by Thomas Laird
When we were finished noticing her obvious charms, I finally re-acquired my speaking voice.
‘Did you have any contact with Joellyn Ransom?’ I asked Brenda Shea.
‘Yes. I was her counsellor, this past senior year. But she never finished out the year — as I’m sure you already know. It was tragic. She was an excellent student.’
‘Did she ever talk to you about personal problems? You know, romantic issues?’ I asked.
‘From time to time.’
‘Was there any particular boy she was fond of?’ Doc asked.
‘There were a few.’
‘Anyone special?’ Jack asked her.
Brenda smiled at Wendkos the way young women of any colour always did. I didn’t see a gold band on her finger, and Jack never wore his marriage ring to work.
‘There was one boy who wanted to be her significant other ... but she kept him at arm’s length.’
‘Who was he?’
‘Another dropout, I’m afraid. And he was a year younger than she. She thought he was just infatuated with her. She kept turning him aside, like a puppy —’
‘What was his name?’ Jack smiled warmly at her.
‘Oh, I’m sorry. I was babbling! His name was Rico Perry.’
She watched our faces transform from casual pleasantry to a far more sombre mood.
*
We received the tip on Rico from Tactical just two nights later. He had a new crib just six blocks from his old apartment where he was supposed to be cohabiting with a mother and two younger brothers. The new flat was in an abandoned apartment building. He was living on the top floor.
We arrived at the West Side location with four patrol cars full of uniforms as back-ups. The kid was a killer, even if he hadn’t burned Joellyn down. He’d done Arthur and probably Dilly and his two bros who got gunned down in the alley. We didn’t know what his true body count was.
Jack led the way up the stairs. There was no lock on the entry because the building had been condemned and awaited demolition. The whole block was ready to undergo the steel ball.
We got up to the top floor and Jack banged on the door.
‘Police!’ he bellowed.
There was no answer, so Wendkos put his foot to the entry. This door still had a functioning deadbolt.
The door blew inward, and as soon as we were inside, we heard someone racing toward the back door. We ran after the fleeing figure, and as soon as we got to that back exit, we saw Rico Perry flying down the stairs toward the alley.
But the patrol cars were covering that escape route. Blue beams of light lanced the backyard where Rico Perry stood like a cornered coyote. There was no place for him to run.
‘Up!’ Jack shouted.
Perry raised his arms skyward, toward the black, night heavens.
Doc walked around behind the young man.
‘You wouldn’t be thinking of cutting me, would you, Rico?’ Doc asked.
The boy reached into his black leather coat’s pocket.
‘Whoa!’ Jack warned him. ‘Use your left hand ... slowly.’
Rico changed hands and went into that same pocket with his left hand, this time. Out came a long switchblade. He dropped it on the scraggly grass of the backyard.
‘You carrying? You strapped, Rico?’ Doc continued before he patted him down.
‘Left hand ... gently,’ Jack again warned him.
He reached inside his coat toward the waistband, and he drew out a nine-millimetre automatic. He held it daintily by the handle, almost as if the weapon had a disease on it. Then he dropped it to the ground.
Doc handcuffed the boy, and then he patted him down to make sure he was indeed disarmed. The kid was clean, then.
*
‘You had a big thing for Joellyn Ransom,’ I told the handsome, athletic-looking black teenager.
‘Naw.’
‘Bullshit. We talked to your teachers, to your counsellors. Everyone in that school and in your hood knew you had it bad for her.’
‘They lyin’.’
‘But she belonged to Abu Riad. She was untouchable, no?’ I asked.
‘I doan know what y’all —’
‘You thought she was Riad’s bitch, didn’t you,’ I shot back at him.
‘She wadn’t no bitch, mothafucka!’ he shouted as he snapped himself upright from his chair at the interview table.
‘No. She wasn’t. You loved her, didn’t you? You didn’t think a badass like you, Rico, could ever let a girl, a woman, get to you because you’re a stone killer. Right?’
He glared at me as if he was mentally cutting my throat. Doc and Jack stood in either corner. They were letting me handle this show.
‘You let a bitch get to you and then you found out that she belonged to the head motherfucker. Yeah? But you didn’t know, just like we didn’t, that Joellyn Ransom was Abu Riad’s daughter ... not his bitch, not his lover. His blood daughter.’
Rico Perry couldn’t hold back the change in his hard face from vehement anger to authentic surprise.
‘Naw. She wadn’t none of his ...’
Then he settled back into his chair and the tears began to flow freely.
‘You thought he was taking her away from you because he wanted her for himself. You were afraid of Abu Riad — everybody is. But you saw her on the street. You got into it with her and then you convinced her to come by your crib. You knew it’d be just the two of you. Maybe you used the piece or the blade to help her make her mind up, but you got her inside where no one could see and you put it to her. She was an old man’s kept bitch. She didn’t want you even though you were more her age, more her kind of lover. She kept putting you off. The other young bitches never said no because you were a big man in the crew, in the barrio. You always had a wad of bills from doing the man’s dirty work, but you weren’t good enough for his woman, and you couldn’t handle it. She stuck in your head, in your throat, in your very guts. And you got angrier and angrier. She wouldn’t have you. And then she disappeared for a long time — until you saw her on the street. What? Near Abu Riad’s crib? And you stuck that Nine under her ribs and told her to come along. Because you were going to straighten this ho out — right? Am I right, Rico? Did she spit in your face even when you had the piece stuck in her side? Did she, Rico? Did she?’
‘Yes! Yes, goddammit!’
I expected him to break down and sob, but he didn’t.
He looked slowly at each of us. The heat of his hatred had raised the temperature in the interview room.
‘She wouldn’t have none of me. And yeah, I took her back to the crib. And yeah I had to put my piece upside her too. You got it all just right, Lieutenant. That make y’all feel big? It make you feel large? And I was gonna put a cap in her ass too, when she tole me how small I was. That what she kep’ sayin’, over and over. How tiny, how little I was. And I knew she was puttin’ me next to him ... but I thought she was his ... not his daughter, man. Everyone thought they was ... not his own blood daughter ...
‘So she kept sayin’ it again and again, about me bein’ little, small, just a goddam kid, and I took her by the throat and I squeezed and I squeezed and I squeezed until all that smile was gone from her face. The harder I went at her, the less of a smile she was showin’.’
‘Then you dragged her downstairs and dumped her in the trunk of that car,’ I said.
He nodded.
‘You going to write me a statement or do you want that lawyer I offered you when we started all this?’
‘I doan need no goddam lawyer. I just wish you’d stayed away until I could’ve killed that son of a bitch who —’
‘You can still get him, Rico,’ I offered.
‘You ... you offerin’ me a deal?’ he asked.
‘No deals. But you can take Riad down with you.’
‘How? How I can do that?’
‘Confess to killing Arthur Ransom, Dorothy Beaumont and the two boys whose faces you blew off.’
‘How do that get at him?�
��
‘You tell the Prosecutor that Abu Riad, also known as Charles Jackson, ordered all those whacks. You say all that, and you can torch that motherfucker permanently.’
Jack and Doc stood quietly in opposite corners.
I looked at the young man — he was barely out of boyhood — across from me.
‘Aw right,’ he said.
I handed him the pad and gave him a pencil.
‘Write it down, Rico.’
‘Aw right ... why not?’
He began to scribble out the beginning of the end for the man who had murdered Celia Dacy. And for the man who had ordered the shooting that had killed Celia’s innocent young son, Andres, out in front of Cabrini Green on a frozen winter’s night with the hawk howling in from the east off Lake Michigan.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Now are thoughts thou shalt not banish, Now are visions ne’er to vanish;
From thy spirit shall they pass No more — like dew-drop from the grass.
Just when I thought I was on a roll with getting a confession out of Rico Perry and a deal in the works for him to flip Abu Riad, my worst nightmare came back with body number four. This time it was a black nurse who lived by herself on the near north, not far from the other three victims. Samsa left his by-now usual stanza from ‘Spirits of the Dead’. There was only one stanza left to go in the poem, I saw, as I picked up Doc’s copy of Collected Poems of Edgar Allan Poe.
I didn’t know if it meant that he was planning only one more murder with the use of his mortician’s needle, or if it meant he was moving on to some other poem with multiple stanzas. I was looking for some key, some clue, in the first four victims and the stanzas attached to each killing, but nothing registered.
Martha Daniels was victim four. Recently received her RN from the University of Illinois Chicago, and like the others lived alone with no immediate family in the Chicago area. We found the name of an aunt in Corpus Christi, Texas, listed on a page in Ms Daniels’ file at St Edward’s Hospital in Cicero, where she worked. We were in the process of contacting the aunt at the moment.
‘He’s just fucking with you, Jimmy P. He wants you to be all caught up in these little verses he leaves behind. This is an uneducated killer. He’s sly. He’s very very clever. But he’s not used to thinking or speaking metaphorically — as we say in the academic world. He just picked out some morbidity from Poe. Any tenth grader would know about Poe’s big fling with death — especially the death of a young woman. Samsa probably picked it up in some remedial literature class at fucking St Charles. Don’t spin your wheels, Jimmy. He’s got you dangling, he thinks ... but we’ll get him. I guarantee we’ll have him, at the end of the day. He’s not that bright. He keeps on killing on the same grounds with every cop in the northern half of the state after him. He’s going to get caught in the thorns just like that bad old red fox always do, bro.’
Doc and I were standing outside the headquarters in the Loop. Neither of us smoked. Nor did Jack Wendkos. There were several other coppers out here with us who did, however. The three of us were in the minority when it came to tobacco use. Smoking had been forbidden in our offices for over a decade now, so the nicotine addicts had to take their breaks out on the street. We were so used to cops smoking that it didn’t seem to bother us when the clouds of carbon monoxide breezed around us.
Jack Wendkos was looking for Matt Cabrero, as we all were. He was the connection that might draw Maxim Samsa to us.
What did we know about this murderer? We knew he was bright but not formally educated. He was clever enough to have avoided arrest for all these months, now, and it was mid-May. He had eluded the CPD, the State Police, the Cook County Sheriff’s Police, the FBI and the US Marshal’s Deputies. Not bad for a dropout from St Charles.
He made no lasting attachments to anyone. His detachment was in his favour. Cabrero wasn’t a friend, just a business connection. Doc and I and Jack figured Cabrero was in the middle of his sales of human blood. The kind of blood that was taken from unwilling female donors. That was what made it attractive to these incredible spooks who’d gone far enough to have false fangs implanted in their jaws. The illicit serum made the ritual — Satanic or whatever division of black arts that these geeks were involved in — a rush, a thrill, a high. Whatever it was that motivated what appeared to be human beings into this kind of bizarre misbehaviour.
I didn’t think Samsa did it for the money. He watched those women fade from this life for his own reasons. Not gain, money-wise. He was getting even. When you had someone this cruel, then the crimes were about cruelty. Someone had abused him, but I didn’t really care who it was, at this point. I wasn’t going to spend time developing a profile of my own on him — the FBI had already sent theirs to us and it didn’t tell us anything we didn’t already know.
Maxim Samsa was a shadowy creature. That was the persona he was creating. He was inventing himself as he went along. His unpredictability was now a pattern in this killer. You could expect the outrageous in him.
Which meant to me that he wasn’t going to stop killing with a fifth victim. He thought of all of this as a first stage. Perhaps there were other poets he’d use. Other verses to tape to his victim’s cold toes.
All of the above I thought was true. That was why we had to get him now. Before he changed his MO in order to confuse us and throw us off the scent. We had to find Samsa before he invented an even crueller, more sophisticated version of himself.
*
‘If you ever use my name, Jimmy P, you’ll never see my face or hear my voice again. You know all that, going in.’
My cousin, Jimmy Ciccio, sat in the same booth he’d shared with me before in Little Italy.
‘You ever think of retiring from the cops, cuz?’
‘Yeah. Sure. On occasion.’
He looked at me with the wolf’s eyes.
‘This motherfucker has you so angry that you want to quit?’
‘You should’ve been a psychologist.’
‘Dead-end racket, Lieutenant. You have to talk to goofy fuckers all day. It doesn’t pay good enough. The goofs I listen to either bring in income or they don’t get their tickets stamped. You know how it works ...’
He watched me. I supposed he thought he could cow me into lowering my eyes from his, but I locked on and didn’t let go.
‘The cops I know wouldn’t let this prick bother them the way he does you. They’d figure “fuck it” and move on to something less frustrating, you know?’
I nodded, but I kept my eyes on his.
He wouldn’t blink either. I thought the match might become a stalemate, but he finally dropped his glare onto his outstretched fingers on the table before him.
‘Your guy Cabrero is going to be available tonight at the Priest’s and Priestess — it’s a titty bar in Old Town.’
‘Yeah. I know it.’
‘But you never patronized it, eh, cuz?’
‘No ... but I’ve been there for professional reasons.’
‘Cabrero is going to be there at 4:00 in the a.m. — on the dot, when they’re supposed to close. He’s supposed to do a fifty K trick for some “h” that’s just arrived from a crossover in south Texas. It’s high grade skank, expensive heroin, all the way from central America. This is his big sale, and I’m supposed to get twenty-five per cent.’
I looked at him and smiled.
‘You want to know why I’m dumping a profit of this magnitude, Lieutenant? It’s because this guy Cabrero is into that blood shit with your laughing boy, that cocksucker Samsa. Which means that every law enforcement swinging dick in the Midwest is looking for these two motherfuckers. And the faster we take Cabrero and his girlfriend Samsa out of the picture, the sooner I go back to business as usual —’
‘Don’t tell me about it. I told you. I’m cutting you no deals. I’m not in Narco anyway, but don’t tell me anything you don’t want me to hear.’
‘Fair enough, Jimmy P. You’re a balls-up guy. You never shit where I ate. An
d we are blood, hard as it is for you to swallow.’
‘What can I tell you?’
He laughed, and the lupine eyes suddenly went humorous.
‘I remember your old man. And your Uncle Nick too. They were balls-up and straight, like you. I don’t know how the genes on your side of the family went wrong, but what the fuck. I’m no biologist. Four a.m., Jimmy P. If I was you, I’d make sure there are no fuckups. You want to land Cabrero now. It was difficult for me, even, to find out where this Mex fuck was floating. You nail him, you’ll nail your big fuckin’ tuna, Samsa. I guarantee it. They been doin’ business without paying tribute to me, and that’s another reason I’m handing this white-haired dick over to you. You better collect him while you can, cousin.’
*
Everyone on scene around Priest’s and Priestess was in plain clothes. We were a half block down, but our troops were everywhere in the vicinity. If Cabrero showed, he was inside the net. Jack and Doc and I had already informed Narcotics that we were looking at one of their hottest topics. Murder overrode drug sales, I figured, and Narco went along with us. Samsa was the highest of the high profiles, so they didn’t want to muddy our path.
It was 3:30. I had been listening to Nancy Wilson on my headphones, and I asked Doc and found that he was tuned into the same all-night jazz thing from Evanston.
‘You’re finally seeing the light,’ Gibron grinned. He was in the front seat shotgun. I was behind the wheel, and Jack was fully alert and awake in the back seat of the Taurus.
All the other cops on the stake were sitting in more elegant rides. There were black Mustangs, red Hondas, yellow Cameros, a couple black Lexuses — we’d gone all out on trying to use vehicles that players would drive — everyone except us in the Ford, of course.
‘Son of a bitch,’ Jack whispered. ‘He’s early ... look.’
