The Underground Detective: A Novel of Chicago Streets

by Thomas Laird

  We arrive at Marco’s about 8:45. This is unusually late for dinner, but my routine has been altered pretty well, the last several months. I’m getting used to changes.

  Matthew talks about himself easily, and he appears confident but not cocky. I like the kid and I’ve only known him for less than an hour. And then Kelly knows him far better than Lila or I do, and I respect Kelly’s opinion.

  The four of us sit in a booth in this bar and grill, and I look around and see that the place looks new, or it was newly remodeled. When the food arrives, it’s very good. We sit and talk for a half hour after the meal. I feel as if I’ve known everyone here for as long as I’ve known my daughter.

  Something has to disrupt all this good cheer. I’m remembering Dr. Fernandez and our discussions about those “footsteps” that signal something evil is afoot. We worked on my paranoia, if that was what it really was. It could be just cynicism or pessimism about the way things work in life. The literary term is foreboding. You get this sense that something bad is catching up with you, and it’s always just about the time your life seems to be at its best.

  Like now. I survived a fall from the second floor of the Lieutenant Governor’s house. I crashed to the ground on top of a multiple murderer and general psychopath. I avoided getting my jugular sliced by a piece of broken glass. I only bruised several ribs instead of breaking them, and I avoided slicing various arteries in my arms on my plunge to the lawn atop Franklin.

  Fortuitous? I don’t know if it was luck or fate. I don’t know if misery is just around the corner, although I have suspicions that it’ll rear its ugly head sooner or later.

  But I’ve got someone to face it with, now. Actually, two someones. Lila and Kelly. I have a family, I think, for real, for the first time since Kelly was born. Mary ran off, and then my daughter and I were never really all that close. Lila seemed to vanish from my horizons, but she was reclaimed to me.

  There will be other killers to catch. We never run out of them. We never run out of business, in Homicide, and it’s likely our trade will never hit a Recession or a Depression, unfortunately.

  But I’m going to forget all that for tonight. I’m going to allow myself to emerge from the underground, and if only for a few minutes or hours, I’m going to let myself be happy.

  She wears white. I have the suspicion that she’s not a virgin. She might as well be, with her beaming face, coming down the aisle of the church toward me. Her father walks her with the music accompanying them.

  Jimmy Parisi, my best man, looks a little uncomfortable wearing the tux we rented for him in a genuine rush job. This whole wedding has been accomplished in a blur. Jimmy’s about my height. He looks like Al Pacino, a little. Maybe it’s just the Italian in him, and maybe I’m typecasting. His wife is out there in the pews, and so is his partner, Harold (Doc) Gibron. That’s about it from my side, other than Matthew and his mother and father and his younger brother, Dave. The bulk of guests belongs to my bride. There are maybe thirty people on her side of the pews.

  Lila arrives at the altar, kisses her distinguished counselor of a father, and then he hands her off to me. We turn around to the cross and we face the priest, and he begins the ceremony.

  The roads are all slick on the way up to Wisconsin to The Abbey Hotel. I think the town’s name is Fontana. It’s only a ninety minute drive in optimum conditions, but tonight, after the fancy, expensive reception that Lila’s parents threw for us at a place in the Loop right by the Chicago River, it takes two hours of laboriously slow driving to get where we’re headed.

  During the last half hour of the drive, conditions improve because the salt trucks cover the highways, and it stops raining with its icy mixture. By the time we hit the hotel, the trees are glistening with ice, but the roads are clear and melted.

  When I see the interior of The Abbey, I’m glad her father picked up the bill for the week. This place is far out of my league.

  But I could really get used to it. Room service has been included by Lila’s dad, as well as all of our meals in the restaurant in the hotel. But we’re going to fast food it for everything but our nightly dinner so that we don’t soak the Chapmans worse than they’re already getting hosed for the cost of this almost-impromptu wedding. Nothing wrong with pancakes at the mighty Mac’s. Lila likes their food, too.

  We’re fairly destroyed by the time we reach our wedding suite. There’s a magnum of champagne waiting for us, and we drink just one glass before Lila tears our clothes off. We consummate the marriage with all appropriate brio and enthusiasm.

  “I thought it was supposed to be better when we weren’t married,” she smiles as she kisses me.

  “Practice, practice, practice,” I reply as I kiss her and move her head back down onto the pillow.

  “I’ll try to be gentle,” I tell her. “I know it’s your first time, and I’ll try to take it easy on you.”

  She laughs.

  “You’re the one who has to be coddled. Look at you! You’re a mess, Danny. You look like you met up with the cold cuts slicer at the deli. All those laces in your arms. Those lovely purple welts on your ribcage. I really should be turned off. Hell, I want a refund.”

  “You’re not happy with my efforts?”

  She shoots me a very sly grin.

  “Happy? No. That doesn’t capture it at all.”

  She starts snaking her way down toward the middle of the bed, toward no man’s land. And then my eyes pop open in surprise when she begins.

  We take walks around the hotel property. The lake, Lake Geneva, is only a few hundred feet behind the hotel. They have scores of ducks that walk the lake- front, scavenging for food from the guests. The ducks are very domestic—they have no fear of people, probably because their diet relies upon the kindness of strangers.

  Lila bought some snacks from the gift shop just for the quackers. She’s been here before, with her parents. When she extends her hand with the junk food, the mallards or whatever they are come rushing at us aggressively. I almost want to go for my gun, but we left our pieces back in the room. We’re on honeymoon, Lila told me when she saw me putting the holster around my waist. So I dropped it into the drawer where she put her .32. I’m relying on her intuition that they don’t allow bad guys at The Abbey.

  At night, we go to the movies. We watch some pseudo thriller where I figure out the surprise ending thirty minutes into the two-hour flick.

  “I’m not taking you to the movies again,” she complains halfheartedly.

  I whispered what was going to happen at the end about twenty minutes before it did. She punched me on a non-stitched part of my arm, and she caught me good.

  Later at night, we made up for the more than thirty-eight years I never knew Lila Chapman. She’s insatiable, but I’m worse. We get almost no sleep. Every time we roll away to try and catch a few, she or I start it up all over again. I never realized I had all this sap and energy. At least I haven’t since I was in my twenties.

  As the cliché goes, she makes all things new. Me, included.

  Epilogue

  Kelly’s got a year of college behind her. She nailed a 3.85 GPA, and she’s made herself and her old man proud. Not to mention Lila—who Kelly has begun calling “Mom.” It startled Lila the first time my daughter called her that, but it’s really made my wife happy. So I’m hoping she’ll always think of Lila as her new “Mom.”

  The summer brings out the worst in those who have the worst in them, and we’re busy in Homicide. That little respite in The Abbey is over, and it’s back to business as usual. No multiples, yet, this summer, but some asshole will have to make up for lost time. Someone has to be heir to the throne that Franklin Toliver sat on. Someone has to make headlines and become high profile.

  High or low, I have to chase them all. My job is like the Greek legend of the guy condemned to roll the stone up the hill only to have it roll back down at him every time. His name was Sisyphus. That’s my job, sort of. You get things in place, you catch a perp, and a new b
addie comes along and starts that stone rolling right back down at you, all over again.

  As I said, we’ll never have to worry about business, not with all the knuckleheads in this city, in this world.

  I picked up a habit I learned from my best man, Detective Jimmy Parisi. He would always visit the graves of the victims whose murders he investigated, and he would place a single yellow rose on the site, beneath their markers.

  I’ve picked up the habit. I’ve begun to frequent the cemeteries where my ex-cases rest. I place a single yellow rose on each spot, also.

  Yellow roses stand for loyalty, fidelity. Faithfulness.

  I figure I owe each of those departed victims the gesture. It isn’t much to ask, I guess.

  Author’s Note

  As a work of fiction, this novel acknowledges that women did not fly combat missions until after the Vietnam War.

  Acknowledgements

  To Thomas Palakeel, my Underground partner in crime.

  Also by Parkgate Press (Dionysus Books)

  www.mattfullerty.com

  www.dionysusbooks.com

  www.parkgateoriginals.com

  THE KNIGHT OF NEW ORLEANS

  The Pride and the Sorrow of Paul Morphy

  A quiet boy is born in New Orleans with a spellbinding gift: he can beat anyone at chess. But what happens when love, desire and ambition intervene?

  THE MURDERESS AND THE HANGMAN

  A Novel of Criminal Minds

  The story of female killer Kate Webster, the man who hanged her and the missing head found 132 years later in Sir David Attenborough’s garden.

  Also by Parkgate Press (Dionysus Books)

  www.parkgatepress.com

  www.dionysusbooks.com

  Tom Robertson

  NAPOLEON Vs. THE TURK

  When the Master Warrior Met the Master Machine

  A play based on the chess match of Napoleon Bonaparte and ‘The Turk,’ the famous 18th century chess automaton. Who will triumph, the master tactician or the technology? First performed at the Toronto Fringe Festival.

  Engin Inel Holmstrom

  LOVESWEPT

  A Cross-Cultural Romance of 1950s Turkey

  Neri falls in love and marries young,

  but which of three men will win her heart?

  About the Author

  Thomas Laird has published six novels: Cutter (2001), Season of the Assassin (2003), Black Dog (2004), Voices of the Dead (2006), Desert Storm Heart (2013), and The Ruin of Souls (2015). The first three books were co-published in London and New York by Constable & Robinson and by Carroll & Graf (Perseus) and the fourth in the Czech Republic by Domino Publishers. Desert Storm Heart was published by Dionysus Books / Parkgate Press and The Ruin of Souls by Ecanus Publishing. The books received favorable reviews from the Washington Post, the Chicago Sun-Times, Publishers Weekly, Library Journal, the Independent on Sunday (UK) and Crime Time (UK).

  Thomas Laird lives with his wife Marsha (Masha) near Germantown Hills, Illinois. He also shares his residence with Mick the Australian Shepherd, Jimmy the alley cat, and Tar (Tarzan) the Amazon Yellow Nape parrot. He teaches English part-time at Bradley University in Peoria, Illinois, the hub of the arts in central Illinois.

  This title is also available in paperback from Dionysus Books.