The Underground Detective: A Novel of Chicago Streets

by Thomas Laird

  But for now, I’m watching Kelly grow, instead of doing the other thing, and I’ll try to be happy for her and for me, and I’ll try not to listen for footsteps coming up behind us.

  Franklin Toliver has had several sightings, but none of them have been confirmed. None of the girls came from money, and no self-respecting charitable organization or church is willing to pop for reward money. Rich kids have that advantage when they get waxed or snatched. Someone is always willing to put up cash in exchange for justice. Jefferson’s words about equality were, after all, nothing but idealistic. All men are not created equal, politically or any other damn way. If you were ever in a men’s shower room, you already knew that.

  So just to screw my theory, the Chicago Sun-Times ponies up ten thousand bucks for anyone who comes up with evidence or whatever that helps catch the killer or killers of the six girls. Some columnist named Jimmy Malone comes up with a personal crusade to collect even more than the cash the paper’s going to provide, and by the third week in July, the amount has doubled to twenty grand.

  Funny how some people believe that bill of goods about equality that Jefferson tried to sell.

  Anyway, we’ve received a number of calls on Franklin because the Sun-Times has let it slip that he’s a “person of interest.” They’re really taking their balls in hand to mess with a politician’s son that way, but they do have the truth to back them up—Franklin is a person of interest.

  I can see the hairs on our Captain’s neck standing on end when he reads about the Lieutenant Governor’s son in the paper. I wonder if our boss is one of Toliver’s bag men? Maybe he’s just a loyal voter. Or maybe I’m wrong about our honcho. Perhaps the shit is simply cascading on him from above.

  Whatever might be the case, we’re getting calls. But we haven’t nabbed that hooded son of a bitch, yet.

  Lila and I get called to a part of the city where homicides are very infrequent. You don’t find stiffs on the Gold Coast unless they’re dead from natural causes, most of the time. And you don’t find celebrity’s spouses shot and raped in these high rises where security is part of the attraction.

  There is a doorman and there are security guards who sweep all thirty floors constantly, looking out for thieves and muggers. They don’t usually have to look out for murderers and rapists. That’s not the type who frequents this high rise of condos on Michigan Avenue. This is truly the high rent district in the Loop.

  The celebrity is Bill O’Connor. He is the popular talk show host whose program is syndicated in a hundred and fifty markets in North America. He has his own magazine, a la People, but his mag is called BO, a little play on initials for body odor. The magazine caters to movie stars and TV celebrities and the rich and idle of the world. But it ranks second in circulation to the above-mentioned People. It has made O’Connor a very rich schlockmeister. His word is solicited by all kinds of people in order for them to consider themselves “stars.”

  We arrive at 3:42 A.M. Lila and I have the third shift, the graveyard watch, this week. Only Captains are pretty much assured of working solely days. Most killings happen on off hours, anyway. People never seem to be able to get themselves butchered at reasonable hours. It’s a downside of Homicide.

  The ME is still on hand. This time it’s Dr. Garrison. He’s young for this job—maybe forty. He’s also a looker, and it doesn’t slip by my partner, who seems to fawn on him just noticeably.

  But she finds out the facts, so far. Rape is obvious, but more specifically it’s sodomy. And there is semen in none of her orifices.

  “He spent some time with her,” Garrison tells us both. “He lingered.”

  “How much linger?” I ask.

  “Can’t tell until the tests come through, but I’d say he was up here at least a few hours. Looks like he had a couple of drinks. There’s an empty tumbler in the sink with some scotch on the bottom. He had a least one, but the bottle on the counter is half-empty. Maybe somebody else drank the better part of it. We’ll never know. But I’m betting he took his time.”

  The body is hung by its heels from the light fixture in the spacious living room. The fixture is an expensive piece of electrical art. Probably a multi-thousand dollar chandelier. It shows the construction values in this condo that the weight didn’t pull the lights down out of the ceiling, but Mrs. Sharon O’Connor looks like she might have tipped the scales at barely one hundred pounds. She might be five feet two. The weight she did have was nicely distributed. She’s naked, so we see all her charms.

  The only thing not so charming is her slit throat.

  “How long you think it’ll be before we get the call?” Lila asks me, back in my cubicle.

  “You’re trying to say this is a high profile killing?” I grin.

  “There were already thirty reporters downstairs.”

  I nod. I know. We both waded through them with several perfunctory “no comments.”

  “The first guy we look at is Bill,” she says.

  “Doesn’t look good. He has an alibi.”

  “I know. But it’s almost always the old man. Lousy marriage, she ate crackers in bed.”

  “She could’ve eaten all the crackers she wanted, if I’d had a shot at her. Before the slit throat, of course.”

  Lila groans.

  “You don’t seem to be as sympathetic towards Sharon O’Connor as you were toward our departed working girls, Danny.”

  “She’ll get plenty of sympathy elsewhere. All I want is the sweet human being who relieved her of her life.”

  “That much, you’re democratic about. But it usually is someone they knew.”

  “There was no forced entry. Was that your first clue, Holmes?”

  Lila doesn’t like it when I make Holmes jokes with her. She’s not crazy about Dr. Watson, either.

  “So, as usual, how the hell did he gain entry? She let him in or he had a way in, past a doorman and three security guys who check those floors every twenty-five minutes. How’d he avoid all that surveillance?”

  “Maybe, I’m just guessing, maybe someone helped him avoid detection.”

  I smile broadly at her.

  “I hate it when you’re smug.”

  “I know,” I grin just as widely.

  “I really hate smug, Danny. I really do.”

  17

  We continue to receive messages concerning the whereabouts of our number one prospect for the Twin Killings. All of them turn up nothing. Franklin is either very clever or very dead, I’m thinking. He cannot remain out of view for long unless he’s fled the country, but we have contacted the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and the Mexican rurales, the policia south of the border. And for good measure we contacted Interpol, as well. The alert is far reaching enough that Franklin will not be able to transport his sorry ass very easily. Someone will see him, and then Lila and I will be there.

  Bill O’Connor comes downtown voluntarily, accompanied by his attorney. O’Connor is a good-looking Mick, sandy-haired and six feet four. He played guard in football at the University of Notre Dame. He’s around my age, and his personal info says that he was rejected by the Marines because of two bad knees, courtesy of the Golden Dome.

  His lawyer is Patrick Callahan, a not nearly so attractive Harp. He’s five-seven and pudgy and balding , and he reminds me of Cervantes’ Sancho Panza, Don Quixote’s beer-barrel buddy.

  Callahan doesn’t say anything because O’Connor does all the talking, once Lila asks him to go over his alibi for the night his wife Sharon was raped and murdered and hung from the ceiling.

  “I was working with my two assistants, Denise Wyrick and Don Carmon. You have their statements, right?”

  Lila nods at him.

  “You were with them until 1:47 A.M. Is that correct?” she asks the talk show host.

  “Yes, that’s right.”

  “Isn’t that awfully late to be working?”

  He smiles at Lila. I sit next to my partner, and I am ignored.

  So I smile at Callahan, the mouth
piece, and he squirms visibly and trains his eyes on my partner.

  “Not when you’ve got a magazine to put to bed by the morning in question,” he tells her.

  “Okay. Now. What was your relationship with Sharon like? Were you deeply in love?”

  “Yes.”

  He casts his eyes down onto the table, and for the first time since he arrived I don’t see impatience on his friendly face. This guy is America’s sweetheart. He’s got answers for everybody, whether it’s your soured relationship or your psychotic thirteen year old, Bill knows the cure or he’ll damn well bring on an “expert” who does know the solution.

  “I loved Sharon very much.”

  “That’s not what some of your other staffers told us. They said there were problems, that Sharon was talking about a divorce,” Lila insists.

  Now O’Connor looks to me as if I’m going to rise to his defense simply because I’m his “bro.” But I watch him carefully, and I show no signs of empathy, and he shifts his gaze back to this bitch who’s antagonizing him.

  “Was there talk of a split, Mr. O’Connor?” she goes on.

  “Yes. But only because I’d been spending too much time on the magazine, and we’d settled that problem. I was delegating more authority to my senior editor so I’d have more time for Sharon.”

  “There are no children. Is that right?”

  “Sharon couldn’t have children, but we were thinking about adoption.”

  “Where is this headed, Detective?” Callahan finally interjects. “Because it seems you’re beginning to head far afield.”

  “I’m trying to find out if your client was on amicable terms with Mrs. O’Connor.”

  “Asked and answered, Detective. Can we get this headed toward some kind of conclusion? Mr. O’Connor has been through enough, don’t you think?”

  “We have to ask this stuff,” I tell the attorney. “A man of your experience knows the drill. Right, Counselor?”

  He finally peers over at me, and then he shuts up.

  “I know this is painful, sir, but we have to eliminate any of the possibilities left on the board,” Lila tells O’Connor. She sounds less aggressive, this time. She knows his alibi is fairly strong.

  Which doesn’t mean he didn’t kill his wife or have Sharon O’Connor killed. We don’t know how solid an alibi from two employees really is, but we’ll bring them both around and find out soon.

  “I think that’s all, then,” she tells the lawyer and his client.

  They stand up and depart hurriedly. I’m sure O’Connor has business to attend to.

  “He almost pissed himself, he was in such a rush to get out of here,” Lila says to me as I buy her a Diet Coke at the machine down the hall from our cubicles. I pop for a Diet for me, too.

  We walk back to my mini office and we sit inside. Lila gazes out at the skyline, but I’m peering out into the hall at nothing.

  “If he were guilty, I think he would’ve put on a much better show for us,” she claims.

  “Yeah. You’d think an actor like O’Connor could put on the despondent husband for us, but he just seemed a little too detached. His sense of theatre is really horseshit. I was expecting Olivier decrying the death of Desdemona in Othello. Sumshit like that.”

  Lila laughs. We haven’t had much to giggle about, lately. Franklin still lurks out there in some dark hole and now a rapist/murderer has styled and profiled himself into a major media clusterfuck. They’re camped out on the first floor in the lobby, waiting for us to tell them “no comment” for the sixth time today. I’m afraid I’ll find one leaning over the stall in the john while I’m making a major transaction.

  “You don’t like Bill O’Connor?” I ask her.

  “You mean perpetrator-wise or TV personality-wise?”

  “Perp, naturally.”

  “I think he sucks big time for either,” she says, deadpan.

  I have to hustle to make Kelly’s last therapy session at the hospital. It’s like a second graduation for her, she said.

  The head shrink’s name is Marion Quillian. She’s the head of the Eating Disorders Department. She’s fairly young—perhaps in her early forties, like me. She must have been a nova to take over her department at such a young age. She has prematurely silver hair, but it looks good on her. She is leaning toward voluptuous, and maybe she’s packing a few extra pounds, but she has a nice glow of aliveness about her.

  “You should be very proud, Mr. Mangan.”

  I guess no one told her I’m a cop, and I’m not about to.

  “I am very proud of Kelly,” I say, and I look at my girl and I squeeze her hand.

  “I’d like Kelly to come in every few months and have a chat with me, just to see how she’s progressing.”

  Kelly nods at the shrink. She knows the war’s never totally over when it comes to addiction. It’s always an ongoing battle. Booze or drugs or bulimia—whatever kind of destructive behavior you’re hooked to, you have to constantly sharpen the blade. It’s always trying to find a way back in.

  “I think you’ve come a long way, a very long way. If I weren’t a scientist, I’d think it was a miracle. And I never talk about miracles. It was hard work, yes, but the manner in which you took all this on is nothing short of…well, it’s remarkable. You both have a lot to be proud of.”

  She stands and shakes my daughter’s hand, and then she comes around her desk toward Kelly and gives her a for-real embrace. I think I see tears in her doctor’s eyes. I never saw a doctor cry before. I’ve seen medics weep in the field, but never have I seen this kind of emotion from a medical person back in The World.

  We meet Lila for breakfast on this second Sunday in August. It’s torrid outside. Burning. Throw in a jungle setting, and this is the climate we endured in Vietnam. Maybe the heat is not quite as intense, but it’s fucking boiling out there.

  We’ve had our share of domestic killings, lately, but Lila and I have cleaned those cases relatively quickly. When you’re enraged, you don’t think much about covering your tracks and your ass. And someone always talks. Always. Those cases are the infamous “slam dunks.” We get many more of those than we do homicides like the Twin Killings and Sharon O’Connor.

  We eat at Bob Evans. Lila insists they have the best pancakes, and Kelly loves blueberry pancakes with whipped cream.

  I’m not worried that she’ll gain a lot of weight that she’ll want to dump by purging because I’ve seen her exercise regimen. Kelly never eats between meals, and she’s got a solid metabolism. She’s an eighteen year old kid. She ought to.

  You can see by the rose blush on her cheeks that she’s come back from the near-dead.

  I always found The Odyssey an interesting story, even when I read it first in my junior year in high school. I liked the story about Odysseus’ descent into Hades, into the Land of the Dead. He was to learn the things in the world of the dead so that he might rise back to the world of the living.

  My daughter has made that journey. I made it in Vietnam, and I’m still trying to emerge into that light, all the way. I haven’t pulled myself above the surface yet, but I think I’m making progress. My daughter has literally been reborn. It almost makes me believe in the Resurrection. Why Christ would be so special always gave me doubt about the Easter story.

  And this is nowhere near Easter. This is the doggest-assed dog day in August, in the heat of what has been an unbearably tropical summer in Chicago. Tempers have been flaring in every neighborhood. Loving spouses have been slaughtering each other with frying pans and cocktail tables. It’s almost as if a mad dog epidemic has seized the city, the last couple months.

  Lila and I are trying to keep the lid on the pressure cooker, but we can’t be successful all the time. People get away with murder. They get away with shit, and shit really does happen. We try to minimize their successes at the “perfect crime” and our batting average ain’t bad.

  And then my daughter comes back from the other side. She blooms like that rose I was talking about, a
nd my entire existence suddenly has meaning—almost.

  If Lila would get it straight where we’re headed, then I think I could bear most anything.

  But things are definitely improved in my family of two.

  Her mother, of course, never sent a message or a card. She hasn’t sent Kelly anything since she left. I wonder how much my kid can remember about Mary. It can’t be much. Other than that her mother deserted her when Kelly needed her the most.

  I’m trying to get rid of all that bile by talking to Dr. Fernandez, but like all things in the head, the big one, I mean, it goes slowly.

  The pancakes come, and I partake in our overdose of syrup and sugar. I can only manage to clean half of my plate, but Kelly and Lila both make clean sweeps of their meals.

  We make time for the interviews with the three roving security men and time for the doorman. We have no reason to ask the four of them for semen samples, and as of now we have no reason to suspect any of them. The security guys do not work together, so there’s no way to find out where they were at the time of the slaying—except for the security cameras at the end of each hallway. Going by the ME’s time of death, after we look at the tape, all three security guys were elsewhere when the throat-slitting occurred. The doctor can be relatively certain of the time because of body temperature, which can be determined by a rectal thermometer. The human body cools off predictably after death has swarmed over the corpse.

  So O’Connor was with his flunkies and the four men in charge of the high rise are all accounted for. So who the hell remains?

  The doorman didn’t see anyone other than residents enter the building, but that doesn’t mean someone couldn’t slip by him when he was out to take a piss or a smoke. The front door greeter doesn’t take his breaks on a regular schedule so that someone casing the building can establish a routine.