The Underground Detective: A Novel of Chicago Streets Read online

  “In The Underground Detective, Thomas Laird creates a compelling world. He is a natural storyteller with an instinct for the right turn of gritty phrase and an authentic feel for his Chicago cops and killers, hookers and addicts. It’s a world as fast-moving, as real, as tough and as heartbreaking as the streets his characters walk.”

  Michael Malone

  Author of Handling Sin, Foolscap and First Lady

  “The Underground Detective is a suspenseful masterpiece that will leave you hooked until the very end. Follow Detective Mangan as he struggles to come to grips with the terror left in the wake of a sadistic serial killer and races the clock to stop him before he is able to claim another life in horrific fashion.”

  Trooper P.L. Green

  Virginia State Police

  “A gritty thrill ride. Detective Danny Mangan will take you through the darkest aspects of the human psyche, until you’ll be left wondering how the human mind can harbor such darkness.”

  Officer G. Morrison

  National Airport Police Department

  Washington, D.C.

  www.parkgatepress.com

  The

  Underground

  Detective

  www.parkgatedigital.com

  Also by Thomas Laird

  Blue Collar and Other Stories (1994)

  Cutter (2001)

  Season of the Assassin (2003)

  Black Dog (2004)

  Voices of the Dead (2006)

  Desert Storm Heart (2013)

  The Ruin of Souls (2015)

  To Marsha, always. To Kathy and Andy and Anne.

  And to Matt Fullerty, who brought back the stuff that dreams are made of.

  The

  Underground

  Detective

  by

  Thomas Laird

  Parkgate Digital / Parkgate Press

  Publishers Online!

  For updates and more resources, visit

  Parkgate Digital and Parkgate Press online at

  www.parkgatedigital.com

  www.parkgatepress.com

  Copyright © 2012-5 Thomas Laird

  All Rights Reserved. Permission is granted to copy or reprint portions for any non-commercial use, except that they may not be posted online without permission.

  Page layout and cover design by Parkgate Digital

  Cover photographs courtesy of Flickr and Picasa

  ISBN-13: 978-1-937056-76-6

  Kindle Version 1.1

  First ebook (worldwide) April 2015

  [Parkgate Press: Parkgate Digital reference number: 021]

  “Every man has some reminiscences which he would not tell to everyone, but only to his friends. He has others which he would not reveal even to his friends, but only to himself, and that in secret. But finally there are still others which a man is even afraid to tell himself, and every decent man has a considerable number of such things stored away. That is, one can even say that the more decent he is, the greater the number of such things in his mind.”

  Fyodor Dostoyevsky

  Notes from Underground (1843)

  “This is a work of fiction. All names, characters, places, and incidents either are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.”

  The

  Underground

  Detective

  1

  You don’t know loss until you’ve got it. So goes the conventional wisdom.

  I lost my wife when she took off, about the time our daughter, Kelly, turned four. Mary, my ex-wife, ran out on us in 1973. I came home to marry Mary when my wife was eight months’ pregnant. The Army was benevolent enough to let me come back to The World for the nuptials. I was with the Rangers at that time, so it was surprising that they’d let me come home, but as soon as the ceremony and the one-day honeymoon in Oak Lawn, Illinois, were over, I was on a flight back to Southeast Asia.

  So Kelly was technically illegitimate for the eight months she was inside my wife. Mary and I had lived together two years prior to our daughter’s entry into the world, but I had the feeling we were a terminal couple even before the birthing. I married my wife to give Kelly a name. I didn’t want her sharing a “scarlet letter” for the rest of her life. Marriage was the least I could do. But losing Mary hurt more than I thought it would, even if our being together permanently wasn’t happening.

  I raised Kelly into the teenager she is today. I mean I tried, at least. I suppose you could blame me for her bulimia and her drug habit, but I’ve already hoisted all the above on my own shoulders. Anybody made parental misfires, it was I. No one else. Mary has been long gone. Kelly barely remembers her mother. She was just four, as I said. Her mom becomes more vague each day.

  Kelly is very bright. You couldn’t tell by her grades because she skipped school so often that the truant officer and I were on a first name basis. She has been suspended three times from the Catholic high school that I pay major bucks to, and the next time she boogies, she’s expelled. I can’t blame the school. I try very hard not to be my kid’s enabler.

  The only reason she’s still enrolled at Sacred Heart on the south side is that the truant officer has shown me professional courtesy. At least that’s what he calls it, since I’m a Chicago police officer. I’ve been in Homicide the past five years. My kid’s been bulimic and a junkie for the last three years, I estimate. I estimate because Kelly lies so often to me that it’s hard to tell how long she’s smoked and done uppers and whatever else she’s snorted or swallowed. She hasn’t injected because I check her arms and legs and all the other usual suspected places. Which really pisses her off. I’ve taken her in several times for urine drops at our family doctor, but it’s my house and my rules, and she can leave any time she wants, I’ve told her, now that she’s seventeen. She’s not legal until her next birthday, in August, but I don’t explain the letter of the law for her because I really don’t want her to leave, but if I ever catch her with tracks I’ll arrest her myself, and then she can have the streets and all their shabby splendors.

  I’ve taken her to counseling twice, and she was in out-patient rehab three months ago. But she won’t go to a counselor unless I take her there personally. She now weighs about 90 pounds, I guesstimate. I know she’s well under the century mark. And I know also that her expulsion from Sacred Heart Academy on the southside is imminent. I know the call is coming from their truant officer at any moment, as I sit here in Homicide, not far from Lake Michigan.

  The Rangers liked guys like me. Good students with a couple years at a community college. Good athletes, but shorter (five nine) and with wiry builds. The bigger men made bigger targets, we used to tell each other. Our kind of work required bulldogs, in Vietnam. We had to be tough and we had to persevere, and we did. The War is lost, now that it’s 1986. Lost for thirteen years. I don’t use the fall of Saigon in 1975 as a terminal date for Vietnam. The peace talks in Paris concluded that sad and lame business, as far as I’m concerned. I returned home in 1972, just a year before Henry Kissinger talked peace in The City of Lights.

  One year later, in 1973, my wife left me and my daughter, Kelly. So I know about loss. A lost spouse and a lost war.

  And now a daughter who’s about to become one of the departed.

  “Detective Mangan,” the Medical Examiner pronounces.

  His name is Harry Morris. I’ve known him for five years, on the job. He is about fifty, tall and lanky with a shock of chestnut hair always dangling over his brow. It’s sometimes distracting, watching him try to tug that hank of unru
ly hair back away from his forehead.

  The survivor was a teenaged female. They’ve brought her to County Hospital on the west side because she’s nineteen and indigent. The copper I talked to, Sergeant Phil Esposito, said he thinks she’s a hooker. Phil said he thinks the dead vic was a street denizen, also. Phil is a middle-sized man, about forty-five, with a close-cropped hair cut that is nothing but dark blond stubble. He keeps it short, very GI. He was an MP in the same War I fought.

  “It’s spooky, Danny,” he tells me. His eyes keep looking at the tree, out here in the forest preserve where the two girls were found.

  “Why?” I ask the sergeant.

  His eyes keep staring at that oak tree where the survivor was bound and gagged with duct tape.

  Then he finally looks my way.

  “Her hair was snow white. Like the Disney cartoon, Snow White. He made her watch the whole thing.”

  “So we have a witness?”

  “No, Danny. Not really. He cut out her tongue, and the poor broad is catatonic, the ME says, even though he’s not a shrink. Her hair was polar bear white, and I never saw this kid even blink once. She’s way gone, almost as far away as the dead one. He did things to that one that were highly creative. Things we never saw, even over in the shit.”

  Esposito took off after he informed me all that.

  I lifted the plastic off the victim, and then I saw what Phil was talking about. It might have taken a while to recognize that what was left was human for the poor bastard who stumbled onto the two of them, out here in Evans’ Pond.

  This preserve is located on the far southwest side. It’s on the very edge of the city limits. There are state cops here, too, but it’s our jurisdiction, and my case.

  Lila arrives just as they remove the corpse. She’s been my partner for two years. She’s a hard case and ex-military (Air Force), as well. She flew jets and dumped death on the Viet Cong and the NVA. She was shot down twice and was rescued both times, obviously.

  Lila is gay. She does not broadcast it because the closet doors have not flown open, yet, in Chicago. The time is coming when it will, I think, but it hasn’t arrived, at the moment.

  Which matters not at all to me. It would be a true bone of contention for many other police, I’m sure, but I only care about her competence. She’s got a shitload of competence and confidence. Her ability and intelligence are sky high. I’ve never been around a copper who was better at this job, and I trust her in any of the “dark alleys” we’ve walked down. She has a black belt in karate—I’ve forgotten what degree it is. But there’s nobody in Homicide who’d like to find out if she can handle herself hand-to-hand because I’ve seen her fuck up several perpetrators who tried to get physical with her. I’ve never had to intervene for her. I just step the hell back and let her loose. It wasn’t pretty, what she did to some of those sorry pricks who provoked her. And they always came at her first. Then they paid for their sins.

  Lila is not a large woman, but she would’ve made a nice Ranger. She’s about five-seven and her physique is like sheer tendon—no excess anywhere.

  You wouldn’t think she was that aggressive when you talked with her in the unmarked car. She likes to talk country western, however, which I detest. The only thing we can converse easily about is baseball. We’re both White Sox fans because we’re both natives of the southside.

  I fill her in about the tongueless survivor. Her eyes widen when I tell her about the kid’s newly white locks.

  “White?”

  “That’s what Esposito told me,” I tell my partner.

  The scene has been scoured, so it’s time for us to leave. I look around at the fall foliage and I wonder how anyone could foul this landscape the way it has been soiled. No animal would leave the mess our guy has left.

  No animal other than the human variation.

  We drive the Eisenhower to Cook County, over on the west side. The traffic is as it usually is, snarled and capable of producing road rage. Lila drives because she can’t stand hearing me voice my opinions about the idiots who clog this main artery of the city. She drives the squad as efficiently, I’m certain, as she flew her jets in the War. She glides effortlessly through all the congestion of the prime time Eisenhower Expressway.

  It takes an hour to arrive at the hospital. Lila puts the police tag inside our windshield as we park at the entrance to County. We find out at the entry where our survivor’s room is. Her name is Helen Gant. She, like the dead vic, is African American. She is nineteen. The murdered girl was about the same age, the ME had informed me, back at Evans’ Pond.

  We take the elevator up to the fifth floor.

  Lila has short auburn hair, but it’s not so short that it’s what she calls “butch.” She keeps it short because she says it’s easier to manage in the mornings when we’re working days, as we are today. It’s near the end of our shift, and I’m getting hungry. We’re both in the habit of eating out at fast food places because Lila lives with a non-present roomie and I might as well live alone. Kelly never eats, as far as I can tell. Or she eats when I’m not around, so I don’t buy many groceries, and the food I do purchase seems to get eaten only by me.

  My partner has very blue eyes. I think she calls them “china blue.” I’m not certain what color that is, but her eyes are deeper than sky blue. It’s her most outstanding feature. She lives with a female roommate, but I’m not sure they’re lovers because she rarely talks about her personal life. She did tell me about her sexual preference, though, because, as she explained, partners needed to be truthful to each other. I told her I didn’t care who she was fucking, and she laughed, and that had been the end of the discussion.

  We enter Helen Gant’s room. A doctor and a nurse are here with her, and now we are, too. We show the doctor our IDs.

  “Make it brief. You won’t get anything anyway. She’s lost a lot of blood, and a tongue, and we’re taking her back to surgery in five minutes.”

  I nod to the physician. Then he and the nurse leave the single room.

  “We need to put a guard out there,” I tell Lila.

  “Yeah, that would be prudent, Danny.”

  But she’s not smiling.

  Helen Gant’s eyes are closed, now. They’ve got her hooked up with oxygen, and her mouth is shut and I think they might have the stub of her tongue packed with something to stanch the bleeding if it hasn’t all clotted up by now.

  The visit here is perfunctory. We knew we couldn’t get anything from Helen Gant. We probably never will. We stay a few minutes and Lila writes a few notes in her notebook, and then we head back down to the car.

  “He cuts up the other girl and he straps Helen Gant to a tree and rips out her tongue. Helen watches and her afro turns bone white. He leaves us a witness who can’t talk and who probably never returns to planet Earth to tell the tale. Even if she can communicate someday, what’s your bet, Danny, that this guy will never be identified by Helen Gant?”

  I stare out at the mess of traffic on the Dan Ryan as we head out to Guiseppe’s Pizza on the far southwest side. It’s Lila’s favorite joint. I’ll call my daughter when we arrive and ask if she wants some carry out, but I already know Kelly’s answer.

  The pizza comes quickly, as it always does at Guiseppe’s. It never takes more than twenty minutes. It’s thin crust. It tastes more like pastry than pizza crust, and the toppings are dynamic, also.

  “How’s your kid?” Lila asks as she bites into a piece.

  The place is typically Italian, with Christmas lights lit through all seasons.

  I shrug and take a sip of beer before I eat. I enjoy owning the roof of my mouth, but Lila is always too anxious, and she burns hell out of her mouth every time we come here.

  “You’re an Air Force Academy grad, but you still don’t appreciate what molten pizza does to your palate.”

  She takes a quick tug at her Diet Coke. Lila doesn’t often drink alcohol. She says it’s because her dad likes the booze, occasionally, but she never expounds on th
e subject.

  “Army Rangers just have common sense, I guess,” she says.

  I made the call to Kelly on the pay phone here, and my daughter actually picked up. She sounded sober. I asked her if she went to school today, but I got the sound of silence, just like the song. I asked her if I could bring her anything, but she said she was okay. I wound up mumbling about being home in an hour, but she hung up before I could say goodbye. Lila knew what kind of call it was. I could see it in her blue eyes, but she never said anything to me, she never asked how my kid was. She already knew.

  “We have other cases,” she said. She was fingering her Coke glass, drawing something in the beads of perspiration on the mug.

  “You think we’ll come up empty, I take it?”

  She smiled at me. She didn’t take the bait.

  “I know, I know. The fun hasn’t even begun…. But it’ll be low profile, and you know it.”

  “Because they’re whores,” I tell Lila.

  “Yes. Because they’re whores,” she replies.

  But there’s no smile of recognition on my freckled Irish face. I have hazel eyes. Lila says it’s her favorite color, but she doesn’t say it with a hint of flirting.

  She already knows I’m attracted to her. No one had to tell her. She just knows, and I know she knows, too.

  We get the word, later that night, that Helen Gant died. The docs at Emergency thought shock might have caused a fatal seizure. But we’ve lost our witness, regardless of whatever it was that finished her.