Cutter

by Laird, Thomas

  Doc and Jack went to work, checking out the scene, but we knew what we had before any of our work had begun.

  I crouched in front of my cousin. There were no other wounds on him. I saw a piece of paper sticking out from beneath Billy. I gently maneuvered the sheet out from under him without touching anything else.

  There were a few words printed on the sheet. In pencil. They were crudely rendered, like the writing of a child learning to print.

  ‘See you soon.’

  That was all there was of a message for me.

  *

  ‘I say we trash the project. This guy’s too smart to come after you at your house after trying to get to Fortuna and after wasting Billy,’ Doc said.

  ‘I told you. This guy is competitive. It’s a task for him. It’s like an obstacle. Look where he’s already been. He’ll still make a run,’ I told Gibron.

  Wendkos shrugged when I looked over to him. We were at dinner break at Garv’s in Berwyn since Berwyn was where our call about Billy had come from.

  ‘He walked past the FBI and right into John Fortuna’s home. He doesn’t give a shit if we know he’s coming. Let me try and speed him up. That’s all. He’s going to come to me, but I don’t want him doing some other woman in the downtime when he’s gearing up for a Chicago policeman. Let’s get him going toward me.’

  ‘The Captain won’t have it, guinea. You better keep all this in this room,’ Doc reminded me.

  ‘Yeah, this is just between the three of us. We put all kinds of people around my house he might try anyway. The FBI didn’t scare him off. But he might be a little more overly confident if he sees the door swing open. It’s his little door of opportunity. I think he’ll move fast because he thinks we think he won’t because he got a scare at Fortuna’s. Big John pumped four rounds into Vito before Marco got his ass out that front window. Anybody else would knock off while they’re still in luck. But not our guy ... Something else I want us to clear up is what’s what with that missing sister of Karrios’s. She’s been out of the picture for years, the parents told us, but I still don’t like the way they became all sullen and protective when I asked them who she was. I have the feeling that she’s important to Karrios. Very important.’

  ‘One last time, dago. You and Natalie and the kids and Momma Parisi all get aboard a flight and take off for the island of your choice. Don’t come back for a month. I guarantee Jack and I’ll haul Karrios’s ass to the lockup before your tour of Tahiti or wherever is over.’

  ‘No. He will be coming around by my house. I’m not going to let him move me out. Or my family. The kids’ll go with my mother to Nick’s. We’ll have some people assigned to them around the clock too, and Natalie and I’ll go along like it’s just another week at the shop. Now let’s quit dragging it and get our man in motion.’

  *

  I talked to theTribunefirst. A reporter named Martinson. I met him at the Billy Goat Tavern downtown. It was the bar made famous by John Belushi onSaturday Night Live. ‘Cheese bugga cheese bugga, no Coke. Pepsi.’

  I sat in a booth with this red-headed, freckle-faced journalist. He looked like a kid, but he was in his midthirties and had won the Pulitzer twice. He’d been doing a piece or two on the serial killings The Farmer had committed, and I’d turned him down for interviews twice already.

  ‘What changed your mind, Lieutenant?’

  The waiters even did the ‘cheese bugga’ thing when they took your orders. It must have been good for business.

  ‘I’ll take any edge I can get.’

  ‘What edge would you mean, Lieutenant?’

  ‘I want you to report some falsehoods.’

  He looked at me and then he laughed.

  ‘Now why would I do that?’

  ‘To catch a killer.’

  ‘What lies do you mean?’

  ‘I mean that you print some things that I know will light Karrios’s ass end up. I want him mad at me.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Will you give me your word on confidentiality?’

  ‘Again, why?’

  ‘Because we’re trying something very unorthodox to nab Marco Karrios, and if you tell anyone about it, my ass’ll be in the wringer with the people I work for.’

  Suddenly it dawned on him.

  ‘You mean you’re using yourself as bait. You want to anger him into coming after you. That’s ridic —’

  ‘Sure it is. I’m banking on his pride. His vanity. The guy has a new face that no one alive has seen, except for John Fortuna. And Fortuna didn’t get a clear picture of him. He was too busy trying to shoot the son of a bitch in the head.’

  ‘You mean that mob guy who was shot was —’

  ‘Yeah. And that’s part of the confidentiality. That story was released that way so I could set this up, and I’m asking for your help in getting to Karrios before you and your fellow writers have another dead white woman missing her vitals to write about. You follow all that?’

  Martinson nodded.

  ‘I want him to attack me and my wife. My wife’s a police officer too. We’ve moved my family out somewhere, so it’s just the two of us.’

  ‘You’re involving your wife?’

  ‘She’s already involved. Just like every other swinging dick with a badge. Natalie’s got her eyes wide open. She’s all for it. She knows this guy will eventually turn up in our neighborhood even without the invitation. We just want to expedite, get him off the fucking streets ... Are you willing to spread bullshit for the cause?’

  ‘I can’t knowingly print inaccurate material. It’s called ethics.’

  ‘Yeah. But you don’t know it’s bullshit. You got it from a very reliable source in the police department. I’ll be the guy who simply misinformed you ... But some of this stuff is true. Some of it is assumption. You got a way with words, don’t you, Martinson? Say it was "alleged". Say it any way you want, but I need your help. All the falsehood comes from me, not you. I’ll give you first shot at an interview when we clamp this cocksucker ... Will you help me out?’

  The guy with the two ‘cheese buggas’ and the two Pepsis arrived at our table.

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Martinson did the deed. He gave me the whole deal. Everything I told him about Karrios made it into his next column, two days later. He had the business about what a sexual-psychotic Karrios was. How he probably couldn’t have normal ‘relations’ with a woman. How he had engaged in necrophilia — sodomy with a dead body. He laid it on thick. We were going to need to put a man on Martinson for his own protection.

  Then there was the suggestion that there was something disturbing happening in Karrios’s family home. I left that part purposely vague because we were still not sure what it was that was wrong in that direction. Doc and Jack and I were on our way to Kankakee at the moment. I wanted to ask Mrs Karrios what it was that was off about Marco and his sister.

  It was another long drive to reach them. When we got to the door, we found Niko Karrios. He let the three of us in. But there was no Elena this time. We asked him where she’d gone to.

  ‘My wife ... my wife die yesterday afternoon in hospital. She have stroke. My son ... my son, he kill his mother.’

  We sat down on the couch across from the old man.

  He was beginning to tear up, so I was hoping to make this brief.

  ‘We just have a few questions, sir,’ I told him. ‘Please accept our apologies —’

  ‘Hekill his mother just like he kill all those other people. He put a knife to her heart …’

  ‘Do you feel up to telling us a few things?’ Doc asked.

  ‘I tell you,’ he said angrily. He glowered at the three of us, one at a time. ‘I tell you whatever you want and you catch him. You put him in cage where he belong ... When he come back from Army, he like animal. Cold in the eye. You know? I don’t know him no more. It was like ... it was like he belong to someone else.’

  ‘I wanted to ask you about his sister,’ I said.

  ‘What about
Marina?’

  ‘Did he have an unusual relationship with his sister?’ I asked.

  The old man sat up as if he was about to stand, but then he settled back.

  ‘I don’t care no more. I don’t care. He don’t belong to us. He dead to us a long time ago ... Marina was not his sister.’

  ‘What are you telling us?’ Jack asked him.

  ‘Marina ... Jesus help me. He not mine anymore. He never wasmine.’

  ‘Can you help us just a little bit more?’ I asked him.

  ‘Marina was his mother, not his sister. We knew he was her baby. Marina was ours, Marco was hers. She fall in love with boy when she fifteen. This boy leave her with child. She too young to get married, so we take Marco as ours, go to Kansas City when she have baby. Nobody know about it except Elena and me. Marco find out when he leave for Army.’

  ‘You think that’s what made him quit school and leave home, you’re saying,’ Doc tried to clarify.

  Niko winced in pain.

  ‘No. That was not all ... They ... they — Marco and Marina. They don’t act like brother and sister. Not like mother and son, either. They ... Jesus help me.’

  ‘Are you trying to say that they had a sexual relationship, Mr Karrios?’ I asked him.

  He couldn’t even nod. The tears streamed down his face.

  ‘I throw him out. I make him leave. He never want to leave Marina. His own mother. It make me sick to remember. Sick,’

  ‘We’ll leave you alone now,’ I told him. The three of us rose. But he stopped us.

  ‘I want to kill him when I find out. I never tell his ... I never tell Elena ... I find them together, Marina and Marco, when I come home sick from work one day. He was sixteen. I beat hell out of him. I think it would stop then, but I know it don’t. It was the way they look at each other. After he get out of high school, he go to college for two years, then he drop out. He come back and start up all over until Marina get engaged to a man name Aaron. Marina is killed in car wreck with husband, but all Marco want to do is kill Aaron. But Aaron is already dead. I throw Marco out when he twenty. He keep going into Marina’s old room again and again. It make me sick to have him in house. I make him leave. I never see him since ... But you catch him. You tell him he kill his ... grandmother. You tell him. Will you tell him for me?’

  ‘We will,’ Doc assured him.

  ‘You tell him,’ Niko insisted.

  *

  ‘So Marina’s the tickler in his throat,’ Jack said as we made the long drive back to Chicago.

  ‘He’s hooked on Mommy. She went out and got married on him. How could she’ve done a thing like that to poor Marco?’ Doc said from the back seat.

  ‘Momma’s no damn’ good ... I’ll bet she was thirtysomething when she died,’ Jack told me and Doc. ‘He keeps on trying to bring her back so he can even up on her over and over again.’

  I didn’t say anything because, just as he sickened Niko Karrios, Marco nauseated me too.

  ‘You going to give this to Martinson?’ Doc asked me.

  ‘As soon as we get back,’ I replied.

  ‘Sonny will really be angry. He’ll be looking for his knife. We better get a round-the-clock for the journalist ... Sal’s under surveillance, John Fortuna’s guarded by the best that money can buy, and your front gate’s still open, Jimmy. Right?’ Doc summarized.

  ‘Natalie and I take turns sleeping. But we took Merlin the wonder dog to Nick’s in Elmhurst. He makes too much noise, and I wouldn’t want to see the pooch get hurt by that prick’s knife. Michael couldn’t take it. He loves that goddamned neurotic dog.’

  ‘I don’t like being perched two blocks from your house,’ Jack said.

  I had them keep a big space between me and Natalie and them. I got four detectives for a nighttime shift on my house while Natalie and I were working days. I bucked Doc’s advice about approaching the Captain. I went into the redhead’s office and I laid it out. He said we should be surveilling my house anyway because he agreed Karrios might want to take out his most vocal irritant — me. So we had the manpower, but we didn’t want this weasel to get cold feet. He’d been very careful about hitting the plastic surgeon and about hitting my cousin Billy.

  There were moments when I wondered just how personal all this had become. When I went to Billy’s funeral, when I saw some of my other cousins I hadn’t talked to in twenty or thirty years, things began to well up inside me. Blood told. Not everyone in the Ciccio clan was mobbed up. There were doctors, lawyers, mechanics, nurses, and a variety of blue-collar laborers in the family. I was with them a lot more often when I was a kid. Billy’s background, the shitty way he’d lived his life, didn’t negate the blood tie.

  The vendetta was an emotional, mindless act. It was not what my church taught; it was not what I believed in or wanted my children to believe in. Most murderers I encountered on the job were still human beings. Fucked-up human beings, granted, but human people. They killed out of rage and out of a variety of other reasons, but few of them did it simply because theyenjoyedit. Karrios was one of those creatures for whom the word ‘sociopath’ was created. Therewas absolute evil in the world. You didn’t need a divinity degree or a PhD in philosophy to figure it out. I dealt with a lot of fucked-up people, but I could almost understand why they did the terrible things they did. Karrios was one of those exceptions. He was like a rogue virus. One of those mutations of nature. His DNA was all messed up and he crawled on the same planet with all the uprights. I could picture myself blowing his brains out. Perhaps I would rather gut-shoot him so that he’d suffer a little bit of what his victims suffered.

  Of course I couldn’t hurt him physically unless it was self-defense. But God forgive me, because I truly hoped that when we met he’d give me a reason to blow him in half. I had to speak for my cousin and for all the other people he had murdered. I could visualize the scenario. I could see him bleeding. I was holding the gun to the head of his wounded body, in my mind’s eye, and I could feel the tension of the Bulldog’s hair trigger. It would be so very easy to simply squeeze off just one more round.

  Like the man said, you never knew what you were capable of until the opportunity presented itself. So I’d be seeing Father David, the priest who’d married Natalie and me, at confession this Saturday. Maybe he could help me since I was wondering if I could help myself anymore.

  *

  I was back on midnights when Terry Morrissey came bursting into my office at two in the morning.

  ‘The wiring has gone off the scale. There’s an intruder trying to get into Sal’s house.’

  *

  The three of us, Doc, Jack and I, were in the Taurus, and Terry Morrissey and three other Federal agents were in their vehicle, headed toward Sal Donofrio’s house. The agents who were surveilling Sal had spotted a guy walking the neighborhood at a very late hour. He had walked past Donofrio’s home three times, the Federals on scene had reported. Sal was still unaware, at least officially, that he was being watched.

  We pulled up behind the four-door Chevy that was staked out there. Terry got out of his car alone. We were parked directly behind him. I got out and left Jack and Doc in the Ford.

  We walked up to the driver’s side of the Fed’s car.

  ‘What’ve you got lately?’ Morrissey asked Jim Phalen, another Chicago-area special agent. Carl Lux was his partner, sitting on the passenger’s side. Lux looked like he was ready to z-out. He didn’t appear excited about the prospect of nabbing Marco Karrios.

  ‘White male. About six feet, maybe a little over. About 180 pounds. Glasses. Too dark and too far away to make his face. But I don’t think he lives in this neighborhood. We’ve been here ten days and I’ve never spotted him before.’

  ‘Where’s he now?’ Morrissey asked.

  ‘Down at the end of the block. I think he goes down about two or three blocks and then circles around. But he stopped twice right out in front of Sal’s and looked awhile before he continued making the rounds.’

  ‘
So you don’t think he’s a solid citizen with insomnia,’ Terry asked.

  Lux started to giggle. I thought he was finally waking up.

  ‘You want to grab him when he comes back, Jimmy?’ Morrissey wanted to know.

  ‘I got a bad feeling on this guy, Terry. I don’t think Karrios is big on indecision ... But let’s check him out anyway.’

  We went back to our cars and waited. Ten minutes passed, and then a figure appeared, and he was headed toward Donofrio’s. Morrissey had already called for

  backup. There was a fed car behind this guy and another pair of Fibbies in the alley behind Sal’s. We were surrounding him.

  We got out of the vehicles quietly. Marco was not known for carrying anything but a knife, but we didn’t know what he had on him tonight.

  As soon as the figure became aware that five cops were approaching him from the south end of Sal’s block, he decided to try the other way. But now there were four dark images trotting toward him from the other direction. I got the feeling he was going to bolt toward someone’s driveway or yard, but he stood still instead. We were on him in seconds.

  ‘Put your hands over your head,’ Morrissey commanded.

  The man followed the order. Lux patted him down and found a .22 pistol in his coat pocket.

  *

  We took him to the Loop. He could have been Marco Karrios. He had the same body size, but it was anyone’s guess if he was the right guy because he didn’t say anything until Morrissey asked if he had a license for the .22. Then he said he did. He said he was contracted by a private investigation agency to protect Salvatore Donofrio and that his name was Anthony Manigotti.

  We took his prints to confirm his ID. In half an hour we found out that his prints didn’t match Marco Karrios’s. We called his ‘agency’, but we recognized the ‘owner’. It was Philly Donadio, one of John Fortuna’s soldiers. The private-eye agency was a front for muscle. Everybody in the department knew it, but their business paid taxes to the IRS and no one had caught them with phony paperwork yet.

  We released Manigotti one hour later.