Season of the Assassin (19 page)

I felt a great chill come over me. I had a notion I could not share with anyone. Not even with my wife. Nearly fifteen years had passed since this country had mourned the loss of its leader. Wounds were supposed to have healed, time was supposed to have distanced us from the trauma of what had happened. Theories about FBI or CIA involvement…Ideas about the Mafia carrying out a whack on the President…nothing ever came of any of it. There was just one strange ex-Marine who pulled off some of the fanciest marksmanship in history. Grassy knolls.

Jesus. A chill hit me again when I remembered the Zapruder film. The top of Kennedy’s scalp being blasted off by the bullet.

Picture Anglin as another of the shooters. Envision this pride of the Navy, now gone bad, taking big money to hit any target. As long as the price was right…Carl Anglin. One-time war hero. Now a mercenary. He was the sniper out in the weeds. He was the man with the real ability to pull off a kill like that. He wasn’t some lame loser who’d almost defected to the Soviets. He could actually have pulled it off. He’d got the skills.

Again, the cold crept up my back.
Leave
it
alone
, I told myself.
It’s
silly
and
scary
.
Kennedy’s
dead
. The burden of proof selected Lee Harvey Oswald, and there were no more boogeymen to pursue. Let the damned dogs stay lying and sleeping.

It grasped me and wouldn’t let go. But I could never speak of it to anyone else. It would be like spotting a UFO and reporting it. You’d have to be crazy. No one’d think of you as a serious human being ever again. 

And how would I make the last move upward in the CPD if people heard my theory about the murder of a US President? I’d be back on the street in uniform, watching out for parking offenders.

I had to bury the idea so deep inside myself that I couldn’t even come back to it in dreams. If Anglin really had been in Dallas that fall, I didn’t want to know about it. This city was a big enough territory. I was a local copper trying to keep tabs on my own turf. Dallas, Texas was too big, too distant. I’d begun my career and I’d got a new wife and we were about to create a family of our own.

I left the archives and I promised myself I’d stick to car thieves. Boosters. I could deal with them.

I could deal with them. I couldn’t deal with ghosts and grassy knolls and snipers who couldn’t hit a cow in the ass if that sniper were standing right next to that goddamned bovine beast. It was only a fantasy, a set of coincidences, I told myself.

I’m
a
lowly
car
-
thief
copper
, I told myself.
I’ll stick
to
the
job
they
gave
me
.
And
I’ll
think
about
Carl
Anglin
no
more
.

[May 1999]

The surviving Regals, lords of 111th Street in the southeast part of town, right over by the Lake, were angry. And there were plenty of them still around. The word from Tactical and Gangs was that there was going to be payback. They were not frightened that one of their higher-ups had got waxed with his girlfriend on their own turf. Like most gangs, they were brain dead and didn’t learn easily. Striking out at an opponent was SOP. Trouble was that they hadn’t isolated their target. They knew Anglin had something to do with the shooting, but they knew also that it was likely more than one shooter had done Wayne Jackson and his significant other…Who to pop? That was the question.

Anglin had changed his residence. He was living somewhere in the New Town District. It was where the wannabe yuppies lived before they got married and headed off to the burbs with their brats in tow.

We knew where he was, and if we did, the Regals had their intelligence too. I wasn’t worried about Anglin’s safety, but I wanted him to go down by the numbers. I didn’t want any outside influence affecting him. Not the Feds or the Regals or that mysterious outfit hiding somewhere behind the Spooks of D.C.

I had shared my suspicion about Anglin’s target, my JFK theory, only with Doc. I had not talked about it with anyone else, not even with either of my two wives. It was too crazy to share any more widely. Anyone except Doc would think that this investigator had become overly obsessed with catching this particular killer, and that with the JFK idea I was making him some kind of super-villain —

Wasn’t he already that, with seven victims, perhaps ten? Was the explosive secret of Kennedy’s assassination worth more than the sum of all their lives?

I had to back away from the notion. It scared me, as I said. I had to concentrate on Anglin as a murderous psycho in his own right.

Carl had plenty of problems besides me. There was a large group of African-American male gangbangers who would dearly love to use his entrails as lawn cover. So Anglin had better watch his back. Whoever was shepherding him had better keep a close watch on their boy.

And finding out about that guardian angel of Anglin’s still depended on Special Agent Mason. The tap had been on his phone for two weeks, but we’d come up with nothing to stir our interest. Like most agents, he understood how easily he himself could become a target for surveillance. Paranoia was the Bureau’s watchword. It was a legacy from J. Edgar Crossdresser.

But one night Mason might become overly confident that no one was listening out there. Someone might call him on what he — and the caller — thought was an ordinary unsecured home phone. We had to hope he thought we thought he was beyond reach.

That lucky call happened on a Thursday evening. Ralph the Techie was on hand. He was sitting in a station wagon with his tape running, just 100 yards from Mason’s residence.

Early on Friday morning, Doc and Ralph and I were listening to the recording at my office in Homicide.

‘Yes?’ Masons voice.

‘I have the document.’ Female voice.

‘This is an unsecured line.’

‘I understand.’

Pause.

‘What the hell,’ Mason went on. ‘What have you got for me?’

‘Are you sure?’ the female voice asked.

‘I don’t feel like going all the way downtown to my office to find an encrypted — ’

‘Okay, then…The Major says that group with the royal name is planning to take our boy into a downward spiral this very weekend. You had better provide security. You know how our man is about his personal safety — ’

‘You’d better stop right there and tell me the rest over a secured line. And don’t call me at home again.’

‘This is considered a One Priority. Time is a factor, Mason.’

Female voice hung up, and so did Mason.

‘Major?’ Doc asked.

‘Major Motherfucker,’ Ralph quipped.

No one smiled back at him.

‘Ralphie, do you realize the deep shit you’ve just waded into with the two of us?’

Ralph the Techie looked over to Doc.

‘What? I just record messages. That’s all I…What deep shit?’

‘You’re listening to an FBI guy who has another master, other than Louis Freeh. You follow me, dummy?’ Doc told him, glaring at him in a deadly serious manner.

‘You mean Special Agent Mason is — ’

‘Yeah. If you want to bail, now’s the time to grab a bucket,’ I warned him.

‘Oh man. I didn’t know we were digging into dirt that’s not for human consumption. I mean I thought this was just routine police…I can get myself killed here?’

We both looked right at him.

‘Oh man, oh man. I got a family, Doc.’

‘So do we, Ralph,’ Doc returned.

‘How shitty is this shit?’

‘The shittiest you can imagine,’ I replied, grinning harshly.

‘Oh man, oh man…Who’re we going after?’ 

‘Anglin. It’s always been him. But we have to get past his friends too.’

‘And they are well-placed individuals within the framework of our government?’

‘Yes, Ralphie. But no one elected
these
sons of bitches. They were spawned by some lazy bastards who like to hire out to have their garbage removed.’

‘Doc, this is crazy. You’re scaring me. We were just after a murderer — ’

‘The safest way for us to go is to get them, expose them. We don’t have to arrest them. The daylight kills them on contact, Ralph. Like in the vampire movies. You remember what happens to the Count when the sun’s rays hit him?’

Ralph watched Doc’s eyes. ‘What’ve you two got me into?’

‘I’m sorry, Ralph, it was my fault,’ I told him. And you can still walk out now. We’re never going to speak your name. You can trust us. No one else knows about this recording.’

He looked down at his shoes.

‘Christ, I gotta think Doc’s right. I won’t feel safe unless you can root these mothers out. I don’t want to be watching over my shoulder for — Christ, I have my family to protect, too.’

‘So do you think the three of us could invade Special Agent Mason’s office?’ I asked.

Ralph sat up with a start. ‘You want me to trap his freaking office? His
federal
office?’

We watched him again. 

‘Oh man, oh man. I could’ve gone into insurance, accounting…A Fed’s home field.’

‘We’d do it, actually. You’d look a little strange, walking in there with us. We have legit business with Mason. One of us could distract him while the other planted the bug…You got something simple enough for us to put into operation?’ I asked.

‘I suppose I could show you how to…Yeah…Has he got a big desk, like this one here, Lieutenant?’

‘I think it’s similar.’

‘Look, tapping a G’s office telephone is way too risky. But we could get a bug in the room so you could hear what he’s saying, at least.’

‘Sounds like a plan,’ Doc confirmed.

Ralphie the Techie started to give us our first lecture on audio surveillance.

*

Doc diverted Mason into the hallway while I asked to use the Fibbie’s telephone for what I explained was a private call. I dug into my pocket for the tiny transmitter. I took the ball of adhesive goo that Ralph had supplied me, stuck the goo on the underside of the wooden desktop and then pushed the transmitter into the goo. All we had to do now, Ralphie suggested, was hope that the Feds didn’t sweep their own offices for bugs for the next few days. 

When Mason and Doc walked back in, I was just hanging up from my call to the National Weather Service. Sunny and warm, the man had said.

*

The attack on Anglin was coming this Saturday night, we found out. We didn’t hear who Mason was talking to, but we got the idea from his responses to a call on Saturday morning. Our luck had held up. The Feds hadn’t found the crude transmitter we’d planted. They had no reason to believe that anyone would dare invade their space, so I guessed we were banking on their arrogance. Something that was indeed usually a bankable notion.

We had to involve SWAT in this business. Homicide took care of bodies after the fact. Special Weapons and Tactics, of course, was something of a preventative measure, when they were not actually eliminating targets. Since we had notified the SWAT people, though, Doc and I were allowed to accompany our friends in the anti-terrorist garb to the scene of what we hoped would not become a reenactment of the serious disagreement between the Clantons and the Earps in Tombstone at that famous corral.

The first precaution was to get Anglin’s neighbors out of their apartments. The operation was due to take place there in the new neighborhood that Carl Anglin had invaded. Three-flat apartment buildings made up most of the blocks there on the near by North Side. We cleared out the occupants for a half-block on either side of Anglin’s abode.

Carl Anglin was the only tenant home tonight. As soon as the sun went down, the evacuation went ahead. You had to admire the SWAT guys. They could’ve cleared out Wrigley Field and the ballplayers would never have noticed. It was done that quietly and quickly.

The hit itself was scheduled for 2.00 a.m. Sunday morning, officially. So we had about six hours to prepare for the Regals.

Doc and I sat in our Taurus, about two hundred yards from Anglin’s place. Doc had brought along the usual gear for a stakeout. His portable radio, a bucket of Brown’s chicken — which he finished solo — and a flashlight and a paperback of poetry by a guy named Pinsky. He left not a second to chance or to boredom.

I tried to sleep when I could while on a stakeout. At least, I did once I was sure that Doc was awake with his jazz station and his poetry and his ‘six clucks for a buck’ or whatever the cooked poultry cost him.

I couldn’t zee that night. I was waiting for the Regals’ arrival long before they were scheduled. What mystified me was how Mason’s friends had infiltrated them. They were a gang upon whom Tactical had made no dent for the last ten years. They were an extraordinarily hostile clan. None of our black undercovers had been able to get inside to date. The Regals were very clever and very paranoid. If you wanted to be one of them they had to know you since you were in grade school. They were extremely selective about new recruits.

It was the witching hour. Only two more to go. The neighborhood was too quiet. God knew where Tactical had taken the residents. They’d herded them off somewhere, far away from this site. Maybe the quiet would tip off the Regals, and perhaps they’d abort.

Our man was nestled quietly in his apartment with yet another young devotee who wanted to be near this dangerous suspected killer of ten girls. Anglin must have seemed exciting to whoever was up there in bed with him. I didn’t know how some women reasoned — especially those who fell in love with cons on Death Row.

I settled back and tried to listen to Ahmad Jamal on Doc’s all-night jazz station. The man could play the piano. Very smooth. Doc had extraordinary taste, it seemed to me. But I was not an aficionado of jazz.

1:30 a.m. rolled around, and the people in black out there had been fully deployed. If the Regals tried to enter Anglin’s apartment building, they were in for a shock.

Doc turned off the radio. It was now ten minutes before the hour. And the Regals were early. We saw the two vehicles cruising down the street toward the three-flat in question. They were four-door cars, the kind of vehicle that drive-by shooters tended to use.

But the Pontiac and Buick late models passed by Anglin’s location.

‘They see something?’

‘No,’ I answered. ‘They’re just being cautious.’

I was vindicated when we saw them coming back down the street after having made their first pass. Now they slowed before they got to the address. The Pontiac pulled over first, and then the Buick followed behind it to stop at the curb outside the building where Carl Anglin rested with — or on top of — his company for tonight.

There were seven of them. Four from the first car and three from the second. They were carrying some kind of sawed-off weapons, something compact.

Doc pulled out his Nine and I gripped my own weapon. We were letting the SWAT team handle the takedown, but we were taking no chances about getting caught in some cross fire if things went south.

The seven Regals glided toward the entry. Three of them split off from the main party and circled around toward the rear exit.

As soon as the first banger touched the handle of the door, ten SWAT guys were on

top of them. Gun barrels were immediately jammed behind the four bangers’ ears, and we could hear the clunk of their weapons as they hit the sidewalk.

Doc and I got out of our vehicle. We heard one gunshot, and then there was another burst of gunfire from behind the apartment building. But the firefight there was over in seconds. We rushed up to the scene. The four men who had been going in via the front were on the ground and were already cuffed. Doc and I circled to the rear and found the SWAT standing over three dead Regals.

‘They tried to act,’ a hooded figure informed me.

The bangers’ heads looked like exploded melons. All that damage had been done with one deadly burst of automatic fire.