by Thomas Laird
“They wonder about you. They wonder why they’ve only seen you a few times. They know you’re helping us out.”
“You need to get out of here, Marilyn. It’s too dangerous to stay.”
“Where am I going to go?”
“Anywhere. But away from that animal down the street. Don’t think he won’t try to hurt the three of you, too.”
She looked at the scar on his face. It was white, as if lightning had struck him. It marred an otherwise handsome face, she thought.
“Why would he hurt the three of us? My God, we didn’t do anything to him. And the accident was just that. David didn’t have a violent bone in his body.”
“You’re wrong to think he’s like everyone else, Marilyn. These guys are fucking wolves. They think that forgiveness is a weakness.”
“Why do they need to forgive us? We didn’t run over that child. It doesn’t make any sense!”
She wore a white blouse and navy blue pants. She was not an attractive woman. ‘Medium’ seemed to encompass her description—medium height, medium build. There was nothing exceptional about her, and Mark thought that was what made him angry that Rossi made her and the girls possible targets. Rossi’s version of settling scores was total annihilation. There was nothing singular in his version of revenge.
“Put the house up for sale. I’ve got enough to pay for something reasonable for you to move into somewhere far away from here.”
“But the girls have school. They have friends—”
“He’ll kill you all, Marilyn.”
She shuddered visibly.
“Put this house up for sale tomorrow. I’ll put you into a rental if I have to, but you need to get the hell out of here now.”
The coldness in his tone made her shiver again.
“Tomorrow, Marilyn. You’d better start packing tonight. I’ll hire movers just as soon as you get this place sold. It’s a solid neighborhood. It shouldn’t take long, and I’ll find a house to rent until you unload it.”
“Why is this happening, Mark? What did we, or David, ever do to this man?”
“David’s hitting the kid was an accident. You saw how Rossi reacted. He had him killed. You start thinking this thug is incapable of doing the same thing to you, I’ll have to bury you, all of you, too.”
*
It wasn’t getting any better for Parisi with the new partner. She was still stiff and unbending and cold, and he was used to something far different with Doc Gibron. He could handle the ‘professionalism’ or whatever it was that Dani Hawke was peddling, but the outright hostility was getting old.
He called Doc and explained the situation.
“I won’t be gone forever. They’ll be kicking me out of rehab in a month or two. I been there before.”
Parisi thought that Doc might be mending. His voice sounded more like his old partner before they’d witnessed the carnage on the street in Cicero and after they’d seen the remains of the dead baker, his face all bloated, that look of surprise on his death mask.
“She probably wants you bad, guinea.”
“I don’t think so. I keep looking for her to pull a razor on me.”
“Can’t be that bad, can it, Jimmy?”
“I guess not. Get the hell back on the job, you Polski. I need a return to normal.”
“So do I…How’s your love life, Detective Parisi?”
“Pretty shitty.”
“It’ll happen like a lightning bolt.”
“Yeah, Doc, I’ll get struck and I’ll fry inside my wingtips.”
“Man, you are a bummer.”
“I’m sorry, Doc. I don’t mean to drag you down with me.”
“Maybe you ought to talk to the company shrink, Jimmy. I hear he’s all right. No couch and Sigmund Freud bullshit. No ‘how do you feel about that?’ horseshit. I hear he’s a decent guy, for a shrink.”
“I’d rather light my hair on fire and slit my wrists.”
“Then you better think about Mary and Mike. They need you.”
“I know.”
“Look, Jimmy. I’m getting a little bleary from the meds, and they’re going to make me hang up, anyway.”
“I miss you, Professor.”
“I ought to quit the cops and go academic. You’re probably right.”
“Then I’d be stuck with this very unhappy Native American.”
“At least you’re politically correct. You didn’t call her Pocahontas.”
“I value my scalp too much. I like her, in a strange way. It seems like I have to have her like me, too.”
“The harder you try, James.”
“Yeah. I know…Listen, let me know when they’ll let you have company. I’ll buy you a bag of sliders from the White Castle.”
“I know they mourn my absence, at the Castle.”
“Take care of yourself.”
“Watch out for that cocksucker, Rossi. They don’t mind shooting cops from time to time if they feel the necessity, and that bastard has no rules of engagement.”
Parisi put the phone back in its holder when the nurse audibly told Doc that time was up.
*
“You think much about Pa, Ma?”
Eleanor sat at the kitchen table after the kids had gone upstairs to do their homework. She was staying the night because Parisi was on midnights’ shift, and someone had to be there until Jimmy got back around 7:30 A.M.
“Only every day.”
“I didn’t appreciate that detective who questioned you about the accident.”
“It’s your job to ask rude questions, isn’t it, Jimmy?”
She had aged well, Parisi thought. Her hair was only a little white at her sideburns, and the wrinkles hadn’t take over her beautiful face. He could understand how Jake must have lost it when he first felt the pangs. She was still a stunning woman, even in her late fifties.
But there had always been the doubt whether Eleanor had pushed Jake down that flight of stairs. They’d had their problems, and Jimmy was aware of them. The old man drank. He was an alcoholic, but he was under control enough that he always made it to work, and Jake had never laid a hand on him or his mother.
The booze certainly had to do with Nick being Jimmy’s biological father. Jake had been sterile. The doctors thought it was teenaged mumps that had caused the sterility. And Eleanor wanted a child, she wanted a baby so badly that she had convinced Nick to sire it. She was sure that she could keep it all a secret from Jake because he wanted a kid as badly as she did. Eleanor had known Nick before Jake. Jimmy’s uncle had wanted to marry his mother, but then he’d taken off for Oklahoma and the oil fields in order to make the fortune that would support a wife and family. But the wildcatting took longer than Nick anticipated, and then Jake entered the field and the two of them were married.
When it became apparent that Jake couldn’t come through with the fertile semen, Eleanor desperately begged Nick to supply the seed.
But Jake always suspected his brother because he knew how much he wanted Eleanor, all those years before he left to seek black gold.
“I know you didn’t push Pa down those stairs. I deal with killers, day in and out. You don’t have it in you.”
She didn’t reply, but she took her son’s hands in her own as she reached across the kitchen table and looked solemnly into his brown eyes.
CHAPTER TEN
Of the capos, Bertelli was known as the ‘smart’ one. He let his brains do the work, but he had the muscle to back it up. Rossi might have four hundred button men on the street and Joe, Giacomo, Bertelli might have half as many, but Joe knew how to play the waiting game. He had informers who worked like spies who were double agents. He passed along information to the cops, but he gained intelligence from his people inside the CPD as well as from street punks who knew the streets that they infested and ran. There were druggies and stooges and bagmen and whores, and they were Bertelli’s network. They all had something to sell—to the police and to Joe Bertelli himself.
So the informa
tion was passed along to this Homicide cop named Parisi, but the surprise was that the Italian detective thought what the informants shared was old news.
When word came back to the Captain of the northwest side, including Arlington and Barrington, Bertelli was disappointed but not shocked. He knew Parisi was competent. He’d heard about this guinea copper before, several times. He’d put some of Giacomo’s crew in Menard and Joliet and a few other shithouses. There was no great love for the policeman, but there was respect.
So they wouldn’t nail Rossi by ratting him out. But Joe wasn’t about to go back to Tony Calabrese with bad news. Bad news wasn’t well received by the Boss. He would have to try another tact with Benny Bats, and the only thing he could think of was to kill him.
However, it couldn’t look like an ambush from a rival. He’d have to bring in outside talent to take Rossi out. The thing to do was go to Italy, more specifically Sicily, and hire the best pros he could find. And when the deed was finished, Bertelli would leave no witnesses, meaning the killers from Sicily themselves.
He dispatched Rocco Palmieri to do the recruiting. He trusted Palmieri with his own children, his two teenaged sons, so he knew Rocky would select wisely. They’d be men who were off the radar, men who were anonymous, as all the best assassins were. They truly lived in the shadows, these top buck button men, and Rocky would know exactly who to select.
One week later, Rocco Palmieri returned, and he let Joe B know that help was on the way.
*
When Rossi drove his Cadillac past the Johansen house, he saw the for-sale sign. He hit his brakes with a squeal and left the Caddy running in the middle of the street. When a car pulled up behind his ride and began to honk to have him move, the guy in the crappy Chevy saw who the driver of the black sedan was, and he backed away at 20 miles an hour until he reached the previous intersection, and then he squealed his tires and the car pealed out of sight.
Ben went toward the for-sale sign, and then he walked up to the front window and peered inside. There was still furniture in there, but there were no residents. The place looked deserted.
He went back to the Cadillac and pulled onto his own side driveway, by his house, and then he rushed inside and called the real estate outfit that had its name on the sign, but they couldn’t tell him where the Johansens had gone or who actually put the house on the market. Ben couldn’t intimidate the guy he was talking to at the realtors’, and the real estate man didn’t react when Ben told him his name. So Rossi hung up abruptly. He’d have to go down to that office and have a face to face with the motherfucker, he told himself.
He got in touch with Manny and told him he wanted to know where the woman and her two daughters had gone, and Fortunato said he’d get right on it.
Benny Bats still had a notion there was unfinished business with David Johansen’s survivors. He knew Manny had been right and that it was stupid to go after civilians, but his rage at the three of them couldn’t be contained.
He would find them sooner or later and his blood lust would be satisfied. Manny and anyone who disapproved could go fuck themselves. Nick was dead. He was his only son, his only heir, and that family down the street was still in for some more suffering of their own.
*
The only thing that haunted Rossi’s house was Rossi himself. He battled with insomnia and depression. He didn’t need a shrink’s diploma to know what depression was. He was familiar with the illness. His mother had suffered what they used to call ‘the blues,’ and Ben knew how she got when it took the old lady over. They didn’t go to doctors, back then. They took extended vacations. That was the old man’s cure for what his mother went through, now and then. They trusted MDs very little and psychiatrists even less. A change of scenery was the cure, and even though it never helped his old lady, going to medical people to solve your problems was a sign of weakness. Especially if your symptoms were from the neck up.
Ben the capo was certainly not going to some psychologist or psychiatrist who would medicate him. There was no medicine that would bring Nick back. The Resurrection was one more kids’ story that the Vatican tried to hoist on Catholics. The Protestants bought into the same bullshit. It sold a lot of Easter eggs and Hollywood movies about rocks being slid aside from tombs.
There wasn’t a hint of Nick’s presence in the house. Not a scent, not a sound, not a shadow. His only boy was gone. He lay in the family plot at St. Cecilia’s with Ben’s mother and father.
He drove over to Maureen’s. She hadn’t returned from her usual spree at the Evergreen Plaza, in Evergreen Park. He didn’t like her shopping there because too many coons were moving into the area, and there was a change of the color of the patrons at the mall. But Maureen didn’t like to drive out to the far suburbs to buy clothes and everything else for which Benny Bats footed the bill.
She showed up at 6:30. It was still light out, but the days were getting shorter now that it was early October. He was waiting for her at the entrance to the three flat. Manny was sitting in his own ride at the curb. Ben didn’t go anywhere unattended while Cabretta’s executioner was still at large, running around. Ben and his bodyguard were certain the threat hadn’t died. The guy might be dead or out of the country; only time would tell the resolution to the tale. They weren’t taking chances, though. Manny Fortunato would remain at the curb and he would follow Rossi back to Cicero when the capo was done with his deed.
“Are we going out to dinner?” she asked as she took her booty out of the shopping bags.
“How much is all that shit gonna cost me?” he demanded.
Maureen didn’t like the edge in his tone.
She was a buxom redhead, a natural redhead, and her tiny waist and her ample ass end were all selling points. Her legs were a little thin, but they weren’t pencil-like, either. Her calves might have had a little more flesh to them, but overall she was a delicious specimen. Ben had been amazed she’d never been married. There’d been boyfriends. A lot of them. But when he made his intentions clear about the twenty-eight-year-old chunk of sexy, all his romantic rivals magically disappeared.
Manny and Vince had looked each of them up, one at a time, and they’d had sincere heart-to-hearts, and the suitors disappeared like the lover-boys on Ithaca when Odysseus came home.
“Are we going to dinner?” she insisted.
“We’ll go later. I ain’t hungry yet.”
“Yeah? Well I’m starved.”
“It’s better, on an empty stomach. You know that.”
She smiled. She figured she might as well get it over with. And the way to get him aroused was to hit the shower with him. She knew she should’ve tried it when he had trouble getting it up after Nick died. But Maureen was a bit concerned that his flaccid member might just stay that way for a long time, and that meant that her meal ticket might soon get canceled.
She took off her blouse hurriedly. Then she dropped her jeans to the floor. She was wearing a beige bra and bikini underwear, beige, also.
He rose from the couch and started to strip. He was down to his Jockey briefs when she took him by the hand and led him into the bathroom. She started the water and made sure it was warm, not hot. Ben was sensitive to heat and cold.
They dropped their remaining underwear on the bathmat and stepped into the shower stall, and Maureen closed the glass door behind them.
He was already carrying a semi erect weapon when they hit the spray. She smiled at him, and then she grabbed the bar of scented soap and began to lather every part of him except one. Then she handed him the soap and he returned the favor. Last, they rinsed themselves off under the soft threads of descending warmth, and Maureen got down on her knees and began.
He moaned the way he always did when she had him down to the roots. But she didn’t keep it up for fear he’d finish too soon.
He lifted her off the wet deck under the pulsing water, and he had her beneath her thighs and hoisted her until her shoulder blades were flush against the cold tiles of the shower wall.
When he was fully connected to her, her mouth opened into a wide O, and her eyes snapped open when he rammed himself home.
*
They lay on her king-sized bed after they’d both expended everything they had. They were still wet, and the mattress was soaked.
He looked over to the redhead and smiled.
“I’m back,” he grinned.
“I never thought it would go any other way.”
He was still in a painfully erect state, and she went down, once more. Then she got atop him, and this time it went on for the better part of a half hour.
*
“How’s Carmen?” she asked.
“Decaying, I suppose.”
“That’s mean, Ben.”
“I actually heard she was a little better. The shrink said she was lucid. I guess she came out of that fucking coma or whatever she was in.”
“They call it catatonic shock, baby,” she smiled.
“Why do you want to know?”
“I’m just curious.”
He eyed Maureen carefully. “You’re not gonna start in on that divorce shit, are you?”
“I can dream, can’t I?”
“It ain’t happening. We already went over this a hundred times. And you’ve got it nice, here, don’t you?”
“I’m not complaining baby. But I’ll be thirty, pretty soon, and my baby years are receding as we speak.”
He sat up abruptly. “I’m not having any kid, and you better not throw any surprises my way.”
She pushed him back down onto the pillow, and she kissed him with a deeply thrust tongue. Her grip on him below was tight, and Ben thought the damned thing wasn’t going down any time soon. It was like some goddam miracle cure. Like an overdose of vitamin E or some fucking thing. She had unloosed the fury of that same member that had been completely uncooperative, not very long ago.
She got on him astride, once more, and they became lathered up all over again. When all this volcanic action finally ceased, they were both fatigued, and the damn thing finally faded and lay down.
They dressed and went out to Johnny’s Italian Restaurant in Oak Lawn, Manny following the Cadillac close behind.
