Season of the Assassin

by Laird, Thomas

  *

  Patricia Anglin was in her early eighties, as Doc had guessed. But she seemed very bright. When we asked a question she responded promptly, even briskly. There was obvious antagonism in her eyes as she answered our questions, here at her retirement complex. She had an apartment in this village of senior citizens.

  ‘You hounded Carl thirty years ago, and now you want to start up with him all over again.’

  ‘We want to talk to him. Yes,’ Doc told her. He smiled at her, but her response wasn’t exactly amiable.

  ‘You were after him and you couldn’t prove anything because my Carl is not a murderer. Did you know he was in the Navy?’

  I nodded.

  ‘Did you know that he was involved in secret operations for our government?’

  ‘Yes,’ I told her.

  ‘My son was a hero…And then he decided he wanted to get out of the service. But they didn’t want to release him. They said what he did was too “classified”. Whatever that meant. So he stayed on for two more years, and then he really quit. It was like they’d kidnapped him. I don’t know where he served or what he did, but he came back different. He wasn’t the same boy they’d signed up. He was quieter. More sullen…But he wasn’t the monster who killed those nurses. If he killed anyone, it was while he was wearing a uniform…Now, I’m very tired and I haven’t anything else to say to you, and if you ever come back I’ll need to have an attorney present.’

  She stood as straight-backed as an Army drill instructor.

  ‘You don’t have any idea where your son can be located, then?’ I asked, trying to smile encouragingly.

  She huffed, we said thank you — and we got the hell out.

  *

  ‘Tough. She made you, you know,’ Doc said to me as we drove the Taurus back to the Lake Shore.

  ‘Made me?’

  ‘She recognized your name as soon as she heard it. I saw it on her face. Instant recognition, Jimmy. She made you as Jake’s boy. That old broad’s got a bear trap for a memory. She knows where sonny boy’s at, too.’

  ‘You think so?’

  ‘Enough to have her eyeballed until further notice.’

  ‘Surveillance?’

  ‘Indeed, Lieutenant Parish’

  ‘So be it,’ I agreed. ‘We’ll set up the shifts when we get back to the office.’

  The stages of the drive from the retirement home back into town were marked by changes in the smells. When we reached the outskirts of Chicago, we sniffed the stink of the chemical plants on the western edge. As we changed direction and headed eastward, there was the smell of the icy lake water. The Loop had a scent of its own. There was nothing exactly like it.

  We pulled into the parking lot next to the central downtown headquarters. I halted the navy blue Taurus in its marked spot, we hopped out, and then we headed up in the elevator to the floor that housed Homicide.

  *

  He’d cut their throats twice. That had been to kill. The other damage was done postmortem. That was the style of the newest slayings as well. It looked like Anglin, and I had a feeling my father would have said it felt like him, too. Maybe he was getting too old to do multiples simultaneously, the way he’d murdered the nurses. Or maybe he was working himself up to another grand finale-type multiple homicide. I was trying to figure it his way. He was tantalizing us. He knew, if he read the papers, that I was on this investigation. My name had been in print more often than I’d have liked it to appear. It didn’t help us for him to know who was coming after him, but it was a free press.

  Perhaps, after all, it was to my advantage, his being aware of me. Maybe he’d remember my dad and Eddie Lezniak. Maybe he’d recall how he got lucky with them, losing two witnesses against him. Or maybe he knew why it was a fix. A sure thing.

  We headed back to the point of origin. To the location of the original killings. We stopped at the rib joint across the street from the girls’ dormitory, there on the West Side. It was thirty years later, but we found out that Billie Lee still owned and operated the restaurant. Billie Lee was close to retirement age. She appeared to be about sixty-five. Black woman, medium height, natural ‘do’. They used to call that style ‘unconked’.

  We took a walk outside the small rib house with Billie. She looked a little sullen and suspicious when Doc explained what two Homicide cops were there for.

  ‘That been over for, what — thirty years?’ she complained.

  ‘It ain’t over ’til it’s over,’ Doc said and smiled at her. The two of them. Senior citizens, I was thinking. Doc was sixty-three. They were both Korean War-era.

  ‘What you expec’ me to recall about somethin’ been gone for three ten-spots?’ she asked, smiling. She was trying to appear relaxed. Even nonchalant.

  ‘I think you gave the police some bad evidence the night your man got popped out here on the street. You said you saw a car full of African-Americans drive by and kill our witness. I think you saw something else,’ I told her.

  My bluntness seemed to have frightened her.

  ‘I told the po-lice just exactly what I saw.’

  ‘I think you’re lying,’ I said, grinning wolfishly.

  Doc stepped in to become her pal in time of need.

  ‘Easy Jimmy. I don’t see why Billie here would fabricate anything.’

  ‘Fabricate? What the fuck do “fabricate” mean?’ Billie blurted out.

  ‘It means lie. It means to bullshit a police officer. You know where that leads, Billie?’ I was bullying her now.

  ‘Take it easy, Lieutenant,’ Doc said. He gave me a sly wink.

  He walked down the street with Billie. They were alone for a couple of minutes, about a half-block from where I stood. Then they headed back my way.

  ‘Jimmy, I think the lady was strong-armed into giving false evidence. I think we can help her,’ Doc said, his face straight.

  ‘This all go down thirty fucking years ago. Why you want to mess wid me now?’

  ‘There’ve been more since Carl Anglin did his thing, Billie. Two more that we know about. And one of the new ones was a sister. I mean she was black, an African-American. And no one’s paid for those seven young girls. You haven’t forgotten them, have you, Billie?’ I asked.

  ‘I ain’t forgotten them, no. That was a terrible thing. Terrible. I never forget it. We was all scared to take a smoke outside here after it happened…Look. A white po-lice come up to me after the first po-lice — ’

  ‘That was my father, Lieutenant Jake Parish.’

  ‘Yeah. I remember his name…The next po-lice don’t give me no name. Don’t show no badge, neither. But he tell me all about the Health Department and how they can find rats in most any bidness, and I figure I ought to cooperate wid this po-lice. Him and his fuckin’ rats. This place all I got, and this man say I’m gonna go on fuckin’ food stamps if I don’t cooperate.’

  ‘You cooperate with us and I’ll guarantee nobody’s going to shut you down for rats or any other damn thing. You have my word,’ I told Billie.

  ‘Maybe…maybe it wadn’t no black men killed your witness. Maybe it was just two white men wearin’ ski masks to cover their faces.’

  ‘You sure, Billie?’ Doc asked. ‘Don’t just tell us something you think’s gonna make us happy.’

  ‘Nah. That’s the way it was. I was lookin’ out that glass front door, about ready to tell the lazy son of a bitch to get his ass back to work, and along come this unmarked car — ’

  ‘You mean like a squad car?’

  ‘Like a detective’s car, yeah…They pull up to him, he turn around like he’s gonna bolt away when he see them ski masks, and they

  put two shots in him from a .22. I could tell it was a .22. Heard enough gunfire in this neighborhood to know the difference.’

  I could see the fear in her dark face, even out there with only the streetlights illuminating this West Side side street.

  ‘You gonna get me killed, Lieutenant.’

  ‘Nobody’s going to know we ever ta
lked to you, Billie,’ Doc assured her.

  ‘That’s right. We’re going to keep an eye on you. Don’t worry.’

  ‘Don’t worry. That’s what my two ex-husbands say. First one choke on my own spare ribs. The other one fall flat on his face in Vegas with the only blackjack winner he hit after losin’ three thousand dollars…Don’t worry.’

  We walked her back inside, and then we came back out to the car.

  On the drive back Doc started to put pieces into the puzzle.

  ‘Were they ours or were they Feds?’

  ‘I don’t think they were ours. I know how prejudiced we both are against the government issue, so let’s try to be reasonable. Something’s connected to Anglin’s military service. He was involved in classified operations, so we assume that the spooks were trying to protect one of their own. Maybe Carl threatened to blab everything on Sixty Minutes. Who knows? They saved his ass on the seven nurses because he was involved in something very touchy. Something sensitive enough that they figure it’s national security.’

  ‘Maybe we’re widening the scenario,’ Doc mused.

  ‘Could be. Maybe Billie is full of shit. Maybe she gave us what she thinks we wanted to hear…But I don’t think so. I think Anglin was involved in something someone thinks is extremely significant.’

  ‘What would that be, Jimmy? Did he whack some dictator? Make some despot disappear?’

  ‘He’s into something they don’t want us to know about…We need to see the workup on the witness’s shooting.’

  I made the call to Evidence, and they said they’d expedite.

  The return call came in a half-hour.

  They had a file for me to see, so Doc and I took the elevator downstairs. We entered their cubicle, and Randy Smithson had the file ready.

  Doc and I took the lift back up to Homicide. We went back into my office. Doc didn’t like his space — said it was too small. So that was why he hung out with me so often, even when we weren’t working the streets.

  The information about the caliber of the weapon had been razored out. It’d been excised.

  ‘What’s the story on the cutouts?’ I asked Smithson on the phone.

  He professed ignorance, as I’d supposed he would. I hung up. It was no use. The trail was three decades old, and I was trying to follow along as if my father were still around, ending his shift with all those shots and beers at the Greek’s saloon.

  ‘Where now?’ Doc said and smiled sadly.

  *

  The Redhead had no advice for me. She was my wife — Detective Natalie Parisi.

  ‘Seems like it’s a no-winner, Jimmy. Everybody loses. The nurses, your dad. You, too. This thing with Anglin, sometimes it happens that way.’

  She sounded like a thirty-year vet. So I humored her.

  ‘Yeah, sometimes.’

  ‘You’re not quitting though, are you?’ she asked, smiling quizzically.

  She was bent over the crib wherein our newest addition lay. My daughter’s name was Mary. A fitting Mick moniker for a redhead, born of a redhead whose maiden name was Manion. Half guinea, half harp. Should turn out to be a drunken kidnapper, Doc wisecracked.

  She had auburn-colored hair, actually, what little there was of it. My wife’s hair’s hue was the same. It was the most beautiful color for a topknot that I could imagine.

  ‘He doesn’t walk. He doesn’t get a free pass. He’s going to pay for the seven young women he killed and the two new additions to his lists. My old man was still after him when he died. Jake Parisi didn’t let go and, by Christ, neither will I.’

  The baby began to cry, so I picked her up.

  ‘Hey. All that wasn’t directed at you, toots.’

  ‘Toots? What the hell is that?’ Natalie demanded.

  ‘It means sweet, in the old country. My mother used to call me that before I wouldn’t let her anymore.’

  My girl Mary had green eyes, but they were nothing like the way Jake told me Anglin’s eyes were. My girl’s eyes put you at ease, they were so soft and muted. Carl Anglin’s shade of green was intense, the old man had said. It came out of the dark corners of a room and found you wherever you hid. Like a jungle cat’s eyes. Stalking. Preying. Looking for any kind of a weakness, any kind of hole in your defenses.

  He massacred those seven young women. He hog-tied them and then he went to work on each of the gagged girls. They were killed in a line, like at a slaughterhouse. Each of them had to wait their turn. He ungagged them as he worked his way down the row, but he made sure they wouldn’t scream too loud or too long. He cut their throats down to the bone, you see. He severed the larynx, making it impossible for them to sustain any loud sounds. Anglin cut the jugular twice to make sure the bleeding would be at maximum flow. They’d die quickly, but he would take copious amounts of time with the dying and dead victims. The torture was taking place between life and death, I’d say. When they stopped, he didn’t, necessarily.

  Jake, my father, told me about Anglin because he didn’t want me to follow in his professional footsteps.

  ‘This is the kind of work I do, Jimmy,’ he told me, just before I went to Vietnam. This is the kind of shitty business I’m in.’

  ‘Then why do you do it?’ I asked.

  ‘Because I’m good at it. I’ve got a nose for shit. Human excrement walking on two legs, I mean. I know when people lie. I have a nose for lies, too. I smell all the odors in both nostrils, Jimmy. That’s my gift. It’s like a sense. An extra one past the usual sense of smell. I’ve got an educated schnoz, Sonny. The crap had better stay downwind when I’m around.’ He smiled.

  Then he took a tug at his sweating quart of Old Style.

  I went to Vietnam where I killed several men. I’m not proud of those killings. I came home and married my first wife, Erin. I became a policeman after graduating from the Academy. Twelve years later, I had a Homicide cop’s shield, and I was trying to finish a thirty-year-old murder case that had made my father old before his time and perhaps had even helped fling him backwards down a flight of twenty-six stairs.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  [July 1968]

  I see Jimmy off at the airport. Eleanor accompanies us, as does Jimmy’s girl, Erin. Erin’s the one he’s going to marry when he gets out of the Academy. He’s going to the police training facility as soon as his hitch in the Army is over. He’ll be able to finish his degree at nights, he says. The kid seems to have himself aimed at something. My son wants to be a Homicide cop, like me.

  We don’t hear from him for two weeks. Then we get a letter every week. He’s settling into Basic Training in some hot place in Georgia. The people tend to be very dumb or very smart, he tells us in his letters. It’s much the same impression I had of the men in the Army in 1944 and 1945 when I served.

  Estella the waitress tells us a very different tale about the night of the murders than does Billie, the co-owner of the rib joint. Billie goes along with the original version of the four black guys in the car. When we go back to talk to Estella again, her ass has been fired. It seems very disappointing for Eddie Lezniak who was sort of hoping to be able to flirt with the big-breasted waitress once more.

  Billie must have heard from some people who helped her confirm her story. And we can’t locate Estella. She’s been swallowed up by the West Side, something which happens frequently.

  The city is getting hot. Racially and temperature-wise. These are bad times here in Chicago and bad times most everywhere else. Assassinations. Overheated inner cities. Hell, we’ve had bricks tossed at our unmarked vehicles here on the West Side. Blacks have been burning each other out on this side of the city, and it’s scary to be a policeman where your skin makes you a target.

  Shots have been fired at uniforms, and there’s been talk of bringing in the National Guard if things explode. They feel like they’re at the boiling point to me. Eddie’s frightened, too. He keeps the pump-action shotguns in our back seat wherever we go, and our least favorite place to tour is the West Side.

  *<
br />
  Anglin lives in an apartment in the city’s north-central district. He hasn’t disappeared since we had to let him go. He keeps what you’d call a high profile after the case is dismissed. He shows up on local talk shows on the radio. There are a few TV spots about what happened to the man accused of butchering seven student nurses. He seems sympathetic to some people.

  Eddie and I cruise Anglin’s new neighborhood whenever we get the chance. There seems to be little reason to continue after him other than the obvious one: The motherfucker killed those girls. We both know it, so we continue to let Anglin see us from time to time.

  We try wrenching information out of the Navy about Anglin, but they are very closemouthed about intelligence-related matters since they’re embroiled in southeast Asia at the moment. Everyone in any Federal department is very tight-lipped about everything, at the moment. Things are not going well for us in the Orient, and things are going even worse here at home. As I said. Gunfire on the West Side. It’s in the open now. Like Dodge City after a cattle drive. There doesn’t seem to be any stopping it.

  *

  The Convention ignites that final conflagration. Every available cop in town is sent into the line at that park near where the Democratic gathering is taking place. This park used to be a place I’d take Jimmy on my days off when my son was a little guy. Now there are three million apes loose here, and there are thousands of cops with batons and guns and plastic shields. This can’t be Chicago. These guys can’t be from here. This is a place you come to on Saturdays and Sundays in the summer with a cold quart of brew hidden in a paper sack. This park is where you swing your kid on the swings and where you balance him on the teeter-totters. Not this ugly little jungle where the freaks are squaring off with the ‘pigs’.

  I’m not a real fan of being called a porker. I don’t see the humor in it, even though some of my brethren in blue do. Some of them have little pig dolls fixed to the dashboards of their squads. It’s their way of coping with the longhairs who throw feces at our windshields, here at the park.