You get too big and you ride the desk—and you don’t get in, in the first place, lately.
“We damn near didn’t,” I reply with my hand trying to block all that blaring illumination from my eyes.
“But how did it finally go down?” she insists.
I hear some chuckling from the other candidates.
“You’re getting cop talk from TV, right?”
There’s some sporadic laughter.
“That’s okay. It’s hard not to let that shit rub off on you. Like the beauty queen CSI tech who walks into a room that’s a crime scene and flashes her chic little pen flashlight all over the room when all she’s got to do is turn the light switch on as she enters.”
There is a little louder laughing, this time.
When they settle down, I look down at her.
“The street will straighten all of you out, someday soon. Then all the cop show crap and TV clichés will suddenly desert you, and you’ll start talking like a police officer in that nice, blunt, staccato rhythm that you’ll hear until it becomes your rhythm of speech. This is a good thing for all of you, this Academy, but you’ll know the job better when the job comes to you, out there.
“We got Casey McCaslin by being persistent. Persistence is usually the way the difficult cases end. He was smart, smarter than the usual piece of shit murderer on the street. You’ve been told that most killings are no brainers, slam dunks as they’re called. And it’s true. People kill other people for the stupidest reasons you can imagine, and these perps get caught in a day or two. It doesn’t take Sherlock Holmes to put most of these idiots behind bars.
“But there will be cases that will try your faith as to why you’re sitting where you are now. There will come a day when you question the decision you made to join the police.
“McCaslin was like that for me. It was the beginning of my career in Homicide. I’d been a patrolman and a Robbery/Auto Theft detective before I got to Homicide, and I was only at that top level a few years when he began doing his own thing.
“He was a thief first, and a killer second. We found out later why he went into his sideline of serial killer, but knowing why he did the girls really didn’t explain who this guy was and it didn’t shed any light on serial murderers themselves, I don’t think.
“Series killers are very difficult to understand at all. We send shrinks in to interview them, and the psychologists come out of the interviews with very little that enlightens policemen about that kind of creature. Quantico has guys you’ve read about from some of your courses here, and they’re very popular on the lecture circuit, and some of them have had success in predicting what these animals’ next moves might be after they’ve murdered a few people.
“But by and large serial killers are baffling to cops. They’re strange to any normal human being who has a working conscience. Why would anyone kill a number of children—because that’s what McCaslin’s victims were, girls who were barely teenagers. We know he says he was getting even with his mother for the abuse he suffered at her hands in his own youth.
“But he got even with Mommy Dearest, too. He beat her nearly to death and caused her to have a series of operations on her face. He waited until he was old enough and strong enough to inflict all that damage.
“Those young teens never did him any harm, obviously. Later, he said he did them because he was stopping them all from becoming someone like his mother. I don’t subscribe to his explanation or excuse whatever it was. Something inside him was allowed to surface and do the terrible things he did to them. Was it his hatred for Mom? Maybe. I think he killed them because he could, and because he thought he could get away with it.”
I peer down again at the young woman in the third row.
“That make any sense?”
“You think it was to assert his power?” she asks.
“Yeah. That’s in your readings, too, straight out of Quantico.”
“It’s the god-like power to take life, right?”
“Sure. Look how he kept trolling Old Town for his victims, and look how he kept tossing the body bags into Lake Michigan.”
She doesn’t answer.
“Boy, all these questions, today. Feels like a real conversation. Some of you other guys might try joining in.”
There’s a little more laughing going on. I feel like I’m on a roll.
“We caught him because we kept coming on, and most killers think cops have a tolerance level for failure, and then they get to the point where they’ll just give it up. Like Vince Lombardi, the old Green Bay Packer coach, used to say—‘fatigue makes cowards of us all.’”
“Why didn’t you quit, then?” a male voice booms out from the back.
There’s no chance I can make him out. He’s too far up in the back rows.
“Some people are just stupid that way, I suppose.”
A little more chuckling.
“Casey McCaslin killed a lot of unformed human beings. They were just children. I have kids. I kept thinking how I’d feel if the victims were my own blood, and I became angry. Anger isn’t even the right word. I thought of the injustice. I kept ruminating about the ego of some son of a bitch who thought he had the right to pull the plug on a child of God, and it made me very, very angry.”
I don’t hear any more forthcoming queries, so the lecture’s over, and I leave the stage.
*
Jimmy Parisi, 1980
My partner is a man of many hues and shades. He’s the most brilliant detective I’ve ever worked with, but I know he’s more than that. He has all those credentials in academia, and he’s a published short story writer. He’s had several pieces published in collegiate literary quarterlies.
“For which I received not a nickel,” he tells me as we have a beer at Fatso’s on the southwest side. We just got done at a crime scene about three miles from here on 83rd and Kedzie. It happened in a three-bed flat there. A guy came home and went into the bedroom after a midnights’ shift at a brand name bakery, and he brought a wrought iron skillet into the bedroom with him, and he promptly brained his wife for no apparent reason he could give to Doc and me when we interviewed him, on scene. The guy said the woman and he had five children, all out of the house now, and he said he was tired of looking at her sleeping in bed when he had to work all night long.
They were going to give him a free ride to Cook County Hospital to have a psychiatrist ask him if he has issues.
So we’re fresh off shift, and a beer seemed like a good idea. Fatso, the owner of Fatso’s, is a skinny little shit who could barely make bantam weight in boxing, but he was Golden Gloves champ at that weight in Chicago when he was eighteen. He told Doc and me that he always wanted to own a bar
so he could watch people acquire the pot belly he never seemed to gain for himself. Fatso looks like he could fight at his old weight today, as we watch him bobbing and weaving at the bar and at the cash register.
“I got to write the Great American Novel because it still hasn’t been done, Jimmy. It’s like a literary Mount Everest, to me. I’m going to do it because it’s there and it needs to be done. And when I sell the movie rights and all that good shit, I’m going to build a log cabin in northern Wisconsin, maybe up in the UP in Michigan, and I’m going to live like a literary hermit up in the fog and the chill and the snow. I won’t have to talk to assholes who clobber their wives with skillets, anymore.”
“When are you going to write this goddam book?” I ask him.
“Whenever the fuck it occurs to me. We’ve been a bit preoccupied with this McCaslin fuck, lately.”
“We’re supposed to let go of him,” I remind him.
“And how’s that working out for you?” he smiles.
“About as well as it’s working out for you.”
“Well, that’s how it goes in Homicide. You can forgive a man when he steals, if he’s trying to feed his family, like the guy in Les Miserables, Jean Val-what the fuck. That was just a loaf of bread, and the guy was starving and there was all that injustice going on. But someone like McCaslin just kills kids because he likes it or because a demonic parrot is telling him to do it.
“And I draw the line of crime right there, at stealing bread because you’re hungry. McCaslin has stepped way out of bounds, he has. So the Captain’s word that we’re not allowed to pursue the matter any longer has landed on deaf ears with the two of us. God forgive us, but I don’t care if the Boss forgives us or not. Nothing’s over until that prick pays a hundred fold for his sins.”
Fatso comes over to us with a refill on the Old Style drafts.
“You two fairies on a date?” the skinny man grins.
“You aren’t afraid we’ll arrest you for talking like that?” Doc laughs.
“Harold, I have no quibble with any man, except with the fools who got in the ring with me. Queer or not, you’re all just customers to me.”
