Jimmy Parisi- A Chicago Homicide Trilogy

by Thomas Laird

  ‘Okay, you slowed me down.’

  But he was smiling.

  ‘He would’ve outrun me too if it’d gone any farther, so fuck it, Jimmy. We probably should’ve used the car in the first place.’

  ‘He would’ve cut through the yards. We would’ve lost him anyway.’

  ‘Where do we go next?’ Jack asked as we cruised this Northwest Side in vain.

  ‘We interview the four brides of Dracula,’ I told him.

  Janet Meyerson was first on our list of interviews.

  Her face was almost a bone white with black lipstick and black eyeshadow to create the effect of bloodlessness. She might have been a very pretty young woman if it hadn’t been for the garish cosmetics. She had silver hoops the size of tennis balls in both ears. There were silver studs in both her eyebrows, and I saw the silver ball that was in the middle of her tongue when she spoke.

  ‘This is a murder inquiry,’ I told her.

  ‘Yeah?’

  She reached for a pack of smokes.

  ‘Uh uh,’ Jack warned her. ‘No smoke zone.’

  She huffed out a reply and stuffed the pack back into her black leather bag. There was nothing of colour on her person. ‘Tell me about Albert,’ I asked her.

  ‘I love Albert.’

  ‘Really? Are you two engaged or something?’ I asked.

  ‘No. But we are committed.’

  There was a slight emphasis on the word ‘are’.

  ‘You know your boyfriend murdered two women ... At least two we’re aware of,’ Jack told her.

  ‘That’s false. Albert couldn’t kill anyone.’

  ‘You lie to us and there’ll be repercussions,’ I warned her.

  ‘Repercussions?’ she smiled vaguely.

  ‘A shitstorm on top of you,’ Jack explained.

  ‘Why would I lie?’

  ‘Because your boyfriend’s a murderer,’ I said.

  ‘That’s false. I told you he couldn’t do anything like that.’

  ‘He tied them down like cattle and bled them for a few days and that’s how they died. As white-faced as you are now,’ I said.

  ‘That’s disgusting. And I told you, Albert wouldn’t —’

  ‘So why’d he run from us?’

  She looked at Jack. She had grey eyes. Like a she-wolf. They seemed almost hypnotic.

  ‘He’s had trouble with the cops ... But nothing like ... this. He’s been charged for chickenshit stuff. Like credit-card theft and ATM things.’

  ‘So you think he’s just a thief,’ Jack asked.

  ‘I know he never killed anybody.’

  ‘Where’d he get the blood from, then?’

  ‘What blood?’ she shot back at my partner.

  ‘You know. The stuff you all have been snarfing at your little get-togethers,’ Jack smiled.

  ‘We’re not into that.’

  ‘You aren’t?’ I asked. ‘What are you into, then?’

  ‘Goth is a way of life, Lieutenant. But we don’t go around hurting anybody.’

  ‘There’s no blood ritual involved, here.’

  ‘No,’ she said.

  I was convinced she was lying and that she was becoming more and more agitated as we asked her about that blood ritual.

  ‘If you’re involved in any of this with Finnegan, you’ll be going away for a very long time,’ Jack explained. ‘You’ll cop conspiracy and maybe two or three other counts — all felonies. Your daddy on the Gold Coast won’t be able to save you, Janet. No more make-up, no more blood cocktails. No more Albert, of course.’

  ‘I have no idea what you’re talking about.’

  She licked her lips, and we spied the glint of the silver bulb implanted in the middle of her tongue.

  ‘You can go,’ I told her.

  She looked surprised.

  ‘I can go?’

  I nodded. Then she slowly rose. She was a tall young woman, as we had noticed before. You took away the white puss and the silver spikes in her face and you had an attractive female. Now, however, she was the living dead she wanted to be.

  *

  We interviewed the other three and came up with nothing. They were on the periphery with Finnegan, it appeared. They knew him through Janet and had only been around him a few times. It appeared that Ms Meyerson was the primary squeeze for The Count. The other three were just along for the ride. Apparently they liked to be around someone who was dangerous, and Janet had delivered Albert to them at the White Castle.

  The information we got at Women’s Fitness about Finnegan had all turned up dead end. He had lied on the job application, but no one at the club had verified anything he’d told them. He had shown them a driver’s license with the name ‘Albert Finnegan’, but when we ran that name through Vehicles, no one popped up on the screen except for an Albert Finnegan who was sixty-six and very unlike the image of The Count we’d seen running away from the White Castle.

  But Albert’ had left a full set of prints on the window where he’d gazed at the four brides of The Count. We were hoping that he’d had a record.

  And he did. Maxim Samsa had done a stretch at St Charles, the boys’ reformatory in the city of that name, for car theft and aggravated assault. We pulled his file from our brethren in Juvenile. The information told us that Maxim had broken out of St Charles when he was sixteen and had been missing in action for six years.

  The assault charge grabbed our attention, however. He had beaten an elderly man and had stolen his wallet. But the interesting part was that Maxim had bitten his senior citizen victim. In the neck, the file read. The old guy apparently thought Maxim was trying to drain a quart before he was able to fight him off and before a couple of street kids on scene helped scare Maxim off.

  Naturally Samsa spent some time in psychiatric at St Charles. They seemed baffled by him, according to the report. Couldn’t put any of their usual labels on him. Sociopath was the closest they could come to a description, but they were a bit confused about the biting incident.

  He spent only a year at St Charles before he broke out. But no one ever discovered just how he had made his escape. The best they could figure was that he found a way through the fence that surrounded the facility, but there was no hole or cut-out portion of fence to indicate that that was his mode of departure.

  ‘Maybe he stretched his batwings and flew over the fucking fence,’ Jack suggested.

  *

  I slowed my partner down in the foot pursuit of a murder suspect. I got myself cut by a punk dressed up for Halloween. My sinuses were still loading my ears and I had trouble hearing. Everything was giving out on me. The next thing to go would be my libido.

  I sat down on the bed, next to Natalie. I was too weary to take my clothes off.

  She sat up and took my head in her hands and brought me to her and kissed me. There was a healthy heat to her lips. I kissed her again, and then she lay back.

  ‘Tell me about The Count,’ she said. Her eyes looked very tired.

  ‘Nah. It’ll just keep you up tonight.’

  I tried to smile, but the effort was too much.

  ‘That bad?’ she asked.

  She smiled warmly at me.

  ‘You feeling sorry for yourself, Lieutenant?’ She was trying to goad me. Get me angry instead of self-pitying.

  ‘You bet I am. If I don’t, who will?’

  ‘Michael’s thing is bothering you, too.’

  ‘Oh yeah.’

  ‘You shouldn’t have threatened the priest.’

  ‘You’re right.’

  ‘You should’ve capped him,’ she grinned.

  ‘Then you’d be a widow or at least the wife of a con.’

  ‘I know. I’m glad you just loosened his bowels a little. Maybe I’ll shoot him.’

  ‘No you won’t. Look into that bedroom with those two small, smiling faces.’

  I was referring to our younger daughters.

  ‘I know. But I can fantasize.’

  ‘Michael still has bad dreams.’
r />   ‘Yes, Jimmy. I remember clearly.’

  She ran her palm over my left cheek tenderly.

  ‘You will catch this little cheesedick, my love.’

  ‘Are you trying to seduce me, Red?’

  ‘There it is.’

  *

  We drove to St Charles to interview a teacher who dealt with Maxim Samsa at the reformatory. His name was Justin Fennell. The guy was an ex-heavyweight wrestler at Michigan State. I couldn’t imagine any of these punks messing with him.

  ‘You’d be surprised,’ Justin told Jack and me. ‘They’ll test anybody. Some of these little fellows are fearless. You might be too if you came from their sad fucking lives. It almost makes you sympathetic toward some of them ... almost,’ he smiled.

  The man was a veteran of all this. He was no romantic when it came to rehabilitating America’s youth gone wrong.

  He had an old-fashioned flat-top haircut and he reminded me of Dick Butkus, the former Chicago Bears middle linebacker — except Justin was much bigger than Butkus. And even meaner-looking.

  ‘Tell me what you can about Maxim Samsa,’ I asked as we sat down in their faculty lounge. I gave him the file we’d received from Juvenile.

  ‘I remember him. He’s the kid who bit the old man. Tried to pull a Dracula on him until a couple of homies came up and broke it up ... This kid’ll surprise you with his intelligence and charm, Lieutenant, Sergeant. He’s nowhere near stupid. It’s just that his form of intelligence is sort of the perverse variation. Maxim was always looking for an angle, even with the other inmates here. They still aren’t sure how he got loose. But that’s the kind of smarts he had. Survival smarts. I’d say he was a very dangerous adolescent. I can imagine he’s become an even scarier young adult.’

  ‘Yeah. We like him for at least two murders,’ Jack added.

  ‘Christ,’ Fennell muttered. ‘Why am I still always surprised when one of ours goes out and pulls this kind of shit?’

  ‘This guy’s full of surprises,’ I told the reformatory teacher.

  ‘Apparently. You talk to his parents?’

  ‘I see he has a father. Lives in Skokie,’ I said.

  ‘I talked to him just once. To try and get an idea about Maxim, you know. The old man is more evasive than the kid. He did twenty at Joliet. Maxim grew up with an aunt.’

  ‘Yeah? That we didn’t know,’ I told Fennell.

  ‘Did you know the aunt died of “suspicious causes”?’

  ‘No,’ I answered.

  ‘Official cause was heart failure. I read the file on her. The interesting detail came right at the end of the case file.’

  ‘Yeah?’ Jack asked.

  ‘His aunt — named Jean Greene — had numerous bite marks on her neck and upper torso. And there was a significant loss of blood, the coroner wrote in his report. They were never able to pin it on Maxim, though. The bite marks didn’t match his dental report, so he walked away from that one.’

  I knew the shudder was arriving, and I tried to stave it off, but it ran clammily up my spine in spite of my concerted effort to thwart it.

  CHAPTER TEN

  We found Ronnie Jenks and Bobby Howard with their faces blown off in an alley a half mile from Arthur Ransom’s crib. Tactical discovered them and gave us the call. It was a Thursday night in late December. The city had been hit by an ice and snow storm, so everything was crusted over, white, and glazed. We couldn’t speed to the site of their murders because the city guys hadn’t salted the streets at that point. We slid and skidded our way through city traffic, but the traffic thinned out when we arrived on the West Side. Apparently the yos had sought shelter inside on this early evening. Jack and I had just gone on shift when we received the call about the two bangers we thought were involved with Arthur Ransom’s slaying.

  We slid to a halt in the alley. The Crime Scene people had already set up, their portable lights and generators already hummed and made a whiter glare of this site.

  The Tactical cop, Dave Galley, stood next to the bodies.

  ‘They’re all yours, Lieutenant,’ Galley said.

  There was no smile on his face. Just relief that he’d be able to escape the cold now.

  Jack and I put on the latex. Dr Gray still hadn’t arrived. It was probably this bitch weather that slowed him down, like everyone else tonight.

  I turned over Ronnie Jenks. I only knew it was he because Galley pointed to him and gave me the name. He pointed out Bobby Howard, who lay to the right of Jenks. Neither was recognisable.

  ‘Sawed-off shotgun. Close range, point blank,’ Jack suggested.

  I had a real concrete notion that he’d be proved right by the specialists on site.

  There were no noses on either of them. Jenks had no chin, either. There was a mass of twisted cartilage and bone, but not much flesh that I could make out.

  ‘Two out of the three suspects we liked have been eliminated for us, Jimmy,’ Jack said.

  It wasn’t the way I liked to clear the table. But he was right.

  All that remained was Rico Perry. I didn’t want him to wind up this way only because it wouldn’t satisfy my idea of justice, or of closure. I wanted a live one in the hole. I wanted a tangible perpetrator to spend his life in a cage for what he’d done to Arthur Ransom. This kind of end was just too goddamned easy. I knew they were only fifteen years old, but they did an adult crime. It was cruel and brutal, not something a human teenager would do. This was something hardboiled and emotionless, what had happened to Ransom — and to the old lady, Dilly, as well. They were executed. Not murdered. Executed. As in the military sense of the word. Arthur’s and Dilly’s deaths were as stone cold as they came.

  Someone breathing still needed to pay. The last I heard, Rico Perry was still sharing oxygen with the rest of the world.

  *

  I moped around the house. I moped around Natalie, who was becoming obviously anxious about my depression.

  I was gaining weight. Every time I thought about my two cases, I got lower, and every time I got lower I sought instant gratification — which was food. Either something very salty or very sweet. I ate lots of junk food.

  Natalie caught me struggling to button my collar button before I went to work. ‘We’re going for a walk when you get home,’ she declared.

  ‘A walk? In the dark? In this cold shit?’

  ‘Yes.’

  There was no look of arbitration in her eyes. She never demanded anything of me. She got my cooperation via other means. Natalie wound up usually getting exactly what she wanted.

  When I came home from that day shift at 5:00 p.m. on the evening before New Year’s Eve, she was waiting for me. In full Arctic gear. She held out my hooded winter coat and I knew that we were indeed headed out of our warm home for parts unknown.

  ‘You feel weak,’ she said.

  I watched the white, chilled fog come out of her lovely lips. The frost and ice had not melted on the grass and most of the sidewalk. The streets appeared black and slick because of the tons of salt the city men had spread with their trucks.

  ‘What?’

  ‘C’mon! You’ve been moaning and whining like a puppy for months, Jimmy! You think I don’t hear you?’

  ‘I didn’t realise I —’

  ‘You better realise. It isn’t at all like you.’

  I felt my face flush.

  ‘I didn’t want to rag you in front of the kids ... about your weight, I mean.’

  ‘Now I’m fat?’

  She looked over at me. We were both snorting frosty breath, like a pair of horses.

  ‘Yes. I’m fat,’ I admitted. ‘I gained twelve pounds and my pants and collars are tight, goddammit.’

  ‘You’re letting things get to you, yeah?’

  ‘Yeah. I suppose.’

  ‘Maybe some gym time’d help with the stress.’

  ‘The gym’d beat the hell out of these cold-assed streets, Natalie.’

  She threw her arm around my waist and we turned back toward our house.r />
  *

  Michael had been to the psychologist’s four times. He said he was feeling better, but I didn’t ask if he was still having nightmares.

  I went to his basketball games when I could. He was a reserve guard on the varsity at St John’s High School, an all boys Catholic secondary not far from our Northwest Side address. Michael wasn’t a gifted athlete, but he made the club because he was tenacious on defence. He’d claw your throat out to retrieve a loose ball. He’d hit the floor and get himself a new floor burn during every game. And he was fearless on the court. Which got him more than a little playing time.

  Natalie was home on one of her vacation weeks with the young ladies, our daughters. Kelly was at the U as usual. It was early January now, and Michael was back to school as well.

  He got into the van with me after St John’s lost a double overtime on their home court by three points. Michael had only played about ten minutes of the contest.

  ‘They could’ve used your “D” in that overtime,’ I told him.

  ‘I’m not good enough to play the crunch,’ he said matter-of-factly.

  ‘The hell you’re not! You’re a fucking animal out there! Excuse my fucking French. Catholic school. I forgot.’

  The well-worn joke didn’t work, this time. He looked over at me with the saddest eyes I’ve ever beheld from my son.

  ‘I felt helpless.’

  ‘During the game?’

  ‘No ... with Father Mark.’

  ‘Did you tell the counsellor that?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And what did he tell you?’

  ‘He told me that I’m deeper inside than my flesh, on the outside. He said it was something like being a rape victim. The rapist could never touch what I wouldn’t let him touch.’

  I had heard that advice before when I was in uniform and had to deal with sexual assaults on the street. I’d heard the rape counsellors say exactly the same kind of thing, and now someone had uttered those words to my son.

  ‘He’s right, this counsellor. He could never reach —’

  ‘I know he didn’t actually do what he did to the other guys I went to school with. I shouldn’t have the right to feel the way they do.’

  ‘Yeah. You have the right.’

  ‘Why?’