Black Widower

by Thomas Laird

  *

  He sits at the interview table across from Doc and me, and our Captain is behind the one-way mirror. And Skotadi knows that he’s out there, watching. Skotadi’s a cop, at least in name.

  “You recall your whereabouts on this night?”

  I show him the sheet.

  “I was at home,” the Vice cop says.

  His face is unreadable. It’s absolutely blank, as if he’s not even here. It’s like whoever he is has moved out of his body.

  “Anyone there with you?” Doc asks.

  “You might say. But I can’t produce her as a witness.”

  “What’s that mean?” I ask him.

  “It means I never feel alone in my house. It’s as if Jennifer is still there with me. You’re a widower. You should know the feeling.”

  “We’re not here to share, Skotadi. Was there anyone there who could corroborate what you’ve told us?”

  He looks at me as if he’s amused. Then he peers over at Doc, and I’m wondering if the son of a bitch plans to come at us across the table.

  But he remains seated, his palms flat on the table top.

  “What’s this about? Do I need a lawyer?” he demands of us.

  “You know the drill,” I say. “You want to make the call, you know where the telephone is.”

  “So you’re not charging me with anything.”

  “Two of your old friends are dead. From a .38 special. A cop’s gun,” I say.

  “How many .38s are loose in this city, Parisi?”

  “Is it all right if we ask the questions?”

  Doc stands up. Skotadi flinches, just barely.

  My partner smiles at the Vice policeman.

  “Did I make you feel uncomfortable?” Doc asks him.

  “Strong arm shit has gone the way of the mastodon. No, you’re not frightening me,” he tells Gibron.

  “How well did you know Frank Pastore?” I query.

  “I met him a few times. It’s part of my trade, Detective. He employs girls who sometimes cross the line. They do nasty, dirty, illegal things, from time to time. You know how it is.”

  “IA thinks you were on Pastore’s pad.”

  “IA’s full of shit. How come they can’t prove it? How come they haven’t charged me? Are we about done here?”

  “We think you might know something about the demise of Pastore and his gorilla, Lou Martino. They both died of lead poisoning, as I’m sure you’ve heard.”

  Skotadi grins at Doc and his question.

  “Somebody just helped clean up the city, no? A little post birth control.”

  “I’m glad you’re able to see the bright side of all this, Derek. We know you did Jennifer. And we have a witness who saw you at Britches, the night of the troubles,” I add.

  Skotadi glares at me. Of course he doesn’t know that our stripper-college kid friend only saw his burly backside.

  “Bullshit. Bring it on, assholes. If you had an eyeball, you would’ve rung me up by now,” he spits.

  “Ca-ching!” Doc laughs.

  “If there’s nothing else.”

  “You can go, Derek. For now,” I smile.

  “Your shit is extremely weak, Parisi.”

  “It’s been real, Derek,” Doc grins.

  He walks out of the interview room, and we remain in our chairs.

  “He’s right of course, Jimmy. Our poop is very watery, regarding a case on him.”

  “We had to let him know we’re here.”

  “That’s about all we got accomplished. You know he’s not going to confess, like that kid axe murderer in Dostoevsky.”

  “I think we skipped that one in high school.”

  “Let’s just say that he confessed to two whacks under the heavy burden of a working conscience.”

  “And you think Skotadi has one of those, a conscience?”

  “Well, shit...You can’t have it too easy. That’d take the challenge out of it.”

  “Fuck the challenge, Doc. I just want to pin his daddy parts to the wall.”

  “So far we’re not winning,” my partner laments.

  “It’s early in the game. We’ll do what we always do. Outlast the prick.”

  He rises from the wooden chair.

  “Time to build up some more goo in our vascular systems.”

  “Maybe we should try Burger King or McDonald’s,” Gibron mumbles over a mouthful of cheese slider.

  “The ambience just ain’t right at either of those joints. And they’re not all open during the heart of darkness, after midnight,” I smile as I take a swallow of Coke.

  “I suppose you’re right. But perhaps we ought to start eating smarter, you know, salads and shit. Maybe kale.”

  “The hell is kale?”

  “Damned if I know, but it’s supposed to be healthy. Gotta live off the land, James. Eat green.”

  “Maybe you’re right, but I think all that’ll be a fad. It’ll pass.”

  “There is something we’re not looking at, with Derek Skotadi. Something we’ve overlooked.”

  “Well of course. Why else would his ass be running loose?”

  “Maybe the Outfit will take out the garbage for us, Jimmy.”

  “That would be highly illegal. They don’t like to waste police, Doctor. It’s bad for business.”

  “Not even with a dirty cop?” he grins.

  He looks at me.

  “What?” Doc asks.

  “I suppose I could ask around, see if it does any good.”

  “Haven’t you tapped that side of your family enough, yet?” Doc asks.

  He finishes off his remaining dose of death, his last cheese slider.

  “It’s good to stay in touch with the familia,” I remind him.

  “But you’d have to go to the wrong side of the tracks, again.”

  “Yeah, and I’ll have to go alone. You know how much they like anyone other than the clansmen.”

  He sips at his coffee and eyes me warily, but he lets it go, and we pay our tab and go off into the parking lot.

  *

  Toots (William) DeNardo is my second or third cousin on the Parisi side. His father was another undesirable, as far as my dad, Jake Parisi, was concerned. We only saw their bunch around the big holidays, when I was a kid. Christmas or Easter, but not every year. There was this old school element in my father’s way of life that couldn’t completely sever ties with members of the blood, even if some of them were pieces of shit.

  Toots is in women and gambling. He’s not known for doing a lot of wet work—murder, that is—but I’m sure he got bloodied in order to get made, which he is and has been for twenty years. I know him slightly, but we always got along. He liked to talk sports whenever we got thrown together at some family extravaganza. Usually it was his father Bernie who threw the holiday get-together in a restaurant they owned on the southwest side, Guido’s.

  We always left early. His people made my father nervous.

  Toots is a fat, round little man who must tip the scales at about 275—and he’s only five-six. But no one messed with him in school because he had a habit of biting and then not letting go of the other guy’s body part, usually an ear or a nose.

  I meet him at one of his hangouts on the southwest side, near Beverly. It’s called Rondo’s, and it’s been known to be a front for numbers and whores. It looks like a bar, to the naked, uneducated eye.

  He rises from his booth and gives me a hug. I’m a little wary he might try to take a chunk out of one of my earlobes.

  “Long time, Jimmy,” he says, and we sit in his booth.

  “Long time,” I agree.

  “Tell me what you want. I know this ain’t a social call.”

  I ask him if he’s heard about Pastore and Martino.

  “Sure. Word says it was a cop who did them both. Some Vice copper.”

  “Yeah. I’m looking into it.”

  “How hard are you looking, Jimmy?”

  “Same as we always do. This shit can’t stand.”
/>   “Same old choirboy, aren’t you.”

  “Not hardly, Toots. Not even a little.”

  “What do you want from me?”

  “Anything you have on this Vice policeman, Derek Skotadi.”

  “Everyone knows he was in Pastore’s little black book.”

  “We know, and Internal Affairs knows, but neither of us can prove it.”

  Toots looks down at his tiny espresso cup, and then he takes a thoughtful sip and then replaces the cup onto its equally tiny saucer.

  “I’ll see what I can do,” the fat man finally concludes.

  Chapter 7

  I know one thing for sure. Pastore and Martino aren’t coming back to haunt me. Once you’re in hell, they don’t let you loose. The thought gives me a strange sense of relief.

  Parisi and Gibron are turning up the heat trying to get at me, and IA never closes a file until they scratch deep enough to make you bleed. They’ll keep coming, just like the Homicide cops.

  It seems like the move would be to re-locate, and I’ve been living pretty steadily with Carrie. Her pitch for marriage has only intensified in the last few weeks, and now we’re in mid-December, and she wants to get married on Christmas Eve and she wants to do it in Vegas.

  For some goddam reason, I go along, and we find ourselves at the Sands in gamble town. We go look for an Elvis to do us, but they’ve only got some hillbilly in a chapel on the Strip, and he performs the nuptials, and then we go back to the hotel and Carrie comes at me like a lioness in heat and my ashes get hauled and packaged and delivered to sexual fatigue. And then she wants to do more. This is going to be an extra-innings game, and it’ll likely not get over until the sun comes up over the desert.

  I ask her if she’s got life insurance. She says she doesn’t, and I tell her now that she’s a married woman, she needs to seriously look into it. She’s so hazed over from all the sex and from the decent sized diamond I bought her back in Chicago from some discount jeweler, she doesn’t protest.

  “Make it for something substantial. You’re young, and it gets a hell of a lot more expensive to pay the premiums when you hit middle age.”

  “You planning on getting rid of me?” she grins slyly.

  “Sure. Just like I did with my first wife.”

  The rooms are posh in the Sands, but they had a deal going on, and anyway they expect to get back your money at the casinos. Pay me now or pay me later. Pastore’s associates in Vegas operate these big joints, but they do it behind the scenes.

  “I don’t think that’s funny, Derek.”

  “You know it’s just a joke, don’t you, baby?”

  “Yeah, I know. But it just doesn’t seem right to make fun of it, of her, I mean.”

  “Okay, so you’ll never hear any of that again.”

  Her face softens.

  “You have a will, baby?”

  “You know I do. Everything’s going to you. Everything. Are we going to talk money, or will you let me get back to business? I think maybe you are planning to make me disappear, the way you talk.”

  But there’s a smirk on her lips.

  I don’t bring up the life insurance or the will again. She might have thought I was just messing around back in Las Vegas, but here in her apartment I’ve got to play it a lot more subtly. I planted the seed in Nevada, and now it either grows or withers, but whatever happens she’ll think she’s the one who came up with the ideas.

  This marriage won’t last. That’s for certain. The longer we’re together the more I realize that this is a white hot sex thing, but they all burn out, and what I’m left with is an annoying bitch who I can barely tolerate. She’s got no social skills, just the talents that she shows in abundance on the sheets. That wears off, just as it did with Jennifer. I lingered too long with her, and what happened had to happen. And I see the same scenario with Carrie.

  I don’t know that I’ve ever met a female that I could stand for more than a few hours, let alone years or a lifetime. There will be no silver or golden anniversaries for me. I wasn’t meant to be monogamous. That’s all romantic bullshit. Men think with the little head, when it comes to broads. It isn’t natural to get tied down to one when there’s always another, younger version, coming around the corner.

  Some of these feminists would call me a chauvinist pig, but it’s our nature, so I don’t give a shit what they call me as long as I can exhaust a few possibilities with them. And there are always women who make allowance for our male, base instincts.

  It’s been quiet at my house. I only go over to check and see that there are no gas leaks or anything that might screw up my property. Eventually, Jennifer will tire of ‘haunting’ a virtually empty building, and then maybe she’ll go wherever it is migrating souls go when they reach a final port of call. Nothing’s forever.

  No more running water emanates from the bathroom while I’m there briefly for my checkups, but I figure I’ll wait another year or so before I put the place up for sale.

  I went over it and over it trying to figure out why that torcher failed to get the job done, here. He knew how to fray wires, but when the electrician came, after the burner got shot, the wires were only minimally screwed up. The electrician thought the situation was not as bad as he first thought. He was in and out in twenty minutes.

  Wires don’t heal themselves, but I’m damned if I can figure out how the arsonist could screw up that badly. He was supposed to be one of the best in the business. Look what it got him. Sad, actually.

  I could suppose that Jennifer, or what’s left over of her, had something to do with it, but in life she was helpless around the house. I literally had to screw in the light bulbs. She couldn’t do a damn thing other than burn the meals and do the laundry and wind up bleaching the colored clothes into a universal shade of pale blue. I had to do the wash, too. It was cheaper than buying new clothes every week.

  The house looks good. When I put it up for sale it should fetch a good price. This neighborhood is solid. Where you have old goats you have people who keep up their properties. Lawns are manicured and watered, and there are backyard gardens with vegetables and flowers in profusion. It was bad luck, the first time, with the appearance of the thing in the shower room.

  I’ll come and live in here for a few nights before I put the house up, and I’ll see if the coast is clear. I have the feeling that it’s probably clear now, but Carrie still refuses to even come close to my house. It’s a new place or stay in the apartment, she insists.

  Parisi and Gibron think I’m a series or serial killer, by now. They’re sure I did my wife and that I wet-worked Martino and Pastore, too. And maybe they’ve connected me to the home-fryer, the Greek. But it’s a stretch, I’m thinking.

  They say they’ve got a witness, but if she saw my face, I’d already be in the shithouse. And all they have to do is pinch me for just one murder. Homicide is good for a life sentence or execution, so the other killings would be superfluous.

  It doesn’t mean they don’t want me for all four, but if I get nabbed for one, they’ve got unlimited time to make a case for the others. Multiple convictions are really a moot point. It doesn’t matter, except for Parisi’s sense of justice. When I was a Homicide dick, it was just a job. The only thing I really liked about it was the look on the perp’s face when you cuffed him and when he knew he was about to become extinct.

  I didn’t last on Homicide. Being a Vice cop is much freer. You’re like a king, on the streets. You can virtually do what you want, if you’re smart and careful about it. No one gives a shit about whores and pimps. They’re the lowest rung in the sewer. When a prostie gets waxed, no one gives a damn. They figure they had it coming, no great loss. They look into her murder, but not the way they do with the high profiles, the cases that attract publicity. Then the dogs of war are loosed. I found all that to be the modus operandi when I was in the murder squad.

  I see them constantly, now. They follow me all the time, and when it isn’t Parisi and Gibron, it’s another pair of Ho
micides. They’ll be out in legion until they figure out that they really don’t have anything to allow a prosecutor to make charges against me for any of the killings. They haven’t got dick, and as I say, I’d already be in irons if they did.

  “Why do you keep looking in the rear view mirror?” Carrie asks me.

  “It’s good to be aware of what’s around you, baby. That’s why predators survive in this world and prey doesn’t.”

  “I don’t like the sound of that.”

  I glance over at her. She’s showing a lot of cleavage, but that’s the way I like it. It makes other men envious.

  “It’s just Darwin, darlin’. Just fact, just science.”

  “I might take that predator stuff personally, Derek.”

  “Don’t be silly.”

  We’re on the way to some expensive steak house in the Loop, something owned by some ex-jock who played pro football, I think.

  We get out of the car, here on State and Lake, and the valet in the burgundy jacket takes the car for us. She’s wearing some faux fur coat because she doesn’t want to wear the pelt of some weasel-like little beastie that’s raised to be skinned. She belongs to the Anti-cruelty outfit, and sends them checks all the time. I have to talk her out of that. It’s money she could have in an investment or in savings.

  My name is on the will, now. It’s early January, and she’s already got the life insurance policy for 250 K, and I’m the sole recipient. Everything’s falling into place, and I’ve seen fewer and fewer cop rides in my rearview mirror, as of late. They must be running out of manpower hours. And Parisi has still come up dry, obviously. The mist from the john is still absent, and I’m thinking about contacting a realtor in June. Spring and summer are when houses move faster and better. The winter is dead time, in the housing business.

  She’s paying for the meal. She’s got money from her old man’s trust fund. The guy was a big wheel in the Chicago stock market, but he’s giving her her inheritance in a dribble-down, gradual way. She says he wants to be sure she didn’t squander what he’s already shelled out to her. The old boy’s only sixty-eight, so it might be a while before he croaks and she gets what he gives her and her three siblings.

  Even though we’re married, I still haven’t met him. They live in California, now, since he’s retired, and he refuses to come back to Chicago in the winter, Carrie tells me.