The Underground Detective: A Novel of Chicago Streets

by Thomas Laird

  “Tell me again.”

  “We went together through high school. We were going to get engaged when I graduated the Air Force Academy, but my senior year he got tired of waiting, he said.”

  I look around the jewelry store. No one’s in ear shot.

  “And when did the interest in the other team begin?”

  “Why’re you asking me all this now?”

  I look down at her and take her shoulders.

  “Mary’s out of my life, gone. I want to know that’s the way it is with you, too. Everyone else is out of it, gone.”

  She looks up at me again, but this time her eyes are filling.

  “I love you. And you’re all I want. Okay?”

  I kiss her before the waterworks commence.

  “Perfect. Absolutely outstanding, Lila. That’s all I wanted to know. Now go crazy. Put me in hock for twenty years.”

  She bats my chest with the back of her right hand. I pretend she’s knocked the air out of me.

  The first thing she does when we get home to the odor of newly painted rooms is to call Kelly at Northern. I can hear Lila squealing and giggling like a teenager, and then Lila puts me on the phone with my daughter.

  “I am so happy for you, Daddy!”

  It sounds like she’s bouncing up and down, even over the phone.

  “I’m pretty happy about it, myself.”

  “When’s the wedding?” Kelly asks.

  “We haven’t set a date, but I figure neither of us wants to put it off very long. We’ve been doing this mating dance for too long, already.”

  Lila swats my back, this time.

  “I have to marry her soon to start the payments on the setting she picked out. She don’t have cheap tastes, let me tell ya.”

  I get whacked again.

  She grabs the phone from me.

  “He’s the one who went nuts, Kelly. Don’t let him give you that crap about my expensive tastes…. Well, I’m happy you’re happy. Jesus, everybody is happy. What the hell happened to us?”

  She goes on with my daughter for a couple minutes more, asking her how she’s doing in the summer session she signed up for. Kelly’s determined to get her degree in four years, so she signed up for summer school, and she says she’s going in the summer again, next year, too.

  I get the receiver, one more time.

  “This one’s gonna work, Dad,” she tells me.

  I choke slightly, but then I thank her for saying it.

  “No, I mean it. This is your turn. It finally happened for you, and this is your turn. I just know it.”

  I tell her to take care of herself, and I say Lila and I will come up on Sunday to take her to dinner. And I tell her Lila’s wild to show her the ring, too.

  Then I say goodbye, and I see my fiancé removing her tank top and her bra and her panties.

  I look at Lila. I wish I’d seen her like this when she was eighteen or twenty. It isn’t because she’s worse for wear because she’s in full bloom. A woman at age forty is at her full maturity, at her sexual peak. I read that somewhere, but I can’t remember where. I just wish I’d been with her from then until now.

  Her breasts are perfect orbs, not too big or little. No sag, which is a testament to the shape she keeps herself in by running and swimming. She still trains like a cadet at the Air Force Academy. Her sides are sleek and perfect. Her legs, like the rest of her, are lightly tanned—like a doe’s skin. Her stomach is flat, and she has a pert inny bellybutton that gives me hours of entertainment. Lila thinks I’m obsessed with her inny, and she’s probably correct.

  Her butt is tight and only slightly prominent. But it’s a really good-looking ass. She wears bikini underwear because she knows it makes me suffer.

  “Are you just going to stand there?” she grins.

  I take her in my arms before I start throwing off my clothes.

  “Is this $2000 ring going to give me anything a little special, tonight?”

  “What you get with me is special every night. And day, for that matter, bub.”

  “Damn right, you are.”

  She starts tearing at my shirt, and then she’s working on my pants. And last she’s removed my Jockey briefs.

  “You have to start wearing boxers.”

  “Don’t start again with that, Lila.”

  “You have one offspring, but that’s not nearly the end of your line—and mine.”

  “Now we’re having babies?”

  “Three. At least.”

  “Do I look like an incubator to you?”

  “You’re my stallion, big boy.”

  “You gotta stop watching porn with those Vice guys.”

  “It shows me new techniques. Our love will never get old, Danny.”

  “It doesn’t need any outside help, Lila.”

  “There, you’re right on the money. Don’t stop delivering your pizzas. They’re the best in town.”

  I cover her lips with my own. She takes hold of me and directs me where I should be. Then she jumps up so I can get my arms under her thighs. When we’re fully connected, I turn around and find that Sonny the border collie is watching us intently.

  38

  In my dreams, he’s loose. He finds a way through security. He runs over their lawns until he hits the wall. They don’t use concertina or barbed wire at Elgin because most of their patients are helpless souls who need special care to give them a reason for waking up and breathing for the next twenty-four hours. Most of their patients are defenseless.

  The high-risk inmates are kept in an isolation ward. It’s pretty much state of the art, I found out when we dropped Toliver off, there. Everything is done electrically, with cameras covering all the hallways and cells where these dangerous cases are housed. From what I saw, it doesn’t seem likely that Franklin is going to bust out like John Dillinger did in the ‘30s. I can’t picture Franklin brandishing a Thompson submachine gun and then Toliver busting guards’ heads as he bullies his way free to some moll—like Jennifer O’Brien—waiting for him in an eight cylinder getaway car.

  No, in my dreams he weasels his way out with his charm. He simply asks twelve guards to cut him loose, and miraculously, they do. The twelve guards are, of course, the twelve jurors who deemed him crazy and who put him in a hospital instead of on death row, where he belongs.

  Steinback told me what I already know: You never know what a jury’s going to do, and neither do they until they do it. It’s our system of justice, warts and all, but it’s ours.

  That’s where the dream always ends. Then I wake up, just after he’s climbed the wall and escaped into the mist of my fantasy. I thrash a lot while it’s going on, and it wakes Lila up.

  “Danny?” she murmurs.

  “I’m sorry, babe.”

  “Same dream?”

  “Same dream.”

  “Go back to sleep. We have to go on shift in three hours.”

  It’s three-thirteen A.M. on the digital. We’re working days, but Lila has made the request that she be assigned a new partner. She explained to the Captain that we were getting married sometime soon, and the commandant said he’d expedite matters to accommodate Lila and me.

  After all, I’m the man who shot Liberty Valance—I captured Franklin the Maniac, the Twin Killer, so my shit is very precious right now in the CPD. There were stories in both major newspapers, and I reluctantly gave an interview to the newsbabe on Channel 5 because the Captain made it clear I was to cooperate with the media because the Department needs the good pub, lately. So I talked with her, and Lila forced me to watch it on the evening news, a few nights ago. She loved watching me squirm through the whole eight-minute interview.

  “You look very sexy,” she giggled as we watched.

  I glide my hand down my fiancé’s left flank. She always sleeps on her right side. She purrs like a feline. Her side becomes slightly rigid, and then it relaxes and softens, and finally she turns over to me.

  “We can sleep when we’re old and fried,” she smiles grog
gily.

  She pulls off the oversized tee shirt that she wears as a nightgown.

  “You’re killing me,” I say as I feign weariness.

  “Let’s make it permanent. Let’s die in each other’s arms, Danny.”

  “I don’t want you to die. Ever.”

  “I won’t. I promise.”

  “Yeah, you say that because you know you’ll outlive me. Women have a habit of doing that to men.”

  She reaches down and touches me through the boxers she bought for me for my enhanced sperm count. She’s still on the pill, now, though, and she says she will be until I make her an honest woman and until we’re both ready. But she keeps telling me she’s already at the far edge of primetime baby-making. We’re both around forty, she reminds me.

  “I love the morning best. You’re always ready. No foreplay necessary.”

  “It’s the nature of the wee fellow,” I smile at her as she grips him tighter.

  “Easy, Bubba,” I urge her.

  “He’s not so wee, and I don’t know any damn body named Bubba.”

  She yanks the white boxers down, and then I kick them off. She separates my legs so she can squeeze in between them and join us at the same time. It looked as though it would be an awkward position, but Lila has a way of getting us where we want to go.

  Her heat is what always surprises me. Not all the women I’ve slept with are literally hot, the way Lila always is, when we enjoy “sexual congress.” I’ve always liked that term because I get an image of the Senate and the House rolling on the floor of Congress.

  Her heat is what makes me want to have orgasm a little too fast, some of the time, but she knows how to back off when I become too intense. She’ll slow things down and kiss me. Or she’ll help me withdraw just so I don’t finish too fast for either of us. We don’t always throb together, but we’re getting more in sync, now that we’re together regularly. When we had those single encounters—twice—I was like the veritable billy goat under a bush. I was out of control.

  Now I’ve become far more patient than I was when I was with Mary or any of the other few women I slept with.

  But the flesh is weak, and even though I’ve tried the best way I know how, the passion and the heat overcome me, actually both of us, and we’re straining to somehow merge into one body. It’s as though I’m trying to enter Lila all over. It’s an impossible physical feat, but my mouth covers hers, our tongues are deep inside the other’s mouth, my shaft is straining to get deeper into her womb, and we’re struggling not to be separate from each other. It’s like the reverse of the rib story in Adam and Eve.

  Finally, we’re spent.

  “What time is it?” Lila asks. “My eyes are too fuzzy. Everything’s freaking glowing in here.”

  “It’s 3:59,” I tell her.

  “Shit. It’s all your fault. I never should have bought those damn boxers.”

  She smiles at the ceiling with her eyes shut. I can barely make out her face, but I can see her teeth, even in the dark. I lean over to her and grab a few strands of her long hair. Then I let go of the strands and graze her left cheek with the back of my hand.

  “I love you so much that I can’t tell you how much I love you.”

  “You’re balmy. Better go back to sleep,” Lila tells me. “And stop wasting your rest on that prick in Elgin. I’m going to exorcise the son of a bitch myself. I’m going to throw him out of your dreams. You’re only going to dream about me, Danny. Nothing and nobody else but me.”

  “I like you in the real world better. You feel a lot more like you.”

  “That doesn’t make any damn sense.”

  “But you know what I’m trying to tell you, right?”

  She opens her eyes and rolls toward me again. Then she worms her way down toward my middle, and I feel her starting me up, once more.

  She halts, momentarily.

  “If we’re up, we might as well get some exercise,” she proclaims.

  Instead of feeling drained and punchless, I feel energized. I take Lila out to an expensive Loop eatery for breakfast, and we both pig out on a trillion-calorie meal of pancakes and animal fat patties of some brand. It’s delicious, but it sits like an anvil in my stomach. This joint is open twenty-four hours, but I’ve never seen it empty. It’s called Fazio’s, and it’s not far from the Art Institute. So we can make it to work by 7:00. We got here at 5:45, and the place was already hopping.

  We sit in a booth. It was the last seating available. The booths have windows that look out at the spectacle of Michigan Avenue. This is the hood in Chicago that the photographers visit when they want to capture anything elegant about this town. You don’t take pictures of the west side, or most of the hoods north and south—you go to the lakeshore to glimpse at the civility of the city with “the big shoulders.” This is close to the Gold Coast. This is where you live if you’ve embraced the American Dream—You know, the cause we bled for in Vietnam and in every other bloodbath we’ve engaged in?

  I don’t know why a $30 breakfast brings out all the above in me, but there it is.

  It’s 6:45. We need to boogie. The Captain is being a nice guy by assigning Lila to another partner in Homicide. He could’ve put her in Burglary or Auto/Theft or even Vice. But he knows how good she really is, and, as I said, I’m still Wyatt Earp, for a little while, until everyone forgets Franklin Toliver and Kirk Radley.

  July Fourth is our day off. Luckily, Lila has the same day off as I do, even though she’s been paired with Ben Bradford, a twenty-five year vet with two ex-wives and thirteen kids to support in his old age. Lila says all he talks about is his bills. He keeps joking that he’s worth more dead than he is alive, and I wonder if he’s really joking. He might want to talk to Dr. Fernandez, himself. Me? I’m scheduled to see her tomorrow.

  We’ve been talking about my ex, and the shrink knows now that Lila and I are going to be married. She told me it was a smart move to take the air out of the balloon and have Lila get a new partner. She said our relationship didn’t need to formally begin with all the pressure of hiding our togetherness with necessary lies.

  Now we can at least begin out in the open. It made me think of Lila’s former bi-sexuality, but her past hasn’t bothered me the way it used to. And Lila insists it is all behind her, now, and I believe it.

  On this Fourth of July, Kelly has come home, and the three of us are going to Grant Park to watch the fireworks show. The show almost didn’t happen because of a gigantic thunderstorm that buffeted the entire top one third of Illinois. It knocked down power lines all over northern Illinois, but we were spared at our house, and the lights in the Loop are mostly back on, by now. It’s eight in the evening, and we’ve got a blanket spread on the grass. There must be a few hundred thousand people here by now, and more will be coming. The park is well lit enough even when the dusk becomes night. But the real show will be over our heads. The Navy’s Blue Angels squad of fighter jets has already flown over us several times. I could see the look of awe and the ache of remembrance in Lila’s face as they passed over the park with a BOOOM! that startled all of us here below.

  Kelly has a new boyfriend. His name is Matt, and he’s in pre-med. We’ll meet him the next time we go to Northern to visit my daughter. Kelly’s got the same happy glow that she had when she was with Michael, and I’m thankful she’s found someone to be with, especially since Lila and I have so recently come together. When you’re alone, you don’t want the people you love to be alone, but when you’re a couple, you want those beloved to have someone with them even more than you did when you were flying solo.

  I know that eagles don’t fly in flocks, but there’s something to be said for community, for partnership. I was trained to fight alone in the jungle if I had to, but it was always better to be with a partner—or twelve or twenty or a hundred. There is something about numbers. Which is why I like the feeling of celebrating the Fourth in the middle of a vast mob of humanity. When I was by myself, I never would’ve come out here. I would’
ve stayed home and read a book or watched a ball game on the tube.

  Lila has truly civilized me, at least for the moment. I’m not adverse to being with the herd, with the masses. I’m not political, but I’ve always been an individualist, in my own head. I have not always been all that rugged an individualist, however. I’m thinking I might even join something associated with the church—maybe get into a softball league or learn to play golf at one of their outings.

  I don’t really know what’s come over me, but it isn’t unpleasant.

  The show begins at 9:30, on the button. Starshells go up and burst into a multitude of colors. The streamers rip through the sky in every direction. The pops come just before the explosion of light and reds and greens and blues and oranges and golds and every other imaginable hue in the spectrum.

  The noise and the fury and the spectacle go on for a half hour, and then we’re on our way to battle the traffic and to return home.

  It’s on the answering machine when I get home and turn the lights on. I see the flashing little red bulb pulsating with the call. It’s the Captain. He wants me to call him at home.

  I’m thinking perhaps there’s a problem with Lila’s new assignment—but he would’ve called her direct.

  I dial his number, and he picks up on the third ring.

  “There’s a problem, Danny.”

  My heart begins to race.

  “Which is?” I ask.

  He hesitates, and I wonder if the line’s gone dead.

  “You remember the big storm early this morning?”

  I wait.

  “The lights were out everywhere. And I guess it hit the northwest suburbs worst of all. And there was power out everywhere—“

  “He got out.”

  The line goes silent.

  “Yes,” he finally responds. “The supervisor of his block called a few hours ago. I tried to call you right away, but I kept getting your answering machine, so I left the message.”

  “He got out.”

  “It was chaos, this guy said. Their power went out, and their backup generators blew because of the heat and an overload. The doors were opened because everything’s electronic—“