Jimmy Parisi Part Two Box Set Page 4

  Parisi knew about public sentiment. He had spent a career having that same public assume that all Italians were mobbed up, that all blacks were criminals or obsessed with basketball, that all Jews were wealthy and powerful, that all Poles were stupid, that all Hispanics concealed blades on their persons, that all Arabs concealed gunpowder in their tennis shoes….And on it went. Not all Chicagoans were racists, bigots. But it was like any great center of humanity. There was plenty of ignorance to go around, and it was easier to be stupid than smart when it came to understanding human nature. Pigeon holing was a game for the multitudes. It was just too facile to lump people. Guilt by association.

  Maybe Bin Laden was responsible, but Parisi didn’t think he felt right, and Tommy Spencer was beginning to lean toward his partner’s point of view.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  We put the computer geeks to work at the Loop Headquarters, but there were nearly a thousand victims of the Anderson Building, so even with the high speed computers, it’d take five or six computer geeks a great number of hours to do the sifting. There was of course no guarantee they’d find anything we could use because the six foot six inch prick named Bin Laden might very well have been the mastermind behind the explosion.

  But when I talk it over with Tommy Spencer, and talk it over some more, the Saudi terrorist doesn’t seem right. You get a feel for killers lots of the time. Sometimes you don’t locate them at all—those so-called ‘cold cases.’ But there haven’t been all that many dead ends in my career. I’d say we’ve caught at least seventy percent of the cases thrown our way, first for Doc Gibron and me and now for me and my partner Tommy Spencer. We’re pretty good at what we do in Homicide, but we have been stonewalled before. Some of these murderers get away with it, I’m saying. It happens to the best of us. It never happened for Sherlock Holmes, naturally, because he’s fantasy. The rest of us came in flesh and blood and we were all limited in intelligence and intuition.

  It simply seems out of joint for Al Qaida and Bin Laden to target a place like the Anderson Building. It has no political value as a venue for terrorists to gain international recognition. Chicagoans are pretty much the only people in the country who’ve even heard of the place or know of its existence. No, the Sears Tower or the Art Institute or the History Museum would be the places I’d hit if I were that blood-loving son of a bitch. I’d hit some place with a reputation, some place famous. Like the Tribune Building. There are several likely candidates and the Anderson edifice isn’t on anybody’s short list.

  However, I get the royal dodge when I contact Jack Donlan, head Fibbie of the downtown FBI Office. He gives me the official stance, something his answering service could’ve delivered. I meet him in his office. I’m considering myself graced by this meet—he’s never in his goddam office. I know because I’ve been trying to locate him for four days. I finally get through to him on this fourth try. It must be accidental that I make contact, I’m thinking as I sit opposite him at his desk in the Loop FBI Headquarters.

  “You have no doubt that it’s the Arab and his people,” I smile.

  “No doubt. We’re in charge of the case, as you know—“

  “A lot of Chicagoans died in that blast, Jack. Don’t talk shit about whose yard this is.”

  “I didn’t mean it that way, but yes, we have jurisdiction. This is absolutely a national security thing.”

  “And a thousand vics took it all the way home on my watch. Don’t tell me I can’t stick my nose in. I’m going to, no matter what you and the current J. Edgar have to say about it.”

  “Look, Lieutenant, I don’t want to play politics, but I will contact your Captain if I have to. You can sniff around all you want, but I’m telling you who the big dogs are, and I hope you’re hearing me. I know your rep, Parisi. I’ve read about you in the papers. You’re a fucking bulldog. But I’m the Alpha Male Wolf in this fucking pack, and my bite is lethal, do you follow?”

  “You threatening me, Special Agent Donlan?”

  “I don’t make threats.”

  “I don’t think Bin Laden did this one. My partner, who you so rudely left standing outside this office, doesn’t think so either. And I think we’ve got a typical power play between the FBI and the CPD, and I think a few calls to the local papers and TV people would make all this look like bureaucratic chickenshit. This isn’t a pissing match—Alpha fucking male—and the media guys would love one more story about the Bureau’s penchant for being bureaucrats and pencil-pushers in a time of National need. What if it ain’t your boy in the Middle East, Jack? What if it’s someone right here with a motive for murder, and what if they’re parlaying the national thing in New York so that they can hide what they did and lay it on the favorite fiend from the Middle East?”

  “And what if you’re wrong, Parisi? Is that just possible?”

  “Sure it is. Been wrong plenty. Let me find out if I’m wrong. Stop standing in the fucking way, Jack!”

  “You don’t know me well enough to be familiar with me, Lieutenant Parisi.”

  “Okay, Jack…Just let my people look around without all the shoving backward. Give me a month. That’s what my Captain gave us.”

  I look at the ex-local legend of high school football from the Catholic League, and he gives me his best stoical stare.

  “All right, Parisi. One month. I’ll tell my people one month, starting today. And in thirty-one days I’ll shut you off like a leaky spigot. You won’t have access to shit and you won’t find this office accessible to you and yours. That’s the deal and it’s non-negotiable…Here’s the catch. You find out that anyone else is a likely candidate for perpetrator of the Anderson Building explosion and you will take the evidence to me first, not to your Captain.”

  “How the fuck does that work?”

  “It doesn’t. It isn’t negotiable. You find someone that you can prove did this, and you work with us, first and foremost. And I will have it in writing from your Captain by the end of this working day, Parisi. You may be certain of that.”

  I rose. I wanted to tell him to fuck himself and that he’d be the last man in this city who’d know I’d found anything. But I did know he wasn’t bluffing about going over all our heads at CPD. This case was that high a high priority, and I would’ve been a fool to think otherwise. If I had to connect up to the Federal tit, then that was what I’d have to do. If it meant clearing this bombing, then it would be worth it even if we got no credit at the CPD. I really had no interest in another notch on my city pistol. The killer was getting farther away from us even as we spoke. Time was elemental in a homicide. Every wasted hour put distance between us and the bad guys.

  “I love it when you fucking guys grab us by the balls. I love the feel of your fevery little fingertips.”

  “Get the hell out of here, Parisi.”

  “Fuck you too, Jack.”

  We did the staring routine for about twenty seconds, and then I got the hell out before I thought about shooting him right in the head, right where he sat.

  *

  Tommy Spencer saw the bush in Vietnam, just as I did, for the better part of a twelve month tour. However, Spencer re-upped, went for another twelve months, while I went back to the World and finished my twenty-four months stateside. Tommy said he fell in love with Vietnam. I knew other guys who did, too. But my first love was always my home, this city, Chicago, Illinois. There is no real charm about this burg. It’s too rough and tough around the edges.

  The city had gone a little crazy just after the bombings in New York and now here in town. Things had since become a little numb. We were still reeling from the aftershocks, I suppose. We’d never been attacked like this before. They’d never put a hole the size of the Anderson Building into the heart of the Loop, and we were all still staggering from the impact. This kind of thing was unthinkable. It simply could not happen, even in the scenario of someone’s wildest imagination. But it had occurred, and suddenly the denizens of this town were laboring with the notion of our own mortality and vul
nerability. This kind of violence happened somewhere else in the world. It was not allowed to happen here in the Heartland, in the Middle West, in the City of the Big Shoulders. Carl Sandberg’s stomping grounds were not a place for the heathens of the world to pull off their evil. Pull it off and then get away with it.

  So we hit Afghanistan, looking for Osama Bin Laden, the new devil incarnate. He was as obvious a villain as Hitler.

  And we at the Chicago Police Department didn’t have anything to dispute that international wisdom. We had over a thousand case histories to pore through, and it would likely take every minute of those thirty-one days we’d been given by our own Homicide Captain and by the god-like Jack Donlan of the FBI.

  Tommy and I sat in a White Castle on Fullerton on the northside at three o’clock on a Saturday morning.

  We were the only customers at the moment.

  Tommy ordered six cheesesliders, and against my better judgment I ordered the same. They call them sliders because they slide down into you, and a little bit later they slide right out the other end. They were beautiful incarnations of indigestion, but they tasted so goddamned good on the way down…We never learned our lessons about the mini burgers, cut square, with the holes punched in the paddies and with the overload of onion flavor, topped by horse radish mustard and ketchup. The burps were delicious and lasted for days.

  We topped off the burgers with rings and Diet Cokes—to add to the dietetic hypocrisy.

  “You think this one is a no-winner? Cold case, Jimmy?”

  He burped after three cheesesliders and then he excused himself.

  “Could be. We’re getting the big freeze like never before. They’re acting like we’re minor leaguers around this job. It ain’t going to be easy, no.”

  “Why would anyone else blow up the Anderson Building?”

  “To cover up the murder with this terrorism thing. Let the Arabs take the heat.”

  “Murder a thousand people, say, to get at one, or maybe a few, targets?”

  “Killers have blown airliners out of the skies just to get at one vic. All those other deaths just complicate it for us. You know there are perps who have no trouble killing in multiples. We’ve been after enough serial, series guys to know that.”

  “But a thousand dead.”

  “They can only execute you one time, and the way capital punishment’s headed, it’s more likely this killer’s going to do life. The way it is in Illinois currently. We won’t see another execution from death row for a very long time, Tommy.”

  He nodded and took another hit on his Diet Coke. Then he inhaled two more cheesesliders. I waited for the next burp, but I beat him to it myself.

  An obviously Middle Eastern male walked into the White Castle. He had the mustache and full beard. He wore the usual khaki colored garments that his homeboys always seemed to wear—

  And then I caught myself in mid-profile. I told myself to turn off the mechanism. I was on lunch break.

  The new customer gave us the full stare-down, and then he found a seat in a booth. The waitress went to him and asked his order.

  “You checked him out, Lieutenant?”

  “I have to admit that I did. My bad.”

  “Used to be with Hispanics and blacks. Now the bad guys are supposed to come in brown, and I feel a little sick in my stomach.”

  “Did you feel sick there when it was blacks and Hispanics, Tommy?”

  “As a matter of fact…”

  He smiled sadly.

  “This job does shit to your head, Jimmy.”

  “This world force feeds you.”

  The Middle Eastern guy turned in the booth and looked at us.

  “Peace be with you,” Tommy told him.

  He shot a quizzical glance at both of us, and then I smiled at him as warmly as I could and I waved as well.

  He looked at me like I was a recent escapee from the Elgin State Mental Institution, and then he returned his stare to his own batch of cheesesliders.

  “It’s stereotyping,” Tommy said.

  “Sure.”

  “It’s pigeon-holing.”

  “Yep.”

  “It’s—“

  “You’re right,” I told my partner. “So what’re you going to do about it?”

  “Thanks,” he muttered. “Thanks.”

  I slapped him on the shoulder, and the blow prompted him to burp yet again.

  “Damn. That tastes fine,” Tommy smiled. “I could die right now.”

  “We’re too busy. Die with the onions and gray poupon some other time.”

  *

  The computer nerds worked twenty-hour days in spite of the Captain’s edict against overtime. They did it on their own because they knew the sense of urgency that permeated the Headquarters here in the Loop. They knew we were fighting against a murderer or murderers, and they knew the Federals frowned upon our avenue of attack. Like any other close-knit crew, we felt it was us against them—all of them. Feds and terrorists and whoever else was lurking in this poisonous stew.

  We pursued the insurance line. It was always a reliable stand-by. People killed for personal gain. They killed for the money. After a week we had it sifted down to three hundred life insurance policies of one hundred thousand dollars or more. Then after two more days we had it narrowed to twenty-four policies that had an odor to them. Thirteen women and eleven men. We divided the twenty-four possibilities among six investigators, and we hit the streets. After a round of interviews, there were no personal favorites among any of the detectives working with Tommy and me. They seemed to all be legitimate victims—spouses without mates. And the money didn’t seem to matter a damn to any of them. That was the feeling we had when we got together and shared what we’d learned in the field.

  The thirty-one days was already dwindling before our eyes. Our theory of someone local doing the Anderson job began to look like a true wrong turn in the road. It looked wrong with every interview, with every computer search our beloved geeks made for us.

  But it still felt wrong, the deal about the Arab’s guys doing the blast. Intuition was a squirrelly thing. You couldn’t always rely upon it, but it was always there, somewhere in a crevice in your gut somewhere. It was always unshakeable, sometimes in the light of hard evidence too. And I still thought we were headed in the right direction when the middle of our month came and went without a scent of a killer in our collective nostrils.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Doc Gibron, my previous partner and my best friend, died around Halloween, 2001. He died of a heart attack. He died quickly, and from the account from Mari, his wife, he died in his sleep. His face looked peaceful, she explained to me at the funeral. He was laid to rest at St. Catherine’s in Oak Forest. There were a lot of cops at the funeral, including Tommy Spencer and me. And my wife Natalie and my children, all four, big and little, were present. They all knew Doc and loved him like a favorite uncle. He remembered them at every birthday and Christmas, and he spoiled them all for no reason at all throughout the years he was with us.

  Doc (Harold) Gibron had an adopted daughter. He and Mari did, I should say. Karen was black, in her early twenties, and was a medical student in her first year at the University of Chicago. She had been born deaf, but surgery and implants had given her hearing back when she was a young teenager, courtesy of Mari’s insurance at the hospital where she worked as a paediatrician.

  I kissed Karen and Mari. The ceremony went on with the rifles’ crack as a salute to one of its own, Detective Harold Gibron, and then he was lowered away into the earth away from us all. I was going to be strong, especially in front of Natalie, but when I saw her and all four of my children weeping, I wept with them for the finest man I’ve ever known.

  “I don’t know who to go to when I need advice, now,” I told Tommy at Garvin’s Comeback Inn in a western suburb called Berwyn. We had gone to this bar many times for our dinner breaks, Doc and I. This was the new Garvin’s however, not the old sawdust-on-the-floor saloon that we used to inhabit.
The new Garvin’s was a sports bar built almost on the identical location as the old joint, but the new place was state of the art with multiple TV’s turned on to ESPN and various other sports events. There was no sawdust on the floor. Spitting on the floor, therefore, was frowned upon, so the new Comeback Inn had lost some of its ‘ambience’, as Doc called it. But it held the same memories, all those late nights and early mornings. Doc stopped drinking almost twenty years ago and I’ve never been a fan of alcohol, so it is most strange we would both gravitate toward a saloon like Garvin’s, but here it is that we spent those hours off the clock, reloading, getting ready to go back after killers, trying to catch just one more thief of life. Garvin was a World War II veteran of the Battle of the Bulge. He fought with Patton at that famous spot during Christmas of 1944. John Garvin was now retired. His son finally took over the new place after Garvin’s kid floundered as an insurance salesman. But the place seemed to flourish under John’s son’s management. The son’s name was Mickey.

  Tommy and I both ordered a Diet Coke. I was surprised to see the old man himself behind the slab.

  “I work a few hours, here and there,” he explained.

  I introduced Tommy to him. He’d seen him with me a few times, but I didn’t know how solid John’s memory was anymore. A few of his arteries had to be hardening. He was in his mid-eighties, like most WWII vets.

  “I remember. The hippie dippie cop.”

  John smiled to show Spencer he was joking. Garvin didn’t smile very often. The Krauts had screwed up his right leg at the Bulge, and the cold weather made him miserable.