Lieberman's Folly

by Stuart M. Kaminsky

  “Maybe I didn’t kill her,” said Jules, rubbing his head where it had hit the wall.

  “Who did?” asked Hanrahan.

  “Just tell us what you remember about last night,” said Lieberman.

  Jules rubbed his hands on his filthy shin and dug his dirt-caked nails into the fries.

  “Last night,” he said around a mouthful. “It’s hard to … Which one was last night.”

  “You were in the Michigan Towers, sixth floor,” Lieberman tried, deciding not to finish his fries. Watching Jules eat had taken his appetite.

  “The guy who told me about the bottle,” said Jules, spitting pieces of fried potato.

  “Don’t talk with food in your mouth, I told you,” Hanrahan said.

  “Who was this guy who told you about a bottle?” asked Lieberman.

  “A guy. I don’t remember. All messed up in my head, you know what I’m saying? Wait, I got some of it now. I heard them. The door was open. Open.” The fat woman with the kids opened her mouth but before she could speak, Jules screamed, “Just eat your fries.”

  The woman looked at Jules and shouted, “Fucking creeps.”

  “Where was I?” Jules asked, digging in for more fries.

  “Open door,” said Hanrahan.

  “Yeah,” said Jules, closing his eyes and nodding as if he were a particularly bright student who had given the professor a particularly bright answer to a very tough question. “I went in. Mess. Mess. Bottle on the floor wasn’t broken. Then I heard … She was doing like this.” Jules the Walker then proceeded to gag and cough.

  “Beautiful,” said Lieberman.

  “I talked to her,” said Jules. “I said to her, ‘What?’ I’m not feeling so good. Can I get to the john?”

  “You asked her if you could use the john?” asked Hanrahan.

  “No,” answered Jules. “I mean now. I need the john.”

  “What’d she say to you, Jules?” Lieberman asked.

  “‘Under the house at my mother’s,’” said the Walker proudly. “That’s all.”

  “‘Under the house at her mother’s’?” Lieberman repeated.

  “Can I go to the … I gotta piss.”

  “What else did she say?” asked Lieberman.

  “Nothing,” said Jules. “I got the lamp and flew out the window. Hey, I gotta …”

  Hanrahan moved into the aisle and stood up. Jules scooted out holding his crotch. The fat woman gathered her brood and went for the exit, pulling one of the kids, who didn’t want to go, behind her. Jules went into the toilet.

  Both cops knew there were no windows in the restroom and no way Jules could hurt himself unless he tried to drown in a toilet or basin or bash his head against the walls.

  “What do we do?” asked Hanrahan. He sipped his coffee and then looked deeply into the dark liquid.

  “Book him, hold him,” said Lieberman. “Tell Hughes we found him and keep looking. You know who Jules looks like? Remember Dustin Hoffman in Midnight Cowboy? Ratso Rizzo.”

  “Yeah. You know what I did today?” asked Hanrahan.

  “Voted early in the Bud Bowl?” Lieberman tried. “It’s Bud Light’s turn, but my grandson figures they’ll pull a fast one and go with …”

  “Abe, I’m serious here. I went to confession,” said Hanrahan, still looking at his coffee.

  “Mazel tov,” said Lieberman. “Feel better?”

  “A little,” said Hanrahan. “What you think about Chinese women?”

  “Don’t think I’ve ever considered them as a category,” said Lieberman, reaching up to touch his mustache. “You want me to?”

  “No, where the hell …?” Hanrahan began, but Jules came out of the restroom and silenced him.

  “No towels,” said Jules, dripping dirty water on the floor.

  “Use napkins,” Lieberman said, handing a stack to the Walker.

  Jules took the stack of napkins, wiped his hands, and looked for someplace to deposit the sopping mess. He settled on the bag in which their sandwiches had come.

  “You’re not an appetizing sight, Jules,” said Hanrahan.

  “I used to have a card shop in Holland,” said Jules, standing next to the table and glancing at a trio of teenage girls who giggled through the door. “Kids, a wife. Something happened.”

  Jules began to cry. The teenage girls looked at him and giggled.

  “We’re going to jail, Jules,” Lieberman said.

  “What happened?” asked Jules, wiping tears on his ragged sleeve. “I was selling cards one minute. Next thing I know it’s where and when. What the goddamn hell happened?”

  “You learned how to fly,” said Hanrahan.

  “No,” said Jules, shaking his head. “I was lying to you. I was lying to me. I fell. You guys getting me a drink?”

  Lieberman and Hanrahan were up now. The teenagers with their sandwiches were looking for a place to sit far enough to be safe from these weird men yet close enough to watch them.

  “‘Under the house at her mother’s house’?” Lieberman said.

  Jules nodded. His energy was draining off somewhere and his eyes were losing focus again.

  “Under the house at my mother’s house, she said,” Jules agreed. “Her name is Maureen. Wife.”

  Hanrahan’s knees almost buckled. Lieberman touched his partner’s arm.

  “Whose wife?” asked Lieberman.

  “Mine,” said Jules. “My wife’s name is Maureen.”

  “So’s mine,” said Hanrahan.

  “Haven’t seen mine in years,” said Jules, looking at the big policeman. “I think she was good in bed. Don’t remember what she looked like.”

  Lieberman stepped between the two men before Hanrahan did something new to bring to confession.

  “Let’s go for a ride to the station,” he said.

  As they walked back to the car with Jules Van Beeber between them, Hanrahan said, “Rabbi, if I believed in the devil, I’d think he had a hand in giving me the screws.”

  “Not the devil, Father Murphy,” said Lieberman. “God’s got a sense of humor. It’s one of the things I like about him.”

  “Amen,” muttered Jules Van Beeber, his eyes fixed on the driveway. “Amen.”

  6

  CAPTAIN HUGHES SAT IN the interrogation room listening to the tape and drinking coffee from a white cup with Beethoven’s picture on it. His pink and blue tie was just slightly loose to make room for the open top button. His dark brow was furrowed in concentration. The door was closed and Hughes had informed Feitler, the morning clerk with the overbite that earned him the nickname Bugs, that no one was to bother him. No one. Period. No one, Feitler knew, meant no one but the mayor, chief of police, and Hughes’s wife. Lieberman sat at the end of the table taking notes on the back of a Northern Illinois Gas Company receipt. Hanrahan operated the tape recorder.

  The tape recorder was a small cassette player confiscated from the apartment of a drug dealer named Murrayhoff. It should have been in the evidence room, but the squad’s two recorders were unavailable. One was being repaired. The other one had been stolen.

  LIEBERMAN

  … last night.

  JULES VAN BEEBER

  Last night?

  HANRAHAN

  The lady and the lamp.

  JULES

  Oh, life’s like that.

  HANRAHAN

  Like what?

  JULES

  Hard to remember. There was a guy, I think.

  LIEBERMAN

  A guy?

  JULES

  I think a guy. Gave me bottle. No, he told me where to find a bottle. Don’t know what.

  HANRAHAN

  Could you identify this guy if you saw him again, heard him?

  JULES

  Looked like him.

  LIEBERMAN

  He looked like Captain Hughes? He was black?

  JULES

  Big. He was big. (Long pause) She told me. She told me that it was under the house in her mother’s house. She told me.
Nice-looking lady. Seen her before on the street. Didn’t look good on the floor.

  LIEBERMAN

  Did you kill her, Jules?

  JULES

  Maureen?

  HANRAHAN

  The nice-looking lady.

  JULES

  Kill her? I don’t think so. Maybe. I took a drink and the lamp and I told you. I flew. No, fell. You’re not going to tell my wife?

  LIEBERMAN

  Maureen. She’s …

  JULES

  … in Michigan. Got two bucks for the lamp from the Raw Izzy.

  “Turn it off,” said Hughes with a sigh. He examined his Beethoven cup. Beethoven was frowning. Hanrahan turned off the tape recorder. “We book him?” asked Lieberman. Hughes looked at the detective and shook his head. “That’s shit and you know it,” sighed Hughes. “You can maybe drop it on him if we get Judge Dreuth or Shoenberg on the prelim and your Jules pleads guilty. Who’s the PD?”

  “Public defender on this one is Sheridan,” Lieberman said.

  “He’ll go along with this?” asked Hughes, standing and looking at Hanrahan who rewound the tape.

  Lieberman shrugged and said, “He owes us. We owe him. Who knows?”

  “I know,” said Hughes. “It’s shit. That sorry bag of scum isn’t competent to plead anything. Even Dreuth wouldn’t go for it. It’d come back and haunt him. The Valdez woman could have beat the crap out of him. Son of a bitch doesn’t have the strength or the balls to stab someone once, let alone eight times. What about the weapon? What about … shit.”

  Hughes shook his head.

  “I’ve got three homicides going today,” he went on. “My wife’s got a theory. You want to hear my wife’s theory on this one?”

  “Sure,” said Hanrahan.

  “The fuck you do,” said Hughes, “but you’re going to hear it anyway. She thinks some pimp did her in or some guy she brought up there who went nuts.”

  “I think your wife’s right,” said Lieberman, putting his pen and envelope into his pocket.

  “You want to know what else my wife thinks?” said Hughes getting angrier. “She thinks she wants to get out of that building. She’s got another theory. There might be a lady-killer living there. She’s off staying with her mother till I prove we’ve got our killer. She thinks the pimp or the John might live … You think she’s got something?”

  “Maybe,” said Lieberman. “Doorman couldn’t identify anyone who might have …”

  “You think she’s got anything?” Hughes repeated.

  “Not that hard to get into the building,” said Lieberman. “Someone got our Jules in. You know what we say in Yiddish?”

  “No,” said Hughes. “How the hell would I know? What’s more, I don’t want to know. You see the papers? The Sun-Times? Page eight. Nothing much, but they’ve got it. No television. Least none I saw or heard about. You?”

  Hanrahan and Lieberman both shook their heads no.

  “Bring the bum in here,” said Hughes.

  Hanrahan got up and left the interrogation room.

  “Place smells like piss,” said Hughes.

  “It is piss,” said Lieberman. “Novotny had a guy in here—”

  “Abe,” said Hughes, looking at the door and then across at Lieberman. “Your partner fucked up. He’s on the bottle hard. Don’t answer. I been there and back with a whole string, Dysan. You remember Dysan?”

  “I remember Dysan?” Lieberman said.

  “Got his partner killed,” Hughes whispered. “You know what it takes to get a cop booted? Shit, you know. But I’m thinking about it, Abe. I’m thinking serious. You going to back me if it comes down?”

  Lieberman was saved from answering by the opening of the door.

  Jules Van Beeber came in with Hanrahan behind. Jules had been cleaned up, not much, but washed, shaved, and given clean clothes from the barrel in the closet. Nestor Briggs, whose father was a barber, had even cut his hair. Jules looked like a new person, but the new person wasn’t much of an improvement over the old one.

  “Van Beeber,” Hughes said.

  “Schubert,” said Jules.

  “Your name is Schubert?” asked Hughes.

  “No, on your cup, Franz Schubert,” said Jules the Walker, pointing at Hughes’s coffee cup.

  Hughes looked disgusted.

  “He does that a lot,” said Lieberman.

  Jules looked at the captain, eyes trying to focus.

  “You hear me, Van Beeber?” Hughes asked.

  “I hear you,” said Van Beeber, leaning against the wall and closing his eyes. “It’s day. I don’t do day very long.”

  “I’ve seen you around the streets near my place,” Hughes said. “Look at me, man.”

  Van Beeber opened his eyes and looked at Hughes.

  “You kill her, Jules?” Hughes asked, moving around the table toward Jules, who would have slumped to the floor if Hanrahan hadn’t reached over and pulled him up by the collar.

  “Yes,” said Van Beeber. “My wife. She irked me. I hit her. Back of the card shop. I don’t know when. Elsie was her name or Kate. No, Maureen. Kate’s my sister. Elsie’s the Borden cow.”

  “You killed your wife?” asked Lieberman.

  Van Beeber shook his head.

  “You said you didn’t want us to tell your wife?” said Hanrahan.

  “I’m a little confused by life,” said Van Beeber, trying to shake his head.

  “We all are,” said Lieberman, “but we don’t all kill our wives. Jules, think. Did you really kill your wife?”

  Jules the Walker laughed. “That’s why you arrested me,” he said. “Don’t you know … Where’s my lamp? No, I remember, Izzy, two bucks.”

  “Get him out of here,” said Hughes.

  Hanrahan opened the door with his left hand and kept a firm grip on Jules’s collar with his right. When Jules and Hanrahan were gone, Hughes said, “You think maybe the son of a bitch really killed his wife?”

  “Who knows?” said Lieberman. “I’ll run a check.”

  Hughes smiled, clenched his fist, and shook it.

  “All right,” he said. “If he did it once, we got him on this one if we want him.”

  “I don’t—” Lieberman began.

  “Lieberman,” Hughes warned, “I’m in a good mood now. It won’t last but you don’t want to cut it short. I checked your sheet this morning when you were sleeping in. You two have an outstanding seven-eleven robbery, a home invasion, an assault with intent, and two other murders, one gang related, the other domestic. You don’t have enough work I’ve got a long list for you and some of them you wouldn’t like at all.”

  “I’ll check the story,” said Lieberman, and Hughes went through the door.

  Lieberman went to the barred window and looked out on Clark Street. There was a concrete playground across the street beyond the scrawny trees in little patches of soil embedded in stone in front of the station. Four kids were playing basketball. Their shirts were off. Lieberman watched. When he was a kid, his high school team, the Marshall Commandos, had set a record, won a hundred straight games, a record never equaled. A team of Jewish kids, mostly short Jewish kids, and they still held the record. Maish Lieberman was on that team. Maish Lieberman hardly ever got in a game, but he was on that team and his picture, along with the ten others, hung on the wall of Maish’s deli. Abe had gone to every game his older brother had played in.

  The door opened behind him but Lieberman didn’t turn.

  “I told Nestor to book him material witness and possible suspect,” said Hanrahan. “Sheridan’s off for the weekend.”

  Hanrahan moved next to Lieberman at the window and looked out at the kids playing basketball.

  “You wanna check with Michigan? Holland police,” Lieberman said.

  “Skinny kid’s not bad,” said Hanrahan.

  “Team game’s gone,” sighed Lieberman turning from the window. “Everything’s one on one. Let’s call Michigan before our Jules confesses to every open murder
from Cal City to Prague.”

  The squad room was empty when Lieberman went to his desk, empty and hot. There was a message taped to the telephone from Nestor Briggs. A man had called four times. Left no name. No number. The man had said it was about what happened yesterday. The man had said he would see Lieberman about what happened to “her.” Two workmen were taking apart the air conditioning vent and talking about the pennant race and the Cubs’s chances at the play-offs. Lieberman had some thoughts on the subject but he called home instead.

  “It’s not fun here, Lieberman,” Bess said. “I’m schlepping kids, listening to Lisa complain, canceling, calling, hauling.”

  “You love it,” said Lieberman. “You’re needed.”

  “Don’t psychoanalyze,” said Bess.

  “Part of the job,” he said. “I’m picking up from Maish’s for breakfast tomorrow so don’t stop at the Bagel Boys or the Kosher.”

  “What time you coming home?” Bess said.

  “When I can,” he said. “How’s Lisa?”

  “Kvetching, brooding, drinking coffee,” said Bess. “You know.”

  “Keep pouring and listening. I’ll relieve you when I’ve rid the city of crime. Should have that done by seven. Kids?”

  “Dropped them at the library. They’re showing Roger Rabbit again,” said Bess. “Kids don’t read at libraries anymore, Lieberman. They watch movies.”

  “Could be worse,” he said.

  “Could be worse,” she agreed. “Rabbi Wass called. Renovation committee meeting tonight at eight.”

  “He’s a rabbi,” said Lieberman with a sigh, watching the air conditioning men argue. “He’s not supposed to be making calls on Shabbas.”

  “Levan called for him,” said Bess. “What’s the difference?”

  “God’s watching,” said Lieberman. “God has a sense of humor.”

  “Get home when you can,” said Bess. “I’m making leftover brisket.”

  Lieberman hung up and looked at the air conditioning men and over at Hanrahan, who was on the phone at his desk across the room. They were partners. They should have been together, but shift changes had messed up the beautiful floor plan laid out by Central when the building opened. Central never talked to any working cops when they designed a new space. They designed from memory and the imaginations of kid architects who grew up on reruns of Baretta.