The Underground Detective: A Novel of Chicago Streets

by Thomas Laird

  “I can’t believe I’m all that special in his life,” she insists.

  Modesty doesn’t play as well, with her. In my experience, really beautiful women and extraordinarily handsome men are well aware what they look like. How they hide that self-knowledge is another thing, however. Some aren’t able to come off as anything but arrogant about their physical attractiveness, and others seem at ease with the fact that God spent way too much time with them.

  I think she’s lying, and I think Franklin has been hanging onto his past association with her. At least he’s been trying to, I have to believe, unless he’s even a crazier son of a bitch than we think he is. I can’t see how you’d cut this young woman adrift from your dinghy unless she insisted on it, and I get the impression she doesn’t really believe Toliver is capable of what we think he’s capable of.

  “Withholding information in a possible homicide case is a bad thing to become involved with, Jennifer. You’re a teacher. You’re going to be married. You don’t want any clouds over all that. Now I ask you again. Has Franklin Toliver contacted you since you went to school together?”

  It really bothers me to cause her to switch her amicable attitude toward me and replace it with the attitude she now aims my way. It’s the first time she’s flashed hostility at either of us, but it’s a subtle shade of animosity. I think it’s difficult for her to flash negativity at most anyone. It’s the teacher in her, especially the teacher and caretaker of young children in her. They are inclined to keep it light, keep it happy, almost all of the time. Otherwise you’d have a herd of weeping little shits on your hands. And I think she shows that same upbeat face toward most of the folks she comes in contact with.

  “Tell me, Jennifer. We have a pretty fair idea that your old schoolmate has murdered at least six women.”

  Justin is watching her intently. I turn to him, but his eyes never leave Jennifer O’Brien.

  For the first time since we laid eyes on her, Jennifer appears anxious. There’s none of her original cool remaining. She fidgets. She squirms just noticeably.

  “You’re not the person we came to grill or make feel bad,” I tell her. I don’t want her clamming up and lawyering up or whatever she figures she’s supposed to do from watching all those TV cop shows.

  “We’re not here to make you uncomfortable,” Justin reassures her. “We’re here to find out where Franklin Toliver is so we can find out if he really is the man who killed the six women. If we catch him, it’ll either exonerate him or stop the slayings. It’s win/win, Jennifer.”

  She becomes noticeably more ill at ease when Justin talks to her. I noticed how she backed off, just barely, when I introduced him to her. I thought it might just be shyness.

  “What brought you two together at Western?” I ask her. “Just the class you were in?”

  She shifts her eyes toward me, once more, and I think I have a subtle odor in my nostrils.

  “I hope you haven’t forgotten my original question. We’ll get back to it in a second, but what was it that helped you hit it off so well with Franklin that he’s kept you in mind all these years later?”

  She’s decided to withdraw from the field. It’s in her body language. She uncrosses her legs and settles back against the sofa on which she’s perched. She even looks like a bird ready to take flight. There’s a hawk approaching, she figures, and Jennifer is now a bird of prey trying to escape a predator—and I’m the predator.

  “You can talk to us here or talk to us downtown.”

  I hate the bad cop scene, but she doesn’t leave me much choice.

  “He said he was in love with me. I told him I didn’t feel the same way, but I wanted to be friends, and he couldn’t live with those limitations, he said, back at school. And then he got thrown out, and I thought it was the end of it. But six months after they’d expelled him at Macomb, I started getting phone calls.

  “We used to talk for hours. I enjoyed the conversations. We looked at things…similarly, I guess you’d say.”

  “What kinds of things do you mean?” I ask her.

  She shifts her eyes just momentarily at Justin, and then she darts her gaze back at me. She seems to have trouble looking at my partner, at least for any length of time.

  “You have a variety of kids at the school where you teach?” I ask her.

  “Variety?” she repeats.

  “I mean racially,” I answer.

  This is a far southwestern suburb, Orland Park. There aren’t many African Americans in the vicinity, yet. This is where whites headed when the blockbusting began, almost twenty-five years ago. The white population of Chicago moved to the burbs, west and south and north.

  “Racially?” she parrots.

  She’s not going to make it easy on me.

  “Do you have any African American students in your class? What grade do you teach?”

  “I teach the fifth grade at Henry Harrison Middle School. And we have Hispanic and Asian—“

  “Do you teach any black children, Jennifer?”

  Her eyes smolder at me as if she figures she’s finally snared into answering.

  “No. Not this year. But we do have black children at our school, yes.”

  “But you don’t have any.”

  “I already told you. No.”

  The friendly love goddess has turned into a stonewalling adversary, I’m thinking. I look over at Justin, but he’s still watching her while she shoots lasers my way.

  “Has that man contacted you lately?” I finally throw her way.

  She looks as though she’d like to come off that couch at me. That’s the way I read her. I can see her tightening in her upper body. I can see the flush of anger in her cheeks, in the jut of her magnificent jaw.

  “He has. He’s never stopped.”

  “Do you know where he is, now?” Justin engages.

  She avoids looking at my partner. She figures there’s no advantage in trying to seem indifferent toward Justin, any longer.

  “No. He never says. I think he’s been moving about because he knows all of you want to get hold of him. He says it doesn’t matter what the truth is. You’ve already made up your minds he’s responsible for what happened.”

  “What does he tell you about that?” Justin asks her.

  She finally eyes my partner.

  “He says you’re going to get him because he’s white and they were all black. He says anybody knows he wouldn’t dirty himself with people like them.”

  Justin smiles, now that she’s exposing her colors, as it were.

  “He’s never told you where he is or where he’s headed.”

  “No. And I’ve never asked.”

  “You remember what I told you about holding back information,” I warn her.

  “I have a fine memory, Detective Mangan. I think I’ve talked to you both enough. If you need to talk to me again, I want a lawyer to be there when you do.”

  I stand. Justin gets up, as well.

  “Maybe you’d like to see the crime photos, Jennifer. Maybe Franklin’s not the good guy you think he is or that he says he is. After you’ve seen the photos, maybe when your nightmares stop, maybe you’ll have a different take on Toliver.

  “If he calls, we’d like you to let us know. I mean if he calls again.”

  We turn and head toward the door. She stands and quietly watches us go, but she doesn’t throw any friendly salutations our way on our way out.

  “Such a pretty girl. You think she’s a racist, right?” Justin says as I head us back north on Mannheim Road—they call it LaGrange Road, here in the south suburbs.

  “What do you suppose caused her to be a soulful best friend of Franklin’s?”

  “Hard to believe, anyway.”

  “Why? Because she’s so damned good looking? What makes you think assholes look like assholes?”

  “Yes, I know, Danny. It just seems—“

  “A pity. I’ll go along with that.”

  He watches the park district woods go by as we hea
d back toward Headquarters. We’ll catch 55 to Chicago to go back to work.

  “We need to have her phone tapped,” I tell Justin.

  “She’s smart. She won’t say anything to him that we can use.”

  “We can hope to get his number and location, if he’s dumb enough to talk long enough for us to trace the call.”

  “When has a movie dick ever successfully traced a call and caught a guy as a result of the trace? I’ve never seen it once.”

  “Yeah? Well, we have to hope he does something really stupid some time very soon or we’ll both be doing traffic in the Loop with the old guys waiting on retirement, and that can’t be the fast lane you were hoping to be tooling down, no?”

  He grins at me and then turns back toward the scenery that’s receding behind the Ford I’m driving.

  I arrange a wiretap with my Captain and with the Cook County District Attorney’s Office, and the County Prosecutor gets a judge to sign off on the tap. It’ll be up and running in eighteen hours. Cook County knows Franklin is high profile, and even though Cook County is heavily Democratic, as is the Lieutenant Governor, there doesn’t seem to be any opposition, lately, to our playing tag with Franklin Toliver. I think even Fast Tony Vronski wants this little problem to just disappear.

  But I don’t trust that slimy prick Vronski as far as I could throw his Olds 98. He’s still a snake in the elephant grass, as far as I can figure it.

  I drive by Bill O’Connor’s high-rise with and without Justin as often as I can, and I make my presence obvious to my favorite doorman, there. I make sure I slow down so Mr. Swanson can be certain it really is me, and I sometimes smile and wave at him.

  Even amateur sleuths understand that the more time that goes by after a homicide, the harder it becomes to apprehend the suspect or suspects. Most killers aren’t like John Dillinger or Baby Face Nelson—they don’t leave calling cards or other signature remnants that shout out whose work the slayings were. Dillinger killed cops, so everyone from the Chicago Outfit to the FBI lusted for his blood, and eventually that blood lust was sated.

  We’re after the murderer of six black hookers, and even though the media has helped fuel the fire for justice, it really would have expedited things if Franklin had whacked a cop. Then all bets are off, all the hounds are unleashed, and politics can’t intrude on an investigation into the killing of a police officer.

  They were just whores, the lowest feeders on the food chain. And color them black to make them even more disposable. No matter how much righteous indignation the Times can drum up with their reward money, the facts still remain:

  Nobody really gives a shit about six dead nigger prostitutes.

  Ugly word, nigger? Sure. But it’s the word used, still, by a good-sized chunk of the Caucasian population. Maybe they don’t use it out in the open as often—Archie Bunker on the TV show made it painfully public that it was uncool to call blacks by that coinage, along with coon, spearchucker and so on. But the word remains, and so does the sentiment. Race is a very big issue in Chicago, and it’s a very big deal everywhere. I can’t think of a color-blind society anywhere on Earth. Some places are more liberal than others, but Chicago is a very segregated city. Neighborhoods have very well defined color boundaries, and anybody who claims that their hood is racially diverse and color-blind is probably stretching the truth.

  Racism was dominant in Vietnam, too. We looked at them as gooks, and they hated us right back as white outlanders—even though a lot of American GIs came in assorted flavors and ethnic backgrounds.

  There are all kinds of roadblocks cluttering our way, on this case. Maybe when Justin entered the fray I became even more aware of how nasty this color business can be. I fought with a whole lot of brothers in Vietnam. There were American Indians and Hispanics and Asian brothers in arms, as well. We really did try to look out for each other’s asses. We really did claim we’d all go down together. At least in the Rangers things were that way. There was a team concept, and ego was left out of it, in the field, especially.

  But I’m certain we all had that ingrown notion that we really weren’t all the same on the inside, somewhere deep in the fabric. It’s too deeply instilled in most of us. This separates me from you. That keeps us distinct from each other. Like that Frost poem about walls. There has to be something to keep us all at arm’s length from each other. There is something fearful about allowing the other guy or woman to encroach on our sacred private property.

  In spite of all of the above, or maybe because of it, I’m going to catch that son of a bitch, Franklin Toliver.

  And I’m going to throw in whoever it was that put out Sharon O’Connor’s headlights, as well.

  28

  Lila stops by my office on her first day back to work, two weeks before Christmas. Justin is in his own cubicle, three doors down. He’s calling about the phone tap to see if there were any positives from Franklin. I have my doubts we’ll catch him this way because I know Jennifer O’Brien has already called him on an outside line, probably at a booth, and she’s warned him away. So we’ll have to start tailing her, Justin and I agreed.

  “You look good,” I tell her as she stands in the doorway. “Got time to talk?”

  She enters my office and sits down at the lone chair opposite me.

  “Do you feel all right, really?”

  She grins slyly at me.

  “I’m out of sick leave.”

  “Come on!”

  “No. I feel okay. I just get tired easily, so I can only work half shifts until the doctor signs off that I’m fit.”

  Her paleness is evident. The white is whiter than usual. She looks anemic, but I’m no MD.

  “How’s Kelly?”

  “Getting over the boyfriend, but doing a lot better than she was two months ago.”

  “Yeah. I talked to her last night.”

  “Then why’d you ask?” I smile.

  She returns the gesture, and I recall again why I’ve been in love with her for as long as I have.

  “Just to hear you say it, Danny.”

  I want to tell her that I still want her back as a partner and that I still want her to move in with me, but the words simply won’t get started.

  “What’s going on with the Toliver case?”

  I inform her where we are.

  “At least it’s the first decent lead you’ve had in months, no?”

  “It was your case, too, Lila.”

  She sends her glance down at the table in front of us.

  “Well, yeah, but not anymore,” she concludes.

  “Yes. Not anymore.”

  “What about the O’Connor thing?” she wants to know.

  “Dead in the water. I think the doorman let the killer in or he was drunk and asleep when the guy made entry. Either way, he’s fucked if he tells me either of the above, so he’s not talking, and right now I have no evidence that this guy let the boogey man in the house, so we’re waiting.”

  “Hurry up and wait. Just like the military.”

  I nod at her, but what I really want to do is kiss her. All over her face.

  “I missed you. I still do,” I finally blurt.

  “I missed you, too.”

  I notice the past tense in her reply, and my heart sinks again, the way it always does when she puts me to the side.

  “I better boogey,” she says, and she rises out of the chair with a noticeable effort.

  “You’re not really out of sick days,” I say to her.

  “Not really.”

  “Then you look like you need a nap.”

  “I’ll learn to doze on the job,” she smiles with a strained effort.

  “You wouldn’t know how to do that.”

  “You think?”

  “I know.”

  “I’ll see you around, Danny.”

  “I still want you back.”

  “You mean as your partner?”

  “I mean every way you got.”

  She gives me an intense stare, but then she sm
iles again and walks out my door.

  Justin and I have arranged with the Cook County Police and with the Sheriff’s Office and with the Orland Park PD to keep tabs on Jennifer O’Brien. Regular tabs. There’s no money to watch her all three shifts on a twenty-four hour basis just because I think she’s still in touch with Toliver, but there’s enough suspicion about her to keep an eye on her at night. During the day, she’s a teacher at that grade school, and I’ve already contacted her principal, a guy named Elroy, and he’s agreed to call me if she ever takes a personal day or if she calls in sick. I’m also planning on checking in with Jennifer’s fiancé. I called the mother, and she told me his name was Rick Carlisle, and she even sprung for a phone number. I could hear the concern in both the principal’s voice and Mrs. O’Brien’s tone when I talked to them both.

  But I didn’t intimate that there was any problem when I talked to the two. I just told them it was routine follow up. They still sounded wary, the way I would if I were them.

  Jennifer has shown no inclination to go out at night—except with Rick Carlisle, on the weekends and once or twice during the week. I’m wondering if Carlisle knows about the other man in his future bride’s life. I wonder if he knows his fiancée’s attitude toward non-whites. Maybe he feels the same way.

  I’ll have to ask him, straight up.

  Kelly comes back from Northern Illinois University at the end of the second week of December. She’s just finished final exams for the semester, and she looks haggard, all tuckered out. Her weight looks as if it’s stabilized since I saw her last at Thanksgiving, but she appears weary.

  “You feeling all right?” I ask her as we drive toward Franco’s Pizza on the Friday she’s come home.

  “I just need to vegetate for the three weeks off.”

  She smiles, and I begin to think that maybe she’s gotten over Michael.

  “I’ve gotten over Michael,” she says when I hit the first red light.