Season of the Assassin (18 page)

We were listening to Doc’s all-night jazz station on a portable battery radio that my partner always dragged along on stakeout.

‘You think anyone funny’ll show up here?’ Doc asked.

‘That’s why we’re here,’ I moaned. I hadn’t had enough sleep lately. Natalie had been questioning me about all the ‘overtime’.

‘We need to tap his phone,’ Doc concluded. 

We got one of our own technicians to do the illicit deed for us. He owed Doc big time on a woman my partner had set the technician up with a few years ago. The blind date became his wife. His wife was a major babe, so Ralph Krenski could hardly refuse Doc’s request.

‘I’m tapping a freakin’ Fed’s residence?’ Ralph gulped.

They’ll never get us to squeal on you,’ Doc said to the tech.

‘Jesus, we could all go away for a long freakin’ time — ’

‘Think how lonely you were until I helped you out,’ Doc reminded him.

‘If you really don’t want to, Ralph, I understand,’ I told him.

‘This is about Anglin, Doc tells me.’

I nodded.

‘The varmint who killed all those nurses?’

‘Yes.’

‘My beeper goes off and I’m comin’ out of there like the speed of bleedin’ light.’

Doc got out of the Celebrity.

‘Where’d you acquire this ride?’ Ralph asked.

They walked toward the darkened house of the FBI agent. Mason was not due home for three hours. We’d made sure he was at his headquarters before we’d come to this northwestern suburb. We were not far from Arlington Race Track. 

Doc had his magic bag with him, and in moments Ralph the Techie was inside.

[April 1978]

Erin clutched hold of me and kissed me. My young wife cried as we shared the award of my detective’s shield. All the years prior to this moment had finally come to fruition. This was the moment for which I’ve been waiting all my professional life as a police officer. Detective James Parisi. And it didn’t stop with my assignment at Burglary/Auto Theft. I was headed to Homicide. It was clear in my mind as my wife’s lovely face was as she stood near enough to me to make me go cross-eyed.

I held her at arm’s length to look at her properly. Erin Galagher, now Erin Parisi. Schoolteacher. Lover. Wife. The mother, someday, of my children.

I’d left her to go to Vietnam. I served two tours in spite of her begging me to come home after twelve months. Explaining how the second tour would pay our bills for my schooling didn’t seem to stop her pleading. She wanted me out of Asia. Erin didn’t care about our finances. But I knew that lack of money would become a factor adversely affecting our ability to get married as soon as I returned home, so she more or less gave up the battle over my second hitch in Vietnam.

The war was part of my preparation for my career. I looked at it that way so I could endure the heat, the mosquitoes, the lunatic lifers — all the horseshit attendant on the misery that ended a few years ago. When I returned Stateside in 1970, the war was already lost. The will to defeat the communists was long gone. The country wanted to shrink back inside its borders and refused to become the superpower watchdog of the so-called free world. It was a time, I suppose, much like the 1920s. It was a decade of reaction against sacrifice, brutality, and loss. I understood why people began to turn inward. They wanted this nation to reject the notion that we were conscience and copper to the world. Music, sex, drugs, booze, property. We became the nightmare antithesis of anti-materialism.

All these things that I heard about in college turned out to be pure politics. The world I came back to was interested primarily in the pleasures of the groin. Life was meant to become painless. The Big Aspirin was the cure-all of an ancient malady.

That was the big lie of the 1960s and 1970s. At least it was the bullshit that my nose got a whiff of when I came back, when I arrived home in 1970. The war didn’t make a philosopher out of me. It made me more resolute. I was going to get the bad guys. It was as simple as the plot of a Hollywood western. Good prevails over the shitheels of the world. There is a God, He is just, and we are His instruments. Just like in Catholic grade school. Very simple and straightforward.

After the ceremony for the award of my detective’s shield, I took Erin back to our ginchy apartment in the Old Town District, and we made love standing up in the middle of our living room floor. Then I took her out to dinner at a Czech joint about five blocks up the street from our residence. We walked together in the sweet air of spring, with a breath of Lake scent wafting toward us from the east. We were only a half-mile from Lake Michigan. Here I was, a young cop with a beautiful bride on my arm in a city I loved. My war was over. I had survived it. I had survived the last half-dozen years as a patrolman, doing duty on the West and South Sides, the real shit beats in the city, and I had attained the goal my life had been aimed at. Now there was only one more step upward. Homicide. Where the best of the best live. The pinnacle of copperdom. But I was definitely on my way.

My wife was an exceptional educator. She was a natural with children. They love her. I’ve talked to some of her co-workers, and I kept hearing it over and over. Erin was a natural.

Eleanor, my mother, was at the ceremony where I received my shield. My father, Jacob, has been gone all these years, and I regret his absence. I miss him.

He didn’t survive my second tour. The accident happened just as I was leaving a hospital in Japan. I’d been there for the third whack I took. Shrapnel in the lower back. Got it while we were deep in the bush. After that hit, I was reassigned as a Rear-Echelon Motherfucker, an REMF. I had fulfilled my combat obligations, the Army informed me, so I spent the rest of my tour in country lecturing to newcomers to the war about how to survive the first two weeks. Everyone believed that if you made it past the first fortnight, your odds of making it home alive had somehow increased dramatically. That was the legend, anyway.

I had to make myself cold and remote to look into their innocent eyes and tell them that this was no joke, this war business. I could see death prefigured in some of those fresh faces, but I hoped I was wrong in my forecasts. I figured some of the wisdom I handed down to them might come in handy in their next twelve months.

I came home, I got married, I became a cop, and now, a half-dozen and more years later, I had the gold badge I had been aiming at for a lifetime. Aiming at to show Jake Parisi my worth. And then he goes and trips and falls down twenty-six steps at our home, and when I get back for the funeral, via a special dispensation from our Uncle Sam, I find out there is a mystery about his demise.

Did my mother shove the old man down those stairs? Was it, as it was finally decided, an accident?

My mother answered no questions. I went into therapy, at the Department’s expense, to come up with answers of my own.

Detectives solve mysteries, as everyone knows. That is what they do. They look into the heart of matters and discover the truth or what passes for the truth and they bring matters to closure. Closure. That dramatically necessary word and concept.

My father left Carl Anglin hanging in Jacob Parisi’s conscience. My dad could very well haunt our family home, there in the northwest part of town. He left matters unresolved. It’s like an ended love affair in which things are left unsaid, incomplete.

My job right then did not entail Carl Anglin and his seven murders. I had a caseload that revolved around stolen vehicles. I dealt with boosters. But if I could distinguish myself quickly, I might be able to reach the top level, Homicide. The cream of the coppers.

I listened to the Homicide cops talk about Anglin. For some of them, that decade-old case was not history, it was not closed. My father’s partner Eddie still worked in Homicide. He talked to me quite often and told me all the old details about the nurses’ murders. Eddie knew where I wanted to be someday. I asked him all the routine specifics about what Homicide cops did do during each shift. Eddie Lezniak told me I’d be moving up soon. The word was already out that I was a comer, a surefire big-league player. I hoped he wasn’t saying nice things just because I was his erstwhile partner’s son.

*

Anglin was out of the news. He wrote a book ten years ago, the last I heard, and tried to peddle his story to the movies. But he’d disappeared from the daily media. He didn’t show up on the evening news denying everything as he always used to. There were no magazine interviews with this creature who fascinated the public — How could anyone human do what the murderer of those seven women did? It was like watching a hooded cobra do its thing. There was something magnetic about someone that evil.

Some said he’d disappeared and gone out West. New hunting grounds. Chicago had focused too intensely on Anglin. Wherever he went, coppers recognized him. He was no longer just the drifter, the ex-Navy killer, that no one had known before 1968.

My father never found out why Anglin was under the wing of someone extraordinarily powerful in the government, or the ‘G’ as it was referred to by the police. Jake’s cousin Marty was blown up in a car, and that branch of the family never forgave my old man for involving one of its crew in the Anglin mess.

I have cousins in the Outfit. I wasn’t proud of those familial ties, but there was nothing you could do about blood. It came with your equipment.

In fact I talked to Marty’s nephew, Petey Mancari, after I arrived Stateside. Petey was still pissed, seven years later, about his uncle’s death too. I talked to Petey about a month ago, right before the beginning of spring when there was still snow on the ground.

We met at Presto’s Pizza in the far southwest part of town. Presto’s has the best thin-crust in the city. It’s like eating pastry, the crust is.

‘You catchin’ all them boosters with the fine rides?’ Petey smiled.

Petey had movie-star looks, even though he was a small-time member of the outfit who collected bets. He was a bagman, I mean.

‘From time to time,’ I told him.

‘I hear you’re really hot shit, Jimmy. The terror of northwest Chicago.’

He wanted me to get on with it. He knew this was business, that I didn’t have anything personal to do with his side of the clan.

‘Don’t your people wonder about why Marty was blown to hell?’

I put it as straight up as I could. Petey was no genius.

‘Yeah. There are some hard feelings. Some of which were aimed at your dad for involvin’ my uncle with that rapist — whatsisname.’

‘Carl Anglin.’

‘Yeah, yeah — I know his name…There was talk about reciprocatin’ the blast, but it died down after about a year or two. You was still out of the country. Hittin’ someone over Marty didn’t make good business sense, Jimmy. That’s all.’

We took a few bites out of our pizzas and a few tugs at our beers. Presto’s Pizza had the green and blue Christmas lights still strung up all over the restaurant and bar areas.

‘You tryin’ to get me zapped, cousin?’ Petey asked. He was dead serious about the question.

‘No. I don’t want you hurting yourself…But I got unfinished business with Carl Anglin.’

Petey took another sip of his draft. He was a killer with females. His looks more than offset his natural stupidity. But he was clever enough to survive within his crew. He had smart instincts, at least.

‘It’s bad business, like I said, Jimmy. You’re a car-thief cop. Stick with it. You can grow old and get a decent pension and not face jail or pissed-off Outfit guys, like some of my associates.’

Maybe he wasn’t as dumb as he looked. 

‘He killed your uncle, indirectly, Petey. He made my father…he hurt my old man the worst way you can. With his pride. The son of a bitch is trash and we allow him to walk the streets like any other man. I don’t give a shit what you do for a living, Petey. That’s not my job. But you can do something right if you can aim me at who’s helping Anglin piss on our feet.’

‘You’re takin’ all this far too personal, Jimmy…All I know, all I
heard
, is that this guy is connected to the government. He did them a favor. He did a job for them, and then he was smart enough to hand over the story to somebody who can hurt the Feds if Anglin takes the heat for the girls’ murders. You’ve heard this story before.’

I nodded. I’d made him edgy. He started tapping the table with his forefinger.

‘I need a name, Petey. Somewhere to start.’

‘It ain’t your fuckin’ business, Jimmy! I told you. You can get people hurt. Includin’ yourself. I can’t help you. Not with this. It’s over my head and out of my league.’

I’d come to the end of the line with him. The avenue to the illicit side of the familia was closed. If they wanted vengeance, I was out of the loop.

But I knew they hadn’t forgotten Marty Genco. They didn’t allow hits on made men unless there was absolute justification for the whack. Somebody’s personal safety or fortune must have been on the line.

I did some homework on my own. I hit the libraries and the archives in my spare time. Finding traces of Anglin after his military duty became very difficult. But there was the Freedom of Information thing that opened one tiny door.

Anglin had been officially demobilized in 1960. Then he disappeared into the miasma of the Far East. But IRS records showed that Anglin was in the States from 1962 to 1965, at least. He worked as a fisherman in Key West during those years. At least, that was what his income tax returns said.

The suspicion was that he was CIA or CIA-affiliated during all of those post-Korean War years. The CIA denied any connection to Carl Anglin. It was old news. If he’d worked for someone in Washington or Quantico or Arlington, they’d have had no official name for themselves.

I tried to find out if Anglin had any politics. I found that he was a registered Democrat but had not voted in more than two elections since his return from Asia. He had not shown allegiance to anyone, particularly. He’d been a member of the National Rifle Association, but he’d stopped paying dues in 1964.

On my own time I contacted the police in Key West and asked for information about Anglin during his residence there. Some deputy sheriff let me know that Anglin had been arrested three times on suspicion of armed violence, but that each beef had ended in a dismissal of charges. A lawyer waltzed him right out of the shithouse on all three occasions.

Then he gave me the name of the lawyer — Preston Ramsey. I knew I’d heard the name, but I couldn’t place him. I asked for more information about Ramsey from the deputy in Key West, and he filled in the missing piece. Ramsey had been involved in the investigation of the John Kennedy assassination. He’d been in the middle of all the accusations when the conspiracy theories abounded in the early 1960s. But Preston Ramsey came away free and pristine, and his name faded away, just like that Congressional report about the President’s demise.

They got the guy who did Kennedy. And then someone got Oswald’s killer. Old news. Case closed. Books and movies tried to resurrect the mystery of the killing of JFK, but Oswald remained the lone gunman. The FBI supposedly proved that no single man could have shot as quickly as Lee Harvey Oswald was supposed to have shot. No one could’ve hit the target with such deadly accuracy, either.