The Underground Detective: A Novel of Chicago Streets

by Thomas Laird

  He slams the screen shut, and it appears that confession’s over.

  31

  Washington’s Birthday approaches—it’s the fifth of February, today. We have made no new inroads toward Franklin Toliver through Jennifer O’Brien. Our visit to her house must have put both of them on high alert, and none of her incoming phone calls has been suspicious.

  I get a call from the DesPlaines PD. They say to rush over to the Toliver residence, but they won’t tell me what’s going on over the phone. So I check out with the Captain, who raises his eyebrows dramatically when I tell him where I’m headed.

  Lieutenant Bill Bartell of the DesPlaines police meets me at the door of the Lieutenant Governor’s home. The State Police are milling about out front—there must be ten of them, this time. They don’t even look my way, and I don’t recognize any of them.

  Bartell escorts me into the house, but Mrs. Toliver is nowhere to be seen. He directs us both up the staircase that starts just a few feet from the entryway. We head up a flight, and then turn right, and he stops us at the first door in the hallway.

  “It’s Mrs. Toliver’s bedroom,” Bartell explains.

  The door is open, and there are photographers and assorted crime scene specialists packing the bedroom. Bartell walks us right past them all until we reach a huge walk-in closet. The accordion doors are opened. I walk closer.

  Mrs. Raymond Toliver is hanging by the neck, inside. She’s used a wide belt to dangle herself from a hook in the closet. Her feet are barely off the ground. She was shorter than I thought she was, after meeting her the first time. If she’d used her tiptoes, she might not have got the job done.

  Her arms dangle loosely. There are no bruises, no signs of a struggle. She is wearing only a light green nightgown, which appears to be silk or something like silk. Her eyes are bugged open, and her tongue bulges and lolls out of the left corner of her mouth. There is a wet spot beneath her, and I can smell the strong stench of urine.

  “We’re thinking straight suicide, but we’ll do an autopsy, of course, and then we’ll be more sure. We’ll also run toxicology, see if she was on something. But it doesn’t look suspicious, at this point. I’m pretty sure it’s suicide,” Bartell tells me.

  “Note?” I ask.

  Bartell is middle aged, perhaps fifty. He has the look of an ex-military. Short- cropped hair, what’s left of it. Tall, maybe six-two. Probably hits the scales at 215, and he looks like he cares about his body. No excess blubber that I can tell, even though he’s wearing a leather jacket that goes thigh length. He appears to be some kind of ex-athlete. He has the prominent jaw minus the jowls. No turkey neck, yet. Wide shoulders, and not much bulge in the middle.

  “We haven’t found one.”

  “Was she seeing a doctor?” I ask.

  “We have to find that out, too. We’ll apprise you of everything as soon as we know.”

  “I appreciate it, Lieutenant.”

  “This has got to be more bad luck for Raymond Toliver,” he says with a sigh.

  “It’s been running bad for him. Yes,” I concur.

  “You ever met him?” he asks me.

  I look over at the grotesque thing his pretty wife has become.

  “Yeah, I did, but just briefly. We mostly talked about his son.”

  “Yes. His son. Some guys just seem to find the shit, no?”

  There’s no grin of pleasure on Bartell’s face. He appears genuinely saddened by the death here and by the business with Franklin Toliver that is yet unfinished.

  I’m thinking about my own happy life story, but I’m not going to share it with this DesPlaines policeman.

  “Bad luck and worse,” I finally reply.

  We turn from the suspended body just as the morgue people bring on the body bag. I flinch just slightly when I hear them tear it open.

  I’m supposed to drive up to DeKalb to see Kelly on Sunday. The Washington’s Birthday Aryan Nation rally is scheduled for the holiday on Tuesday. So I can only spend a few hours with her because I have a lot to do to prepare for that get-together in Marquette Park. It’s a long shot that Franklin will show up because the police presence will be suffocating. Even if Toliver weren’t suspected of wanting to attend, the place’d be crawling with coppers. He really has to be nuts if he shows his sorry ass, but then he’s the guy who did six prostitutes in the whores’ own backyard. No one can say Franklin’s timid about taking chances, and since we have no idea where else he might be, the holiday assembly in the park is our best shot at him. He might just be thinking what I’m thinking: He can’t be that stupid. Whatever. I’ll be there with a host of other assorted five-ohs, including the Federal Bureau of Investigation. They’ve been sharing information with us, lately, but they’d still like to make the headlines by grabbing Franklin at a high profile event.

  I’ve been worrying about shooting this piece of shit. When I said I’d do him instead of arresting him, I really meant it. And I still might clock him if the opportunity shows up.

  The priest was right, however. I’m not a murderer, even though I suppose I was an assassin in Vietnam, if you don’t buy the “soldier at war” theory. My killings were all pretty much premeditated in the War, but I also knew the enemy was fully prepared to unload one into me without provocation, as well. It was our job to kill each other, and no one made any fucking bones about it on either side, back then. It was why we were there.

  Now I’m a cop. I’m not an executioner. I know I’m sworn to uphold the law, not abuse it for my own personal satisfaction.

  More importantly, I care what Kelly would think if she found out I took that law into my own hands. I couldn’t face her. I don’t want my daughter to be ashamed of me—which is why I’ve turned down money before I entered Homicide. When I was a patrolman and a green detective, I was offered cash a number of times. I worked with guys who took bucks for favors. I know coppers who have private stashes to put their kids through college, or they have an outside “income” to support their mistresses or summer homes on some fucking lake in Wisconsin or Michigan. I’m not a rat. As long as it didn’t affect a case I was working, I kept the “blue silence.” If they’d ever asked to buy off a criminal, I would’ve found a fed or a newspaper guy and I would’ve squealed like a rat in a trap, and I wouldn’t have cared. I can’t overcome all the corruption in this city, and it’s damn near hopeless. But I can deal with my own white board. I’m not fucking Batman; I’m no caped crusader. I can only handle what’s on my own, personal plate. I know it sounds like copping out, like rationalization, but there it is.

  I’ll never be accused of being a saint. My feet are pretty firmly planted down here in the mud.

  Frank Swanson is waiting at my cubicle door.

  It’s 9:45 P.M. on the Saturday night before the Washington Day fiasco.

  “You need to talk, Frank?”

  It’s six below outside, and there’s sweat on his upper lip even though he’s holding his ankle-length overcoat over his right arm.

  I motion for him to come inside, and he does. He sits down in the chair across from my desk without asking first.

  “She had a boyfriend. Her husband knew about it. He never stopped her from seeing this guy. She told me all about it because she paid me to let him in all the time when Bill wasn’t around, and that was most of the time.”

  “Slow down, Frank.”

  “Can I have something to drink?”

  “You mean soda pop?”

  “Anything,” he answers. “My mouth is so damn dry it hurts to talk.”

  I walk to the door and then down the hallway. I stop by Sergeant Bill Terrio’s cubicle.

  “I need a witness to something,” I tell Terrio. Bill’s been a Homicide for twenty years. He’s a gangly-looking veteran of Korea, the war before mine. He’s got longer than GI hair, and he looks perpetually unshaven. You might call him swarthy—it’s the Eye-tie in him.

  He comes back down the hall with me after I buy Swanson a Seven Up from the machine.


  When we get back to my office, Frank is still where he was.

  “This is Sergeant Terrio. We’re going to take a walk to an interrogation room, Frank. It’ll be much more comfortable there, okay?”

  He gets up from his seat, and then he swoons, and I have to prop him up, momentarily.

  “You all right, Frank?” I ask.

  Terrio has him by the other forearm.

  “I’m gonna lose my fucking job,” he tells me, mournfully, as if he’s lost a family member.

  “You can sell your story to the rag mags and make a million, and then fuck big Bill,” the Sergeant smiles at him.

  Frank looks over at the Sergeant, and then he regains his legs, and we walk down the hall to the interview room.

  I pop open the Seven Up for Swanson. He sips at it slowly, and gradually his paleness passes.

  “What was her boyfriend’s name?” I ask.

  Terrio has paused outside to begin the tape machine inside here. The microphone sits in front of Swanson. He stares at it.

  “We have to record this,” I tell him.

  He nods. Then he watches the Sergeant sit down on the far end of the rectangular table. I’m opposite Swanson.

  “Kirk Radley. And this guy is a loser. I could never believe she’d have anything to do with a bum like him.”

  “Why’s he a bum?” I ask.

  “He’s a small time cocaine peddler. But his clientele are all from the Gold Coast. All the celebs use him because he’s not running with the Italians or with any other crew. He does business with them all, so he’s just a middleman. So at least they’re not buying direct from the Outfit or anybody like that. You understand?”

  “He’s not as unwashed?” Terrio smiles.

  Swanson remembers the Sergeant’s heritage, and he blushes a little.

  “No offense, Sergeant,” Frank apologizes.

  “No offense taken. I’m not even Sicilian, so what can I say?” Terrio grins.

  “You let Radley in the night Sharon was murdered?” I ask.

  “He comes in at least four, five times a week. He comes in late, like he did, so the other residents never get a gander at him. He’s smart about going unseen, seeing the trade he’s in.”

  “So he came in that night?” I ask again.

  “She paid me to look for him. She paid me two hundred a month to keep my mouth shut. And he pays me, too. He says if I ever told anybody about him coming to see Sharon….He says he knows where I live. He says he’d cut me, Detective Mangan. He’d find me asleep and he’d slit me from my balls to my chin. That’s the words he used.

  “I knew he was wrong. I knew something like this was gonna happen. I haven’t seen him since that night. I don’t know how he got out. I might have been in the john.”

  “Might have been asleep?” I ask.

  He looks at both of us sheepishly.

  “I’ll lose my job. I’m seventy years old and I got no pension. I only got the government insurance for all the shit I have to take for my blood pressure. You know what I’m saying?”

  “You’re already in for withholding, Frank,” Terrio informs him.

  “That guy threatened to fucking kill me,” he pleads to me.

  “I think I might be able to help you out, but I can’t promise anything,” I reply.

  Swanson leans back hard against his chair.

  “He said he’d cut me open like a fucking fish and gut me if I ever told anybody he was up there with her.”

  “We’ll put people on you, Frank. He won’t get close. He won’t know you talked to us until it’s too late,” I soothe him.

  “This guy is a fuckin’ loon, Detective Mangan. He’s the kind of asshole who uses his own product. You understand? His eyes get as big as saucers, every time I let the son of a bitch in. I think he likes threatening me, fuckin’ with me. He’s smart, though. He knows the security guys’ routine, in the building. He knows where they are and when. None of them ever asked me who he was. He went into her place and out of it, like clockwork. I’m the only one who knew.

  “O’Connor couldn’t…..She used to tell me things about him. Embarrassed the hell out of me. Christ she showed me a tattoo on her right tit when I walked her to the elevator. Almost made me shit.

  “O’Connor can’t, you know.”

  “Can’t what?” I ask.

  “He couldn’t do her, you know? He couldn’t…get it up. She told me this shit when she came home one night, all blown out. She was addicted, Detective. She was using coke as a backup. She was snorting heroin, too, I think.”

  “She told you?”

  He looks at me, then at Terrio.

  “She’d been off everything for a few months. He sent her to some joint out in Arizona for rehab. She was clean, the night she…died.”

  That was why the tox tests were negative. She must have been off dope for a long time.

  “Why’d she keep seeing Radley if she was off the shit?” I ask.

  “She liked bad boys, I guess. I don’t know. Her marriage was just for show. He’s too busy to care what she does, and I guess he’s had this problem for a coupla years. It gets lonely, wouldn’t you think?”

  He sips again at his Seven Up.

  “I woulda told you at first, but this guy….You don’t know this guy. When he looks at you, your skin shrivels up and tries to crawl off into a corner. I never seen eyes like his, and when he’s flyin’? Shit. He’s a scary son of a bitch, Detective. I mean fucking frightening. He said he was gonna slit me open like—“

  “A fish. I caught that.”

  “You know where he hangs?” Terrio asks.

  “Like I said, he’s got clients on the Gold Coast. He’s a delivery boy, but he’s still a fucking nightmare,” Swanson laments.

  32

  Tomorrow is the Aryan Hatefest in Marquette Park. They’re going to get the frigid tundra reception from Mother Nature. It’s supposed to top out at zero, with flurries intermittent. With any luck, these neo-assholes will get frostbite on their dicks, and then they won’t be able to create any new Hitler Youth. One can always hope.

  The Zionists will be there, as well, and they promise to be even more violent than the Aryans. They’ve got a lot more to be pissed off about than these morphs with the swastikas.

  Today, however, Sergeant Terrio and I are more concerned with Kirk Radley.

  “You ever read To Kill a Mockingbird?” I ask my guinea partner-for-a-day.

  “Maybe in high school or sumshit. I can’t remember.”

  I smile and let it go as we get into Terrio’s unmarked vehicle. There are three squads headed out with us.

  We get a fix on Radley’s whereabouts from the DEA and from our own Narcotics squad. They both know him, and they’ve both allowed him to rattle around selling his death to the elite of Michigan Avenue and the Gold Coast because they’d very much like to know who his suppliers are. Thus he was able to be there the night Mrs. O’Connor met the Light, or whatever Death really is.

  He has an apartment on Grand Canal, on the near northside. It’s a fairly dumpy hood, but it makes good cover for Radley and people like him because he fits right into this over-ripe environment. It’s a high crime area, and there is more than enough illegal drug usage around these parts. But Radley, according to our informant, Swanson, doesn’t deal with these locals. He takes his trade over by Lake Michigan, where they can afford coke, the white boy’s blow of choice.

  It’s three A.M. The best time to bust in for a collar is very early morning. We try to catch them in a daze, just after the evening’s binge is beginning to peter down to paralysis. Then you don’t have to get involved in as many firefights as you would if you tried to take them around lunch or dinnertime.

  We pull up to his apartment building first. The squads are right behind us, but they’ve left all their lights off.

  Terrio deploys two uniforms out back, near the alley. The other patrolmen will accompany Bill and me up the stairs. Radley’s on the third floor, so it’s highly unl
ikely he’ll try to jump out his front windows. He tries to fly, it’s two broken legs, and he won’t be hard to catch up with.

  Terrio picks the entry lock. We don’t have a search warrant, and the pick is illegal, but someone will testify that the door was open when we arrived. A uniform props it open with a newspaper, just to make it look believable.

  I’m thinking about how Lila took one in the neck. I’m remembering how Justin flopped back and died with the single shot that Marvin threw at him. I don’t think I’ve ever really been afraid to get into a gunfight, but it’s not as if I look forward to them. I’ve just never really worried about getting shot. It never occurs to me that I’ll be killed. I know men get wasted all the time in these things, but I solemnly believe this is not how I’ll check out, when the time comes. I have this very clear notion that I won’t be let off the hook at a young age. God, in His ultimate joker-dom, somehow intends to dangle me out here as long as He can. I’m not going to get any early out.

  We reach the third floor door. Two of the uniforms have brought up the swinging sledge. We move down out of their way, and they start their rocking back and forth motion with the sledge, and then they finally shoot it toward the door, and on the first blow the entry explodes inward, and we’re rushing through the doorway, weapons extended.

  The lights are all off. We swivel in every direction, but no one is shouting “Clear!” like the cops in the movies do. If he’s here, he’s already heard us come in.

  The bedroom door is down a hall to the left.

  The door is unlocked. Terrio turns the handle, but he stands to the side. A gunshot blasts through the middle panel, and then the Sergeant rips the door wide open. Another round pops through the entryway, and then we rush Radley.

  He’s up on the bed, standing, buck-naked. When he sees the four of us aiming at his noggin, he immediately drops the piece onto the mattress.