Season of the Assassin (11 page)

‘Jimmy. Wasn’t it enough what she went through with Anglin, that night?’

‘But she’s a survivor, Doc! She held her breath, never made a whimper. She outfoxed him — a professional assassin. She stayed with him all night long, all those hours, and she didn’t give it up. I think she’s home with the lights on, Doc. I think she was trapped in hysteria for a while after that night in 1968, but I think she gradually came out of it. Then they had to back up their bet by making it all a sure thing, and I think Theresa Rojas got hip to all the pharmaceuticals they were trying to pump into her and she’s been allowing herself to be kept captive in the hospital.’

‘That’s very wild, Lieutenant.’

‘No wilder than what Anglin did to get himself protected by some outlaws in the government who’re willing to kill anybody just to keep it inside the sack where it hides.’

‘Jesus, Jimmy, we’re talking about people who’ve got no scruples at all. They’ll kill anybody. Good guys, bad guys — they don’t make any distinction.’

‘You saw them lurking about in the aftermath of the Korean War, and I saw them in Vietnam.’

Doc nodded.

I went on. ‘These creeps. They’re like sappers, if only in one way. Slithering through the bush on their bellies. They don’t know boundaries, no. Once you let them loose…It’s like a bacteria. It’s got no conscience. It kills and spreads and kills. Nothing stops it except a burning-out. A purge.’

‘Or…Theresa really is in some kind of mute state and your theory is paranoid bullshit.’

‘Yeah, Doc, and I’m pulling for your paranoid bullshit explanation.’

He laughed and turned on the radio. He switched to a classic-rock FM station rather than his usual jazz preference. Doc turned to me and said that rock and roll helped him turn back time occasionally. Like taking a dip in the Fountain of Youth via the airwaves.

[October 1968]

The Bureau investigates the death of Agent Callan, as do we. I take a close look at the toxicology of his medication, but nothing I discover invalidates the conclusion that he was what the FBI calls a special agent under ‘duress’. They tell Eddie and me that this guy Callan’s been inside the pressure cooker for too long.

The interesting thing I find out about this Fed is that he was in the Marines before joining the Bureau. He served on board a ship, the
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, during the Bay of Pigs disaster. It makes me wonder if his path crossed Anglin’s back then. But I’ve already received the royal runaround from the government. Getting information from them is like prying open a rusted-out vault. You’ve got to blow the door off the hinges to get inside.

Callan wanted to do the right thing. He was prepared to help us, and suddenly he was taken out of play. There are too many coincidences, too many odd circumstances. I’m not a conspiracy freak. I don’t see the work of the devil in a corrupt City Hall deal. I see human crooks. That’s all. Maybe I’m too simple for this job, but I’ve been hauling out the trash on these streets for a long time, and my arrest record is as good as that of any of my colleagues.

Frustration happens when doors slam in your face. I understand that much psychology. But with this case there are too many doors, too many slams. Callan comes along, and suddenly I’m thinking I see some daylight.

Then, on a Friday afternoon, his sister from Dubuque, Iowa calls me. She wants a meeting, a face-to-face. I arrange it for this afternoon. At Garvin’s Comeback Inn in Berwyn. It’s a dump, but it probably isn’t bugged, either.

Her name is Doris. She’s Agent Callan’s twin. I can see the resemblance.

She takes a look around the seedy saloon and her nose goes skyward. I have to laugh. Eddie looks at me like I’m laughing at a funeral.

‘I know. It’s terrible, this place, isn’t it?’

She looks at me and smiles. She’s a pretty woman, but I don’t see a wedding band.

‘Andy didn’t kill himself.’

‘Why do you say that?’ Eddie asks her.

‘He’s my twin. I knew him like no one else knew him. Someone murdered my brother. And I think you know why.’

‘Did Agent Callan talk business with you?’ I ask.

‘He did. I was the only person he ever talked to. Our parents are dead. Neither Andy nor I ever got married. My work — I’ve got a PhD in English Literature — took me to Iowa, and so we’ve communicated over the telephone.’

I look over to my partner. We’re both thinking a bugged telephone had something to do with Callan’s demise. Andy had told Doris things she shouldn’t have heard. Now she’s as much a target as her brother was, if the conspiracy theory is really true.

‘Are you afraid for your safety?’ I ask. 

‘Yes. I think our calls were being listened to. Andy knew something was wrong before he died. He stopped discussing his work, the last three weeks or so. But we met about ten days ago, and he told me it was dangerous to share anything else about this Anglin case with me. He apologized for being stupid enough to have said things over the phone. He told me to quit my job, get out and not leave a forwarding address…Was he right? Is all this as dangerous as he said?’

‘I think you might want to do what your brother said,’ I tell her.

‘Oh, my God.’

‘You’re single, right? You can work anywhere. I’d do what Andrew told you to do. I wouldn’t be able to offer you protection here. And I don’t have much confidence in any federal aid at the moment. There might be one other way.’

‘What’s that?’ she asks.

‘Go public. Get some journalist to write it down. The problem is that they’d have to substantiate all your allegations, and to date we’ve got nothing to prove your brother didn’t kill himself. They’ve done this thing very cleverly. If they drugged him, they did it with something that leaves no trace. We run into questionable deaths all the time. They don’t all get resolved…No, if I were you, I’d head out until — maybe — all this comes out in the wash. I wish I could offer you more.’ 

‘Andrew didn’t kill himself. Don’t let it lie, Lieutenant Parish’

‘I won’t.’

Eddie looks down at his shoes. The three soft drinks we ordered from the owner of Garvin’s sit on top of the slab, untouched. Ms. Callan gets up and leaves us there. She’s driven all the way in from Dubuque, but I can’t guess where she’s headed now.

‘Would they pop her, too?’ Eddie inquires. ‘They might. They also might figure she’s frightened enough to keep her mouth shut. Too many murders make for too much tidying-up. Even the government can’t afford an unlimited mess. Maybe they’ll leave her alone. She’s just a sister with a grudge and a sad tale to tell. Who’s going to listen to her?’

‘She still ought to get the hell out of town,’ Eddie concludes.

*

I watch Carl Anglin, as I said, on my free time. I’m careful not to let him catch me at it because we’ve been warned by the folks downtown not to harass him. Since he is no longer a prime suspect in the nurses’ murders, we are to look elsewhere.

Naturally there are no other likely suspects. Anglin did it. Everyone in Homicide knows it. He walks free with all that blood on his hands. Life and death go on. There are other killers to apprehend. We are kept busy. But now that the outdoor summer months are closing out, the number of homicides decreases. The hot politics of Chicago’s summer of’68 is simmering down some, but the anti-war sentiment is growing by the day. The liberals want us to love the North Vietnamese. The guys who’ve been shooting at my goddamn kid. Jane Fonda, the movie bitch, is talking nice with the communists while our guys are getting chewed up in that weed patch.

Jimmy writes that they’re aware that the nation is not behind them, that the troops’ morale is low. Mostly everyone wants to saddle up and come home. Winning is not a priority. Survival is. The South Vietnamese — the ARVN — are Number Ten. They have no respect or love for the Americans and they fight poorly. They fight for money when they pull the trigger at all, Jimmy writes, and it feels like our guys are out there on a limb all by themselves. Not optimum prospects for victory in Southeast Asia.

His tour is coming to a close in a few more months, but he thinks he might like to commit for a second go-round. He says the benefits are pretty good. He’ll get more money when he gets out and he won’t have to do chickenshit Stateside duty for the rest of his hitch when he returns. He’ll be out immediately when the Freedom Bird lands in the U.S.

I’m back to spending more time in the Greek’s tavern. There’s nothing for me at home. Eleanor is only there physically. We do not touch, we do not intersect at any point. The house feels empty without Jimmy.

I embarrassed my son with my drinking. I drove him out when he wanted to spend time with his friends. Jimmy would not bring his buddies or his girlfriend, Erin, inside our walls. And I can’t blame him. Drunken old homicide investigator. Failure, in fact. Murderer walks the streets because I couldn’t collar him. I know my own excuses. Christ, a dead witness and a fruitcake zombie who lives anonymously in Elgin State. I have the killer’s scent fully in my nose, but I cannot bring him down.

I know Anglin was up to his eyebrows in evil with the military. A hired killer who hides today behind his flag, behind his uniform. I understand he’s done something big enough for the Spook community to watch his ass end. He’s a protected man. His connections go to some major vein in the heart of D.C. or Quantico or Spookville — or wherever.

There’s an innocent teacher of English who had better be on the run because her brother confided in her over the telephone. There’s a dead FBI agent who I know in my gut never pulled his own plug.

It’s no wonder I’m here at the Greek’s on the South Side swilling up bourbon and beers by the pair. If you drop a shot glass full of bourbon into a glass of draft beer they call the result a depth charge. Well, I’ve blown up a whole flotilla of submarines, then, with all the charges I’ve dropped.

‘Jake, you better head on out into the sunset,’ the Greek himself tells me.

I’ve exceeded my limit, he explains. He’s the only friend I’ve got. He’s called me a cab. Is sending me home before I get my pension in trouble with a drunk-driving rap. The cabby comes into the bar and hails me.

I wave to the Greek and stagger out into the icy wind. The breeze takes my breath away momentarily, but I’m able to get myself inside the Checker cab.

*

Eleanor is away for two days, visiting her mother in Indiana. They live in some hick heaven called Oxford.

‘Anybody home?’ I bellow out. I know there’ll be no reply.

I walk up those twenty-six stairs and head toward the guest room, my bedroom.

‘Nobody home? You sure?’

I smile with the sound of silence. This is the way it ought to be for Chicago’s most outcast copper. There are policemen at headquarters who make a point of ignoring me. The only guys who talk to me are the captain and my partner, Eddie. Fuck the rest of them, I figure. Times like these reveal who your real friends are. I was never all that close with my fellow Centurions.

I lie down on my bed. It is hard and uncompromising, this mattress, the way I want it. Helps relieve the bad back I got, sleeping for two years on the ground in Europe during the Second World War. Nothing eases the pain except this boardlike bed of mine. Eleanor refuses to sleep with me here anyway.

I close my eyes and I see the photographs of the seven nurses. I see the terror in Andrew Callan’s sister’s eyes. I see the dread in Theresa Rojas’s blank stare. And I see the actual corpses I encountered on the floors of those dorm rooms. There is nothing quite like the real thing. The authentic dead body.

They haunt me every night. I cannot drown them out with the booze. Sleep doesn’t stop them from invading the surreal territory of the land of dreams. They’re with me all day and every night. I’ll need a shrink if the booze doesn’t do me in first.

Eleanor. When was the last time her warm presence made contact with my own flesh? I can’t recall. I love her in spite of her disloyalty. She made me a cuckold and tried to tell me it was for my own good, it was so that we could have the family that I couldn’t give her. Nick was simply providing the seed of our happiness, she tried to convince me. Why couldn’t I see things for what they really were? She loves me, she says. It was never otherwise. 

Why couldn’t I bend my lofty virtue just once, she pleaded, and let us be happy with our lives and with our son? She digs into her Catholic upbringing and reminds me that Joseph had to live with an immaculate offspring. Well, she wasn’t Mary, Eleanor reminded me. If she were to have a child it would have to be via more conventional means. Meaning Nick. Nick’s seed, Nick’s sperm.

Sleep is God’s opium. Sleep puts it behind us, it lets us unload all our burdens. But the price of sleep is dreams — more specifically, nightmares.

I have to close my eyes in spite of that knowledge.

And when I do, I hear a creaking of the floor downstairs. My first reaction is to bolt upright, here in bed. I grab down for the snubnosed.38 in my ankle holster and yank it out. Then, silently, I get out of bed.

I do not call out. I don’t want them — whoever they are — to know I’m aware of them.

So I get to the bedroom door and I walk quietly down the twenty-six stairs. I walk at their far right edge in order to avoid the creaking I heard before.

When I arrive at the first floor, there are no lights on. I’ve turned them off before going upstairs.

Dumb
fuck
, I’m thinking.
Trying
to
boost
a
copper’s
house
.
How
stupid
can
a
thief
be
?

But maybe it’s not a thief. 

I work my way slowly through the dark toward the kitchen. My advantage is that it’s home turf for me. Whoever this is, he’s on foreign ground.

The kitchen is clear. I stand still and listen.

Nothing.

I carry on and make my way toward the living room, just the other side of the dining room that I’m now passing through. I hear another slight squeaking of the floorboards. So I stop in place and try to get a fix on the location. The sound is coming from the kitchen. I hear another faint noise coming from there.

The son of a bitch is following me.

I carefully step back toward where I began, in the kitchen. There’s no way he can avoid me if he’s still in there. I’m pointing the .38 in front of me like a flashlight. One movement and someone is going to be splattered across my walls.

The weariness is still with me. The alcohol makes the room move eerily in the darkness. I try to fight off the effect of the booze. There is only a swinging door separating me from the kitchen and the intruder inside.

Crouching, I rush through the door, the .38 in my hand moving back and forth to cover the room. There is silence and nothing else. This time I hear the movement coming from back out in the living room. I shove back through the kitchen door and hurry toward the source of this latest sound.