Season of the Assassin

by Laird, Thomas

  ‘Are we lunatics?’

  ‘I guess. We’re the craziest dicks on the block,’ Doc said, smiling ruefully.

  ‘What the hell can we do about it?’

  ‘We can shut up and forget it forever.’

  ‘How, Doc? How the hell can we — ’

  ‘My cousin saw a UFO when he was in the Army in 1956. He saw it out in the woods where they were involved in war games or something. He and his buddy got chased through the woods by some kind of miniature flying craft, like a little saucer. Do you think those two reported anything to their superiors? Fuck no, they didn’t. They would’ve been accused of being smashed on duty. They would’ve been tossed in the brig until they rotted. You don’t come down the road with news like that. Elvis is dead. UFOs are explainable phenomena. JFK caught it from a lone shooter. It’s going on a quarter-century, Jimmy. Nobody wants to revisit that horror in Dallas.’

  ‘I’m not crazy You’re not nuts. And Anglin was there, in Dallas. He did the President, probably with another shooter. It was what he was trained to do. He had the motive, he had the ability. He had the lack of conscience, for Jesus Christ’s sake! He pulled the trigger and killed Kennedy, goddammit!’

  The guy flattening the tiny burgers turned and looked at the two of us.

  Doc smiled at him.

  ‘Can you get us a waitress to refill our coffees?’ Doc asked the grill man.

  ‘Sure,’ the cook replied, smiling. He walked off toward the back.

  ‘Keep it down, Jimmy. It’s goofy enough without yelling it aloud.’

  ‘We can’t prove it. I understand that. Unless…’

  ‘Unless what?’

  ‘Unless we can pressure the Feds by telling them that we know where Anglin’s hiding his blackmail material.’

  ‘I’m sure Carl’s got all the angles covered. He knows the kind of people he’s working for.’

  ‘Yeah. Pricks who allow the murder of seven women to go unsolved and unpunished. That’s the kind of people we’re talking about, so I’m not worried about ruffling their feathers.’

  ‘Think about it, Jimmy. You’ve got a daughter. You’ve got a wife. You want more children. Who’s going to keep the boogeyman out of your house? You can count on me, but I’m just one guy in your little army.’

  That’s how all these assholes operate. Keep everyone scared shitless. It’s like omertà with the guineas. Talk and you float with your nose in the sewer water.’

  ‘Facts is facts, Jimmy. What can I tell you? And this isn’t the first conspiracy theory about the Golden Boy from Hyannis Port. Why should our notion be smarter than all those others?’

  I couldn’t come up with an answer for him. And now I was thinking about the harm that could come to my wife and my daughter. It was a real threat. Not something you could shrug off, like a warning from some city thug. These guys played for keeps. They played in the biggest ballpark.

  ‘So we swallow our paranoia,’ I suggested.

  ‘You got another way to go with all this?’

  ‘You’re saying we never speak of this again. We keep it quiet because these animals have all the cards.’

  ‘We’re just no-name Homicide cops from the city. We keep our own yard clean. We try to do something that’s out of our league…hey, it’s a good recipe for getting it up the ass without a condom in play. You follow?’

  I felt sick. Helpless. Doc was right, and there was nowhere to turn for help.

  Anglin got away with it the way he did almost twenty years ago. Some little faction of nutcases was getting away with another big-time evil and our hands were still tied. Carl had himself protected. I wondered if we could get ourselves the same kind of lifetime warranty. What if Doc and I went to the papers?

  They’d want documentation. They’d want witnesses. We weren’t talking about going to the trash tabloids because the Star and the Enquirer publish outright bullshit all the time. To get the legitimate press on our side we’d have to have something besides the unsubstantiated theories of two Homicide investigators. We’d need a witness. Someone who’d worked with Anglin in the field.

  But there was no list of co-workers. The government had shredded any evidence of the exploits of Tactical Five. They were just fantasy, anyway. That’s what any prosecutor in the country would say if we brought all this up in public.

  Our theory was just another Halloween scare, like the Orson Welles hoax about the Martian invasion.

  ‘Let it lie, Jimmy. It can’t go anywhere. They’ve covered their tracks with a mountain of sand. Anglin disappeared into it when he pulled the trigger. He’s a survivor. He understands what it takes to keep breathing in a river full of snakes.’

  ‘What if he goes back to our streets and starts it up again with some new young girls?’

  ‘We’ll have to deal with him if he does. Right now he’s gone beneath the surface. Maybe he’ll leave Chicago alone. Maybe he’ll go after a colony of prairie dogs in Nebraska. Maybe the fucker’ll slip and fall in the shower and he’ll break his sly little neck.’

  The waitress finally emerged from her hiding place. She filled our cups and then she retreated to wherever it was she’d been hiding, waiting for the sun to come up and end her shift of slinging cheese sliders and pouring coffee.

  ‘You never thought you’d be involved in the murder of a President of the United States, did you, Jimmy?’

  ‘No. You’re right. We’re wading into deep water. It’s time to move on back where we can operate.’

  ‘That’s my boy. Don’t take it personal. Everybody’s gotta learn their limitations. It’s painful to reach that point of awareness, but there it is. We don’t get to hunt down Judas Iscariot, nor do we get to cuff Hitler or Mussolini. We miss out on a lot of justice. You just have to put things in perspective, James.’

  We had to keep the evil genie confined inside the jar. We could never unscrew the lid and let him loose. Our caseload did not include the assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy.

  And Carl Anglin’s name had apparently been deleted, too.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  [June 1999]

  The gang had been put on hold as far as Anglin was concerned. We had Tactical on round-the-clock watch over the Regals. The bangers had been told by our people to lay off. If they didn’t cool down, Tactical had promised them a roust like they’d never seen before. Our people let them know that all their business in the hood would be effectively shut down for as long as it took. The pressure seemed to work, since money was more important to them than one gang member’s sister. The urge to vengeance went only so far, then it was back to business as usual.

  My mind wandered back to the conversation that Doc and I had had late at night a number of years ago. We’d been talking about Anglin’s big hit. The one that got him all this federal aid. I’d blurted out that I thought Carl Anglin had fired the head shot that had killed Kennedy. To my amazement my partner had agreed. We’d sat in some White Castle at near-dawn, having a few burgers and some coffee, and I remembered the chill that had hit my spine when Doc went along with my spoken-out-loud nightmare. Anglin had assassinated JFK, not Lee Harvey Oswald. And Anglin had had help.

  Renny Charles was the help I’d had in mind when that horrible theory came into my head. Renny Charles, who’d taken a header out of his front-room window when Doc and I had first made contact with him.

  I was going back to Charles. He might have been the key to finding out what had happened back in the 1960s. I was hoping that I was wrong. I truly was. I wanted Oswald to be the shooter. I wanted this whole matter to boil down to the murders of ten young women and nothing more. I didn’t need the complications. But the idea of a lone assassin still stuck in my throat like a dry hunk of Thanksgiving turkey.

  I was not involving my partner in this one. He’d been right the first time we discussed this insanity. We should have got on with our caseload and kept our noses out of shit we couldn’t shovel.

  I made my way back to Renny Charles’s North Side
apartment in my family Chevy. This was off the clock.

  When I approached his apartment building, it was 9.46 p.m. I checked my watch with the help of the nearby streetlamp. It was a moonless night. Hot, humid, the usual June Chicago evening just before the real summer hit the streets.

  I didn’t have Doc’s little burglary kit, so I had to enter in the normal fashion, via a ring of the doorbell. I buzzed Charles’s apartment. No answer. I rang again. Same silence. So I buzzed his neighbors on the other two floors, and fortunately one of them responded. When I arrived at Renny Charles’s door, I knocked four times.

  I could hear the guy who’d buzzed me in cursing when he realized no one was there for him.

  I knocked four more times. Then I simply reached for the knob, and found that the door was unlocked.

  I took the Bulldog .38 from my ankle holster, and then I walked inside.

  Darkness. I reached for a switch. I clicked it up, but no light-bulb came on. The drapes were closed, so no illumination streamed in from the sidewalk outside. Light from the streetlamps was shut out.

  I took two more steps — and a blow to my head sent me plunging down into Renny Charles’s carpet.

  When I came round, I found I was sitting in a chair in the apartment. I thought I was still in the living room, but I couldn’t be sure.

  ‘Good evening, Lieutenant.’

  I couldn’t see the source of the voice, but whoever it was was apparently seated directly in front of me. I decided to stand up. Then I remembered I’d dropped the .38. The Nine too was missing from my shoulder holster. The guy in front of me was holding all the cards. So I stayed seated.

  ‘Who are you?’ I asked.

  ‘I’m the Major.’

  It hit me with a shock of revelation. He was the man in Tactical Five. The vague name we’d got for Anglin’s splinter group of spooks. ‘Why’d you sap me?’ I demanded.

  ‘Because it’d be a bit inconvenient for you to see me. Don’t you agree?’

  ‘All right.’

  ‘You were looking for Renny Charles?’

  ‘That must appear obvious…Major.’

  ‘I really am a major, you know.’

  ‘I’m sure you are.’

  ‘Lieutenant…I’m here because I want to try to help you.’

  ‘So you crack my noggin as a way to get acquainted.’

  ‘We could not meet in any usual way, but I’m sorry for the pain nonetheless.’

  ‘Where’s Charles?’

  ‘He’s deeply hidden, Lieutenant.’

  ‘Does that mean dead?’

  ‘No. You see, he comes under the umbrella that Mr Anglin has opened. We have an understanding with Carl. I’m sure you’ve guessed as much by now.’

  ‘Yeah. I figured he had your nuts in a vise over something pretty valuable to himself.’

  ‘Indeed. He has the greatest life insurance policy ever written. The big companies would be envious of Mr Anglin’s coverage.’

  ‘You didn’t kill me.’

  ‘No. I’m hoping I won’t have to.’

  ‘Why would you have to?’

  ‘Please, Lieutenant Parisi. Please. You know what this involves. You know that Anglin worked for us and that he was clever enough to insure his survival by leaving documents in the hands of people who could do this country very great harm. You’re a policeman, and that’s why I’m giving you this courtesy. But if you continue to look into Anglin as a suspect for the murders of — ’

  ‘He killed all ten of them, you son of a bitch!’

  I was standing by then. But I remembered he had the weapons, and it was a useless gesture. I sat back down.

  ‘Yes, he did. He killed them all.’

  ‘And you want me to allow him to go on doing — ’

  ‘We are negotiating a solution for Mr Anglin. We are attempting to locate the owner or owners of the documents that serve as his protection from us — and from you, as well. Let us find the documents at their source, Lieutenant, and justice will be served. But if you insist on bulling your way into matters that don’t concern you…Well, that would be unfortunate for both of us. Let us negotiate a settlement with Mr Anglin — ’

  ‘You haven’t been able to for thirty years. Why now?’

  ‘Remember there are things we are only just now discovering about World War Two. It takes decades, sometimes, to unearth evidence, facts…You have a family to consider, Lieutenant. Your wife is a police officer, too. You have three lovely children — ’

  ‘You threaten my family — you come near my house, you or any of — ’

  ‘None of that will be necessary if you just leave him to us. Think, Jimmy. Think.’

  I wanted to grab one of my missing weapons and light up this room with gunfire.

  The Major went on: ‘I have no desire to harm you or your family. You must provide them with protection. You must ask yourself if an animal like Carl Anglin is worth the risk…Is he?’

  ‘It’s my job. It’s what I do.’

  ‘Your job does not entail digging up the agony that this country endured over thirty-five years ago. This nation survived the pain. We put matters to rest. It serves no purpose of justice to dredge it all back up. And those girls will have their justice if you will only allow us to pursue Mr Anglin in our own way. Doesn’t that satisfy your personal and professional needs?’

  ‘Why should I trust you? You’ve let him slide, and because you did, he’s murdered three more young women.’

  ‘Carl Anglin was one of the best field operatives I have ever trained. His hard heart made him the perfect assassin. It didn’t matter who his target was. It was simply a task to be performed. He was also one of the best shots I have ever seen. Anglin could do head shots at more than 200 meters. The best pair of eyes I’ve ever encountered. Then he came home and did jobs in South America and Central America. And finally he was on the beach at the Bay of Pigs. Anglin was taken prisoner. He was raped and mutilated in prison. They cut off one of his testicles in that jail. But he escaped with some Cuban nationals and made it back to Key West. The jail thing turned him into something worse than an assassin. He’d always had a problem with women…You see, it was a female at the prison who cut off one of his balls.’

  ‘And I’m supposed to feel sorry for the puke.’

  ‘No. I just thought you might be interested in Anglin’s history…Let me take care of him, Jimmy. We’re almost home. Can you trust me for, say, one more month?’

  ‘He and Charles did John Kennedy, didn’t they?’

  ‘Ridiculous.’

  ‘Lee Oswald couldn’t hit a barn with a bowling ball.’

  ‘Absurd. No one would believe such a lunatic story.’

  ‘But it’s true anyway, isn’t it, Major?’

  ‘This is my last offer. Let him go. Things will become very unpleasant for you if I ever have to talk to you again.’

  Then it was silent in the apartment.

  ‘Major?’

  No response. I waited a full two minutes before I got to my feet. Then I stumbled toward where the voice had come from. I found the chair, its seat still warm from the Major’s body. And I found my .38 and my Nine lying on top of the seat. There was a lamp next to the chair. I switched it on, and the dull glow from the low-wattage bulb barely illuminated the living room. He must have run out the back, through the kitchen. I switched lights on as I proceeded to the back.

  There was no trace, though, of the Major. He’d slid out of the place as noiselessly as he’d arrived. I felt the welt his sap had made on the back of my head. Then I remembered my most dangerous blunder: Telling him about Anglin and the Presidential whack. My idea was so humiliatingly idiotic when spoken aloud that the Major knew no one would believe me if I repeated it. So many conspiracy nuts had claimed to know the identity of the ‘real’ slayer of JFK that even to speak about the subject had become a joke. Like Elvis sightings and UFO abductions. I wouldn’t be able to get a soul to believe my theory about the true history of Carl Anglin, so the Majo
r didn’t really feel threatened by me.

  But he wanted me to back off from Carl because he thought he could free the G from the threat of Anglin’s blackmail document. That document had to be a hell of a lot more convincing than a lone Chicago Homicide cop with a squirrelly notion of who’d killed a famous American President.

  The Major must have come across new information about where Carl had stashed the goodies that kept the Spooks from his door.

  Anglin had no such deal with me or the Chicago Police Department. He was just another piece of shit to us — and especially to me.

  No, the Major wouldn’t come after me unless I put Anglin in a position to tell all to the media. He wanted a month. He’d already had three decades.

  He couldn’t stop going after this butcher. And neither could I. I told Doc about my evening at Renny Charles’s place and my partner went into a rage.

  ‘Let’s go have a talk with Mason.’

  ‘Wouldn’t do any good. I don’t think Mason knows the Major. This guy is Superspook. I never heard him before he conked me, and I never heard him get out the room, either.’

  ‘He’s flesh and blood, Jimmy. Screw him. Let’s go find him.’

  ‘No. He made his threat. He wants us to lay off Carl for a while because he thinks he can take off his other nut. He thinks he can defuse him. They must have located Anglin’s “representative”.’

  ‘When they do, they’ll kill Carl.’

  ‘Like swatting a fly hovering over shit.’

  ‘And we’re supposed to sit back and let them do our business?’

  ‘I was hoping you’d see it that way.’

  ‘Shit, you scared me.’

  ‘Anglin put his piss-scent on our territory. He doesn’t get any free rides…Tell your wife to keep her eyes open, anyhow.’

  The first look of personal concern crossed Doc’s face. He was a husband and a father, just like me.

  I tried to reassure him: ‘I don’t think this spook wants to put the hurt to any of ours — or to us, either. I think he just wants us to know he could, if he felt like it. Power ball, with the big dogs playing.’