by Thomas Laird
It was eleven-thirty. We’d been standing out in the cold and in the remaining three inches of snow that still lay on the grass. Winter wouldn’t seem to flee. It lingered, maddeningly.
A car pulled into the lot. It idled, but no one got out. In another few minutes, three more vehicles pulled into Fisherman’s Slough. I reached into my leather jacket’s pocket and retrieved the .44 Bulldog. Luckily I was wearing thermal underwear and a navy stocking cap. Natalie told me I looked like the Boston Strangler when I left the house to do this roust.
A van pulled up, finally, and dark clad people came out of the five vehicles. I beeped Jack twice with my hand-held radio. It made an almost inaudible chirping sound, but I was far enough away from our new arrivals that I was confident they couldn’t hear it. It was Jack’s job to beep the other uniforms, then.
They gathered in the parking lot. They scoped the surrounding area very carefully, and then they made the move toward the woods. They were heading toward Jack Wendkos’s post, it appeared. When they’d moved out of the lot, I whispered into the radio.
‘Your spot. Incoming.’
‘“K”,’ Jack replied.
When they were far enough away from me, I talked to the other patrolmen on my handheld. We would begin to converge on Jack’s location.
I tried not to make any sound, but the snow covered leftover leaves and brambles, and I could hear a slight crackling from time to time as I progressed through the woods toward my partner and his new party guests. There was no alternative. I had to keep on going. We weren’t going to alert the Sheriff and his deputies and the Park District cops until we were sure we had grounds for an arrest. In other words, not until we saw the blood.
The least we could do was bust them for being in the park after closing hours — 10:30 p.m.
I saw an opening before the Slough itself. There was a campfire site just at the edge of the water. The other cops had to be coming in. We’d have them with their backs toward Fisherman’s Slough. There was no escape route that I could make out.
A fire burst forth from the campsite. One of them must have used charcoal starter or gasoline, because the flames jumped toward the cold, black February sky.
A male was dressed in a ceremonial black cape. It had a red interior, I saw, as he raised his hands skyward. There was a collective groan that emanated from his ‘followers’, if that’s what they were.
I moved as close as I could get without leaving the cover of the trees and foliage that surrounded the campfire. There appeared to be six males and six females — the clown with the cape made thirteen. I wasn’t a fan of numerology, and I wasn’t a believer in the bad-luck aspect of that number, but I had never taken any chances at wearing that numeral on my various game jerseys in baseball or football or softball.
I was no expert on the black mass, and it really didn’t matter to me if that’s what they were up to. I just wanted to catch them dirty with human blood. Their answers about the source of the serum would prove to be very interesting. And we might even get lucky and get some information about Samsa. There couldn’t be that many entrepreneurs in the gore business, I didn’t think.
There was only a pine tree between me and the thirteen spooks all dressed in their finest black apparel.
The guy with the cape was wearing a mask. It was one of those Halloween pullover types, so I couldn’t see any of his real face. This mask was the usual rendering of Lucifer, with the horns and the Vandyke beard and moustache. I could see that much from the illumination of the still-flaming fire they’d started.
The moans increased, until the caped figure pulled out what looked to be a glass vial. It was too dark to see what colour the fluid was.
The caped devil-lookalike uncorked the vial and brought it to his lips — very theatrically. Then he passed the vial on to the other members of his cult.
They took a sip and passed it along, and as they did so, the moaning turned into a chant.
I took Latin in high school, but I remember little to nothing of it. We read about Caesar crossing the Rubicon or some damned thing —
‘Let’s go!’ I said over the hand-held. It was loud enough that the black-clad men and women jerked their heads toward me as I emerged from behind the tall pine. My fellow cops began popping out from behind trees and bushes as well.
I had the Bulldog palmed. I wasn’t planning on using it. Jack had his Nine pointed toward the ground as we trotted up to the group by the campfire.
‘Just stand very still,’ I ordered them.
They were all wearing black masks that covered only their eyes — like the Lone Ranger’s mask. Everyone but the honcho with the scarlet and black cape looked the same.
‘Why don’t you take off your Halloween finery,’ I told the thirteen.
Everyone removed the black masks. Except the head man.
‘You too,’ I told him.
They had nowhere to run from us. The Slough was at their backs.
The caped leader slowly began to tear off the rubber Satan mask.
‘Hello, Lieutenant,’ Maxim Samsa said.
He was smiling brightly, as if he were pleased I’d shown up.
I took just one step toward him, and then he bolted around and shoved aside three of his co-worshippers, and before I could lay hands on him, he dove into the murky, black waters of Fisherman’s Slough. By this time we could see the flashing lights of the Sheriff’s Deputies and the Park District Police.
Jack dove into the Slough after him.
‘No! Jack! No!’
I ran to the water’s edge. The other patrolmen were converging on the remaining twelve worshippers.
I saw my partner freestyling out toward the middle of the Slough, fully clothed. He hadn’t had time to throw off anything before he dove in. But Jack was the only figure I could just barely make out in the water. When he reached almost the halfway marker in the Slough — the opposite bank wasn’t more than a hundred yards away — he was treading water and looking all about. Then he grudgingly turned back toward the rest of us and swam back to the muddy beach.
One of the patrolmen with Jack and me ran to a Sheriff’s cruiser and found a blanket and put it over Jack’s shoulders.
Wendkos was quivering by now, uncontrollably.
The Sheriff’s deputies arrested the twelve remaining black-clad freaks for trespassing the park after closing hour. We would have to interview them all after the charges were filed.
‘Son of a bitch just disappeared, Jimmy. I swear I was right behind him ...’
He shivered.
‘Then he went down and disappeared. The son of a bitch just vanished.’
I went over to the Park District Police and asked them to scour the entirety of the Slough and the woods that surrounded them. They didn’t appear happy about wandering about the premises on a night as cold as this, but when I told them this guy Samsa was wanted for the murders of the two young women they’d read about in the papers, their eyes widened in recognition, and they took off after the caped Count.
Janet Meyerson was one of the black-clad attendees. I saw her being questioned by the Sheriff himself. I told the head county copper I wanted to see Meyerson first, once we’d transported the twelve of them to the county lockup.
‘Hello, Janet. Nice to see you again so soon,’ I smiled at her.
She flipped me off, but I didn’t say anything more to her. Jack was trembling. He had to get some dry clothes. We would have to let the Park District people come up with The Count.
*
‘He’s not supernatural,’ Wendkos said with his teeth chattering on the ride downtown. We had arranged for Meyerson to be transported to our headquarters in the city as soon as County was through with her trespassing beef.
We had not come up with the vial. Either The Count had it or one of the others tossed it before we could lay hands on them. We’d have to search the Slough in the morning. I had to know if the blood belonged to either of Samsa’s victims.
‘Of course he isn
’t. He just swam under while you were on the surface and he made his way to shore and then he took off.’
‘Where’s he going to go? That place was crawling with us, cops every goddam place. How’s he going to slip through all that manpower?’
‘Maybe he won’t.’
‘You don’t sound very confident, Lieutenant.’
He’d sliced me to the bone and had avoided two shots from my miniature howitzer, the Bulldog. He took off down the street when we had him for sure at the White Castle, just after he had ‘communed’ with his female followers — if indeed they were followers.
This guy was very lucky. Or he was supernatural.
And he had taken off with the blood. He’d be the one to make sure he left no evidence behind. The rest were indeed just followers. Samsa was sly. He was slippery. But he wasn’t the devil or Dracula or anything else unworldly. He was a stealthy murderer. Likely he was very intelligent, even without the formal education.
I was not looking forward to explaining to our mercurial Captain why Maxim Samsa had once again eluded capture. The Captain had no sense of humour about escaped murderers or about the cops who allowed them to do so.
I could’ve thrown another blast from the .44 his way, at the Slough, but Jack popped up in my line of fire when he took off after him. Samsa wasn’t worth any bodily harm to my partner, so I knew withholding fire was the right thing to do.
Samsa got away again, regardless of the circumstances That was the bottom line. Whether I got reamed out by my Boss or not, I was the senior investigator, and the weigh fell on my shoulders and no one else’s.
‘Maybe the prick’s got real batwings under that fancy cape. But now he’ll have to really go underground,’ Jack lamented.
‘Not necessarily,’ I countered.
‘Why, not necessarily?’ Jack asked.
‘He’s got three more vics to bleed. Three more stanzas from that Poe poem to copy. He enjoys the work, Jack. We got a real live sociopath on our hands, this time. He enjoys what he does, and he thinks he’s getting better at it all the time.’
Jack Wendkos had finally stopped quaking, once he got into dry clothes.
‘Just be thankful this cheesedick didn’t jump into Lake Michigan.’
‘Why, Jimmy?’
‘The water’s a whole helluva lot colder.’
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
The Count left tracks on the mud beach where he got out of the Slough. The Park District Police found the vial of blood. It was tossed about thirty feet from where the campfire had blazed. All the members of The Count’s ‘blood cult’ had been arrested for trespassing, but we didn’t have anything else on the twelve of them unless we found out that the blood used in his ritual belonged to one of the two women he murdered. We were still awaiting the results from the Lab and the forensics people.
We went after Samsa in every way we could. We checked DMV and found that there was a Honda motorcycle under his real name. We had his plate number, and every copper in Cook County had his tag by now. I thought he’d change plates or get rid of the bike. He was that greasy, but you never knew. We tossed the apartment where he nicked me with his knife. We found grey duct tape, but not much else we could use to have him prosecuted by the Candy Man, our prosecuting attorney. The Candy Man was his nickname because of the horror films by that name. He was a horror to go up against in the courtroom. He just about never lost. And he had the highest rate of death-penalty decisions in the state of Illinois.
The Captain was not as irate as I figured he would be about letting Maxim Samsa slip away from us once again.
‘Next time shoot the prick,’ the red-haired Captain told Jack and me. I wasn’t sure he was being serious, but I knew his military background. He was a member of the Rangers in Vietnam and he’d had some ties to Operation Phoenix — which was all about assassinating North Vietnamese and Viet Cong brass. He never said anything to me about it because I was just a standard grunt in that Lost War. He was no braggart, either, which kept him silent on that piece of American history, so I never asked him about his exploits. Both of us, I assumed, were happy to be done with that goddamned war.
I would’ve shot Jack if I’d cut loose a round with the .44. There was no clear line, and I was beginning to wonder if there ever would be. I preferred a clean collar. Shootings required vast reams of paperwork, something I was not at all fond of going through. But I knew I’d kill Samsa if the situation required.
The net was out. It wasn’t just us in the CPD anymore in this Count business. County and State were involved. The FBI had tossed its hat into this affair. They loved serial or series killers because it meant headlines. The US Marshal’s Office had offered its services, which we accepted because they were extremely efficient at finding and arresting people. They were, in fact, much better at it than the famous Federal Bureau of Investigation was. They were much lower key and lower profile than the Fibbies, and they had a great track record for coming up with perps.
*
We needed to do more canvassing on the West Side. There were sufficient bodies assigned to snatch The Count, so I thought we should turn our attention to the murders of the old guy, Arthur Ransom, and to Dilly Beaumont and the two faceless, dead bangers we found in that alley.
‘It’s the girl, Jack.’
‘Who?’
‘Joellyn Ransom. The old guy’s granddaughter. There’s something she knows that we don’t.’
‘Why do you think so?’
‘Because, junior, she looked like she had more to tell us when we talked to her at her library job.’
‘What’re you getting out of all that, Lieutenant?’
‘Body language, Jack. The evasive eyes. She looked right at me when she barrelled into the old man’s apartment just after we’d arrived on that scene. She eyeballed me with no fear, then. And later she appeared all squirrelly when we saw her that next time. Maybe Abu Riad had a talk with her about the facts of survival in his hood.’
‘You mean he’s threatened her.’
‘Yeah. She knows something, but Abu Riad doesn’t want any more heat thrown his way. Otherwise she’d be on a meat wagon leaving the West Side.’
We drove past Rico’s crib twice just to make ourselves visible to the killer punk. Then we headed toward the girl’s residence.
*
We found her apartment and parked the Taurus about a hall block down. It was a rainy afternoon in mid-February, but at least the temperature was in the mid-fifties. So no snow or ice. But the rain kept the yos and yoettes off these mean streets. And we didn’t bring any back-up because the patrol cars would attract too much attention. Two white boys in the hood would be bad enough.
No one was walking that hood when we approached her entranceway. It was four o’clock. She should have been home for an hour by now. The schools got out at 2:30 — at least the secondary schools did. Joellyn was a twelfth grader at DuSable High School. She was a year ahead of my son Mike.
Her educational experience, I was certain, was alien to my son’s, at his lily-white Catholic school.
She answered the doorbell on the first try. We walked up two flights to her flat. She was supposed to be living with her father, but I had never laid eyes on him.
Joellyn was dressed in her uniform — which had just become a rule at DuSable and several other Inner City locations.
‘Yes?’ she asked. I wondered if she remembered us.
‘We’d like to ask you a few questions,’ I said.
She let us in.
‘I shouldn’t ... my father’s not home.’
If her old man lived here, I couldn’t spot any evidence of his male residency. I had the feeling Joellyn lived here alone. She wasn’t eighteen, and she wasn’t an adult, then.
We sat down on her old but comfortable three-seat couch. She stood across from us. She appeared tired, as if she’d gone sleepless for several nights.
‘I think Abu Riad is involved with the murder of your grandfather,’ I told her.
> The young woman didn’t blink.
‘I found out something interesting about Arthur,’ I told her.
‘Yeah?’
‘Yeah. He owned that apartment building.’
‘So?’ she asked. She was becoming a bit more openly hostile.
‘So he owned the two three flats right next door, too.’
‘And what are y’all asking me?’
‘Your grandfather wasn’t rich by any means, but he owned property. That’s kind of unusual around here, isn’t it? For a working stiff like your Grandpa to own real estate?’
‘Because he was black?’ she accused.
Jack sat quietly next to me. His eyes were on the girl. She wasn’t looking anywhere but directly at me, this time.
‘I don’t mean that, no. I meant that most of the folks around here are poor. How come Arthur Ransom has the fazools to buy apartment buildings?’
She stared at me as if she were trying to laser her way right through me.
‘My grandfather worked for forty years at the railroad. When he first moved in around here, he used to tell me, this was a decent place to live. The houses and apartment buildings was kept up. There was whites and blacks here for a while, and then, he told me, blockbusters come around and spooked white people into believing black people was going to run them out of here. And the white people believed it and sold their property for real cheap prices. That was what Grandpa told me. He had some money from the stocks and bonds he invested in — did y’all know he graduated from high school and had a year of junior college?’
‘No. I didn’t know that.’
Jack continued to watch her. But she never looked anywhere but at me.
‘So that’s how he bought them apartment buildings. And now they worth about the same as his ashes that we spread at his old job down at the railroad.’
Arthur Ransom had been cremated. We went to that service, also, but Joellyn was the only other mourner at the West Side funeral home that night.
