Season of the Assassin (22 page)

I’d warned my mother to be wary of anyone coming to our door with a story that would require her to take off, with the baby in tow, toward a hospital.

I’d asked too for a squad car to keep a very high profile in our neighborhood. Especially at night when I was at work. The desk sergeant had been very cooperative. He knew I was working on Anglin.

If the Major didn’t take Anglin out of play in a month, I’d be waiting. But I was not going to sleep much during the next four weeks. I was still after him. Full-time. Just as it was before.

Because Carl Anglin was not finished. He’d never have enough. Losing half of his manhood might have been the spark for all this carnage, but there’d been plenty of hate and viciousness in that scrawny-assed body even before that female Cuban cop had started to cut at him.

Anglin was my business. He was in my district, my parish. The Major wouldn’t beat me to him. My father had started this long chase, and I was going to be there, waiting for Carl Anglin, at the end of the line. 

[July 1999]

After two years in Burglary/Auto Theft, my wife Natalie joined the crew. She became a Homicide cop. A member of the fraternity. Doc and I and Eleanor and Mari, Doc’s wife, and my three children were at the ceremony where she got her promotion.

‘Detective,’ I said to her.

‘Lieutenant,’ she responded. And then she began to cry. And Eleanor and my eldest daughter Kelly began to sob along with her. Soon Mari had to join in. Doc and I and my son and the baby Mary, had the only dry eyes in the vicinity. Natalie’s side of the family had moved to Pennsylvania and couldn’t make the trip because they were coming to see us over Christmas. It was crowded enough around my wife. I couldn’t remember the last time I felt as up as I did then.

There hadn’t been much to feel elated about recently. The welt on my head had finally started to go down, though. The Major apparently knew how to use a sap. It told me he might once have been an M.P. in the military. At least he was no pencil pusher. He’d showed up in person to contact me, and that also told me something about him. He didn’t always pass the dirty work to underlings. He had the sack to do it himself when necessary.

We took the newest member of Homicide to a fancy place in Oak Park — The Elms. It served over-priced food, but it was good, and my wife deserved the swank of it. For too long I hadn’t seen her as much as I’d have liked because of the Anglin case, and she’d been busy moving upward in her career too. I told myself that we were going to take our vacation days together, and later, at The Elms, I confirmed that with Natalie. We were taking five days in southern Wisconsin. We were going to lie on the beach during the daylight hours and we were going to become reacquainted in the bedroom in the evenings.

*

By the third day on the beach in Delavan, Wisconsin, Natalie was literally grinding her chompers to get back to work. She’d waded through three paperback thrillers and one romance. She said she preferred the detective books because they made her laugh out loud.

We were sitting on this same beach on the fourth day — it was the week after the Fourth of July — and she laid the news on me.

‘We’re not going to be able to have another baby for a few years.’

I looked over at her with the appropriate surprise on my face.

‘What brought that announcement on?’ I asked.

‘I have to get settled into the new job. I can’t be taking maternity leave as soon as I arrive at Homicide.’

‘No one expected you to.’

‘You mean you understand?’

‘Of course I understand. And maybe we ought to be happy we’ve had the one little girl together. Do we need a flock?’

‘Not necessarily. I thought you might’ve — ’

‘We have our baby. If you want more, that’ll be up to you. I’m happy with the three live ones we’ve got…The big ones belong to you too, you know. They’re kind of attached to you by now. You don’t need to produce your own train of offspring if you’re happy with where we’re at.’

She leaned over to me from her lawn chair. We’d been watching the sailboats and the water-skiers. When the heat became uncomfortable, we walked into the lake and doused ourselves. It was pleasant and uneventful. My kind of vacation. She gave me a kiss on the lips.

‘I want to help you with Anglin, but they won’t let us work together.’

‘That’s SOP. It makes life a little simpler. If we hadn’t already been married, you might’ve had a harder time getting into Homicide. They like to discourage the fraternization stuff.’ 

‘Is that what you’ve been doing to me the last four nights? Fraternizing me?’

‘Yeah. Extreme fraternizing.’

A look clouded Natalie’s bright, freckled face. Her auburn hair seemed redder in the sunlight.

‘Is Anglin a dead case, Jimmy? Are you just going through the motions?’

‘No. It’s active.’

‘You never talk about it much…And you never explained the bump on the back of your head, either.’

I reached up and touched the small pill-sized lump that was my souvenir from the Major.

‘The less you know, the better I feel about it.’

‘It has to do with the G.’

‘Yeah. You’re talking like an old vet already.’

‘What’re they doing with Anglin?’

‘If I tell you, Natalie, you’re involved.’

‘I
am
involved — with you. Till death do us part is the way I remember it.’

‘It’s dangerous.’

I was telling this to a woman who had faced down a sociopath in our own home. Faced him down and calmly blasted him into our furniture.

‘You’re right…Okay.’

I told her all there was to know about Anglin. I included the Major. I explained my idea about Anglin shooting the President of the United States, and then she sat up, alert and straight-backed in the chair.

‘So now you think I’m an idiot.’

‘Jimmy.’

‘I know. I’m nuts. I’ll be speaking in tongues next.’

‘The President? Kennedy?’

I told her about Anglin and Renny Charles and their erstwhile membership of the assassin community.

‘It’s…It’s a little hard to digest.’

‘Yeah. It’s the weight I’ve been carrying for about fourteen years. The only other person I’ve told it to is Doc. Who recommended I shut the hell up and never utter a word about it again. He’s probably right. And I hope you don’t pass it on to anyone.’

‘Of course I won’t…My God. John Kennedy…’

‘I’m probably wrong. It’s just a hunch, you know, a theory?’

She looked over to me and her stare was severe.

‘What if you’re right?’

‘I don’t see justice being done any time soon, if that’s what you mean.’

‘Jimmy…How can you sleep at night?’

‘Sometimes I don’t.’

She took hold of my hand. Then she narrowed her gaze as she looked out across the placid water of Lake Geneva. Only an occasional sailboat broke the line of the horizon out on the blue water. And the touring paddleboat that came by with the sightseers every hour on the hour.

I squeezed my wife’s hand and I shut my eyes.

*

Mason the Fibbie stood as I entered his office. His assistant was sitting in a chair across from Mason’s seat.

‘I still haven’t heard your name,’ I told her.

Doc was standing next to me, waiting to hear her lovely voice, but she didn’t speak.

And you’re here to tell me what?’ Mason asked coldly.

I tore my gaze away from the blonde. I left the scrutiny of her to my partner.

‘I got a nice bump on my noggin from your Major.’

That got Mason’s attention. He stopped dicking around with the papers on his tabletop.

‘Major who?’

‘You know. Tactical Five. Those spooks who float around the D.C. area with a clandestine title. You know. The CIA with different initials.’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking — ’

‘Ah, c’mon, Mason, please. He’s as real as the lump on my head. I’d say he was an M.P at one point. Christ, he knocked me down and out with one swipe. Very professional…He tried to swing a deal with me.’

‘A deal?’

‘Yeah. He wants me to lay off Anglin for about a month because he says he’s got a line on his blackmail data. You know, the material that’s incriminating enough to get you and the Major to obstruct a homicide investigation that’s been going on for thirty-one years?’

And you think I know this Major guy and that I’m somehow involved in his plans to eliminate Anglin from your playing field. Is that right?’

‘That is first-rate stuff, Special Agent Mason. You take acting lessons at the college?’

‘Look, I don’t know any Major — ’

‘You’re a liar. But I’ll tell you what I’m going to do. I’m going to tell you so you can tell the Major. I’ve got my own little document about the Anglin case and about the interference you and your boss have thrown my way since we began looking into the more recent murders. I’ve got that paper with both major newspapers in Chicago, and I’m working on a third publisher in New York. They’re very interested in printing the piece. But there’s a stipulation.’

‘What stipulation?’

‘They can run the story only if I or one of my family or Doc here, or any of
his
family, meet with an untimely death. I’ve given them enough tasty morsels as appetizers for them to be willing to wait and see if any of us have bad luck. So if I break my neck falling in the shower, you are all going to become the recipients of a great deal of unwelcome publicity.’

‘You can’t back up anything you’re saying. It’s all bluff. It’s all bullshit.’

‘Try me, Mason. I know how to please a pack of journalists. I’ve had lots of experience with them.’

‘You’re lying.’

I was looking right into his eyes.

‘Tell the Major to back off. He’s got his fingers in my sandwich and they’re about to get bitten off. I don’t care who he’s connected to. I’ll put all that dirty laundry in my basket and I’ll hang it up in every federal office in this county. You wanna play chicken?’

Mason’s brown face darkened to midnight blue. ‘You bastard — you wouldn’t…’ he spluttered, enraged.

‘Try me, Mason. Try me.’

*

Doc looked at me in the elevator and he began to giggle.

‘What a performance. You talk about what an actor Mason is — ’

‘Mine was no act. I’ve contacted the papers. The
Tribune
and the
Times
are slobbering at the chance to get an expose piece from a Chicago Homicide cop.’

‘You didn’t say anything about the Kennedy business.’

‘No. Hell no…But I whet their appetite when I told them it had to do with putting a monkey wrench in the Anglin affair. I didn’t get specific. I just told them I had something extraordinarily juicy for them if they’d agree to publish only — ’

‘Only if something bad happens to any of us,’ Doc finished my sentence for me.

‘They don’t have anything except my word that I could have something very special for them. They don’t have a story now, but they’re willing to keep an open mind for a future possibility.’

‘You think you can threaten this Major guy?’

‘No. I want him to know we’re still players, though. I don’t think he wants the mess of popping Chicago policemen. He knows how the Department is about losing any of its own. I just want him to give us the room to go after Carl Anglin ourselves. Because the Major’s going to make him disappear, if he has his way. That’d be too easy for the son of a bitch. I want him in the lockup with no way out, this time. I want him staring at life in the shitter or lethal injection. I don’t care. I want Carl Anglin to be frightened, the way his young women all were. I want him to face the terror they did, knowing they were going to die.’

‘And how are we going to get Anglin where we want him?’ Doc asked.

‘We’ve got a month, it sounds like.’

*

I got the call from the psychiatrist on a Saturday morning. So I got Natalie up — it was 6.35 a.m. — and we dressed as though we were going to the beach at Lake Michigan. When we arrived at the Oak Street Beach, I left Natalie at the parking lot with our Cavalier, and I jumped into the waiting car that Doc Gibron drove. We tried to make sure that we weren’t being followed, and it seemed we were clear.

We headed out to the Outer Drive and went south toward Indiana. The drive took an hour and forty-five minutes in light Sunday-morning traffic.

The psychiatrist left us alone with Theresa Rojas.

‘Hello, Theresa,’ I said, smiling gently.

Doc greeted her with a familiar yellow rose.

‘Hello,’ she said. It was more like a whisper.

‘Theresa?’ I asked.

‘Yes,’ she answered.

‘You’re back?’ I asked her.

She smiled. ‘I was never anywhere else.’

‘Can you talk to us? I mean, can you tell us about what happened all those years ago?’

‘You mean what he did to my friends.’

‘Yes.’

Doc was mute. All he could do was stare. ‘Who knows you’re able to speak, Theresa?’ I asked.

She looked at the yellow rose and smiled. ‘You gave me flowers.’

‘I gave you yellow roses. They’re supposed to stand for loyalty.’

‘You were loyal to me…You look like him. Like your father.’

I was not going to educate her on my genetic background. I was too excited to see her lucid, alive, clear-headed.

‘They drugged me, Lieutenant Parish’

‘My name is Jimmy. This is Doc Gibron.’

She smiled over at Doc.

‘They gave me something and then those other doctors all talked to me — like in hypnosis. I was studying to be a nurse. I know what they did to me.’

‘It was called MRS 127. It’s a synthetic drug, like LSD. It kept you tied up, in your head.’