Season of the Assassin

by Laird, Thomas

  I had members of our own surveillance team at CPD check my car and my house for tailing devices. The Feds were big on electric toys. So far we hadn’t found anything, but they had very sophisticated devices that they used out on the street.

  They’d find Theresa, if they hadn’t already. They had the men, money and time.

  This Sunday night, I brought her her usual yellow rose. Her lips puckered a bit, and she damn near smiled. Or maybe it was just the angle I was watching her from.

  I didn’t say much to Theresa. I’d already told her everything she needed to know. So I watched some TV with her, even though Sunday nights were vast wastelands on the tube. We sat together quietly and watched some movie-of-the-week nonsense. Occasionally she got up from her bedside chair and walked to her window. She looked out into the darkness, and then she went back to her chair and watched the rest of the show. Sometimes I bought her a bag of buttered popcorn from the cafeteria. Theresa enjoyed this treat. She ate every last kernel. I’d sip a Diet Coke and watch her gobble down the popcorn.

  *

  We moved Theresa to another hospital. This one was in rural Indiana, near a town named Lebanon. It was really isolated. And it meant I could pay her very few visits because of the distance and the greater chance of one of us getting spotted.

  She was not happy with the move. She liked the view of the city from her old room. Now she had only a view of several cornfields for amusement — that and the TV, of course. The Indiana location offered her greater security, but she was used to the noise of Chicago. Now the relative solitude might become unbearable for her.

  I had to make elaborate plans just to see her. A faked fishing trip to nearby Quinn, Indiana was my ruse for being out of state. When it got dark, Doc and I decamped and headed home — with a side trip to the hospital.

  I was fairly certain we weren’t tailed from Quinn, but there was no way of telling for sure. Our security people swept our vehicle before we left, and I didn’t see any aerial surveillance on our asses.

  You never did see them, however.

  *

  Theresa seemed angry with me, this time. She wouldn’t even look at the yellow rose.

  ‘I won’t be coming to see you for a very long time,’ I told her.

  This news seemed to soften her sullen expression.

  ‘It’s too dangerous. Someone might be following me, and they’re so good at it that I won’t even know they’re out there. So I won’t be coming out anymore unless…unless you get better.’

  She flinched slightly.

  ‘Theresa…Do you really hear me?’

  She looked out into the cornfield. Perhaps the field was the backdrop upon which Theresa Rojas replayed the horrors of 1968.

  *

  We walked into Susan Malkin’s North Shore apartment. We were almost out of the city limits — that was how far north we were. The lights had all been unplugged or broken.

  The blood on the carpet looked black, like oil on a concrete floor, in the darkness.

  Doc trained his flashlight toward the woman’s bedroom. Susan Malkin had not been heard from in three days. Her mother had become alarmed, had reported her to Missing Persons, and then the owner of this very elegant apartment complex had reported a strange smell emanating from the flat. But the owner was too spooked to enter the place himself, so it became a suspected homicide scene and here we were.

  ‘Police,’ Doc said loudly. ‘If anyone is in here, come on out slowly with your hands visible.’

  No response. We didn’t think there would be one. Susan Malkin was dead. She was back in that bedroom and, Jesus, we could smell her.

  Doc flipped the overhead light on. The two uniforms following us stopped dead in their tracks when they saw it. Susan’s head had been stuck atop one of the bedposts. The headless body lay at the center of the bare mattress, the legs forced wide apart. It was almost as if she had been split up the middle, like a wishbone. There was a lot of blood around the genital area. She’d been stabbed in the torso repeatedly, so there was not much skin that wasn’t lathered in gore.

  One of the uniforms was already making use of Susan’s bathroom, next to where we were.

  The eerie thing about the head was that the eyes were wide open, as if she had been forced to watch it all happening to herself.

  On the neck were two very precise razor strokes. Very clinical. As distinct from the rest of the savagery. Doc knew without being told. The razor cuts had killed the woman. The killer had done much of the damage while Susan was bleeding to death. The beheading had been for our benefit. He’d left a witness for us.

  *

  We were at Anglin’s apartment at 3.12 a.m. He was not there. Doc and I sat in the dark of his living room on a very expensive couch. The backups were all out on the street. They had this place surrounded. If Carl came in, he wouldn’t get away without company.

  ‘He didn’t leave anything for us, of course,’ Doc said.

  ‘Of course not. He’s a pro,’ I concurred.

  ‘So we’ll just be going through the motions with him again.’

  ‘Yeah. He’ll lawyer up, and we’ll have to let him go. There’ll be no hair, no prints, no witnesses. He’s very good. You have to give him that.’

  I took out my nine-millimeter gun.

  ‘No, Jimmy. You can’t.’

  ‘Yes, I can.’

  ‘No. You won’t. You have a wife and three children, and I’m a married man with a daughter of my own.’

  We sat in the dark for some minutes.

  ‘He’ll get away with this one, too,’ I reminded Doc.

  ‘Maybe not. All the reports aren’t in. You know how much time it takes to — ’

  ‘Too much time. This makes ten that we know about. He likes to pick out individuals in his old age. Carl likes to work on single subjects now. Takes his time.’

  We were sitting in a darkened apartment waiting for a killer to come home so that we could arrest him and then let him go again. It was a sick game we played with Carl Anglin. We knew. He knew we knew. We knew that he knew we knew. And so on.

  ‘Maybe we should shoot that FBI agent, Mason,’ Doc suggested.

  ‘And leave the blonde assistant a widow?’

  ‘You think he might be boning her?’ Doc laughed.

  ‘Jesus, I hope so.’

  ‘If I weren’t married, I would’ve offered my services to her long ago.’

  ‘You’re old enough to be her daddy.’

  ‘True enough, Jimmy, but so are you.’

  ‘Thanks for the vote of confidence.’

  ‘The truth is the truth. We’re both too old for the luscious assistant special agent.’

  I was thinking about what he’d said about shooting Mason. Not that I was going to pop Mason. It was just that I hadn’t considered going after him as a suspect in a homicide investigation. But why should the Feds be exempt from our scrutiny?

  I got a squawk from my handheld radio. I told them I copied, and then I turned the radio off and Doc turned his off as well.

  Someone was on the way up. So Doc and I positioned ourselves on either side of the doorway.

  The key turned in the lock, and a dark, tall form entered.

  When Anglin heard the click of Doc’s .38, he froze.

  ‘Stand still,’ I told him.

  I shoved him into the room, and then I flipped the overhead lights on.

  ‘Oh — oh. I must’ve killed somebody,’ he said, a grin on his face.

  His green eyes seemed to pop out at you at first glance.

  ‘Where you been, Carl?’ Doc asked.

  ‘More appropriately, how the hell did you two get into my — ’

  Doc showed him the search warrant.

  ‘You found a conservative judge,’ Anglin said and smiled bleakly.

  ‘He’s one of your fans,’ I told him.

  ‘Where you been, Carl?’ Doc asked again.

  ‘You still driving that Ford?’ Anglin said.

  ‘Yes,’ I answered
.

  ‘Get it warmed up. Let’s go downtown so I can call my lawyer and get this whole lame process over with.’

  ‘What makes you so sure we haven’t got something that ties you to the scene?’ I queried.

  ‘Shall we just get on with this?’

  ‘All it takes is a thread, a fiber…Maybe you whacked off in the living room and just one small remnant of your DNA is swimming on her carpet,’ Doc said.

  ‘You both know better. Please. Can’t we just go?’

  *

  Anglin’s lawyer was downtown fifteen minutes after his call. Ten minutes after the lawyer’s arrival, we were forced to let Carl Anglin go since he was not an official suspect in a crime where there was no workable evidence on the table. We would be offered no help by Henry Fields, the prosecutor. We had nothing and Anglin and his high-priced attorney were aware of our unsustainable suspicions. Out the door he walked, just the way he’d said he would.

  We would now await the official word from the evidence specialists that we didn’t have a goddamn thing on him, and then he would be out of the woods once more.

  ‘The key is Mason,’ I told my partner during our lunch break in Garvin’s slovenly tavern. ‘He’s the guy. He knows why Carl Anglin wears this invincible ghost shirt. We have to proceed against him secretly, of course, but he’s our guy. Our indirect route to Carl.’

  ‘We investigate the G? Jimmy…I could retire any time. Why do I need my swan song to be a beef against the Feds? Don’t make our lives even more miserable. Why don’t we just try to hit some Iranian or Libyan terrorist? It’d be a lot easier and a lot more fun.’

  I watched his eyes, and then my partner surrendered.

  ‘J. Edgar Hoover. Now I could’ve gone for a shot at him…Mason. Jesus, Jimmy. Special Agent Wyatt Earp Mason. Jesus.’

  He put his hands flat on the table, and I began to tell him all about it.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  [December 1968]

  Marty gets blown to bits. Jimmy takes a tap in Southeast Asia. Carl Anglin is a free man. I’m looking for something that is right in the world, something that is just. I constantly encounter the word ‘justice’ in my business, but I have seen very little of it during this year and even during this decade. It seems like things had design, back in the 1940s. Then there was a world at war against evil, and evil was eventually rooted out. Hitler, Mussolini in Italy and Tojo in the Land of the Rising Sun all got theirs, finally.

  Now, though, kids believe in pharmaceuticals. They believe they expand their horizons with drugs — the way some people used to embrace religion. I’m no great Catholic, but I still respect the Pope and his brother priests.

  The world’s flipped ass over teakettle or whatever, and I have no control over anything anymore. Justice isn’t the only thing that’s gone south lately. Cops used to be respected. Now we’re called ‘pigs’. The Yippies and Hippies really mean it when they call us that. They don’t respect what we do.

  Personally, I speak for the dead. I always thought there was dignity in my work despite the bloody nature of the scenes I have to witness.

  I was never a complainer, but I find myself bitching more and more about the job. I don’t know why any of us walk into those dark places anymore. They sure as hell don’t pay us enough to do what we do. But here I am, whining again.

  Maybe it’s because of the recent false start with Eleanor. We were sleeping together, living together again for the first time in almost two years. Then the coldness crept back in when we got the news of Jimmy’s second wound. Eleanor started to backpedal on me, and I was not exactly understanding about her anxiety.

  Then it became the blood thing again. Jimmy is really hers. He belongs to her body, not mine. It came up in an argument, like it always does, and I’m back in the guest room once more.

  The comfort she gave me for those few days of reconciliation was better than any I’ve had for longer than I can remember. She is a beautiful woman. She has aged well. A little more wrinkled than she was in her early twenties, but a beauty nonetheless. I never stopped loving my wife. We just couldn’t cohabit very well. The usual reasons. But the usual reasons can’t change the natural passion I have for her. The usual reasons will never diminish the craziness, the madness I feel when I know I can’t have her or touch her or kiss her or embrace her…

  It makes me physically ill to go over it all, again and again.

  I have failed at the only relationship in my life that matters. I have failed to produce my own child with Eleanor’s help. Carl Anglin walks free because I can find no trace, no footprint, that would link him with seven brutal rapes and murders. And now I get one of my own kin blown to hell by someone who knows what it was that Anglin did to help preserve his obscene existence.

  All these failures lead me to think about swallowing a blue barrel and ending the fury in my head. But I am, as I say, a Catholic. I believe, fool that I am, in Heaven and in Hell. I think Jesus Christ died for my sins, and I don’t want to anger God any more than he is already apparently angered at me. He’ll let me off the hook when He’s ready, not before.

  I cannot shame my family by killing myself. The least I can do is take the pain. It was part of my Ranger training in World War Two. I was at Normandy. I saw unholy hell on the beaches, there. All the carnage that the history books describe can never equal the true terror of actually being there on that sixth day of June in 1944. Then all the days after the landings. For almost a year we fought our way across a devastated Europe. I looked men in the eyes before I shot them. I cut German throats. I booby-trapped people I never saw get killed. Those images return to me from time to time. I never watch war movies. I have my own that I run in my head occasionally.

  No, I was taught to survive, not to give in. The thought of surrendering to Hitler’s forces was unthinkable. In my outfit we’d rather have died.

  The war ended. Times changed. The world raced by me, and I began to feel like a mastodon. A furry old prehistoric elephant with a long memory.

  Maybe it’s just that I don’t belong in this time, in this place. I should be moved back two decades to a time I could understand. This world belongs to Jimmy, not to me. Maybe Fate fucked up. Perhaps I should have been left lying face down in the sand at Normandy where a lot of my brothers in arms fell, the impact of the bullets that killed them the last sensations they were conscious of.

  Morbidity comes with my job. I deal with the dead. I try to speak for them and take the place of the living tongues they’ve forfeited.

  I’ve done a lousy job for seven young women who were learning to help people. Nursing. Now there’s a job with integrity.

  Killers survive in the jungle. They flourish all over the world. The meanest of us were the most likely to live through the nightmare of June 6, 1944, I believe. There must be a final cruelty somewhere in my makeup. It shows in the subtle rejection of me by my wife and son. It doesn’t matter that he’s not mine by blood. He’s always looked to me as his father, and that should’ve been good enough for me. He was there for me to love, and I never loved him enough. Now I can’t tell him those things in the few letters I mail him. I wind up talking about my caseload instead. I write to him about unfinished business like Carl Anglin. I tell Jimmy that when he gets on the force there will be someone like Anglin to haunt him too, if he ever makes it to Homicide. Don’t be a cop, Jimmy, I tell him. Be a schoolteacher or a doctor or a lawyer — anything but a ‘pig’.

  He remains resolute. He tells me in his own letters that he wishes he could help me nail my one outstanding case. He’d like to be my partner on the day I slam the door of the cell that holds Anglin. Jimmy insists I’ll get my man, just like the Mounties. My son wants to be Stateside when I cuff the monster with the dangling locks and the jungle-green eyes.

  *

  ‘I’ll call the cab,’ the Greek insists.

  ‘No. No…I’m fine. Really. It’s all right,’ I tell the barman.

  I manage to rise from my bar stool and then I�
��m navigating toward the door. Out I go into the frigid December evening air.

  I get the car rolling toward home. Driving at an abnormally slow speed, I am able to keep it steered accurately toward my residence. Like all drunks, I have the idiotic notion that I drive better when I’m stiff.

  I’m lucky and I know it.

  When I arrive at the house, I cut the left front tire over the curb, and then I pull back the other way and the auto comes to a clunking stop as the wheel hits back down on the street.

  It’s dark already. Eleanor and I went round and round last night. My drinking has become too much for her to bear. She despises me for turning my back on her just when it appeared we might be coming back together for the first time since we married.

  I open the door. I turn on the hall light. Eleanor awaits me at the top of the twenty-six steps that lead to the upper level of the house.

  ‘I can smell you. By God, I can,’ she growls.

  ‘Can you really, Eleanor? Can that lovely nose of yours tell you all about my day?’

  I begin the ascent, but I stagger about five stairs up.

  ‘You’ll kill yourself.’

  ‘Me? Never, darlin’. I love my life too much.’

  I continue up. I look at my bride’s beautiful face. It’s the face of a twenty-year-old beauty who’s consented to make me the happiest man in the world.

  ‘Why don’t you sleep there? Eat there? There’s nothing for you in this house, nothing that you really want — ’

  ‘Shut up!’ I bellow.

  ‘It’s my house too. I’m the one who lives here, Jake. You’re just a boarder, here for a meal from time to time, but you’re still just a boarder.’

  ‘A short-timer.’

  ‘Yes.’

  I’m almost up the stairs. A vicious notion grabs me. I should take her by her long brown hair and drag her down this flight with me. We could tumble to our deaths together.