by Thomas Laird
Her man or her husband or whoever he is behind me with the World War II relic in his hands says something to her, but it isn’t in Vietnamese. I know a number of words in the language, and what he says doesn’t sound like the musical language of the indigenous personnel.
“He says you and your soldiers have slaughtered a whole village. Some of them were VC, he says, but the others were innocents. Is it true?”
Her skin has an olive glow to it. I can’t decide if she is beautiful or if she was beautiful, a lifetime ago.
“It’s true. We killed them all. There were women and children and old people. No young men, except for the three VC we came for and found.”
She looks through me and then over me and then back at me. Her eyes hate me, and I can find no reason why she shouldn’t.
“The VC is our enemy, as with you. But the others, they are murder.”
“Yes. It was that. Murder.”
She scans my eyes. She gestures for the rifleman to leave us.
“Do you feel shame?”
“I’m a soldier.”
“That is not an answer.”
I look into her brown eyes. The only thing that mars her beauty is a slightly snubbed nose. The Hmong have that characteristic.
“No. It is a lie. We are murderers. You’re right.”
I want to tell her I never shot anyone in that village, in that tiny hamlet called Dia Nguc, but it doesn’t seem to matter anymore that I never fired a shot. I was complicit. I did nothing. It was the sin of omission.
“Why are you out here alone?” she asks.
She motions for me to sit opposite her on a woven mat. Suddenly I am very fatigued, so I sit down. She sits cross-legged on the other side of the hut. Shadows conceal the right side of her face.
“I’ve left the war. I’ve gone AWOL, absent without leave. I’m a fugitive.”
She finally smiles.
“Like us,” she tells me.
*
Chicago, 1984
“The Cubs will fold. They’re too good to be true,” Rita says.
We’re at Wrigley watching the Cubs and the San Diego Padres, and she’s right, if there’s a way to take a dive the Baby Bruins will find it. The 1919 Black Sox were pikers compared to the North siders. Blowing it is an art form in Wrigley.
Rita got the box tickets on the third baseline from her brother who works downtown on the stock market. He’s one of those guys who screams and waves worthless paper at other guys who scream and wave equally worthless paper at each other. He gets comps, Rita explained, when she offered me the ticket last week, and I couldn’t think of a reason to refuse her and the ticket, so here we are. It’s sunny, it’s June, and nobody gets murdered here except the home team.
Today they are winning 6-0, so it feels like a surreal parallel universe.
Rita even buys the beers. She won’t let me take out my wallet. So I don’t protest because I’m cheap and because I can see the look of pleasure on her brown face for being able to treat her partner to a day at the ballpark.
The Cubs hold on and don’t manage to blow the game late, 6-5.
*
We go to the Cubbie-Bear Lounge across the street, and by now I’m a little woozy, but Rita seems like the rock she was back in the first inning. So I order a Coke as we sit at the bar. She orders an Old Style and a shooter of Jim Beam.
“If you go into your purse one more time I’ll shoot you dead,” I tell her, with a bit of wobble in my diction.
“You’re not a drinker,” she states.
The Cubbie-Bear is crammed with the after-game crowd of already-drunks, most of them from the right-field bleachers, where the truly odd people gather at the ballpark.
It’s so noisy, and the juker is so loud, that I have to strain to hear Rita.
Then she summons the bartender back and changes her order to a Seven Up.
“I don’t want you to think I’m a lush.”
“I don’t think you’re a drunk, Rita.”
She cups her palm to her left ear telling me she can’t hear me.
“LET’S TAKE THE DRINKS OUTSIDE,” I shout, and she nods and we take the bottles of pop out the doorway.
We amble back to the private parking lot on Clark Street where she got screwed into a $25 parking space that she insisted on paying for, as well.
We get into the Mustang convertible—her private ride—and she takes down the top, and the warm breezes out of the south come wafting at us.
“You haven’t said a goddam word about this dead guy, Vincent, Detective Parisi.”
She refuses to call me Jimmy even after I insisted a few times, but the more I hear it the better I like it. Only Rita calls me ‘James’. My kids call me Pa, and Doc always called me Wop, just to maintain the racial harmony.
“I don’t bring business to the ballpark.”
“Yeah, you do, even more than I bring work home with me. I can tell by looking into your eyes, James.”
“Can I ask you a personal question without getting pissed off and misunderstanding where I’m headed?”
“I don’t like the question; I won’t answer it anyways.”
Her voice isn’t even a little slurred, but I’m getting sleepy. Lucky she did the driving. Picked me up at the house.
“You seeing anyone?” I ask her.
She looks at me strangely. As if it was the weirdest question anyone ever asked her.
“Are your intentions pure, James? Like partner to partner? You ain’t hitting on me, right?”
“I ain’t hitting on you, right.”
“Somehow I’m real disappointed in you, James.”
*
We work Vincent from every angle. I talk with the Army CID types about him, but they’re not impressed that it’s a city investigation. They come from a totally different universe than Rita and I do. Their rules do not coincide with our laws. So I get nothing about Vincent’s military background that we don’t already know.
I look through the roster of Vincent’s fellow operators from the Vietnam War, and I make some inquiries as to their present locations. There were seven names on that list:
Frank Miranda, San Diego
Mark McIntosh, Portland (Maine)
Terry Dellacord, Tacoma
Evan Azrael, Unknown Whereabouts
Steven James, Unknown Whereabouts
Cal Johnson, Chicago
Carl Vincent, Chicago
Then I happen upon a news story at the Chicago Public Library about the murder of Frank Miranda in San Diego.
Rita is suitably impressed with my research. She looks across my desk as I peer out behind her through the window at my beloved Lake Michigan.
“Pure dumb luck,” she smiles.
She really shines when she flashes those white nuggets at me.
“You think?” I smile back.
“I heard how you’re the darling young man of Chicago Homicide, James.”
“Bullshit.”
“You do have a rep. Why’d you think I requested partnering with you in the first place? Because of your Italian charms?”
“That was Johnny Fontaine, alias Frank Sinatra, in the first Godfather.”
“You really that unaware of yourself, James?”
She makes me blush again. That’s three times more than I’ve colored like this in my whole life, and all three are her fault.
“You hitting on me, Rita?’
“And if I was?”
“It’d be unprofessional.”
“Yeah.” She grins again.
“We have two murders, young lady.”
“I thought that might be the theory,” she retorts.
“Same MO, same pool of victims. Both Rangers. No coincidences in this world, Rita. The cobweb has many threads, but it is all one body.”
“That’s really profound, James.”
“I got it from a Charlie Chan movie. It was on The Late Show, last Thursday night. I couldn’t sleep, so…”
“We got us a serial killer
.”
“Might just be.”
Neither of us is smiling, at the moment.
“Just luck, Rita. That’s all it was.”
“And the Chicago Public Library, God love it.”
“They say computers might kill off all the libraries as we know them.”
“It’ll be a sad day, James. A sad day.”
*
We go to Captain Lou Manfredi with our ‘discovery’ about the linkup with Carl Vincent’s murder, and he tells us to follow it.
“Would you rather be lucky or good, Jimmy?” Lou asks me.
He’s another of my countrymen in Homicide, but he could pass for a Greek or a Hispanic. All the male detectives here think Lou makes the ladies wet, and he is a handsome goombah, I have to admit.
I asked Rita if she thought he was hot, and all she replied was, “He’s the boss. That’s all.”
We check the lists to try to locate the living members, but we quickly come to a dead end with the survivors. Nothing. Not a trace or a scent in the breeze. We can’t find a track in the dirt. We call to all of their former addresses, and nobody’s home at any of them.
“It was too easy,” I tell Rita at White Castle. “Finding the key was too simple. We know the why, but we don’t know the who. It could be one of the survivors, and it could be another player unknown. It was all too goddam easy.”
This time she’s decided to do sliders. She says she’s famished, starving.
“You pregnant?” I grimace.
“You ain’t the daddy, that’s for damn sure… No, I’m not—”
“I know. You’re just really hungry.”
“Yes. That’s it, James.”
“What happened to the vegetarian?” I smile.
She washes down her three micro-burgers with the rest of her Coke.
“What made you think it would be simple in the first place, Detective Parisi?”
I take a bite out of my sixth and last grease treat.
I can feel the onions rising on me already. We’re on midnights, and it’s four in the morning, and we don’t get off until 7:30 a.m.
“There are five living members from our list of Army Rangers. Let’s just say the shooter of the two is from that breathing group—just for the sake of a theory,” I offer.
“We have nowhere else to begin. Otherwise it’s the X-Factor, the boogie dude who lurks out there in the void, in the deep abyss.” She grins.
“Someday you really ought to take your work seriously. I thought you were a stone when I met you in that locker room, but now I know—”
“I’m just flesh and blood.”
I’m blushing again, goddamnit!
My wife Erin never caused me to go red and hot in the cheeks. She made me hot, yes, but I never felt the flush the way I do with Rita. She’s my partner, I keep reminding myself.
“Johnson lives in the city. It’s about time we talk with him. Either he’s the hangman in this, or he’s the next to become extinct,” she says.
There’s nothing humorous in her lovely brown face, this time.
CHAPTER THREE
Vietnam, 1978
I was the White Buffalo. I was legend. The Viet Cong and the NVA couldn’t kill me. At least that was the legend. My new family, the Hmong, took me with them. We migrated westward until we came to Laos. Along the way we ambushed NVA and VC, taking their ammunition and food and equipment, if they had anything we could use.
We found cash on the bodies, sometimes, and the Old Man with the M-1, whose name I could never pronounce (so I simply called him the Old Man in Vietnamese) and the woman who spoke French and English, she of the ageless face, who I later called Auntie Alice (Alice was her French grandmother’s name) went along with us—there were sixteen from that village where the Old Man led me. We picked up news of the outside world from time to time, so we heard that the war ended in Vietnam in 1973 with the peace treaty in Paris, and then later we heard, in 1975, that Saigon had finally fallen. It was now called Ho Chi Minh City.
We drifted into Laos, my extended family and I, and we took what we needed as we went. Sometimes there was cash, as I said, and I knew that now I had added theft to murder among my many offenses, but it was a matter of survival, I told myself, and gradually I would have to go back to the United States.
It took three years to get to Thailand, and that is where I said farewell to my Auntie Alice and the Old Man and all the rest of my newfound clan of the Hmong. They turned back eastward because they thought I was going in the right direction and that they were going in the wrong direction. East was their native soil, and sooner or later the blood will determine your path, the Old Man told me.
There were no tears because the Hmong believed in flux, in change, in constant meandering. They had a culture of wandering, but their wandering had limits, too, and so we parted.
I finally emerged into Bangkok in the spring of 1980. I’d left my weapons in the jungle because I couldn’t very well bring them into a city. I kept a knife and a Beretta, but my M-16 was long gone, along with the AK47 I’d scavenged from some unfortunate NVA we’d encountered back in Vietnam. I wore some clothes we’d pilfered in our tour of Southeast Asia, and I left my fatigues in the brush. I’d made that unilateral break with my country, with the war, and with my adopted village of the Hmong.
I had plenty of cash from each of the countries we’d passed through, and I found a street vendor who pointed me in the direction of a man who could give me American dollars for the money I’d stolen from the dead left in our wake. It amounted to a small fortune, so the next person I sought out was a forger, a man who could sell me papers with a new name on them.
I still had some cash left over after I secured a flight to Singapore, and thence to San Francisco. The papers were top shelf, and I was never detained in an airport. When I arrived in San Francisco, I showed the new ID with the name William Roberts on it, and I was home.
*
Chicago, 1984
I spend time at the cemetery with Erin, but I never take the kids with me. Somehow bringing them to a churchyard is not acceptable to me, and they never ask to go along to see the grave, anyway. They know their mother isn’t there, really, and so do I, but her marker is all I’ve got left, except for memories and a few photos. It’s a symbol, everyone knows, and nothing more, but I almost feel like I’m closer to her there than anywhere else.
Erin never comes to me in dreams, but I wish she would. She died in the hospital, not at home, so I don’t figure she’ll haunt me there. She wasn’t the type to hold that kind of grudge, and as far as I know, she didn’t carry any bad feelings about me with her to the grave.
I want her at peace. I don’t want her lingering in my world. She was a Catholic, too, as I am, and she believed in Heaven, and if anyone ever deserved entry there, it was my wife.
It’s a sunny Sunday in August. I’m standing out in a cemetery in the heat and humidity of a brutal summer in Chicago, here on the far southwest side, and I’m staring at a piece of marble with my wife’s name and birth and date of death on it, and I’m not sweating, suddenly. I feel very cold and clammy and I’m wondering if I’ve got the flu. But I know I’m not sick.
I’m just absolutely alone.
*
Cal Johnson cracks open the door of his apartment in Beverly, here on the south side. We show him our ID, and then he slowly creaks the door open like it’s a haunted house flick.
I’m expecting to see sheets thrown over furniture and cobwebs dangling from the ceiling, but instead Rita and I see a spartan little apartment with a single bedroom off to the right of us—the door is open and we can observe a single bed made up in the precise military style, and I know you could bounce a quarter off the top of it. Very GI.
I see the tiny kitchenette off to our left, and we are all three standing in the heart of his modest living room with a couch and a chair, but, conspicuously, no TV set. There are instead shelves of paperback books, mostly novels, on the two walls of this part of his micr
o-flat.
He stands before us an average-sized male of about five feet nine, perhaps 170 pounds. He’s a black man of African complexion, but he’s got stark blue eyes that are absolutely out of place on that African visage. He sports a medium Afro that has been neatly manicured. Cal Johnson looks like a Zulu warrior—he’s lithe and lean and muscled for grace and speed.
He indicates that we should sit on his couch across from him, now seated on his recliner chair.
Johnson doesn’t ask us the obvious: why the hell are we here? He waits. He’s been through interrogations before, I’m thinking.
I look over at Rita, and she’s got her eyes planted on Cal Johnson, and it’s as if I’m not in the room with them. I’m thinking she might be admiring this specimen of ex-fighting machine, this ex Army Ranger.
“We’d like to ask you about some men that you were with in the war,” I finally manage.
“My time in the service is classified, and I can’t speak about it, I’m afraid.”
He sounds very bright, very quick. I’m guessing well educated, also.
“This is a murder investigation,” Rita tells him straight up.
“I know,” he replies. “It’s about Carl Vincent.”
He and Rita still have eye contact. I’m the odd man out, here. It’s starting to piss me off.
“Carl isn’t the only one. Frank Miranda took a .22 to the back of the skull, assassination, execution style. I’m assuming you detect a pattern here?”
He finally tears his eyes away from my partner, and he bores in on me.
But he doesn’t say anything for an extended moment.
“As I said, I’m not able to remark on anything that happened—”
“We’re asking you about the murder of Carl Vincent and Frank Miranda. They were operators with you in the war, but I’m asking you about now, not about then,” I shoot at him.
“I only know what I read in the newspapers about Carl’s death.”
“It was a murder, Mr. Johnson,” Rita adds.
“Yes, I understand it was a homicide, but I don’t know anything about it.”
This man, like his partners, is lethal. He might have pulled the trigger on Carl, after all.
