Lieberman's Day

by Stuart M. Kaminsky

  It had been more than a week since she had last said anything about Frankie and her fear that he would come back to find her and Charlie.

  Hanrahan smiled and tried to listen, picking up enough, a cop trick, to be able to nod in the right places.

  He reached for another moo shu crepe, put it on his plate, spooned the filling on it, and poured some thick plum sauce over the filling.

  A horn blew.

  “Myrna,” Jeanine said, getting up. “Let’s go, Charlie.”

  Charlie rose without comment and wiped his mouth with a paper napkin.

  “I’m sorry I can’t stay to clean up,” Jeanine said to Iris.

  “But Mr. Hanrahan won’t let me, anyway. Thank you for the delicious food. What do you say, Charlie?”

  “Thank you for the delicious food,” the boy echoed soberly.

  “You are both welcome,” said Iris. “Have a good day. Stay warm.”

  And then Iris and Bill were alone. He considered one more filled crepe. It would be his fifth. He decided against it. His appetite had grown enormously since he had stopped drinking. He tended to control it, but when someone placed a meal before him his stomach and the memory of his father’s voice told him to eat until there was nothing left, eat as if there was no tomorrow; because for a policeman, there might be no tomorrow.

  “A good cop enjoys every moment of life,” his father had told him when he had decided to make a career of it. “He savors every moment, laughs at every joke, tries to put things right on the spot. The devil eats fast and leaves no leftovers.”

  “It was very good,” said Hanrahan, pushing away his plate and standing up. “But you didn’t have to come out this early in this weather to …”

  “I did,” said Iris.

  Hanrahan had begun to remove the dishes one by one, to clean them off into the fresh plastic bag in the garbage can. He never nested the plates nor piled them.

  “Why did you have to come?” asked Hanrahan.

  “To observe you in the morning with the young woman,” she said, with her hands on the table.

  Hanrahan paused, dirty dish in hand, to look at her with a smile.

  “You’re not jealous?” he asked.

  “Yes,” she said calmly. “I am. And I have reason. She is a lovely young girl, very grateful to you. You are a man. To not respond would not be human. I know you to be human.”

  Hanrahan put down the dish, rubbed the side of his nose, and moved to the table to sit next to Iris, who watched him, her eyes never leaving his.

  “I consider the possibility from time to time and reject it before it takes heart or form,” he said. “Jeanine is a child of misfortune and not the brightest of God’s creatures. I neither need nor want what such a thing might mean and I know she doesn’t need such a thing. My goal is to get her money saved and ship her and the boy to Danny Shea in Santa Fe.”

  “I will contribute one thousand dollars,” said Iris.

  Hanrahan laughed.

  “I am serious,” Iris said.

  “I know you are, darling,” he said, realizing he was echoing the words his father often spoke to his mother. “Maybe we can each give her five hundred and send her on her way to warmth and happiness and leave me in frequent nightly solitude.”

  “I would be pleased if this were to happen,” she said.

  “Good, settled,” he said. “When Jeanine and Charlie are gone, maybe we can do some serious talking about where we …”

  Iris was shaking her head now, almost imperceptibly, but shaking it nonetheless.

  “What?” he asked.

  “It will take more than money to send out from this house the presence of your wife,” she said.

  “Maureen isn’t coming back to me,” he said.

  “But you would not be unhappy if she did,” said Iris. “I am not trying to make you uncomfortable. I’m trying to see what is true.”

  “Look …”

  “This house,” she said, looking around. “Even the way you do the dishes. You await the day she may return.”

  “If she walked in here tomorrow,” he said, “she’d see I can take care of myself.”

  “She would see that you have kept a shrine,” Iris countered gently.

  Hanrahan rose slowly. “You been taking night classes in psychology?” he asked, with a hint of the smile still in his voice.

  “No,” she said. “I have been thinking. William, do you know how old I am?”

  Hanrahan was decidedly uncomfortable. “I don’t think …”

  “No,” she said. “That is true. Often you do not think. I am fifty-seven years old. I am more than seven years older than you are. I can have no children. I was content or resigned to what I was and what I had till you came into our restaurant. Now you have asked me to live with uncertainty and affection. I find it difficult.”

  “You want to stop seeing me?”

  “No, I want you to give up the past or embrace it.”

  “Iris, my dear, this is heavy duty on a heavy morning after a heavy breakfast. Give me some time to think this through.”

  “Yes,” she said. “Now, if you agree, I would very much like to have you make love to me.”

  She rose and faced him. She was lovely and he felt oafish, bloated, held together by his tight suit. She had never offered before and he had never pushed.

  There was no way he could or would or wanted to reject her.

  “I would consider that an honor I do not deserve,” he said.

  “Do you joke?”

  “Not in the least,” he said. “I’m being nervous and childish.”

  “No more nervous than I,” she said, stepping toward him.

  He took her in his arms and smelled her. He kissed her open lips and tasted distant mint.

  “Only one request, one demand really,” she whispered when their mouths were no longer touching.

  “Yes,” he said.

  “We do not make love in the bed you shared with Maureen.”

  “I understand,” he said.

  “No, I do not think you do. I do not wish to overcome your past and erase your memories. I wish to be your present and future.”

  “And so say all of us,” he said, picking Iris up and cradling her in his arms. She weighed so little. He felt he could fling her in the air and when she came down it would be floating and laughing.

  She put her arms around his neck, lay her head against his shoulder, and said something that must have been in Chinese. Something told him to check the clock, reminded him that he had someplace to be. He did not ignore that something. He simply decided that it was not one tenth as important as that which he was about to do.

  The old car was rattling, steam hissed from the cap. It shivered and shrieked for mercy, but Raymond Carrou tortured it onward with George DuPelee at his side. So far the plan was working just fine. George had entered the McDonald’s on Clark, gun in hand, while Raymond waited outside. No more than two minutes later George had come out with two bags, one filled with money from the register, the other filled with Egg McMuffins.

  The man was definitely a walking fool. And he looked a fool, the little dead man’s hat on his head, a hopeful grin on his face, a mouthful of egg, bacon, and bread.

  “How much you think we got?”

  “Not enough, mostly singles,” said Raymond, moving carefully down a narrow, slippery side street. “I’d say a couple of hundred maybe.”

  George’s smile slipped and he stopped chewing, though his mouth was full.

  “How much you say we need?”

  Raymond shrugged, feeling his hands tremble.

  “At least a thousand, maybe more. Don’t worry. Next place I picked out should have all we need.”

  “What you say? You want one of these sandwiches?”

  Raymond took a sandwich, unwrapped it awkwardly, and ate as he drove, spinning George a tale to lull him into fantasies of modest wealth and escape.

  “Before we hit the Burger King up near Montrose,” Raymond said, “w
e’re going to do the same game we just played at a place I hear makes collections from hot-dog carts, ice-cream carts, things like that.”

  “Uh huh,” said George. “But no hot-dog carts, ice-cream carts such like out in the cold. They’re not gonna have much money.”

  Raymond hit the steering wheel with the heels of his gloved hands and said, “No, of course not, not outside. In the winter, those places go inside, office lobbies, factories. They’re out all night. Taxi places. You know where they send the cabs out. Those guys come in hungry. You know Jason?”

  “Cabo Jason?”

  “No, man. Bass Jason, cab driver from Guayaguayare back home. He says there are money piles in this place we’re going. We’re going where they drop the money, all cash, every morning. Be no one in there but a couple of old men counting. Might be more than you can carry. Maybe you can use one of their bags.”

  They slid across Sedgwick, almost kissing the side of a slow-moving semi. Sandwiches and change went flying. Raymond straightened the car out on its nearly bald tires and moved slowly northwest.

  “I don’t know,” said George, gathering money and meat in both hands and shoveling them into the brown McDonald’s carryout bags. “I think I’d rather maybe be doin’ another McDonald’s.”

  “We just did one,” Raymond said, easing the car past old red-stone factories and warehouses and across a bridge over railway tracks. “They’ll be waiting, all alert if we do another one.”

  “Maybe so.”

  “We need money. Remember. You shot that woman with the baby. We’ve got to get out of here.”

  “But it’s you she pictured, not me,” George said, firmly adjusting David Lieberman’s hat on his head. “Remember, you said she saw you good, not me.”

  “Right,” Raymond said. “We’re in this together. There, right there, doorway next to the restaurant.”

  George looked out the window while Raymond came to a stop. A deep horn blasted somewhere not too far away. The restaurant wasn’t much of a restaurant, more of a small, old, one-story carryout diner wedged in between a railroad embankment and a three-story block-long warehouse.

  “You sure?” said George, fishing for his pistol in his coat pocket. “I don’t see no carts.”

  “Must all be gone by now,” said Raymond, not meeting George’s eyes. “Doesn’t look like there’s many people in the place. You see the door? Go in. I hear it’s down the back. Just push open the door, bring up the gun, and tell the old man to give you the money. I’ll pull the car around out of sight, back there by that fence. You come out slow or running and I’ll be there. You hear? That clear?”

  George nodded, opened the door, reached in the bag for an Egg McMuffin, and hurried across the street, steam puffing from his nose and mouth.

  This was the careful time. No one really knew his connection to George DuPelee. They had met in a bar, struck up talk about the Islands, and got together. Raymond had to be sure no one saw the car.

  When the Russian drug dealers in the office behind the diner shot George full of holes and dumped him and his gun in the river or in a dumpster, the police would find him, place the gun as the one that shot the woman, and maybe be satisfied. In any case, there would then be only one person who could connect him to the murder of David Lieberman, and that was fine with Raymond Carrou.

  Raymond turned the car around, trying not to notice the grinding sound beneath him as he made the U-turn and headed back toward the fence. He opened the window a crack. It was cold in the car, but this made it much worse. There was no choice. He had to hear the shots, be sure George was dead. Besides, the inside of the car was beginning to smell of eggs and bacon grease and it was making Raymond quite sick to his stomach.

  He kept the noisy motor running after he had pulled much farther down the street than he had said he would. His one fear was that after the Russians killed George they’d come running out looking for a getaway car, see him, and be crazy enough to start shooting. Those Russians were crazy men. That was what he was counting on, but he didn’t want to take any chances on just how crazy they might be.

  That was all the thinking Raymond had time for. There, running out of the door next to the diner, was George, gun in one hand, small pink plastic pail in the other. He was panting, running, tripping, and looking back over his shoulder at the doorway.

  “Shit,” said Raymond aloud, hitting the steering wheel again with the palms of his hands.

  Turn and run leaving George there and hope they came out and finished him off, chased him down? What if they didn’t? What if George came looking for Raymond? What the hell had happened?

  George was lunging toward him down the middle of the street, the Russian hat tilted to one side. George fell to his knees, picked himself up, and came on.

  Raymond drove slowly toward the running man and twenty yards from him made another slow U-turn. George caught up with him, opened the door with his gun hand, collapsed inside holding his stomach, and gasped, “Go, go.”

  Raymond went. The door next to George caught the wind and slammed shut. In the rearview mirror Raymond watched for pursuers. There were none.

  “Why … you … so … far?” George said, holding his stomach.

  “You shot?”

  “No … exhausted, man. Why … you …?”

  “Police came by. I couldn’t have them put two and two together. You know. Be parked across the street asking me what I’m doing there just when you come running out with a gun in your hand. You understand what I’m saying? I saved your ass.”

  “Thanks,” George said, sitting up, putting the gun in his pocket and straightening the fur cap on his head. He sat panting and clutching the plastic bucket.

  “What happened?” asked Raymond, taking the first left turn he could.

  “Like you said,” panted George. “Go down this little hall. Go through this door. Two guys sitting there. Not old. Tough looking. You know. They be sitting there with some plastic barrels of some brown shit and piles of money. I dump the shit on the floor holding the gun on them and tell ’em to fill it with money. They be talking something. German, who knows, but they get the idea. They had guns, Raymond. I took ’em, dumped ’em in the snow when I came out after I shove them in a closet and lock the door. Still got the key.”

  He held up the key, opened the window, and threw it out.

  “Let’s see,” said Raymond, now taking a right turn into decidedly unfamiliar and white-faced territory.

  George tilted the plastic bucket so Raymond could look at the money. Then George lifted out some bills. Twenties, tens.

  “Here’s a fifty. Must be a couple of thousand dollars,” George said with a grin and a cough. “We’re on our way.”

  Raymond didn’t know what had been in the buckets, but whatever it was, it was worth a hell of a lot more than the few thousand dollars George had picked up. The Russians must have thought he was some stupid local dumb-shit nigger passing up who knows how much in shit for a few bills.

  They’d come looking for him. If they couldn’t speak much English, maybe they hadn’t caught George’s accent. But they had seen his face, the hat. They’d come looking for him. They’d have to make the effort or have the word put out with every trigger-happy, knife-carrying punk that the Russians were good for a few thousand easy ones.

  George sat there smiling, clutching the bucket. He was even more of a liability now for Raymond than he had been twenty minutes ago. And he deserved to die, to die for what he had done. Raymond seriously considered taking out his gun, shooting George in the face, and kicking his carcass out of the car, money and all. But he rejected the idea. First, he didn’t know where they were, didn’t know if he could get away safely. Second, there might be a way to link this fool to him. Raymond didn’t know how, but there might be. No, it would be better to get things together, tie up all the ends, be packed and ready to move, and then kill George outside the city.

  “Looking like good times now, Raymond,” George said, patting him on the
back.

  “Yes,” said Raymond, knowing that he had let in the devil’s own fool two nights ago and the fool had not only ruined the plan but was sure to get Raymond caught or killed if he did not get things moving fast.

  Eight Minutes After Nine A.M.

  HANRAHAN WAS DIZZY AS he sat up in the pull-out bed in the living room. He couldn’t remember how many years it had been since he’d last opened it. Eight, nine? Longer. When he had snored fiercely during the worst of his drinking, Maureen had kicked him out and told him to sleep in the living room.

  He sat at the edge of the bed, looked at his suit crumpled on the chair, and wondered if he had dreamed the whole thing, if he had gotten up in the middle of the night, gotten drunk, and imagined the morning. Iris had been more than fine; willing, giving, gentle, satisfied, soft. Reserved though she was with her clothes on and in the sight of others, in bed she had been all passion and plumage, and he feared for an instant that if it weren’t a dream, he might not be able to keep up with the Iris who had exhausted him.

  Iris had gone. She had kissed his nose, placed his right hand between her legs for an instant, and then disappeared. He had closed his eyes, arm over his face for what felt like a moment, and then came awake seconds ago, dizzy.

  He reached for his watch, found it on the table where he seemed to remember leaving it, and realized he was late. There would be no time to finish the dishes, no time to make up the pull-out bed.

  The fleeting thought of Maureen coming through the door, seeing the unmade bed in the living room, finding the dishes on the table in the kitchen, gave him a moment of near panic. He considered trying to reach Lieberman, telling him he would be a few minutes late. Claim illness, an emergency.

  Then he stood up and grew calm.

  If he called, Lieberman might think he had been drinking. Lieberman’s nephew had been murdered hours ago and Lieberman was still going to go ahead with the sting. Could Hanrahan miss the whole four-week setup to clean house? “Hell with it,” Hanrahan muttered, and he frantically began to put on his now-rumpled suit.