by Thomas Laird
He bends over and kisses me on the right cheek. The tears swell in my eyes, but I’m trying to smile, and maybe I show them a slight grin. It’s all that I can manage.
Chapter 36
Jimmy Parisi, Fall, 1981
Mary and Barry are still in full bloom. She’s living in the YWCA, as before, but she’s saving up for an apartment. She told me over the phone that when Barry graduates in a couple of years and when she gets her GED and gets into a junior college, they’ll talk about getting engaged.
She has to see a counselor about all the shit she’s been through, but the County is picking up the tab. Doc and I talked to Social Services, and they’re making it happen. But she told me she likes the therapist, and all the bad dreams are shutting down and getting scarcer and scarcer. She’s young, of course, and she’s resilient. I’m only in my thirties, but I don’t know if I could bounce back from what she’s been through.
Doc is back plugging away at the first draft of his great American novel, the one he gave me the plot summary for, but he won’t talk about it much, not even when we’re at White Castle on midnights and when there’s nothing else to talk about except the cases we’re involved in.
I’ve got all those names that were in red off the board, now, but I keep the list on a sheet of paper in my desk: Jacquelyn Martin, Sara Murphy, Tracy Amber, Jennifer Daye, Joan Kelly, and Terri Flynn—and the bag lady and the night watchman and Sandra are on that typed list, also. Nine names, nine lives gone.
I’ll keep in touch with Mary O’Connor and with Barry Gold. She says they want me to be godfather to their first kid, and they want Doc to be godfather for their second. I told her that might be a long way off, but she said it was going to happen, as sure as the earth keeps turning.
You got to admit, she makes things happen.
Her picture and story have been all over the papers, and some writer wants to write a book about her experience with Casey McCaslin. He told her that Hollywood might get involved. But she turned him down. She told him that all she wanted to do was go to school and have a life, a very private one, once all the uproar faded and people lost interest in what happened to McCaslin, one of the most notorious serial killers Chicago’s ever seen.
Who could turn down all that money and fame?
Mary O’Connor could and did, that’s who.
THE LAST SLEEP
Table of Contents
PART ONE
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
PART TWO
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER NINETEEN
CHAPTER TWENTY
PART THREE
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
EPILOGUE
PART ONE
And I looked, and behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him. And power was given unto them over the fourth part of the earth, to kill with sword, and with hunger, and with death, and with the beasts of the earth.
Revelations 6:8
CHAPTER ONE
Quang Tri Province, Vietnam
Dia Nguc Village
1972
My death is in me, this day, and all days. I was thinking that thought when the round from an AK47 spun me about like a child’s top and then propelled me into the brush. I could smell the burning as I lay there. Mortar rounds had preceded us into this shithole village that seemed of little consequence except for the three target VCs we were scheduled to kill. As I lay there a little longer, I could hear the screams that always attend an assault like this, and I knew that the quiet would follow. It was the silence that comes with the last breath of a human being or of a village replete with them. I knew I was bleeding, but I didn’t know where the wound was. It had numbed my body, but the pain would arrive inevitably. I’d been hit three times before, in country, once in the right thigh and once in the right arm and once in the left arm. The hurt would show up in due course. Then the air went still, but I could still smell the burning.
I passed out about then, and I saw the dark, and the dark saw me.
Brandon Wiles woke me up with salts. He told me the chopper was coming and he was going to help me to the landing zone, about a half klick from where I was still on my back. I asked him how’d he figure on getting me to the chopper on his own, and he smiled and replied that he’d drag my dumb ass all the way to the clearing where that green meadow was.
And then he proceeded to do just that.
I felt every jolt until the morphine kicked in, and then I went and nodded off until I awoke to find the evac chopper roaring, with its blades kicking up dust all over. When they’d got me aboard, I got stuck again by the medic, and this time the lights stayed out.
*
I saw what they—I mean I saw what we—did in Dia Nguc. I don’t think I pulled the trigger once because I was too busy being frozen, watching the other operators splattering those three VC all over the greenery in the village. But no one stopped with the three targets. They—I mean we—canceled all of them—several children, a few old people, and the females who must’ve been the mothers of the kids. There were only aged males in the village. The men were either dead or they were elsewhere. The only swinging dicks I saw were the VC in the crosshairs.
But we killed them all, anyway.
No witnesses. No survivors. It was a massacre, like Custer did to the Indians before Sitting Bull and friends caught up to the Seventh Cav in the Black Hills.
I never pulled the trigger, but I was there and I never did a goddam thing to stop those other operators from wasting every Asian in Dia Nguc.
*
I got out of the hospital three weeks later, in Japan. I hopped a transport back to my group, but I never reported back to duty in Quang Tri Province. Instead I took my pack filled with as many supplies as I could muster, and I took off for parts unknown, and ‘parts unknown’ is a pretty fair description of the jungle I slid into, and I kept right on slithering into the darkness.
I never stopped, and I never looked back.
Until I saw the muzzle of an ancient World War II M-1 pointed right at my forehead as I stepped into yet another verdant meadow, where the air smelled like the day that school let out for the summer.
*
Chicago, 1984
I took Erin’s death as hard as you’d suspect, but I never wept right away. My sorrow was like a slow fuse that never quite hits the charge with its flame. I suppose I must have cried somewhere along the line, but I had two children to consider, and breaking down in front of them wasn’t an option after my wife died of liver cancer.
It shut Erin down the way a machine would come to a halt after its insides had simply come grinding to a stop. I wasn’t in the hospital when she died because I was home feeding the two kids before the three of us went back to the hospital to see her. When we finally arrived at Christ Hospital in Oak Lawn, she was already gone. The nurse stopped us in the hall before we could see her.
I let the kids come in and say goodbye, and it was all I could do to not join in with their weeping, but someone had to be under control, and I was elected.
*
First day back on the
job, and Doc Gibron, my partner, went down with a messed-up left knee. It was going to be major surgery, and Harold (Doc) Gibron was going to be out for two to three months, depending on rehab.
I saw him in the hospital after he woke up from the surgery. He, also, was sliced and diced at Christ Hospital in Oak Lawn. I was becoming very tired of the place. Workers and staff were beginning to address me by my first name.
“Jimmy,” was all he could manage.
“This is a really chicken shit way of saying you don’t love me anymore.” I tried to smile.
“Detective Parisi.” He grinned weakly. “I think I’m going to puke.”
“Is it anything I’ve said or done, darling?” I asked.
I handed him the vomit bucket, and he spewed forth with only a little bile.
“Sorry, partner,” he managed to whisper.
“I won’t keep you up, sweetheart.”
Then I took Doc’s hand.
“Do what these idiots tell you to do. I don’t like working alone.”
Then I left him to heave again. Anesthesia is the worst. I saw Erin get sick from it a few times, her last few months.
*
Her name is Rita Espinosa, and she comes on with an absolutely lovely attitude.
“I’m not here to fill any goddam quota, Detective,” she declares in the locker room just about one minute after we meet there.
“No one thought you were the product of a quota, Detective Espinosa. We’re partners, and that sums it up.”
She looks at me like she’s unconvinced.
“You wouldn’t mind having me as your backup in a loosey-goosey scenario, then?”
“Can you pull the trigger?” I ask her.
“Yes. Absolutely,” she says, cold as an ice compress.
“Okay, then. We’re good,” I tell her.
She’s eyeing me dubiously, but I figure I’d do the same in her situation.
“I don’t date guys on the job. And I’m not a lesbian, either.”
I feel my face coloring just slightly, and the blush embarrasses me a little.
“I was recently widowed.”
“Damn,” she says. “I mean, I’m sorry.”
“It’s all right… And I’m not a lesbian, either.”
Her face wants to smile, but she won’t let it crack.
“I’ll try to keep this professional, at all times,” I finally say.
She slams her locker shut.
“You guys just don’t understand what it’s like,” she says.
“I understand you’re a Homicide Detective, and that’s really all I have to know.”
Her face seems to soften, and it’s a good face. Might even be a pretty one if she used any makeup, which she does not. No lipstick, no powder, no nothing. But you can still tell there’s an attractive woman under that natural flesh who might be quite the hot young thing, if she were of that persuasion.
As I said, I’m recently alone, so I haven’t been noticing female pulchritude, as Doc the writer might call it. I’ve got work and I’ve got two kids, and I’ve got a bed that’s cold on one side of it.
She’s about five-seven, I’d guesstimate. Maybe 135 pounds. Not big on top, and not bulky like some body-builder female. Some lady cops spend more time in the gym than males do. Maybe it’s to compensate. Hell, I don’t know. I’ve never had problems with women as police officers, and surely women are as smart and as durable and as brave as any swinging dick on the force. I suppose I just thought I’d never have anyone besides Doc as a playmate on this job.
“I’m sorry if I came on too hard. And I’m sorry for your loss, Detective Parisi.”
We head out to the lot.
*
Rita drives. I don’t like driving these Ford hearses anyway. Everybody knows you’re a cop when you show up in one of these things, and it’s amazing that we don’t have more potshots thrown our way when we arrive on-scene.
The order of business is strapped to a chair—one of those wooden breakfast table type seaters. His hands are tied behind him with rope, the type you’d use to hang the wash if you’re old-school Chicago from the south side. He’s dressed in his underwear, as if he was awakened from sleep. We’ll see how long he’s been dead when the ME arrives, shortly.
It appears that he’s been shot in the back of the head. The hole is at the base of his skull, about midway in the back of the noggin. Very precision pop, it looks like. One shot, no muss, no fuss. This was no amateur, on first glance. Maybe an Outfit job. It’s the way the Italian-Americans do it when they want efficiency but when they’re not trying to make a statement by making the body parts wind up in the river.
This guy was left behind so we could find him. Which tells us that the gunner wasn’t concerned about leaving evidence. Also meaning that this was no crime of passion even though the victim was attired in his Jockey briefs and dago tee and that’s all. I don’t think the shooter was interested in anything psycho-sexual, so we probably won’t have to consult a shrink about any Freudian or Jungian possibilities, like whether the killer had mommy or daddy issues.
He did have an issue with the dearly departed, but I’m guessing it had nothing to do with mating season.
“Execution,” Rita says, glaring at me with her almond brown orbs.
“You think?” I ask.
“You being sarcastic?” She grins.
I see her pearlies for the very first time. White and even. I’ll bet she was born with good teeth. Suburban broads always needed braces, not chicas from the barrio. I’m guessing again, there, because I don’t know her personal history, although I doubt she’s from Lake Forest or one of those rich ‘burbs.
“Let me guess, Rita. You’re ex-military.”
“Who ain’t, in this business?”
“Branch?”
“Marines. But I missed Vietnam because of my age.”
“I didn’t miss Vietnam and I still I don’t. One hitch was enough.”
“Combat?” she asks.
Her pen and notebook have become suspended in front of her.
“So we’re into full disclosure?” I ask.
Now she smiles at me as if she’s lowered the guard just a fraction.
“You got a nice smile, Rita.”
Now it’s her turn to change that light tan face to a little darker tan courtesy of a rush of the red.
“His name is Carl Vincent,” the ME tells us.
He’s reading off a piece of paper. The ME’s name is Dan Trafficano, and as far as I know he’s no relation to the Outfit’s Trafficanos. He’s about fifty, perfectly tanned, and you might mistake him for a car salesman who just got back from Hawaii.
Vincent has been found in the middle of a three-flat on 91st and Bishop. The neighbors above and below never heard or saw a thing. Rita found out via the uniform who met us when we got here. So it’s starting off with a thud. There will be ballistics and fingerprinting and the usual assortment of Homicide chicanery, but in the end this is going to be a long road with seemingly no end.
You start to smell it coming, after a while.
*
Carl Vincent worked as an insurance salesman for State Farm. He just opened an office on 95th and Western. He formerly worked in two other insurance offices in two other locations on the far southwest side. He was unmarried and childless.
Maybe he was unattached, as Rita and I find out, because he was former military, and not just military but a member of the elite Army Rangers. And not only that, but beyond being an operator with the Rangers, he was a deadly sniper with seventeen kills to his credit. There is no more specific information because his experiences in Vietnam, of which he was a veteran, are classified—as usual. So the well from the Army is shallow.
“They’re secretive shits,” Rita tells me at lunch break at White Castle on 95th and Western.
We just took a look at Vincent’s office, a few blocks away.
“Who?” I ask after chomping into cheeseslider three.
“The Army.
Your guys.”
“The Marines weren’t clandestine?” I retort.
“Clannish, but not clandestine.”
She never eats on lunch break. Just coffee or a Coke.
“You on a diet?” I ask her.
“You think I’m fat?” she laughs.
“No. Hell no. But you never—”
“I can’t eat this shit, Jimmy. You keep it up and it’ll kill you. I’m a vegetarian.”
“How’d that work out in the Marines?” I query.
“I stopped the animal flesh the day I demobilized.”
I wash down the fourth and final cheeseslider with the rest of my Coke.
“You remember what Claude Rains said to Humphrey Bogart at the end of Casablanca?” I ask Rita.
“I don’t watch old movies, so no.”
“I think this is going to get very interesting. That’s all I meant, Rita.”
“You mean this Carl Vincent thing?”
“That, too,” I tell her.
CHAPTER TWO
Quang Tri Province, 1972
He leads me at the point of that M-1 into a village that appears magically after we walk and struggle through endless tracts of bush and thorns. I feel the tip of the barrel goading me forward when I come to an impasse in the thick vegetation, but we finally come to an opening, to a clearing, and there are scattered hootches of bamboo and straw in front of me.
His hut is on the far left. He nudges me into the doorway, and there I see a woman of indeterminate age. She could be fifty or twenty or seventy—her hair color is black and will not betray her number of years in this life, in this wilderness.
“I speak English. And French,” she says. Her accent sounds British.
“I’m an American,” I say.
“It is apparent,” she replies.
She gestures for me to come closer to her. First I look to see if her hands are empty, but then I recall the M-1 behind me.
“You are GI. We are Hmong. We are from Laos, and we are in hiding from the VC, just as you are, it is apparent.”
Her words sound odd, as if she’s pasting them together from a movie or from a television show. I don’t know whether to laugh or weep.
