Lieberman's Choice (2 page)

On this early morning, wearing his favorite green robe with hardly a bit of nap remaining on its threadbare surface, Abe sat in the kitchen with the door closed doing the
New York Times
crossword puzzle and drinking an iced mixture of diet cola and coffee. He considered shaving.

There were four prevailing opinions about the appearance of Abraham Lieberman. Bess thought he looked like Harry James. The Alter Cockers, the regulars at his brother Maish's deli on Devon, after much and continuing debate led by Syd Levan, thought he looked like a dyspeptic dachshund, while at the Clark Street Station out of which Lieberman worked, he was accepted as the Rabbi, which only his partner called him, or the Bloodhound, a title settled upon him by a well-educated car thief more than a dozen years ago not because of any particular tenacity on Lieberman's part but because of the policeman's sober face and lean, round-shouldered body.

Lieberman was well aware that he was not an imposing figure at five seven and hovering around 145 pounds. He looked, even to himself, a good five years older than his sixty years. Bess thought his best features were his curly gray hair and his little white mustache. Lieberman could never see anything in his mirror except his own long-dead father in disguise.

Bess was five years younger than Abe. On a bad day she looked fifteen years younger. On a good day she looked like his daughter. She was no beauty, but she was a lady. The daughter of a South Side butcher, she carried herself like Katharine Hepburn. The Alter Cockers admitted without reservation that Bess had “class.”

Over the past few years it was always something different that seemed to wake Lieberman up each morning between four and five. Usually it was a sound, a real or imagined movement by Bess, his own snoring, an inner clock that had gone wrong just after his fifty-seventh birthday, or a memory. This morning it was different, a dream.

Lieberman was not a dreamer. He knew that everyone dreamed, but he was not usually moved by his dreams nor did he particularly remember them, but this one had been different.

A face had loomed before him suddenly. A round white face with sunken dark eyes, a face not attached to a body. The mouth of the face had opened to reveal red gums and no teeth. The tongue was white and moving, and a word was whispered and then another. “They will die.”

He knew the face. The face was telling the truth, but the face was a balloon. If he could wake up, unlock the night table drawer with the key around his neck, get out his gun, and fire at the balloon, it would burst. He knew it would splatter blood on Bess, on him, on the new flowered comforter, but if he didn't destroy this balloon, someone would die.

Abe had forced himself awake with a grunt and sat up in bed.

He knew the face. Frankie Kraylaw. It was a face, a smiling, innocent face that had troubled him from time to time more than once over the last four months during his waking hours. Now it was intruding on his dreams.

Lieberman had listened to Bess's even breathing and then had gotten out of bed. He had tiptoed out of the room and retrieved his book of
New York Times
Sunday crossword puzzles, an early birthday gift to himself. He would be sixty-one at the end of the month, the twenty-ninth. The prospect did not please him.

The puzzle Lieberman found himself working on was unusually difficult or he was unusually tired. He wasn't getting it. What he was getting was a stiff neck from sitting in the same position at the kitchen table. Dawn and a hot shower would help.

Above him he heard Lisa's bed creak. If she walked across the floor, he would leave his puzzle, leave his drink, and pad as quickly as he could to the bathroom. He was not ready for another session with his daughter, who had left her husband and moved back into her parents' house on Birchwood Street in West Rogers Park with her two children, Barry and Melisa. Lisa was an endless vacillation between uncertainty and determination. If Lieberman even suggested that her husband, Todd Cresswell, was not a self-serving monster, she would give him a Talmud-length catalog of terrible deeds, none of which struck Lieberman as particularly terrible. If he, however, said something that might be construed as critical of Todd, she would point out her father's own imperfections, a remarkable talent she had developed at an early age.

It was sometimes best to avoid Lisa. This was certainly one of those times. When he heard her footsteps above him, he got up quickly, dumped the remains of his drink down the drain, leaving the glass in the sink, and took a step toward the door, puzzle page and pen at the ready, bathroom only eight feet away promising hot water and privacy.

That was when the phone rang.

Lieberman picked it up before it could ring a second time.

“Yes,” he said.

“Abe, it's me. You awake?”

Hanrahan sounded sober and serious.

“I'm awake, Bill.”

“You know the Shoreham Towers?”

“On Fargo, just off Sheridan. I think Bess has a cousin who lives there.”

Lisa was definitely on the way down the stairs. He could hear the wooden steps creaking. Escape was no longer possible.

“Bernie Shepard lives here too. Looks like about an hour ago he came home, found his wife in bed with Andy Beeton, and blew them both to hell and back.”

Lieberman said nothing.

He did not believe in prophetic dreams. He didn't disbelieve either. He would wait till he had gathered more evidence, and if the evidence did not come, he could live with the mystery. Less than an hour ago he had dreamed of Frankie Kraylaw, a man who had threatened to kill his wife. Perhaps he had dreamed it at the same moment Bernie Shepard had …

“Abe, you there?”

“I'm here, Bill. Kearney know?”

“No, you're the first to hear the pleasant tidings. Congratulations.”

“I'll tell Nestor to find Kearney,” said Lieberman. “I'll be there in twenty minutes.” He hung up.

Lieberman knew them all, Shepard, his wife, Olivia, and Andy Beeton. Beeton, a detective out of Edgewater, he knew the least, but he vaguely remembered that Beeton was married and had a big wife. There was nothing else he could think of at the moment, pro or con, about Beeton. Bernie Shepard, however, was a story, a bull of a man about ten years younger than Abe, a man with a temper, a man no one really wanted to work with, but a man who everyone agreed was an honest, good cop. Bernie was the kind who volunteered for cleanups, who had a bad word to say about SWAT teams, who trusted no one, and got along with only one partner, Alan Kearney, who six weeks ago had become captain at the Clark Street Station and Lieberman's boss.

Shepard had married Olivia about ten years earlier. The story he heard was that Kearney had met her when she had been assaulted less than an hour after she got off the Greyhound from Muscatine, Iowa. He had helped her to find work, had introduced her to Bernie Shepard. Lieberman remembered her from Kearney's promotion party a few months ago. She had long hair and large eyes, and was shy. Lieberman remembered that, but her face wouldn't come to him. Instead of Olivia Shepard's face, he saw Jeanine Kraylaw, the young, frightened wife of Frankie Kraylaw about whom Lieberman had just dreamed.

Lieberman put down the phone and looked at Lisa as she opened the kitchen door and came in.

Lisa was wearing her pink robe with a frilly collar. Her dark hair was tied back. She looked pretty. She looked young and she looked miserable. From the day of her birth, the Liebermans' only child had been, in her father's opinion, “serious.” She had been a beautiful child who took in everything and seldom laughed aloud. She had been a wonder student. She had gone to Mather High School and then to the University of Chicago, where she had met a serious young assistant professor of classics with a love of Greek tragedy. They had two children and lived, although Lieberman was not aware of it till a month go, discontentedly ever after.

“I'm hungry, but I don't want to eat anything,” she said, moving past him to the refrigerator. “I get depressed and eat. I eat and I get fat and I hate myself. I'll look like Aunt Rose. I can't afford to look like Aunt Rose and hate myself right now. I can be a little displeased with myself, but not hate. I heard the phone ring.”

“Yeah, I've got to make a call and go,” he said, watching her eye the contents of the refrigerator critically.

“A murder?” Lisa asked, reaching for a see-through bag of bagels Lieberman had brought home from Maish's.

“Yes,” he said, dialing the station. “There's some cream cheese with chives at the back, on the second shelf.”

Nestor Briggs answered the phone. Nestor always answered the phone at the Clark Street Station at night. Nestor liked to work nights and double shifts. Nestor did not like to go home. The only family Nestor had was an ancient one-eyed cat that Nestor called Sy Klops. Lieberman gave Briggs what he had and told him to track down Kearney.

When Lieberman hung up the phone, Lisa asked, “You think a little cream cheese with chives would be bad for me?”

“You're a biochemist,” he said. “If you don't know …?”

“Abe,” she said, for she always used his first name when she was about to point out one of his many failings as a father, “do you know what I do? I mean what I do when I work?”

“Precisely?”

“Approximately.”

“No,” he admitted. “Enzymes elude me. I respect them and you, but their function is an enigma. I've got to go.”

She put the bag of bagels and the white carton of cream cheese and chives on the kitchen table.

“Go,” she said, pulling a knife from the dish drainer on the sink. “You need the
Times
puzzles?”

He dropped the book on the kitchen table and placed the pen on top of it.

“You can finish that one and do the next. That's it. You going to be all right?” he asked.

She sat, surveyed the snack, and shrugged.

“No. Maybe.”

Lieberman walked to his daughter and leaned over to kiss the top of her head.

“You wanna talk later?” he asked.

“I'll talk to Mom. Go rid the streets of crime.”

“I'll try to get back in time to take Barry and Melisa to lunch at Maish's,” he said softly as he opened the door. His grandchildren were both asleep in the living room beyond. Barry, almost thirteen, was in his sleeping bag on the floor. Melisa, eight, slept in the pullout bed that had been a gift from Bess's father more than thirty years ago.

“It's a school day, Abe,” Lisa whispered with a sigh, slicing a poppy seed bagel.

“I'll take them for ice cream tonight.”

“Sounds fine,” Lisa said, lifting the top off the cream cheese carton.

Fifteen minutes later, shaved, holster in place, Lieberman tiptoed past the closed kitchen door, through the living room, careful to avoid Barry on the floor, and out the door.

The night was warm but not really hot. Lieberman needed a coffee. Normally, he ground beans when he got up, but since Lisa and the kids had come, he had not only stopped grinding in the morning to keep from waking them up, but he had also avoided turning on the microwave to heat leftover Bavarian Creme because the microwave hummed and rang.

There was an all-night 7-Eleven run by Howie Chen's cousin or uncle next to a Sari shop near Western, and it was on the way to the Shoreham. Howie was the only non-Jew in the Alter Cockers who hung out at Maish's T&L on Devon. It was generally and incorrectly agreed among the Alter Cockers that every Chinese businessman in Rogers Park was related to or knew Howie and owed each of the Alter Cockers a discount.

Lieberman took a less direct route to the Shoreham down Broadway so he could stop at the White Hen Pantry near Argyle. There was no one in the parking lot of the White Hen when he pulled in. And there was no one inside but the morning shift clerk, a puffy-faced young woman in a white smock.

“Poli around?” Lieberman asked, going to the pots of coffee and pouring two into plastic cups.

“You kiddin'?” asked the young woman, who folded her arms and watched him put the lids on the cups. “He doesn't come in till eleven.”

Lieberman brought his two cups of coffee to the counter.

Up close the woman had the pale waxen look of a tracker. The white jacket had long sleeves. He looked at her arms anyway long enough to be sure she was watching him. She didn't reach for her arms or hug herself or find something to do, which led Lieberman to the conclusion that she was probably clean.

“Kraylaw,” he said, fishing out two dollars. “He still working here?”

“Kraylaw,” she repeated ringing up the sale and giving him change. “The kid.”

Frankie Kraylaw was almost thirty, but he looked like the friendly best buddy teenager in a “Brady Bunch” rerun.

“The kid,” Lieberman agreed.

“No. I don't think so,” she said as another customer, a man in a night watchman's uniform too warm for the weather, walked in and headed for the coffee.

“I'll check with Poli,” said Lieberman, heading for the door.

“You a …?”

“I am,” said Lieberman.

“I heard the kid had some trouble with his wife or something.”

“Yeah,” agreed Lieberman.

“He's a creepy guy,” the woman said with a look of distaste. “Not creepy like lots who come in here. Present company excepted, of course.”

“Thank you.”

“Creepy,” she said, “Big smile on his face like Uncle Ira.”

“Uncle?”

“Ira. In
Invasion of the Body Snatchers.
Nothing behind the smile like, like he was a puppet or something. Like …”

“Howdy Doody,” he supplied.

“Who?”

Lieberman pushed the door open with his elbow as the weary night watchman poured coffee on himself and said, “Goddamn the hell.”

Even if the streets hadn't been almost traffic-free, and he had gone straight there, it would have taken Lieberman only fifteen minutes to get to the Shoreham from his house.