“And you wear the key around your neck,” she said. “I know.”
“You want me to call Marvin now?” Lieberman asked. “Or do you want to complain further about my lifestyle?”
“Call,” she said, glaring at her father.
“Give me the number again.”
She did and he dialed.
The phone rang five times before Marvin Alexander picked it up and said, “Hello.”
“Shalom,” said Lieberman.
“Shalom, Avrum,” said Lieberman’s son-in-law.
“Do I have to tell you why I’m calling?” asked Lieberman.
“Lisa wants to come back,” said Marvin. “She says I threw her out.”
“Yes.”
“I didn’t throw her out, Avrum. I found out about her and the intern and talked to her on the phone, told her we had to discuss the situation. When I got home, she was gone. She left a note. That was yesterday.”
“And?”
“I talked to the intern,” said Marvin. “He was frightened. He was apologetic. He promised to stay away from Lisa. He swore that they had never — to use a biblical phrase — consummated their relationship. In fact, that’s not the issue. Part of the blame is mine. I’ve been caught up in some forensic cases and I haven’t spent much time with Lisa. Her work is basically nine to five. Mine is whenever someone dies. Much like yours, I imagine.”
“I understand,” said Abe, looking at his daughter, who was trying to figure out from her father’s minimal dialogue what was happening.
“I love Lisa,” said Marvin. “She is not easy, but I love her. Tell her to come home. We’ll talk. I know a good marriage counselor.”
“You want to talk to her?”
“No, just tell her to come home. And, Abe, I’d still be happy to have Barry and Melisa live with us, but, just between us, for now at least I still think they’d be better off with you.”
“I think you’re carrying understanding a bit further than a saint,” said Abe.
“Someday I’ll tell you my life story. I think it might help you understand. Meanwhile, you might still qualify for special treatment from your God. Remember Abram became Abraham when God told him he would be a prophet and renamed him.”
“I don’t think that’s going to happen to me,” said Abe, “and I’m afraid of what God might rename me and what he might tell me to do.”
“Tell Lisa I love her. Goodbye, Abe. To tell the truth, I don’t have the heart for a discussion with Lisa right now, but I’ve got a homicide victim who needs attention back at the hospital.”
“Goodbye, Doc,” Abe said, and hung up.
Father and daughter simply looked at each other as Bess came out of the kitchen with a microwaved Sara Lee coffee cake and three plates, three forks, and a knife.
“Well?” asked Lisa.
“He wants you to come home,” Abe said as Bess cut and served and sat to listen. “He says he didn’t throw you out. You ran. He said he loves you and thinks you should both see a marriage counselor. He talked to the intern. The intern confirmed that nothing much had happened between you.”
Abe took a bite of the warm cake. It was just what he needed. He knew he would try for a second piece and that Bess would stop him.
“I can’t face him,” Lisa said, looking at Bess who touched her daughter’s hand.
“Wear a mask,” said Abe. “He’s a good man. Get a plane ticket and go back to California tomorrow.”
“I’ve got a round trip,” Lisa said softly. “Open ended. It was cheaper than one way.”
“Then go back to your husband in the morning.” Your mother will drive you to the airport.”
“I’ll drive you,” Bess confirmed.
Lisa hesitated and said, “You think he really wants me back?”
“He really wants you back,” said Abe.
Abe ate. He tried to eat slowly. It didn’t work.
“I’ll call TWA,” Lisa said.
“Settled,” Lieberman said, glancing at the television set. The score was flashed. The game was over. The Cubs had been trounced.
“You’re tired,” Bess said to her daughter. “I’ll take you upstairs. We’ll worry about your travel arrangements in the morning.”
Bess was the president of the Temple Mir Shavot, and there was a big meeting in two days. Her pile of paperwork and the number of calls she had to make to appease, persuade, and cajole was monumental. She wouldn’t get much more finished tonight. Bess wasn’t an insomniac.
When Bess finally came down, she went to the sofa and sat across from Abe who had turned off the television set and was simply sitting with his feet up on his almost ancient hassock.
“You know how much our daughter’s spent on airfare over the last three months?” Lieberman said. “We could spend a month in Florida, not that I want to spend a month in Florida.”
“You ate Lisa’s piece of cake,” Bess said.
“You’re the one who should be a detective.”
“You left the evidence.”
“I ate the evidence,” he said.
Bess smiled and said, “Do us all a favor, Abraham. Try harder to keep company like we had tonight away from the house.”
“You mean Lisa?”
“You know what I mean. Remember, I said ‘try.’ ”
“You are a realist,” he said.
“I’ve been married to you for a little more than forty years,” she said. “I just know the way things are. I’m going to sleep. Tomorrow promises to be busy.”
She had given him a kiss on the cheek and gone to their bedroom. Lieberman sat up watching Out of the Past for the sixth or seventh time and then sat through about half of Oklahoma coveting another piece of coffee cake and resisting the urge. Then he took a bath, running the water as quietly as he could, though it let out a nearly maddening hiss when it was on anything but full power.
He read an article on George Bernard Shaw’s Irish heritage and how it appeared in his work. The article made sense. By three-thirty in the morning, Abe had turned off the lights and was in bed. He slept till seven.
And now, tired and with three cups of coffee in him, he entered the squad room, looked across the morning victims, suspects, and weary policemen and women and saw Captain Kearney in the door of his office motioning for Abe to come to him. Kearney did not look happy, but, then again, he seldom did.
Kearney was only in his early forties. He had been a rising star, headed for the top, possibly chief of police, and then, about a year ago, it had all gone bad. His ex-partner had lost control, held the city hostage for two days from a high-rise rooftop, and accused Kearney of seducing his wife. The ex-partner, Sheppard, had hit every newscast and front page. Kearney had denied the accusations, but the department needed a scapegoat and Kearney was it. When Sheppard was killed, so was Kearney’s career. He would never be more than captain of detectives at the Clark Street station.
Lieberman made his way around the desks and through the smells, past his own desk, and into the captain’s office with Kearney behind him. Kearney closed the door and faced Lieberman.
“Your partner’s in deep shit again,” Kearney said. “The woman’s dead. The kid’s gone. The state attorney’s office thinks you better talk to our witness before whoever took his son gets to him. What are you working on?”
“Convenience store robberies,” said Lieberman. “Salt and Pepper. One black, one white. Armed. About every other night. The black one is skinny, nervous, has a gun, uses good grammar. The white one is big. Hits the clerk with his fist. The last clerk looks like he has some brain damage. If it keeps going, I think Pepper’s going to start shooting and Salt is going to hit someone a little too hard.”
“Stay with it,” Kearney said. “Press coverage on it?”
“Nothing on television. A few small articles in the papers. At one I’m supposed to be at a house on the paving scam.”
“Juggle,” said Kearney. “If you need help …”
“I need Hanrahan,” said Li
eberman.
Kearney shrugged and said, “Gornitz is priority. Hanrahan’ll be back later in the morning. Go see what you can do with your old friend Mickey.”
CHAPTER 3
“REMEMBER HAL LITT?” MICKEY Gornitz asked.
Mickey was thin, liked to wear cheap baggy clothes. He sat on the sofa, hands on his legs, clutching deep. Once he had been called Red Gornitz, but that was a long time ago. Gornitz still had hair, but not much of it and none of it red. Mickey had the face of a nervous accountant, which he was, and the perpetual half smile he wore since childhood as a mask.
The hotel room they were in was a decent size with a view of Lake Michigan between a pair of high-rises along the lake. They were downtown, east of Michigan Avenue in a hotel that had been seen a lot and once been the luncheon meeting place of the Chicago Press Club. Lieberman had covered a murder here about twenty years back. A department chairman at Loyola had picked up a pair of young men. The closet gay professor had given in to his need. The pair of young men had robbed him and thrown him out the window. Catching the pair had been easy. Telling the professor’s family had been hard.
Sitting here with Mickey wasn’t too bad, but Abe really had other things on his mind.
“I remember him,” said Lieberman, sitting across from Mickey on an old fading sofa.
“Crazy guy,” Mickey said, reaching into his pocket and then pulling it out as he remembered that he no longer smoked. According to Mickey, he had quit more than seven years ago. Old habits. “Took his clothes off on graduation night and stood in the middle of Roosevelt Road directing traffic. He wasn’t even drunk. What happened to him, Abe? You know?”
“He got crazier,” said Lieberman. “He’s dead.”
“I wonder what made me think about Hal,” Mickey said, looking down at his lap. “So?” he asked, looking around the room and slapping his legs.
There was a young cop in plain clothes standing next to the door. Another cop, also in civilian clothes, stood outside in the hall pretending to read the Sun-Times. An investigator from the state attorney’s office was in the bedroom watching a monitor that showed the hotel’s lobby.
Mickey had spent a life of anonymity. Old acquaintances didn’t recognize him in the street, and when he ran into someone from high school or college and stopped them to say hello, it was clear to him that he was not remembered.
Now all that had changed and one of the Lieberman brothers, half of one of the best back-court duos in the history of Chicago high school basketball, was sitting across from him, talking about old times.
Mickey had been an accountant for his father’s paper box factory when he got out of the University of Illinois and then, when his father died and the factory went into bankruptcy, Mickey had gone to work for Jimmy Stashall. As Jimmy Stashall’s bookkeeper, Mickey had led a life of relative comfort, though a solitary one since his wife took their son and left him more than a decade ago. Still, Mickey had been resigned to his lot. Then something, who knows what, maybe the need to change things around, stay ahead of the game, had gotten to Jimmy Stashall, who decided that Mickey Gornitz was getting a little old and was maybe a little dangerous because he knew too much.
The state attorney’s office had picked up Mickey and played him a tape of Stashall’s number-one man, Carl “the Fish” Cataglio, telling someone unknown that Mickey Gornitz was beginning to smell funny, that he needed a bath. The guy he was telling it to simply said, “Yes.”
The state attorney couldn’t use the tape in court, but he used it on Mickey, who understood exactly what the conversation meant. Mickey’s lawyer made a deal and Mickey never even went back to his apartment to pick up his clothes and a toothbrush. Witness protection in exchange for copies Mickey had kept on floppy disks of Stashall’s illegal activities. Mickey would also have to appear on the stand to testify that the disks were authentic.
Now came the waiting. Convinced that Stashall had gotten to the first lawyer, Mickey fired his lawyer and got a new one. Living in the hotel room for three months, talking and talking and talking to lawyers and cops and prosecutors and the FBI, Mickey was beginning to go a little mad. Everyone expected it. Then one day Mickey insisted on talking to Abe Lieberman and no one else. He knew Lieberman was a cop.
Mickey got what he wanted, including, he assumed, protection for his son and ex-wife.
A television was on across the room. The sound was off. It looked like C-Span.
“Hal Litt’s dead,” Mickey said, shaking his head at the more than forty-year-old memory. “One of the greatest. Best all-around player I ever saw, like French silk pie to play with, wasn’t he? Could have, should have been the best Jew in the NBA. What was he? Six seven? Should have gone to a major college. Would have set records up the ass.”
“Hal was stupid,” Abe said, reaching for a cup of coffee Mickey had leaned over to pour for him. “A basketball idiot savant. Genius on the court. Couldn’t read past fifth-grade level. Couldn’t add numbers over the low hundreds.”
“Couldn’t carry numbers,” Mickey said, handing Abe the coffee cup. “I tried to help him. You know that? With you, Hal, Mel Goldman, your brother Maish, and the black kid …”
“Alvin Garrett,” Abe supplied.
The coffee was bad, very bad.
“What happened to him?” asked Mickey.
“Went to Pepperdine,” said Abe. “Got a Ph.D. Heads a department out there.”
“And Hal’s dead.”
Abe shrugged.
“He worked in Fetterman’s bagel bakery. Went to park district games at night. Looked older than any of us.”
“Time,” Mickey said with another shake of the head. “How’s Maish?”
Abe said his brother was fine.
“Still owns the T&L on Devon?” Mickey asked, glancing at C-Span and over at the cop at the door.
“Still,” said Abe.
“Okay,” said Mickey sitting back. “Now we talk about what you’re really here for. The days of the Marshall Commandos can wait for better times.”
“Bad news,” said Lieberman.
“How bad?” asked Mickey, the small smile still in place, hands clasped together white in frightened mockery of prayer.
“Someone killed your ex-wife,” said Lieberman.
“The boy?” asked Mickey. “Did they …?”
“We don’t know,” said Lieberman. “Happened just outside of Dayton. Motel. We were watching. You can’t be one hundred percent sure of protecting people who are out …”
“Stashall’s got him,” Mickey said, standing up and running his hand through nonexistent hair. He began to pace.
“Maybe,” said Lieberman.
“There’s no maybe,” Gornitz said, pacing around the sofa. “How did they do it?”
“She was shot during the night. Window smashed. Cop guarding them came in, just missed them. Your son was gone.”
“I don’t care about her,” he said. “She was a bitch, took my kid, told him lies about me, tried to make him hate me, kept me almost broke.”
Which Lieberman knew was a lie, at least the part about his ex-wife keeping him almost broke, but he sat quietly listening.
“She was a warning,” he said. “That’s how much I can count on you people. They told me that my kid would be protected and …”
“They won’t kill him,” Lieberman said.
“I know that,” Mickey said, pausing and glaring at Lieberman. “I shut up, Matthew lives. Happens fast, doesn’t it, Abe? One minute we’re talking basketball and the old days. The next …”
“Happens fast, Mickey,” Abe said, flashes of his own nightmares held back.
“Now we —” Mickey began, but he didn’t finish.
Two men came through the door to the hallway. One man was short, stocky, black, head shaved and wearing a well-pressed dark designer suit. The short black man was about forty-five and not happy. At his side carrying a briefcase was a thin, towheaded white man in a nondesigner suit. The towhead looked thirty at th
e most.
“What the fuck is going on here, Lieberman?” asked the stocky black man who was an assistant state attorney and whose name was Eugene Carbin, Eugene A. Carbin. The “A” was for ambition.
“Kearney sent me,” Lieberman said without getting up.
“And I suppose you told …”
“He told me,” Mickey said, standing behind the sofa.
“You should have checked with our office,” Carbin said, adjusting his tie. He didn’t look comfortable in the tie, possibly because he had so little neck.
“I assumed Captain Kearney had …”
“You assumed shit,” said Carbin, motioning for the thin towhead to move to the table near the window.
“Abe stays. He’s the one I talk to,” said Mickey.
“Okay,” said Carbin, holding out his hands. “We’ve had that straight for some time, but that doesn’t give Detective Lieberman the right to keep my office uninformed …”
“What the hell difference does it make who tells me my ex-wife was murdered and my son kidnapped?” Mickey shouted.
Unspoken was the likelihood that Carbin may well have withheld the information indefinitely.
Lieberman leaned forward and drank some more of the awful coffee. He exchanged looks with Carbin and they understood each other. If Matthew Firth was kidnapped, by Stashall or by someone Stashall paid to do it, someone would be calling to talk to Mickey Gornitz, someone who would insist with the threat of killing the boy if he didn’t.
“We don’t know if your son was kidnapped.” Carbin moved past Gornitz and sat at the table where the towhead was setting up shop with the contents of his briefcase. Carbin looked out the window. It looked as if it might rain. “It could have been a coincidence. Locals after money. Wouldn’t be the first time that motel was robbed, room broken into.”
“Then Matthew is dead,” said Mickey.
“I didn’t say that,” Carbin said, rising again.
“If Stashall has my son,” said Mickey, “I’m not talking. I’m not testifying. No disks.”
Mickey was shouting now and pointing to his chest.
“I’m not talking. I’m goddamn mad. If Stashall hurts my boy, I’m gonna get out of here and kill Jimmy Stashall. I never killed anyone in my life, but I’m gonna kill Jimmy Stashall. You get my boy back alive.”
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