Lieberman's Day

by Stuart M. Kaminsky

  He put on his blue button-down shirt and looked at himself in the mirror over the bathroom sink. He saw a strong Irish face with a hint of the rose in his cheek and nose from the years of his friendship with the bottle. He saw the flat features of his father and grandfather, tempered just a bit by the warmer heart of his mother. All in all not a bad face to have.

  Jeanine, he thought, sitting on the edge of the tub and putting on his socks, was a good kid, but not a very bright one. Conversation tended to be brief unless he could bring himself to listen to her recounting her day with the fillet-o-fish and Big Mac. Charlie seldom spoke. The few times they had gotten him together with Lieberman’s grandchildren, Charlie had dutifully done what they had engaged him in and had soberly said “thank you” and announced in a whisper in the car that he had had a good time.

  Truth was, Hanrahan admitted, turning off the light and moving into his bedroom, Jeanine and Charlie were innocent, gentle, and none too smart. They reminded him, in contrast, of the arguments, jokes, banter, and business that had filled this very house when Maureen had lived in it and the boys had grown up in it bringing home friends, battling, and leaving lights and television sets on all over the place.

  The house now had the stillness of an Amtrak station at midnight. All creaks and howling wind, the lone sound of the television filling only a narrow band of cold space.

  Hanrahan turned out all the lights but the one on the night stand and looked at the small television in the bedroom which showed him the silent scene of some distant war on CNN. He lay back on the bed, feeling the familiar indentation of his body on the mattress.

  He had kept the house clean, perfect, neat, better even than Maureen had kept it, even when he had been on the needle edge of the worst of his sessions with the bottle. He had kept it for the moment that Maureen might drop in or one of the boys might pay an unexpected visit and find not that Hanrahan had gone the way of the slovenly bachelor but had and could make a commitment.

  The first time she had seen it Iris had marveled at the house, at the shine on the polished hardwood floors, the nap of the area rugs, the lack of dust. Iris, her pretty, ageless Chinese face surveying the rooms politely as they spoke, had trodden carefully, lightly, as if in a museum. Which was what it was.

  He and Iris had never made love. Neither wanted to, and the few nights she had stayed over she had spent in the room in which Jeanine Kraylaw was now asleep.

  The knees felt better on the oversized pillow on which he had rested them. He closed his eyes, put his right arm over his face to block out the light, and sensed the flicker of changing images as the wind shook the bedroom windows and CNN careened around the world in thirty minutes with no one in the room watching.

  George DuPelee, clinging to the dead man’s fur hat as if it was a teddy bear, lay on his back on the battered sofa, snoring gently. Raymond Carrou sat at the table in the corner of the room in the dim light of the television on the table in front of him, considering whether or not he should beat George to death as he slept or let him live so Raymond could make him suffer.

  Nothing had gone right, nothing. And now he sat in this small, cold room over a hardware store on Grand Avenue listening to George snore, watching the news, changing stations to see if their crime would make the television, and wondering if they were safe.

  It was cold in the room, which he had been renting for almost two years. Not cold like outside, but cold enough. And Raymond had been afraid to get a space heater. Just one block away a whole Vietnamese family had died because of one of those space heaters. Raymond wasn’t sure what it was about the space heater that had made them die, but he had seen it on the television and walked past the very building.

  It was never cold like this in Trinidad. In La Brea he had been respected, not just another black face with an accent. He had been a shift boss at the Pitch Lake natural asphalt mine, one of the wonders of the world. Tourists had come to watch them work and marvel. But asphalt production declined in the 1980s. When he had started as a boy in 1970 they had produced 128,000 tons of asphalt in a single year, asphalt prized around the world and used for domestic roads and construction throughout the island and on Tobago. By 1985 asphalt production dropped to 21,000 tons and Raymond had been working few shifts and spending more time looking into the blue-green waters of the Gulf of Paria, picking up lonely older tourist women from England and the United States and wondering whether he should go inland in search of an oil job or take a boat over to Venezuela for whatever he could find.

  In the end, he had spent all of his savings on bribing a U.S. immigration official to move him to the very top of the list for a work visa. He had made his way to New York City and then to Chicago in pursuit of a distant cousin who presumably lived there and owned a trio of music shops. He had found neither cousin nor work that suited him, and so he had taken the low-paying job in the sundries shop of the Stowell Building on Randolph Street.

  Like his father and grandfather before him, Raymond was straight-backed, chocolate-skinned, handsome. He liked women and had little trouble drawing them to him.

  And it was his woman, the woman he called Lilly because she reminded him of the flower. He had met her at work more than a year ago and in that year she had encouraged his ambition. He had begun by taking a night course at the downtown campus of Loyola University to show Lilly that he could become something. He would walk to the school from work even in a snowstorm and catch the subway a few blocks away after class. He had done well in that first class and in the next two, English and algebra, the following semester. He had begun to think he had a chance somewhere in the future to become a lawyer. He had told her of his plans and she had encouraged him while they lay in his bed trying to keep warm, and they had talked and planned for the future.

  But life had changed so quickly.

  And working in a matchbox shop in an office-building lobby paid little.

  And people like George DuPelee were so easy to find.

  And one was tempted to take a chance.

  It would have gone perfectly had not George panicked and shot the woman. Raymond had no criminal record. He had a job. He was going to school. But, now …

  Now what? Now where? In front of Raymond Carrou, gray-white in the light from the television, lay the money he had taken from the dead man, one hundred and eighty-seven dollars. The jewelry, worthless. To sell it would mean risking discovery by the police.

  Raymond rubbed his forehead and looked at George.

  Maybe there was still something to be done. Maybe the woman was not dead. Maybe the baby inside her was still alive. He was sure the man he had shot was dead. No doubt about it. But the woman. George had shot her once. Maybe, maybe …

  He tried to think. Could someone have seen them get into the car when they had run from the crime? Could someone in a window have seen them, be able to identify them? Not likely. Two black men bundled in the cold. But the car, a distinctive wreck. It was parked now behind the building in the space reserved for the Ace hardware store’s customers. He would have to move it in a few hours. The Haitian family that ran the hardware store wouldn’t give him a hard time. They were afraid of the lean, handsome man from Trinidad who smiled knowingly at their women and hinted at a violence his eyes confirmed.

  Now he should sleep. When the sun came up he would drink strong coffee and make a plan. He was much calmer now as he turned off the television set. He had possibilities to work with, the first jagged pieces of a plan that might allow him to survive or maybe even come out of this with What he had planned for, more than the sad pile of bills he now folded and shoved into his pocket.

  The floor was cold even through Raymond’s socks. He moved to the bed, not bothering to undress, and climbed in, curling over on one side, covering his exposed ear with a pillow to mute the sound of George’s snoring.

  When the sun came up, Raymond would have his plan.

  When the sun came up.

  Six-Twenty in the Morning

  ABE WAS SURE
EVEN before he had fully opened the door that his wife and daughter knew about David and Carol.

  Across the living room, sitting at the dining room table, dressed in a no-nonsense gray suit with a white blouse, her dark hair tied severely back, was his daughter, Lisa. It was too early for Lisa to be dressed. It was too early for Lisa to be up unless they knew.

  He closed the door and looked across the room at his daughter, who shivered at the chill he had brought in.

  “Your mother?” asked Lieberman, taking off his rubbers.

  “With Aunt Yetta,” said Lisa, pale, composed.

  “And Maish?” Lieberman added, removing his coat and hat.

  “Aunt Yetta says Uncle Maish walked out of the hospital without saying where he was going.”

  “Was he dressed warm? Did they say?”

  “I don’t know,” said Lisa.

  In more than thirty years of dealing with sudden, violent, and unexpected death, Abe had seen a range of reactions from complete denial of reality to protective glee at the freeing of the soul of the victim from the troubles of the imperfect world. He had seen an old man and woman take each others’ hands when informed of the death of their only grandchild and walk out of the front door of their apartment never to be seen again. One young wife, a black woman with an astonishingly beautiful Egyptian face, who had been told that her cab driver husband had been murdered for eighteen dollars by a big, white, redheaded man, had walked the streets with a gun until she encountered a man vaguely fitting the description and shot him in the face. The black woman had been a lawyer. The redheaded victim had been a Red Cross worker.

  “Bess is angry with you,” Lisa said as her father padded across the carpeted living room.

  “I didn’t want to wake her,” said Lieberman, standing over his daughter. “David is dead. Your mother needed rest so she could help with the living.”

  “That should be her choice,” said Lisa seriously. Lisa had always been serious, even as a child, seldom smiling. Biochemistry suited her. And though he had not thought so at first, Todd Cresswell suited her, too. Todd, tall, blond, brooding, saw in his wife the tragic bearing of the Greek tragedies he knew, taught, and loved. The sense of tragedy was there. What Todd had failed to see was the fire, which was not Greek but Semitic.

  “How are you doing?” he asked.

  Lisa shrugged and tapped her red fingernails on the polished dark tabletop.

  “David is … really …” she said, looking up at him. Her eyes were wide and brown, moist but not crying, a glint of light on her contact lenses.

  Lieberman nodded his head yes and Lisa stopped tapping, stood up, and faced him. He held his arms open and she stepped forward to hug him. Lisa was not a world-class hugger. She held back, always held back, but this was better than most other times and she let Abe hold on for almost ten seconds before she stepped back. Her eyes were no longer moist.

  “You? How are you?” she asked.

  “The truth?”

  “No, a lie,” she said.

  “The question was rhetorical,” Abe said with a sad smile.

  “Really,” Lisa answered with her own sad smile. “How are you, Abe?”

  “Tired, cold, especially my feet, wondering why I’m not angrier than I am, wondering what I’m going to say to your mother and how long she’ll stay angry and hurt, readying myself to get dressed again and be with Maish for an hour or two, anxious to find the people who killed my nephew, my brother’s son, to find them, get in their faces and repeat ‘why, why, why’ for hours or days till they sink to the floor crying the way Yetta and Maish must be crying. Am I making sense here or am I just rambling like a …”

  “Classics professor,” said Lisa, moving toward the kitchen. “Coffee’s hot.”

  Lieberman followed his daughter knowing what she knew, that he wouldn’t go back to bed or even rest, that he would look at the Tribune if it had been delivered yet, have a couple of cups of coffee, and be out the door again.

  “Kids know?” he asked, moving to the table and sitting on the red-leatherette and chrome chair.

  “No,” said Lisa. “I’ll tell them when they get up. I think I should let them go to school.”

  “Yeah,” agreed Lieberman, accepting the hot cup his daughter handed him.

  “I feel guilty,” Lisa said, still standing, her arms folded over her breasts. “I’m feeling guilty that I’m not feeling more. You know if Carol will …?”

  “Doctor thinks so,” said Lieberman.

  “The baby?”

  “Looks good,” he said, after taking a long sip. “No promises.”

  The phone rang suddenly, piercingly. Father and daughter looked at it without reaction for two rings and then Lisa stepped to the wall and answered.

  “For you,” she said, holding out the phone.

  The long cord reached to the table, but the receiver had to be held firmly or it would, as it had more than a dozen times, go skittering and crashing back toward the wall as if it were tied by a thick rubber band.

  “Hello,” he said.

  “Abe?”

  The voice was familiar. A man.

  “Syd Levan here. Say, I’m sorry to call you at home, a morning like this. Let me say how sincerely sorry I am for your family’s loss.”

  “Thank you, Syd.”

  Syd was one of the morning crowd of old men with nothing more to do with their lives than hang around Maish’s T&L Deli on Devon. The group, known in the neighborhood as the Alter Cockers, consisted of Jews, with the exception of Howie Chen, whose family had owned the Peking Lantern Chinese Restaurant one block down just off California. Howie and his wife were the last of their clan in the neighborhood. Two sons and a daughter had all moved to California, where they were all engineers.

  Syd had been the one who had dubbed Abe’s brother Nothing-Bothers Maish back when they were kids on the West Side. That name had preceded the founding of the Alter Cockers, had gone back to the days in the ’40s when Syd had been a classmate of Maish’s back at Marshall High School.

  “We’re at the T and L,” said Syd. “Maish is here. And he’s acting, if I can say it, a little meshugah. He’s got a right, considering. He’s got a right, but we’re …”

  “I understand, Syd,” said Abe, watching Lisa pour herself a cup of orange juice.

  “Well, that’s it,” Syd whispered. “He’s acting maybe not quite meshugah, but … He’s acting like it’s a day like any day, you know? And this is not a day like any other day.”

  “I’ll be there in ten minutes,” said Abe.

  Lisa reached over to take the phone and crossed the room to hang it up as Abe drained his cup and stood up with a sigh.

  “I gotta go,” he said.

  “Uncle Maish went to work?”

  Lieberman nodded and walked toward the kitchen door, his feet not yet fully warmed in his thick white socks.

  “If I got murdered on the street, would you go to work?” she asked.

  “If something happened to you,” Lieberman said, with a shudder he hoped did not show, “I’d find my own way to go crazy with grief. You tell Todd about David?” he asked, stepping past her.

  “He has other interests,” she said. “Other distractions.”

  Lieberman stopped and looked at his daughter, who turned from him and sat in the chair he had just vacated.

  “Other interests?”

  “A woman,” Lisa said. “A new faculty member. Alice Stephens told me.”

  “Ah,” said Lieberman.

  “Ah,” repeated Lisa, raising her eyebrows. “I walk out on him with the kids, tell him I want a new life. He chases me, pleads, begs, humiliates himself for five whole weeks, and then goes out and …”

  Lieberman resisted the urge to check his watch.

  “You think I’m being selfish,” she said.

  “No,” said Lieberman.

  “I don’t want him, but I don’t want anyone else to have him, at least not till I have someone first, if I wanted someone, which I do
not.”

  “So you’re not going to tell him,” said Lieberman.

  “You think he should know? He should know. He liked David. At least he said he liked David. I don’t think they met more than two or three times, but … Can you tell him, Abe?”

  “In my spare time,” Lieberman said.

  “I’ll leave a message for him at his office,” she said. “I’m not going to work today. I’ll help Bess with Aunt Yetta, things.”

  “I’ll tell Todd,” said Lieberman.

  Lisa looked down. “I can’t stop thinking about myself,” she said.

  “Someone close dies,” he said. “Sometimes you think about the time you’ve got and what you’re going to do with it.”

  Lisa smiled. “You’ve been reading philosophy?”

  “No, Mike Royko. I gotta go, Lisa. Tell Barry and Melisa I’ll bring them something tonight.”

  “Are they going to have to go see David’s body?” she whispered, so softly that he barely heard her.

  “No,” he said.

  She nodded and drank her coffee, knowing that there was no point in asking the next question, that she would have to go.

  Lieberman thought he heard the first faint stirrings of his grandchildren in the room above him as he shuffled to the closet, put on his still-chilled overcoat, and slipped into his shoes and wet boots.

  The day was just starting.

  “Get up.”

  George was aware of something, some presence, a voice, angry like his mother when he got up late for work back in Trinidad.

  “Mmbunnn,” he mumbled, pushing away the hand that rocked him by the shoulder.

  “Get up,” Raymond repeated.

  George tried to open his eyes. He tried very hard and then made a special effort, spewing air from his puffed-out cheeks.

  His eyes did not want to open, did not want to see, did not want to start a new day that would make him remember something he did not want to remember.