Season of the Assassin

by Laird, Thomas

  ‘Would they pop her, too?’ Eddie inquires. ‘They might. They also might figure she’s frightened enough to keep her mouth shut. Too many murders make for too much tidying-up. Even the government can’t afford an unlimited mess. Maybe they’ll leave her alone. She’s just a sister with a grudge and a sad tale to tell. Who’s going to listen to her?’

  ‘She still ought to get the hell out of town,’ Eddie concludes.

  *

  I watch Carl Anglin, as I said, on my free time. I’m careful not to let him catch me at it because we’ve been warned by the folks downtown not to harass him. Since he is no longer a prime suspect in the nurses’ murders, we are to look elsewhere.

  Naturally there are no other likely suspects. Anglin did it. Everyone in Homicide knows it. He walks free with all that blood on his hands. Life and death go on. There are other killers to apprehend. We are kept busy. But now that the outdoor summer months are closing out, the number of homicides decreases. The hot politics of Chicago’s summer of’68 is simmering down some, but the anti-war sentiment is growing by the day. The liberals want us to love the North Vietnamese. The guys who’ve been shooting at my goddamn kid. Jane Fonda, the movie bitch, is talking nice with the communists while our guys are getting chewed up in that weed patch.

  Jimmy writes that they’re aware that the nation is not behind them, that the troops’ morale is low. Mostly everyone wants to saddle up and come home. Winning is not a priority. Survival is. The South Vietnamese — the ARVN — are Number Ten. They have no respect or love for the Americans and they fight poorly. They fight for money when they pull the trigger at all, Jimmy writes, and it feels like our guys are out there on a limb all by themselves. Not optimum prospects for victory in Southeast Asia.

  His tour is coming to a close in a few more months, but he thinks he might like to commit for a second go-round. He says the benefits are pretty good. He’ll get more money when he gets out and he won’t have to do chickenshit Stateside duty for the rest of his hitch when he returns. He’ll be out immediately when the Freedom Bird lands in the U.S.

  I’m back to spending more time in the Greek’s tavern. There’s nothing for me at home. Eleanor is only there physically. We do not touch, we do not intersect at any point. The house feels empty without Jimmy.

  I embarrassed my son with my drinking. I drove him out when he wanted to spend time with his friends. Jimmy would not bring his buddies or his girlfriend, Erin, inside our walls. And I can’t blame him. Drunken old homicide investigator. Failure, in fact. Murderer walks the streets because I couldn’t collar him. I know my own excuses. Christ, a dead witness and a fruitcake zombie who lives anonymously in Elgin State. I have the killer’s scent fully in my nose, but I cannot bring him down.

  I know Anglin was up to his eyebrows in evil with the military. A hired killer who hides today behind his flag, behind his uniform. I understand he’s done something big enough for the Spook community to watch his ass end. He’s a protected man. His connections go to some major vein in the heart of D.C. or Quantico or Spookville — or wherever.

  There’s an innocent teacher of English who had better be on the run because her brother confided in her over the telephone. There’s a dead FBI agent who I know in my gut never pulled his own plug.

  It’s no wonder I’m here at the Greek’s on the South Side swilling up bourbon and beers by the pair. If you drop a shot glass full of bourbon into a glass of draft beer they call the result a depth charge. Well, I’ve blown up a whole flotilla of submarines, then, with all the charges I’ve dropped.

  ‘Jake, you better head on out into the sunset,’ the Greek himself tells me.

  I’ve exceeded my limit, he explains. He’s the only friend I’ve got. He’s called me a cab. Is sending me home before I get my pension in trouble with a drunk-driving rap. The cabby comes into the bar and hails me.

  I wave to the Greek and stagger out into the icy wind. The breeze takes my breath away momentarily, but I’m able to get myself inside the Checker cab.

  *

  Eleanor is away for two days, visiting her mother in Indiana. They live in some hick heaven called Oxford.

  ‘Anybody home?’ I bellow out. I know there’ll be no reply.

  I walk up those twenty-six stairs and head toward the guest room, my bedroom.

  ‘Nobody home? You sure?’

  I smile with the sound of silence. This is the way it ought to be for Chicago’s most outcast copper. There are policemen at headquarters who make a point of ignoring me. The only guys who talk to me are the captain and my partner, Eddie. Fuck the rest of them, I figure. Times like these reveal who your real friends are. I was never all that close with my fellow Centurions.

  I lie down on my bed. It is hard and uncompromising, this mattress, the way I want it. Helps relieve the bad back I got, sleeping for two years on the ground in Europe during the Second World War. Nothing eases the pain except this boardlike bed of mine. Eleanor refuses to sleep with me here anyway.

  I close my eyes and I see the photographs of the seven nurses. I see the terror in Andrew Callan’s sister’s eyes. I see the dread in Theresa Rojas’s blank stare. And I see the actual corpses I encountered on the floors of those dorm rooms. There is nothing quite like the real thing. The authentic dead body.

  They haunt me every night. I cannot drown them out with the booze. Sleep doesn’t stop them from invading the surreal territory of the land of dreams. They’re with me all day and every night. I’ll need a shrink if the booze doesn’t do me in first.

  Eleanor. When was the last time her warm presence made contact with my own flesh? I can’t recall. I love her in spite of her disloyalty. She made me a cuckold and tried to tell me it was for my own good, it was so that we could have the family that I couldn’t give her. Nick was simply providing the seed of our happiness, she tried to convince me. Why couldn’t I see things for what they really were? She loves me, she says. It was never otherwise.

  Why couldn’t I bend my lofty virtue just once, she pleaded, and let us be happy with our lives and with our son? She digs into her Catholic upbringing and reminds me that Joseph had to live with an immaculate offspring. Well, she wasn’t Mary, Eleanor reminded me. If she were to have a child it would have to be via more conventional means. Meaning Nick. Nick’s seed, Nick’s sperm.

  Sleep is God’s opium. Sleep puts it behind us, it lets us unload all our burdens. But the price of sleep is dreams — more specifically, nightmares.

  I have to close my eyes in spite of that knowledge.

  And when I do, I hear a creaking of the floor downstairs. My first reaction is to bolt upright, here in bed. I grab down for the snubnosed.38 in my ankle holster and yank it out. Then, silently, I get out of bed.

  I do not call out. I don’t want them — whoever they are — to know I’m aware of them.

  So I get to the bedroom door and I walk quietly down the twenty-six stairs. I walk at their far right edge in order to avoid the creaking I heard before.

  When I arrive at the first floor, there are no lights on. I’ve turned them off before going upstairs.

  Dumb fuck, I’m thinking. Trying to boost a copper’s house. How stupid can a thief be?

  But maybe it’s not a thief.

  I work my way slowly through the dark toward the kitchen. My advantage is that it’s home turf for me. Whoever this is, he’s on foreign ground.

  The kitchen is clear. I stand still and listen.

  Nothing.

  I carry on and make my way toward the living room, just the other side of the dining room that I’m now passing through. I hear another slight squeaking of the floorboards. So I stop in place and try to get a fix on the location. The sound is coming from the kitchen. I hear another faint noise coming from there.

  The son of a bitch is following me.

  I carefully step back toward where I began, in the kitchen. There’s no way he can avoid me if he’s still in there. I’m pointing the .38 in front of me like a flashlight. One movement
and someone is going to be splattered across my walls.

  The weariness is still with me. The alcohol makes the room move eerily in the darkness. I try to fight off the effect of the booze. There is only a swinging door separating me from the kitchen and the intruder inside.

  Crouching, I rush through the door, the .38 in my hand moving back and forth to cover the room. There is silence and nothing else. This time I hear the movement coming from back out in the living room. I shove back through the kitchen door and hurry toward the source of this latest sound.

  It’s the same in here. I hear the noise coming from back in the kitchen.

  Fuck him. I’m going to turn on the light. I flip the switch and the brilliance of the bulbs blinds me slightly. But there’s no one in here with me. So I walk through the dining room and I flip on that switch. The overhead flares on and I’m still on my own.

  I throw open the door to the kitchen, and I fumble until I’ve switched the light there on. Still there is no one to be seen. I hear the noise in the dining room. I peer through the crack in the swinging door and I see the backside of someone dressed in black. They’re headed toward the living room. They’re running a game on me, staying one square ahead, but now the game is going to get deadly.

  I charge into the dining room at a dead run, hurl myself through the still-lit living-room and finally catch sight of the black-clad figure making his way out of my living-room window. I pump five shots at the fleeing figure, and I know I’ve only hit with one. I think I’ve caught him in the buttocks as he bent over in order to get out the window.

  If I’d been sober, I would’ve killed him. My eyesight is 20-20, and I’m a better than fair marksman.

  The five shots are noisy. When I look out at my front lawn I see lights coming on in the front windows of several of my neighbors’ houses.

  I call in for a squad car to get out here. They respond in under five minutes because the car’s not far from my house.

  The patrolmen want to have a look around, so I show them where everything is. They defer to the fact that I’m a Homicide cop, but I know they can smell the liquor on my breath and maybe even the scent of the fear I’m spreading all over my own house. They’re polite — Adams and Lefferts are their names — but I can tell they’re thinking I might have hallucinated, me being bombed the way I am.

  ‘I’ve been drinking,’ I tell Lefferts. ‘I’m not, however, all fucked up, Patrolman.’

  ‘Yessir.’ Lefferts smiles. He goes to find his partner who is searching the upstairs storey now.

  I make them some coffee. Mostly I make it for myself. My hands are shaking as I put the grounds into the pot.

  ‘There’s no blood anywhere that I can see, Lieutenant,’ Adams tells me when he and Lefferts come back into the kitchen.

  ‘I know I hit him once,’ I tell the tall, good-looking kid.

  ‘Could be he didn’t leak until he got to his ride,’ Adams says. ‘But there was a set of footprints on the wet grass.’

  ‘We need to get a cast made,’ I tell them. He goes out to the squad car to ask for some on-scene help.

  ‘Five shots?’ Lefferts asks. ‘You’d think he would’ve bled a little, even if you did only hit him once.’

  The electric coffee pot begins to perk, and the noise makes me jerk upright.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  [April 1999]

  The night in 1968 went something like this. It was after 8.00 p.m. The seven student nurses were in the dorm for the night because they didn’t speak English very well. They hadn’t been in El Norte long enough to pick up on the directions and whereabouts of things. The girls were pretty much homebodies because this city was big. So big that nothing but Mexico City or Havana in the Hispanic countries compared to this foreign place.

  There were Mexican men in Chicago, but not of the same class that the girls were used to. These seven nurses came from educated families, some better off than others. But all of them came from the middle classes. On the West Side of Chicago, there was stark poverty. There was a large black population, and there was also a growing Hispanic community. But the Hispanics lived on the edge of poverty in these barrios. So the girls might not have felt comfortable mixing with the established Spanish-speaking residents. It wasn’t necessarily because of snobbishness. These folk were adjusted, more or less, to El Norte. The student nurses were still only visitors to this part of North America.

  Chicago could be intimidating. The students knew something of the city from the cases they studied at County Hospital. Gunshot wounds, stabbings, stranglings, poisonings. They’d seen it all come through Emergency. So they might have been a bit scared to venture out into the world immediately around them.

  So it was early evening and they had settled in to study or watch television or just hang around and generally be lonely. After a couple of hours the boredom or the weariness had worn them out and several of them were preparing for bed. Since they were all Catholics, they prayed before going to sleep, and perhaps a few of them said the rosary as well. (Later, cops found the beads by three of their beds.)

  Carmen Espinoza was the last one out of the dorm, around 10.00 p.m. Everyone else was socked in for the night.

  It must have been that last nurse out who made it possible for Anglin to get into the dormitory. The safety door probably swooshed closed just a hair too slowly after her departure, and Carl Anglin was in the alley, just waiting for someone to give him his chance. It came — and he was in.

  Anglin began with the first nurse, Angela Trujillo. He bound her with her own sheets and silenced her with a balled-up pillowcase that nearly choked her to death. He moved on to the next room and subdued the two room-mates, Maria Colota and Juana Martinez, by punching both of them unconscious with his fists. The ruckus must have lasted only seconds because the other girls down the hall never heard him coming.

  He continued in a similar way until he had all seven girls tied up.

  He returned to the first room and spent some time with victim number one. When he had raped her several times, he cut her throat twice. Very skillful cutting. Like someone who had done that kind of knifing before. She bled to death very quickly. Her mouth was stuffed with pillowcase, so there was no audible screaming.

  Anglin moved on to the pair of student nurses in room two. He sodomized one of the young women, and then he raped the roommate in a more usual fashion before he also anally assaulted the second girl. He cut their throats, one after the other, and then he disemboweled both women, leaving them split open like butchered cattle at the stockyards.

  All this was done without disturbing the student nurses on the floors above or below. There were three floors in this dormitory.

  Anglin finally finished the carnage around 1.00 a.m., it was estimated by the Medical Examiner. Give or take an hour either way.

  My father arrived on scene early that morning. He told me before I went to Vietnam that he had never seen such savagery, such an absence of pity for the victims, in his entire career. He told me the details of the case before I left for Asia because he wanted to dissuade me from joining the police. I saw some things in my area of operations that might have rivaled in brutality what Anglin did to the girls, but then, I was in a war. Anglin had taken the unbelievable violence of combat and transferred its ugliness into the dormitory where the seven young females perished. My father’s story frightened me because of the matter-of-fact way he told it. It was as if this was nothing new, this incredible carnage. But he had seen savagery before, in the streets and in his own war.

  So he did not convince me to do anything other than become a policeman. I came back from Vietnam after two tours with a box full of decorations that I stopped wearing as soon as I could find my civvies. I signed up for the remaining hours that I owed for my bachelor’s degree, finished up that work and graduated and promptly signed on at the Police Academy. My first assignment was a beat on the West Side — patrolman, of course. Several years later, I had my shield and worked in Burglary/Auto Theft. Fi
nally I landed where I am today: Homicide. That was my own personal evolution. I grew up in the police with the Anglin murders already a matter of history. I saw my father turn gray with the weight of the nurses’ deaths. Then he died and I was left alone with this burden. The CPD put Anglin’s file in their ‘inactive’ section and hoped he’d go away.

  If I compared Carl Anglin to Evil, I’d be accused of sounding philosophical or even theological. I knew he was a man with two legs, two arms, and all the other usual equipment. Carl was human. It would be facile or naive to explain him away as something supernatural. No, he was one of us, more’s the pity. It would make us more comfortable with ourselves to categorize him out of the human species. It’d make things easier for us, more bearable. The presence of evil in men had long been a subject of study and dispute for men far more intelligent than yours truly, so I wouldn’t tarry, as they said. But there was a dose of something in Carl Anglin that made all those tales of a horned beast with a tail and a pitchfork just a little more credible to us believers who had no trouble embracing notions of angels and the God of Abraham. Still, the bad guy was undoubtedly less acceptable, the product of medieval ignorance, even if Jehovah was okay in some intellectual circles. To me it made no sense to exclude the Devil because there was a helluva lot more evidence for the Beast in action on earth than there was for the presence of this Essence of Good. I was a Catholic, as I said, and we still had that little embarrassment known as the Rite of Exorcism in our book, so I guess modern man hadn’t dismissed Old Scratch entirely.

  It was difficult to deal with Carl Anglin if I didn’t try to see him as human rather than demon. He had the same weaknesses any other perpetrator had, I told myself. He’d escaped punishment because of a glitch in history, not because he was the son of Satan. To think any other way would be ignorance and superstition.

  But when I went over in my mind the crime scene my father had encountered thirty years ago, I was left there in my office, alone at 3.30 in the morning, feeling a chill creep up my backbone.