by Thomas Laird
*
By the third day on the beach in Delavan, Wisconsin, Natalie was literally grinding her chompers to get back to work. She’d waded through three paperback thrillers and one romance. She said she preferred the detective books because they made her laugh out loud.
We were sitting on this same beach on the fourth day — it was the week after the Fourth of July — and she laid the news on me.
‘We’re not going to be able to have another baby for a few years.’
I looked over at her with the appropriate surprise on my face.
‘What brought that announcement on?’ I asked.
‘I have to get settled into the new job. I can’t be taking maternity leave as soon as I arrive at Homicide.’
‘No one expected you to.’
‘You mean you understand?’
‘Of course I understand. And maybe we ought to be happy we’ve had the one little girl together. Do we need a flock?’
‘Not necessarily. I thought you might’ve — ’
‘We have our baby. If you want more, that’ll be up to you. I’m happy with the three live ones we’ve got…The big ones belong to you too, you know. They’re kind of attached to you by now. You don’t need to produce your own train of offspring if you’re happy with where we’re at.’
She leaned over to me from her lawn chair. We’d been watching the sailboats and the water-skiers. When the heat became uncomfortable, we walked into the lake and doused ourselves. It was pleasant and uneventful. My kind of vacation. She gave me a kiss on the lips.
‘I want to help you with Anglin, but they won’t let us work together.’
‘That’s SOP. It makes life a little simpler. If we hadn’t already been married, you might’ve had a harder time getting into Homicide. They like to discourage the fraternization stuff.’
‘Is that what you’ve been doing to me the last four nights? Fraternizing me?’
‘Yeah. Extreme fraternizing.’
A look clouded Natalie’s bright, freckled face. Her auburn hair seemed redder in the sunlight.
‘Is Anglin a dead case, Jimmy? Are you just going through the motions?’
‘No. It’s active.’
‘You never talk about it much…And you never explained the bump on the back of your head, either.’
I reached up and touched the small pill-sized lump that was my souvenir from the Major.
‘The less you know, the better I feel about it.’
‘It has to do with the G.’
‘Yeah. You’re talking like an old vet already.’
‘What’re they doing with Anglin?’
‘If I tell you, Natalie, you’re involved.’
‘I am involved — with you. Till death do us part is the way I remember it.’
‘It’s dangerous.’
I was telling this to a woman who had faced down a sociopath in our own home. Faced him down and calmly blasted him into our furniture.
‘You’re right…Okay.’
I told her all there was to know about Anglin. I included the Major. I explained my idea about Anglin shooting the President of the United States, and then she sat up, alert and straight-backed in the chair.
‘So now you think I’m an idiot.’
‘Jimmy.’
‘I know. I’m nuts. I’ll be speaking in tongues next.’
‘The President? Kennedy?’
I told her about Anglin and Renny Charles and their erstwhile membership of the assassin community.
‘It’s…It’s a little hard to digest.’
‘Yeah. It’s the weight I’ve been carrying for about fourteen years. The only other person I’ve told it to is Doc. Who recommended I shut the hell up and never utter a word about it again. He’s probably right. And I hope you don’t pass it on to anyone.’
‘Of course I won’t…My God. John Kennedy…’
‘I’m probably wrong. It’s just a hunch, you know, a theory?’
She looked over to me and her stare was severe.
‘What if you’re right?’
‘I don’t see justice being done any time soon, if that’s what you mean.’
‘Jimmy…How can you sleep at night?’
‘Sometimes I don’t.’
She took hold of my hand. Then she narrowed her gaze as she looked out across the placid water of Lake Geneva. Only an occasional sailboat broke the line of the horizon out on the blue water. And the touring paddleboat that came by with the sightseers every hour on the hour.
I squeezed my wife’s hand and I shut my eyes.
*
Mason the Fibbie stood as I entered his office. His assistant was sitting in a chair across from Mason’s seat.
‘I still haven’t heard your name,’ I told her.
Doc was standing next to me, waiting to hear her lovely voice, but she didn’t speak.
And you’re here to tell me what?’ Mason asked coldly.
I tore my gaze away from the blonde. I left the scrutiny of her to my partner.
‘I got a nice bump on my noggin from your Major.’
That got Mason’s attention. He stopped dicking around with the papers on his tabletop.
‘Major who?’
‘You know. Tactical Five. Those spooks who float around the D.C. area with a clandestine title. You know. The CIA with different initials.’
‘I don’t know what you’re talking — ’
‘Ah, c’mon, Mason, please. He’s as real as the lump on my head. I’d say he was an M.P at one point. Christ, he knocked me down and out with one swipe. Very professional…He tried to swing a deal with me.’
‘A deal?’
‘Yeah. He wants me to lay off Anglin for about a month because he says he’s got a line on his blackmail data. You know, the material that’s incriminating enough to get you and the Major to obstruct a homicide investigation that’s been going on for thirty-one years?’
And you think I know this Major guy and that I’m somehow involved in his plans to eliminate Anglin from your playing field. Is that right?’
‘That is first-rate stuff, Special Agent Mason. You take acting lessons at the college?’
‘Look, I don’t know any Major — ’
‘You’re a liar. But I’ll tell you what I’m going to do. I’m going to tell you so you can tell the Major. I’ve got my own little document about the Anglin case and about the interference you and your boss have thrown my way since we began looking into the more recent murders. I’ve got that paper with both major newspapers in Chicago, and I’m working on a third publisher in New York. They’re very interested in printing the piece. But there’s a stipulation.’
‘What stipulation?’
‘They can run the story only if I or one of my family or Doc here, or any of his family, meet with an untimely death. I’ve given them enough tasty morsels as appetizers for them to be willing to wait and see if any of us have bad luck. So if I break my neck falling in the shower, you are all going to become the recipients of a great deal of unwelcome publicity.’
‘You can’t back up anything you’re saying. It’s all bluff. It’s all bullshit.’
‘Try me, Mason. I know how to please a pack of journalists. I’ve had lots of experience with them.’
‘You’re lying.’
I was looking right into his eyes.
‘Tell the Major to back off. He’s got his fingers in my sandwich and they’re about to get bitten off. I don’t care who he’s connected to. I’ll put all that dirty laundry in my basket and I’ll hang it up in every federal office in this county. You wanna play chicken?’
Mason’s brown face darkened to midnight blue. ‘You bastard — you wouldn’t…’ he spluttered, enraged.
‘Try me, Mason. Try me.’
*
Doc looked at me in the elevator and he began to giggle.
‘What a performance. You talk about what an actor Mason is — ’
‘Mine was no act. I’ve contacted the papers. The Tribune and th
e Times are slobbering at the chance to get an expose piece from a Chicago Homicide cop.’
‘You didn’t say anything about the Kennedy business.’
‘No. Hell no…But I whet their appetite when I told them it had to do with putting a monkey wrench in the Anglin affair. I didn’t get specific. I just told them I had something extraordinarily juicy for them if they’d agree to publish only — ’
‘Only if something bad happens to any of us,’ Doc finished my sentence for me.
‘They don’t have anything except my word that I could have something very special for them. They don’t have a story now, but they’re willing to keep an open mind for a future possibility.’
‘You think you can threaten this Major guy?’
‘No. I want him to know we’re still players, though. I don’t think he wants the mess of popping Chicago policemen. He knows how the Department is about losing any of its own. I just want him to give us the room to go after Carl Anglin ourselves. Because the Major’s going to make him disappear, if he has his way. That’d be too easy for the son of a bitch. I want him in the lockup with no way out, this time. I want him staring at life in the shitter or lethal injection. I don’t care. I want Carl Anglin to be frightened, the way his young women all were. I want him to face the terror they did, knowing they were going to die.’
‘And how are we going to get Anglin where we want him?’ Doc asked.
‘We’ve got a month, it sounds like.’
*
I got the call from the psychiatrist on a Saturday morning. So I got Natalie up — it was 6.35 a.m. — and we dressed as though we were going to the beach at Lake Michigan. When we arrived at the Oak Street Beach, I left Natalie at the parking lot with our Cavalier, and I jumped into the waiting car that Doc Gibron drove. We tried to make sure that we weren’t being followed, and it seemed we were clear.
We headed out to the Outer Drive and went south toward Indiana. The drive took an hour and forty-five minutes in light Sunday-morning traffic.
The psychiatrist left us alone with Theresa Rojas.
‘Hello, Theresa,’ I said, smiling gently.
Doc greeted her with a familiar yellow rose.
‘Hello,’ she said. It was more like a whisper.
‘Theresa?’ I asked.
‘Yes,’ she answered.
‘You’re back?’ I asked her.
She smiled. ‘I was never anywhere else.’
‘Can you talk to us? I mean, can you tell us about what happened all those years ago?’
‘You mean what he did to my friends.’
‘Yes.’
Doc was mute. All he could do was stare. ‘Who knows you’re able to speak, Theresa?’ I asked.
She looked at the yellow rose and smiled. ‘You gave me flowers.’
‘I gave you yellow roses. They’re supposed to stand for loyalty.’
‘You were loyal to me…You look like him. Like your father.’
I was not going to educate her on my genetic background. I was too excited to see her lucid, alive, clear-headed.
‘They drugged me, Lieutenant Parish’
‘My name is Jimmy. This is Doc Gibron.’
She smiled over at Doc.
‘They gave me something and then those other doctors all talked to me — like in hypnosis. I was studying to be a nurse. I know what they did to me.’
‘It was called MRS 127. It’s a synthetic drug, like LSD. It kept you tied up, in your head.’
‘I still have flashbacks. The doctor says I probably will continue to have them.’
‘But you’re back, and you’re here to stay, this time,’ I insisted.
‘Am I? Am I really, Jimmy?’
Her eyes were brimming with tears.
I took hold of Theresa and hugged her tightly.
‘Who did this to me? Why would they do this to me, Jimmy?’
I had a lot of explaining to do to her. And her talk about ‘flashbacks’ had me wondering if she was indeed all the way home, in her head.
‘You remember the night Carl Anglin killed all your friends?’
Theresa looked down for a moment. Then she looked back up at me before glancing over at Doc.
‘I remember every second of every minute. I saw him. I saw him kill two of the girls. I was under the bed, but he never saw me. I saw him. Yes. I remember everything.’
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
[July 1999]
Mason didn’t find the crude transmitter that I’d slapped under his desk, so we still had an ear in his office. When he got another call from the Major, we picked up something interesting. A meeting place for Special Agent Mason and this enforcer from Tactical Five.
Grant Park. Eight p.m. on the button. I myself heard Mason repeating the Major’s instructions.
‘I can’t believe they haven’t located the bug,’ Ralphie told Doc and me after he removed his earphones. ‘Or maybe they’re playing it cute.’
‘You think they know we’re listening and this meeting is to set us up?’ Doc asked. My partner looked over at me. ‘The Major’s no dummy. I can’t believe he’s taking risks,’ he explained.
‘But the bug is crude. They’re used to playing high-tech and maybe they reckon everyone thinks the way they do,’ I told them.
‘Are we going after the Major?’ Doc wanted to know.
When he looked at me again, he had his answer.
Ralphie uttered his usual groan.
*
We were at Grant Park at 7.30. Just the two of us, Doc and I. Ralphie was excused. He was done with this project. It’d been dangerous enough, so we cut him loose.
It was a hot, early summer’s night. Truly breathless. High humidity and just a hint of a breeze coming off the Lake in the east. We were sitting on a park bench near the softball diamond where Mason was supposed to meet the Major. It was Diamond Number 13. We’d heard Mason repeat the number, so we should have been near where they’d be — if they weren’t setting us up, as Ralphie the Tech suggested.
We were armed as always, but the weaponry didn’t make me feel any more confident.
Fifteen minutes went by, along with a few pairs of neckers. Two couples were heterosexual and one twosome was humming Bette Midler tunes in low, masculine voices.
Doc giggled. ‘Hey.’ He gestured to me when I looked over to him.
It was now five minutes to the hour. And we spotted Mason’s blonde assistant. But no Mason. We were far enough away — perhaps the length of a football field — from the baseball diamond for her not to notice us. Doc had a set of opera glasses.
‘It’s the girl. Mason’s girl,’ he confirmed. ‘She’s standing right behind the screen, right behind home plate. I don’t see anyone coming up on her…Wait a minute.’
The light was going. Dusk was on us, and I had to rely on Doc and his opera glasses to keep me informed. I could just barely make out the figure of the girl. And now I saw a male approaching her. He was tall, wearing a black cloth jacket on this hot-as-hell evening. When he reached her, he directed the blonde toward the nearest park bench.
‘He’s very unhappy with her. They’re arguing,’ Doc said. ‘He’s got his hands in his jacket pockets, so it doesn’t look like he’s going to get physical…Shit, Jimmy, it’s getting dim out here. I can barely make them out anymore. Maybe we ought to approach — ’
‘He’ll bolt. He’s got those kind of reflexes. You can bet on it.’
The male in the dark jacket rose. Both of us could see at least that much. The traffic in the park was very light this evening. Most people were probably down by the Lake to get the cooler breezes from the water.
‘He’s taking off, Jimmy. We’re going to lose him…’
We were both off the bench and half-trotting toward the assistant. We closed the 300 feet in seconds. We were moving at a fast clip.
We stopped about twenty feet in front of the blonde woman on the bench. She was sitting, oddly still.
Doc walked up to her.
�
��I don’t recall your name, but…’
Then he reached down to touch her, and she slumped over onto the bench.
I walked over to the two of them.
It was then that we both spied the red splotch on her white-bloused chest. The tall guy had pumped a slug through her. He must have had a silenced gun in his jacket pocket.
‘Stay with her and call an ambulance,’ I told my partner.
I took off to the west, the direction the tall man in the black jacket had gone.
It would soon be full dark and then I wouldn’t have a prayer of spotting him. He’d been moving off at a near gallop when we’d started to approach the dead FBI woman.
But I saw him jogging up to the stop sign at the boulevard. He stopped, looked around, and snapped back into motion when he saw me a hundred yards behind him. He bolted across the busy intersection — and I was after him. He was trying to head toward the Loop, toward some crowded streets where he could vanish.
Soon I was running out of steam. My breath was growing ragged from the running, from trying to close the gap between us. But I had shortened the tall man’s lead. We were out of the park and were heading toward the downtown district. I had my handheld radio and I told Doc where I was headed. He responded and said he’d send some help my way if I gave him the general location.
My quarry was headed toward State Street. By now I was really almost out of gas, but the memory of that lump on my head and his threats to me and my family spurred me on. Anger overcame fatigue and I somehow got my second wind.
Now he was on State, nearing Lake. The streets were still crowded from the tourists visiting the downtown shopping locations, and I was afraid that he’d vanish into the pedestrian traffic. But I found that I was still gaining on him.
He had the piece in the right pocket of his jacket. I was picturing it even though I hadn’t actually seen it.
