by Thomas Laird
“Jesus, Jimmy, what a fucking situation.”
The Captain wants to say more. I can see it in his eyes. But he doesn’t come up with the words.
We have two leads on Celia at the end of the week, but they both evaporate. We check out two spots on the far southside, but the women spotted bear only a weak resemblance to the woman I’m still in love with.
Doc and I cruise the area on the southside near Jean Giroux, but we come up equally empty.
“You still care for her.”
I look over to my partner. He’s doing the driving. He hates being driven.
“Yeah.”
“After the killings. After seeing what she can do—”
“I still love her,” I tell him.
“Yes. I see that.”
“I can’t turn it off once it begins, Doc.”
“Ain’t that a bitch? I been there, too. First wife.”
He turns the comer. We’re on 79th Street, headed east.
“I hated that woman and I loved her. I don’t know which emotion I showed her more often. Might’ve been a tossup. Goddamn, could that broad get me angry! And then we’d make up with this stupendous fuck bout, and I thought I was in love with her all over again. Never doubt the power of fucking. It is a healing device, James, granted to us by a Higher Power. You slip and slide about inside that lovely labia, and you don’t know if you’re doing it with Eva Braun or the Lennon Sisters or Lorena Bobbitt, that bitch that cut her old man’s dingus off, and you don’t give a fuck, either.”
“She didn’t enslave me in the bedroom, partner, if that’s what you’re getting at.”
“Sex is a powerful number, Jimmy.”
“I love her. Sex was there, all right, but I love her. And nothing’s going to change it, Doc.”
“You’re a sad case, boy. You got that lovely redheaded criminologist all in a flutter for you...”
“How the hell did you know about her?”
He smiles.
“I have my ways.”
We drive as far east as State Street, and then we turn back.
“We ain’t going to find her unless we can cut her off from Bobby Wells,” he reminds me. “We’re going to have to wait until that other Mister Motherfucker shows up in a crowd, where she can get at his ass. I’m telling you, Lieutenant. That’s how this thing is going to happen.”
He goes into his forty minute tirade about his psychic abilities, about his second sight and all the rest, and I let it slide over me in waves on the long ride back to the Loop.
While he goes on and on, I hear Celia’s words. I hear her giving me her final goodbye. I tell myself I won’t accept a bad ending to her, to us. It’s unacceptable. I won’t tolerate it and I won’t let it happen. I’m going to fashion her future a hell of a lot more positively than she supposes. It can happen. I keep telling myself: If I can just lay hands on her one more time. If I can make eye contact with her, I can transmit everything she needs to know. I can do it with just a glance. I know I can. This fate business is overrated. I can help her if I can find her. The words become a chant, a mantra, in my head.
Doc babbles and I laugh as he drives. He’s been doing this same stage show for all the years we’ve been together.
He’s got it down pat.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
Natalie Manion is a beautiful young woman who wants to buy me more buffalo wings on this Friday night at the singles bar that is close to work for both of us. I know I made the rule about not getting involved with a female copper, but somehow I’ve overruled myself, and here I sit with her. She has that auburn shade of red that I find very attractive. Erin and Celia both had dark brown hair. This is the first redhead I’ve ever gone out with. I spent most of my adult life with my wife, and I’ve spent the remaining months with the woman who’s disappeared on me. Celia hasn’t emerged at her sister’s, mother’s, or ex-husband’s places. We’ve had them staked out for a few weeks, and we’ve come up empty. This time the Captain says we’re going to maintain the surveillance on those three until Celia Dacy does show up. He doesn’t want Celia to outwait us the way Chaka did right before he wasted Karen Nathan and blinded Doc’s adopted daughter Keesha.
Natalie is witty, she’s far better educated than I am, and she doesn’t stick her big brain in my face. I have the feeling that she finds men her own age, twenty-seven, to be immature. “Infantile” is the word she actually proffers to me. I don’t know if it’s really an indirect slam towards me to be considered mature, but I don’t much mind. I just came down here to get out of the house. For all the time I spent away from the kids and Eleanor, I made up for it in spades when Celia took off on me. Now they’re tired of my ass, and they told me so.
“You’re still all caught up with her,” Natalie says. She takes a sip from her stein of beer. Then she picks up a buffalo wing and studies it before she returns it to the basket.
“Yeah. I am. But I didn’t come here to bore you with a load of crap about my sad existence. I like you very much, Natalie. I like hanging with you, but I don’t want you to get the wrong idea because I wouldn’t want to make you angry.”
“What wrong idea?”
“I wouldn’t want you to think that I... Shit. I’m sorry. I’m taking a helluva lot for granted, ain’t I.”
“No. I’m interested in you, Lieutenant. You’re not leading me on, if that’s what you mean. I just like to be around you, too. I’d like to move things to a higher level, but I can wait and see how things work out. I’m not that young and that naive, so you won’t crush me if things swing back toward Celia Dacy.”
She wants me to get up and dance with her to the tune “Wild Horses.” I stand without thinking what a lousy dancer I am, but it’s a slow song comparatively for the Stones, so I don’t refuse her. And I’m thinking I would have a great deal of difficulty telling Natalie no about anything. There is something roiling around in my system, and it’s making me a little uncomfortable. What happens if I pick Celia up and there’s a decent resolution to her case? I mean she gets some jail time, but time in rehab in some good mental hospital where they take into account the amount of trauma she’s endured. She could be out in the street in a few years.
Could I take a killer into my house? I was having problems with the color of her skin and mine, about our cohabiting in my home, and now I have to deal with someone who’s killed three men?
I look down into Natalie’s green eyes. I know I want her, and I know I should be ashamed to be putting someone into Celia’s place so quickly. It’s the same shame I felt about Celia occupying Erin’s spot when Celia and I first saw each other at her place at the Green.
“I’m giving you a way out of this before it gets messy,” I tell Natalie.
“I’m not going anywhere unless you tell me I should.”
“That’s what I should be telling you. I’m twice your age, damn near. I’m not over Celia Dacy, like I told you, and I still haven’t got the goddam brains to give you a break.”
“I don’t need any breaks from you, Jimmy Parisi. I’ll make my own breaks. I always have.”
She reaches up and kisses me, and I can’t hear “Wild Horses” any longer.
CHAPTER THIRTY
“This piece of human flotsam has been on the phone with me for two hours. You need to assuage his fears, Lieutenant Parisi.”
The Captain is not jesting. He wants me to get on the blower and make Bobby Wells think we’re investing all our energies to protect him.
“Jimmy.”
“Yes, Captain.”
Doc and I are sitting in his cubicle.
“She’s been calling him on the phone.”
“You mean Celia.”
“Yes. She’s been threatening him in no uncertain terms, dago.”
“I don’t know what else we can do to keep tabs on him. Were the calls traced?”
“The last one was,” the redhead says. “Far southwest side, payphone. She got off long before we could get a squad to her. Smart girl, y
our Celia.”
“I don’t think she’s mine anymore, Boss. She’s cast me off just like everything and everybody else in her life. She’s going to die trying to get at him.”
“We aren’t going to let that happen, are we, boys.”
Doc stares at him the way I am.
“Come on now. Give me a little spiritual uplift. Show me a little confidence that the
situation is in fucking hand.”
“I’ll take her, Captain. It’s what I live for,” I tell him.
His jocular mood has shifted.
“Jesus, Jimmy. I better not lose you in this fuckin’ deal.”
“I don’t plan to fly into the side of the mountain, if that’s what you mean.”
“You still love this woman.”
I look into his eyes.
“Jesus, Jimmy, Jesus. I knew I should’ve yanked you off this Dacy case and fuck what the NAACP or anybody would’ve said about removing my best guys from this deal.”
“You did the right thing. I’ll make it happen yet. Trust me, Captain. I’ll make it right yet.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
We accompany Rashaan Abu Riad everywhere but to the head and to his bed. Wherever he appears, we do.
Tonight it’s the Midnight Basketball League Banquet. He has to make a presentation of trophies for the Summer League, so we’ll be right there alongside him and his four personal bodyguards.
There have been no further sightings of Celia. Everybody on the street has come up empty. I’m starting to think she’s blown town. Maybe she was able to squeak through our surveillance at the rail and bus and air terminals and perhaps she found her way to either Coast, or maybe to the Gulf Coast or to Canada, for all I know. I find myself pulling for those scenarios — the ones where she disappears and I don’t have to slap the irons on her and watch her go to prison or some asylum for twenty or more years.
I’d be damn near seventy when she emerged from a twenty year stretch. She’d be in her mid-fifties. The thought makes me shiver.
I walk out to the driveway, and Doc’s sitting out there waiting for me. As I knew he would be. He never honks the horn. He’d sit out there all night in the drive listening to that Evanston jazz station on his little, portable, battery radio. He’d be content if I forgot to go to work and left him out there all damn night.
He’s indeed tuned into the bebop station. He tells me it’s Ahmad Jamal or someone. Piano, drums, and bass.
We take off as I watch the lights from my living room become smaller and smaller.
“How many dinners is this?” I ask him.
“I lost count. The bitch must never pay for a meal. No wonder he’s got all this cash.”
We hear something on the car radio. It’s a call about a shooting. They want us to swing by before we go to the banquet. The Captain has left a message that he feels comfortable that Rashaan’s bodyguards can handle things if we arrive a little late. He’s sending some plainclothesmen to take our spots until we investigate the scene on this shooting.
We take off toward the west side. It’s a twenty minute trip, but it’s past rush hour, so it goes pretty quick.
We’re in an area on the west side, now, that looks like Berlin in late 1945. At least the films I’ve seen of that German city remind me of what we’re looking at. There is rubble and there are demolished buildings everwhere in sight. It looks as if it’s been bombed.
We arrive at one of the few apartment buildings which is still standing erect. We get out of the Ford. I see the two patrol cars sitting in front of the building, so I know we’ve got the right address.
Doc and I ascend three flights of stairs. We walk into the apartment and we see the body of the old man lying on the kitchen tile. There is a miserable stench that attacks our nostrils as we walk toward the corpse. Doc makes a squinched up face, and I’m having trouble keeping my fingers from pinching my own nose.
“What’s the deal?” I ask the patrolman.
He explains that it’s a real no brainer. He can’t understand why they’d need to take us off our detail with Rashaan, but I tell him it’s all right. I tell him that Prince Charles is the limey guest of honor in Chicago this past week and that all available coppers have been assigned to him as security and that they probably just ran out of bodies and that’s why Doc and I are on scene. The explanation satisfies the sergeant and we examine the dead guy.
Three shots to the forehead. The top of his head is over near the sink. It’s like someone scalped him a little too deeply off the crown of his noggin. There is brain matter and blood and bone fragment scattered all over the tom to hell tile of this kitchen.
We find his cat, next. It’s balled up in a corner and it’s missing its two front paws. We hear it hissing at us.
“I didn’t know what to do about the goddam animal. It’s too late to call the pound,” the Sergeant says.
I walk over to the cat and I see that someone’s performed very crude surgery on the feline. It’s amazing the cat hasn’t bled to death. It hisses weakly as I pick it up.
I can’t stand to see any animal suffer, but I haven’t got anything to put it to sleep with. So I tell Doc I’ll be right back. I lean over carefully and I pick the cat up by the scruff of his neck. It looks like he’s a male, and he’s a tabby furred little shit. There’s not much blood left in him to drip out, it seems. He’s very weak, but he manages to keep on hissing at me.
I walk him downstairs; he’s extended from me in my right hand. I don’t want him bleeding all over my coat.
I take him out into the alley. It’s dark, so I won’t be interrupted.
“Kitty kitty,” I whisper. The cat’s in mortal pain so I can’t drag this out. I take him by his head and neck and I wrench his face sideways viciously. His neck snaps and it doesn’t take him long to die. I make sure he’s dead before I gently place him in the dumpster.
I don’t know why I feel so bad. I did the poor son of a bitch a favor.
I walk back up toward the crime scene. I enter. We spend another half hour there.
“I’m getting nervous, Doc. Let’s get this over with.”
“We got a call while you were outside with Felix. They’ve picked up a banger with blood all over his black leather jacket. This gone be the slam dunker of the week... We’re finished here,” he tells the forensics people.
*
We arrive at the banquet at 9:45. Rashaan’s about to appear. It’s his turn to speak. I wonder if he’ll do his ‘black male and his responsibility to the black community’ spiel all over again. I don’t think I could take it one more time.
Doc is at his post on the left hand side of the dais, and I’m walking down the aisle that is on the other side of the hall. There must be 700 people here this evening. The Mayor’s present, a whole lot of aldermen are here, and the players in the Midnight Basketball League and their families are in attendance as well.
I’ve got the earphone installed as always, but Doc lays off the Polack jokes tonight. I think he’s still all depressed about what I had to do with that cat. He knows it was the humane thing to do, but he’s pissed at the banger who shot the old dude on the west side over a drug debt. Then the gangster figured he owed himself the old man’s cat. Sort of like a perk to the execution. We found the carving knife that he used to hack off the feline’s front paws. Just when you think you’ve found the crudest act you’ve ever beheld, someone goes out and becomes creative.
“Jimmy. Shit. Jimmy...”
I stop dead in my tracks and I whirl toward Doc at the dais. I pick out Doc first, but then I see the figure moving toward Rashaan. Bobby Wells is in mid speech, but Doc’s picked her out.
“Get to her, Jimmy! She’s got a gun!”
I hear the screaming begin. People are jerking up out of their chairs, and I bolt toward the stage. Rashaan’s people are surging in front of him and suddenly they’ve got their guns drawn. Doc’s concealed behind a table full of people who’re blocking his access to Celia, and I see him trying
unsuccessfully to bull his way through the crowd.
It’s as if she’s floating toward Abu Riad. It’s as if I’m running in a sea of mud instead of across a smooth, expensive carpet. Now I’m stuck in the middle of hundreds of scurrying people.
I hear the first two shots, but I see Celia’s head still moving toward the dais where Bobby Wells is cowering behind his four bodyguards. It’s the bodyguards who are shooting.
A woman in a white evening dress is hit in the shoulder with one of the pops from Bobby’s people, and she sits down abruptly. I see the blood on her gown as I try to force myself through the crowd. I can’t see Doc at all at the moment, but I’m almost twenty feet from where Celia is when I hear three more shots.
It’s then that Celia disappears in a cluster of expensively dressed bystanders.
“Celia!” I scream.
I’m finally upon her. I’ve got the Nine in my hand, and I hear another blast. I huddle down over her, and as I do I hear Doc screaming at Rashaan’s people to stop the shooting, stop the firing or Doc’s going to shoot the dumb motherfuckers himself.
The attendees are all running and shrieking and piling out the exits. It doesn’t take long for me to be with Celia without the crowd pressed all over us. I can hear the weeping of the white woman who was hit. She’s a few rows behind us.
I turn Celia over. She’s been hit in the throat and in the chest.
“Oh Jesus oh Mary oh lovely Jesus God!” I blurt. I take her to me, but she can’t talk.
She’s bleeding to death and I don’t know how to begin to help her.
“Call the paramedics! Get an ambulance! Doc! Jesus Christ oh God! Doc!”
I see my partner scrambling toward the lobby where the phones are.
I try to press her wounds, but all I come up with is a wet, bloody hand. I can’t stem her bleeding; I can’t stop it.
“Celia. Can you hear me?”
She’s still watching my eyes. But she can’t speak.
“Celia. We’re getting help. Hang on. You’re going to live if you’ll just—”
