by Thomas Laird
‘You mean why would we be bothering a stone fucking killer like you, Rico?’ Doc laughed.
‘I ain’t done no —’
‘Please. Save the bullshit for the grand jury,’ I told him. ‘We’re trying to offer you a way out.’
‘Way outta what?’ Rico Perry demanded.
‘Life in prison, asshole. Whatta you think the Lieutenant means?’ Jack hissed.
‘I told you I ain’t —’
‘Whole fuckin’ block knows you and those two now-faceless motherfuckers burned Arthur Ransom and Dilly Beaumont down. You think we’re stupid, Rico? We know you’re dirty, dirtier, dirtiest. Shit, we got two of your bro yos in the lock-up now who can’t wait to roll over and squeal on you just for a reduced sentence,’ I told the black kid in the back seat.
We pulled into a White Castle at the periphery of this West Side. We parked the Taurus, got out and sat at the bar inside.
‘Ain’t this special, Rico?’ I smiled. ‘Dinner with the five-oh at the Castle. Fuckin’ sliders for everyone, mah man.’
I grinned at him, but there was no joviality on his handsome African face.
The girl took the order from me. I asked for a dozen cheesesliders and four Cokes.
‘Get me a order of them French fries,’ the banger blurted at the girl. When she looked over to me I nodded in affirmation.
‘Did you kill Joellyn Ransom too, you piece of shit?’
I took him by surprise. I had him by the collar of his black leather, thigh length jacket, and he was shocked at how close and in his face I had suddenly become. The White Castle was deserted at this hour. The Castle did their main business at lunch and late at night. It was too early in the evening for them to be jammed.
‘What the fuck you talkin’ —’
‘I’m through talking, Rico. I’m gonna pull your fuckin’ plug. I’m gonna let your bossman know you squealed on him and that you said he burned Joellyn Ransom down because the bitch got greedy and wanted a real share in all that fed money Riad’s gonna claim with that urban renewal shit right under Arthur Ransom’s old crib. Riad was poking that little bitch, wasn’t he.’
‘I don’t —’
‘How long you think you’re going to last when I spread word that you dropped the dime on Abu Riad for Arthur Ransom. We offered you a sweet deal and a reduced sentence on Arthur if you’d implicate the head banger. And how could you pass up a sweet deal like that?’
‘You ain’t got shit. You bluffin’ and bullshittin’ me!’
‘Try me, you punk-ass motherfucker. Just try me!’
I let go of his collar just before our food appeared before us. The three of us cops went right at the cheesesliders that I divvied up by four. But Rico sat with his eyes planted on the cheeseburgers and Coke and his hands flopped at his side.
We made haste at cramming all that wonderful cholesterol down our gullets. Rico sat still. As if he were a stone image planted next to me at the White Castle counter.
‘You ain’t got shit.’
‘Deon Jackson,’ Doc said softly.
That got Rico’s attention.
We didn’t have Deon Jackson, who wasn’t related to Charles (Abu Riad) Jackson, in our hip pockets, but it was a calculated manoeuvre on Gibron’s part. He knew, as the other two of us did, that Jackson had been feuding with some of the younger members of the Vice Kings. Rico and his more newly blooded brethren had been at odds with some senior gangsters — Jackson being a part of that senior faction. This was all gathered information from our Tactical cops who had penetrated the Vice Kings for intelligence.
‘I don’t believe y’all,’ he retorted.
‘You can sing the same song to us as you wave bye-bye from the paddy wagon that’ll ride you to the cell you’ll be sharing with some buttfucker for the next forty years, Rico,’ Jack told him.
Rico stood up.
‘I want to go back. You ain’t gonna charge me, then I want to go home right now.’
‘Wait ’til I finish this last cheeseslider,’ Doc told him.
‘You ain’t gon’ pull this bullshit on me.’
‘You’re right. You’re too smart, Rico. Charles Jackson, aka Abu Riad, will be tickled ebony to hear you had this modest repast with the Chicago Police Department.’
‘Go on. Tell him. I ain’t buyin’ you bullshit, man.’
‘We already got a pool on you at work, Rico,’ I told him.
‘You got what?’
‘A pool. On who guesses the day you turn into ground chuck, motherfucker.’
Rico stared at me with a glance of genuine hatred.
‘I want to go home. Now. Or I call my attorney.’
‘Okay. Just let me finish this Coke,’ I told him.
I sipped at the soft drink slowly. I knew the kid’s eyes were burning into my back.
Finally I rose, paid the waitress for the full bill, and then we escorted Rico Perry back out to the parking lot.
*
‘You think he’ll roll?’ Jack asked after we’d deposited the teenaged gangster back onto his home soil.
‘I think he’s got some serious thinking to do. He might really think we’re trying to bullshit him into a corner, but if we have any luck at all, he’s going to get into Deon Jackson’s face, just to find out if there was any truth to what we told him.’
‘Jackson isn’t going to let this young punk make any accusations. If we have any luck at all, this’ll light the fuse that’s been begging to be lit between those two factions in the Vice Kings. We just might start a civil fucking war,’ Doc grinned.
‘Or he finds out that the three of us are really full of shit and that we made up the whole scenario with just the slightest bit of truth behind it,’ I suggested. ‘Either way, the way things were going, we got nothing to lose. Maybe we’ll get a real special sideline seat for a little internal humbug among our favourite group of murderers.’
‘It’s not personal with you and Mr Charles Jackson aka Abu Riad, is it, Jimmy?’ Doc sneered.
‘It sure as hell is. Always will be.’
‘Good. Now it sounds like you got your hard edge back on.’
I was going to ask him what he meant, but he walked out of my office abruptly.
Then I knew he had talked with Natalie before he decided to return to our thing, homicide.
*
A few days passed, but we heard no rumblings from the West Side through our Tactical contacts. I really thought that a kid like Rico Perry might flip on Riad, but you never knew, with these bangers. Sometimes their fidelity was as true as the Corps or the Outfit’s, here in Chicago. Sometimes it was a race thing; sometimes it was just a perverse matter of honour, or what passed for honour in the barrio, in the hood.
Doc wanted to re-interview every ‘vampire’ from the mini orgy in Highland Park. He said he wanted to check out the nude, especially, because he’d felt left out, having missed the whole bust.
‘Great tits,’ Wendkos informed the now-senior partner. ‘But not monumental. And how’re you going to get her to flash you in the interview room?’
‘Ve haf our vays,’ Doc grinned slyly, doing his best movie-Nazi impression.
*
My wife’s career was flourishing. If I lived long enough, she would probably wind up running Homicide. But the Captain was my age, and like me, he never planned to give up the ghost or the ship. All we both had was this job. The Captain didn’t even have the family. He was what we used to call a lifetime bachelor. It seemed that no one knew anything about his personal life. And no one ever seemed to inquire.
Natalie had made three homicide busts in the last three weeks. All of which were considered very high profile cases — none of them were no-brainers or slam dunks. They were difficult investigations, but she and her partner Terry were on the inside track, going up rapidly.
If I weren’t so proud of her, I would have certainly been jealous. The Redhead was on a hot streak, and I was still on my treadmill, treading nowhere fast. The set-up with Rico
Perry was desperation. It was doing something when you couldn’t do anything. My life was inertia, just then. I was the giant rock at rest.
Samsa was my burden. Arthur and the West Side killings were jobs. It wasn’t because of that same old song about profiles. Samsa prodded me — like that white leviathan in Moby Dick plagued Ahab. Call it an obsession. Call it a burden or a fixation or whatever it was. But it haunted me.
Not because there was anything supernatural about Samsa. I knew he was just a man. Just a very evil individual. And he’d had the better of me in every encounter to this point. He had me reeling and ready to retire. I’d been on the verge of quitting, and Samsa was the reason. He was the match that met my tinder.
Then Doc had returned. He got us rolling toward Abu Riad — even if it were an outright longshot. But he had taken action. He was what I needed. Natalie couldn’t provoke me as he had because Gibron knew where all my buttons were. Jack was too young and polite to kick me in the ass and tell me to get on with it, but Doc knew just where to aim his big front toe.
*
We brought in the vampires from Highland Park. The list included financiers, lawyers, psychologists, two beauticians, and an undertaker.
‘He’s the guy we hang out to dry,’ Doc said to Jack and me before we entered the interview room.
The undertaker’s name was Gregory Corso. He was thirty-eight and single. Short, fat, balding, he looked like a lifetime loner.
He had his own mortuary on the Northwest side. He’d inherited the place from his father.
‘So it was you who supplied Samsa with those mortician’s needles,’ I said even before we sat down.
The balding man was already sweating heavily. His brow was pocked with droplets and there were grey stripes beneath each armpit on his long-sleeved white shirt. The cufflinks were gold with diamonds set in their middles.
He looked taken back. He had agreed to talk to us without a counsellor because he knew he had nothing to hide, he’d told us.
This time I had made a fortunate guess.
He coloured deeply and the sweating seemed to accelerate. I would soon need to hand him a bath towel.
‘We saw evidence of your “gifts” to Samsa at each of the crime scenes, Mr Corso.’
‘Jesus,’ he whimpered. He couldn’t seem to get his mouth to work.
Doc looked over at me with a smile of encouragement. We were down big in the bottom of the ninth, and he and Jack and I were aware of it. It was time to pull something out of our collective asses.
So I continued to take my shot at him. I could see that I had guessed right. He and Samsa were not strangers. His was not a onetime chance occurrence wherein his life and Samsa’s intersected by chance.
‘You’re an accessory to at least three homicides, Mr Corso. I once more want to remind you that you may ask for an attorney at any time during this interview, and then we have to immediately shut down.’
‘But I never knew ... He told me he was studying mortuary —’
‘How’d you figure he acquired that human blood for your little club meetings?’ Jack asked.
‘I told you! He told us he’d been robbing blood banks at several hospitals. Surely you don’t think that we —’
‘Think that you innocent bloodsuckers would resort to murder to procure the essence of your ritual?’ I asked.
The blood drained from his face altogether, then. I thought he might become physically ill.
‘You had no idea that he might be the Maxim Samsa that all the newspapers and media were talking about. You want us to buy that scenario, sir?’ Doc demanded.
‘Yes!’ he cried.
‘All right ... okay ...’ I said. ‘Maybe you really weren’t aware. But you got to believe that a jury would have difficulty believing that someone involved in a group, a cult, like you are ... You do understand that it wouldn’t cast you in a very favourable light.’
Corso was on the verge of hysteria. I thought he might lawyer up, but he started to weep, instead.
‘If you can help us at all, Mr Corso. If you can direct us toward Samsa with any information that could help us in apprehending him. It would go a long way in promoting good will between you and the police. We’d be inclined to lean your way, if you understand what I’m saying, sir,’ I told him.
Doc handed him a handkerchief, and Corso mopped his brow.
‘He’s a coke freak. I mean big time. I have an acquaintance, he supplies me from time to time — do I have to implicate him, too?’
‘Everything you tell us is in confidence. If we have to collect your connection, he won’t know it was you, Mr Corso, who dropped on him.’
‘Matt Cabrero. He’s a Mexican dude with Colombian connections. He works for the Outfit too. You know, the Italians.’
Jack looked at me and smiled.
‘Don Vito,’ he grinned.
‘We don’t have time to fuck around with you, Corso. Where is this guy Cabrero?’ said Doc.
Corso looked over and answered.
‘He hangs in Old Town. Makes a lot of bread off kids. You know, tourists and teenagers. Likes to hang out in head shops. He won’t be hard to spot.’
‘Why?’ I asked.
‘His hair is white. White as snow. He’s got a slow eye. Lost the real one in a knife fight ... He can be very violent. I never saw him that way, but I always paid in cash.’
‘A snow-white-haired Mex with one for-real eye,’ I repeated.
‘Yes. And he always wears a Texas Rangers ball cap. I think he’s from south Texas, somewhere.’
‘You’ve been helpful, Mr Corso ... But tell me,’ Doc asked. ‘How the hell did you ever get hooked up with a bunch of self-proclaimed vampires?’
‘I was ... I was lonely. There were women ... I was ... lonely.’
Doc watched Corso’s sad green eyes. Then my partner gently tapped his fingers on the walnut surface of the table in front of us.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
The call from Tactical came just twenty-four hours after we’d interviewed the mortician, Gregory Corso.
The three of us drove the Expressway to the West Side and found three patrol cars surrounding a smouldering Chevy Cavalier. It was parked on the street next to a vacant lot. Someone had set the car on fire the previous night, and when the firemen arrived on scene to put out the blaze, someone smelled the terrible stench rising from the trunk. When the fire had cooled off sufficiently, they raised the trunk and found the body of Joellyn Ransom. The fire hadn’t raged long enough for her body to be consumed, and they found a purse with her ID in the trunk along with her remains.
The body was in bad shape. She looked as if she’d been dead for several days, but the ME and the coroner would determine how long she’d been deceased, as well as whether or not she’d died in that trunk or had been killed and moved there. I assumed the latter case to be a lot more likely.
‘She appears to have been manually strangled, Lieutenant,’ Dr Gray pronounced after he’d taken a long look. ‘Ligature marks on her throat suggest as much. We’ll give it a much more thorough look when we have her on the table, of course. But it looks like someone shut off her air, Jimmy. Someone with very strong hands. The marks are very pronounced. She was no match for whoever it was.’
Gray moved back to his vehicle and then took off.
‘This all started as a simple gangbanger initiation, as I recall,’ Doc said as they put Joellyn Ransom in the body bag and removed her from the Chevy’s trunk.
‘Just an old man and his cat. Just one more killing on this West Side and no big deal,’ Doc lamented.
He had a far-off look on his face. Doc looked grey today. Much greyer than he had before he took off on his sabbatical. He was thinking about the two young black girls that he’d investigated long ago. It was the drive-by shooting case of two pre-teen girls that had nearly driven him off the job then.
His eyes met mine.
‘It is our old friend Abu Riad, Jimmy. Isn’t it. We know he did it or had it done,
don’t we?’
He was becoming increasingly agitated as we stood on this broken West Side sidewalk next to a still smoking vehicle that had hidden the corpse of yet another West Side youngster.
‘We know it’s him. He knows we know. And all we can do is ...’
His voice dropped off.
He raised his hands.
‘Hey! I’m all right. It’s part of the business that we do. I understand. I’ve resigned myself to it, Jimmy. Haven’t you, Jack? There are things which are never resolved. Cases that stay open. Wounds that never seem to heal. And you have to get your mind settled about it. There is no justice for some victims. No one speaks for them because they’re simply the voiceless dead. I know that. Hell, we’ve all conceded. It happens. It just happens, and you have to go on as if all this made some kind of sense.’
He put his hands up once more, but then he dropped them. He walked back to the Taurus, alone.
‘Jesus, he sounds depressed,’ Jack whispered.
‘Yes. He does,’ I replied.
I walked toward our vehicle. Doc was sitting in the back seat, looking out the window toward the still-smoking Cavalier. The firemen were still on scene. They doused the vehicle with more water now that they were certain there was nothing to fear from a gasoline explosion.
Jack got in the car and started it up. He was the driver again. Doc and I liked him to do the wheel. It gave us a chance to relax and to think, between destinations.
No one spoke on this ride, all the way back downtown.
*
Matt Cabrero was underground, our Narcotics cops told us. The word had slithered out that we knew about him and one of his notorious customers, Maxim Samsa. It became more and more frustrating to have to worry about watching who you talked to at headquarters or even on the street. Abu Riad had ears among us and so did the Outfit. And Matt Cabrero didn’t do the volume of cocaine trade that he did without the blessings and involvement of the Outfit, Chicago’s branch of the Mafia. The Ciccios were one of the multiple families in the Outfit. They were connected to the Parisis by blood — they were the offspring of my father’s (and my Uncle Nick’s) sister Rosalee. She had married a Ciccio before the Korean War. I had gone to family dinners and graduations and funerals with the Ciccios. It wasn’t something we looked forward to, but they were familia, and my dad, Jake, and his brother, Nick, did not disavow blood, even if the blood had become tainted. They were very traditional Italians when it came to family ties. We didn’t shun them even though we knew the business they were in.
