The Underground Detective: A Novel of Chicago Streets

by Thomas Laird

  “I saw a lot of dead people in Vietnam. I work with corpses all the time, here in the city. But I never saw anybody get back up after they were ten-counted. Never. Not once.

  “All I saw was death, in Asia. Young, middle-aged and old. Dead bodies all over the vegetation, all over the jungle and the rain forest. No one ever blinked or said another word.

  “You ever read Dostoevsky, Father?”

  “I think I have, back in college, before I went into the seminary.”

  “Ever read Notes from Underground?”

  “Yes, as a matter of fact, I have.”

  “Sometimes I feel like the guy in the book. I feel as if I’m isolated and all alone. I haven’t felt like that as often since my daughter and I started getting along and since Lila told me she’d marry me. But before those two things happened, I felt like one of those tunnel rats back in the War. You know, the guys who searched the VC tunnels with a flashlight and a .45?”

  “Yes, I’ve read about them.”

  “I’ve felt as though I were buried alive. I could see the sun and the sky, but the feeling of suffocation, emersion—I don’t know how to describe it. I just felt as if I were covered over and planted like a dead body into the ground. Except that I was aware of the world above ground, but it would have no part of me. I was always excluded, somehow. I was always separate.

  “The character in the book was always bitching about how society, people, excluded him, how they looked down on him and vilified him. I never felt as extreme as he did, but I always felt as though I knew exactly what he was talking about.

  “And his attitudes toward the world were extremely cynical and negative, and I couldn’t help seeing things the way he did. I have trouble trusting other people. I spent years being suspicious of everything my daughter did. Only recently have I been able to feel comfortable about what she tells me. I know I had good cause to suspect her when she was doing her addictions, but it was hard to stop mistrusting her, even when she went straight.

  “And Lila. I doubted Lila when she rejected me, at first. And when she came back, I kept waiting for her to take off, just like my ex-wife did. And I’m still listening for those footsteps.”

  “Footsteps?” Father Bob asks. “You mean like in football?”

  “Yeah. It’s like waiting for someone to come up and blindside you, and I’m still listening for that change in tone in her voice, that little suggestion that she’s changed her mind again and that I’ll see an empty closet some night when I come back from my shift.”

  “You know what I’m going to tell you, don’t you.”

  “You’re going to tell me that faith is believing without seeing.”

  “Bingo.”

  “I don’t mean to hold you up, Father.”

  “Don’t be silly. Finish.”

  “I want to believe that Lila saw Mrs. Toliver. I want to believe that Kelly is really rehabbed and is headed right toward medical school and an MD. I want to believe that Lila really loves me and that she’s committed to growing ancient with me and that we’ll retire together and buy a beach front house in southern Wisconsin and watch our dogs run in the sand and watch the sun beam off the water and the parasailors floating by over the lake, and everything will end happily ever—“

  “After. And why not, Daniel?”

  “That’s not the way of this world, is it, Father Bob? You’ve got a few decades on me, so tell me. Do you really believe in happy endings?”

  “Not in this world, necessarily. Death is ugly. But so is childbirth. I really think the line points upward, not downward. You’re a reader, it sounds like. You read Faulkner?”

  “A few of his books.”

  “Ever read his Nobel acceptance speech?”

  “No. Don’t think so.”

  “He said, Daniel, that man will not merely survive. He said that man will prevail. How’s that grab you?”

  “I don’t feel like I’ve prevailed.”

  “Because of Franklin Toliver?” the priest asks.

  “Yeah. And there have been others who’ve scooted, who’ve escaped.”

  “Screw ’em if they can’t take a joke, Daniel. Right?”

  “Toliver’s not very funny.”

  “Yes, I know. Forgive the jocularity.”

  “It’s all right.”

  “Act as if ye had faith. You know that old bromide?”

  “Yes, Father.”

  “Then, like Emerson said, ‘Keep up the comedy.’”

  Halloween arrives. The DesPlaines police let me know that four vehicles were stolen on their patch during the last four weeks. Their stolen car numbers are far fewer than ours because DesPlaines is fairly affluent and they’re far smaller than the city, of course. I get the makes and the models and the plate numbers, and I circulate them to the tri-county area so that if Franklin is mobile, someone is eventually going to see him.

  The house in DesPlaines is no longer under surveillance. The cops in the suburb can no longer justify the manpower hours, and neither can the State Troopers. So Franklin could be cooping back in his old haunts.

  The FBI arrests Richard Ellsworth and ten other members of the Aryan Nation. I get a call from Dan Packard, a Chicago special agent with the Feds.

  “We found out that Ellsworth was involved in black market weapons. They were selling pieces to gangs in Cook County. Ellsworth wanted to cut a deal with us, and one of the things he sang about was that he gave a piece to your boy.”

  “My boy?” I ask.

  “Franklin Toliver is armed and dangerous. I thought you ought to know.”

  “Did he tell you where Toliver was?”

  “If he had, that would’ve been the first thing I’d have told you. Sorry. He doesn’t seem to know. He gave the gun to Toliver about four weeks ago, at Ellsworth’s house. You know, the bunker?” Packard chuckles.

  “What kind of weapon?”

  “It’s an old US Army .45 automatic. Apparently, he wanted something that blows very large holes into things.”

  We keep up the running in the morning, but I’m beginning to ache in my legs. Lila massages my calves and thighs, but she never gets to finish her therapy because we always wind up getting another form of exercise in the bedroom.

  We’re lying together, intertwined and perspiring all over each other. It’s the night before Halloween—All Souls.

  “I missed,” she says.

  “You missed what?”

  “Take a wild guess, Danny.”

  “I thought you were on the pill.”

  “I told you I had to go off because they were giving me headaches.”

  “And you said you were going to use something else. I remember, now.”

  “Yeah. The diaphragm. But if you nudge the little devils, and if just one of your little marauders reaches my beachhead….”

  “You think you are?”

  “I’m pretty regular, Danny, but it might just be that I got off the pills. We’ll need to wait and see.”

  “But what do you think?”

  She takes my face in her hands and kisses me.

  “Would it disappoint you if I were pregnant?”

  I look deeply into her gaze.

  “You know it wouldn’t.”

  “We’re both pushing my biological clock, you know.”

  “You been having morning sickness?”

  “No. Not all women do, and not with every baby.”

  “Well, there is one thing I am disappointed with.”

  She purses her pink lips and stares down at me.

  “And what might that be, Danny?”

  I touch her lips with my forefinger.

  “That I didn’t knock you up with this last effort. I think it was my finest work, don’t you?”

  45

  On my visit to Dr. Fernandez in early November, she finally corners me on the issue of Mary.

  So I begin, close to the beginning. I met Mary during my senior year at the Catholic high school I graduated from. It was all boys, but Mary we
nt to the public high school not far from where I went. We met at some dance her school was throwing for graduating seniors. The dance was open to the public.

  I found Mary O’Hara at the end of the night, sitting alone on the bleachers. She was sitting on the bottom rung, and what possessed me to go right up to her and sit down beside her—I’ll never quite understand. But I did, and we began talking about casual things, like where I went to school and if I played any sports. Mary O’Hara was on her high school’s volleyball team. She was All City her sophomore and junior and senior years. This dance was in the spring, not long before both of our graduations, so her career as a setter was over. She said she thought she might attend the same downtown college I had my eye on, and we talked about maybe going out the next weekend. She said she would go out with me, and the next Friday we had our first date.

  There was no physical stuff the first two or three times we went out over the summer, but on the fourth date or so, we went to a drive in movie. The joke about the drive in was that they didn’t sell tickets at the entrance; they sold rubbers. They used to call them passion pits, and they were.

  We became rather intense, that night, as I recall, but we didn’t have sex. The sex didn’t occur until a few more dates were history. But once we started, it was standard. I mean we made love every time we were together—when we were alone, that is. I suppose our relationship wound up being more physical than anything else. I can’t remember having any drawn out conversations with Mary. We’d go to a movie or get something to eat. Sometimes when I had money we’d go to a concert. But we always wound up in my mother’s beat up Chevy, parked at Donovan’s Woods, a nearby forest preserve.

  The cops were lazy. The park district cops, I mean, and they didn’t much care what anyone did as long as they didn’t leave used condoms all over the parking lot. If anyone left scumbags on the pavement, you could expect a big crackdown on nighttime activities at Donovan’s Woods. So most of us respected the rules. Sex was okay, just no messy sex.

  After all these years, you’d think I wouldn’t still ache for Mary O’Hara. It was just a superficial, physical partnership, right? It wasn’t based on any mutual interchange of feelings or ideas, was it? We just explored our (then) immature bodies and exhausted our combined energies on sexual congress. There was nothing more to it, right?

  I keep asking myself those questions after all this time, but I cannot rid Mary from myself. It should be easy to reason that it was lust and not love and then let go of it, even if our relationship ended in marriage and a child and then Mary’s desertion. The ache I feel isn’t just about her leaving me, or about the fact that I can never enjoy her physical presence again. I can’t join her genitalia with mine, in other words.

  All of the above sounds very cold and brutal to me, and it is. I’m wondering if there was any genuine affection in the few years we had together, but I cannot recall any instances of that gentle feeling that lovers are supposed to experience with each other.

  I can recall the heat, the animal desire that we shared frequently. I can even remember the night we conceived Kelly. The sex was outrageously passionate, but the times in between bouts in bed were not nearly as memorable.

  When we were together we often fought, but our battles were always quiet. She wasn’t a yeller and neither was I. We’d both become moody and distant, and only when we made up did the sexual thermostat ascend. It became sort of like a roller coaster, emotionally. I’d come home to her at night, before she took off, and I’d dread the next prolonged bout of silence between us.

  Then came the War and the hurried nuptials and the birth of my daughter, and one night I returned to absolute quiet in our apartment. I knew she was gone without even looking around the small two-bedroom flat. I could hear she wasn’t there anymore. I couldn’t smell her scent, the fragrance of the perfumed soap she bathed with every night. Mary had gone, and she never came back.

  Dr. Fernandez wants to know if I’m worried that Lila will desert me, too. I tell her the notion has crossed my mind more than once. Fernandez is very familiar with Lila, by now, because Lila is also her patient. She won’t tell me anything that my fiancé tells her in their sessions, of course, but we talk about her as far as I’m concerned, relationship-wise. It’s hard to avoid Lila. She’s one-third of my life. Kelly is one-third, and my job is the final fraction of the pie. Dr. Fernandez thinks that one-third is too big a piece, regarding my profession. I agree with her, but I don’t know how to change anything. I don’t think of myself outside of the two women in my life and the job that I perform. I have no hobbies, no other outside life that occupies me when I’m away from Homicide. She thinks maybe I should play softball with the parish team, or take up bowling—any damn thing. Fernandez says obsession is a destructive element in anyone’s life, and my particular obsession is, of course, the one case that I’m working.

  Franklin Toliver.

  My relationship with my ex-wife is an example of my personality. Fernandez claims that I become overbearing about everything I do—personal or professional. She tells me I have to learn to give Lila and Kelly their own space to travel in, or I’ll inevitably alienate both of them if I become too protective of them.

  I remind her that Toliver has my address, and that he used to have our phone number.

  “Do you really think this man is going to stalk a Homicide police officer?” she grins.

  “Yeah. I think he wants to, and I think he has, already.”

  “You’ve seen him around you, Danny?” she asks, her face going solemn.

  “No. I’ve never seen him, but I feel him all the time.”

  “Feel him?”

  “It’s the gut wrench you get when you know someone is behind you.”

  “Why don’t you have the Department watch your home?” she asks.

  “They are, but they can’t send someone out there continually since this jerk has gone phantom on me again.”

  “Don’t you think he’d be smarter than to go after two Homicide cops who are both military trained in martial arts and weapons? And you were a member of an elite fighting force—this guy can read, can’t he?”

  “He has a slight disadvantage, Doctor.”

  “What’s that?”

  “He’s fucking nuts.”

  And I really do sense someone out there in the neighborhood at night. Perhaps he’s there in broad daylight, as well. I wouldn’t put it past Franklin. He really has nothing to lose, at this point. He knows he’s going to be apprehended. It’s only a matter of when, not if. Too many people know his by now infamous face. He’s the Number One Most Wanted Man in America, not just in Illinois. He’s made the FBI’s very short list. As incompetent as the Feds can be, when they really want someone, they tend to deliver. They put aside the politics, occasionally, and they get their man, like the Mounties.

  I just hope someone pops Franklin before he gets an opportunity to hurt Kelly or Lila. I’m really not worried about myself because I’ve had men become very hostile toward me before. I’m used to it, courtesy of the military. But when it comes to putting your family in the line of fire, it’s something altogether different.

  Pursuits are much like homicide cases. The longer they drag on, the more difficult they become. It’s November, and the fall has definitely changed the weather pattern. Most of the leaves have descended, by now. The drive I take on Lakeshore, the Outer Drive, is noticeably different, lately. The water of Lake Michigan appears brackish, gray and cold-looking. The waves are choppier. It reminds me of the Gulf of Mexico. (I visited Texas to see a cousin, back after I returned from Vietnam.) The lake water has lost its appeal. It seems to offer no relief, now, as it did in the swelter of summer. It appears hostile and frigid, maybe even ominous.

  The vitality of spring and summer has been replaced, removed, and the withering chill will become colder and colder as the year fades into the dregs of 1987.

  The Challenger tragedy still lingers, after almost a year. There are the usual catastrophes all ove
r the planet. We call it history, and it never reads very happily. Only the people in our personal lives keep us going on, keeping us up with what Father Bob quoted from Emerson: “It’s the pious man’s duty to keep up the comedy.” Or something close to that.

  Lila takes the at-home test in mid-November. It comes up positive. What she suspected is true, so I’m going to be a father in about seven months. Her due date, she figures, will be some time in either late June or early July of 1988. Maybe we’ll have a firecracker baby, maybe he or she will arrive on the Fourth.

  “You’re sure?” I ask.

  She wrinkles her brow.

  “I did the test twice, but we won’t get confirmation, honey bunny, until I see the doc.”

  “Honey bunny?”

  “I rather like that term of affection, don’t you?”

  “I can live without it, Lila.”

  “How ‘bout baby cakes?”

  “Worse.”

  “You’re right. I’ll stop, because then you’ll try to get even and call me sweetie pie or honey bun. That’d give me morning sickness for sure.”

  “Have you had the barfs?” I ask her.

  “Have you heard any retching from the bathroom in the morning?”

  I shake my head.

  “There it is, then. So far, so good, as the man who jumped off the fifty-fifth story kept saying as he passed every window on his way down.”

  “You’re really feeling all right?”

  “I’m feeling really pregnant.”

  “You’ll have to translate into male-ese.”

  “I’m feeling the best I’ve ever felt in my life.”

  “Even better than when you got shot?”

  “That was a highlight, Danny.”

  I grab hold of her and squeeze.

  “Don’t never get shot again.”

  She laughs up at me.

  “There, you’ll get no argument.”

  “I think you better stop running in the morning.”

  “The hell you say. Exercise is good, unless there are complications, and there ain’t gonna be, I’ll tell you right now. This is not going to be a fat baby and he or she’s not going to have a fat momma.”