The Color of Fear Read online

  THE COLOR OF FEAR

  Thomas Laird

  © Thomas Laird 2016

  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 2016 by Endeavour Press Ltd.

  This edition published in 2018 by Endeavour Media Ltd.

  Table of Contents

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  EPILOGUE

  CHAPTER ONE

  She says it went like this: She walks into the boulevard, she has her head down because of the driving snow, and she hears three pops as they make it halfway out into the street.

  Celia clutches at the hand of her son Andres, but his hand is already limp. She loses her grip as his fingertips slide away from her. When she looks over toward her eight year old boy, she doesn’t see the blood yet. It’s only when she picks him up beneath his armpits that she spies the red splotch on the back of the winter coat. She’d saved and put away pennies in order to buy it for him at the Venture.

  Celia walks into the entrance of Cabrini Green. She’s got a deadpan look in her brown eyes as she holds the lifeless boy in her arms. The security guards rush over to her. They bolt at her from behind their desk. She motions them away as she walks toward the wall where the buttons for the elevator are.

  Suddenly she cries out. “Oh God oh my baby oh no.” All slurred, as if she’s in a nightmare. But it’s no bad dream. Andres is dripping on Celia Dacy’s arms, down the front of her raggedy ass winter coat. She hasn’t put away enough cash to get herself a new garment at the Venture. Celia says it’s because her son comes first. Andres always comes first.

  After she boards the elevator, the two security men call 911.

  That’s when Doc and I arrive. We try to ask around out front, but the crime scene is compromised because Celia Dacy wasn’t thinking about what some detective needs in order to do his job. See, her boy’s dead. One shot and he’s gone. It takes us a half hour to drag the story out of three eyeballers outside the project. They see two white po-lice — Doc and me — and they go D and D. But three of them are so outraged about the little guy taking the pop in the back, they decide to drop the dime on the three bangers. One of the thugs pulled a machine pistol, something like an Uzi, on a dude who was trying to get into his ride before he got his ass shot off. So it seems like Andres and Celia got between the three hitmen and the cousin they were really aiming at.

  Someone might call it an accident. But it’s murder. I never even have to look into Doc’s eyes for affirmation.

  “Pricks can’t even shoot straight,” Doc mumbles. “They could’ve waited three more seconds and the Dacys would’ve been clear. What a bunch of ruthless cocksuckers.”

  We walk into Cabrini with our pieces palmed. It’s a habit you take on whenever you enter the projects. The black cops think it’s racist to walk in with an unholstered piece, but they do it too when white officers aren’t around. It’s a scary place, the Green.

  The ride up in the lift is slow. It’s fortunate it’s working at all.

  This is interview number two with Celia Dacy. We talked to her right away, almost as soon as we arrived on scene, but we didn’t talk too long because she was visibly shook when we entered her fifth floor apartment. I asked her a couple of questions. We got the general picture of what happened. And then we got the hell out because I could see the pain building on Doc’s face. He began to remind me of three years ago with the two girls, so I told Celia we would be back in an hour or so. I told her we’d return after she had a little time to be alone to get herself all together.

  “You sure you don’t want to wait downstairs?” I ask Doc.

  He’s got those thunderheads on his face again.

  “Shove away, you guinea.”

  Tough guy. He’s back in the ballpark again.

  “Take care of your own goddam self.”

  When he sees me lower my eyes, he reaches out and touches the sleeve of my flight jacket. It’s an apology for talking that way because Erin’s been gone only three months. She died of breast cancer back in the heart of the meanest winter Chicago’s produced in a decade.

  The double doors open. We’ve got our guns palmed, but we holster them when we arrive at Celia Dacy’s door.

  “Are you feeling better, Mrs. Dacy?” Doc asks.

  She smiles the best way she can, and it’s then that I see her looking at me. Something strange is happening in the pit of my stomach. I’m wondering if it’s the polish sausage I took down at the Garvin Inn at noon break. After a few moments she breaks her eyelock away from me and I lower my eyes, too. It’s one of those hot flush deals where I’m embarrassed about something I have no idea what I’m embarrassed about. I’ve been in Homicide twelve years and nothing much gets under my flesh. Sure, I’ve had the bad dream for a long time, but I’ve been working on it with the Division shrink. He tells me I’m improving, but I still wake up nights watching my old man take the fall down those twenty-six steps at my mother’s house.

  We sit on her couch. I shake my head back into concentration.

  “Did you recognize the cock — Did you see the men who pulled the trigger on your boy, Mrs. Dacy?”

  Doc is coloring in the cheeks. Celia snaps a quick smile at him as if she can’t help but grin at the white cop who’s apparently as pissed off as she is.

  “Please. I’m sorry I almost said what I said. At a time like this —”

  “It’s all right,” she soothes. “It’s all right. It’s what they are. It’s truly what they are... But I don’t know them. I just saw the backs of them. Somebody in this project know who they are. Someone have to know.”

  She’s a beautiful young woman. That’s what was crawling toward my insides when we did the eye contact. I catch myself not even reflecting on the deep, dark black of her face and body. I just see a beautiful young woman about thirty who’s just lost her boy.

  We ask her a few more perfunctories. I record the answers in my notebook and we leave her to her grief. Just before we depart Doc asks her as gently as he can whether there’s a husband she wants us to contact. The ‘husband’ has left three years ago, she tells us. She’s looking right at me. It feels like my bad right knee is beginning to buckle beneath me.

  Doc intervenes by opening her door. We walk out into the hallway. I’m just able to grab a glance of those piercing brown eyes before the door is shut and we’re palming our pieces again as we tread the threadbare carpeting that leads to the elevator.

  *

  I open the door to the eighth floor apartment. It is nothing like the immaculate dwelling that Celia Dacy lives in. It is soiled. It stinks from dirty clothing and an unclean bathroom that I haven’t seen but can smell.

  The smell is what prompted se
curity to call us down here again. It’s only been eight days since we were here for Andres Dacy. There is a small living room, a kitchen-dinette, a bedroom, and a bathroom. We find him in the bedroom. He’s on the bed with his throat sliced. It appears at first glance that the blood loss from the cut killed him.

  “No other injuries, it doesn’t look like,” Doc adds.

  “Maybe he was asleep when the dude stole in here.”

  “Maybe Jimmy. It doesn’t appear he put up a fight. And it don’t take any booster to get into the locks in these Cabrini apartments. Our man, here, didn’t have a chain or a deadbolt either.”

  “Slip a card into the opening. Pop a lock.”

  “Blood spray on the wall suggests a righty. He was cut right to left. Unless the cutter backhanded him.”

  “His highness the M.E.’ll explain it all to us eventually.”

  “Sure he will.”

  “You’re probably right, though. The cut looks deeper on the right hand side. Point of entry. You think he ever woke up and saw who did him?”

  “It’d be better for him if he didn’t. Just sleep your way on out. That’s what I’d hope for if I was this guy.”

  The wallet is on the bedside table. I’ve got my latex gloves on, as does Doc. I flick on the cheap table lamp. If it hadn’t been for the opened curtains in the bedroom we would’ve had to snap it on in the first place. It’s overcast, but it’s bright enough to witness what happened in here.

  “Ronnie Jackson, it says,” I tell Doc from the driver’s license. “There’s twenty-two bucks in bills and that’s it. Don’t figure to be a robbery unless the perp was high classed and left a little chump change in Ronnie’s wallet.”

  “Not a robbery, Lieutenant Parisi,” Doc agrees. “Simple homicide.”

  “You’re sure.”

  “Yeah. The brother’s got a nineteen inch color portable and a VCR in the living room.”

  “He sure does. So what’s a ‘simple’ homicide?”

  Doc grins.

  “You tell me, Jimmy.”

  *

  The security guy stops us at the door to the entrance.

  “My name’s Arthur Wendell.”

  The emphasis is on the ‘dell’ part of his last name, he explains.

  “Is Ronnie dead up there? I mean I don’t want to intrude on the investigation but—”

  “Weren’t you in Robbery or Major Crimes?” Doc asks Wendell.

  “Yeah. I got laid off with a physical. Got shot a while back. A booster put a nine in my hip. Can’t run the hundred no more.”

  He’s not smiling, though.

  “Ronnie’s dead. But I’d appreciate it if you’d say nothing until we talk to whoever he might have had as family.”

  “I know how it goes. It’s just that word’s got around that Ronnie was the target for those three motherfuckers who shot the little boy. I didn’t hear it, but my partner overheard it outside, just yesterday.”

  “Thanks for the information. We’ll look into it. Appreciate it,” I tell him. Then I shake his hand and he smiles at us for the first time.

  “Mrs. Dacy is a lovely woman.”

  He hits ‘lovely’ maybe a bit too hard. I watch his eyes as they shrink from mine.

  Out in the parking lot I take a long, hard look at the area before us. The usual dudes at the hoops across the street. The normal dockers waiting for us to leave. They’re watching the young men play basketball. There are also a few women hand in hand with smallfry, walking them around and through the broken glass and debris.

  Scatology gathers in my mouth, but it passes and I get into the unmarked Ford Taurus with Doc and we pull away from the curb and we’re out into the boulevard.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Doc and I tend to gravitate toward Garvin’s Comeback Inn in Berwyn, a western suburb, when we’re working days. There are many places we could afford to eat lunch at besides this piss-smelling, saw-dust-floored tavern, but the ‘ambiance’ would never seem the same to Doc. He says we’re in a ‘film noir’ world, whatever the fuck that means, and the least we can do is play our parts in this “high theatre.” I have to listen to his shit all the time.

  “We have only one name. Chaka. The shooter.”

  Doc nods. It’s old news. We’ve known as much since a week after the killing. We also know about Ronnie Jackson.

  “So Chaka gets to Ronnie. He finishes the job he fucked the first time out,” my partner theorizes.

  “That would be what they call a viable conclusion,” I concur.

  “So we arrest Chaka and this whole thing is a slam-dunk-in-your-face-motherfucker forgone conclusion.”

  I have to laugh at him. He always says exactly what he’s thinking.

  “You’re going to tell me the ‘things are not always as they seem’ speech.”

  “No, I am not, Doctor. You’re probably right. It looks like Chaka is the man. But finding him might prove a little more challenging than your slam dunker theory.”

  “Life does not have to be complicated no matter how my life disproves it.”

  I nod at him as Garvin sallies forth with our lunch.

  “I’ll be burping and farting all afternoon, and I’ve got another interview with Celia Dacy in an hour.”

  “You seeing her again, Jimmy? How come?”

  “You’ve got court at 1:00. I thought I might as well take care of business until you’re sprang. You okay with that?”

  “Please. Please. Never ask me if I’m ‘okay’ with anything. I’ll have to unsheath my service revolver and slay you if you ever use that fucking valley-talk on me again.”

  He bites into his brat and he follows it with a belt of his Sprite.

  “I don’t like you going into the Green alone. It isn’t done. You know how it works.”

  “I’ll have a couple of uniforms meet me there. You’re right.”

  “The uniforms’ll love you for the assignment, Lieutenant Parisi.”

  “Fuck ‘em if they can’t take a joke.”

  Doc takes another swallow out of his soda pop.

  “You really need to see her again so soon?”

  I feel my face heating up, but I refuse to let him see me blush.

  “I’m just trying to get myself back into life, Doctor. She’s a lovely young lady and I’m just investigating the murder of her son. There is nothing funny going on in spite of the innuendo in your questions.”

  “You can never cross some lines, Jimmy.”

  “What do you mean? Like her color and mine?”

  “Well you can rest easy, big man. She’s young enough to be... my kid sister. And you can bet she sees me as a white po-lice and nothing else. So what the hell you worrying about?”

  “Nothing, junior. Just don’t walk into the Green alone and with your peepee in your palm.” He finishes his lunch without another word. The only conversation I can muster from that point on is with Old Man Garvin, and all he does is grunt when it’s his turn to do the talking.

  *

  She watches me as we pull away from the project. We left the squad and the two uniforms behind us. The two patrolmen were called elsewhere after I told them I didn’t need the bodyguards any longer. I told Celia Dacy that we might talk more comfortably if we sat in some restaurant somewhere and had coffee. We’d both had lunch, so I had to find somewhere in the burbs where it’d be quiet, without a crowd of teenagers on lunch break bringing all kinds of noise to bear.

  I see when I look into her eyes that it’s because she’s here that I’m not watching the clock, telling her that I’ve got to meet Doc later this afternoon downtown.

  “You know anybody named Chaka from the project?” I ask as she sips the bubbly concoction she ordered.

  She has a medium ‘fro. She’s not clipped short, which seems fashionable among the black women I see on the streets. She has a straight nose and her no stills flare just slightly when she inhales. I tell myself I’m just being a copper noticing the way she is and the way she looks.

  “Nev
er heard that name.”

  She smiles faintly. She will not remove those powerful eyes from my glance. It’s like trying to have a staring match with a female wolf. Except her eyes aren’t steel-colored. They’re a deep brown. A brown that the term ‘earth-tone’ was invented for.

  Her arms are thin but muscular. A woman’s sort of muscular. Not brawny or bulky. Just lithe and athletic and perfect. She could pass for one of our Olympic runners. Maybe a miler or a long distance runner’s type of body.

  Erin’s been gone only three months and I can’t keep my eyes away from hers.

  I strain to concentrate and I know she senses my awkwardness.

  “We think this Chaka was the man who shot Andres. We think he might have killed Ronnie Jackson, too. Ronnie was the target when your son was hit. It was luck that you weren’t struck as well.”

  “Luck?”

  “Yeah, Celia. Luck.”

  “You think I’m fortunate to still be here, do you?”

  I nod, and she glares at me. I see the quickness of her mood shift. The temper comes on instantaneously.

  “I think you’re fortunate to be alive. I feel fortunate that you’re still here, too.”

  The anger flees her face as suddenly as it came on.

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to embarrass you.”

  “Why would that embarrass me? What you said—”

  “I have no business talking to you that way.”

  “Because you’re investigating my son’s murder.”

  “Right.”

  “Because you’re a policeman who’s not supposed to get himself involved with anyone connected to the business that you deal with.”

  “That’s exactly right.”

  She takes another sip at the steaming bowl of coffee that is positioned before her.

  “You married, Lieutenant Parisi?”

  She engages me with those brown orbs. She’s merciless when she locks onto me.

  “My wife died three and a half months ago. Of breast cancer.”

  “You have children?”

  “A boy and a girl. He’s eight and she’s thirteen.”

  She drops her glance when she hears the ages of my kids.