The Underground Detective: A Novel of Chicago Streets

by Thomas Laird

  2

  I wake up and hear rustling in the living room. I go out into the living room and see what the source of the gentle commotion is. It’s Kelly, getting her school stuff pushed into her book bag. It’s the same book bag I’ve inspected over the last six months. Although I haven’t found any drugs and even though I haven’t caught my daughter with dilated pupils or found her acting spaced way out, I’m still not convinced she’s clean.

  There’s been no odor of weed on her hair or on her clothes, and she doesn’t wear any kind of noticeable perfume to mask the rank stink of the smoke from a blunt, but I have difficulty believing she’s altogether straight. It isn’t the way it is, for junkies or users. They always relapse.

  “Would you like to take a look?” she offers.

  She’d be a very attractive young woman if she weren’t so sickly thin.

  “No. I haven’t heard from Mr. Baker, lately.”

  Baker’s the truancy guy at Sacred Heart Academy.

  “That’s because I haven’t been truant.”

  “If I call him, is that what he’ll tell me?”

  She has her mother’s green eyes. She has Mary’s face. I see my former wife in my daughter in all the rare moments when I’m allowed to look my kid in the eyes.

  “Knock yourself out. Call Mr. Baker.”

  “What’s going on, Kelly?”

  “I’m going to school.”

  “I mean what’s going on.”

  “I just told you, Dad, I’m going—“

  “Tell me, dammit!”

  She smiles delicately, tentatively.

  “You’re looking for something. You’re always looking for something. You can’t stop being a cop.”

  “Why’d you stop using?”

  I think I’ve caught her leaning in for a punch. She’s off balance and has no retort.

  “I told you I—“

  “You’ve told me you were clean before. You lied.”

  Her pretty but fragile face turns into a frown.

  “I’m sorry,” I apologize.

  “You’re not sorry. You just want to catch me doing something so you can feel good about it.”

  “I’d never feel good about anything like that, Kelly.”

  “Now who’s the liar?”

  She grabs hold of her book bag and heads out the door of our southside, brick, three-bedroom home.

  I call the head nun, the principal, at Sacred Heart and make an appointment in an hour to see Sr. Rachel. She agrees, and then I head to the shower to take a wash.

  Sr. Rachel is a legend at Sacred Heart. She’s been there thirty-seven years, and the wear and tear shows only slightly on her face. Her order does not wear a habit. They were liberated, apparently, after Vatican

  Two.

  She is tall. She can face me eye to eye, and she does as she shakes hands with me. We sit in her spartan office, here inside this ancient Catholic girls’ school on the southside. The neighborhood is Latino and black, now, as is most of this side of the city. The school and the grounds have been kept up immaculately. Rachel is a proud woman. I can see it in the steely quality of her gaze.

  “You want to know what’s going on with your daughter, Kelly, I understand from your call.”

  “Yes.”

  “You’re a policeman, yes?”

  “Homicide detective, actually.”

  I can’t help serving one back at her. I’m a product of the Christian Brothers at Trinity High School, on this same side of Chicago.

  “Oh?”

  “Yes. I’m here because the drums have gone silent, lately.”

  “Kelly hasn’t been truant in a long time.”

  “I was wondering what brought about the change because she won’t confide in me.”

  “You don’t get along?”

  “I don’t get along with users, dopers, Sister. Even if it’s my daughter.”

  “You never inhaled, I take it.”

  There’s the faintest malevolent grin on her lips, at the moment.

  “I’ve used marijuana, yes. I drank alcohol when I was in the military, yes, but I gave it up after the war. I was hoping my daughter wouldn’t have to do the same stupid damn things her father did, but I realize kids experiment. She was beyond ‘experiment.’”

  “I know. I remember the suspension clearly. She seems to have been able to refrain, the last several months. She hasn’t missed school, lately. So where’s the bad news?”

  “You think she’s stopped all her crap?”

  “I don’t know, Detective Mangan. I know she hasn’t done anything to stop her from graduating from Sacred Heart next spring. Is that good news to you?”

  “If it’s true.”

  “If it’s true? Are you questioning my veracity, now?”

  She snorts with “now.”

  “No, Sister, I didn’t mean to impugn your….Look, it just happened so quick—“

  “She’s been talking to Sister Catherine, our school psychologist, who’s also a counselor here.”

  “So why wasn’t I informed?”

  “Because Kelly explicitly told us that her counseling was to be between herself and Sister Catherine. Even I don’t know the specifics, but I know they’ve been getting together before and after school for several months, now. You mean to tell me that you’re just now noticing the change in her behavior, Detective?”

  I’m positive it’d be my ticket to hell to bitch-slap a nun, but it is my sincere desire to do just that, presently. But I let it go. I’m an adult, I keep telling myself, even though she’s talking to me like I’m one of her teenaged charges.

  “Yeah, I noticed. But she’s seemed straight before, and then she goes under another wave, about the time that I think she’s better.”

  “You need to talk to Sister Catherine.”

  I find Catherine in the counseling area. She invites me into her office, and then she promptly informs me everything she’s said to my daughter is in confidence. She tells me that I need to talk to Kelly about Kelly.

  Sister Catherine is in her mid-thirties, it appears. She doesn’t wear the penguin uniform, either. She’s an attractive woman, except for the stoutness, perhaps. She appears a bit too muscular, not too fat.

  This is an interview in which I’m going nowhere, so I surrender and get up to leave.

  “You really need to talk to Kelly.”

  “Why don’t you explain that to Kelly, Sister.”

  I turn and walk out of her cubicle.

  Lila and I trace the two kid prosties to the near northside. They worked the Old Town District, which is a rough place for hardened hookers, let alone novices.

  The first victim’s name was Tracy Amberson. They finally IDed her via her dental work. Luckily for us, she’d had fillings in her teeth, and her dental records told us her name.

  Neither girl has parents that anyone can locate. We went back to the high school they’d both dropped out of at sixteen and we got addresses for them, but each girl had been living with an “auntie,” a kind soul who’d picked them up off the street. So the information was brief and unhelpful.

  We canvas the Old Town area and talk to the working ladies, the sidewalk princesses, who operate in this slum. A few of them remember the faces of the photos we’ve secured from their high school yearbooks, but no one seems to have been familiar enough with either girl to give us any leads as to who it was who picked them both up and transported them to Evans’ Pond and then butchered Tracy Amberson while a tongueless, gagged Helen Gant was forced to watch the slaughter.

  Lila walks on the street side of me. We’re on Garland Street, walking the hood, coming up empty. It’s very un-gentlemanly of me to allow her to walk on the street side, but she’s the one who chose the pattern of humping down the street, not I.

  This is the best time of fall in the city. It’s late October, almost Halloween. It’s crisp but not cold, now. The World Series is history, and neither the Cubs nor the Sox have been playing since the beginning of the month, as usual.
The Bulls are in pre-season, and the Bears are coming off a World Championship. This is the time of the year when some things seem possible and others seem out of reach.

  “What’s going on in your skull?” Lila smiles.

  “I’m enjoying a walk with a beautiful woman. What could be better than that?”

  “Something going on with your kid?”

  She knows Kelly’s name, but she always refers to her as “your kid.”

  “Surprisingly, no. She hasn’t been expelled, and her hair just smells like hair.”

  “What about the other thing?”

  She’s referring to the bulimia.

  I shake my head.

  “Maybe she’ll—“

  “Hey. Enjoy the moment. We’re going to catch a beast who kills little girls.”

  “Not-so-little girls,” she says, with a suddenly somber look on her face.

  “No. They were full-grown. You’re right.”

  She turns and smiles at me. We’re both wearing leather jackets. It’s in the upper forties and the sun is brilliant, and the wash of pedestrians files by us in both directions. We pass easy loan joints, titty bars and fast food places that murder with lots of fatty calories. This is the city I love. It’s like falling in love with a somewhat sympathetic jungle cat. It’s beautiful but lethal, too.

  “We’re not going to get any face time with this guy until he hits someone else, you know,” Lila tells me.

  I look at her, and then I grin sadly at her.

  We catch a break one block before we reach our car. There are a group of three working girls standing in front of Fat Lou’s Pawn Shop, here on Garland Street. Fat Lou’s doubles as a numbers front, but cops let Lou slide because he’s good for street information, from time to time.

  Lila approaches them. A female is less intimidating, we both figure. But I figure they don’t know Lila.

  Two blacks and one Asian. You don’t see scores of Asian hookers. Not around here, anyway.

  Lila shows the three of them the two photos of our victims. The taller of the two black girls shows emotion when she sees the pictures.

  “That my cousin!” she blurts. And then there are tears.

  We take Halee Maxey downtown with us to interview her. We sit in the interrogation room on the Homicide Floor, here in the Loop.

  Halee is not attractive. She has a jagged scar running along her left side jaw- bone. Somebody cut her deep. It’s a thin scar, so my guess is it was a razor that did her.

  “You’ve seen her with Helen Gant?” Lila asks.

  Halee sits directly across from the two of us at our rectangular slab of table.

  “Yeah. I seen her wid dat bitch. Helen be the one who drag her into the life. I try to tell her to get shut of her, but she doan listen to me.”

  Tears well and then descend on her face.

  “We couldn’t find Tracy’s family,” I say. “Just some woman she lived with on Ardmore Street on the southside.”

  “Her peoples lives in Mississippi. You doan need to look for them. They drop her like a sacka shit on dem streets. My ma is dead. Doan know no father.”

  “You ever see them working in Old Town?” Lila asks.

  “Yeah. Seen them a few nights back….In fac’ I see them get into some man’s hooptie.”

  I can’t help my eyes from widening slightly.

  “You get a look at him?”

  She looks suspiciously at me. I’m the male intruder here, to her.

  “Tell him, Halee,” Lila says gently.

  “Naw. It be dark as my black bottom, that night.”

  She tries to grin, but then she remembers why she’s with us.

  “I only see a dark car. Big. Fo’ door. Maybe a Chevy, maybe a Ford. Hell, I doan remember.”

  “What about the john? What about the man?” Lila proceeds.

  “Him? He be tall. Taller’n he be.”

  She nods toward me.

  “You remember anything else?” Lila asks.

  “Yeah. He wearin’ a hoodie. Tryin’ to look like he belong on dese streets. But he was white. I saw a little of the side of his face. He was white, all right.”

  “You didn’t notice the plates on his car?” I ask.

  “Naw. Why’d I look for some a dat?”

  I smile back at her. She seems to soften her glare at me.

  “You gone arrest me?” she asks me directly.

  “We’re not Vice,” Lila tells her.

  But she keeps looking at me, instead.

  “You need a ride back, Halee?”

  She looks back down at the two photographs of the two dead hookers. Then she looks back up at me.

  “Where else I got to go?”

  3

  When I joined the Rangers—that is, when they accepted me—I thought of the military as a life’s career. Then Kelly was conceived and I knew it wasn’t going to happen. I served out my tour and arrived home to become a father. The marriage went south, but I don’t know what direction Mary headed. Just somewhere far away from me and far away from her very young daughter.

  I’d saved up a lot of cash in my two tours in Vietnam. There was nothing to spend money on, for me. I wasn’t on drugs or booze, and I didn’t do the R and R thing in Japan or anywhere else. So I had it socked away pretty good. It got the two of us a small apartment on the far southwest side while I spent some GI Bill on a community college. I hired a babysitter who conveniently lived in the same three flat with Kelly and me, and then I finished my degree at Loop College, near downtown. From there it was the Police Academy, and after hoofing it in uniform, I graduated to Homicide, a few years ago. Been there since.

  Because Kelly saw more of that babysitter than she did of me, and because the majority of time that I spent at home with her she was asleep, we were never very close. It’s not that I don’t love her because I surely do. We just never seemed to be as close as we should have been. And now, of course, she’s like a boarder in the house we finally bought after all those years on the police.

  I remember the flight home from Vietnam to marry a very pregnant Mary. I remember the teasing I got from my brothers in arms—but I knew they were all secretly jealous of my temporary trip back to the World.

  “When you get back, go to fucking Toronto,” Billy James, a staff sergeant whispered to me, the night before I left. We were hunkered in a hootch near a place called Bong Son. It was a tin hut, and the rain was falling softly, making dull thuds against its roof.

  Billy was a brother from Des Moines. He was well-educated. Well-spoken. A college graduate who said he just wanted to see the world outside Des Moines, Iowa.

  “Go to fucking Toronto, Danny. Take your old lady with the baby inside with you. Don’t never come back here.”

  He whispered in the dark to me while seven other Rangers snored in various degrees of loud.

  When I got home, we were married in a civil ceremony. I’m not a practicing Catholic, and Mary called herself an agnostic. Kelly was never officially baptized until I did it when she was just four years old. She’s been in Catholic schools since kindergarten. She did well in grade school—good grades, everything. She started off pretty well at Sacred Heart, too, but her troubles with the eating thing and drugs began when she was in the tenth grade.

  I suppose it was the people she hung with, but she knows, because she’s bright, that she made her own decisions about the things she did, and about the food she didn’t eat. The counselors say it’s about self-esteem. Kelly was a little pudgy in grammar school, but she took off the excess when she hit the high school. The weight loss apparently wasn’t enough, in her eyes, because she gradually stopped eating to the point where it became very noticeable that Kelly wasn’t well.

  We’ve been through counseling and rehab repeatedly. I think she might have given up the smoke and the pills when Sacred Heart began a testing policy that randomly checks students. It seems that she wants to get out of school, now, from what Sister Rachel said. I don’t know of any other reason she’d clea
n herself up. As I said, I never saw needle tracks, but she could have shot up where I wouldn’t have looked.

  She kept telling the counselors that she only did marijuana and a few kinds of pills. I noticed money missing from my wallet a few years ago, when she was a sophomore, but it was chump change, not the kind of money you’d need for the expensive, white girl/white boy suburban shit.

  I never ragged her about the missing money. We were on edge with each other often enough as it was. But then the cash wasn’t disappearing anymore, about the beginning of her junior year, last year. The only problem that was obvious, last year, was the truancy. I thought she might have a boyfriend, but she’d never say. She didn’t say much to me one way or the other until I threatened to throw her out. And then she didn’t say anything—it was the look of betrayal in her eyes. The betrayal was coming from me, I mean.

  I haven’t noticed the odor of pot. I haven’t seen the staggering to bed at night with the reek of booze on her breath. Not lately, not this year. Maybe she has turned the corner. To be honest, I was starting not to care. I was certain she was going to land on the street one night, and like her mother, I’d never see her again. But she’s still boarding with me. Kelly’s probably just biding her time to get out of here, and she’s figured the easiest thing to do is just remain until she’s eighteen and legal.

  Maybe she’ll go to college. I have money saved for her schooling, including a college or university. I had a guy in the police tell me about an investment, and I put a good chunk into it, and I’ve multiplied my investment five times over and then I let it continue to multiple like sex-crazed rabbits. I never touched a penny because that was Kelly’s nest egg. Up until now I never thought I’d be able to spend it on her. I still haven’t talked about the next level of school to her, and she….She never talks to me about much of anything.