Season of the Assassin

by Laird, Thomas

  ‘You mean Special Agent Mason is — ’

  ‘Yeah. If you want to bail, now’s the time to grab a bucket,’ I warned him.

  ‘Oh man. I didn’t know we were digging into dirt that’s not for human consumption. I mean I thought this was just routine police…I can get myself killed here?’

  We both looked right at him.

  ‘Oh man, oh man. I got a family, Doc.’

  ‘So do we, Ralph,’ Doc returned.

  ‘How shitty is this shit?’

  ‘The shittiest you can imagine,’ I replied, grinning harshly.

  ‘Oh man, oh man…Who’re we going after?’

  ‘Anglin. It’s always been him. But we have to get past his friends too.’

  ‘And they are well-placed individuals within the framework of our government?’

  ‘Yes, Ralphie. But no one elected these sons of bitches. They were spawned by some lazy bastards who like to hire out to have their garbage removed.’

  ‘Doc, this is crazy. You’re scaring me. We were just after a murderer — ’

  ‘The safest way for us to go is to get them, expose them. We don’t have to arrest them. The daylight kills them on contact, Ralph. Like in the vampire movies. You remember what happens to the Count when the sun’s rays hit him?’

  Ralph watched Doc’s eyes. ‘What’ve you two got me into?’

  ‘I’m sorry, Ralph, it was my fault,’ I told him. And you can still walk out now. We’re never going to speak your name. You can trust us. No one else knows about this recording.’

  He looked down at his shoes.

  ‘Christ, I gotta think Doc’s right. I won’t feel safe unless you can root these mothers out. I don’t want to be watching over my shoulder for — Christ, I have my family to protect, too.’

  ‘So do you think the three of us could invade Special Agent Mason’s office?’ I asked.

  Ralph sat up with a start. ‘You want me to trap his freaking office? His federal office?’

  We watched him again.

  ‘Oh man, oh man. I could’ve gone into insurance, accounting…A Fed’s home field.’

  ‘We’d do it, actually. You’d look a little strange, walking in there with us. We have legit business with Mason. One of us could distract him while the other planted the bug…You got something simple enough for us to put into operation?’ I asked.

  ‘I suppose I could show you how to…Yeah…Has he got a big desk, like this one here, Lieutenant?’

  ‘I think it’s similar.’

  ‘Look, tapping a G’s office telephone is way too risky. But we could get a bug in the room so you could hear what he’s saying, at least.’

  ‘Sounds like a plan,’ Doc confirmed.

  Ralphie the Techie started to give us our first lecture on audio surveillance.

  *

  Doc diverted Mason into the hallway while I asked to use the Fibbie’s telephone for what I explained was a private call. I dug into my pocket for the tiny transmitter. I took the ball of adhesive goo that Ralph had supplied me, stuck the goo on the underside of the wooden desktop and then pushed the transmitter into the goo. All we had to do now, Ralphie suggested, was hope that the Feds didn’t sweep their own offices for bugs for the next few days.

  When Mason and Doc walked back in, I was just hanging up from my call to the National Weather Service. Sunny and warm, the man had said.

  *

  The attack on Anglin was coming this Saturday night, we found out. We didn’t hear who Mason was talking to, but we got the idea from his responses to a call on Saturday morning. Our luck had held up. The Feds hadn’t found the crude transmitter we’d planted. They had no reason to believe that anyone would dare invade their space, so I guessed we were banking on their arrogance. Something that was indeed usually a bankable notion.

  We had to involve SWAT in this business. Homicide took care of bodies after the fact. Special Weapons and Tactics, of course, was something of a preventative measure, when they were not actually eliminating targets. Since we had notified the SWAT people, though, Doc and I were allowed to accompany our friends in the anti-terrorist garb to the scene of what we hoped would not become a reenactment of the serious disagreement between the Clantons and the Earps in Tombstone at that famous corral.

  The first precaution was to get Anglin’s neighbors out of their apartments. The operation was due to take place there in the new neighborhood that Carl Anglin had invaded. Three-flat apartment buildings made up most of the blocks there on the near by North Side. We cleared out the occupants for a half-block on either side of Anglin’s abode.

  Carl Anglin was the only tenant home tonight. As soon as the sun went down, the evacuation went ahead. You had to admire the SWAT guys. They could’ve cleared out Wrigley Field and the ballplayers would never have noticed. It was done that quietly and quickly.

  The hit itself was scheduled for 2.00 a.m. Sunday morning, officially. So we had about six hours to prepare for the Regals.

  Doc and I sat in our Taurus, about two hundred yards from Anglin’s place. Doc had brought along the usual gear for a stakeout. His portable radio, a bucket of Brown’s chicken — which he finished solo — and a flashlight and a paperback of poetry by a guy named Pinsky. He left not a second to chance or to boredom.

  I tried to sleep when I could while on a stakeout. At least, I did once I was sure that Doc was awake with his jazz station and his poetry and his ‘six clucks for a buck’ or whatever the cooked poultry cost him.

  I couldn’t zee that night. I was waiting for the Regals’ arrival long before they were scheduled. What mystified me was how Mason’s friends had infiltrated them. They were a gang upon whom Tactical had made no dent for the last ten years. They were an extraordinarily hostile clan. None of our black undercovers had been able to get inside to date. The Regals were very clever and very paranoid. If you wanted to be one of them they had to know you since you were in grade school. They were extremely selective about new recruits.

  It was the witching hour. Only two more to go. The neighborhood was too quiet. God knew where Tactical had taken the residents. They’d herded them off somewhere, far away from this site. Maybe the quiet would tip off the Regals, and perhaps they’d abort.

  Our man was nestled quietly in his apartment with yet another young devotee who wanted to be near this dangerous suspected killer of ten girls. Anglin must have seemed exciting to whoever was up there in bed with him. I didn’t know how some women reasoned — especially those who fell in love with cons on Death Row.

  I settled back and tried to listen to Ahmad Jamal on Doc’s all-night jazz station. The man could play the piano. Very smooth. Doc had extraordinary taste, it seemed to me. But I was not an aficionado of jazz.

  1:30 a.m. rolled around, and the people in black out there had been fully deployed. If the Regals tried to enter Anglin’s apartment building, they were in for a shock.

  Doc turned off the radio. It was now ten minutes before the hour. And the Regals were early. We saw the two vehicles cruising down the street toward the three-flat in question. They were four-door cars, the kind of vehicle that drive-by shooters tended to use.

  But the Pontiac and Buick late models passed by Anglin’s location.

  ‘They see something?’

  ‘No,’ I answered. ‘They’re just being cautious.’

  I was vindicated when we saw them coming back down the street after having made their first pass. Now they slowed before they got to the address. The Pontiac pulled over first, and then the Buick followed behind it to stop at the curb outside the building where Carl Anglin rested with — or on top of — his company for tonight.

  There were seven of them. Four from the first car and three from the second. They were carrying some kind of sawed-off weapons, something compact.

  Doc pulled out his Nine and I gripped my own weapon. We were letting the SWAT team handle the takedown, but we were taking no chances about getting caught in some cross fire if things went south.

 
; The seven Regals glided toward the entry. Three of them split off from the main party and circled around toward the rear exit.

  As soon as the first banger touched the handle of the door, ten SWAT guys were on

  top of them. Gun barrels were immediately jammed behind the four bangers’ ears, and we could hear the clunk of their weapons as they hit the sidewalk.

  Doc and I got out of our vehicle. We heard one gunshot, and then there was another burst of gunfire from behind the apartment building. But the firefight there was over in seconds. We rushed up to the scene. The four men who had been going in via the front were on the ground and were already cuffed. Doc and I circled to the rear and found the SWAT standing over three dead Regals.

  ‘They tried to act,’ a hooded figure informed me.

  The bangers’ heads looked like exploded melons. All that damage had been done with one deadly burst of automatic fire.

  *

  Mason wanted to know how we’d known about the attack on Anglin. I smiled and said we had some intelligence on these mean streets too, but the special agent was not happy with my response.

  We’d got there before his own folks had arrived — that was what really stuck in his throat. We’d had the area cleared and secured before his Spook friends could set up and deploy. And if they’d got there before us, I’m certain there would have been seven corpses at County instead of the three that our SWAT fellows had had to neutralize.

  Mason wanted information from me, but I was not forthcoming. He’d find the transmitter within twenty-four hours. He’d figure it out. He’d find the tap on his home phone within thirty-six hours as well. He was, when it came down to it, no fool. And then he’d know who his opposition really was. It wasn’t the Regals. It was me. And Doc. Then we’d have a war of our own.

  I was not convinced this raid would put the street gang off the vendetta trail. They wouldn’t forget. But maybe it’d give Doc and me time to focus on Mason and this ‘major’ who supplied Mason with intelligence about our subject of mutual interest, Carl Anglin.

  For the first time since the newest rash of rapes and murders, I felt like some kind of door was opening. But I didn’t know if the opening was something any of us wanted to look through.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  [May 1986]

  The bulbs popped and the ceremony was over. I had my new shield and I’d become an official member of the elite: Homicide. All those years of preparation were ended and I was where I belonged.

  Jake had been gone all those years, as well. Nick, my uncle (or father, biologically), Erin, my wife, and Eleanor, my mother, were all there with me.

  The labor had ended fruitfully. I’d scoured the streets for the common variety of auto booster, and now it was time to play in the big leagues. It was where I was born to be.

  *

  My first partner was John Matuzak. A veteran of ten years in Homicide. He was a natural teacher, showed me all the moves. Orthodox and not-so-kosher moves. In other words he taught me to expedite, to get the job done. But John instructed me too about not losing sight of the smallest details. He showed me how to defend myself in a courtroom against a greaseball shyster who was paid for an acquittal. I never realized the survival moves you had to employ as a homicide investigator. It was absolutely adversarial in a court of law, and you couldn’t let your ass hang out naked in the breeze.

  Then Johnny M. had a heart attack two years after we became partners, and he spent six months recovering in a hospital, and then he took his retirement because he’d put his thirty annums in. We had a big party for him in Cicero, and Johnny retired in Williams Bay, Wisconsin, where he fished and hung at the beach by the shores of Lake Geneva.

  He survived the heart thing and Homicide.

  My next partner was a guy named Harold Gibron. They called him Doc because he was going after his Master’s in English or European Literature — I couldn’t remember which. So I was thinking they’d stuck me with some wiseass academic who’d correct my grammar.

  But Doc was just another street guy with a shield who happened to enjoy fine literature but who didn’t foist blueblood fine arts onto his ignorant guinea younger partner.

  We got along from the beginning. He told me everything. About his divorce, about his living alone, about his dream of copping that PhD and teaching compliant coeds. Harold was, of course, a bullshit artist, but he never lied to me. He saved the lies for his troop of lady friends — none of whom fell into the ‘serious’ category. It seemed that the divorce had turned him away from thoughts of settling down and having children.

  When he met Erin, they became fast buddies. Doc told her dirty jokes that made her laugh and made me a little embarrassed, but when I saw the fun she was having listening to this old Korea hand, I couldn’t get angry with him.

  We had an impressive turnover rate for our caseload. We worked well together, and we put together a string of solved murders. I was a sergeant, as was Doc, but I was going to take the exam for lieutenant in the fall. It meant more money, and Erin and I were starting a family. We already had a little girl and we wanted a boy next.

  Doc and I started off making a few waves with the arrest of a TV anchor who’d been wasting young women on the North Side. We got our names in the paper, and then the media knew me. They’d already become acquainted with the good doctor.

  Our next big headline case was the murder of several teenaged girls — done by an ex-nun. This deal also made the media. The lieutenant thing looked closer to reality now. All I had to do was pass the written test.

  *

  Lurking behind everything I accomplished, everything we got closed, was Carl Anglin. I had spent six months in therapy, courtesy of the Department, talking to a shrink about what I thought had happened with my father the night he’d rolled down those stairs at the family house. Had the old lady shoved him? If so, had she done it deliberately? The verdict had been accidental death. There hadn’t been much argument about the cause of death from the detectives who’d been called to the Parisi house that night. They had been able to smell the booze on my father’s clothes, on his body. It had been an accident. He’d simply slipped and tumbled down all those twenty-six steps, and he’d broken his neck on the way down.

  Case closed.

  But not Carl Anglin’s. Every so often I got the urge to look into the old man’s files. I tried to get a fix on Anglin’s whereabouts. Which was difficult because he moved about quite often. He stayed in no place for very long, and it would have taken full-time surveillance to keep good tabs on him. He was in and out. But there were no more slayings that carried his signature. We saw plenty of savagery, but nothing that resembled that crime in 1968.

  Almost twenty years had passed. The unnamed witness to the killings was still hidden away at Elgin Mental Hospital. According to the doctors I’d talked to there, Theresa Rojas was still cut adrift from our world, and so there was no new development in the case. The only other witness was dead, and we hadn’t been able to crack the military or the Feds for any new information about Carl Anglin’s wartime exploits. It was still just a theory that he’d been shielded from prosecution because of something he’d done after the infamous Bay of Pigs fiasco, and we couldn’t break their silence.

  So we went about our work as if Anglin had departed the world along with Theresa Rojas — who might as well have been dead for all the use she was to any investigation — and the other seven nurses. Doc told me obsession was unhealthy, and I confirmed his notion. But that didn’t stop me from looking over the old files from 1968, from time to time.

  And yet the pieces meshed. It explained why Carl had heavy-duty help in avoiding the murder rap for the nurses. He must have had his story on tape somewhere. He must have had it written down and arranged for its exposure to the world’s media. Something was preventing this ‘Tactical Five’ from calling on Carl Anglin with ‘extreme prejudice’. They couldn’t hit him because he’d insured himself. With whom?

  He could have given a tape or
a transcript to a lawyer. Or the material could have been stuck in a Swiss account box. It would have been impossible to pinpoint the hiding place of Carl’s blackmail data among the complexities of the history of the United States during the last quarter-century.

  Carl Anglin had blown the top of JFK’s head off. Oswald had been the schmuck. He couldn’t have nailed a moving target three times in six seconds, or whatever it was. But Anglin and an accomplice could have done. It was their job. They were skilled assassins, not disgruntled fanatics like Oswald. Then Oswald got wasted with cops all around him and we were supposed to buy into that kind of copper incompetence. The man who was supposed to have shot Kennedy was allowed out in the open and Jack Ruby just happened to be there.

  I understood closure. I understood how important it was to let old wounds heal. But a lie of this size would never close. The wound would stay open. There was no possibility that it would heal. Shakespeare had once said something about murder crying out for resolution, but I couldn’t remember which play that was in.

  Approaching Doc about the matter was something I hadn’t so far been able to do. But on our dinner break at the White Castle at 3.16 a.m. on a Wednesday morning, the words just seemed to rush out of my mouth.

  There was no one at the counter with us, no one in earshot. The employees of the White Castle were either very busy or half asleep. The dawn was still hours away.

  I turned to Doc as he bit into a cheese slider.

  ‘I think Carl Anglin shot John Kennedy in the head. I think he’s got something on tape or in writing that he’s hidden with a lawyer or somebody, and I think he’s hanging it over the heads of the FBI. I think that’s why they had to help him with the nurses.’

  Doc swallowed the remainder of his cheese slider. He took a sip from his black coffee.

  ‘I’ve been thinking the same goddamned thing for about six years.’

  ‘Why the hell didn’t you tell me, then?’

  ‘Because I thought you’d think I was a lunatic, of course. Why else do you suppose?’