The Underground Detective: A Novel of Chicago Streets

by Thomas Laird

  I look down at my hands, resting on the arms of this straight back chair. I don’t have any witty comeback.

  “So I guess I’m free, then. Right?”

  “You tell me, Detective. You tell me. Who the hell’s ever free?”

  “I thought you said it wasn’t necessarily my fault.”

  “It wasn’t. It isn’t. Sometimes it absolutely is your own doing. Sometimes you do get the primate on your own shoulders. And sometimes you have to know when to unload. When it’s time to forgive yourself.”

  I look at her eyes. They’re too gentle for the tough woman who’s been telling me to take it easy on myself, sometimes. They’re too understanding to be the eyes of the consummate professional who turned my puerile come-on to her aside with the ease that a world class matador would sidestep a killer bull.

  “It is time to give yourself a break, isn’t it?”

  She tells me all that as I keep boring in on her brown, Latina eyes.

  “Who did Franklin Toliver hang with in high school or college?” Justin muses as we finish up with yet another drive-by slaying on the near northside. This time it’s a ten year old African American boy. I can see a stab register on Justin’s face as he looks at the dead boy lying on the sidewalk at Ardmore and Durham Avenues. It’s gang-related. It almost always is. But this time we don’t have any willing witnesses who are ready to talk to us. Everyone around here is deaf and dumb by choice.

  We walk back to our car. Justin asks the same question again about Franklin, the phantom of Old Town. The murderer of six women. Jack the Ripper, who only rips some of his victims. Others he simply strangles or incinerates.

  “He had no one. He was always a loner,” I tell my new full time partner.

  Apparently Lila has called the Captain and made her wishes formal.

  “He didn’t hang with anyone,” I repeat.

  “He must have someone he confides in. Someone he’d go to in desperation.”

  “Only mommy. But the shrink said he had problems with her, too. I think his old man would drop a dime, himself, if Franklin showed up in Springfield.”

  “So if he doesn’t hang with his mother or father, he has to be holing up somewhere, and he can’t be going to the grocery store or the laundromat on his own, so that leaves a girlfriend or a boyfriend.”

  “I’d figure a female, if he’s living with anyone. A moll, like in the gangster movies,” I smile at Grant.

  “Who’d know about a woman in sonny’s life?” Justin poses.

  “The shrink in Elgin, maybe?” I reply.

  26

  Dr. Lawrence Talbot meets Justin and me at the front door of Admissions. I’m still expecting him to turn into the Wolfman at the full moon, but he won’t go along with my fantasy. He’s a mere mortal with an MD in Psychiatry, but he has no fangs and no facial hair.

  He takes us down the hall past the front desk toward his office. He opens the door, and then he shuts it behind the two of us. We sit in two high backed chairs opposite his desk. He must have dragged the second chair in just to accommodate both of us.

  I introduce Justin Grant to Dr. Talbot.

  “No offense, but your previous partner was a little better looking,” the shrink grins.

  Justin takes the crack for what it is, but I find myself coloring slightly at the cheeks. Talbot notices my blush, but he keeps on going.

  “He didn’t have any close friends, male or female, or so Franklin told me.”

  I suppose I could’ve conducted this interview over the phone, but I hate telephone conversations because you can’t see the face of the person you’re talking to. You can’t read them, in other words. There is no body language to observe, no tell, on their faces. Even though I have no reason to doubt Dr. Talbot’s veracity, everyone tends to lie or withhold things, at least some of the time. It’s harder for them to fool you if you’re looking right at them. There’s nowhere to hide. You can’t roll your eyes or hold the phone away from your ear, pretending to listen to my questions. I’m right in front of you, daring you to try and escape my glance.

  Talbot seems not to be holding back. Why would he? Unless the Lieutenant Governor or Fast Tony Vronski had a talk with him before we arrived. Anything is possible, so that’s why we took the ride to Elgin.

  “He did talk about one particular young woman he knew at the university, however,” Talbot recalls.

  “You mean at Western?” I ask.

  “Yes. I don’t think he went to college anywhere else, did he?”

  “No. Only at Macomb,” Justin adds.

  “Her name was…Let me look it up.”

  He grabs hold of a manila-colored file on his desktop.

  “Her name was Jennifer O’Brien. He knew her from a class he took his second year. He only lasted three semesters at Western Illinois before they threw him out.”

  “Yeah, I talked to the dean who tossed him.”

  “What was so special about Jennifer O’Brien?” Justin asks.

  Talbot peruses his file, and then he closes it and places it on his desk.

  “Have you ever read William Faulkner?” he asks us both.

  “I read him a bit, when I was in the war.”

  “The Vietnam War?” he queries me.

  I hesitate because I’ve learned not to bring up that war unless I know exactly whom I’m talking to.

  “That was the only war I had,” I tell the doctor.

  He smiles, but it’s a reassuring smile. I don’t think he’s going to spit at me or call me a baby killer.

  “Did you read The Sound and the Fury?” he goes on.

  “As a matter of fact, yes,” I answer.

  Justin looks over at me and he grins.

  “Well, I actually did read it, dammit.”

  The two men laugh. But it isn’t a laugh that’s poking fun at me, the poor, illiterate ex-grunt. They just didn’t expect a Homicide to have read Faulkner. I’m wondering what my partner has read, now.

  “There’s a character named Quentin Compson. Do you recall him and his sister, Candace? Caddy, they called her?”

  I nod.

  “All women are bitches….But I think it was his brother, Jason, who said that. Quentin asked, ‘Did you ever have a sister?’ Maybe he said that other stuff, too. I don’t remember. It was hard to read that novel, but I remember I liked it a lot.”

  “Yes,” Talbot says. “But it comes to mind because that was the way Franklin looked at most women—bitches. And it wasn’t just that he had a demeaning attitude toward females. He was way beyond demeaning. And then you throw color into the mix. He railed about women of color, especially African American women. He told me they were all whores. He threw in Hispanics in that rant, also.

  “It brings Jennifer to mind because she was the only girl or female he never lumped into his frenetic little cauldron of hatred. He told me how much he admired her. It seems he went out with Ms. O’Brien several times, but their relationship was specifically platonic. They were merely good friends, according to Toliver. Hearing him talk about her as he did made me think of multiple personality disorders, because Franklin never had positive things to say about anything feminine—other than Jennifer O’Brien. She was the sole recipient of his admiration for anything female.”

  “What was unique about her?” I ask.

  “He had no sexual designs on her, but from what he told me she was a beautiful young woman.”

  “How can he hold that kind of view about a woman when everything else in him is hateful toward the fairer sex?” Justin asks.

  “The only predictable thing about Franklin Toliver is his unpredictability. Perhaps he made this young woman up. Maybe she was all fantasy, but if she was a chimera of his imagination, she was a very powerful concoction, indeed. He made me believe she was real. And I’m pretty used to listening to patients fabricate, pretty used to hearing them lie to me. I don’t think he made up Jennifer. She was the one pure female he’d ever encountered, in his mind.”

  “Could she be
a replacement for Franklin’s mother?” Justin proffers.

  “I don’t think so,” Talbot grins. “Franklin related several Oedipal episodes he’d dreamed or fantasized about his mother, and they were all uniformly ugly scenarios. He wanted his mother dead. I don’t know how else to put it. On the one hand he loved his mother unconditionally, but he also despised her for her sex.

  “You can see why I was so upset when he bolted from these walls. Toliver is a very emotionally and psychologically disturbed young man. He should be institutionalized.”

  “We’d love to accommodate you on that one, Dr. Talbot, but we’re having a little difficulty locating this guy,” Justin smiles.

  Talbot doesn’t return the smile.

  “You both already know very well how dangerous he is.”

  He looks out the window in his office, behind us.

  “He isn’t going to stop killing women, you know,” he tells us.

  His face has gone solemn and worried.

  “He’s probably just begun. And you know about these series murderers. They tend to get better at it, if someone doesn’t stop them.”

  He averts his gaze once more out at the grounds of the Elgin State Mental Facility. It’s as if he’s expecting someone to arrive here, and he doesn’t want to miss their arrival.

  Jennifer O’Brien graduated from Western Illinois University just last spring. We go to the registrar to find out her address. Her latest residence was with her parents in Orland Park, a southwestern suburb of Chicago. We’ve got another long ride ahead of us, but Justin calls her parents’ telephone just to make sure Jennifer will be there to meet us. Justin nods in affirmation after he makes the call on the phone in the unmarked Ford.

  We should make Orland Park in around three hours.

  Jennifer is at home when we arrive at her parents’ ranch house at 149th and Highland Avenue. It’s a modest home in a middle middle-class neighborhood. The people who reside here are working class. They’re likely people employed as middle management in someone else’s company. I don’t see doctors and lawyers living here. These are more pale-blue collar type of folks, and you can tell by the brand of cars parked on the streets and in the driveways.

  Jennifer’s mother answers the door. We know who it is because she tells us her name is Evelyn O’Brien, Jennifer’s mom.

  “Come on in,” she tells us warily. I don’t think she’s wary because Justin is black. I think it’s because we announced we were both Homicides when my partner made the phone call, three hours ago. Justin said she sounded very anxious when he talked to her.

  We enter the house. The living room is small but well kept. The furniture is functional, utilitarian. Not like the stuff I’ve seen in fancier neighborhoods around Chicago. She sits us down on a three-seat sofa. It’s cream colored and it looks relatively new. There is a mahogany coffee table in front of us at our feet, and there are two stuffed chairs opposite us. There’s no TV in the living room, and I find that a bit unusual.

  “I’ll get Jennifer. She just got home from school. She teaches at the middle school, here in Orland Park. And she’s engaged. Going to be married next August. Well, I’ll just….”

  And she leaves us.

  It takes about ten minutes before her daughter descends the staircase leading to the upstairs bedrooms. At least I presume bedrooms are what’s upstairs. The ranch is actually a split-level. It’s deceptive from the way it appears on the outside. The lower level, where we are, is slightly dug into the property.

  She appears, and I see that Talbot had it right. At least he had Franklin’s description of her right on the money. She’s beyond pretty. She’s a beautiful woman, and there’s no exaggeration in that description. She has an extraordinary presence about her, and I’m thinking her fiancé is one lucky bastard. Few men wind up with someone who exudes…serenity, I guess you’d say. Yes, ‘serene’ is the exact word. Jennifer O’Brien has an aura about her that makes you feel at ease with yourself immediately, no matter what toil and travail might be bubbling below your own surface. When this young woman enters a room, it’s almost as if a hush comes along with her. You can’t be raucous or violent in her presence. She has a calming influence upon whatever or whoever is near her.

  I can imagine she casts a spell over her students, too.

  She smiles and sits opposite us on one of the sturdy stuffed chairs. There’s no pretense in her. She doesn’t seem capable of one false word or move, and she hasn’t even opened her mouth, yet. And a pretty set of peach colored lips they are, also. I’d like to see the man who convinced her to marry him. I’d like to know what kind of magic influence he must be able to cast toward Jennifer O’Brien.

  “You’re here about Franklin Toliver,” she says as she settles in. Her mother didn’t come into the living room with her. It’s just the three of us, and there’s no sign of her father.

  “Yes,” Justin says. “As your mother likely told you, we’d like to know about your relationship with him at college, a few years ago.”

  “He was a few years ahead of me, but they kicked him out his sophomore year. I was just a freshman. It took me five years to get through because I had a double major.”

  She makes me melt, just listening to her softly muted, hypnotic voice. She sounds like a soprano, but there’s no sharp, high-pitched edge to her voice. She speaks in a voice that you’re compelled to listen to—every syllable of every utterance. Jennifer is the complete package. I’m getting the idea why Franklin placed her on a pedestal. I see why she came off so differently from any other girl he ever knew.

  “You think Franklin’s a murderer?”

  I look at her vivacious mouth, and I have the urge to kiss her, and I wonder how Franklin could control himself when he was with her. But she seems, somehow, unapproachable, as well. This woman is a puzzle to me, so perhaps that’s how Toliver saw her, too. Elevated. Aloof. Goddess-like. But who the hell knows what was going on in that crazy bastard’s head. Maybe she was a younger version of some idealized mother he never had. Maybe.

  “He’s a person of interest,” I tell her. I dread repeating that line to everyone we interview, but it’s all we’ve got to say, officially, about our most likely suspect. Hell, he’s not our most likely perp—he’s it. If someone else really did those women, then we really are chasing a spook, not a human prey.

  “I only knew him briefly.”

  “Were you very close?” Justin asks her. She crosses her long, lithe legs and I have a tremendous desire to groan, but I somehow control myself.

  What kind of genes produced this offspring? I’d love to get a look at her old man.

  “We were friends. Nothing more.”

  “Did Franklin confide in you?” Justin continues.

  I can see my partner is properly impressed by Jennifer. He’s got a frozen grin on his face that tells me he’s struggling not to be intimidated by the hoodoo Ms. O’Brien seems to spread as she enters a room.

  “Yes. I think so. But he was a very private person. Anyone could tell he was troubled. But if I thought he was capable of doing all those terrible things you think he did, I would’ve contacted you long ago.”

  “We’re not here to make you feel accountable for anything he might have done, and we still have nothing to formally charge him with. We just want to bring him in for questioning.”

  She looks at me and smiles, and I can feel a little quivering going on somewhere way deep inside me. I have the urge to call this off before I start slobbering all over myself. Whatever she has is powerful shit. It’s like being in a room with one of those for-real faith healers. She has that kind of charisma.

  “You think he did those terrible things, don’t you, Detective…ah Detective, what’s your name?”

  “Mangan. I’m sorry. This is Detective Grant. That was very rude of us.”

  “Don’t apologize….You think he did all those awful things, don’t you.”

  I watch her eyes. They’re green, sort of emerald-colored. Quintessentially Irish,
they appear. Her hair is red, true red, and she has light freckles dotting her pale, fragile complexion.

  “Tell me the things Franklin Toliver told you, Jennifer. Tell me why he picked you to talk to. You were special to him, weren’t you,” I tell her.

  She smiles. Then the look fades and her face darkens.

  “He was like looking into a dark corner in your bedroom. He was like looking into a dark corner when you were afraid and you didn’t know what was in the room with you when the lights were all out. He was like that moving thing that you just barely notice out of the corner of your eye, but you can’t quite make out exactly who or what the moving entity really is.

  “I never knew Franklin. Not the way he wanted me to know him.

  “He frightened me, Detective Mangan. He frightened me terribly, but he never once laid a hand on me.”

  She smiles at me strangely, and the hair on the back of my neck stands up as if a chill breeze has just crept up behind me and grazed me from behind.

  27

  I’d like to meet her fiancé. I really would. I’d like to see him melt before her gaze, the way everyone else seems to.

  “Have you heard anything from Franklin Toliver since your college years?” I ask her.

  She finally seems taken off guard.

  “No…. Why would I want to talk to Franklin?”

  The calming smile reappears on her lips and face, just as if it were all conjured for Justin Grant and me.

  “I was thinking it’d be more likely he would want to contact you, since he thought so highly of you.”

  “That’s very flattering,” she smiles warmly at me. “But I don’t think he’d even remember me, after all these years.”

  “I think he’d remember you,” Justin adds. “You’re apparently the only young woman he didn’t abuse, one way or another, all the way from high school through the university.”