The Underground Detective: A Novel of Chicago Streets

by Thomas Laird

  “The State Police stayed for like three weeks after the old lady did herself, but they can’t hang there forever. We watched the house. We went by it until we saw the place wasn’t being looked at by the cops. It’s boarded up, but he got in through the back, somehow. I don’t know if he’s still there, but he told me that was where I could find him if I needed to.”

  “You’re not lying to me, are you Richard?”

  “No. I swear to God it’s true.”

  “Listen carefully. If you try to take this little encounter to the police or the Feds or anybody, I’ll come back and kill you. I can play the way your guys play, too, Richard. Your mother and father still alive? Any siblings, girlfriends? Boyfriends?”

  His eyes have widened even further.

  “I’ll kill all of you. I did it for a living in the jungle, and I can do it again. You see, I can be provoked. I’m not Pablo.”

  There’s a question on his face.

  “I see. Not a reader, eh? Well, fuck it. Just remember, you’ll be first. I got by that highly trained hound of yours and I got into your fucking bunker here and I’ll find you wherever you are and you’ll be first. Then I’ll eliminate your whole family fucking tree, Richard. Are you understanding all this?

  “Then again, I left no prints. Nothing the police could use to establish my presence here tonight, and it’d be my word against yours. And who do you suppose the police would believe? Me, or an Aryan Nation storm trooper?”

  His mouth is open. I think the look is called “aghast.”

  “Any recriminations against your cousin, same deal is in effect. You’ll be first, numbnuts. You really need to shower, man. You just unload in your pants?”

  The odor is not a joke. There is a stench rising.

  “You can wriggle out of the duct tape in maybe a half hour. Remember what I told you, Dicky. Mum’s the word. Right?”

  He nods.

  “You have a great night. What’s left of it. You’re going to need to do some laundry, but that can wait until tomorrow. Go with God, Richard. Sieg motherfucking heil!”

  I snap my stuff back into my carryall, and then I leave the way I came in.

  “What if he’d called the police?” Lila asks me at breakfast.

  “He won’t, I don’t think. He had laundry to do, instead.”

  “What?” Lila asks.

  “Nothing. Forget about it.”

  I eat the rest of the bacon and eggs she’s made me.

  “Want to go to a haunted house with me tonight when it’s real dark and scary out?”

  “Halloween isn’t until October,” she tells me.

  “This year it arrived a few months early,” I reply.

  42

  “ S

  o why didn’t you call the cavalry and go out to DesPlaines right after you, uh, questioned that Ellsworth idiot? And I’m still pissed you broke in and pulled all that crap, Danny. You could’ve gone to jail, and you still might, and where’s our wedding then, dummy?”

  “By the time I got done with Dicky, the dawn was coming on. This is black work. And I wouldn’t worry about him calling the cops on us. I think he got the message.”

  “Which is thuggery for thuggery.”

  “I have no defense, Lila. It was wrong. But I’m not going to let Toliver or his friends get close to you or Kelly, and like I told Ellsworth, there ain’t no rules when it comes to survival.

  “If we’d brought out a legion of cops, I figure Franklin would’ve boogied by the time everyone got in place. You notice how easily he avoided us when we came at him with standard tactics.”

  It’s 2:27 A.M. We’re both supposed to be at work at 7:00, but I’m really not expecting to find Toliver at his father and mother’s home. Ellsworth’s information was a few weeks old, and Franklin has never roosted anywhere longer than a couple of days. It’s a very long shot that he’s still there now, but I have to know. And if he is there, I think a small operation stands the best chance of landing him. It’s much quieter, just Lila and me, and he won’t be expecting me to come without a platoon or company of coppers as backup. If he is there, we just might be able to surprise him.

  “What if Ellsworth warned him?”

  “I don’t know how he’d do that unless Franklin is using a payphone. The house line was cut off two weeks ago. I checked yesterday. He’d have to have prearranged a number to call, and I’m betting that’s not how Franklin works. He’s got to know what a fucking idiot Ellsworth is, and it’s not likely he’d let Richard call him—he’d do the calling.

  “But I could be wrong. We’ll find out when we get to DesPlaines.”

  This is the only time traffic is close to reasonable in Chicago. The only people out on a weekday at three in the morning are drunks or lovers. All the midnights shift people are already at work. The rush won’t start until six A.M. We float through the Stevenson all the way west to LaGrange Road. Only a few cars flow with us and stream the other way, across the expressway.

  I don’t play the radio. It grates me, early in the morning, and Lila never turns it on, especially when she’s driving, as she is now.

  We approach the Lieutenant Governor’s residence about 3:17 A.M.

  Lila pulls the car to the curb a good half block from the house. We’ll approach on foot. No lights, no noise.

  This neighborhood embodies “suburbia.” There are tall elms and oaks, and there are a few birches and evergreens thrown into the mix. The leaves are preparing to die, but they haven’t begun to change hue just yet. It’ll be October before the colors turn scarlet and orange and yellow and golden brown. We had a wet summer, so the colors should be riotous. Something to do with the amount of water that comes down from the heavens determines whether it’ll be spectacular or dull.

  As we walk toward the front of the house, I see the wind powering through the leaves. The branches are heavy with those dying extensions of green. You can hear the gentle fluttering from above us. There is no birdsong. The light is still not forthcoming—not until about 5:20 A.M. Pretty soon, the days will last fewer hours and the dark will linger, in the morning and at dusk.

  I motion for Lila to head around toward the back of the house. We’ll look for his point of entry. The front door has been boarded up until they put the house for sale. The publicity of Toliver’s wife’s death has made this home too attractive to the rubberneckers who like to see a crime scene. So until the suicide’s media coverage is over, they’ll keep this place nailed shut, pretty much.

  There’s a four-foot chain link fence in the back, but the gate is not locked. It’d be rather pointless since it’s so easy for an adult to hop over. So we open and shut the gate as we pass through, and then I open that same carryall bag I brought to Ellsworth’s crib. I have a pen flashlight that gives off enough of a glow to see but doesn’t cause enough of a glare for any of the neighbors to notice that Lila and I are creeping the Lieutenant Governor’s place.

  The windows back here have been boarded-over, also. There is at least a half-acre backyard here, so it would make a convenient entry point to the house for Franklin or anyone else who might want to break in. We check each of the boards—there are four windows and a glass door, back here. They’ve also boarded the door inside the glass door.

  None of the nailed pieces of plywood seems to have been disturbed. So I take my breaker bar out of the carryall, and I begin to remove the rectangular piece of plywood from the inside of the back doorway. The wood creaks as I pry it away, but it’s not loud enough to wake the neighbors. Toliver has a wide lot, and his neighbors on either side would have to be already awake to hear the slight moaning sound that my breaker bar is making. The wind is rustling the trees pretty noisily, as well, and I figure that breeze is helping to mask any noise I’m making.

  The plywood is gone in less than three minutes, and then it takes another 180 seconds to pick the deadbolt on the back door inside the glass screen door.

  It’s pitch, inside. They’ve left no lights on. I don’t know if they�
��ve also shut the juice off, but I rather doubt it if they’re trying to sell this place. I flick the kitchen light on and off quickly, and there is electricity, Lila and I see.

  I take my .38 out of its waistband holster, and Lila has her .32 snubnose out, as well. I can barely see her. Only the dim moonlight shines through the kitchen window. It’s behind the sink. The kitchen is spacious. There is an “island” in its middle, and pots and pans still dangle from hooks.

  There is a holder for kitchen knives on the wall next to the sink, and I see that all the holders still contain cutlery. Nothing’s missing.

  I motion for Lila to follow me, but she walks alongside me, instead. We’ve secured the kitchen, but this is a very large house. I have no idea how many rooms there are, but I’ve seen the inside twice, and I know we’ve got a lot of ground to explore.

  I’m not going to light any fixtures because there is a slight chance Franklin really is here. So we enter the dining room, next. The table and chairs are in place as if someone still lived here. The table was mahogany. I saw it when I visited Mrs. Toliver. It’s covered with a cloth, now, however.

  We keep moving. The living room on the main floor is in front of us, and the furniture is sheathed in plastic. I use my pen light to sweep the room. There is the upstairs, next. The bedrooms are up there.

  I gesture toward the ascending steps. Lila nods.

  We walk up the steps, treading on the outside edges of the stairway. The creaks are fewer than walking on the middle of the rungs.

  “You said this joint was haunted?” Lila whispers in my ear.

  I nod in the affirmative. I stop and whisper in her ear.

  “The Staties don’t like coming in here. Some of them won’t, anymore.”

  I see her visibly shiver.

  “Cut it out,” she murmurs, almost inaudibly.

  We keep going up toward the bedrooms. We arrive at the first—I think this was the son’s room. Franklin was an only child.

  I slowly turn the handle. I open the door just as slowly. Then I flash my small light all over the room, and we find no one home, as expected. We check the walk-in closet, and nothing hangs from any of the wire and wooden hangers. The place is deserted. I feel as though no one has occupied this room in many years.

  The second bedroom is the master. It’s where the Lieutenant Governor and his spouse slept together, when they were still a couple, at least. It’s where Mrs. Toliver hanged herself in the closet with a belt.

  Lila halts before we enter the second bedroom.

  “Is this the one?” she whispers confidentially into my ear.

  I smile, and then she socks me on the left arm. Hard. I wince.

  “Shit, Lila,” I protest faintly.

  I open the door and we go inside. The bed is made, the pen light shows us. The pillows are fluffed. The room smells as if it were recently cleaned and freshened. Maybe they’ve been prepping the house for a sale. Who knows?

  There’s also a faint fragrance of lilac. I’m trying to recall where I smelled lilacs before, and then it returns to me. I think Mrs. Toliver exuded that same scent when I talked to her. I remember the presence of lilac on her. She wore it subtly—not like some older woman who might’ve doused herself in the perfume. It was faint, that smell, as if she’d just dabbed a finger of it behind each ear. But it was unmistakable and it was there, when I last saw her alive.

  Some things linger after people, like memories, I suppose.

  “Let’s get the hell out of this room,” Lila urges me quietly.

  I have to look, first. So I open the accordion doors of her large closet.

  I see the chain dangling from the light fixture, so I pull the chain, and the bulb illuminates the entire closet and bedroom. Lila grabs my arm.

  “Let’s get out of here, Danny!” she urges me in a hushed voice.

  I snap off the light.

  We leave the bedroom and head to the last room at the end of the hall. The bed and the furniture are covered with blankets, in here, and I check the closet as well, and then we head back toward the stairs.

  There’s only one area we’ve missed. There is a basement in most structures like these. I noticed a door off the kitchen hall, and I’m betting it goes downstairs. The only other place we haven’t looked is the large garage, way out by the alley in the back.

  We head toward that door in the kitchen, and I find out I was right. As I open the door, I see the stairs that head down into what people used to call the cellar.

  She follows me. We still have our weapons in hand, but the presence of Toliver grows fainter and fainter as the minutes inside the house accumulate.

  The basement is finished, but there is nothing down here—no furniture, no recreational stuff. There is only a small utility room at the far end that contains a washer and a dryer. There is literally nothing else.

  We’ve wasted our time. We check the basement out thoroughly. Then we decide it’s time to check the garage and then get the hell out of here.

  Lila heads up the stairs first. As we reach the top, I think I hear something from back below.

  “Hang on a minute,” I whisper again.

  “I’ll wait for you in the kitchen,” she says.

  “No, just wait here.”

  “Forget it. This basement creeps me completely.”

  “Then just stay still up at the top, okay?”

  “Okay.”

  She heads up to the main floor, opens the door, and then walks out toward the living room.

  I hurry back down the stairs. I find a switch for the overhead fluorescents, and I snap them on. The room comes alive in a wash of illumination.

  But there is still nothing here. I quickly check out the rest of the basement, but there is nothing moving.

  Maybe they have mice, I figure.

  Then I hear Lila scream. And it’s no muffled sound. It’s a full-throated shriek.

  I burst up the stairs, and I race into the living room, where I thought the sound was coming from.

  Lila is sitting on the couch, her .32 lying on the seater next to her, and she’s sitting straight up, as if a ramrod were holding her erect. I flip on the lamp which is atop the table next to where she’s seated.

  She’s ashen. She’s staring straight ahead.

  I kneel down by her and touch her cheek with my left hand.

  “What happened?”

  At first she doesn’t answer, but then she slowly turns toward me.

  “Forget the garage. You were right. Franklin’s not here. But his mother is. I just saw her by the stairs.”

  Before we left the Toliver house, I took Lila upstairs one last time. I took her with me because she refused to stay in the living room alone. So she stayed as close to my back as she could without grabbing hold of the rear end of my shirt.

  There was nothing up there, in any of the bedrooms, including the master.

  On the way back home, she couldn’t stop shivering. It was in the low eighties outside, and we had the windows opened, and the equatorial heat was making me sweat. But Lila couldn’t stop quaking from what she’d seen. Or what she thought she had seen, at least.

  “What was it?” I asked her again, just as we were pulling in front of our house.

  “I already told you. Don’t make me say it again, because if you do I’ll start to think I’m nuts, too, and I know I’m not, Danny. She was there. It wasn’t a mist or a hallucination.

  “I don’t believe in ghosts. I’m not so sure I believe in the Holy Ghost, for that matter. But I saw Mrs. Toliver standing by those stairs just as sure as I see you sitting next to me right now.”

  I pull to the curb in front of the house.

  I look over to her and I want to ask if what she saw was the form of a real, living person, but I know not to pursue it. I only wonder why I never got to see Mrs. Toliver, why she didn’t appear to both of us, why she picked Lila to scare the hell out of.

  I could say that she was already frightened about being in that house and that she a
lready heard the story about the Staties’ encounter with the recently departed Mrs. Toliver. I could explain to her that the power of suggestion is a mighty influence upon what people think they see or observe.

  Lila was a Vietnam vet. Decorated multiple times. She’s no vulnerable kid who’s receptive to illusions. So what did she really see?

  I’ve never heard Lila Chapman scream, let alone hear her belt out the shriek that came from the upstairs at the Toliver place just a few minutes ago.

  Odysseus departed the land of the living to visit the land of the dead. I’m no Greek hero. I was a warrior, once, and so was Lila, my beloved wife-to-be. I don’t believe in haunted houses and I believe less in spooks and spirits. I don’t buy much of anything that’s supposed to be supernatural.

  It begins to really piss me off that I decided I had to have one more look at that basement. I should have been there with her to see what she saw. I should never have left her alone in that damned place.

  43

  Lila’s going to see Dr. Fernandez, now, too. On her own, of course. She can’t reconcile herself to what happened at Raymond Toliver’s house in DesPlaines. I can’t talk her out of seeing the shrink, and I don’t think I really want to.

  I’m not sure what Lila saw, but I know she’s not insane. She’s not even a little nuts, and in fact she’s the most down-to-earth, common sense human being I know. And she wasn’t the only one who saw Mrs. Toliver after Mrs. Toliver’s demise. I’m referring to the State Troopers, and those guys are not known for selling fish stories.

  The Toliver house is under constant surveillance. Franklin’s photos are in circulation in the tri-state area, and it’s not likely he’ll be able to remain subterranean much longer.

  But that’s what I said the first time he went invisible, after the six slayings. The fact that he has no friends, no family (except his father who told me to shoot him if I could) and no fellow warriors from the Aryan Nation who want anything to do with him should help him resurface soon. What he’s living on, no one knows. He has no resources. His bank assets have been frozen and his credit cards and checking account have been cancelled. The FBI made certain of the above.