The Underground Detective: A Novel of Chicago Streets

by Thomas Laird

  “Why is Mr. Kelly doing my job, Your Honor?” Steinback asks as he stands.

  The gallery and the jury engage in some muffled laughter.

  The judge hammers just once with his gavel.

  “It seems that you’re covering old ground, Mr. Kelly.”

  “I’m trying to show the jury that my client really does not have any recollection of committing the crimes he’s been accused of. We’re not arguing that Mr. Toliver didn’t do these killings. What we’re saying is that he was not in command of his faculties during the course of the six slayings.”

  “That’s about the worst scenario I’ve heard since daytime television, Your Honor.”

  There’s more laughter, and then the judge slams the gavel one more time.

  “Let’s keep it somewhat relevant, okay?” the judge suggests.

  Kelly returns his glance to Toliver.

  “Do you think you know the difference between right and wrong, Franklin?”

  “Yes. I think I do.”

  “Is killing six women wrong?”

  “Killing anyone is wrong, yes.”

  “Do you have any guilt about what you did?”

  “I don’t remember harming anyone.”

  “Here we go again, Your Honor,” Steinback interjects.

  “I apologize…. Franklin, did you feel bad about the death of your mother?”

  “Yes. I did. I mean I do.”

  “Irrelevant,” Steinback protests.

  “Yes, it is, Mr. Kelly.”

  “Your Honor, I’m trying to show my client’s state of mind. You heard him tell us, just now, rather indecisively, that he felt bad about his mother’s suicide. If Franklin is ambivalent about his feelings toward his own mother—“

  “Please, Your Honor! We’ve already heard about Franklin’s inability to love, his inability to respond emotionally as a sane person would. These are simply stalling tactics to mislead the jurors into thinking Mr. Kelly’s client is deranged, that he has no grasp of reality.”

  “I agree, sir. Get on with it and knock off the sidetracking, Counselor.”

  Kelly gestures theatrically to the jury, as if he has been frustrated in his sincere attempts to display the febrile mind of Franklin Toliver.

  “My mother,” Franklin says softly.

  “What, sir?” the judge asks him.

  “My mother was the most miserable animal that ever crawled on earth. My mother—“

  “Restrain your client, Mr. Kelly.”

  “My mother was the most miserable bitch who ever wormed her way—“

  “Mr. Toliver! You will be quiet or you will be removed from this courtroom!”

  “She was insane. You have no idea what it was like, living in that house—“

  “Sit down, Mr. Toliver!”

  The Deputies are converging on the witness box.

  Suddenly Franklin throws his arms toward the ceiling and he lets out a lupine howl that causes several of the females in the jury and several more women in the audience to burst out with screams of their own.

  Toliver hurls himself toward the judge, and two of the Deputies grab him about the throat and shoulders and haul him back into the witness box. They can’t seem to subdue him down into his chair, so I trot toward the scene up front. I motion for Lila to stay seated. She doesn’t need this kind of exercise.

  As I approach the witness chair, Franklin has managed to throw off both Deputies. The other cops assigned to Franklin are circling the judge, who’s standing off in a corner, as far away as he can get from Toliver.

  Franklin explodes toward me, as if he was waiting his chance to get at me. He tries to grab me by the throat, but I kick him in the left shin, and he flops quickly. With a remarkable recovery, he gets to his knees and tries to throw his arms about my legs. Instead, he gets my left knee in his nose. I see the blood gout from his nostrils, and I’m pretty sure I’ve broken his beak. He looks amazed as he wipes the blood from his chin, and he tries to get to his feet, just as the first two deputies jump him, and finally they take him to the floor and throw his irons back on as they were, before he was unleashed in here.

  The courtroom, however, is still bedlam. I search out the face of his defense attorney, Mick Kelly, and instead of seeing any form of joy for a scene he helped to concoct, I see genuine horror on Kelly’s visage.

  This has all been the creation of the man they’re pulling to his feet, right now. There’s no smile of joy or victory on Franklin’s bloody puss. But he glares directly at me, and he keeps his eyes firmly on mine as the cops drag him out of the courtroom.

  “They’ll never buy that bullshit,” I tell Chad Steinback as we have coffee in the cafeteria downstairs from the courtroom.

  “I’ll bet you a ‘C’ note they do,” the Prosecutor glumly replies.

  “How can they not know all that was theater?” I ask.

  “You saw Kelly,” Lila says. She’s sitting with us at the table. The cafeteria is virtually empty. Everyone’s gone, by now. It’s 5:00 P.M. Business is concluded, but the café stays open until 8:00 P.M.

  “What about it?” I ask her.

  “She’s right,” Steinback adds. “He wasn’t in on it. He’s not that good an actor. Nobody is. This was all Franklin. He just won his Emmy and his Oscar, all in one performance. It was a beaut. He scared the shit out of me, too. I think it was the howl. He probably listened to the wolves out at Brookfield Zoo before laying it on us, here. Lon Chaney Junior would’ve been proud, Danny. I thought fucking hair was going to sprout from his cheeks.

  “I prosecuted a swinging dick who thought he was a vampire, once. Drained all his female victims of their blood over the course of a few days. Bled them to death and then sold their blood to vampire cults. Franklin is definitely more fucked up than the vampire guy.”

  “You think he’s crazy now, too?” I ask.

  “Doesn’t matter what I think or you think or Lila thinks. Even the judge probably knows Franklin’s a performance artist. It only matters what those twelve honest citizens think. You two take a gander at them while you, Danny, were busting Franklin’s face?”

  Neither of us answers because we both know he’s right.

  “I don’t like our chances at all. We have him cold on the evidence, but they really bought Mr. Toliver’s grand production. All he needed was lions, tigers and bears. Dorothy and Toto weren’t necessary.

  “They think he’s nuts. Certifiable. Looney. Insane. Totally fucked up. And speaking of totally fucked, that’s us, by the way.”

  Closing arguments are finished three days later, and on April 28, 1987, Franklin Toliver is found innocent on account of mental incapacity—insanity—and he is remanded to the Elgin State Mental Facility in Elgin, Illinois.

  I go to Steinback’s table after the court is cleared. Lila is with me. Steinback’s female assistant is the last to leave before we join the Prosecutor.

  “We lose. I can’t believe it, but we lose,” Steinback pronounces.

  “He’s not free, Chad. He’s going to a hospital,” I say. “This time under highest security.”

  It’s like a lame apology, and the three of us know it.

  “No, he’s not at liberty to dismember anyone. At least for a while. I don’t know about you, Danny, or you, Lila, but I’m not going to be able to sleep sound and comfortable for a long, long time.”

  He snaps his briefcase shut, and then he smiles painfully at both of us, and Chad Steinback departs.

  The Sun-Times and the Tribune both bemoan the verdict of insanity, but there’s nothing to be done by us, anymore. Franklin’s in the laughing academy instead of death row, and everyone is taking this one as a defeat. Even though we’ve got Toliver off the white board (and Sharon O’Connor’s killer, too), it doesn’t seem like anything good has just occurred. It seems like a miscarriage of justice.

  Murderers do get away with it. It does happen. Sometimes we never even apprehend them at all. It is rare, however. And even though it doesn’t occur very often, it
doesn’t make Lila or me feel any happier about the outcome.

  Perhaps I should’ve let him knock me down and put me on the floor, and then I could’ve been justified in breaking his neck. It’s a move I’ve accomplished more than once in Vietnam. I could’ve snapped his neck easily, but I would’ve had to been in a jeopardized position. I simply reacted and stopped him before he could get me in a compromised spot. I simply became defensive. I didn’t have time to do anything else.

  The two of us get to accompany Franklin Toliver on his brief trip from County Jail to Elgin. He is again shackled heavily, his cuffed hands ringed to a chain around his waist, and his ankles bound close together with irons

  so that he has to shuffle like some dude on a chain gang.

  We get him into a van. There are two County Deputies in the back with us, and Toliver, for the ride out west and north.

  We pull out of the underground lot, and I see the sunlight pour through the windshield. There is a chain link divide between us and the van’s driver, another County cop. Toliver has been chained yet again to a ring in the floor of the vehicle.

  He sits between the two County men, and Lila and I are on the opposite side.

  “Detective Mangan,” Toliver smiles. His nose has been reset. He has a shiner under his left eye.

  I look at him but I don’t respond.

  “See what you did?” he points to his black eye.

  “Shut the fuck up or we’ll have an accident. My billy might slip into your other eye, Franklin,” the County cop on his left warns him.

  “It’s okay. Let him talk,” I wave. The County guy nods in affirmation. It’s up to me.

  “Broke it clean. You know I never meant to hurt you. Right?”

  I don’t answer. We’ve got a forty-five minute trip. We might as well be entertained by the newly-deemed crazy fucker. “The Wolf Man,” the Trib christened him because of his magna performance in court.

  “You are one lovely woman, Ma’am,” he says to Lila.

  Lila doesn’t rise to him. Her face is expressionless.

  “Don’t go there, Franklin. Then it’ll get ugly,” the same County cop tells him.

  “I didn’t mean anything.”

  The cop throws a quick elbow into Franklin’s left side ribcage. The air oofs out of him.

  “Oooops,” the County guy smiles.

  Franklin gasps for air, but he recovers quickly enough.

  “Love tap, motherfucker,” the cop explains.

  “He hits harder,” Toliver tries to grin and gestures toward me.

  “You don’t want to irritate the lady,” I say. “She’s the real killer in here.”

  Franklin peers over at Lila, and Lila beams right at him. Her smile is wide and brilliant.

  37

  In June, the newspapers play up Frank Swanson’s firing at the high rise downtown. Frank has sold his story to The Tattletale, a rag mag, for six figures, and big Bill is suing Swanson and the magazine for libel.

  The tale of Sharon’s nasty relationship with Kirk Radley is in there, and so is the stuff about Bill O’Connor not being able to get a rise on demand, as it were. All of this lovely, sordid crap appears in the June edition, and the legit newspapers have a field day with the libel suit. O’Connor has gone to reruns on his TV show, so we’ll see in the fall if he’s going to air his grievances.

  Me? I’m kind of glad to see O’Connor get it in the neck. I remember his empty face when we interviewed him about his wife’s murder. It was as if we were talking about some stranger that had been sliced open and hung upside down in his living room. He seemed as if there were no connection between him and Sharon.

  Which was why I wanted the killer to be O’Connor, at first. There would have been some kind of satisfaction putting that blowhard in a hole for the rest of his life. But Kirk took his place. One scumwad for another. At least we caught the feces that really killed her.

  It just seems as if justice swerved around Bill O’Connor. Maybe his magazine, BO, is appropriately titled, after all.

  Lila wants to paint the inside of our house. She asked me how long it’s been since it was painted inside.

  “Never. Since I’ve lived here.”

  “Jesus! And how long is that?” she replies.

  “Nine years?” I guess.

  “That cinches it.”

  Some men would think Lila was being pushy, and they’d be right. But I like her swagger around the house. She’s moved in completely, by now. She’s a resident, a member, of this household. Before, it was Kelly and me, and then Sonny the border collie. Now Lila is a shareholder in our enterprise. She belongs here. She fits.

  And it fills up a big hole in my life, the one that Mary left, all those years before.

  She wants to do our bedroom in pale yellow. I like pale yellow, too. She wants to do the kitchen in baby blue. I go along with that choice, also.

  “Do you really like those colors, or are you just placating me, Danny?”

  “I really like them.”

  “You’re sure?”

  She has her interrogator’s glare aimed at me at the moment. Her hair has grown out long again, this time down to her shoulders. And she knows long hair puts me into heat. She’s been using a very muted red lipstick that has made her face seem healthier, more vibrant, and she’s been using a few other cosmetics just to brighten what is already a glow that has brought happiness my way, for once.

  I’m trying to follow Fernandez’s advice not to look for the leaden cloud somewhere, and sometimes it’s a struggle.

  We’re both going to take next week off to get this painting done. She says she’s tired of the look, in here. She’s putting her own signature on the joint, and I’m all for it.

  “What do you think about marriage?” she asks as we put the second coat of yellow on the bedroom walls, one week later. There are plastic sheets covering everything we couldn’t move out of here. And everything’s moved out, away from the walls. There are two ladders, here, but we’ve already done the ceiling in white, and first.

  “I like the idea, if you mean you and me.”

  She makes a fart sound with her lips.

  “You know I mean you and me.”

  “Then we’d have to break up the partner thing,” I remind her.

  “I can live with that,” she says. She’s got her pensive look on her full-bloom beautiful face.

  “I don’t know if I can,” I tell her.

  She stops rolling yellow on her wall, momentarily.

  “You don’t?”

  “I like having you there with me all day, and then having you here at night, too. And I never get tired of you, the way you get tired of me.”

  “Who gets tired of you?”

  “I can see it when you look up into the air, sometimes. It’s like telling me to shut the hell up.”

  “Sometimes you do go on, Danny.”

  “I know. But I never get sick of listening to you even when you’re spreading the bullshit upon the waters.”

  “What bullshit? What waters?”

  I dip my two fingers into the paint pan, and then I flick a few drops that land squarely on her left breast side, on top of her Cubs’ tee shirt.

  “That’s my good tee, dammit.”

  “Cub fan. Heresy,” I tease her.

  “I’d miss you, too, Danny. But I want to get married. Don’t you?”

  I drop my roller into the pan.

  “Jesus Christ, Lila. I’ve wanted to ask you to marry me since I first laid eyes on you.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes, really. Don’t you ever listen to me? I’ve done every goddam thing except have it printed in the headlines or put up on a banner behind a goddam airplane. Can’t you read me at all?”

  “Apparently not.”

  “You read everybody else like a first grade primer. Why not me?”

  “I don’t know. You’re difficult to pierce, for me.”

  “I feel special.”

  “Good. You are.”

/>   “We better stop the love fest and finish the walls,” I tell her.

  “Not until you ask me, officially.”

  “Here and now?”

  She nods, and her long hair flaps behind her head.

  “You want me on my knees?” I ask.

  “Any way you choose.”

  I shrug and get down on my knees, and I place the roller into the paint gently.

  Then I look over to her.

  “Will you marry me, Lila Chapman?”

  “Maybe, Daniel Mangan.”

  “Maybe?”

  “Yes. Of course I’ll marry you, you goof.”

  “This is the way I dreamed it would be.”

  I struggle back up to my feet.

  “What about a ring?” she says.

  “Wait,” I tell her.

  I go into the john off our bedroom. I get into a rectangular container, and then I return to her.

  I rip off the outer paper of the band-aid, and then I take off the covers of the adhesive, and finally I wrap the flesh-colored bandage about her ring finger.

  “It’ll have to do until we finish this bedroom. I think we’ll have time to make the jewelry store on Harlem Avenue, if you quit screwing around and finish.”

  Harms’ Jewelers is opened until nine. We get there at seven. It takes Lila all of ten minutes to pick out her engagement ring.

  “It’s too small,” I tell her.

  “Are you nuts? It’s $1200.00!”

  I show her one that goes for two grand.

  “That’s ridiculous!”

  “Do you like it?”

  “Of course I—“

  “Then get it. I’m never doing this marriage thing again, so we’re blowing the door off the hinges. Get the one you really want, Lila. Don’t go discount on me. Not you. Not this time. I can afford it.”

  She looks up at me. She reaches up and kisses my cheek.

  “How come you never got married? Tell me again,” I tell her.

  She colors, slightly.

  “I told you that fable three times.”