Season of the Assassin

by Laird, Thomas

  Eddie thinks the guy works for the Spooks — the CIA. Eddie reads a lot of fiction.

  But it gets my nose turned upwind. Isn’t it remarkable that one witness turns up dead and another has two-way conversations with her thumbs in a mental ward? It’s too remarkable.

  So we set out to examine the demise of Johnnie Robinson, the dishwasher. When we talk to the people at the rib joint where he worked, across the street from the infamous death dorm, they give us a sullen look when we ask questions. It seems they’ve been grilled by the top people in Homicide and now they don’t want to go through the procedure again. It’s as if they were frightened by the previous investigators.

  I find out that Captain Quigley, my boss, did the preliminary investigation of Robinson’s killing. It is very unusual for a police captain to be doing such routine fieldwork. So after Eddie and I get done talking to the brothers at the rib joint, I go back downtown for a talk with Quigley.

  ‘I hope you don’t mind answering a few questions I have about the Anglin case,’ I say to the balding, six-foot-two captain.

  The case is over. We need to catch the real killer,’ he informs me, a very sour look on his face.

  ‘I don’t think it is…over, sir. I think we got the right guy. But what troubles me is losing two witnesses in such a short time-span…It makes me smell a fix.’

  ‘Are you accusing me of something, Lieutenant Parisi?’

  ‘Of course not, sir.’

  I can sense Eddie squirming behind me.

  I’m sitting in the chair in front of the captain’s desk, and Eddie is standing a pace or two back.

  ‘Then what is this bullshit you’re throwing at me?’

  ‘Why would a police captain investigate a murder that would normally be processed by somebody like me or my partner here? Was it considered high-profile? The popping of a dishwasher on the west side?’

  ‘All murders are high-priority, Lieutenant. You should know that.’

  I don’t grant him the courtesy of agreeing because we both know it’s a lie. All deaths are not equal. Just like all lives aren’t — in the real world of the streets.

  ‘I find it strange that you’d have the time or opportunity to investigate the death of one witness in a case that’s already been tanked, for all practical purposes.’

  ‘I don’t much care what you find odd about what I do, Parisi. And if you don’t want some hot jets to scorch your ass, you better find a new angle on this case, Lieutenant.’

  The captain is a fucking harp. A Mick. He thinks all of us goombahs are connected to the Outfit. Like most Irish, he can’t distinguish one Italian from another. We’re all freaking Sicilians, to him.

  End of discussion. I stand and we leave.

  *

  Eddie sips at his coffee in my office. I prefer Coca-Cola. There are no windows in my cubicle. The room seems perpetually dark, even with the lights on.

  ‘Carl Anglin was into something. I think Robinson was a pro job, not a drive-by. I think somebody got to any witnesses on scene when Johnnie caught his death of cold,’ I tell my partner.

  ‘I don’t like all this sidelight shit. I liked it better when it was a simple multiple homicide.’

  ‘I’m sorry to screw up your day.’

  ‘Why would anyone want Anglin off the hook?’ Eddie demands.

  ‘Because he’s done something somebody thinks is worse. Something a lot more embarrassing to somebody.’

  Eddie sips at his black coffee again, and then he puts the paper cup into my wastebasket.

  ‘I hate fucking complicated shit like this. We catch a killer, they get lit up. That’s how it’s supposed to work, Jake. This is bat shit, this.’

  He walks out the door, announcing that he’s going to take a dump and read the sports page. It’ll clear his mind, he says.

  ‘Hello, Greek.’

  This time it’s gone beyond the usual limit of five.

  ‘Maybe I better get you a cab, Jake,’ the Greek says from out of some corner where I can barely see him. ‘You’re wrecked, buddy. Let me call you a ride,’ he repeats.

  Again words of refusal come out of me from some unknown place.

  I stagger out of the Greek’s and make my way to the unmarked car that I use. I stop suddenly and start vomiting beside the driver’s door.

  Puking is unusual for me. But it clears my head a bit, and I think I’ll be able to navigate home now. I get inside the car and open all the windows in the four-door Ford. But I can still smell myself when I get inside, so I reach into the glove compartment for the mints I stash in there, just in case. My badge’ll get me by if I bob and weave, but you never know if some hard-on’ll try to make a name for himself by busting a cop for Driving While Intoxicated. So the breath mints are insurance.

  I make it home without incident. But the vomiting frightens me.

  Eleanor is not up waiting for me at this hour — it’s 4.35 a.m. So I go directly to my bedroom.

  My son Jimmy is going to the university downtown to get his bachelor’s degree, but he says he wants to join the police force when he graduates. I try to dissuade him every way I can. I tell him about the corruption on the job, about all the assholes who make it on sheer politics rather than ability. But he won’t listen. He has wanted to be a cop since he was twelve, I think. All the way through high school until now. And there’s nothing I can think to say that’ll point him in a different direction. He’s a smart boy, Jimmy. Good grades.

  He reads a lot. I don’t have the time or the will. He’s quieter than I am, too. My wife told me that when Jimmy turned six. He’s the thinker in the clan, his mother insists. He’ll be a better husband and father, I guess. He seems to have a lot more patience than the old man.

  I can’t say ‘nigger’ or ‘spic’ or ‘wop’ or anything with a flavor of the street in front of the kid. Eleanor has threatened to shoot me.

  I think of him as I drift off on top of my mattress. I can smell the puke again, but I wander off in spite of the odor.

  *

  ‘I’ve been drafted,’ my son tells me at the dinner table the next evening. Eating dinner with both of them is an event which takes place only rarely.

  ‘What’re you talking about? You haven’t graduated yet.’

  ‘They’ve taken the 2-S away. I’m 1-A. Took the physical last week.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘So I lied to you. I dropped out at the end of the semester. I let myself be drafted.’

  ‘You’re shitting me.’

  ‘No, Pa. I’m not lying.’

  ‘But your grades…They were real good.’

  ‘Yeah. A three-point GPA.’

  ‘What the hell’s the matter with you?’

  My wife pours him another coffee.

  ‘Didn’t you try to stop him?’ I ask her.

  She ignores me.

  ‘What is this? Some kind of goddamn conspiracy?’

  ‘You never gave him a nickel for his education. You got nothing to say to him,’ Eleanor finally tells me.

  ‘Don’t start that again — ’

  ‘It was my call, Pa. Mom had nothing to do with this…Look, the Second World War was yours. This one is mine. I feel like I’m avoiding something I ought to be part of.’

  ‘Everybody hates this war, Junior. You read the papers?’

  ‘Did anybody fall in love with your fight?’ He’s clever, this kid. He’ll make a fine interrogator. He knows how to counterpunch.

  ‘I was hoping you’d miss this one, Sonny.’

  He hates being called ‘Sonny’.

  ‘It’s my turn. I was putting off what had to happen. That’s all.’

  Eleanor’s crying.

  ‘Momma. Stop it.’

  ‘Shut up,’ she warns him.

  ‘Can’t you sign back up for school? Can’t you change your mind?’

  ‘He hates living here! Are you a fool? Can’t you see?’ she cries.

  I look down at my half-eaten steak.

  ‘I’ll cut bac
k, if that’s what this is all — ’

  ‘He’s afraid to bring Erin home. He’s afraid they’ll run into you. Drunk. You, Jake. Do you understand?’

  ‘I…I can stop. I can change. You don’t need to go to a goddamned war to get me to — ’

  ‘I’m not going for that reason. I already told you. It’s my turn. You don’t get to pick your battles. They pick you, Pa. How many times you told me just that?’

  ‘I can stop, Jimmy. For Christ’s sake, all you had to do was tell me that I was…embarrassing — ’

  ‘You don’t embarrass me, Pa.’

  ‘You’re a horseshit liar, Jimmy.’

  He doesn’t try to keep it up. I get up from the table and walk directly out the door. The moist air smacks my face with its spring lushness, but all I can remember is my son being embarrassed by me. What angers me is that I’ve known it all along. I could see him directing that girlfriend of his — Erin — out our front door as soon as he saw I was home in the evening. I barely got a look at her. And she’s the one he’s in love with, Eleanor tells me. Whenever she’s speaking to me.

  I’ve driven my son out of the house. My son. My flesh and blood —

  I know better. She can’t fool me. She never could lie to me. Jimmy’s not mine, except in name. He’s my brother Nick’s child. I had mumps when I was a teenager. The doctor thinks the mumps was why Eleanor and I were unable to have a baby, the first few years after we were married. Suddenly she’s pregnant with Jimmy, but I remember we’d been sleeping together very infrequently after the doctor told me I might be sterile. The marriage was going bad. We were drifting apart.

  She knew Nick before she began dating me. My younger brother Nick. Then he takes off for the oil fields to make his pot of gold. He fails completely, but when he gets back the two of us are together. Engaged.

  He still carries the heat for Eleanor to this day. Somehow she convinced him to help her have a baby. Neither of them have ever confessed and I’ve never put the question directly to them, but I know.

  Jimmy’s Nick’s boy. Not mine. I can see his father in his eyes.

  But we pretend, the three of us. We play that I got divine fertility on just one night and I made him from one creative burst of sperm.

  Jimmy. Nick’s boy. Pretending to be my dutiful son. I love him, but he’s not mine. We look like a family but we’re not.

  She wants reasons for the drink? Do I need another? I know it’s a crutch. I ought to confront her and my brother, get it out in the open. But more than twenty years have passed, and I’m afraid if I ask I’ll get the answer I dread the most. This is one interrogation I can’t handle.

  Nick made Eleanor pregnant to console her. So she’d get at least something out of this marriage. It’s more like an arrangement for the both of us. She cleans and cooks and says she wants to get herself a job when Jimmy’s finally out on his own.

  I drove my own boy out of the house. Even if I’m not his natural father, I’ve been a father to him for two decades. Nick hasn’t. He’s stayed respectfully out of the way. He rarely comes over here.

  Jimmy’s going off to the war in Vietnam. It’s a lousy war and no one likes it.

  My war was a lousy war and I hated it. It frightened me, it twisted me, it wrung me out. There was nothing good about it until it was history.

  I’ve lost my kid. Now I’ll spend twenty-four months in hell, waiting for him to get out of southeast Asia.

  This is my judgment, my penance, my punishment. I don’t need a padre to explain it

  to me. God’s kicking my ass for all my faults. And even though Jimmy doesn’t really belong to me, the illusion was better than nothing. Better than no son at all. Better than sterility and an unhappy marriage. He was there for a while, and now he’s about to leave.

  The rain begins to fall gently as I’m halfway down our block of bungalows. House after house is identical to its neighbor.

  I feel the warm droplets soak my shoulders. I’ve forgotten to put on my jacket.

  *

  The waitress at the rib joint doesn’t want to talk in front of the boss. So Eddie and I take her for a short drive when her break comes up at 7.30 p.m.

  Her name is Estella Johnson. Black, thirty-five years old, divorced, she lets us know.

  She sits in the back of the car with Eddie. She’s big-bosomed and very sexy. Eddie is already red in the puss.

  Estella smiles perfect pearlies at my Polack partner.

  ‘This po-lice captain makes a big deal of the fact that we all agree what we saw the night Robinson got tapped.’

  ‘What did you all agree on?’ I ask from behind the driver’s wheel.

  Eddie’s about ready to swallow his tongue from lust. Estella’s got to be a big draw for the rib joint.

  ‘That it was fo’ black mens in the car that drive by and pop Johnny Robinson.’

  ‘And you disagreed with that story?’ I ask.

  ‘I has my doubts.’

  ‘About what part?’ Eddie finally queries.

  I look in the rear view and see him smiling and squirming. He’s single and he’s wondering what a black woman would be like after all those lily-white Polish girls from the southwest part of town.

  ‘It might be that the dudes in the car were a little lighter in the complexion than your captain would want us to believe.’

  ‘You think they were white shooters?’ Eddie asks.

  ‘There were only two in that car. Not four. I could see them right out the front window. They must’ve knew what time Johnny go outside for his nicotine addiction. They were there the second Johnny walk out, and then I see the passenger’s window roll down and then I hear the pops. Motherfuckers usin’ a .22. Everybody in this neighborhood know that a small piece like that is used by them professional killahs. Them slugs go all crazy when they gets inside you.’

  ‘You think they were white,’ I repeat.

  ‘Didn’t look like brothas to me. But I could be wrong.’

  ‘And there were two, not three or four?’ I ask.

  ‘Both of them was sittin’ up front. I couldn’t see them all that clear, but I know they wasn’t from this goddamn neighborhood. Y’all need to check closer to home.’

  Estella takes hold of Eddie’s hand and pulls it to her left breast. I have to tear my gaze away immediately from the two of them. Estella giggles. I pity my partner.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  [January 1999]

  The Feds eventually lowered their weapons, as did Doc and I. But they gave us no information — what we found we discovered on our own. What my partner and I did locate was Anglin’s yearbook. I stuffed it into my briefcase, and we carried it off the premises of Anglin’s Utah dwelling before the Fibbies could scream foul.

  Back in Chicago, I took a good look at our subject. He’d been an athlete and a scholar and had seemed to get along well with his peers. A member of the swimming and cross-country teams. Honor roll, several times. The guy fit a more modern kind of serial profile — like a Ted Bundy.

  We needed to interview Anglin’s mother. Perhaps he’d contacted her in the ten months since he’d disappeared.

  The man could be dead. This could be some other player that we hadn’t picked up on. It could be a copycat. Someone who’d read all the literature on Anglin.

  I didn’t think so. I thought he was geared up for a comeback. He was having all that fun being a celebrity killer who got off the hook. Doing the talk shows, appearing in the tabloids. Playing the victim to the hilt. And all the while his seven victims, the seven nurses, had no one to speak for them. Once that had been the role of my father, Jake. But after his accident, if that was what it was, the Department had put Anglin on the back burner. Life went on, everyone kept insisting. You couldn’t keep kicking a dead pooch. The son of a bitch got off. We didn’t nab him. My father went to his death and never had the satisfaction of Carl Anglin’s incarceration.

  The problem with Anglin’s mother was that she’d be very old if she had indeed survived.
Had to be in her eighties, Doc figured, reasoning that Anglin was in his sixties. If Carl was still breathing.

  Yeah, he was alive. I could feel his pulse off in the corner of my office. I could remember my dad telling me about the greenness of his eyes. Like some jungle cat’s, Jake had said.

  My old man did not tell horror tales. He wasn’t trying to spook me. I’d heard about those eyes from my father’s partner, Eddie Lezniak, as well. Eddie had retired and now lived in Indiana on a ten-acre piece of land with his own pond full of fish.

  Jake Parisi never talked much to me at all. It was like he was keeping me at arm’s length because he was afraid I’d get too close. When I found out I was really Nick’s son, I understood why Jake had never let me close any distance between us. But I always felt he loved me in spite of my biology.

  The first thing we found out was where Anglin’s mother worked. She was a single parent, my old man’s files informed us. She lived in Cleveland and worked at Richardson, Robinson and Trask, it read. A law firm. She was a legal secretary. When we contacted the Cleveland firm, we found she’d moved to Chicago fifteen years ago. We got her address at her new firm from the old group. When we called Smith, Talbot and Turner, we heard that Patricia Anglin had left that legal group six years ago. They had an address for her, and we decided to visit her in person.