by Thomas Laird
It’s certain that someone did get into Sharon O’Connor’s place. There were bruises that indicated a struggle, but the fight might have occurred just before her demise. She could have known her killer and let him in. The sex—at least some of it—might have been consensual. The sodomy was not. There were tears in the anus. The oral business was probably part of the beating she took. There were bruises and lacerations on her face, as well.
Only the vaginal sex showed no necessary signs of physical distress.
Maybe it started off as rough love, and then maybe it got way out of hand.
There are no maybes that Sharon’s dead.
We printed the entire condo. We fingerprinted the hallway, as well. We’ll see if we come up with anything interesting, but prints have to have a match in somebody’s system, so if our man was neither military or a convict, he’ll be next to impossible to locate.
The media and the hierarchy will not allow us to push Sharon O’Connor’s case aside. If it hadn’t been for the newspaper, the Twin Killings might have been shoved to the bottom of the stack. Six black prosties still do not equal one glamorous white celebrity’s wife. It’s a good thing the Sun-Times has turned up the heat on our original case, or those six young women might just as well have been sucked to the bottom of Lake Michigan, as if they’d never been a part of this planet in the first place.
18
His name is Wade Andrews. He says he is Angela Carter’s grandfather. Angela was in the second pair of victims in Old Town. He walks into my office on a late July afternoon. He tells me his name and why he’s here, and then I buzz Lila to come on in over here. She responds quickly, and there are three of us in my small space. I have Wade sit down, and Lila stands in front of the shut office door.
“I’m from Tennessee. Place called Donaldson. It’s just a farm town, and I been farmin’ since…since I can remember.”
He has a soft southern accent. And it’s enriched by his roots, by his race.
“My son, Darius, had this little girl. I didn’t know her at all because I cain’t afford trips anywheres. Darius, he come to Chicago when he twenty-seven. Give up farming wid me. Said he had to have somethin’ better.”
Wade must be near sixty, but he’s robust and erect. The farm hasn’t stooped him, and his hair is lightly peppered with silver. His teeth are white and perfect, and he looks like he would’ve made an excellent athlete in any sport you might choose.
“He didn’t las’ long in Chicago. He get himself shot eighteen year ago. They sent his body back home to me when I found out he been shot. It’s about drugs, the po-lice tells me. A man called me on the telephone. He said he was wid you, ho-micide.”
There is no sadness in his eyes. I look over to Lila, but she’s watching Andrews.
“I come up here because Darius tole me he had a little girl when he first come here. The gal he had her wid and him never got married, but Darius say it was the gal who didn’t want none of him. She was a prostitute, but my son didn’t know that when they made that chile. He wanta do the right thing, but this woman ran off after the chile was born. All Darius knew was that she name the chile Angela. He say she called her her little angel and that was why she call her Angela.
“Darius never saw much of his baby, but he caught up with Monique—that was her name—and he give her some monies for Angela, from time to time.
“But when the girl turn about two, Darius say, he never see either of them again. I come here to see her grave because she be my blood. They say that County bury her. Is that right?”
“Yes, sir,” I answer. “Would you like us to drive you out there?”
“I got to git back on the evenin’ bus. I really cain’t afford this trip, but this girl was my blood, and my son try to do the right thing by her and by her momma, but this Monique is a whoor. I’m sorry to use that language, ma’am, but what is is.”
Lila smiles at him. She puts her hand on his shoulder as he remains seated.
“You did a good thing,” she tells Andrews.
I get up, and we head out and then downstairs toward the car.
The cemetery is on the southwest side. Cook County pops for the indigent who get planted here. It’s reminiscent of a town’s boot hill, almost, even though most of these victims of murder and mayhem weren’t gunslingers. Most of them were simply too poor to be buried at their own expense.
Her name and date of birth and death are all that are inscribed on Angela Carter’s small stone. Carter, apparently, was her mother’s surname. There’s no mention of Darius or Wade’s side of the family, because it really wasn’t a family.
It makes it difficult for me to understand why Wade Andrews came all this way to honor a woman he never knew. I understand that she was his blood—if in fact Angela really was sired by Darius. In Monique’s line of work, it’s anybody’s guess who the real father was. She might have told Darius he was, but that’s a lot to take on faith. The word of a hooker, I mean.
But Darius believed her, it seems. Maybe his timing was absolutely right to be Angela’s father, but what really matters now is that Wade Andrews believed that she was his grandchild, his blood granddaughter. He came all this way to visit a stranger, so I have to be in awe of his faith, his loyalty, to what is largely belief, not knowledge.
He stands in front of the meager stone and clasps his hands and lowers his head, and he prays. So I join in. I cross myself, say an internal Our Father and a Hail Mary and a Glory Be, and then I thank God that I’m not praying over Kelly’s grave. It could’ve easily been her, but not at this cemetery. I have life insurance on my daughter, and a formal funeral would’ve been taken care of.
Tears sting my eyes, and I feel a trickle leaking down my left cheek. I look over at Lila, but she’s watching Wade pray. I haven’t been found out; I haven’t been caught in the act of sentiment or emotion or grief or fear or joy that it’s not my own blood that I might have been called to make a similar trip.
I’m lucky. Wade’s unfortunate, unfortunate that his son and granddaughter are both dead as a result of mindless violence.
Things have just changed. I’ve seen all six bodies of the Twin Killings. I’ve seen all the CPD photographs of the slain women. But now, just now, there has finally been a face attached to one of the six dead women.
I give Wade the two twenties I’ve got left in my wallet. Lila gives him fifty out of her own cash. He tries very hard to refuse us, here at the Greyhound Terminal in Downtown, but I take him by the shoulders and I face him eye to eye.
“I will arrest you if you don’t take this money, Wade.”
He looks at me as if he wonders if I’m for real, and then I smile at him, and he grins nervously. I’m sure he has had bad experiences with white cops before.
“Y’all is very kind,” he says. He casts his eyes on his shoes.
I take hold of his shoulders one more time.
“I’ve been a policeman a long time, Wade. I’ve been on Homicide for a long bit, too, and I want you to know that I’ve never seen anyone do what you’ve done. I don’t know you hardly even a little, but I know you’re one of the finest men I ever met. I’m proud to have known you, sir.”
I shake his hand. Then the door to his bus swooshes open, and he and the other travelers board, and Wade Andrews heads back to Tennessee.
We go to Waukegan to interview a possible sighting of Franklin Toliver. It seems that even the suburbs have their working girls, so the old notion that you move to the burbs to escape the corruption of the big city seems to be negated in this trip north.
Her name is Patsy Jankowski. She’s in her late twenties, and she lives in a condo on Percy Boulevard in this middle-classed neighborhood. The reason we know she’s a hooker is because she tells us up front when we begin our conversation.
She’s tall, maybe five ten, and she has a little extra heft to her, and her trade has perhaps made her appear about ten years senior to her real age (the age she gave us), but she’s not unattractive. Her makeup is sligh
tly garish, but that’s typical to the prosties I’ve encountered on the job—the living ones, I mean.
Her condo is modest but well kept. She has a roommate, she’s told Lila. (Lila asks the initial questions to put her at her ease. Lila is less threatening, my partner and I think. Patsy’s furniture looks Mart-bought, nothing expensive, but solid and durable stuff. A couch, a loveseat, a couple chairs and a dinette set.
The roommate also runs the area with her. The roomie is two years younger and better looking, Patsy smiles. The reason we’re here is because she thinks she bumped into Franklin just two nights ago, out on the pavement.
“A guy pulls up in a Camaro. Brand new. Black. Real street machine. So it gets our interest right away.”
She told Lila that her roommate/partner, her name is Rosalie, won’t talk to cops unless it’s by strict copper invitation.
“You get the plates?” Lila asks.
“We’re not cops,” Patsy grins.
“Okay, what else?” Lila goes on.
“What happened?” I join in.
Patsy looks at me with a sort of come on glance that Lila notices, and I can see my partner flinch just slightly.
“Well, we’re here, so I guess either he wasn’t the guy you’re looking for or we were lucky he didn’t take both of us on. I think he mighta got spooked when Tony came peddling up to us.”
“Tony?” Lila queries.
“Our man, you know?”
“You mean your pimp,” Lila says.
There’s an edge to her tone, and I’m thinking this interrogation might go south in a hurry. Usually Lila is very calm and cool about asking questions.
“Yeah. That, too,” Patsy tells her with a slight frown.
“Okay. Okay, so what happened?” I continue.
“I’m right up in the driver’s window, so I get a good look at this john. And then I remember the story in the papers about the black girls, and then it all clicks, so I stand up straight and I look back at Tony and Rosalie, and when I do, this dude peels away from the curb. And that’s it.”
“You sure it was the man in the drawing? You sure it was Franklin Toliver?” Lila asks her.
“I was two fucking inches from his nose. I could smell the son of a bitch’s after fucking shave.”
I might have to referee this, if things keep going as they are. So I call a halt to our little talk. I give Patsy my card and Lila gives her one, too, but she dumps Lila’s unceremoniously on her coffee table but holds mine between a finger and a thumb. She holds it aloft so I can see she’s got it firmly in hand.
I’m thinking it’s too bad she’s a pro.
And then I see Lila giving me the evil eye, and I get us the hell out of there.
“How many black Camaros are there in the city and suburbs?” I ask.
I receive no answer from my partner, seated on the passenger’s side.
“You can’t be pissed at this woman,” I finally utter.
“Pissed? I’m not pissed.”
“Then, what’s wrong, Lila?”
“Nothing. Nothing’s wrong.”
One thing I’ll hand to my ex, Mary. She never pulled the “nothing’s wrong” bullshit on me. She was happy to inform me exactly what it was that she was irate at me about.
“Please don’t do that,” I tell Lila.
“Do what?”
“Shit, I surrender.”
She glares over at me.
“I’ve never seen you do that with a woman we’ve talked to,” Lila says.
“Do what?”
“Fawn all over her the way you did.”
“Christ, you did all the talking!”
“It’s not just words, Danny, it’s the way you looked at that bitch.”
“Are you telling me you’re jealous of Patsy, for Jesus’ sake?”
She sits there, aiming warheads out the windshield.
“I guess I should feel flattered,” I finally retort.
“Flattered?” she demands.
“I never saw you jealous of anybody before, so I guess I must be special.”
“You’re special, all right.”
“I got eyes for nobody but you, baby,” I grin at her.
She looks over with her eyes slitted, as if she’s about to strike.
“I mean it,” I tell her.
Her eyes widen a bit.
“Move in with me. Kelly’s going to school and the house will be empty and I can’t stand not being with you anymore.”
Her face softens.
“Is that a for real offer?” she asks.
“It is absolutely dead on for real.”
She looks back out into traffic.
“I’ll think about it.”
With her reply, my heart drops toward the bottom of my insides.
She gets over the crap with Patsy in about two hours, I estimate. After we go to Freddy’s Bistro on Waveland Avenue by Wrigley Field, her demeanor softens and she’s back to normal. But she won’t discuss my offer to have her cohabitate with me and I don’t bring it up again.
We sit in Freddy’s, which has a 1950s atmosphere inside, replete with James Dean and Elvis and Marilyn Monroe posters to waiters with doowop hairdos and waitresses with beehives. There’s an actual 1957 Chevy sitting smack in the middle of the spacious dining room, and the wait staff approaches you on roller skates, like a Saturday night drive-in.
I’m drinking a Diet Coke—one of the few non-‘50s things they allow in Freddy’s. Sign of the times, like computers and guys who are in touch with their inner child.
Lila opts for a strawberry shake. It’s so thick that she has to use a spoon to dislodge it out of the glass.
“Where are we?” I ask.
She stops spooning the shake and looks up at me.
“You mean on the case or something else?”
“I mean on the case. We’re on the clock, remember?”
“Sometimes it’s hard to tell, with you, Danny.”
She takes another go at her thick shake.
“Where do we go?” I ask her again.
“He’s headed north, if it’s really Toliver. He’s gone to white meat, too, it appears.”
“We can ask for a shift of concentration of squad coverage to the far northside. We can ask for the suburban cops to step up the surveillance, also.”
I really want to ask her again to move in with me, but I can’t risk it. With Lila, you get your answer when she’s ready. I don’t feel like pressing my luck.
“I think Franklin’s been getting help from his mommy,” she counters. “I think that line about Franklin and her having issues was bogus. I think it was done intentionally, to throw us off the scent. I don’t think he’s left the area. I don’t think he didi-ed on us, Danny. I think he’s stayed very close to home.”
19
We’d love to search the Toliver home in DesPlaines, but until we get something evidentiary that will grant us a warrant, all we can do is have a squad or two cruise by the house that Mrs. Toliver supposedly inhabits alone. The DesPlaines P.D. has been very cooperative, but since there are already State Police assigned to her, they can’t justify the expenditure of more coppers. The Staties patrol the outside of the home, not the inside, unless she calls for help, so Franklin could be inside without their knowledge. The State Police don’t always cooperate with city investigations, however. But you’d think in the case of murder they’d let us know if Franklin were lurking around. Most cops draw the line with murder. It’s not like junior might have some outstanding traffic warrants. I feel fairly confident that their loyalty to the Lieutenant Governor doesn’t extend that far. Not with all the publicity going on from the Sun-Times.
Lila and I take a drive past the place once or twice a week, just to let our presence be felt and observed. The Staties might have some of their own plain clothes detectives chasing down Franklin, for all we know. As I said, they don’t necessarily share the wealth when it comes to intelligence. We seem to have to all fend for ourselves, from law enfo
rcement agency to law enforcement agency. Politics doesn’t end at the State Capitol or the Nation’s Capitol.
I’m getting anxious about the death of Sharon O’Connor, also. Nothing’s coming up. No one’s talking, except the media, of course. O’Connor’s show has gone into hiatus and reruns, and I’m told someone else is running his magazine while Bill himself has gone into seclusion in their Michigan Avenue high rise.
We’re investigating a shooting on the far southside, a drive-by. A fourteen- year-old black girl has been shot in an apparent gang-related killing. We have these things weekly and in multiples. Lila and I could be kept busy by drive-bys and nothing else if our load weren’t divided up among all the other Homicides in our division. They try to spread out these kinds of murders because they frequently go unsolved.
But today we have a witness. Brenda Fairchild’s grandmother, Marguerite Fairchild, witnessed the homicide from their front porch. She watched her granddaughter collapse on the front sidewalk.
Brenda’s head was literally exploded by an automatic pistol of some sort. The ME is finishing up with her out on the sidewalk. We’re standing on the porch talking to Marguerite Fairchild, and she’s got plenty to tell us.
“I don’t give no good goddamn what they say about talking to the po-lice. I don’t give no good goddamn if they come back and do me, too.”
She’s not mournful. She’s enraged. Infuriated. Take your pick of wrathful synonyms. She tells us the make and model of the car—it’s an ’82 Chevy, four door. Green. Whitewalls. Dent on the left rear quarter panel. She got the license number, also. ZD 1345. Illinois plates. We immediately call in the plates, and within ten minutes we have an ID. It’s Arthur Remington’s ride. He is a known felon. He’s blown probation, and he’s a chieftain of the Rubios, one of the worst bunch of gangbangers in this Area. The cops in the Gang Unit all know him. They’ve liked him for several murders they could never prove.
