The Underground Detective: A Novel of Chicago Streets

by Thomas Laird

  “So stop. It’s not your fault. He was going for his first foursome. That’s why he was cruising and that’s why he stopped for us. He must have made us. Maybe I’m too old for the role. Maybe if he hadn’t made Carol and me, maybe he wouldn’t have stopped and then run—“

  “He would’ve killed them anyway.”

  “No one found a trace of him on the west side.”

  “No. No trace. He vanished, like a fucking illusionist.”

  “Uh uh. He was just headed in another direction, away from us. It’s called misdirection, Danny.”

  “He’s very adept at misdirection. Maybe we ought to call him ‘The Master Illusionist.’ Give him a name the papers’ll grab hold of.”

  “This dick would love the acclaim.”

  “You think so, Dr. Freud?”

  “This was a crowd pleaser, in his head. Like to bet on the psychiatric profile he’s going to rate, now that he’s a big league series killer?”

  “No bet. I should have stopped and tried to put out the fire.”

  “With what, Danny? Your hands?”

  I know she’s right, and I know I shouldn’t punish myself for what this guy’s done, but it’s inevitable that at some point you get personally involved in some cases. No matter how detached we’re trained to be, these guys can sink the barb right into your guts, into your heart.

  Who else but the Bears would have a World Championship deflated by an historical event like the explosion of the Challenger? The day we heard about it, just after the New Year, a deadening thud replaced the celebration that had engulfed Chicago. We were winners of the Super Bowl, we’d bitch slapped New England, but now it was all settled back into perspective by what happened to our astronauts.

  Death’ll do that to people. It’ll remind us all that we’re on a very short leash.

  A decade and more ago, I was still in a jungle, waiting to return to the World. I was part of this country’s most unpopular war and a member of its biggest tragedy—tragedy when it came to waste. A lot of good people died in Vietnam, Americans and Vietnamese. It was unnecessary, the way all wars are at their roots unnecessary.

  They say you can’t fathom a war until two generations go by after its close. It takes fifty years or so to figure out what really happened.

  What really happened? We killed them, big time, and they killed us to a lesser extent, but pretty big time also, and nothing changed. I’ve heard people talk about the lessons of war. There aren’t any we don’t already know. What? Don’t shoot your bro? Thou shalt not kill? Kind of old sermons, no?

  I was in an elite outfit. I was a sniper for a while, and then just a regular grunt who participated in some ventures across borders. All of which I am not at liberty to expound on. I wouldn’t go on about my “exploits” if I wanted to, which I don’t. There’s nothing heroic in what we did. The best thing we did was survive. Not all of us did, of course. That’s why there are 58,000 or so heartsick families still grieving their losses in that lost war.

  It almost sounds like I’m some Confederate bemoaning the outcome of the Civil War, doesn’t it? Well, it was a civil war there, too. Just not ours. No one invited us, really. We crashed that fucking party. Maybe Diehm wanted us there, but they shot his ass, anyway. His own people topped him. They say he was our puppet, but I thought we were the guys who abhorred colonialism and imperialism.

  What brought all this on? The loss just keeps happening. The two newest victims, Marla Donald and LaSharon Martin, had no families to speak of. Just like the previous four girls. We’ve found out that the most recent victims were also whores. Strumpets, hos….Whatever you want to diminish their being with by use of demeaning appellation, they were just human beings. Who the hell gives this guy the okay to pull their plugs?

  Who the hell gave us the high sign to terminate all those Vietnamese? Which in turn wasted 58,000 of our finest? (I’m sure there were a great many lumps of flesh on either side who got waxed, but who the hell cares? Good and bad and mediocre, they were still someone’s little boy (or girl) at some point in their histories.

  I don’t usually get caught up in the funk of regret. We were taught to follow orders, in the War, and we did. When they said assassinate, we killed. When they said intercede in a village, we stepped right in. We did what we were told, and most of us never considered the moral weight of our actions.

  But we all had doubts from time to time, no matter how patriotic you think you are, and if your brain functions you sometimes have to know that what you’re up to is evil.

  Which is why I became a Homicide. It’s cut and dried. Murder is evil. A no-brainer. You don’t have to ponder all the possibilities; all you have to do is catch the bastards and let someone else talk about their inhuman behavior.

  All you have to do is catch them and hope that justice happens. It’s not like that in a war. I never heard any grunt blathering about “ah, the humanity!” We just ate and drank and shit and pissed and humped the landscape and killed some indigenous personnel we were told to kill. Right and wrong didn’t come into play very often.

  Marla Donald and LaSharon Martin weren’t working Old Town. They were working north of the district. He’s moved his area of operations slightly north, but far enough away to become more unpredictable.

  As unpredictable as he was asphyxiating those two black girls in his trunk.

  The car was indeed stolen. Recently. It was green, not blue, but he either got himself a new ride with this car, or the witnesses mistook the color of the vehicle from the beginning of this investigation. I think they probably blew the color of the car. It’s hard to tell hue at night, even if the streets are somewhat illuminated.

  I don’t recall how happy I really was to come home here in 1972. The marriage to Mary wasn’t joyous, and this is a hard town, anyway. There are no soft spots that I can think of in Chicago. All of the sides in this burg have reps for being tough and rowdy. There are bad hoods in every direction you head, around here. It’s not something relegated to the southside, as some would have you think.

  I’m just old enough to remember the stink of the now-closed stockyards. They used to take school children on field trips to the stockyards, but having little guys watch the execution of lambs and calves caused too many traumas. I wonder who the geniuses were who figured watching slaughter could be educational? They probably have PhDs and very fucked up offspring of their own, right now.

  There are great museums. There is the Art Institute. There are the Lakeshore and Wrigley and Comiskey. There are the Planetarium and a score of other classy places that dot the landscape in Chicago. It ain’t all barrio, of course.

  The city I know has blood on the pavement. Comes with the line of work. I don’t see a lot of happy faces, old or young. I see faces set in shades of gray—that’s rigor mortis taking over. The heat and the color leave the body, the face, and then there’s just a waxy impression remaining. I know it sounds depressing and gloomy as hell, but it’s the city that I see, in my field of endeavor.

  Was I happy to come home in 1972? Of course. But that’s only a partial answer. I was happy to leave Vietnam more than I was to return to my life.

  I’m only forty. I keep telling myself that. I have half my life yet to live, if statistics don’t lie. I can find love and someone to love, if my luck doesn’t totally remain stagnant. In other words, if things don’t stay the way they are.

  I have a kid who wants to be somewhere else every time I enter the room. I have a partner who may or may not be bisexual. And she may or may not feel about me the way I feel about her. I have an ex-wife who is somewhere out there in the forest primeval.

  And I have six dead bodies that are unaccounted for. “He tasks me. He heaps me.”

  I read that somewhere, but I can’t remember where.

  Was I happy to come home? There’s the question, Hamlet.

  8

  “ S

  eeing a white boy in my neighborhood after dark is even stranger than seeing a white boy around her
e in the daylight.”

  Karen Adams is an RN who lives on the west side. She lives, in fact, on 17th and Stewart, which is just a few blocks removed from the scene of the chase. Karen is a tall African American woman. She’s very attractive. And being a registered nurse, I’m wondering why she still lives around here.

  “I take care of my mother. She’s eighty-six. This is her house. She won’t leave it.”

  We’ve been scouring these blocks looking for anyone who saw anything unusual on the night we took after the guy in the green car. After two and a half hours of humping the hood, Lila and I came up with a winner on our door-to-door search.

  Karen Adams must be six feet tall. She’s just about eye-to-eye with me. When I showed her the badge, she let us into her ranch style house. The home is all brick, which means it’s been here a long while. Most everything else on the block is sided and pre-fab. Junk, in other words.

  We sit on her tan sectional sofa. I’m in the middle and Lila is on my left.

  “My mother’s at her doctor’s office. They have a service that comes pick them up. It’s one of those mini buses.”

  “Did you get a good look at him?” Lila asks.

  “It was dark, but our street lamps haven’t been shot out on our block, yet,” she smiles sadly.

  She goes on to give us a description that fits the artist’s rendering we already have. It’s our fellow, or someone who’s a lot like him.

  “Did you see the car he drove clearly?” Lila goes on. She continues to scratch notes in her notebook.

  “It was a VW Bug, I’m sure. They’re hard to mistake.”

  “Any idea what color?” I ask.

  “It was dark. Maybe blue, maybe black. I’m not sure. But I got the plate number.”

  “You did?” Lila asks.

  It seems too good to be true. A Homicide’s wet dream. A license plate number!

  “It read WAGON. That’s why I remembered it. That’s why I noticed it,” the black nurse tells us.

  We ask her a few more perfunctory questions, and then we fairly rush out to the squad to get on the radio and try to make the license plates.

  The plates lead us to a residence in Highland Park. The car is registered with William Sanderson.

  There really aren’t residences or houses in Highland Park—there are mostly estates. This is a very wealthy area, one of the richest in the Chicagoland area. You can’t hit the affluence meter any higher than around here.

  A woman answers the door. I’d expected a butler or a housekeeper, but a well-preserved, sixty-something white woman answers our bell. She is stately and tall, almost a Caucasian version of Karen Adams.

  When Lila shows her the ID, a frown takes over her lovely, but ageing face.

  “What’s this about?” she asks, with a thin smile.

  “A homicide investigation, ma’am,” I explain.

  “Homicide? Oh, my,” she says.

  She invites us in, and then she leads us to something that looks like a miniature of a library.

  “This is the study. I hope it’s suitable,” she smiles warmly.

  We sit on individual, plush leather chairs. They’re arranged in a semi-circle. There are shelves of leather bound books behind us, and there is a skylight above us that allows yellow beams to rest upon the carpet beneath us. The rug is a rich amber color. Everything in the place smacks of big cash.

  “Why have you come here?” she wants to know.

  She has large, white teeth. Perfectly straight, unlike my partner’s.

  I explain about the license plates.

  “They belong to my son, William.”

  “Is he here, presently?” Lila engages.

  “Why, yes. Shall I bring him down?”

  I nod, she rises, and then we wait in this lush study.

  In less than five she’s back.

  The kid with her has red hair. Carrot top. He’s got freckles, and he’s pudgy and he’s barely 5’6”, I’d estimate.

  William Sanderson is also his father’s name, we found out. The license plates were in his dad’s name because young William is barely sixteen. They bought him a Toyota, and he managed to get it stolen. The Toyota was recovered but demolished, but the license plates were removed from the wreck. The Sandersons hadn’t got around to reporting the plates as missing, she informed us.

  “We got to sit in a house neither of us’ll ever live in,” Lila groans as we drive back downtown.

  “It was a pretty thought, though, for a little while. Wasn’t it?”

  She nods at me from the passenger’s seat. This time I’m doing the driving.

  If it appears too good to be true, then it probably is, the ancient wisdom reads. And it caught us hoping for a big break. The big illumination, the epiphany.

  None of which is any closer to happening than it was when the bodies started to pile up. Their six names are on our white board. The names in red are the unsolved list. We have nine names in blood red, to date. Six of them are from this hooded spook who’s been toying with us, so far. I don’t know if he’s taunting us or if he gives a shit who’s after him. Either way he pisses me off seriously. Being angry on this job is not being in your happy fucking place. We’re supposed to be objective, and most of the time both Lila and I are cool with the notion that some people get away with murder. But resigning myself to anything was never a particular strong suit, in my own professional profile.

  I’m starting to itch about this son of a bitch. I’m starting to want him. And I know all that does is make him that much more elusive. Any obsession is a sickness. You don’t need a degree in psychology to know all that.

  Lila will eventually tell me to cool off. She’ll suggest we go out and get drunk. Which we never do. It’s just her remedy for me getting strung out and hung up on a case. You do have to let go, occasionally, but it’s way too early to think about giving it up. It just seems like some cases are fixes from the beginning. I don’t like pre-judging our investigations, but this one seems to have been flying south with the fucking geese from the beginning.

  The FBI sticks its ugly federal nose into the six slayings on the third Monday in December. We’re right at the Holidays, the jolliest time for murder in the calendar year. No one wants to work Christmas Eve, Christmas Day or News Year’s Eve or New Year’s Day, but killing doesn’t take time off. It’s much like the War was. Bombs kept booming at unreasonable hours, and weekends didn’t count for jack shit. Bad things just kept on occurring.

  But we get no more twin killings involving hookers. Not since those two died in the green car’s trunk. It lulls you into a false state of ease, when things go suddenly quiet, and in Chicago we have murders almost round the clock. So many people, so many guns and knives. So many frying pans and meat cleavers and other assorted instruments of mayhem.

  The FBI guys are named Travis Rowland and Marty Moriarity. I can’t wait to ask Marty about Sherlock and Dr. Watson, but I’ll have to bide my time.

  Lila gives them both a big smile when they enter my cubicle. Neither of us stands when they enter. There is a well-known sense of adversarial competition between the CPD and the Federal Bureau of Incompetence. We don’t like them and they are indifferent toward us. Unless we have information they can use.

  Travis is a tall blond young man. Looks like a farmer, but when he talks he sounds very articulate, very well educated. I’m thinking he might be a lawyer. Marty is shorter, more cro magnon. Dark hair. Lots on the back of his hands, but not so much on his prematurely sparse top knot. I could see Marty playing the Wolfman in the remake.

  Travis has an eye for Lila. He just about shouts it aloud as he keeps his eyes planted all over her. Marty keeps looking out my window at the skyline of downtown. I have to admit that the tiny view I have is eye-catching. It’s a magnificent Loop, after all.

  “We want to cooperate with you in any way we can,” Travis tells Lila. It’s as if I’ve vacated the room. But now the cro magnon has focused on me.

  “When the bullshit is o
ver, let me know what you want,” I tell the blond Viking.

  “That’s a very negative attitude,” Travis finally smiles my way. “Highly counterproductive, Detective Mangan.”

  At least he knows my name.

  “That was unnecessarily rude, Danny,” Lila erupts, her eyes glaring at mine.

  I’m wondering if she’s taken a hankering for the taller agent.

  “We’ll be happy to help,” Lila smiles at both feds.

  Then they remove themselves and the darkness is gone from my doorway.

  “Don’t have to incite hostility, Danny.”

  “Who else is there to incite?”

  “Very humorous. Maybe we can use them.”

  “It doesn’t work that way, Lila, and you know it. They attempt to use us. That’s how they operate.”

  “Not always,” she grins.

  “You going to used your feminine wiles on the big goof?”

  “He’s an attractive big goof. But I had my eye on the ape man. Think he’s got a sweater growing on his backside?”

  I look out the window and glance at the distant Tribune Building.

  “Are you jealous of the bigger one, Danny?”

  “Nope. Not me.”

  “I think you lie, big boy.”

  “I never lie. Not so’s you’d notice.”

  “I was just trying to appear fraternal. Nothing more. So cool down. Let’s go get a beer.”

  I surprise her and I agree.

  We go to the little joint in the Loop that John Belushi made famous on Saturday Night Live. The Billygoat. The place notorious for “cheesebugga, no Pepsi, Coke.” A lot of the newspaper writers hang here. It’s lunch time, and the small bar is packed. We worm our way to the bar because the few tables are taken.

  I actually order the “cheesebugga,” and after the waiter relays the order at the grill behind the bar, you can hear the cook doing the routine the same way the comedian on the TV does.