The Cop

By R.J. Ellory

In the second novella of the award–winning author’s eBook exclusive trilogy, a cop’s account sheds new light on a young girl’s murder in 1956 Chicago.

In The Sister, R.J. Ellory introduces readers to a woman who thinks she knows all the facts about her sister’s murder. But no single narrative can account for every detail. And sometimes the smallest detail can turn everything we know on its head. Now it’s time to hear from someone who saw what the sister didn’t see. The Cop brings new layers of tension to R.J. Ellory’s electrifying trilogy, Three Days in Chicagoland.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Mar 26, 2013
• ISBN: 9781468306538

Book preview

Believe it or not, I knew Paulie Marcinkus personally. He was born right here in Cicero, just like me. And just like me he grew up hearing tales of Capone, Jake Guzik and Frank Nitti. Paulie was a big old lunk from the get-go, fists like ham hocks, head as hard as a hammer, and he could have stayed in the neighborhood, or shipped out of here one of three ways, just as all us Cicero kids did back then. It was cops, crooks or church. If families had three boys, you’d find one of them gone to each, and if there was a fourth kid, well he never seemed to make it out of his teens. Why? Hell knows. You’d find the cop brother would never bust the crook-brother, and the priest-brother would always take his confession, and so it went. Hands washed hands, backs got scratched, and the Irish kept away from the spics, and the spics kept away from the blue-gums, and the blue-gums stayed away from everyone but their own kind. So Paulie went to the church, all six foot three and two hundred pounds of him, and he went with his nickname already sewn in his shirts and coats. He was The Gorilla. Paul The Gorilla Marcinkus. How he even got to be a priest, how he got assigned to Rome, how he became an archbishop, how he became so unbelievably corrupt, well all of those things are a different story, and will just join the long catalog of tales that will always be told about us Cicero boys. All I can say is that I witnessed Paulie Marcinkus put the caulks to a few heads in his younger years, but I still can’t see how that’s gotten him a ticket to the seminary, let alone the Vatican. Or maybe it has. Maybe that’s what they’re after in the priesthood. The threat of ten Hail Marys ain’t dissuading anyone from a life of crime these days, and they need to get their hides thrashed by someone like Paulie.

Me? Well, I went to the PD. That was my calling, just like my father before me. And when I graduated the Academy in the fall of ’44, me and a whole host of other greenhorns went right out onto the streets to get our asses kicked by the runners and dealers and soldiers and thugs from the 42s, the Outfit, Torrio’s Five Points Gang, and all the other offshoots that loan sharked and hounded people for protection money, all those scumbags and shitheels that lost their livelihoods when Volstead was repealed in ’33 and who had to figure out some other way of taking honest dollars out of decent, hard-working folks’ pockets for no work at all.

I could have gone to the war. Perhaps I should have gone to the war. I could have fought at Messina, at Anzio, at Los Negros when MacArthur began the Pacific assault by cornering fifty thousand Japs on the Bismarck Archipelago, and then set his sights on the Philippines. I could have, but I didn’t. I was already married, me and Evie were planning kids, and I saw the future ahead of me with some kind of eye for making it past a quarter century.

Now, looking back, I don’t think I made the wrong decision. Sure, there were a lot of guys that made it out, but there were a great deal that didn’t. The more time that passes, the less people ask what I did in the war. If Evie is with me, then she just pipes right up with, He survived, that’s what he did . . . and she smiles that Evelyn Maguire smile, and she changes the subject. It’s a misdirection, but it ain’t a lie.

And now it’s 1956, and a great deal of water has passed beneath a great many bridges. Evie and me, well we planned on kids in ’44 and ’45, did the necessary homework, if you know what I mean, but the first one didn’t arrive until ’48. That was Dougie, seven years old now, bright as a lightbulb, smart as a whip. Then his sister, Laura, followed on behind in November of ’51. We named her after one of Evie’s maternal aunts. The one who died young. In fact, Aunt Laura died younger than our Laura is right now.

Anyway, that was all a while back, and this is today. It’s a Monday evening, and when the phone call comes, Evie is trying to bathe