The Underground Detective: A Novel of Chicago Streets

by Thomas Laird

  The burgers are all right at The Billygoat Tavern, and I don’t order a beer, but Lila does. She can drink a few without getting impaired, so I never complain when she takes a belt during our shift. It’s never more than one. We’ve got that rule, but we relax it up, on occasion.

  The place is noisy, but the good news is there is no loud music to add to the raucousness. They only stay open until nine at night, and we’ve been in here after the dinner hour, and it becomes deserted and lonely in here after about seven at night. It’s like that “Night Owls” painting, except it’s a bar instead of a coffee house/grill.

  We have to shout to be heard by each other.

  “You’re not really jealous.”

  I look at her and smile.

  “You’re a big girl. You can decide who you want to lust for,” I try to grin.

  “You’re an idiot, Danny!” she shouts.

  I laugh, and then our food and drinks suddenly arrive.

  I bite into the burger. It’s not bad. It ought to be better for four bucks. Inflation has become a real bitch. I can’t afford to eat out as often as I used to.

  “Why am I an idiot?” I shout back.

  “Because you never really trust anybody, do you.”

  “I trust you,” I tell her in full volume.

  The old couple at the table sitting behind us are paying rapt attention at our conversation. I look at the two grayheads, and I can do no other than smile amicably at them. They become self-conscious, and then they glare at their own food.

  “No, you don’t,” she insists, loudly.

  I lean over close to her.

  “Yes, goddammit, I do! I trust you!”

  She kisses me before I can withdraw.

  I look at her. I stare into her eyes as intensely as I’m able. Then I kiss her back.

  I turn to the oldsters sitting behind us, and I tell them:

  “Did you see that?” I ask the old man and old woman.

  They both nod simultaneously.

  Her right nipple sticks out prodigiously. It is pointed and pink. The left nipple is an inny. She hovers atop me as we engage for a second go, here at her apartment. It’s late in the afternoon, and I thought Kelly might be coming home at any minute, at my house. Lila said her roomie was out of town until next Tuesday, so we opted for Lila’s place.

  “Do we have any birth control issues?” I ask her suddenly.

  “Helluva moment to ask that question,” she replies.

  Her face is flushed and sweating. I’m covered in lather from the both of us, as well, and as I say, this is the second bout on this afternoon’s card.

  I’ve never had anything like this with the girls I’ve known or with Mary, my ex-wife. I haven’t known many women in this way at all, honestly. The ones I made love to were few in number, is what I mean to say. The number of encounters in total would be a much larger digit than the cast of players. I suppose I’m monogamous by nature.

  She comes down toward me and rests on top of me, her face flush against my chest.

  I kiss the top of her close-cropped head. Her hair is thick enough, however, that you can’t see scalp. I’d like to see her with tresses down to her perfect orb of a butt.

  “So,” is all I can muster.

  “Don’t talk. Seize the moment. Seize the freaking day, Danny.”

  “I’d rather seize you,” I tell her.

  “You did a pretty good job of that. Think we both came close to massive coronaries, no?”

  She’s sitting up, looking down at me with her mystic’s eyes.

  “Only way to check out, if you have to check out at all.”

  “Still think this is a mistake?” she demands.

  I watch her eyes but they don’t blink. Not once.

  “I don’t care if it’s a mistake. As long as we’re both making it.”

  9

  On Christmas Eve, I take Kelly to a restaurant on the southwest side, Benedicts. She orders ham and I order turkey, and to my amazement, she eats what’s on her plate.

  Sr. Catherine has her going, as an out-patient, to St. Mary’s Hospital in Oak Lawn for the bulimia. I could never get her to go back to counseling, but this nun has worked the magic. The only reason I know about it is because I get the co-pay bills at the end of the month, and I’ve been getting them since the end of November.

  I don’t bring up the out-patient business because she’s never discussed her eating disorder with me, not even when I attended the parental gatherings at St. Luke’s in Evergreen Park, a few years back.

  We don’t communicate well, regardless of the subject, so I’ve pretty much stopped trying.

  But she does appear to be just slightly less frail than she was at the beginning of the school year, and the truancy and the drugs (as far as I can tell) have stopped, too. I don’t toss her room, anyway, because she’s very clever about stashing her stuff.

  “You have to work tonight, right?” she asks.

  I’m shocked that she initiates the conversation.

  “Yeah. I go in at eleven.”

  “You going to see Lila tonight before you go to work?”

  “No. Lila has her own plans before we go on.”

  “Oh.”

  She grins just slightly.

  “What’s so amusing?”

  “Nothing.”

  I don’t bite at the ploy.

  “Just that I know you have a thing for Lila.”

  She smirks, just a little.

  “And how do you know that?”

  “I’ve seen the way you look at her when she drops you off at the house, sometimes.”

  Kelly has even been civil to Lila, if not outright friendly.

  “Lila is gay,” I tell her. My turn to shock.

  It doesn’t even slow my daughter down.

  “That’s what women say to keep you at arm’s length, Dad. It isn’t always true.”

  “She has a roommate,” I tell her.

  There is a healthier glow about her color now, too. Maybe she’s not just eating tonight. Maybe she’s finally decided not to puke herself to death to spite me and her AWOL mother.

  “That doesn’t mean she’s a lesbian, Dad.”

  I haven’t heard her say “Dad” much until tonight, either. The notion gets me to thinking if it sounds too good to be true….

  But I let it go. It’s Christmas Eve, for Christ’s sake. Neither of us attends church, so—

  “I’m going to midnight mass,” she says as she picks with a spoon at her orange sherbet.

  Benedicts is a mid-scale restaurant. It’s a step up from a mom and pop, but it’s no chain thing, either. It is tastefully put together, and the interior is all modern and eye pleasing. There are candles lit on all the tables, and the waiters and waitresses all wear white shirts and black bowties.

  “You’ve found the light?” I smile.

  “I haven’t found anything. But I’m looking,” she replies with a sad glance.

  “I’m not trying to make fun of you, honey, but shit, all these changes…”

  “I have to, Dad. Or I’ll die.”

  She says it straight up, without the melodrama that it sounds like. Because it’s true. If she keeps on doing it the old way, she’s gone. The doctors told us in the past that she’d play hell on her liver and kidneys and that her heart would finally give out if she kept abusing herself the way she had been.

  And I’ve come to notice that the fridge is emptying out faster than usual, the past few weeks. She’s just begun to call off her elongated hunger strike or whatever the bulimia is. I know it’s got to do with self-esteem. I know Kelly doesn’t like herself, and I know it’s more complicated than just a reaction to being a pudgy pre-teenaged girl, at one time. But she’s been so secretive about what’s going on, and she’s been so outright rebellious toward me, the past few years, it’s hard to know what’s happening with her.

  It’s an appropriate time to start all over again, I suppose. Christmas, I mean. Maybe that’s what Sr. Catherine sold t
o Kelly, because she’s moved her to do things no one else had any success with.

  I know enough about psychiatry, however, to understand that nothing happens overnight to cause profound change in human behavior. She seems to take this moment as a cue.

  “I can’t eat the rest of this sherbet. I think I already ate too much, Dad.”

  “You did great. Don’t worry about it.”

  She smiles. Then she hands me a card.

  I open it. It’s plain, no picture or message on the cover. I look inside and it reads: Merry Christmas. I’m trying.

  I look up at her, and I see her bright, beautiful eyes set in a not-so-haggard face, anymore. I can’t say anything for a moment.

  “Your presents are under our scrawny-assed tree at home.”

  “I know,” she says. “I saw them there. I’ll open them when I get back from midnight mass.”

  “Why don’t you wait until tomorrow morning? We can open them at ten or so, and then I’ll take you somewhere that’s open, for lunch. It might only be White Castle because nobody much is open on Christmas.”

  “Take Lila with us. I know she likes you, Dad. More than you think she does.”

  “Woman’s intuition?”

  “Yeah. You can call it that.”

  “I’ll drop you off at the church before I go in to work.”

  “You’ll be late, then.”

  “So I’ll be late.”

  She looks at me quizzically, but then she drops her gaze to the melting orange sherbet, and finally she jabs at the iced sweet stuff with her spoon.

  Captain Marshall Clarke is our guy in Homicide. He is one of the first black Homicide commanders in CPD history. He rose through the street and he catapulted over bigotry on the force. Everyone respects him, and the word is that he’s always been clean, even when he was in uniform and when he was a lieutenant in Vice.

  Lila and I are called onto his carpet on the day after New Year’s, January 2, 1987.

  He has a very spacious office, compared to our cubicles. It’s understandable since he has the responsibilities he owns. Shit flows downhill, and Lila and I are at the bottom of the mountain. So we expect to hear some kind of reprimand for allowing the “Twin Killer,” as he is now called in the newspapers, to continue to roam Chicago’s mean streets.

  Clarke is a medium-sized man, perhaps five feet eight, but he is rather burly. I’d clock him at 205 or so. It’s all muscle, though. He must be fifty, but he has the look of a weight lifter or some kind of fitness freak. There’s no excess in his poundage.

  “So,” he begins. “Nothing new on this series fellow.”

  He isn’t smiling. He never does. Marshall Clarke is a very somber-looking man for all seasons.

  “No, sir,” Lila chimes in.

  “I understand,” Clarke replies to her. We’re both seated on a small two-seater couch against his wall. He also has a nice view of the city, but his is much wider.

  “We’ve circulated the sketch all over northern Illinois,” I explain. “We’ve hit Old Town so often that the hookers make us before we can engage them, and they take off running the other way.”

  “Understandable. You’re doing everything you can do.”

  He swivels his chair and looks out onto the Lakeshore.

  “How many hours you figure you two have clocked on this one case?”

  “I don’t really know,” I answer.

  “Probably something close to a couple hundred, so far,” Lila estimates.

  He turns back toward us.

  “I have to ask you to cut back. I don’t want your other cases to suffer because you’re constantly running after a dead-ender.”

  “Dead-ender?” I ask.

  “You know how hooker cases end up. The Department won’t call them low profile, but we all know the truth. The papers are puffing these six murders up, but the readers don’t really care, at least not for long, and then the media moves on to something flashier.”

  “You mean something whiter,” Lila tells him.

  “As a matter of fact,” Clarke smiles.

  I can’t remember ever seeing his teeth before.

  “Sir, that’s all bullshit, any way you cut it.”

  He stares at me, and the smile is gone.

  “I know that. You know that. But that’s not the way it really works and everybody in Homicide knows it, too.”

  “The Feds,” I say.

  “What about them?”

  “They’re taking this over because it is their thing, lately. They get headlines when they solve multiples—they call them ‘serial killers,’ now—and they don’t care about readership. It’s about Quantico and profilers and the science behind these mutts who do lots of victims, one after the other.”

  “That’s a very cute soliloquy, Danny. But I don’t take orders from the FBI.”

  I try not to show what I’m thinking. But it appears that he really believes the crap he’s just told us.

  “So. As I was saying,” Clarke says. “You’ll have to cut back on the hours you work on the six killings. Am I clear?”

  “Perfectly,” Lila says.

  We turn and walk out the Captain’s door.

  “Why now?”

  She looks at me as we sit in the car. We’re parked in the garage at Headquarters in the Loop.

  “Because he’s right, Danny. You know he’s right. The media clowns are only on this one because it involves multiples, and series killings are all the rage on TV and in the movies. Once everyone becomes acquainted with the past histories of these girls, the interest will wane. And he’s right about the ‘white,’ too. If they were white, the news guys would never let go, but with six black whores, give it a month or two, tops. It’s reality, partner.”

  “I never thought I’d hear that out of you, especially you.”

  “Why? Because I’m a feminist?”

  “I didn’t know you were a feminist.”

  “Most gay females are.”

  “Yeah, but you’re bisexual, right?”

  “That would explain a few things, now wouldn’t it.”

  She gives me the snide smirk.

  I feel my face heating up. I feel very uncomfortable in this territory. A lot of cops are still pissed that females work the streets, as either uniforms or detectives. The old chauvinistic patriarchal atmosphere has not left the building with Elvis, in cop land.

  “I want to catch this guy,” I rejoin.

  “So do I and you know it. And unless Clarke intends to follow us everywhere we go on every shift we work, how’s he going to keep tabs on the time we spend on the case?”

  She smiles my way. I look all around the garage, but I don’t see anyone else. So I move over from the passenger’s side and I lay a hot, firm one on her lips.

  She responds in kind.

  “I don’t like sharing,” I tell her as we disengage.

  “You mean my roomie?” she asks.

  “I mean anyone, sitters or pointers.”

  “That’s something for which only time will tell, Danny.”

  I look over at her. She’s been letting her hair grow out, and now it tickles her shoulders. She hasn’t let it grow at my suggestion, however.

  “You want to get this to another level?” I ask her, looking dead on into her eyes.

  “It already is. Or haven’t you noticed, dumbass.”

  She gets out of the squad and walks toward the elevators.

  Lila doesn’t say anything more about us, the next few days, and I figure I better back off. I can’t expect her to get solid with what she must think are demands from me. But I really can’t see a threesome working. Not a threesome together all at once. I mean me being with her and she being with another woman when I’m not around. If I were truly a Renaissance Man, maybe I could hack it, but I’m far too square and conservative, when it comes down to relationships. The bit about her being bisexual was a relief at first, but now I don’t know if I can live with her part time heterosexuality. Maybe I’m asking too much, bu
t I know I could never switch hit, myself.

  Most men look at lesbianism as something indirectly erotic. Guys like to watch women go at each other, romantically, but most straight males have real difficulty watching men grope each other. I’m sure there’s something illogical and duplicitous about that attitude, and I don’t have anything against homosexuals. I believe in equal rights for everyone. It’s just that I’m absolutely Neanderthal when it comes to the woman I intend to spend the rest of my life with.

  It’ll have to be me and her. No third parties. I never cheated on Mary, and if I wind up with Lila, it’ll be the same deal. Like I said, I’m absolutely monogamous. I can’t work it any other way.

  Maybe I’m archaic. Maybe I am a latent homophobe (but I don’t really believe it). I just know that I want Lila all for myself, and I can’t see it playing out any other way.

  I’ll never make any ultimatums for Lila. But I guess I’ve got one bubbling up inside me. Some day, some time, the pot will probably boil over, and then I’ll lose Lila.

  Just like I lost the first one.

  10

  I was with the program. I was a fanatic. I was gung ho, even if I wasn’t a Marine. They trained me how to kill for my country and I obliged my nation. I’m not happy about the men I shot and killed, but I’m at least able to say every one of them died at my hands in the heat of combat and in the steam of southeast Asia. It was self- defense. I never went looking for trouble, but I always wound up in the middle of it.

  When Clarke tells us to back off on the murders of six people, I smell a rat. The rat doesn’t live in our building at Headquarters, either. The rat lives in a more elevated dwelling. Somewhere where the shakers and doers reside.

  Everything is political in Chicago. Nothing is untainted by simplicity and logic. Someone wants us to hold back, and it isn’t Clarke. Like the military, you take orders from the top. In the police it’s the same way. I may have been a bit idealistic about Homicide when I got this job, but I know now that even stiffs suffer the fix.

  Blacks used to be victims of the Machine in this town, but now they’re evolving into the parts of the device, and soon they’ll run the controls. Chicago is becoming a city of color. The Irish are no longer completely in power. Blacks are pushing, and so are Hispanics. Hispanics might someday become the dominant player in this burg, it seems. Their population is beginning to swell. For now, though, the leader in the pack to overthrow my Mick brothers is African Americans.