by Thomas Laird
He let me in, an electric buzz signalling the lock’s release.
I walked up to the top of the steps where his front door was, and he opened up for me.
‘It’s early, cousin,’ I warned him.
‘It could be later than I think.’
‘So you got a scent?’
‘Yeah. I got a real bad scent ... Sit down, Jimmy.’
He had a dim-wattage bulb in a lamp on the table next to his front window, but I could still make out that he had lines of sleeplessness on his Sicilian face.
‘So who’s the big dog that wants to disappear you?’
‘You want some coffee, Jimmy P?’
‘I wanted coffee, I’d be at the fucking White Castle. Come on. Tell me what’s scaring the shit out of you.’
‘He’s a made guy, coz. And he got permission to pop me.’
‘Who is this guy?’
‘Jackie Morocco.’
‘What’s his real name, Billy?’
‘John Fortuna.’
The light went on inside me when I heard the actual surname. Fortuna was one of the Young Turks who took over when we sent Danny Ciccio to prison on a multiple murder rap that stuck.
‘What’s Fortuna got to do with The Farmer?’
‘I’m gonna get wasted no matter what I do.’
‘Then come on and help yourself. I told you what you have to do to survive, cousin. You tell me what’s going on, I take these bad nasties out of the picture. Everybody gets happy if you do the right thing.’
He watched me to see if I was setting him up.
‘You wired, Jimmy?’
‘You want me to drop my pants?’
‘You wouldn’t’ve had time to wire up, would you?’
‘Quit wasting our time. Tell me.’
He looked at his own outstretched fingertips.
‘Jackie Morocco — Fortuna — has a guy in his pocket. This guy was connected to Jackie because of some bitch, Morocco’s little sister. The little sister was supposed to be worse than her brother. She’s a killer cunt, I hear. She’d be a made man if she had balls. You know what I’m sayin’? She’s a vicious little shit. Into all kinda kinky crap. Sex, I mean. And she’s had a few physical-like encounters with a few other women, I hear. I don’t mean she’s queer. I mean she likes to hurt people. You know? She was up in Elgin when she was a teenager. They kept it real hush-hush, the family did. Very private matter, but I don’t know all the particulars ... Well, she comes into contact with this outside guy and falls for him big-time. But the guy’s a bigger fuckup than she is.’
‘What’s her name?’
‘Mary Margaret Fortuna ... But she got married when she was just outta high school, and I think she goes by her married name. I don’t know the new name, but I’ll try to find out what it was. She went by something other than her given names, too. Bitch was a whacker. Hated her family. Hated Jackie Morocco. The word was that her bro was fuckin’ his little sis all while they was growin’ up under one roof. But it’s weird. She never called the cops on him. Although maybe that’s the Sicilian in her. She never stuck him in the back with an ice pick, which like I say she’s very capable of doin’ ... She’s just a weird female. All messed up in the head. You know what I’m sayin’?’
‘So how does she connect with The Farmer?’
Billy chewed off a fingernail and spat it on the lush carpet.
‘She meets this geek right after she gets divorced. He goes off to that fuckin’ Gulf War bullshit and he comes home all whacked in the skull. The guy had been in medical school or something and he was a medic over in the Gulf, too. You wouldn’t think a guy like that would become a blade man, would you, coz?’
‘You don’t know his name?’
‘No. I was lucky to make the connection with Fortuna’s goofy fuckin’ sister. Lotta guys don’ wanna talk to me after I got shot. They can smell the wrong in the air. They know Jackie Morocco’s got a beef with me. They know there’s bad blood between my family because of the way Fortuna took over when Danny Cheech went away.’
‘So what’s the hook Jackie’s got into The Farmer?’
Billy bit off the fingernail on a new finger and spat it out on the same portion of carpet. There were faint rays of sunlight coming through his sheer curtains now.
‘This war vet knocks Mary Margaret up.’
‘He doesn’t do the right thing and marry her.’
‘That ain’t it, Jimmy.’
‘Then what?’
‘The guy does an abortion on her. She damn’ near bleeds to death. But she don’t call out the dogs on the guy who butchered her. She begs for his life. It becomes a matter of honor for her bro, Jackie. So he puts the knifeman to work. He gives him a choice. Come up with fresh body parts that Jackie sells overseas, or else Jackie takes one of his lungs, then a kidney ... You get the picture? He takes a week to kill the motherfucker. See, The Farmer’s an amateur when it comes to cutting, compared to his almost-brother-in-law ... But the strange thing was that this lover of Little Sister doesn’t try to bolt from the business. Someone offered you a job like that you’d run for fuckin’ cover, wouldn’t you? This fucker embraces Jackie Morocco and the whole deal like it’s the sweetest proposition he ever heard. It even scares Fortuna, I hear. He never figured the kinda monster he was puttin’ into motion. You know what I mean?’
‘Where do I find Fortuna?’
‘Good luck. He’s a phantom, Jimmy. He’s a capo, but he’s damn’ near invisible. I was you, I’d try the Feds. They always know where everybody’s perched.’
‘Why’s he so ‘invisible’?’
‘The Feds been after him for a long time. Fortuna doesn’t do hits. Hasn’t since he got made. He gets other guys to do his dirty work. Lots of guys think he’s a fuckin’ clone of Old Man Daley. You know, the old mayor of the city. He keeps his own hands clean. He never leaves a connection to anything he ordered. Shit, the guy’s got an education. Went to the state college. You know, the big one down south in Illinois. He’s no jamolk. He’s mean as hell, but he’s not even a little stupid. That’s why I say you’d better check with the FBI. They got so much electricity hooked up to us, I get a hard-on takin’ a piss wherever I go.’
‘So I find Fortuna, I can find the guy with the blade.’
‘That’s why I called you up here, Jimmy P. You’re all I got. I don’t trust the Feds. They wanna put me in a hole, just like the hole Danny’s in at Jolly J.’
‘Jolly J’ referred to Joliet Prison. That was where his big-dog cousin was residing for concurrent life sentences.
‘You settled in here?’ I asked.
‘I got a few places to roost. I’m gonna move around every so often.’
‘You fixed for funds?’
‘I’m all right, Jimmy P. Are you offerin’ financial fuckin’ aid to me?’
‘If you need a coupla bucks, yeah. Sure.’
‘Nah, I’m okay. But I appreciate it. Really ... You think you can bust Jackie Morocco?’
‘I want the guy he’s hiring out to work the body shop.’
‘Body shop. Yeah, I read that in the papers. “Body shop.” You don’t take Morocco down with him, and you’ll find little pieces of me all over one of my safe houses. You gotta take Fortuna too, Jimmy, or I’m dead.’
I sat back against his thick, comfortable chair.
‘The FBI’ll want in on this, like you said. Doc and I don’t much like working with them, but if that’s what it takes then I’ll do it. This guy’s killed enough women.’
‘He likes the work, Jimmy. And look out for that crazy hoo that lives with him. Like I said, she might be worse than her old man. They both got that fuckin’ foamin’- mouth disease. Whattayacallit?’
‘Hydrophobia ... I’ll let you know. You better stay off the phone here. Use a payphone. Move around, like you said. I can give you twenty-four-hour help, if you want.’
‘Yeah. Put a cop at my door, and then you can put a bulls-eye right over my ass while you’re at it. No,
thanks, Jimmy. I’ll shoot the moon on my own.’
‘It’s up to you. There’s the witness protection program, too.’
‘I’d rather be fuckin’ dead. I want to go back to an occasional boost, coz.’
‘I really don’t want to know about it, Billy.’
‘Hey! Oh! If I can’t go back to my old life, then fuck it. I really mean it. I’d rather be a floater in the fuckin’ Chicago River in all that green water on St Patty’s day.’
I looked him in the eyes and I saw it was not bravado or beer talking. He was sincere. He didn’t know any other way to live. There was nowhere for him to retreat.
I slapped his arm as I got up.
‘Remember. Use a payphone, and call me at work. Fortuna might know we’re family and he might bug my home phone. Don’t call any of your old crew. You gotta have a woman, pick one up off the street, but do it at random. Don’t hit on anyone you know ... Don’t smile, Billy. You know how serious this shit is.’
He smiled in spite of me and came over to me and embraced me.
‘Blood is thicker than fuckin H2O, ain’t it?’
I clasped his hands once more, and then I got out.
*
Jackie Morocco. John Fortuna. The elusive Outfit capo. He was looking to be the Don when the middle-aged current chief went down.
Terry Morrissey was the local special agent who’d been assigned to help us with Morocco and The Farmer and this supposedly murderous female partner the cutter had living with him.
‘He stays on the periphery. Your cousin’s right. We’ve got no photographs of him in the last three years. He’s like a vampire. Supposedly only comes out at night.’
Terry was sitting with Doc and Jack and me in my small cubicle downtown on the Homicide floor.
I explained to him that we had The Farmer narrowed down to three choices, but he suggested, as Doc did, that we use the FBI’s profiler here in the city. So he made an appointment for us for this same afternoon. He called the agent from my desk.
When Morrissey left, Doc rolled his eyes, but Jack remained seated without any visible response to our new ‘partnership’.
‘We get too many people on the pile, somebody gets crushed,’ Doc said.
‘Let’s not make this political, Doctor,’ I told him.
‘I’m not. I just don’t want this to become the circus it can become when the United States Government gets its incompetent little feet in our sandbox.’
As I said, Doc and I both were not fans of the Fibbies.
‘They got the resources. We really can’t say no at this point, can we?’ Jack suddenly remarked.
Doc pointed to the junior partner.
‘Listen to the yuppie. He knows how to adapt.’
‘I’m just saying, Doc, that if we want to go through the Outfit, we’re going to need help. Expensive help.’
‘I’ll go along with the youngster.’ Doc finally smiled. ‘We’re not getting to shore on our own, are we?’
Egos. Politics. Gamesmanship. It was part of the trade, although few of us in the department wanted to admit it. No one wanted to ask for help. Sometimes it just came up to you and sat on your lap until you were finally forced to accept that there was this two-ton fucking ape sitting on you. And the FBI was that four-thousand-pound primate.
*
‘He doesn’t do it for the money,’ Dr Adamson told the four of us. It was Doc and me and Jack and Terry Morrissey in attendance, here at the FBI headquarters in the Loop.
‘I know,’ I said. ‘My cousin told me that he was coerced into the family business because he became involved with Fortuna’s sister. But it didn’t take any force to make him go along with what the business involves. I’ve tried to figure this guy by the woman he’s with. I’ve tried to tie him to his military record. And what I come up with is that he is particular about his victims. I don’t think his employers care much about the physical appearance of the victims; they just want saleable product. It’s The Farmer who makes the on-site choices. That’s his end of the operation. The Outfit sells the organs on the Internet. We haven’t been able to find their new listing after we lost the girl on that surveillance.’
‘I’d agree with your tactics, Lieutenant. Especially when it comes to finding out what provokes such rage at his targets. He fits the traditional serial profile, so we don’t have an argument about his color, his age, or his general physical appearance. I think you need to go after what it was that made him enraged with this type of female he’s pursuing. I’d guess that the original subject is either dead or is, to him, untouchable. Meaning that the trigger of his anger is beyond his reach, and unfortunately it also means that he can never satisfy his desire to strike at her. He’ll do it repeatedly and I don’t think his lust is going to be sated unless all of you stop him. So I’m saying you’re headed in the right direction if you get at the backgrounds of your three principal suspects.’
Adamson was the guy who wrote all the books. There have been a half-dozen movies that have fictionalized him as a character in the films. He has appeared on all the cable shows and the mainstream talk shows. I found him to be less self-important than I thought he’d be. He was direct and succinct, and we were out of his office in less than forty-five minutes.
Morrissey stopped me and my two partners in the hallway outside Adamson’s cubicle.
‘We’re putting out the nets for Fortuna. We’re going full-tech after him. Everything that can hold a wire will. If we need to use a satellite, it’s been okayed. The Farmer has hit the big leagues. I don’t know if he’d be likely to celebrate his new status.’
Morrissey smiled and walked down the hall, away from the three of us.
Chapter Twenty-Two
We eliminated Caroline Keady. She was Lake Forest. Her parents were legitimate. She was off the list.
Janice Ripley had no Sicilian in her background. She came from good WASP stock, just like Keady.
We got nowhere, at first, with Ellen Jacoby. Until we looked at the marriage record. Jacob Jacoby was the first husband. It lasted eighteen months. Then he disappeared and we found, also, that Ellen Jacoby’s maiden name was Fortuna — just like her brother’s last name. John Fortuna.
*
We were waiting for them to arrive at their North Side apartment. Another stakeout, another night of late-evening jazz for the Doctor. He was plugged in. He sat in the front seat on the passenger’s side. Jack Wendkos was parked a half-block down with Jimmy Johansen, another Homicide guy.
It was two a.m. We were getting stiff and weary. I was wondering if Karrios was going to show up with his partner. She was his way into the Outfit. He knocked up a sister of John Fortuna. Jackie Morocco explained his dissatisfaction with the way Karrios terminated Little Sister’s pregnancy, and so Marco Karrios took his lunch pail to Fortuna’s workplace every day thereafter.
Changing her first name slowed us down, as well. Apparently she chose ‘Ellen’ because of a favorite aunt. We found all this out from my cousin Billy when we told him her new name.
It crept toward two-thirty, and still no one was home. It got more and more likely that these two weren’t returning tonight. Which made me wonder if they’d got wind that we were onto them. How they’d found out about us was beyond me, but the CPD had paid informants inside it, just as any big-city police force does. It infuriated me to think we were not secure, but I’d been down this road before, and so had my partner.
‘These two wolves have sniffed us out, Jimmy P. They’re headed for the woods,’ Doc said after he removed his earphones.
‘It feels that way, doesn’t it? How could they’ve made us this fast? We just popped Fortuna’s sister yesterday afternoon.’
‘When you call up as much manpower as we have for tonight’s joint punitive action, Jimmy, people sit up and pay attention.’
‘We got moles in our holes.’
‘Yeah. We both knew that. Unfortunately somebody’s nose is attached to a Fortuna asshole ... You want to stay here until d
awn?’
‘We might as well. This is probably going to be the quietest hood in the city tonight.’
Doc plugged back into his bebop, and I turned my attention to the middle apartment our two killers were supposed to be infesting.
Chapter Twenty-Three
I walk in from the cornfield. I close the door slowly behind myself Ellen is still in the bathroom, taking one of her forty-five-minute hot showers. She tells me they are therapeutic, but I reply that I don’t understand the meaning of‘therapeutic’. She groans when she thinks I’m being difficult.
So Billy Cheech has put them onto us. The cop Parisi is this half-wit’s cousin, and Ciccio has pointed them in our direction. John Fortuna hears they’re about to clamp us, and we escape by the hairs on our asses. We missed them by about six hours. Very close.
But now they’ve made me. I’m effectively out of business. They’ve got my photo circulated on television, newspapers, and to every squad car in northern Illinois. I’ll even have to move from my farmhouse here because the sheriff’s police might attach me to the rape of that college teacher. They had me hooked into that crime. The newspapers connected her assault to the killings, so I’m not safe where I am any longer.
And I’m not safe attached to old acquaintances either.
Ellen comes out of the bathroom with only a towel wrapped around her dripping hair.
‘You’ll wet the floor,’ I tell her.
‘It’s okay. We’re not staying here much longer, are we?’
She sits in the chair across from me, on the couch. She lets her knees separate.
I walk over to her, and then I kneel between her opened knees. I touch her and she quivers gently. I bend down and I bite her thigh. I bite so hard that the blood rises to the broken flesh. She slaps me.
‘Son of a bitch! You don’t know when to —’
1 slap her back much harder than she cracked me. Her head flies backward and the towel-turban comes off.
She reaches up and rubs the welt on her cheek.
‘Jesus Christ, Marco! You fucking hurt me!’
I bend over quickly and bite her on the other thigh. She squeals in pain and tries to lash out at me again. But I catch her fist and then I turn her wrist until she’s in more agony than the shots to her face gave her.
