The Underground Detective: A Novel of Chicago Streets

by Thomas Laird

  He has odd colored eyes. I’d say they were violet, but I can’t be sure in this light. The sun is on the other side of the building, and the room we’re in is in shadow. I can’t be sure about his eyes, as I say.

  He’s a good-looking man—as attractive as the guy who did the hookers, I’d say. I can picture the girls sidling right up to that Taurus and looking forward to boinking a guy as handsome as Raymond Toliver. I mean, a guy as handsome as Franklin Toliver appears to be, from the artist’s version of him. They wouldn’t think twice about hopping into that ride. Good-looking young man. Well groomed, like his old man, even with the hoodie hiding his hair. They’d probably just think the young guy was flashing fashion with the hooded sweatshirt. He was being cool, being fly. They’d love having the opportunity to screw someone who didn’t look like he’d been dragged through the gutters, for once.

  “What was your son’s relationship with his mother like? I mean, were they close?” I ask.

  He stares at me.

  “I’m not a doctor. I assume you talked to the physician at Elgin.”

  “Yes sir. But I’m asking you, if you don’t mind.”

  He looks toward Lila as if he’s trying to recruit a confederate. She simply gazes serenely back at him, with no expression on her face at all.

  “He did not get on with his mother. I’m sure the analyst brought all that up with you.”

  “How bad was it?” I continue.

  He looks down at the oaken slab. His eyes never come back up.

  “Does my son need a lawyer?” he asks us both.

  “Your son needs to turn himself in so we can clear all this up.”

  He looks at me, now.

  “Do you have children?” he asks sadly.

  “I have a daughter. Yes.”

  Lila looks over at me.

  “He has never given us a moment’s rest. Not from the hour he was delivered until right now.”

  He looks at Lila as if he’s asking her to come onto his side, but her non-expression lingers on her pretty face.

  “Never. Not from the minute he yelped his first breath,” the Lieutenant Governor says.

  13

  We search in vain for Franklin Toliver. He slipped away from us as easily as he did the security people at Elgin. The vehicle he drove rests in impound, and there is no remnant evidence remaining in the Ford. It has been gone over dozens of times to no purpose.

  He’s probably grabbed a new ride. He has the funds to pay cash. We accessed his bank account and found that his balance was just over $72,000—mom and pop have been very generous to sonny since he seems to have never have held a job longer than two months. The employment has always been temporary work, fast food and so on. He never finished a college degree, so has no marketable skills.

  He was thrown out of Western a long time ago, and he’s made no attempt at gaining an education since then. But with a wad sitting in the bank, why worry about making ends meet? He’d always crashed in DesPlaines whenever he needed a place to go, and even though he’s supposed to have issues with mommy, she still lets him light in their roost.

  We can’t freeze his account because we haven’t got grounds to officially charge him with anything. He is simply and officially wanted for questioning. However, we can trace his withdrawals from that checking account. He uses checks, so we can be waiting at the twelve branches for him to come get cash. But it’s impractical. We can’t have cops sitting at twelve different locations six days a week.

  Instead, we leave word with the managers at those locations that if Franklin comes calling for his bucks, we’re to receive an immediate phone call. His last withdrawal was two weeks ago, and the amount was two thousand. He can submerge for quite a while with that kind of coin, as long as he doesn’t have expensive tastes. The average hooker runs you between $25 and $50 bucks for one throw, Al the Vice dick tells us. The expensive hos charge anything you want to pay them, but they’re more inclined to do their trade in a Loop hotel where the real money lives. They do guys with corporate plastic—not that they use their cards for the price. I’d imagine they take out cash on the card and then claim it was for “entertainment purposes” for their clients or for themselves. The white collar critter doesn’t tend to be dumb enough to leave a paper trail.

  Which gives me the epiphany that maybe junior’s not cashing his checks anymore. Maybe he’s receiving his money from somebody else. Like mommy or daddy. Maybe one of his parents has become a bagman for Franklin. He’s been smart before, and why should he go dumb now that we’re onto him? He knows that we know about his checking account, so he wouldn’t be stupid enough to try and drain the pond there.

  Lila and I decide to watch Geraldine Toliver. We figure the Lieutenant Governor’s a bit too high profile to be the dropoff guy for his nutjob son. And from the way the father talked about his beloved progeny, I don’t think dad wants much to do with Franklin, right about now. I know there are supposed to be “problems” between mother and son, but “problems” has always been a vague area in this case.

  Since we don’t have his car to run down anymore and since he’s backed off from doubling his pleasure with any whores lately, we decide it’s all we’ve got going for ourselves, currently.

  We park the car a half block down from the two-acre house in DesPlaines. We don’t want the Staties to see us and run our city plates. Officially, we’re out of bounds, outside the city limits, but we have the right to park ourselves on public thoroughfares. So we sit and wait.

  Lila brings paperbacks with her. She’s a big fan of the San Francisco poets, she tells me. Her favorite poet is Lawrence Ferlinghetti. I’ve read a few of his things because Lila has offered them to me, and I have to say I think he’s a helluva lot funnier than most of the poets I had to read in high school and in college. I despised Robert Frost. I was always hoping he’d enter those snowy woods and stay the fuck in there. Perhaps it was my immaturity, back in high school, but I was never much of a fan of verse.

  She reads because it is still daylight. We figure if mommy’s going to make a drop for her loving son, it’ll be when the banks are open. We could be wrong, of course. She might want to do her deed by darkness, but then it might look a bit stranger for her to be out alone at night. We have to have an excuse lined up for our Captain, in any case. He has not repeated his veiled warning about expending too many man and woman hours on Franklin, but he hasn’t told us to charge after Toliver full-blast, either.

  The Captain really can’t repeat that speech now, of course. Not when it’s been made public via the press that Raymond Toliver’s son is a person of interest in what has now become a high profile case. The Sun- Times has made it a very big deal with the numerous articles about our mysterious underground suspect. The writer’s name is Jack Phelan. He’s tried to interview both of us at HQ, but we’ve given him the standard “no comment” routine. His appearance at our place was all for show. Lila’s been talking to him via a payphone, I imagine. She wouldn’t use her home phone or the one in her office.

  “You really think his mother’s the candyman, Danny?”

  “I don’t know. But I’d think his two grand might have dwindled considerably for someone who’s being pursued by the FBI and the State Police and the CPD. It must be kind of expensive, moving around every day or two. And his face is plastered everywhere, still, so we can always hope for a sighting of this shitbird.”

  “You think I was wrong to call Phelan.”

  “I never heard you say that, Lila.”

  “Do you think I was wrong?”

  I look into her great set of eyes, blue as the bluest sky.

  “I would’ve called him if you hadn’t.”

  She stares out the windshield.

  “She’s moving,” Lila observes.

  A tan Mercedes comes rolling out over the crushed gravel driveway. It looks like Geraldine’s driving. She turns left onto the side street, and Lila pulls our Ford slowly away from the curb.

  The plates match Geraldi
ne’s registration. We got a list of their vehicles from DMV.

  We follow the Mercedes through DesPlaines as she makes her way to the Stevenson Expressway, and once she exits onto 55 Chicago, we’re headed toward the city. The traffic is still light. It won’t glom up until around 4:00 P.M. Then rush hour will snarl everything up until well after six. You don’t want to be on this expressway during rush unless you enjoy rage.

  She keeps heading east, all the way to the Lakeshore Drive North exit. We stay well back from her just in case she’s seen The French Connection or some other cop flick that suggests everything’s a high-speed chase, in our line of work. I prefer low speed pursuits, myself. I’m not a fan of cars or of car races. They’re damned dangerous. In fact, I’d choose a firefight back in the War to a haul-ass chase on these city streets. I’d still take my chances with the Viet Cong instead of with Chicago lunatic drivers.

  Once we’re on Lake Shore, we slow down as we hit the Loop. The curve that comes right after you’ve left the southside always slows things down to a virtual crawl. Once you get past the near north on the Lake, things open up to about 45 mph. We’re at that juncture of the Drive now.

  She keeps heading north along the lakeshore.

  When we finally get to Tuohy Avenue, she gets off. Then she begins to head west again. (You can’t go east unless you want to get wet.) She takes us all the way out to Mannheim Road. We can see jets heading north over our heads because O’Hare isn’t far south of here.

  Her destination is Rockwood and Wentworth. We’re at the very western periphery of the city. We stop the car at the curb about three hundred feet from where she’s parked. We’re on the east side of the block. Rockwood runs north and south, and we’re facing north, as the Mercedes is.

  Geraldine gets out of her ride and walks up to a three flat. It’s brick and very upscale for the city. This is no blue collar neighborhood. This is where whites fled in order to avoid the influx of blacks and Hispanics, back in the 1960s. These hoods have remained white and upper middle class in spite of the blockbusters, who operated back when I was in high school, in the middle ‘60s.

  Lila gets out of the car to get the address, and when she does, she hurriedly returns to our car. We call in the address and find out the names of the residents from our address directory downtown.

  “Fred Carraway, John Meyers and Victoria Landers. Bottom to top, that’s who lives there.”

  Nothing goes off when we hear those names.

  “Does she have a boyfriend?” I proffer.

  “Why not a girlfriend, Victoria?” Lila smiles.

  We wait for her to come back out. She’s in there only twenty minutes. When she gets back into the Mercedes and takes off, we follow her. We figure it might have been an errand, but we’ll come back later and check out the three residents.

  Geraldine makes two other stops before she makes the long trip back to DesPlaines. Once she returns to the Stevenson West, we cut off at the Loop and return to Headquarters.

  Later in the evening we stop at all the places Geraldine Toliver visited. We come up with absolutely nothing. They claim to be friends of the Tolivers, all of them. They knew each other at college or at church or something, but none of them seems to know anything about Franklin. They become sullen, all of them, when we mention her son’s name. We’re getting nothing from any of the interviewees at all three stops, so we give it up and live to fight another day.

  May brings some of the best spring weather we’ve had in a long time. It’s fragrant and soft. The temperatures are in the low seventies, and the humidity is equally comfortable.

  Kelly graduates on May 21st. I’ve already made arrangements to have the day off. I will not miss her big day because my daughter hasn’t had her share of big days. She’s continued to work very hard all year, and she’s dragged her grade point average up almost to the “B” level. It’s at 2.86, which is a far piece from the 2.1 she was sporting for three years, almost. She was always smart enough to get by with “Cs” even when she was truant and blown out—that’s how bright she really is. I have no doubt she’d be hovering in the top ten if she’d ever shown up to school and shown up sober.

  Which is all history. The past is prologue, no? That’s the positive way to look at it.

  That’s the way I look at it as I sit with her in group in the outpatient program for eating disorders and addiction at St. Luke’s Hospital on the southwest side.

  There are four sets of parent(s) and patients. All four patients are females. Kelly is the healthiest looking kid in here. It appears the other three kids have a long road ahead of them.

  We finally get around the circle of chairs to Kelly and me. I’m here, like the other parents, to listen and observe. Today it’s the kids who get to talk. The therapist is a nice-looking babe named Christine—thirty or so, brunette, dynamically built. Married, according to the rock on her left hand. Christine has an engaging smile. She looks at Kelly and asks her how she’d like to begin today.

  “I think I’m still mad at my mother.”

  The smile leaves my face. It’s down to business for my daughter.

  “That was a long time ago, wasn’t it?” Christine asks.

  The other three girls and the three pairs of parents are all watching us. I couldn’t tell you what any of them looked like. I have jettisoned my cop’s awareness. All I can see is Kelly and the good-looking brunette therapist. No one else is suddenly in the room.

  “How could you leave a child as young as I was? I mean, how could you?”

  Christine has no reply, and I’m supposed to be listening and observing.

  “I could never do that to her,” Kelly tells her. She’s talking only to the therapist, right now.

  Kelly begins to cry, but there are no audible clues. She doesn’t make any snuffling noises, but the tears meander down her cheeks as if they were involuntarily shed. I feel the pangs of moisture prick at the corners of my own eyes, but I maintain my composure.

  “So what happens now?” the therapist asks. “What happens today?”

  “I know. I know I have to learn to live with it even though I’m never going to forget it. I can’t let her leaving ruin my life. I know all that.”

  “It’s what you do, not what you say, Kelly,” Christine answers.

  “Yes. I know.”

  “Knowing and doing are a very different kind of animal from each other,” the counselor says gently.

  Kelly nods.

  “Are you glad your dad is coming to these sessions?”

  She nods again, slowly.

  “Are you going to try and talk to him more than you have?”

  “I haven’t talked to him at all….But it’s not your fault, Daddy. Any of this. I’m sorry I made it seem like it was. You never left me. Momma did. I’m sorry.”

  Then I can’t hold back, and Christine has the Kleenex box in front of me before I can even ask for it. But then she’s probably seen a lot of this.

  “What do you want for graduation?” I ask Kelly on the drive back home.

  “I’ve never seen you cry before,” she tells me.

  “You’re mistaken. I had something in my eye.”

  “In both of them?” she grins.

  “If you tell anybody I’ll just deny it.”

  “Tough guy. Airborne. Rangers.”

  “That’s right, little girl. Don’t ever forget it.”

  She looks out the passenger’s side window as we head home.

  “Are you still mad at Momma, too?” she asks as she watches the dark shapes on the blocks recede behind us.

  “Yes,” I reply.

  She looks at my face as if she’s studying it.

  “What do you want for graduation?” I repeat.

  She watches me a bit longer.

  Then she clasps my hand on the steering wheel lightly. Her touch is like a feather. It’s barely there.

  “I want you to stop being mad at her,” Kelly tells me.

  14

  On graduation ni
ght, Lila comes along with me. Since I took the day off, she figured she’d follow her partner’s lead. Kelly invited her to the ceremony at Sacred Heart about a month ago on an evening when Lila dropped me home after a day shift.

  There are slightly over two hundred graduates in Kelly’s class. The gymnasium at Sacred Heart holds a little over a thousand, I’d estimate, but every seat on the bleachers and on the floor is occupied. It’s sweltering in here because they have no air conditioning. The school was built when Lincoln was a teenager, I figure, and Catholics are notorious about hanging onto a buck. I never understood why Jews have the reputation of being tight-fisted. The Catholics I’ve known always had their first dollar in a frame over the mantel.

  Lila is excited about being Kelly’s guest. I never would have thought she might want to come, even though I know my daughter and my partner like each other. They’ve never had much time together, but they seem to hit it off every time they’re around each other.

  The whole deal lasts a little over an hour. Lila is impressed with their dispatch.

  “My Academy graduation took three and a half hours.”

  She graduated from the Air Force Academy in Colorado.

  We’re filing out of the gym. I have my arm around Kelly, and she’s got her arm around my waist, and I’m wondering about when it was that I last even touched my kid. So I squeeze her while I can.

  She’s put on maybe fifteen pounds, and she looks the best she has since—

  I can’t recall her looking this good, ever.

  Lila takes hold of her from the other side, and we walk toward my car. We’re taking Kelly to Donnellen’s for a graduation dinner. Kelly asked that a friend of hers come along with us, and he meets us outside, by my ride.

  “I’m Mike Carroll,” the tall, handsome, athletic-looking young man tells us.