Season of the Assassin (20 page)

*

Mason wanted to know how we’d known about the attack on Anglin. I smiled and said we had some intelligence on these mean streets too, but the special agent was not happy with my response.

We’d got there before his own folks had arrived — that was what really stuck in his throat. We’d had the area cleared and secured before his Spook friends could set up and deploy. And if they’d got there before us, I’m certain there would have been seven corpses at County instead of the three that our SWAT fellows had had to neutralize.

Mason wanted information from me, but I was not forthcoming. He’d find the transmitter within twenty-four hours. He’d figure it out. He’d find the tap on his home phone within thirty-six hours as well. He was, when it came down to it, no fool. And then he’d know who his opposition really was. It wasn’t the Regals. It was me. And Doc. Then we’d have a war of our own.

I was not convinced this raid would put the street gang off the vendetta trail. They wouldn’t forget. But maybe it’d give Doc and me time to focus on Mason and this ‘major’ who supplied Mason with intelligence about our subject of mutual interest, Carl Anglin.

For the first time since the newest rash of rapes and murders, I felt like some kind of door was opening. But I didn’t know if the opening was something any of us wanted to look through.

[May 1986]

The bulbs popped and the ceremony was over. I had my new shield and I’d become an official member of the elite: Homicide. All those years of preparation were ended and I was where I belonged.

Jake had been gone all those years, as well. Nick, my uncle (or father, biologically), Erin, my wife, and Eleanor, my mother, were all there with me.

The labor had ended fruitfully. I’d scoured the streets for the common variety of auto booster, and now it was time to play in the big leagues. It was where I was born to be.

*

My first partner was John Matuzak. A veteran of ten years in Homicide. He was a natural teacher, showed me all the moves. Orthodox and not-so-kosher moves. In other words he taught me to expedite, to get the job done. But John instructed me too about not losing sight of the smallest details. He showed me how to defend myself in a courtroom against a greaseball shyster who was paid for an acquittal. I never realized the survival moves you had to employ as a homicide investigator. It was absolutely adversarial in a court of law, and you couldn’t let your ass hang out naked in the breeze.

Then Johnny M. had a heart attack two years after we became partners, and he spent six months recovering in a hospital, and then he took his retirement because he’d put his thirty annums in. We had a big party for him in Cicero, and Johnny retired in Williams Bay, Wisconsin, where he fished and hung at the beach by the shores of Lake Geneva.

He survived the heart thing and Homicide.

My next partner was a guy named Harold Gibron. They called him Doc because he was going after his Master’s in English or European Literature — I couldn’t remember which. So I was thinking they’d stuck me with some wiseass academic who’d correct my grammar.

But Doc was just another street guy with a shield who happened to enjoy fine literature but who didn’t foist blueblood fine arts onto his ignorant guinea younger partner.

We got along from the beginning. He told me everything. About his divorce, about his living alone, about his dream of copping that PhD and teaching compliant coeds. Harold was, of course, a bullshit artist, but he never lied to me. He saved the lies for his troop of lady friends — none of whom fell into the ‘serious’ category. It seemed that the divorce had turned him away from thoughts of settling down and having children.

When he met Erin, they became fast buddies. Doc told her dirty jokes that made her laugh and made me a little embarrassed, but when I saw the fun she was having listening to this old Korea hand, I couldn’t get angry with him.

We had an impressive turnover rate for our caseload. We worked well together, and we put together a string of solved murders. I was a sergeant, as was Doc, but I was going to take the exam for lieutenant in the fall. It meant more money, and Erin and I were starting a family. We already had a little girl and we wanted a boy next.

Doc and I started off making a few waves with the arrest of a TV anchor who’d been wasting young women on the North Side. We got our names in the paper, and then the media knew me. They’d already become acquainted with the good doctor.

Our next big headline case was the murder of several teenaged girls — done by an ex-nun. This deal also made the media. The lieutenant thing looked closer to reality now. All I had to do was pass the written test.

*

Lurking behind everything I accomplished, everything we got closed, was Carl Anglin. I had spent six months in therapy, courtesy of the Department, talking to a shrink about what I thought had happened with my father the night he’d rolled down those stairs at the family house. Had the old lady shoved him? If so, had she done it deliberately? The verdict had been accidental death. There hadn’t been much argument about the cause of death from the detectives who’d been called to the Parisi house that night. They had been able to smell the booze on my father’s clothes, on his body. It had been an accident. He’d simply slipped and tumbled down all those twenty-six steps, and he’d broken his neck on the way down.

Case closed.

But not Carl Anglin’s. Every so often I got the urge to look into the old man’s files. I tried to get a fix on Anglin’s whereabouts. Which was difficult because he moved about quite often. He stayed in no place for very long, and it would have taken full-time surveillance to keep good tabs on him. He was in and out. But there were no more slayings that carried his signature. We saw plenty of savagery, but nothing that resembled that crime in 1968.

Almost twenty years had passed. The unnamed witness to the killings was still hidden away at Elgin Mental Hospital. According to the doctors I’d talked to there, Theresa Rojas was still cut adrift from our world, and so there was no new development in the case. The only other witness was dead, and we hadn’t been able to crack the military or the Feds for any new information about Carl Anglin’s wartime exploits. It was still just a theory that he’d been shielded from prosecution because of something he’d done after the infamous Bay of Pigs fiasco, and we couldn’t break their silence.

So we went about our work as if Anglin had departed the world along with Theresa Rojas — who might as well have been dead for all the use she was to any investigation — and the other seven nurses. Doc told me obsession was unhealthy, and I confirmed his notion. But that didn’t stop me from looking over the old files from 1968, from time to time.

And yet the pieces meshed. It explained why Carl had heavy-duty help in avoiding the murder rap for the nurses. He must have had his story on tape somewhere. He must have had it written down and arranged for its exposure to the world’s media. Something was preventing this ‘Tactical Five’ from calling on Carl Anglin with ‘extreme prejudice’. They couldn’t hit him because he’d insured himself. With whom?

He could have given a tape or a transcript to a lawyer. Or the material could have been stuck in a Swiss account box. It would have been impossible to pinpoint the hiding place of Carl’s blackmail data among the complexities of the history of the United States during the last quarter-century.

Carl Anglin had blown the top of JFK’s head off. Oswald had been the schmuck. He couldn’t have nailed a moving target three times in six seconds, or whatever it was. But Anglin and an accomplice could have done. It was their job. They were skilled assassins, not disgruntled fanatics like Oswald. Then Oswald got wasted with cops all around him and we were supposed to buy into that kind of copper incompetence. The man who was supposed to have shot Kennedy was allowed out in the open and Jack Ruby just happened to be there.

I understood closure. I understood how important it was to let old wounds heal. But a lie of this size would never close. The wound would stay open. There was no possibility that it would heal. Shakespeare had once said something about murder crying out for resolution, but I couldn’t remember which play that was in.

Approaching Doc about the matter was something I hadn’t so far been able to do. But on our dinner break at the White Castle at 3.16 a.m. on a Wednesday morning, the words just seemed to rush out of my mouth.

There was no one at the counter with us, no one in earshot. The employees of the White Castle were either very busy or half asleep. The dawn was still hours away.

I turned to Doc as he bit into a cheese slider.

‘I think Carl Anglin shot John Kennedy in the head. I think he’s got something on tape or in writing that he’s hidden with a lawyer or somebody, and I think he’s hanging it over the heads of the FBI. I think that’s why they had to help him with the nurses.’

Doc swallowed the remainder of his cheese slider. He took a sip from his black coffee.

‘I’ve been thinking the same goddamned thing for about six years.’ 

‘Why the hell didn’t you tell me, then?’

‘Because I thought you’d think I was a lunatic, of course. Why else do you suppose?’

‘
Are
we lunatics?’

‘I guess. We’re the craziest dicks on the block,’ Doc said, smiling ruefully.

‘What the hell can we do about it?’

‘We can shut up and forget it forever.’

‘How, Doc? How the hell can we — ’

‘My cousin saw a UFO when he was in the Army in 1956. He saw it out in the woods where they were involved in war games or something. He and his buddy got chased through the woods by some kind of miniature flying craft, like a little saucer. Do you think those two reported anything to their superiors? Fuck no, they didn’t. They would’ve been accused of being smashed on duty. They would’ve been tossed in the brig until they rotted. You don’t come down the road with news like that. Elvis is dead. UFOs are explainable phenomena. JFK caught it from a lone shooter. It’s going on a quarter-century, Jimmy. Nobody wants to revisit that horror in Dallas.’

‘I’m not crazy You’re not nuts. And Anglin was there, in Dallas. He did the President, probably with another shooter. It was what he was trained to do. He had the motive, he had the ability. He had the lack of conscience, for Jesus Christ’s sake! He pulled the trigger and killed Kennedy, goddammit!’ 

The guy flattening the tiny burgers turned and looked at the two of us.

Doc smiled at him.

‘Can you get us a waitress to refill our coffees?’ Doc asked the grill man.

‘Sure,’ the cook replied, smiling. He walked off toward the back.

‘Keep it down, Jimmy. It’s goofy enough without yelling it aloud.’

‘We can’t prove it. I understand that. Unless…’

‘Unless what?’

‘Unless we can pressure the Feds by telling them that we know where Anglin’s hiding his blackmail material.’

‘I’m sure Carl’s got all the angles covered. He knows the kind of people he’s working for.’

‘Yeah. Pricks who allow the murder of seven women to go unsolved and unpunished. That’s the kind of people we’re talking about, so I’m not worried about ruffling their feathers.’

‘Think about it, Jimmy. You’ve got a daughter. You’ve got a wife. You want more children. Who’s going to keep the boogeyman out of your house? You can count on me, but I’m just one guy in your little army.’

That’s how all these assholes operate. Keep everyone scared shitless. It’s like omertà with the guineas. Talk and you float with your nose in the sewer water.’

‘Facts is facts, Jimmy. What can I tell you? And this isn’t the first conspiracy theory about the Golden Boy from Hyannis Port. Why should our notion be smarter than all those others?’

I couldn’t come up with an answer for him. And now I was thinking about the harm that could come to my wife and my daughter. It was a real threat. Not something you could shrug off, like a warning from some city thug. These guys played for keeps. They played in the biggest ballpark.

‘So we swallow our paranoia,’ I suggested.

‘You got another way to go with all this?’

‘You’re saying we never speak of this again. We keep it quiet because these animals have all the cards.’

‘We’re just no-name Homicide cops from the city. We keep our own yard clean. We try to do something that’s out of our league…hey, it’s a good recipe for getting it up the ass without a condom in play. You follow?’

I felt sick. Helpless. Doc was right, and there was nowhere to turn for help.

Anglin got away with it the way he did almost twenty years ago. Some little faction of nutcases was getting away with another big-time evil and our hands were still tied. Carl had himself protected. I wondered if we could get ourselves the same kind of lifetime warranty. What if Doc and I went to the papers?

They’d want documentation. They’d want witnesses. We weren’t talking about going to the trash tabloids because the
Star
and the
Enquirer
publish outright bullshit all the time. To get the legitimate press on our side we’d have to have something besides the unsubstantiated theories of two Homicide investigators. We’d need a witness. Someone who’d worked with Anglin in the field.

But there was no list of co-workers. The government had shredded any evidence of the exploits of Tactical Five. They were just fantasy, anyway. That’s what any prosecutor in the country would say if we brought all this up in public.

Our theory was just another Halloween scare, like the Orson Welles hoax about the Martian invasion.

‘Let it lie, Jimmy. It can’t go anywhere. They’ve covered their tracks with a mountain of sand. Anglin disappeared into it when he pulled the trigger. He’s a survivor. He understands what it takes to keep breathing in a river full of snakes.’

‘What if he goes back to our streets and starts it up again with some new young girls?’

‘We’ll have to deal with him if he does. Right now he’s gone beneath the surface. Maybe he’ll leave Chicago alone. Maybe he’ll go after a colony of prairie dogs in Nebraska. Maybe the fucker’ll slip and fall in the shower and he’ll break his sly little neck.’

The waitress finally emerged from her hiding place. She filled our cups and then she retreated to wherever it was she’d been hiding, waiting for the sun to come up and end her shift of slinging cheese sliders and pouring coffee.

‘You never thought you’d be involved in the murder of a President of the United States, did you, Jimmy?’

‘No. You’re right. We’re wading into deep water. It’s time to move on back where we can operate.’