by Thomas Laird
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 co
ldness 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.
Suddenly, the hostile impulse flees. I want to touch her. I want to make love to her. I want her back. Close to me.
I do indeed reach out with my hands as I nearly make it to the top of the flight, but her right hand shoots out at me. I don’t know if she’s trying to take my hand or if she’s trying to shove me backward, but I stumble on the penultimate step and I’ve lost my balance and I’m leaning dangerously backward and I can hear Eleanor cry out and now my heel is dislodged from the step and I’m tumbling backwards head over heels like in a comedy movie as if it’s some kind of sight gag but I can’t stop rolling over and over backwards and I can hear something snapping beneath the back of my skull and the last sound I hear is the clean soprano shriek of my beautiful wife Eleanor.
PART TWO
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
[May 1999]
Susan Malkin, Martha Eisner, and Renee Jackson. The list of murders beyond the original seven sat with Doc Gibron and me. We were all there was between Anglin and his complete freedom. No one else seemed inclined to go after the son of a bitch.
Until this twenty-eighth day of the month that celebrated the Virgin. We received a call from Anglin telling us that he’d been assaulted. Homicide didn’t get the call originally, but we heard about it from Violent Crimes. Renee Jackson had a nineteen-year-old brother, Wayne. Wayne was a member of the Regals, a South Side street gang. He was near the top of his outfit and he didn’t see justice being done by our letting Carl Anglin walk the streets of Chicago. Wayne Jackson had put out a contract with his own crew to get Carl Angli
n.
So Carl came home with one of his many doper girlfriends who had an IQ of seven in the hole and the young lady got her face slashed. Anglin broke the cutter’s neck with a move Carl had perfected in Asia while he was in the military.
We knew it was the Regals because the Violent Crimes investigator recognized the stiff. When the homey was ID’d at the hospital, and when he was pronounced dead, we received the call. It was in our hands now.
Carl looked shaken. We saw him at Presbyterian Hospital, on the North Side. He was there for his lady, Dolores Claiment. Exotic dancer. Soft-porn star. Brain dead.
‘She’s gonna have to have extensive plastic surgery, man,’ Anglin complained to us.
‘Send the bill to the Regals,’ Doc told him. Anglin appeared to ignore my partner.
‘They got a claim on me,’ Carl said. ‘Are you gonna do anything about it?’ he demanded.
‘We investigate all homicides. You killed a man named Arthur Wells…You broke his neck, like you were wringing a chicken’s.’
‘Military training comes in handy once in a while.’
‘You must really be up on your old self-defense,’ Doc said.
‘I go to the gym five days a week.’
‘Got to keep in shape for your next bestseller,’ Doc added.
Anglin was unfazed. ‘Are you going to do anything about these punks?’
‘We’ll look into it. Sure,’ I told him.
‘I don’t like your low level of enthusiasm.’
‘I don’t either,’ I told him. ‘Maybe it’s those ten kills you’ve got on your fuselage, Anglin. But I will look into it anyway…You might want to change your address and your habits. These kids are deadly. Just ask anyone from Tactical.’
‘You ain’t funny, Parish.’
‘I don’t mean to be…You remember my father? His name was Jacob.’
Anglin’s face lit up, a twisted grin appearing on his lined features.
‘Whatever happened to your old man? I lost track.’
‘He died. In an accident at the house. Fell down some stairs.’
