Lieberman's Folly

by Stuart M. Kaminsky

  “Life is hard,” said Hanrahan, looking out of the window at the string of sari shops and Indian restaurants as they neared Western Avenue.

  “It’s supposed to be,” Lieberman said. “You got a song that goes with that or are you just feeling particularly Father Murphy this morning?”

  “Prices go up. Stock goes bad. People shoplift, an apple here, a can of tomatoes there. They add up to ruin,” Hanrahan said. “The saints don’t hear your prayers. And children? They desert you in the hour of your greatest need. When you are lying in your deathbed, candles at your head and feet, they’ll be there, asking for your blessing, weeping, and you know what you should tell them? What I should tell them?”

  “No, Bill, what should you tell them?”

  Lieberman pushed his glasses back on his nose and headed south on Western. The smell of Dunkin’ Donuts wafted through the open windows and Lieberman felt a belch coming on.

  “Go away,” Hanrahan said majestically. “Where were you when I needed you?”

  “Which kid?” Lieberman said.

  “Michael,” sighed Hanrahan. “The one who lives in Buffalo. Supposed to come in for a few weeks, bring the wife, the kid. Know what they decide to do?”

  “Emigrate to Australia,” Lieberman tried.

  “Close,” said Hanrahan. “Disney World. Bunch of tin music and robots look like zombies. Scare the kid half to hell and back. If I had anything to disown them with … What time you got?”

  “About two-thirty,” said Lieberman.

  “Want to stop at Simi’s on the way?” said Hanrahan, looking casually at a fascinating Pontiac showroom. “Burger and a beer?”

  “I don’t want to miss El Perro,” Lieberman said.

  “I understand,” Hanrahan said softly, holding up his hand and giving a pained smile. “I understand. Why should one’s friends be any more loyal than one’s children. Why should obligations and promises be met? You know what today is?”

  “Friday,” said Lieberman.

  “Seven years and six days since the dry cleaner,” said Hanrahan.

  “You don’t know how many days, Murphy,” said Lieberman.

  “Give or take one or two, Rabbi. Give or take one or two.”

  The incident in the six-store mall had been on a routine call. Argument, shouts in a dry-cleaning shop on Petersen. Pizza shop next door had called in the complaint, said the shouting was scaring customers away. Lieberman and Hanrahan had taken the call on the way to a follow-up with a robbery victim. They’d hit the shop at a little after three, heard voices arguing inside. Lieberman had knocked. He had been ignored.

  Lieberman had knocked again and someone had come to the door. The someone had a very large gun, a Hopkins & Allen .38 five-shot, in his very small hand. The gun had been pointed at Lieberman. The sight was comic. A little shaking man with wild curly hair and a big gun. Behind the man inside the shop stood a big black man in some kind of delivery uniform.

  “Put the gun …” Lieberman had begun, but the first shot had stopped him.

  He had no idea if the man had missed or hit him. All Lieberman could think of was, “I wonder who this man is who is going to kill me?”

  There was a second shot but it went through the window of the dry cleaning shop, spraying glass onto the sidewalk. It missed Lieberman by a good six feet because the little man with the big gun was on his way to the floor with a large hole in his chest from Hanrahan’s police special.

  That was way back and this was right away, but …

  “We’ll stop at Simi’s after we see El Perro,” said Lieberman.

  Hanrahan settled for it and spent the rest of the drive complaining about the ingratitude of friends and relatives. Lieberman tuned him out but nodded occasionally and threw in a word here or there, generic words like the guy who did Santa Claus on the radio every year and took calls from the kids. Santa Claus gave no promises, laughed a lot, and asked if the kid calling had been a good boy or girl.

  Hanrahan had been drinking fifteen years ago when he and Lieberman became partners after Lieberman’s first partner, Xavier Flores, had retired. But the drinking he did back then was nothing compared to what he started to do five years ago when Maureen, Hanrahan’s wife, moved out on him and left him an empty house in Ravenswood. No talk of divorce. They were good Catholics. No thought of moving out of town. Lieberman had helped Maureen get a job with Sol Schuster’s accounting company. When the two Hanrahan boys and their families came to town, Bill and Maureen would meet at the house, have a dinner party, and Maureen would go back to her apartment after everyone left.

  North Avenue near Crawford was wide, busy, and full of parking spaces. The street was bright, hot, and heavy. A fat woman in a blue dress shifted her shopping bag from one hand to the other and talked quickly to her friend or sister, who was also fat. As they got out of the car and locked it, Lieberman smelled the sweat of the two women as they passed and it was neither pleasant nor unpleasant.

  The Chapultapec was across the street. The two cops walked to the corner, waited for the light to turn green, ignored the sound of squealing brakes somewhere down the street, and crossed, their eyes fixed on a broomstick of a kid dressed in black who leaned against the darkened windows of the Chapultapec scanning the street, keeping watch for an attack, a danger. He was the proof that Emiliano was inside the restaurant. He may have been an early warning system but he was also the red flag to any enemy warriors that said, “If you’re looking for El Perro, you’ve come to the right place.”

  Emiliano wanted to be protected but he made himself vulnerable. He wanted people to like him, to love him, to admire him, but he hurt those who came too close and laughed at their pain.

  “Fernandez,” Hanrahan said with a grin to the kid. “Get any twelve-year-old girls pregnant this month?”

  Fernandez didn’t smile back but he looked at Lieberman, his brown eyes starting at the top of the policeman’s head and going down to his toes and back again. He nodded and the cops moved past him through the door of the Chapultapec and into the blind darkness and loud music.

  Julio Iglesias was singing a song Lieberman didn’t recognize.

  Lieberman could see nothing but vague shapes as his eyes adjusted to the yellow-brown table lamps and the dim light given off by a Dos Equis neon sign on the wall. The smell of frying food from the kitchen touched memories.

  “Look who’s here,” came the voice of El Perro. “The Priest and the Rabbi. Ain’t your territory no more, man. Come to exorcise the devil?”

  “Emiliano,” Lieberman said.

  “Shhhhhh,” he whispered. “No fraga me. La cancion. The song.”

  Slowly Lieberman’s eyes adjusted to the darkness and he began to see bodies and faces in the room. Nine Tentaculos, including Emiliano, were seated at the tiny restaurant’s tables listening to Julio Iglesias. On each table was a plate of sliced meat and a mound of Mexican bread.

  Emiliano smiled at Lieberman and Hanrahan and nodded to the juke box near the window. Hanrahan smiled back and stared at El Perro. It didn’t do to stare too long at El Perro, whose face was a map of wild scars leading to dead ends. A scar from who knows what battle ran from his right eye down across his nose to just below the left side of his mouth. It was rough, red, and had probably taken an afternoon of stitches. The nose had been broken so many times that there was little bone, no cartilage. When lost in thought, which was seldom and most frightening, El Perro played with the flesh of his nose, flattening it with his thumb, pushing it to one side absent-mindedly. His teeth were white but uneven except for his sharp eye teeth, which looked as if they belonged on a vampire. Emiliano’s black hair was brushed straight back.

  Lieberman thought but didn’t say that El Perro hadn’t a shot in hell of being a movie star.

  The song ended and Emiliano sighed deeply, pulled out a brush, and worked his hair back.

  “That man can sing, viejo,” he said. “I met him once you know.”

  “After that, what’s left for a man t
o look forward to?” Lieberman said.

  “Yeah,” Emiliano said dreamily, brushing his hair. “I should have had my picture taken with him, right, Piedras?”

  A voice, deep and gravelly, answered, “Should have had your picture took.”

  “Yeah,” agreed Emiliano looking at Lieberman. “Well, how I look? Like Pat Riley, the fuckin’ Lakers’ basketball coach on TV?”

  “There’s a resemblance,” Lieberman said. El Perro didn’t look anything like Pat Riley, but Lieberman wasn’t here to commit suicide.

  “Fucking A,” Emiliano said seriously. “Everyone says I look like him. Imagine, me looking like a Mick. What are you standing for? Sit down. Fuck, man.”

  The restaurant seemed even smaller than Lieberman had remembered it. It had been a small flower shop before Alfonso and Angelica Naranita took it over and turned it into a restaurant. Angelica was a good cook but the Naranitas had no ambition. Their children were grown. This was good enough for them, at least it was until Emiliano Del Sol had chosen to call it home away from home.

  The place was quiet. Tentaculos waited for El Perro to tell them what to do or think in the presence of two cops.

  “You heard I was here and you just came back to the neighborhood to say hello to an old amigo,” Emiliano said, using a chunk of bread like a clamp and plunging it into the platter of meat. He snared a rare piece and held bread and meat out to Lieberman. “Taste this. I had Angelica add more sugar and a little more jalapeño sauce.”

  Lieberman took a bite. It was sweet fire. He chewed, knowing he would pay dearly for it later. Emiliano watched and smiled benevolently. Hanrahan gulped meat and bread down without chewing it.

  “Good, huh?”

  “Piquant,” Lieberman said.

  “You want a beer?” Emiliano asked, dipping the bread back into the meat for himself. Before Lieberman could answer a dark hand with a scorpion tattooed on it handed him and Hanrahan open bottles of beer.

  Emiliano leaned toward the policemen, breathing fire, to whisper, “Like the ad says, it don’t get no better than this. Now,” El Perro whispered, “why you here?”

  “Resnick’s hardware,” Lieberman said.

  “Resnick’s hardware,” Emiliano repeated around a mouthful of food.

  “You ran up a bill with Resnick,” Lieberman explained. “You owe two hundred dollars and forty cents.”

  “Interesting,” said Emiliano looking around at his fellow Tentaculos, who didn’t seem to find it very interesting. “What if I say I ain’t paying no two hundred dollars and forty cents?”

  “Then we can negotiate,” Lieberman said.

  “Negotiate what?”

  “We can forget the forty cents,” Lieberman said.

  “That’s generous,” El Perro said seriously, nodding his head. “Very generous.”

  “Two hundred bucks is toilet paper to wipe my nalgas,” El Perro whispered, with his face now only inches from Lieberman’s. He reached down, miming a wipe.

  Someone laughed, but it was the wrong reaction. El Perro squinted into the dark corner from which the laughter had come. Then someone stirred at the table behind Lieberman and he could hear whoever it was get up and move toward them. A large figure leaned down, whispered into Emiliano’s ear, and then backed off.

  “Piedras says we should cut off your cajones and throw both of you in the Garfield Park Lagoon,” El Perro confided, sitting back. “Piedras is a good warrior but he is a little crazy. We wouldn’t have to cut off your balls. We could just throw you in. So much shit in the lagoon, you’d choke on an old rubber before you came up for air.” He turned to Piedras, who sat behind the policemen, and shouted, “You hear what I just said, Carlos? I said you can fight. You got more balls than an umpire but you crazy nuts, right? You don’t kill cops if you don’t have to. Besides, the Rabbi is special. He was the first cop to arrest me. I was a little shit, maybe ten, right, Rabbi?”

  “A little shit,” Lieberman agreed.

  “Say you’re crazy, Carlos,” El Perro said softly.

  “I’m crazy,” Piedras admitted soberly.

  “It’s bad for the reputation of the Tentaculos to run up bills and not pay them,” Lieberman said. “You pay your debts, you pay my good friend Resnick, word goes through the neighborhood, your neighborhood, that Emiliano Del Sol is a patron.”

  El Perro guzzled a bottle of beer and looked around the room.

  “There are no women in here,” he said. “How come there are no women in here?”

  “Las mujeres estan a la casa donde usted dija …” someone began.

  “I know that. I know that,” El Perro said in exasperation. “It was just a … a …” He looked at Lieberman for help.

  “A figure of speech,” Lieberman supplied, though that wasn’t quite what he needed.

  “A figure of speech,” El Perro repeated. “Carlos, pay viejo. You got balls, old man. Every grifter, drifter, ladrone, and ramera in the neighborhood from the old days respects you Rabbi, because you don’t give a shit. Hey,” El Perro went on, turning to the Tentaculos. “This old cop here with the sad face, one day he walked into the Mazatlan Bar couple years back and shot a hole in Pedro “The Train” Ramirez’s hand. My brother was there. Ramirez had tore the place apart for the second time that month, and was coming at this old cop here with a broken tequila bottle. I wasn’t there but my kid brother, who shouldn’t have been there either, told me about it. Viejo here walked over the tub of guts on the floor, took the broken bottle from his fingers, all covered with blood, patted Ramirez’s cheek, pulled Ramirez’s wallet out of his pocket, took all the money, and handed it to Manuel Ortega, the Mazatlan bartender. My brother saw Ortega put the bills in his pocket instead of dropping them in the till. You didn’t know that, did you Lieberman?”

  “I didn’t know that,” Lieberman acknowledged, pretending to drink from his bottle of beer.

  “But the viejo didn’t arrest Pedro Ramirez,” El Perro went on. “How you like this story?”

  “Bueno,” came a chorus from the dark and El Perro grinned with satisfaction and went on.

  “Months later, even before his bandages were off, dead drunk, Ramirez stabbed a mailman named Perez. He took him for Manuel Ortega. So what’s the moral, here?”

  “Nail ’em when you get the chance,” Hanrahan said.

  “I’m gonna forget you said that,” said El Perro. “You’re lucky you caught me on a good day.”

  “Lucky we did,” Hanrahan agreed.

  A hand came over Lieberman’s shoulder with two hundred-dollar bills in it.

  “I got no change,” came Piedras’s voice.

  “Someone come up with forty cents,” El Perro said.

  Hands came from all directions plunking coins on the table.

  El Perro laughed. Everyone in the place laughed. Lieberman picked out four dimes and put them in his pocket.

  “You like to know what we did with that stuff we bought from your amigo Resnick?” asked El Perro.

  “No,” said Lieberman, getting up.

  El Perro shrugged and, as Hanrahan finished his beer and rose, asked, “Cubs gonna win it this year?”

  “They’re gonna win it every year,” Lieberman said. “Only way to think.”

  “They need pitching,” he said. “They need that little fat guy.”

  “Valenzuela,” Lieberman said. “He’s not what he used to be.”

  “Too bad,” said El Perro.

  Two minutes later Hanrahan and Lieberman were back on the street.

  “I seriously considered shooting the little bastard,” Hanrahan said when they were back on the street.

  “No you didn’t,” Lieberman said.

  “Hard to shoot a man who hands you a cold beer on a hot day,” Hanrahan said. “Never heard that story before, about you shooting the Mex in the bar.”

  “Never happened,” Lieberman said as they headed down the sidewalk.

  The street smelled of bodies, gasoline, and Mexican food. If your nose was good you
could also smell the blood of Polish sausages and frying kielbasa. The scent was mixed, like the people on the street, mostly dark-skinned and Latino but with a few older, round pink-white faces and heavy bodies that didn’t want to or couldn’t move from the neighborhood that used to be theirs.

  “I used to live a few blocks from here,” Hanrahan said as they walked down the street. “Went to St. Leonard’s right across the park. When my mother shamed me into going to mass at St. Leonard’s, these silent, old round-faced Irish were there, bunched together to the right of the altar in the first five or six rows. When I was a kid, the whole right half of St. Leonard’s was filled with those pink faces. Every year there were fewer of them and every year they were older. Father Conlon, whose Irish accent was as much a mystery to the Poles as it was to my mother and the other Irish, seemed to address these faces more than ours but I was convinced it wasn’t out of preference or prejudice to his own. He just found them harder to get through to.”

  They passed Slovotny’s Meat Shop with the white sign in crayon saying that blood soup was on sale today, and went into Resnick’s Hardware Store.

  Lieberman did something with his mouth that resembled a smile or a stifled burp. His hand went into his jacket pocket and came out with a small bottle of Tums.

  “Here,” he said, dropping the money El Perro had given him onto the counter in front of Resnick. One of the bills floated into the little clear plastic display barrel of assorted key chains.

  Resnick beamed and pulled in the bills, looking at Hanrahan and Lieberman with joy. The lids of Lieberman’s hooded eyes drooped even further as he chewed on a Tums.

  “How did you do it?” Resnick asked.

  “We just asked him for it politely,” Hanrahan said. “Abe and El Perro are buddies from way back.”

  “And to know him is to love him” said Lieberman.

  “Who cares?” Resnick chimed in, opening the cash register and hiding the bills under the false bottom of the drawer next to the .32 Lieberman knew was there.