The Vendetta

by Thomas Laird

  “He made us, yet?” Doc asked.

  “Probably caught sight of us leaving the track. We were obvious enough. We did everything but announce ourselves over the PA at Arlington. I like watching the thoroughbreds.”

  “Yeah, me, too. But I can’t afford them. I’m a really unlucky gambler. I think my ex cast a spell on my dumb Polish ass.”

  They waited in the Crown Vic outside at the curb where they parked illegally. A parking maid approached them, and Parisi had to flash the badge. The Meter Maid looked disappointed.

  “You just crashed her party,” Doc observed.

  “Whattayougonnado,” Parisi mumbled.

  They waited for three hours, and finally the lanky Outfit soldier came loping out of the high- rise apartment building all by himself.

  “You think he met his sexual bliss up there somewhere?” Doc wondered aloud.

  Vince Cabretta looked at the copper ride as if he’d only just now spotted them.

  “Aw,” Doc said. “He knows his ride is here.”

  In fact, Cabretta was sporting a brand new red Camaro. Big pipes at the ass end, the whole nine yards, with a white racing stripe that marked the top of the vehicle, front to rear. Nothing too obvious, Parisi mused.

  “That can’t be his work vehicle,” Doc said. “It must be his off-killing-duty ride.”

  They got out of the Crown Vic and approached Cabretta, who was still staring at the police car.

  “I really like the Camaro,” Doc told the hitman.

  “It ain’t for sale,” Vince replied. “The fuck you two want?”

  “I’ll play,” Parisi answered. “You tell me.”

  “I assume you two dicks want to ask me something which I will not respond to without benefit of an attorney.”

  “You learn all that from Perry Mason?” Doc queried.

  “You’re wasting my time,” Vince whined. “I made you back at the track. Could you be more fucking obvious?”

  “We could escort you downtown, asshole,” Doc warned.

  “I don’t think you will,” the soldier smiled. “Otherwise you two would’ve clipped me in Arlington.”

  “Unfortunate choice of words, Vince. Clipped?” Doc laughed.

  “So this harassment is informal.”

  “We know you clipped Rossi’s neighbor, Cabretta. We know it was you and your buddy, Fortunato,” Jimmy smiled.

  “And you know this how?”

  “Maybe Fortunato gave you up,” Doc added.

  “If he really did, you would’ve slapped the manacles on me by now.”

  “Maybe, Vince. We just wanted to give you a heads-up that we consider you a person of interest.”

  Cabretta gave Parisi the hard stare. Jimmy grinned back at him.

  “They taught us the bad look in third grade, too, Cabretta. Save it for someone who really gives a shit,” Parisi said.

  “Are we done, here?” Vince moaned.

  “You all tired out from your companion of the night, up there?”

  Doc looked up at the top of the apartment building.

  “Male or female?” Doc taunted.

  Cabretta made a lunge toward Gibron, but Parisi already had the sap out in full view.

  Vince held up abruptly. He raised his hands in false surrender.

  “Are we holding you up from something, Vince?” Jimmy said with a sober face. “You got another appointment elsewhere? I know all that wet work is very lucrative.”

  Cabretta glared at the miniature club in Parisi’s right hand. He knew one of those things could open his face and head up and spill his brains on the sidewalk.

  Then the shorter police detective pocketed the sap.

  “We’ll be seeing you soon,” Gibron told Cabretta.

  “Stu gats!”

  “At least I have a pair, motherfucker. That man had two little girls and a wife. And a mortgage that she can’t pay. I hear he wasn’t highly insured,” Doc told Vince.

  “That’s a shame.”

  “You can go now. I think I’ve smelled enough of you, now,” Jimmy told him.

  Cabretta looked over at Parisi with another dose of his bad look, but then he walked to the driver’s side of the Camaro, got in, and squealed away from the curb.

  He only made it about a quarter block when a squad twirled its lights and hauled Cabretta back over to the curb.

  *

  The wake was held at Mason & Douglas on the far southwest side in Palos Park. There weren’t a lot of attendees because David Johansen’s immediate family had all died off. One brother-in-law and his wife showed up, and David’s wife Marilyn’s family was as sparse as her deceased husband’s. A half dozen co-workers from Nabisco, where Johansen was a baker, made an appearance, but by the time Parisi and Gibron showed up, about 7:00 P.M., there was just the wife and the two girls. The kids were called Elizabeth and Morgan. Elizabeth was nine and Morgan was seven, Parisi learned later.

  Jimmy and Doc delivered their condolences and stuck around for about an hour. Parisi approached the casket and knelt on the kneeler and said a few Hail Marys and a couple of Our Fathers. Gibron didn’t approach. He was a self-proclaimed agnostic. He’d told Jimmy that those Chinese bugles in Korea had convinced him that God wasn’t the guy you supposed He was.

  Then they left the chapel and drove off in search of Manny Fortunato. They weren’t looking forward to the encounter. Both detectives were packing a .38 special, a sap, and a highly illegal switchblade.

  Marilyn held the girls close to herself on either side as they sat on the padded pew. The crying was over for the night. All three were now numb.

  Marilyn Johansen had no idea how she was going to make house payments and feed the girls and herself. She figured she might look for a job at Nabisco and hoped they’d look upon her with a little charity.

  Then a figure loomed behind the Johansens. Marilyn turned instinctually and saw a man who stood just under six feet tall. He had wide shoulders and his carriage was erect, as if nature had starched his entire frame.

  The man strode resolutely toward the casket, and he knelt before the remains of David Johansen. He remained inanimate for a few beats, and then he crossed himself.

  He turned toward the survivors.

  “I’m Mark Johansen. I’m David’s brother.”

  Marilyn stood up and looked at the new arrival in awe.

  “I thought you were dead,” she whispered.

  “I am,” he replied.

  *

  Mark Johansen met them back at his brother’s house. He went inside with Marilyn and the girls, and then Marilyn sent the children to bed. She returned to the living room and sat on the chair opposite the loveseat where David’s brother perched himself stiffly. It seemed as if he would pop up and fly out the door again at any moment. His posture made Marilyn very uncomfortable.

  Mark looked nothing like his brother, she thought. His features were chiseled and hard. He was lean where David had been soft. He looked like an athlete because of his leanness, but Marilyn didn’t think his physical appearance had anything to do with games of any sort. He appeared as if he’d been in some branch of the military. For some reason, she imagined he’d been a warrior, at some point.

  “We all thought you were…dead,” Marilyn finally blurted.

  “I was. In a manner of speaking.”

  There was a thin, fine scar that began on his right cheek and that stretched to the cleft of his chin. His hair was cut so short that she couldn’t figure out what color it was. And his eyes were gray, an uncanny gray.

  Like a wolf’s.

  “They cleansed my records because of the kind of work I did.”

  “In Vietnam?” she asked timidly.

  He simply nodded.

  “I suppose you can’t talk about it…the war, I mean.”

  “No,” he answered.

  They sat watching each other for an extended moment.

  “Who did this?” Mark asked, point blank.

  The tears came reflexively to her eyes. />
  “They don’t really know, the police, I mean.”

  “But you think you do,” Johansen said.

  She waited a few seconds, and then she nodded.

  “There’s nothing you can do, Mark. He lives right down the street. It was his son…that David accidentally ran over. The boy rode his bike over the curb, and David never saw him until it was too late. That’s what the Cicero Police told me. That’s how they think it happened.”

  “So this man down the street. What’s his name?”

  “You can’t do anything, Mark.”

  “What’s his name?”

  There was a sternness in his tone, but he never raised his voice, and now Marilyn was very afraid.

  “He’ll kill you, too, Mark. He’s a…mobster. He kills people all the time, and the police can’t catch him, they can’t stop him.”

  “Please, Marilyn. Tell me. I’ll find out anyway. You’ll just save me some time.”

  She uttered the name.

  “I’ve heard of him. He makes the papers all the time. They call him Benny Bats because he likes to use the lumber on his victims.”

  Her fist came to her mouth.

  “I’m sorry, Marilyn…How are you doing financially, if I can ask?”

  She sat mute for a moment.

  “We’re family, after all,” he reminded her.

  “We haven’t got a penny. Nothing. David couldn’t afford insurance. We were just getting by. Bakers don’t make much.”

  “I want you to sit down with me and write me a list of your expenses. I’ll take care of everything.”

  “You can’t do that. You don’t even know us.”

  “There’s blood involved. He was my brother. When an ancient Athenian fell in battle, his family was provided for.”

  “David wasn’t a soldier. He had flat feet and high blood pressure. That’s why he didn’t go to Vietnam or to the Army.”

  “But I was a soldier once, and he was my brother.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Carmen was acting crazy. She wasn’t just depressed by Nick’s death. It was as if life in general were oppressing her, too. She was numb to her husband, numb to her friends who tried to console her. She didn’t want to get out of Nick’s bed in the morning. For her, death had already taken both mother and child, but Carmen was merely walking around in a vacated body, soulless.

  Ben started to think she might need to go away, get some full-time therapy from some mental hospital like Elgin, or maybe a more exclusive private place, say on the East Coast. His wife wandered the house like some empty shell of a woman, and he was starting to become anxious about her.

  It didn’t stop him from being with his Friday night girlfriend, Maureen, however. And when he didn’t come home from Maureen’s until six on Saturday morning, Carmen was waiting behind the front door with a carving knife that was almost as big as she was.

  “You’ve been with your whore and couldn’t come home to be with your own wife. I got nothing, now, Ben. I don’t even have you.”

  Her right hand was not raised as if she were going to attack him, but Ben stood in the opened doorway, watching where that hand was.

  “Put that fucking knife on the floor, Carmen. Just drop it.”

  It was dawn outside, and the light that came in behind him seemed to be an aura, Carmen thought.

  “You think this knife is for you? You fucking animal! It’s for me!”

  Now she elevated her hand, but she pointed the tip of the long blade at the middle of her chest.

  “Put it down, Carmen. Put that goddamned thing down!”

  He almost never raised his voice at his wife or child, but this time he became loud, even shrill.

  She smiled and dropped the carving knife on the plush carpet beneath her. Then she smiled oddly at her husband, pivoted about, and she ran into the kitchen. He pursued, rapidly.

  Carmen had her hands on the top of the kitchen table, and as Rossi got behind her, she raised her head like a she-wolf, and first she howled, and then it evolved into a high-pitched scream.

  Ben grabbed her and spun her about, but it didn’t halt the primal shriek that burst from her mouth.So he slapped her, and the blow sent her sprawling back against the table and then onto the tile of the kitchen floor.

  He’d drawn blood, and the sight of the running crimson shocked him. No one else’s blood bothered him before, but he’d never gotten physical with Carmen—not this kind of physical. Their love-making could get rough, but he’d always held back and never bruised her or cut her in any way.

  She rose from the floor and she flew at him in a blind rage that caught him off guard, and he was forced to fling her back onto the tile.

  She sprang back up at him, but this time he grabbed her by the hair, spun her around, and bear-hugged her until she went limp. Carmen collapsed in his arms. She became dead weight.

  He slung her body over his shoulder and took her back to Nick’s room. Once he saw her lying on his son’s bed with her eyes clamped shut, he picked up the phone by his boy’s bedside, and he called for an ambulance.

  *

  Parisi and Gibron braced Manny Fortunato at the gym Fortunato frequented in Cicero. The man wasn’t tall, but when the detectives saw him without a shirt on, they could both appreciate the bulk and strength of this ape-like killer. The only thing missing on Manny was the thick body hair of a primate. The two cops approached the bench where he was pressing about 250 pounds of steel.

  Fortunato dumped the weights on the floor in front of him with a loud thump. There were twenty or thirty other lifters in this gym, and they all took notice of the two new arrivals wearing street clothes. Everyone in the joint knew they were both police.

  Then they all looked away when Gibron returned their stares.

  “I thought you’d be coming around,” Manny said.

  There was a dead look on his face. The eyes were dead. There was no describable slant to his features. It was just dead empty.

  “Get dressed,” Parisi said.

  “Yeah? Why?”

  “You figuring on resisting?” Gibron grinned. “I wish you would.”

  “Fuck this,” Fortunato grunted. He stood up electrically, as if he had been thrust at the two detectives.

  Then he saw that Parisi had the sap palmed and waiting.

  “How you want to do this, dickhead?” Jimmy explained.

  Manny scanned the two policemen—first the shorter one with the unafraid brown guinea eyes, and then the taller man, who was now sporting his own mini billyclub.

  Fortunato’s face relaxed from its clenched muscle appearance.

  “Fuck it. All right. Let me get dressed, willya?”

  They followed him into the locker room, but this time Parisi replaced the sap with his .38 gripped in his right palm.

  *

  Manny sat across from the two detectives in what these cops called an interview room. The Outfit bulldog knew that they couldn’t use rubber hoses or phonebooks on a guy, anymore, but he didn’t like how they served up those two blackjacks they’d flashed him with at Torrio’s Gym and Athletic Club. These two motherfuckers were too dumb to be scared of him, and it scared Manny, a little bit. He didn’t like feeling frightened. He was more comfortable on the giving end of fear than the receiving end. And it was the smaller dick he felt more ill at ease about.

  “Vince gave you up,” Parisi said.

  “Gave me up about what?” he shot back.

  “The guy you threw in the lake, dumbshit,” the taller one retorted.

  “I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.”

  “So you’re you good with letting Cabretta skate while you submerge into that good night,” the Italian cop smiled.

  “You guys are talkin’ a foreign language to me.”

  “How come you haven’t asked for legal counsel, genius?” Gibron asked.

  “I always enjoy coming down here. It sorta relieves the boredom.”

  “That’s from your low IQ, Manny. No bra
in, no pain,” Gibron explained with a warm-looking grin.

  “You ever take that badge off, tough guy?”

  “Only when I take off my pants,” Doc countered. “Did you have something in mind?”

  Fortunato sat mute.

  “You know we don’t have grounds to arrest you, Manny,” Jimmy told him. “But now you know that we know you and that cretin buddy of yours killed Johansen. And now you know we’re going to bleed you slowly, a little pint of blood by a little pint of blood. Just like a vampire would do. We’ll make you wish you’d gotten it over with right now. But you’re the tough guy here, aren’t you?

  “Start watching your partner. See if he starts looking at you strange, in the next few weeks. He’ll drop you cold if he thinks he can make a deal to save his own ass. Forensics gets better all the time. Hell, this is 1991, Manny. It’s getting to be a new century pretty soon. And you’ll drop something for us to use on the two of you. Only a matter of time.

  “By the way. You better call yourself a ride. We don’t have time to take you back to that stinkshit gym. You’re on your own, badman.”

  Parisi rose, and then Gibron, and they left Manny Fortunato sitting there trying to imagine just what the hell had happened to him.

  *

  Mark Johansen was living at the Holiday Inn in Oak Lawn. He lived in motel-hotel rooms any time he wasn’t in his cabin in Sawyer, Michigan. He lived in a log construction by Lake Michigan that dated back to 1885. He bought it from an old couple who were unloading all their real estate to move to Sarasota, Florida, now that the old man was retired from Caterpillar Tractor Company in Peoria, Illinois.

  He purchased the place just after he returned from Eastern Europe where he was doing some trouble-shooting for some black op agency that the feds never admitted was extant. He worked for them, occasionally, and he did classified business for the Brits, as well, when the money was right.

  Mark Johansen got out of the Green Berets in 1972, right before the Paris Peace Accord in ’73. When he saw Washington caving to the North Vietnamese, he knew it was time to boogie. There was no longer any honor with these bitch bureaucrats and their hired help. He figured he might as well get paid handsomely for the things he’d learned how to do in the Army, and there was no longer any pride in what he was doing in Southeast Asia. The war was lost because of the cowards who were negotiating the ‘peace.’ There was no honor in his life, so he sought the cash that would allow him to retire from the life.