The Underground Detective: A Novel of Chicago Streets

by Thomas Laird

  I shake hands with him, and his grip is firm but not overly aggressive. Lila introduces herself, and she shakes with him, also.

  Then I look over at Kelly’s face, and I see it right away.

  Mike Carroll’s the reason she’s here tonight, with her diploma in hand and fifteen lovely pounds on her newly healthy frame.

  I look over at Lila, and she smiles back at me, and she knows now, too.

  We visit some people who knew Franklin Toliver. We begin with the dean at Western Illinois University in Macomb. It takes us a few hours to get there from the city, but I figure we have to know this goof to find him. Hunters have to understand the kind of animal they’re stalking. It’s not a luck thing, tracking somebody down. It’s about preparation.

  The dean’s name is Bob Milton. He’s in charge of discipline. In other words, he’s the man who threw Franklin out of school.

  “If I could’ve had him jailed, I would’ve.”

  He looks almost angry as he says it.

  Milton is nearing retirement, I’d suppose. Must be in his middle sixties at least. He’s probably had a tummy full of puerile college boys and frat rats.

  “Why wasn’t he sent up for the thing with the young lady?” Lila asks him.

  “She didn’t want to get into a trial. She didn’t want the trauma. It’s not an unusual way for young women to go. They’ve already been abused, and they don’t want a defense lawyer to do it again in a courtroom. And we know who Franklin’s father is.”

  “Yes, we do,” I confess.

  “He’d had scrapes with women before. I even had a complaint from a teaching assistant he had in an English course. He kept bothering her about going out with him. And then she began to receive strange phone calls. We presumed it was Franklin, but the calls were all made from various payphones off campus, so we couldn’t prove anything—the police, I mean. They tried to trace the calls on her line, and the caller was running all over Macomb. He knew what he was doing.”

  “How were you able to can him, then?” Lila asks.

  “His grades were dismal. There were several complaints from his resident advisors. It finally accumulated enough for us to get rid of him.”

  The graying man looks somberly at both of us.

  “Do you really think he’s a murderer?” he asks us.

  “We intend to find out,” is all I can respond.

  We take lunch in one of the campus bar and grills—O’Flannagan’s. I don’t know anything about this university and neither does Lila, but we’re hungry after the multiple hour drive and O’Flannagan’s is packed, which suggests to me that somebody must like what they’re selling.

  “I think Kelly applied here,” I tell Lila over the roar of Def Leppard on the jukebox.

  “What?” she squints at me. So I repeat what I said.

  “Oh,” she replies. “I thought she wanted to be a nurse or a doctor.”

  “She applied at a few places. She wants to do it all on her own, but I think I have her softened up to let me help her. I’ve been saving for her college ever since I was in the Army.”

  “I’ve seen you two. Before and after. That’s what it looks like. Before and after. It’s amazing.”

  “I always loved her. I’m glad she’s finally letting me.”

  Lila grasps my left hand. We’re sitting at the bar because there were no tables available and we still have a long drive back to the city to look forward to. I actually do look forward to the trip back because it allows me to be alone with her. Other than on the job, there doesn’t seem to be any other excuse to see her. I don’t ask her anywhere on our off hours because I can’t bear the awkwardness of hearing a polite refusal from her.

  I’m certain it is my male ego at work, but I can’t understand how she can blow so hot and cold. The few times we were together felt like the beginning of something with her, and they wound up being terminal—or at least it feels that way, sometimes.

  In the War, I was used to reading people. The men I was with in the Rangers. The enemy we sought. The brass we took shit from. The indigenous personnel in all the tiny hamlets and villages we humped through. All those human beings had a “tell,” just like in poker. There was something about their faces or their body language that betrayed what they were really thinking. It was part of my job to be able to read the trail on their faces.

  But with Lila, it’s hard or impossible. I’ve almost stopped trying to decipher her moods or her state of mind. Either she’s too good at concealment or I’m losing my touch.

  Our food finally arrives. Two cheeseburgers. Burgers are usually a reliable choice in a bar and grill. I take a bite, and it is better than edible.

  Then I put my sandwich back on the plate. The music has ceased for a moment, so I turn to my partner.

  “I’m in love with you,” I tell her.

  She looks at me carefully, and then she places her own burger back on the plate next to her fries.

  “I’m in love with you, too, Danny, and I’m not happy about it at all.”

  We head back to the city, and it’s uncomfortably quiet in the car as Lila drives us, so I put the radio on to an FM station that’s coming in, all this way from Chicago. It’s a rock station, and Lila doesn’t protest my selection.

  “Why are you not happy about it?”

  “Because it’ll screw things up.”

  “Screw what things up?” I ask.

  “Our professional relationship, for one. My career, for another.”

  “You’re aiming higher?” I ask.

  “Yeah. Aren’t you?” she asks me back.

  “No. I figure on being in Homicide until I retire or hit a slab. I like the work. I thought you did, too.”

  “I do. But I want to move up in the Department.”

  “You want to be the first female Commander, huh?” I smile.

  “Yes,” she replies, with a dead serious stare.

  “I’m not being a smartass, Lila. I don’t have problems with a woman—“

  “You don’t? You really don’t, Danny?”

  “No, I really do not.”

  She looks at me suspiciously.

  “What makes you think I’ve got anything against—“

  “Mary, for starters.”

  I look over at her, but I haven’t got any answers.

  “Look, Danny. I want something without the baggage.”

  “You mean Kelly?”

  “I do not mean the kid.”

  “Then why can’t you ever say her name?”

  “I say her name.”

  She reddens slightly at the cheekbones.

  “No, as a matter of public record, you always call her ‘the kid.’”

  “It’s a term of affection.”

  “What the hell is this baggage? You mean Mary, again?”

  “Yes. That’s exactly what I mean.”

  “What about her? She left me a long time ago. It’s over.”

  “Is it, Danny? Is it really?”

  Then I remember Kelly asking me to forgive her mother, and I go quiet.

  “Nothing left to say?” she asks.

  I look out the windshield at the highway. We’re about an hour away from the Loop, depending on traffic, as always.

  I turn the radio off and close my eyes.

  “Okay, then,” she says. I can see the anger burning in there. This time I can read her perfectly, but I turn away and close my eyes and listen to the tires humming on the blacktop.

  I’m alone in my office in the HQ by the Lake. She offered to drop me home, but I told her I had paperwork to do. So she took off without another word. We spent the last fifty minutes of the ride back from the university in total silence. I think my going quiet on her was what pissed her off the most. Lila, like most women, like most human beings, has a real problem with indifference.

  And indifferent is the last thing I am about her. I don’t know why I clammed up. I guess I was angry, too. Angry that she had me so well-pegged. I have not gotten rid of my anger at my
wife’s desertion. I have never let go of it, and now I have Lila and Kelly both on my ass about my pent-up emotion aimed at my one-time wife.

  I don’t take betrayal well. Not in my personal life or anywhere else. One thing I could count on in Vietnam was the men I fought with. It was the only thing you could count on. Without the surrounding grunts to look after your ass, you were lost.

  In romantic relationships betrayal is commonplace. In the military it means either a brutal confrontation in which someone’s ass is in a world of hurt, or it means death to the betrayer. There is no civility involved in dealing with backstabbing motherfuckers. You beat them bad enough to be hospitalized or you save the medics the trouble of patching them back up. I was never put in such a situation in southeast Asia, but as soon as I got home, damn near, she simply walked, on me.

  I know I should be able to distinguish between battle and life in The World, but to me some virtues and vices are universal. Some shit you simply do not do, especially to those who care about you.

  Mary crossed the line, and the line distinguishes what is and is not forgivable.

  I try to occupy myself with work, with the jackets I’ve read over and over about each homicide Lila and I are involved with. But I can’t concentrate.

  “I love you, too, Danny, and I’m not happy about it at all.”

  Or something close to that.

  I should be celebrating. Lila admitted she loves me. Sort of. At least she said the words.

  But there’s always a goddamned “but.” There’s always a fucking “however.” That exclusive word that negates every other damn thing you just heard. What she said ought to be a cause for joy, for celebration. But I don’t feel like popping the bubbly. All I feel is dead empty because she says I’m carrying weight around over my ex-wife, and that weight will always come between us.

  Not to mention her career aspirations. I don’t begrudge her a life above where we are now. It’d be great if she rose to Commander.

  Great for her, I suppose, because if she did start to elevate, I’d be left down here. And dating or bedding your partner is an official no-no in the CPD. If anyone even catches the drift that we’re a couple or that we’ve been coupling, they’ll separate us.

  And a partner is all she is, right now. Lila is stubborn. I read that much about her, for sure. Once she gets a notion in her head, she’s not likely to let go of it very easily. She can be like a little badger on pet theories. I’ve seen her that way before.

  She thinks I’m hung up about Mary cutting Kelly and me loose, and the sad fact is that she’s absolutely dead on right about it.

  June first, and here I am. Sitting in the waiting room. No one else is here. Two o’clock in the afternoon on my one day off this week. Franklin Toliver runs loose like a mad hound of hell in the streets, and I’m here in a waiting room. Waiting. Which is what these places are for, of course.

  Lila is God knows where on her free day. I never talk to her on the phone, lately. We only see each other on the job, and we don’t breach personal shit, anymore.

  Kelly has her college choices narrowed to three: Northern Illinois at DeKalb, Illinois State University in Normal, and Western Illinois in Macomb. All three are public universities. We can afford them—I can afford them, I mean—but Kelly has insisted on taking the Federal Loan, if not the private loan. I’ll take care of what the feds don’t pay. My nest egg is now in six digits. The market has been very kind.

  She wants to get a bachelor’s degree as well as her nursing certificate, the RN.

  I actually see Mike Carroll at the house, now. They must have been seeing each other outside our home, because the night of graduation was the first time I ever laid eyes on him. It must be going pretty seriously between Kelly and him because she says they plan on going to the same school together, in the fall. Mike graduated from a public high school, not far from Sacred Heart.

  I’m ruminating, I suppose you’d call it. My mind wanders, here in this waiting room.

  Then the receptionist gets a buzz at her phone. The fifty-something blonde smiles up at me.

  “Dr. Fernandez will see you now,” she beams at me.

  I rise from my chair and I put the unread sports magazine back on the table.

  Then I head toward the Department psychiatrist’s office.

  15

  The other people who encountered Franklin didn’t like him much, either. There were no true girlfriends. He was good looking enough to date frequently in high school and at college, but no one wanted a second taste. Franklin is beginning to fit a true Quantico version of “sociopath.” He’s a loner, he has trouble making lasting relationships, he’s white, he’s the right age but on the younger side of the spectrum, and he has no noticeable conscience, according to those who know him at all.

  The mother and father have refused to grant us an interview unless we have some kind of legal justification to “invade our privacy.” Franklin is still wanted for questioning, officially, but nothing more. Our hands are tied, and the Captain informs me that the Lieutenant Governor’s attorneys are very high powered. In other words, he won’t fuck with them until there’s an arrest warrant for the younger Toliver.

  As far as we know, he hasn’t broken any laws—unless we pick him up for dumping his car in the Lake, and I doubt we could prove it was Franklin who did that little trick. He doesn’t leave witnesses or evidence. Leaving Elgin when he was voluntary was not illegal, either, so we can’t nab him for going AWOL out of the nuthouse.

  We will inevitably catch up with this little prick. He can’t stay below the radar for much longer because too many agencies are looking for him. But I hope we get him before the FBI or the Staties do. They’ll have to turn him over to us because all of the murders were done in our province, in Chicago. I don’t want anyone else talking to him first. I know it sounds like bureaucratic bullshit, but I want a throw at Franklin without anyone else muddying his water.

  Dr. Fernandez is Dr. Arlene Fernandez, and I think she’s the singularly most beautiful Hispanic woman I have ever encountered. I don’t know why she inherited “Arlene,” but she looks very much the Latina. Brown eyes, tawny colored skin, including her face. Full, exotic lips, with just a slight touch of pink lipstick. I’m happy I showed up to see her, after all.

  This is my second trip. I’m scheduled to see her once a week until she tells me otherwise, and since the department picks up the tab because she works for the CPD, I’m not worried about her bill. Psychiatrists are a luxury, in my salary bracket.

  There is no couch in her office. I’m almost disappointed. In the movies there’s always a leather couch. In here it’s just a simple but comfortable cushioned straight-backed chair. I can rest my head against the back, because the back goes up higher than my head by about a foot. It’s a recliner for a giant, except it doesn’t recline.

  “How are you?” she begins.

  I grin at her and she grins back.

  “I take it you’re still in pursuit of the main event,” she smiles slyly.

  “Yes. We are still hacking away.”

  I’ve already told her about Lila because what I say in here, she repeatedly underscores, is in strictest confidence and the Department can’t use it against me.

  “How about the personal front?”

  She uses military jargon frequently, which leads me to believe she might have been GI at one point in her life. It’s one way to get the school bills paid.

  “Same, also.”

  She nods.

  “Things are moving along with your daughter?”

  “Yeah. She’s settled on Northern Illinois since her boyfriend got a partial ride there for baseball.”

  She knows about Kelly’s ongoing battle with bulimia and addiction, and she was genuinely pleased to hear about the help they gave her at Sacred Heart and she very much liked hearing I’m going to counseling with my daughter.

  My time here is cloudier, though. She wants to talk about things outside the realm of Kelly and Lila, t
he only two people I really have in my life. (And I’m not at all sure where Lila is, currently, in my little sphere of existence.)

  “You are angry with Mary. It’s understandable. What you do with that anger is very important. We’ve already discussed that it’ll probably never vanish, Danny. Forgiveness may sound easy from a pulpit or an analyst’s office, but it is very difficult to deal with in the real world where people hurt bad when other people disrupt their lives, the way your wife did your world and Kelly’s world.”

  I sit and watch her.

  “Do you have stress over what happened in Vietnam?”

  “You mean to me or toward the general situation?” I ask her.

  “Both,” she replies, her hands clasped on top of her blond-colored desk. Her fingernails are the same pink rose color that she sports on her lush lips.

  “I’m not sure what you want me to say,” I tell her.

  “Do you feel guilt at what you did there?”

  “Yes. Sometimes.”

  “But not always?”

  “I killed people in self-defense. I never scoped anyone who wasn’t trying to kill me and the people around me.”

  “But just the act of killing didn’t disturb you?”

  “No. It was what I was trained to do. It’s what the military trains everyone to do. Kill, that is. We were not a fraternal order, Doctor. We didn’t sandbag rivers during the flood. That’s the Red Cross, not us.”

  I smile to show her I’m not venting at her.

  “I was a Marine,” she grins. “Semper fi.”

  “They paid your way through school?”

  “After I got out, they helped, yes. God bless the GI bill,” she smiles again.

  “You go to Vietnam?” I ask.

  “No, it was slightly before my time.”

  She looks like she’s somewhere in her mid to late thirties. She’s ripe, a flat-out beautiful woman. Not wearing a ring, either.

  “Back to you, Danny.”

  “Back to me. Yes, I killed people, and I sometimes regret killing in general, but I honestly didn’t lose any sleep killing VC honchos who killed quite a number of the guys I served with. I didn’t walk away from Vietnam with any recurring nightmares. I know you folks like to talk about dreams.”