Lieberman's Choice (24 page)

“I'm here, Bill. What happened?”

“There's more, Abe—his wife. She was shot too. She's alive, emergency room, Edgewater Hospital.”

Lieberman couldn't see. His eyes were wet and the familiar kitchen an unfamiliar blur.

“The baby,” said Lieberman, softly, slowly. “She's pregnant.”

“Touch and go, Rabbi. Touch and go. I'm on Devon and Western. You want, I'll pick you up in fifteen minutes, God and traffic willing.”

“No, I'll drive. Does my brother know?”

“Hospital called him. He's on the way there.”

“Fifteen minutes.”

“Fifteen,” Hanrahan confirmed, and hung up.

Lieberman looked at the phone, afraid that if he hung it up he'd convince himself that it was a dream, late-night radishes. But it was no dream. The telephone clicked and bleated, a long insistent bleat. He hung it up, looked at his trembling hands, and, as his father and his father before him and their fathers before them back to the beginning of recorded history had done, Abe Lieberman gripped the open flap of his favorite robe and pulled until the cotton tore.

He stood for a beat in his torn robe, rocking slightly, his bare feet aware of the cool kitchen linoleum. And he remembered a night in 1944 or '45. He and his brother, Maish, had been working for Uncle Murray, who had a small deli-grocery for the summer tourists in Union Pier, Michigan. Uncle Murray had sent them home after two weeks—the sad-faced brothers had driven customers away—but Maish, who had by then acquired the nickname Nothing-Bothers Maish, had declared to Abe on the bus back to Chicago that he would someday have his own deli.

It seemed a modest-enough ambition and Maish had achieved it, but now Abe Lieberman stood in his own kitchen and imagined not his brother as he was now, but as a sour-faced, chubby little boy who would have to be told that his own son had died.

Lieberman stopped rocking, took a deep breath, and walked quickly and as quietly as he could back to his bedroom. He took forever to open the door and enter, listening for Bess's even breathing. There was no light and he wanted none. He made his way around the foot of the bed, past the pink chair, and away from the highboy that had been a wedding gift from Bess's brother. He dressed carefully, knowing that if Bess awoke he would have to tell her. It wasn't that he was afraid that she could not cope. No, she would probably cope far better than he was doing, but he saw no reason to wake her when her strength would be needed in the morning and who knew how far beyond.

Lieberman succeeded and, using the key that he wore on a chain around his neck even when he slept, opened the drawer in the night table on his side of the bed, removed the pistol, put it in his holster, and closed the drawer.

Bess slept on, not quite snoring, but asleep.

He closed the door gently and walked to the kitchen, where he left a note saying he would call her. He didn't think the note would be necessary. He would try to call her a little after seven with the news. Who could know where he might be at the hour when the red-eyed alarm clock woke his wife?

The note done, Lieberman looked around the room and for an instant forgot where he was going and why. But the moment was gone in an instant and he went into the living room, got his coat, hat, scarf, and boots out of the closet, dressed for the howling wind and cold, and headed out the front door and into the early-morning darkness where his car sat frigid in the street.

D
ETECTIVE WILLIAM HANRAHAN SAT
in a low, straight-backed chair in a line of five such chairs directly outside the intensive-care unit of Edgewater Hospital.

He sat alone, a four-month old
McCall's
magazine in his lap, looking at the pale green wall of the long corridor. He shifted his weight for the fortieth or fiftieth time since he had taken up residence on the chair, which was built, he was sure, for someone like the pretty, finger-thin model who grinned large and white-toothed from the cover of the magazine before him.

Bill Hanrahan was coming perilously close to his fifty-first year and his two hundred and twentieth pound. He wore a blue flannel shirt, heavy slacks, and a deeply pensive look.

Hanrahan had dozed, and in his doze he had dreamed, dreamed that he was at Guadio and Stanton's Bar on Fullerton drinking whiskey after whiskey with a beer to kick it down. In the dream he had felt no joy in the drinking, just the need to keep going, methodically, knowing with each drink that there was no stopping and no going back. It was a nightmare of faces behind the bar and surrounding him, watching intently, seriously.

Hanrahan had awakened when the magazine fell to the floor and he almost toppled from the little chair.

He had not had a drink in four months and nine days, but there wasn't a day that he didn't want something, anything, and, at the same time, didn't want it, was repulsed to near nausea at the thought of even a cold beer.

He had shared his nightmares and fears with no one, not Abe nor Iris, who would have been willing to listen. He and Iris had been talking seriously about marriage for about three weeks and even Iris's father, a wispy Chinese who spoke little English, seemed to think it not necessarily a terrible idea. Hanrahan, however, was not so sure. It would mean finding Maureen and asking her for a divorce. Though it was Maureen who had left him, she was the good Catholic who went to church and didn't want to face that particular sin.

The hospital smell was seeping into Hanrahan's consciousness. He fought it, but its pull was strong. He had spent two weeks in a hospital not many months ago with a bullet in his head and drugged dreams that went on for days until he was sure that the dreams themselves were death.

Hanrahan stood, fighting a small, rough ball of panic in his gut, looking for something to distract him. The perfect girl on the cover of the magazine beckoned to him. He picked her up and set her gently on the chair.

And Lieberman appeared. Hanrahan hadn't heard the elevator down the corridor rise nor the door open, but there was the thin, pale man striding toward him, coat, hat, and scarf draped over one arm, boots sloshing with each step.

“Looks like she's going to make it,” said Hanrahan.

Lieberman stopped and the two men stood awkwardly, a few feet apart.

“The baby?” asked Lieberman.

“Doc says touch-go, nip-tuck, who knows. How pregnant is she?”

“I don't know,” said Lieberman. “Four, five months, maybe more, maybe less. We don't see them much and Maish is never straight on things like that. When can we see her?”

Hanrahan shrugged. “Who knows? Doc says he'll let us know.”

“David.”

It wasn't a question, but Hanrahan nodded, knowing what his partner wanted. He turned and started down the corridor, Lieberman sloshing hurriedly to catch up. They went down one flight, turned, and headed toward the emergency room. Abe Lieberman had spent hours in every emergency room of every hospital in Chicago. He had stories to tell, but none like this.

“Here,” said Hanrahan as they came to a dull, ivory-colored swing door. “Behind the curtain on the left. You want me to …”

Lieberman shook his head no and went through the door alone. There were starched-curtained cubicles on both sides of him, three cubicles on each side. The fluorescent lights hummed and beamed white and shadowless. He pushed back the curtain on his left and stepped in.

His nephew David lay on a cart, eyes closed, wearing a suit and open tie. The blood had dried on his chest and drained from his face. He looked nothing like a Lieberman. He looked like his mother's side of the family, which was fortunate.

Lieberman stepped to the side of his dead nephew and looked at his face, at the wounds. He didn't touch the flesh. He had touched dead flesh many times and he didn't want to remember David this way.

David looked troubled, puzzled, his full, dead-purple lips tight, as if someone had asked him one of those questions about trains traveling in different directions at different speeds.

Lieberman muttered a few words of the Kaddish, the prayer for the dead in Hebrew, a language he did not understand. He did not know all of the prayer, knew very little, but he felt the need to try.

Then he turned, went through the curtain and out the swing door to where Hanrahan stood.

“You all right, Rabbi?”

“No.”

“Don't see how you could be. Nurse just came down. Doc says we can see Carol for a minute or two. Doesn't look like Maish is here yet.”

When they got back upstairs in front of the intensive-care unit, a young surgeon in a blue operating-room uniform was standing in front of the row of chairs where Hanrahan had spent more than an hour. The surgeon looked tired and ill and young and a little like Alan Alda. He was certainly no older than Lieberman's dead nephew.

“Detective Lieberman?” he asked, holding out his hand.

The grip was firm, the look of sympathy sincere. Lieberman nodded.

“I'm Jason Lorie. I'm sorry about your nephew.”

Lieberman nodded and looked into the young doctor's eyes and saw that he meant what he was saying.

“Carol?” asked Lieberman.

“I think she'll be fine,” Lorie said, rubbing his eyes. “If there aren't any complications, she should be fine. The bullet didn't hit an organ. Broken rib and muscle damage.”

“And …?” Lieberman said, leaving unfinished the question they both understood.

“I don't know about the baby,” said Lorie. “The bullet didn't hit the fetus, but it did sever blood vessels and scraped part of the umbilical cord. Vital signs are very good. We keep the mother strong and the baby should be fine. We're watching. I'm trying to track down her obstetrician. If we have to remove the baby, we will, but I doubt if that will be necessary. It looks like a seven, possibly eight-month fetus, so the chances are …”

“Can we talk to her?”

“I'm not sure she'll make a lot of sense. She's heavily sedated and just went through some rough surgery. If you can wait till morning …”

“By morning whoever did this could be halfway to California or Little Rock,” said Hanrahan.

Doc Lorie held open his hands in resignation and led the two policemen to and through the doors of the ICU.

The unit was dark with a round nurses' station in the center. Facing the circle of the nursing station were glassed-in rooms with large windows. Green lights flickered beyond each window.

A white-haired nurse with her glasses perched precariously on her nose looked up at them, saw the doctor, and returned to a chart before her.

“There,” said the doctor. “Room Three-sixteen. Two minutes. No more and possibly less. We're monitoring vital signs out here.”

“We'll be fast,” Hanrahan assured the doctor, softly, as Lieberman moved toward the door.

They could see Carol through the window before they entered. She was turned toward the door, her eyes closed, her face bloodless pale, her light blond hair over her face.

Lieberman approached the bed while Hanrahan stayed waiting at the door. Then Lieberman stood for perhaps a minute, his thighs touching the clean blanket that covered Carol, and looked down at her, saying nothing. She stirred, sensing a presence, moaned, and struggled to open her eyes.

“It's me, Abe, David's uncle,” he said softly.

“David,” she groaned.

“Yes.”

Carol's dark brown eyes opened and fought to keep from closing. Her hand fluttered and Abe took it.

“They killed David,” she said.

“Yes,” said Lieberman.

“And me, they shot me. Why?”

“I don't know,” said Lieberman.

“The baby. Someone, a doctor, someone said the baby was all right. Is he all right?”

“Yes,” said Lieberman.

Carol sighed, gripped his hand tightly for an instant, and then closed her eyes.

“We can only stay a minute, Carol,” Lieberman whispered. “What can you tell us about the people who did this?”

“People?”

“Who shot you and David. You said ‘they.'”

“Yes. Two men. One skinny with a twisted face, one huge, like him,” she said, nodding with closing eyes in Hanrahan's direction.

“Did they use names, say anything?”

“Black, they were black with accents.”

“Accents?”

“Not Africa, not the South; Jamaica, Haiti. I don't know.”

“Good,” said Lieberman, patting her hand gently.

“They have one of those things in the back of my hand,” she said, so low he almost missed it.

“Yes.”

“It hurts. Thirsty.”

“I'll tell the nurse. Can you remember anything else about the two men?”

Carol slowly shook her head no, started to drift into drugged sleep, and muttered something very softly.

“What did she say?” Hanrahan whispered.

“David's hat,” Lieberman answered.

The doctor was gone when they stepped out of Carol's room and closed the door. The white-haired nurse with the slipping glasses looked up again.

“Thank you,” said Hanrahan, and the nurse nodded.

The two men said nothing as they left the soft darkness of the ICU and went down the corridor to the elevators. It wasn't until they were standing in the empty main lobby of the hospital, before an erect and quite gray fern, that Lieberman spoke.

“What do we have?”

“They went to dinner at the apartment of David's boss, left about midnight, maybe a little later. Not many people out. They were found in the front yard of a doctor, Doctor Ranpur, cardiologist. He's the one who called nine-one-one.”

Lieberman nodded. “He see anything?”

Hanrahan shrugged. “That's all I've got, Rabbi. Evidence guys are probably there.”

Lieberman looked over his partner's shoulder at the rattling, frosted windows of the hospital lobby.

“Kearney?”

“I called him,” said Hanrahan. “Told him who it was. Told him we'd want the case.”