Read Season of the Assassin Online
Authors: Thomas Laird
Season of the Assassin
© Thomas Laird 2003
Thomas Laird has asserted his rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.
First published in 2003 by Chivers Press and Thorndike Press.
This edition published in 2015 by Endeavour Press Ltd.
Table of Contents
[April 1968]
Pictures are never the same as being on scene. You walk into their dorm room — it’s like a slaughterhouse. Blood. Matted hair atop the crushed skulls. Their facial expressions look either as if they’re asleep or as if they’ve been caught in the middle of a scream. It varies from girl to girl.
Seven of them. One has survived by hiding beneath her bed. She’s in the grip of hysteria at the moment, so there’s no interview for a while.
What he’s done to them. Plenty of violence after they were dead. It’s as if he couldn’t get enough of them. It appears that they were repeatedly raped. Which is why I wonder if it was more than one man. Semen is present on at least three of the bodies. One guy could’ve done all this. But how did he go from girl to girl, seven of them? And not one of them fights back?
Veteran Homicide cops have had to leave the room. I feel the push of today’s lunch against my gorge, but I am able to hold it down. First comes the nausea, and then it turns into anger. A bad thing for a Homicide detective to feel. It’s got to stay business.
When it gets to someplace else, you have to remove your ass from the scene. You get angry, you make mistakes. Killers get themselves sprung on technicalities.
‘Jake? You finished here?’ my partner, Eddie Lezniak, asks. ‘Because they’re about ready to clean up the scene if you’ve got everything we need.’
Eddie the Polack. Not exactly my best friend, but a competent copper. We never hit it off the way a lot of partners do, but we get along well enough that we finish the day’s work. He’s smart. Not like the usual South Side Polski you find in the taverns. Eddie’s a teetotaler. Never imbibes. Not even on the holidays. But working with Eddie is better than being stuck with a spic or a spade. I got nothing against these ‘dudes of color’, but my life is sometimes in the hands of my partner, and some of these swarthy types don’t work out too well in the field.
‘Worst thing I’ve ever seen,’ Eddie says. It’s like he’s talking to no one in particular. Like I’m not standing right next to him, peering at the remains of Selena Moreno. A dead young woman, a nursing student, who never even made it to the adult age of twenty-one.
‘That’s because it’s a multiple homicide,’ I tell him. ‘It always seems worse when it’s more than one. It’s like with airplane crashes. Two hundred die, and it seems like some kind of holocaust.’
‘Yeah, that’s the word, Jake. Holocaust. Like with the Jews. This is a little holocaust on the West Side.’
He walks away as if he’s about ready to burst out bawling. He’s an emotional Polack, too. These Eastern European guys tend to hang their hearts on their sleeves a little too often.
Seven student nurses. He’s used something very sharp on their throats. Each of them has had her jugular slashed several times. Small, precise incisions. Like a razor or some other finely honed piece of steel. We’ll have to wait and see what the evidence specialists come up with.
‘The work of one man?’ Captain Quigley asks me as he arrives on scene.
‘I don’t know how it could’ve been. Unless
‘Unless what, Lieutenant Parisi?’ the sandy-haired commander asks me.
‘Unless he isolated them. Tied them up as he worked his way from bedroom to bedroom.’
‘And only one lived to tell the tale. Is that it, Jake?’
‘It appears so, sir. She’s just this side of shock, so it’ll be some time before we can talk to her.’
‘Be there waiting, Lieutenant. I do not want the newspapers to get to her before we do. It has happened that way before, and I’ll not tolerate it happening again…My God, this man was a fucking savage.’
He looks around the room one more time, just as the body bags arrive. They’re going to remove the seven corpses now. It’s time to get out of their way.
*
The Greek’s is almost empty. It’s the closest place I know on the South Side, so I come here when my shift is finally finished. Eighteen hours because of this multiple. Usually it’s eight to ten on a normal shift. Some big headline-grabber and it takes forever to get the hell away from the job.
‘The usual?’ The Greek, Jimmy Karras smiles.
He knows I’m a cop and he thinks we all talk in clichés, so I let him enjoy his illusions.
‘What’s wrong, Jake? You look a little sour.’
‘Bad business, this. Today, I mean. Seven young girls. None of them twenty-one years old. What he did I can’t repeat. And I
won’t
repeat it, Greek, so this time there’ll be no story to tell.’
He looks me over and knows this well is dry for the long afternoon ahead of us. He’ll just have to keep the shots and the beers coming and he’ll have to hope I’ll loosen up with the booze so that the two of us won’t have to sit here in silence.
I take the moisture-beaded glass of Old Style and I drain the twelve ounces in one extended tug. I follow the beer with a quick pop at the Jim Beam.
Five doubleheaders is my limit. A police lieutenant is always on call, so I can’t turn out my own lights with liquor.
I remember the look on Lezniak’s face. It really was a look of horror that crossed his puss as we entered that dormitory room. Just as well it was a weekend. Otherwise there would’ve been more young girls present, but a number of the residents were gone until Sunday night. He’d caught them on a Saturday evening. All seven of them had been Hispanics. They’d been too far away from their homes to visit for the weekend. They likely saw their families only at Christmas or during the summer break. Mexican and Cuban girls, getting their educations in nursing, up here in El Norte. Now they’d be getting a trip back south long before they’d expected one. I can see why there’d be horror on Eddie’s face. What troubles me is that a similar look never crossed my own face. Maybe it’s because I’m not well educated. Just a high-school diploma. Not like my kid, who’s going to get a degree on his way to where he’s going. I’m just a semi-ignorant wop who picked up his trade by being on the street. Jimmy, my kid, is more what they call ‘contemplative’ — a fancy word for a thinker.
The Greek is still patiently awaiting the loosening of my tongue. He even stands me a free round — which is an occasion in this saloon.
I hit my fifth round and the force of the alcohol finally registers. This is the warmth I’ve been looking toward. Eighteen hours on my feet. Eighteen hours on shift. Time to go home and collapse.
*
Eleanor is there for me at the top of our stairs. Twenty-six stairs to the top landing.
'I can smell you from here.’
‘What a lovely sniffer it is as well, Eleanor.’
‘You spend everything you make at that goddamned Greek’s. Doesn’t it bother you that Jimmy’s putting himself through college?’ She knows the sore spots. She knows where to probe. I stop halfway up the flight.
‘He said he wants to do it on his own. I offered — ’
‘You offered him nothing. You let him do it. God knows you wouldn’t want to share your paycheck with anyone other than that Greek on the South Side.’
‘You make a very poor nag, Eleanor. You’re far too good-looking.’
I start up the stairs again.
‘That avenue is permanently closed, Jake. You closed it yourself. So don’t bother with the blather. You don’t want me. You don’t want your son — ’
‘My son? Is that what you said?’
Her face goes sullen. We’ve been here before, too.
‘Go to bed, Jake. You’re drunk.’
‘No. I’m not drunk. Wish I were. I’m just very, very tired and I’m going to bed alone, which is the usual state of affairs in this unhappy house.’
She backs away from me at the top of the flight. I look over at her, but her gaze falls away from mine.
I throw open the door to what used to be our guest room, which is now my room. I fling myself face forward onto the mattress, and I’m asleep before I can remember what it was like to feel Eleanor lying next to me in bed.
*
A man is reported to have been seen near the dormitory on Saturday night. The dishwasher from the soul-food restaurant across the street had been taking a smoke and had seen a tall, stringy, white male hanging around the dorm’s back exit. The dishwasher never saw the man enter the dormitory, but he tells us it would’ve been easy for him to gain entry if he’d waited long enough, and if one of the other nurses had walked out that door that evening.
Which was what had happened, Eddie discovers. Carmen Espinoza, student nurse,
walked out that exit at about 10.25 p.m. on Saturday evening, which would’ve been around the time the skinny creep had been lurking outside at the back.
So we canvass every bar and bodega on the West Side. Everything within walking distance. Even a good stretch of the legs away from the dorm.
Again it is Eddie who strikes pay dirt. He hits Wesley’s Tap, two blocks from the scene, and Wesley himself knows the guy we’re talking about. Tall, gangly. The guy’s a fucking mess, Wesley says. Wesley himself is a large black male who keeps a sawed-off shotgun behind his bar. He’s been fined for keeping the artillery, but I can’t blame him for being loaded up. Not in this neighborhood.
The guy in question has been in here numerous times, Wesley continues. He’s some kind of merchant-marine guy who’s lost his sea papers or whatever and now he’s bumming around as a landlubber until he can get his shit together. His name is Carl, Wesley remembers. Carl Anglin.
‘He’s been in every night the last week. Hadda throw him outta here the last two evenin’s,’ the big black man tells us.
So now Eddie and I are inside Wesley’s Tap, and there are four unmarked cars outside with the backup troops.
My partner is angry. I can see it in his face.
‘You ain’t going to shoot this guy, polack. This is far too high-profile, and anyways that’s not what we’re about.’
He smiles stiffly like he’s shrugging it off, but I know he’d like to pump all six rounds from his .38 Special into Carl Anglin’s crotch.
‘Besides. What if he isn’t the guy we think he might be?’
‘He’s the guy, Jake. You and I both know he’s the guy. In our guts we know he’s the one who did all the young girls.’
I can’t summon the resolve to dispute him. I take a tug at the twelve-ounce draft that Wesley has supplied me, on the house. Eddie sips away at a ginger ale.
Eddie takes out his piece and makes sure the chambers all contain slugs. I know that my own weapon is ready. I check it every morning or afternoon or before every shift. I carry a snub-nosed .38 in an ankle holster, and I’ve got one of those box-cutters in my pants pocket. We’ve got pump-action shotguns in the squad, but they’re only for when we’re busting down a door, so to speak.
Anglin usually comes in between 9.00 and 9.30, Wesley tells us. It’s just nine, right now.
My handheld two-way goes off. I pick it up.
‘Subject is coming your way, Lieutenant.’
It’s Harry Sandstrom, sitting in one of the squads outside.
‘Got it,’ I tell him. Eddie and I turn off our two-ways.
‘He ain’t gonna like the looks of you two in suits,’ Wesley tells us.
Eddie takes off his jacket and then remembers he’s got his holster showing.
‘Fuck him,’ I tell Eddie. ‘I want him to know we’re here for him.’
The door to the tap opens. Carl Anglin’s hair hangs in long bangs over his eyes. He’s wearing a peacoat even though it’s April and it’s unseasonably warm.
As soon as he walks in, he looks our way. He turns his eyes toward me. I can see their green color even in this dim atmosphere. They’re a bright green, a cat’s-eye green.
I’ve got the .38 pointed directly at those scraggy-assed bangs.
‘You even wiggle and I’ll blow your brains all over Wesley’s oak bar,’ I tell him.
Wesley steps back and knocks two bourbon bottles sideways. The clatter makes Anglin pivot toward his left, toward the exit.
I pull back the hammer on the .38.
‘Think,’ I tell him.
He stops and turns back toward me.
‘Now wait, I didn’t do a goddamned thing.’
‘Then you won’t have a problem, will you?’
‘Get down on your knees,’ Eddie tells him.
Anglin has been here before. He hits the deck, knees first.
‘Hands behind you, lie flat on your face,’ Lezniak continues.
Anglin raises his head toward me as my partner cuffs him. I can see the strange green eyes.
‘You don’t know what you’re gettin’ into,’ he says and smiles. Then he puts his face against the floor.
‘We’ve got you at the back door right before the killings,’ I tell Anglin. ‘We’ve got a positive ID on you. You were there and we’ve got you made standing at that exit.’
He smiles wearily and tugs at a half-burned Camel filter.
He hasn’t asked for a lawyer. I think he’s enjoying this.
‘The worst thing we saved for last,’ I explain.
Lezniak is seated across the table from him. I’m standing behind him.
‘We have a witness inside. You missed her, Carl. You left her alive. She puts you inside the dormitory. We have the death penalty in Illinois. I don’t know how long you’ve been a resident…’