Season of the Assassin (17 page)

‘You both know better. Please. Can’t we just go?’

*

Anglin’s lawyer was downtown fifteen minutes after his call. Ten minutes after the lawyer’s arrival, we were forced to let Carl Anglin go since he was not an official suspect in a crime where there was no workable evidence on the table. We would be offered no help by Henry Fields, the prosecutor. We had nothing and Anglin and his high-priced attorney were aware of our unsustainable suspicions. Out the door he walked, just the way he’d said he would.

We would now await the official word from the evidence specialists that we didn’t have a goddamn thing on him, and then he would be out of the woods once more.

‘The key is Mason,’ I told my partner during our lunch break in Garvin’s slovenly tavern. ‘He’s the guy. He knows why Carl Anglin wears this invincible ghost shirt. We have to proceed against him secretly, of course, but he’s our guy. Our indirect route to Carl.’

‘We investigate the G? Jimmy…I could retire any time. Why do I need my swan song to be a beef against the Feds? Don’t make our lives even more miserable. Why don’t we just try to hit some Iranian or Libyan terrorist? It’d be a lot easier and a lot more fun.’

I watched his eyes, and then my partner surrendered.

‘J. Edgar Hoover. Now I could’ve gone for a shot at him…Mason. Jesus, Jimmy. Special Agent Wyatt Earp Mason. Jesus.’

He put his hands flat on the table, and I began to tell him all about it.

[December 1968]

Marty gets blown to bits. Jimmy takes a tap in Southeast Asia. Carl Anglin is a free man. I’m looking for something that is right in the world, something that is just. I constantly encounter the word ‘justice’ in my business, but I have seen very little of it during this year and even during this decade. It seems like things had design, back in the 1940s. Then there was a world at war against evil, and evil was eventually rooted out. Hitler, Mussolini in Italy and Tojo in the Land of the Rising Sun all got theirs, finally.

Now, though, kids believe in pharmaceuticals. They believe they expand their horizons with drugs — the way some people used to embrace religion. I’m no great Catholic, but I still respect the Pope and his brother priests.

The world’s flipped ass over teakettle or whatever, and I have no control over anything anymore. Justice isn’t the only thing that’s gone south lately. Cops used to be respected. Now we’re called ‘pigs’. The Yippies and Hippies really mean it when they call us that. They don’t respect what we do.

Personally, I speak for the dead. I always thought there was dignity in my work despite the bloody nature of the scenes I have to witness.

I was never a complainer, but I find myself bitching more and more about the job. I don’t know why any of us walk into those dark places anymore. They sure as hell don’t pay us enough to do what we do. But here I am, whining again.

Maybe it’s because of the recent false start with Eleanor. We were sleeping together,
living
together again for the first time in almost two years. Then the coldness crept back in when we got the news of Jimmy’s second wound. Eleanor started to backpedal on me, and I was not exactly understanding about her anxiety.

Then it became the blood thing again. Jimmy is really hers. He belongs to her body, not mine. It came up in an argument, like it always does, and I’m back in the guest room once more.

The comfort she gave me for those few days of reconciliation was better than any I’ve had for longer than I can remember. She is a beautiful woman. She has aged well. A little more wrinkled than she was in her early twenties, but a beauty nonetheless. I never stopped loving my wife. We just couldn’t cohabit very well. The usual reasons. But the usual reasons can’t change the natural passion I have for her. The usual reasons will never diminish the craziness, the madness I feel when I know I can’t have her or touch her or kiss her or embrace her…

It makes me physically ill to go over it all, again and again.

I have failed at the only relationship in my life that matters. I have failed to produce my own child with Eleanor’s help. Carl Anglin walks free because I can find no trace, no footprint, that would link him with seven brutal rapes and murders. And now I get one of my own kin blown to hell by someone who knows what it was that Anglin did to help preserve his obscene existence.

All these failures lead me to think about swallowing a blue barrel and ending the fury in my head. But I am, as I say, a Catholic. I believe, fool that I am, in Heaven and in Hell. I think Jesus Christ died for my sins, and I don’t want to anger God any more than he is already apparently angered at me. He’ll let me off the hook when He’s ready, not before.

I cannot shame my family by killing myself. The least I can do is take the pain. It was part of my Ranger training in World War Two. I was at Normandy. I saw unholy hell on the beaches, there. All the carnage that the history books describe can never equal the true terror of actually being there on that sixth day of June in 1944. Then all the days after the landings. For almost a year we fought our way across a devastated Europe. I looked men in the eyes before I shot them. I cut German throats. I booby-trapped people I never saw get killed. Those images return to me from time to time. I never watch war movies. I have my own that I run in my head occasionally.

No, I was taught to survive, not to give in. The thought of surrendering to Hitler’s forces was unthinkable. In my outfit we’d rather have died.

The war ended. Times changed. The world raced by me, and I began to feel like a mastodon. A furry old prehistoric elephant with a long memory.

Maybe it’s just that I don’t belong in this time, in this place. I should be moved back two decades to a time I could understand. This world belongs to Jimmy, not to me. Maybe Fate fucked up. Perhaps I should have been left lying face down in the sand at Normandy where a lot of my brothers in arms fell, the impact of the bullets that killed them the last sensations they were conscious of.

Morbidity comes with my job. I deal with the dead. I try to speak for them and take the place of the living tongues they’ve forfeited.

I’ve done a lousy job for seven young women who were learning to help people. Nursing. Now there’s a job with integrity.

Killers survive in the jungle. They flourish all over the world. The meanest of us were the most likely to live through the nightmare of June 6, 1944, I believe. There must be a final cruelty somewhere in my makeup. It shows in the subtle rejection of me by my wife and son. It doesn’t matter that he’s not mine by blood. He’s always looked to me as his father, and that should’ve been good enough for me. He was there for me to love, and I never loved him enough. Now I can’t tell him those things in the few letters I mail him. I wind up talking about my caseload instead. I write to him about unfinished business like Carl Anglin. I tell Jimmy that when he gets on the force there will be someone like Anglin to haunt him too, if he ever makes it to Homicide. Don’t be a cop, Jimmy, I tell him. Be a schoolteacher or a doctor or a lawyer — anything but a ‘pig’.

He remains resolute. He tells me in his own letters that he wishes he could help me nail my one outstanding case. He’d like to be my partner on the day I slam the door of the cell that holds Anglin. Jimmy insists I’ll get my man, just like the Mounties. My son wants to be Stateside when I cuff the monster with the dangling locks and the jungle-green eyes.

*

‘I’ll call the cab,’ the Greek insists.

‘No. No…I’m fine. Really. It’s all right,’ I tell the barman.

I manage to rise from my bar stool and then I’m navigating toward the door. Out I go into the frigid December evening air.

I get the car rolling toward home. Driving at an abnormally slow speed, I am able to keep it steered accurately toward my residence. Like all drunks, I have the idiotic notion that I drive better when I’m stiff.

I’m lucky and I know it.

When I arrive at the house, I cut the left front tire over the curb, and then I pull back the other way and the auto comes to a clunking stop as the wheel hits back down on the street. 

It’s dark already. Eleanor and I went round and round last night. My drinking has become too much for her to bear. She despises me for turning my back on her just when it appeared we might be coming back together for the first time since we married.

I open the door. I turn on the hall light. Eleanor awaits me at the top of the twenty-six steps that lead to the upper level of the house.

‘I can smell you. By God, I can,’ she growls.

‘Can you really, Eleanor? Can that lovely nose of yours tell you all about my day?’

I begin the ascent, but I stagger about five stairs up.

‘You’ll kill yourself.’

‘Me? Never, darlin’. I love my life too much.’

I continue up. I look at my bride’s beautiful face. It’s the face of a twenty-year-old beauty who’s consented to make me the happiest man in the world.

‘Why don’t you sleep there? Eat there? There’s nothing for you in this house, nothing that you really want — ’

‘Shut up!’ I bellow.

‘It’s my house too. I’m the one who lives here, Jake. You’re just a boarder, here for a meal from time to time, but you’re still just a boarder.’

‘A short-timer.’

‘Yes.’

I’m almost up the stairs. A vicious notion grabs me. I should take her by her long brown hair and drag her down this flight with me. We could tumble to our deaths together.

Suddenly, the hostile impulse flees. I want to touch her. I want to make love to her. I want her back. Close to me.

I do indeed reach out with my hands as I nearly make it to the top of the flight, but her right hand shoots out at me. I don’t know if she’s trying to take my hand or if she’s trying to shove me backward, but I stumble on the penultimate step and I’ve lost my balance and I’m leaning dangerously backward and I can hear Eleanor cry out and now my heel is dislodged from the step and I’m tumbling backwards head over heels like in a comedy movie as if it’s some kind of sight gag but I can’t stop rolling over and over backwards and I can hear something snapping beneath the back of my skull and the last sound I hear is the clean soprano shriek of my beautiful wife Eleanor.

[May 1999]

Susan Malkin, Martha Eisner, and Renee Jackson. The list of murders beyond the original seven sat with Doc Gibron and me. We were all there was between Anglin and his complete freedom. No one else seemed inclined to go after the son of a bitch.

Until this twenty-eighth day of the month that celebrated the Virgin. We received a call from Anglin telling us that he’d been assaulted. Homicide didn’t get the call originally, but we heard about it from Violent Crimes. Renee Jackson had a nineteen-year-old brother, Wayne. Wayne was a member of the Regals, a South Side street gang. He was near the top of his outfit and he didn’t see justice being done by our letting Carl Anglin walk the streets of Chicago. Wayne Jackson had put out a contract with his own crew to get Carl Anglin.

So Carl came home with one of his many doper girlfriends who had an IQ of seven in the hole and the young lady got her face slashed. Anglin broke the cutter’s neck with a move Carl had perfected in Asia while he was in the military.

We knew it was the Regals because the Violent Crimes investigator recognized the stiff. When the homey was ID’d at the hospital, and when he was pronounced dead, we received the call. It was in our hands now.

Carl looked shaken. We saw him at Presbyterian Hospital, on the North Side. He was there for his lady, Dolores Claiment. Exotic dancer. Soft-porn star. Brain dead.

‘She’s gonna have to have extensive plastic surgery, man,’ Anglin complained to us.

‘Send the bill to the Regals,’ Doc told him. Anglin appeared to ignore my partner.

‘They got a claim on me,’ Carl said. ‘Are you gonna do anything about it?’ he demanded.

‘We investigate all homicides. You killed a man named Arthur Wells…You broke his neck, like you were wringing a chicken’s.’

‘Military training comes in handy once in a while.’

‘You must really be up on your old self-defense,’ Doc said.

‘I go to the gym five days a week.’

‘Got to keep in shape for your next bestseller,’ Doc added.

Anglin was unfazed. ‘Are you going to do anything about these punks?’

‘We’ll look into it. Sure,’ I told him.

‘I don’t like your low level of enthusiasm.’

‘I don’t either,’ I told him. ‘Maybe it’s those ten kills you’ve got on your fuselage, Anglin. But I will look into it anyway…You might want to change your address and your habits. These kids are deadly. Just ask anyone from Tactical.’

‘You ain’t funny, Parish.’

‘I don’t mean to be…You remember my father? His name was Jacob.’

Anglin’s face lit up, a twisted grin appearing on his lined features.

‘Whatever happened to your old man? I lost track.’

‘He died. In an accident at the house. Fell down some stairs.’

‘Oh yeah! I seem to remember reading about it. Sad, that.’

He never took his stare from my face.

‘You ain’t blaming me for the old man too, are you, Lieutenant?’

‘It’s comforting to know there are people out there who want to get close to you.’

Now Anglin’s smirk began to fade.

‘I heard there was something strange about the way your old man checked out. I heard — ’

‘It was an accident. It was over thirty years ago. Back when you were able to do more than one girl at a time. Back when you weren’t a sad old bastard who had to screw female sewers like Dolores to make you think your little cheesedick still works.’

The grin was completely gone. He moved closer to me, and I stepped up to him. Doc edged his way between us.

‘Gentlemen,’ Doc murmured placatingly.

‘Your old man laid hands on me once. He got away with it,’ Anglin hissed.

‘If I ever lay hands on you, I’ll break you piece by piece.’

‘You think you’re badder than that homey I wasted?’

‘Gentlemen,’ Doc said again. He was still keeping us apart.

‘You’re real expert at killing hundred-pound females and one crack cocaine addict who should’ve stuck you and forgot about slashing the sewer…No. We’ll handle this by the numbers, Anglin. You got me provoked, but this is as far as it goes. Next guy to talk to you will be the County Prosecutor.’ I stepped back, but I didn’t lose eye contact with him. This was one pissing contest I wouldn’t back down from.

Finally Anglin turned his gaze toward my partner, the referee. ‘My attorney is just slobbering over the chance to do you two.’

‘Maybe you ought to hire a counsel with two legs instead of four,’ Doc said, grinning.

‘I assume you think you’re quite the badass too,’ Anglin told Doc.

‘If I ever got really mad at you, Carl, I’d use a baseball bat. See, the guinea there believes in coming up on a guy from the front. Me, though, I don’t have any problems busting animals like you from behind. I mean, why would I want to make a contest out of it? I’m too old and impatient. No, if I came for you, Carl, the first thing you’d know about it was when you were picking splinters out of the back of your skull. But now, with aluminum bats, you probably would never be conscious long enough to wonder what it was that laid you low in one swipe.’

We were through threatening Anglin. He was through baiting us. It had gone to the brink. Someone was about to get hurt. You could smell it in the atmosphere, there in the waiting room at the hospital where Anglin’s paramour was getting stitched from cheek to chin.

‘You have anything else you want to say?’ He was looking at both of us. He had assumed the stance. He’d learned karate and judo during his hitch. Standard training.

‘The Lieutenant’s a black belt. Which degree was it, Jimmy?’ asked Doc.

I didn’t answer him. I was waiting for Anglin to move.

‘Same training I had, I bet.’

‘My father was a Ranger in 1944-45.1 didn’t want to disappoint him.’

I was waiting for the first kick, the first jab, but it never arrived.

Finally Anglin turned his back. I was relieved. I was fifty-two, Anglin was well into his sixties and Doc was only a bit younger than him. I could just see hospital security breaking up a bout between three geezers our age. It was an embarrassing image.

‘We’ll look into this Regals thing,’ I said. 

‘But I think you’ll have made them even more pissed off with you this time.’

*

We took a ride to the far southwest part of town. Regal Territory. Gangbanger Central. We found Wayne Jackson on the street with several of his bros. It was a bright, clean day, there on a playground in bangerland. The bros were engaged in a trash-talking marathon game of hoops, while Wayne, Renee Jackson’s brother, watched at the sidelines.

‘You the two Homicide Ds ain’t caught shit with this Anglin motherfucker.’

The brother seemed bright, in spite of the homey dialogue.

‘We’re the two,’ I responded. Doc watched the ongoing trash-a-thon. There was not much basketball going on, however.

‘He kill ten fuckin’ women and he been walkin’ the streets for over thirty motherfuckin’ years, and you here gon’ tell me about somebody tried to nail that cocksucker.’

I nodded and he laughed.

‘You think I’m the dude behind the hit?’

I nodded again.

‘So you roustin’ me or what?’

‘I want you to let us take care of Carl Anglin. He already killed your sister.’

Doc turned toward our conversation now. ‘You know my sister?’ Wayne asked. 

‘I’m investigating her death. You know I never knew her.’

Wayne was a tall, very black African-American. Very good-looking, very athletic-looking. Which made me wonder why he wasn’t out there on the court.

‘We wasn’t close. I mean I love her because she my sister, but she had her way and I got mine. She was a school girl. Always in her books. Momma love her, but she got no use for me, and hey, I unnerstan’. Momma believe in makin’ your dream come true. Renee her dream. It was comin’ true, too. Girl was gon’ graduate, be a nurse, all that fly shit…Now she as dead as…We wadn’t close, but we was blood. Renee never look away when I come around. She still care about what I do. Told me to go to school and shit like that, but she never could get it in her head that me and her…We was the same blood, but we was different.’

‘Call it off, Wayne. He’s not worth your death as well.’

The young black man looked at me oddly, like he couldn’t follow my words.

‘That motherfucker is dead.’

Now there was no trace of his homey accent. He’d simply made a straight-up statement.

‘That motherfucker is dead,’ he repeated.

‘Then we’ll put you in the hole and your sister’s still gone,’ Doc explained. 

‘You all come get me when you ready. You know where I lives.’

He turned away from us, and the conversation was over.

*

The apartment was in the federally subsidized complex, there in the far southwest part of town. It was 4.29 a.m. The sun wouldn’t rise for an hour and a half. Doc and I had plenty to fear, being two white spots in an all-black hood. So we took four black patrolmen along with us. They were a little nervous, as well.

The call came through 911. Sounds of gunfire. Which wasn’t unusual for this area. But a good citizen called it in and a patrolman found the body in the bedroom. The cop didn’t see the other body in the bathroom until he went to squeak a leak in the toilet.

Wayne Jackson had a hole in the back of his head about the size of a baseball. He was lying on the mattress in the bedroom. There were fragments of skull and bits of gray matter sticking to his pillow and the wall behind the bed’s headboard.

The female in the bathroom had been shot similarly. One hole, the size of a hardball, in the back of her noggin. The shooter had done Wayne and then caught the female taking a dump or a whiz in the head and dispatched her soul along with Wayne’s. 

‘High-caliber. Big hole,’ Dr Gray, the M.E., told us. He’d beaten us to the scene. I couldn’t help wondering how come he’d got here so quickly. But he probably just wanted to get in and out before the sun rose and all those friendly neighborhood faces could welcome him.

It was a tense scene. No one felt comfortable there.

‘Not a gangbanger job, do you think?’ Doc asked.

‘If it were, I’d expect some more violence to the bodies. Doesn’t look like anger. Looks like a professional execution.’

Doc knew it was Anglin’s associates. You had to hand it to them for balls, coming into a black enclave, here in the southwest part of town, and doing a tap on a honcho banger while he was balling his old lady. Real brass balls, it must have taken.

‘We better get this show on the road before Wayne’s troops and the media show up,’ I told my partner.

It was a very quiet crime scene. No one was cracking wiseass jokes. No one was making snide remarks about the girl getting hers in the shithouse.

‘They’re out of control, Doc. Nothing stops them. These people are insane. They shield a murderer. They hit a gang leader in his own crib. This goes beyond nuts. These guys don’t care who they have to kill.’ 

‘You think they’d go this far to protect Anglin?’

‘Look at their track record. He gets them to remove anybody who’s a threat to him.’

‘And what about us, then?’

‘It has to have a side story. No, the papers can call this business with the Regals something internal. Inter-gang warfare. There’s no conspiracy here. Nothing you can grab hold of, at least…And who knows? Maybe they’re going to be right. Maybe I’m reading this all wrong, just like my old man did. We got this common obsession, and it’s fried both our brains. Carl Anglin has become the fucking boogeyman. There’s a monster in everybody’s closet. Maybe I need to go back into therapy, Doc.’

‘Then I’ll be in the next chair, sitting right beside you.’

We got through with the on-scene investigation in another half-hour. The sun was just barely up in the east as we pulled away from the complex.

Wayne Jackson joined his sister on a list that Carl Anglin had been composing for the last three decades.

*

The key was Mason. I told Doc that more than once, and even though he was nervous about going after a federal agent, I couldn’t see any other way to get to the roots of the Anglin problem. He was like a weed. You had to get him all the way out of his soil or he just kept popping back up.

We couldn’t do this with the blessing of the Chicago Police Department. It was going to be Doc and me on our own against him. On our own time.

We watched Mason’s house when we were off shift. We did the surveillance in Doc’s Chevy Celebrity. It was an old beater like that some teenager would use to drag his ass to college. Didn’t look like a cop vehicle. The thing was painted mauve, for Jesus’ sake. It stood out so badly that it didn’t stand out, for our purposes.

Mason lived alone. We saw no trace of the lovely assistant.

‘I’ll bet she’s gay,’ Doc snickered.

‘Then life as we know it would not be worth living,’ I replied.