Season of the Assassin (6 page)

‘Must be hell,’ Eddie concludes. ‘Going to all those parties and having to perform. He must be one tired snatch-sucker at the end of the shift.’

We muscle our way out of the stifling-hot apartment and down to the car.

‘We may never get him, Jake. He doesn’t need to kill anybody now that he’s got all this attention. He gets the cooze, the booze, the dope. It’s all legit, so why take chances?’

‘Because he likes it, Eddie. He’s going to get bored with all this celebrity shit and he’s going to want to lay out the challenge. He’s being protected by somebody for something and he thinks he’s invincible. Like some Indian in his ghost shirt. He thinks he can stick our faces in it and have all the good little things his newfound fame has brought him…No, Eddie. He won’t stay happy with what he’s got. You always want what you can’t have. I’m trying to convince him that he can’t have it the old way. I want to push him out the door and make him grab at it.’

‘That could be real dangerous for the local population, Jake.’

‘I understand. This guy’s a loose cannon — with a quarter-inch fuse, no less. He’ll go back to it because he likes it. I’m just trying to make things seem easier for him.’ I aim us in the direction of the Loop. ‘But if he kills again, Eddie, and we can’t bring him in front of the man…then I’ll just naturally have to shoot him right in the head.’ 

[February 1999]

Doc had an in at the military archives. He wouldn’t give me the guy’s name. All he’d say about this source was that he was reliable and that he’d served alongside Doc in South Korea during the mid-1950s. We’d used this mystery man as a source before, so I couldn’t complain about his anonymity.

Doc had found out Anglin’s affiliation in the Navy. He had also found out the addresses of two Chicago-area vets who’d served with Carl.

John Grinder lived in the northwest part of the city. He was the owner of a liquor store in Ravenswood, a North Side neighborhood. Doc and I got into our unmarked vehicle, the Taurus, and we headed out to Grinder’s store.

Grinder was a big man. Much heftier than Carl Anglin. He had a middle-aged paunch sticking out in front of him.

‘Gentlemen,’ he greeted us, smiling as we approached him at his counter. The place was called, very simply, ‘John’s’.

We showed him our ID. He blinked, but he smiled again.

‘I didn’t kill the old lady. She’s at home and in the fuckin’ pink,’ he cracked. 

‘We’d like to ask you about Carl Anglin,’ Doc said.

His face darkened.

‘Anglin? That son of a bitch?’

‘Yeah,’ I told him. ‘But we’d like to talk to you off the premises. Can you arrange that?’

‘Sure. I guess. I haven’t talked about him in — Shit, since I left the service twenty-five years ago…Let me get my son to watch the counter.’

He called out ‘Danny,’ and his son promptly came up front. Good-looking kid in his mid-twenties.

‘I’ll be out for a few minutes. Watch the goods.’

Danny smiled and said, ‘Sure.’

John Grinder asked us if we could talk somewhere other than police headquarters, downtown. He didn’t like to leave the business for too long. Since he was being cooperative, we settled on going over to the Garv Comeback Inn in Berwyn. It was Doc’s hangout. He called the Comeback ‘a noir saloon’. Claimed he did all his best thinking there. It was really because he liked John Garvin’s bratwurst.

It was truly a saloon, standing near the railroad tracks in this western suburb of Chicago. It was a middle-class Slovak neighborhood that never seemed to change.

Garv himself was a survivor of the Battle of the Bulge. His limp, as he plodded toward the three of us, gave an indication of the price John Garvin had paid to run this sawdust-floored bar until he hit retirement age.

‘What can I do you for?’

His opener was another thing that had never changed
chez
Garvin.

‘I’ll have a Diet Coke,’ I told the old World War II vet. Doc had a Sprite, and John Grinder ordered a black coffee.

The barman ambled toward the cooler. ‘We’ll try to keep this brief,’ Doc started. ‘Anything you can tell us about Carl Anglin?’

‘Anything?’ Grinder said. ‘Where would I start…The guy was a natural-born killer. He did those seven nurses, didn’t he?’

We didn’t answer him.

‘I understand. Ongoing investigation.’

‘Yes. He killed them,’ I said.

Grinder looked surprised at my candor.

‘He was part of a special force that I was a member of. Sort of like the Seals, but not exactly. We did the things the papers never print. The embarrassing little jobs. You know, the cut throats in the hotel rooms. The dead camel jockeys who show up disemboweled in their sandy little tents out in the middle of fucking nowhere. We did the covert stuff the CIA wouldn’t or couldn’t do. They always invoked the “National Security” flag to cover everything we did, whenever Congress got a whiff of it…But we were disbanded officially during the Eisenhower administration, right before Nixon lost to JFK. But that didn’t stop the Navy from using us — unofficially. Look, I won’t get specific with you because I signed an oath and, believe it or not, I love my country. I thought I was doing my duty, back then. Sometimes I wonder about it all now, but I gave my word. You understand?’

I nodded.

‘We were in the service, too. Doc was in South Korea with you, and I was in Vietnam for two tours.’

‘Outstanding,’ Grinder said and smiled.

‘Just stick to Anglin,’ Doc offered. ‘You don’t have to name names or places or dates. And everything you tell us is between us. You’ll never have to repeat it.’

‘No witness chair?’

Doc shook his head.

‘I remember Anglin. He was the one with the big-time grudge when the end came for us. We were called Tactical Five. I got no clue why. That’s all we were ever called. We did a lot of assassination stuff in Asia. In places like Hong Kong. Singapore. Places peripheral to the actual thing in Korea. They flew us in by helicopter, dropped us close to shore, and then we swam the rest of the distance. We made our assigned kill, swam back to the meeting place and a chopper or some other form of transport’d pick us up.’

‘You said Anglin was angry about the end of Tactical Five?’ I asked. 

‘Yeah. The rest of us just saw it as duty. Or at least the guys I was close to felt that way. And when it was over, we didn’t question it. Orders were orders. Anglin couldn’t accept it. And he never came home with the rest of the outfit.’

‘He stayed on in Asia?’ Doc asked.

Garvin arrived with our drinks, set them down, and then shuffled away.

‘He remained. Went AWOL, far as I remember. The MPs went searching for him, but when Carl wanted to, he was one of the best I ever knew for going deep under.’

‘That sounds great,’ I moaned at my partner.

‘You’ll have a lot of trouble trying to find that fuck if he wants to go invisible. I saw him do it more than once. He’s better than a magician. Blends in like one of those little lizards.’

‘He never arrived Stateside?’ Doc queried.

‘Not that I know of…But what I heard from a member of the old crew was that somebody picked up his contract in Hong Kong. That was where Carl wound up. The prick was off making himself a new career was what I heard. Gun for hire…Now that was just rumor, you understand. I can’t personally verify it.’

‘He didn’t go home, but he started to contract out to private outfits,’ I repeated.

‘Yeah. That’s what I heard…He killed those girls. I know he did. I wasn’t surprised when they arrested him all those years back. He had a reputation for going physical on any on-scene females that happened to be in our area of operation.’

‘You ever see him kill or rape anyone?’ Doc asked.

‘I would’ve shot the fuck myself if I had. No. I never saw that. But everyone knew about it. He liked to cut them when he was through with them, the word was…Look, I gotta get back. I got a business to run…But one last thing. You want to find Anglin, you might want to find Renny Charles. That was Anglin’s number one bro in Tactical Five. They were what you would call inseparable. Renny took off when Anglin did. They were partners. And I heard Renny was living somewhere in the city. I heard that a little while ago. So…’

We finished our drinks, went out to the car and began the drive back to Ravenswood.

Doc contacted his anonymous friend about Renny Charles. It was true that Charles had served in a classified outfit with Carl Anglin, but we got no further information about him. So we went to Computer Services and set their gears in motion.

We tried credit cards. We tried Division of Motor Vehicles. We came up with a zero for our efforts.

Then Doc reached out to the IRS. He found Renny Charles through an audit that had taken place just a few months ago. The address was on the near North Side.

*

We sat in the car outside the apartment where Charles supposedly resided. Before we got out, we both checked our weapons. Doc didn’t want backup and neither did I. We wanted to keep Charles and his location quiet because of his background. If this guy was the killer he’d been made out to be, then he was probably being watched by his own folks. The Government was exceedingly paranoid about its covert personnel. We didn’t want this to become a media event. So we were going in alone in spite of the potential danger.

I had the Bulldog .38 strapped to my ankle. It had remarkable stopping power. It’d drive a melon-sized hole out of the back of you as it blasted through. The Nine was in my shoulder holster. I used an automatic so that I had firepower comparable to what was on the street. I had a straight razor in my jacket pocket and a sap in my pants. Doc had a snubnosed .38 on his ankle and a .45 Colt in his shoulder holster. He also carried a switchblade in his shirt pocket and a sap in his pants.

‘Ready?’ I asked.

He nodded and we got out of the car.

It was a chill and rotten night. Snow flurries, penetrating damp. A dead cold. Made the bones quiver.

Renny lived on the third floor of a three-flat, there on the North Side. The flurries made it all but impossible to see three feet ahead of us. The wind was blowing a gale, straight into our faces. We got to the front door and made it inside. It was a relief to be able to catch our breath in the entryway.

We were not going in the usual way, of course. Doc buzzed the tenant on the first floor.

No response. So he tried tenant number two.

Same silence.

Out came his toolbox. He had the lock popped in less than one minute forty-five, and the reason it took so long, he said, was because it was so damn dark in there.

We were up the two flights quickly. We’d noticed a light on in the apartment while we’d sat in the car checking our weapons. I was hoping it was not just Charles’s nightlite.

Doc knocked on Charles’s door. We didn’t hear anything.

‘Renny Charles…Police! Open up!’

I heard something moving inside. Doc raised his size twelve foot and smashed the front door open. We lunged into the room, both of us hunched over, and there was a burst of orange flame and an accompanying
crack!
as we stumbled to the floor.

I scrambled toward the shot and let loose with the Nine as I went. Six shots, scattered all over the living room. Another flame roared out at us and Doc emptied five rounds into the darkened room.

Then we heard a crash. The window in the front room had been shattered, and there was a blast of icy air rushing at us from the hole the body made as Renny Charles had apparently plunged three storeys to the lawn below.

We rose and raced toward the landing. Then it was down the three flights of stairs and out that entrance door, Doc huffing directly behind me, and we saw a man lying on the snow-glazed grass in front of us.

‘Stop!’ I yelled as soon as I had enough breath. The snow was flinging itself into my eyes. I had to put up a hand in front of my face.

Doc saw the .22 pistol on the ground, three feet away from Charles.

He picked it up as Charles writhed in agony.

‘My fuckin’ leg. I broke my fuckin’ right leg. Call an ambulance,’ he pleaded.

I went to the car and called 911.

*

‘So why’d you cut loose on us?’ Doc asked.

‘It must have been that illegal entry,’ Charles said and smiled grimly, his cast-covered leg held up by taut wires.

We were at St Luke’s. 

Renny Charles was a six-foot three-inch cracker whose parents obviously never beat him enough. He was easy to hate. I could see how Anglin would find this guy a soul mate.

‘We identified ourselves as police officers. You didn’t respond,’ Doc told him.

‘You didn’t have a search warrant,’ Charles responded.

‘Who says?’ I grinned at him.

The bluff seemed to work.

‘Why would you want a search warrant to get to me?’ he asked, a little less sure of himself.

‘Because we want to find your old buddy Carl Anglin, asshole,’ I explained.

‘Anglin? Christ, I haven’t seen him in — ’

‘That’s not what we heard…You’re up for attempted murder, right now. But we can make all of your immediate problems disappear.’

‘If I hand you Carl.’

‘Very perceptive, dickless,’ Doc said dryly.

‘You two can go hump yourselves.’

Doc unhooked the bracelet over his right wrist and attached Renny Charles to the frame of the hospital bed.

We turned and walked to the door.

‘Wait a minute,’ Charles said.

‘You have a change of heart?’ I queried.

‘I saw Carl Anglin two weeks ago. He was living near the El tracks. Just south of Evanston…Christ, I’m not tight with the prick. I’m not into the shit he’s into. Killing those girls. That’s why I’m here. That’s why you made me bust my leg. I’m in my fuckin sixties! I’m a veteran! You know that?’

‘You better be a little more specific with an address, Renny. And maybe you’re a stranger to this town. Policemen here aren’t fond of getting shot at, cheesedick.’

‘How’d I know who you really were? Anybody can say he’s a copper…Look, Anglin lived at an apartment on something like Kensington Place. That’s all I remember…You’re not really gonna bust me for attempted homicide, are you?’

‘You were in the service with Anglin. You saw the little things he liked to do. Especially to women who were in the wrong place at the wrong time.’