Lieberman's Day (29 page)

George looked around his room, checked his watch. Blanket rolled down on the bed, paintings stacked against the walls, green chair that had been his father's near the window, battered dresser needing glue for loose drawers. Not much, but it beat a cell.

George didn't hide his tools anymore and he didn't use traditional burglary gear. He carried everything in a padded toolbox, only things a decent mechanic, plumber, or handyman might carry: tubing cutter, glass cutter, and minicutter, rib-joint pliers, adjustable-end wrench, a pair of screwdrivers, an Allen wrench, a close-quarters hacksaw, a curved-claw hammer, a wood chisel, a utility knife, and a rasp. Handyman. That was his cover. Hard to shake, even with the two neatly folded linen laundry bags at the bottom of the toolbox. Ex-con trying to make it as handyman, claiming that all of his work was small and for cash if he got caught. Always an angle. Call a guy down the street from where you were breaking. Ask if you could come over and give him a no-obligation estimate on fixing his front steps or loose-shingled roof. Bluebots pick you up and you claim you're at the wrong house. Walked right in after you knocked. The door was open. Way beyond suspicious but hard to prove, even if they nailed you inside, providing you weren't carrying goods. Criminal trespass was the worst he figured he could get.

He looked in the bathroom mirror.

Thin guy in the mirror looked OK. Clean shaven, jaw a little weak, blue-gray eyes, clean but not-so-even teeth, a full head of brown-gray hair. Work clothes. Not black, to blend in and wind up looking suspicious, but faded jeans, red-and-black flannel shirt. Shoes, three-year-old faded Rockports. Sneakers might make someone suspicious.

Checked the watch again, not one he'd stolen. One he had paid twenty-five bucks and change for, about what your not-successful ex-con handyman trying to make a living might wear.

Satisfied, George picked up his toolbox and saw something on the canvas resting on the easel near the window. The left eye of the woman at the bar was too large. He would have to correct that or at least check to see if the morning light gave him a better perspective. George went out the door and into the cool spring night. He had a private entrance to his mother's house. After George's father had died, Wanda Eupatniaks had married her husband's best friend, Laslo Skutnik, a widower with a pension from the slaughterhouse, a Swift and Company employee for almost forty years. Wanda and Laslo had vegetated together in front of the television till Laslo died a year and a day after George's father, leaving Wanda a new name and a comfortable, mortgage-paid house.

When he first got out, George had rented a small apartment in the house of the Vivlachkis, a few blocks away off of Diversey. The Vivlachkis were a nice old couple who knew George's mother. They called him Gregor. They went to sleep early and didn't hear too well. They liked Gregor. He painted a portrait of their dead son, Stanley, from an old photograph. It hung over the mantelpiece right next to Jesus Christ Almighty his own self. But money had gotten a little tight. A few jobs had to be canceled. Too many risks. And old man Vivlachki started to get too curious about George's sources of income and late nights out. It was easier to move in with his mother, who couldn't make it down the stairs to his rooms and who watched television most of the day, went to bed early, slept like a mountain, and snored like a volcano.

George shivered with the chill. Couldn't have been more than forty-five degrees. Fine for a Chicago spring. Sky dark, looking like it couldn't make up its mind to piss or snow. If the temperature dropped and it snowed while he was on the way to the job, George would turn around and go home or maybe head for Unikle's bar, maybe get lucky and run into Mary Ann Zdrubecki, whose husband, Cinch, was doing four short ones for holding up a 7-Eleven.

Snow was too many chances. Rain had its problems too, but rain kept people off the streets where they might remember seeing a man with a toolbox.

Among the skills George had picked up was bringing the dead back to life. Dead cars. Both of his brothers were mechanics, Ernie at a Volvo dealer on Elston, Sandor with his own gas station up north on Howard Street. Before he retired with emphysema, George's father had been a mechanic for a series of Brunswick bowling alleys owned by Davey Moran, who was just as big a Litvak as any Eupatniaks but knew which side his alley was buttered on.

George's car was a Toyota Corolla, dark green, three years old. Nothing suspicious on the outside, but it ran almost as silent as a submarine. Part of the job. Keep your tools clean and silent. The Toyota was a tool. Tools don't work and you take an extra chance.

Toolbox sat on the seat next to him. Right in the open. Windows closed on a cool night. Radio playing some talk show guy saying it was fine to look at women's asses and think about how they'd move. Guy was right. Natural to look and think. Can't stop looking and thinking.

He drove past a series of bombed-out two-stories with hot dog, fried fish, or auto parts on the street level. Apartment or two above. Woman over Wynette's Fried Shrimp in the window. Skinny. A shadow, hugging herself. Fear? Cold? What? And he was gone, almost bumper-to-bumper with a dirty white van. He'd paint that scene when he finished the painting he was working on, the one of the lonely woman at the bar. He could see the woman over Wynette's, little more than a shadow, the night lights of the fish house below her casting yellow on the street. He wanted to capture the smell of the place and the lonely sag of her thin body.

And the guy on the radio with a raspy voice said, “How about breasts?” George didn't like music. He liked voices, people talking, keeping him company. He didn't have to talk to them. They told the news or talked in cycle two, nonstop, nervous talk, saying nothing. In the Patniks analysis, developed during his years in the joint, cycle one was fear coming out as anger or depression. That could last anywhere from a month to a year. Cons seemed to vary their cycles depending on the length of their sentences. A murder one could be angry for years. Cycle three was the most dangerous and looked the least like trouble. In cycle three the con gets mellow, shows no emotion, looks as if his mind is off somewhere listening to Sade. There's a space around these cons. It's the place they've found a troubled peace. Break in on it and they've got no place to retreat and nothing much to lose. Cycles one and two you see coming. Cycle threes …

The hard gray and dusty red of squat city buildings gave way to hulking factories and then the expressway. Concrete and green exit signs. Cars with drivers minding their own business. The sound of swishing tires and radio voices.

George got off at Peterson, turned onto Lincoln, and drove past hot dog stands, one-ruck motels, and Jew bookstores. A Buick dealer and a barbecue restaurant on his left, Goodyear tire center on his right, and then Devon. Different world. Trees, houses with space between them even on the main drag, too cold for people to be walking or meeting with their neighbors over the fence.

When he got to the Roziers' street, George checked for dog walkers. Unpredictable. Always a problem. Dog walkers. Who could predict the bladder control of a poodle? George knew of two burglars personally who had been turned up because of dog walkers with notebooks or good memories.

He pulled into the driveway of the Rozier house at the end of the cul-de-sac. He drove over the neatly fitted red bricks and sat for a few seconds looking at the lights in the house. He was sure the Roziers had left the lights on to discourage people like George Patniks. They had left the lights on every week when they went to the chamber music series.

“In for it all now, George,” he said to himself, as he had said before every job he had done in the last two decades. He stepped out of his car.

He hurried around the side of the house to the kitchen. George could hear music inside the house. He didn't stop. He knew the radio was on a timer, that the station would change every fifteen or twenty minutes as if someone were fooling with the dials.

The dining room window at the side of the house was wired as he remembered and expected. It wasn't a bad system, connected to both the local police and the Everwatch System office. George put down the toolbox, took the glass cutter from his pocket, checked the second hand on his watch, took a breath, and moved quickly to cut a more or less round hole in the glass. From the moment he began the cut, George knew he had to hurry. Everwatch Security gave the homeowner a full twenty-five seconds to get to the phone and turn off the system. He reached in and opened the window and climbed in. The music was loud, something classical, light, breaking champagne glasses and giggles that were implied rather than released. He hurried through the dining room with its eight high-backed wooden chairs around a table with spindly animal legs and went right through the kitchen door, heading for the phone on the wall near the back door. He put the tool chest down, opened it almost silently, and pulled out the wire cutter. He pulled the phone from the hook on the wall, turned it over, found the wires he was looking for, and snipped neatly. He was breathing hard as he checked his watch. Sixteen seconds.

George had made it with nine seconds to spare.

A sound from above, like footsteps. Somebody home? A creaking step or floorboard? Hard to tell over the blaring music. George stood for twenty seconds or so until he was reasonably satisfied that no one was there. He hurried across the kitchen floor.

George needed no flashlight. The Roziers had provided him with all the light he needed and more than he wanted. He planned to move fast, check the case spots, go for the jewelry, and forget the big things. If he was lucky, the Roziers would come home, maybe have a drink, and head for bed without noticing the small hole in the window and not discovering that the kitchen phone was out of order at least till the next morning.

George had his hand on the kitchen door when his world exploded.

Voices. From beyond the door. Two. Arguing. Sounded like a man and woman. Coming downstairs. Coming fast.

Shit. Shit. Shit. Shit. Go for the window. Too late. Too far. They were heading for the kitchen. Fast. The kitchen was big. One night-light near the sink. Table, modern, and six chairs around it to his left. Working table in the middle of the room. Big butcher's block. Walls lined with cupboards, dishwasher, refrigerator. Door. A pantry or closet. George stepped inside.

Pantry. No window. The toolbox. His toolbox. It was out there, sitting in the middle of the kitchen. Well, maybe not the middle, but still hard to miss. Too late. The kitchen door was opening. George closed the pantry door, praying that it was well oiled and that the toolbox would be overlooked.

The kitchen door burst open.

“Harvey, Harvey,” the woman wept as George pressed his back against a shelf of cans. “Please.”

Harvey didn't answer. And the woman sounded weird.

What were they doing home? What the hell were they …?

Something scratched across the tile floor.

“God, no. Please.”

George moved from the wall of cans and pitty-pittied to the pantry door, opening it a crack. Pitty-pitty on frightened little cat Rockports.

The white nightgown of Dana Rozier was bright with blood and open to her stomach. She staggered backward toward the kitchen door. Harvey Rozier strode silently toward her. He wore some kind of white floor-length smock that made him look like a mad scientist George had seen in some English horror movie about zombies on channel 32.

Dana Rozier was going for the door. She had no chance of making it without help, and George was sure that if he stepped out of the pantry he'd be covered in his own blood within a couple of heartbeats. Rozier was too big for him, in better shape, and carrying the biggest fucking knife George Patniks had ever seen.

George pushed the door open a little more, wondering what the hell Rozier was planning to do. That was when Rozier tripped over George's toolbox. The knife flew out of his hand and spun across the floor. Rozier went sprawling, smock billowing awkwardly.

Dana Rozier went for the door, losing strength. Too many bolts. She reached for the phone as her husband got to his knees and scrambled for the bloody knife.

“No, no, no,” Dana Rozier panted, unwilling, unable to turn her back on her husband.

George, standing in the pantry doorway, watched her hit three numbers, 911 for sure. But she heard nothing as Rozier found the knife. There was nothing she could hear because George had cut the phone wires.

Too late. Too late now. Rozier was on top of her, pulling his wife from the phone, plunging the knife in wherever her flailing arms let him through. Face, eye, scalp, chest, arms. She crumpled, whimpering, and Rozier went on.

George didn't move, couldn't move. Rozier knelt over what was left of his dying wife, panting, his white smock splotched like a bloody Rorschach.

George watched the exhausted man's face and heaving body and knew what was about to happen. Rozier looked back across the room to see what had tripped him. His eyes found the toolbox. He panted heavily, not understanding, and his eyes moved across the room, finding George almost instantly.

Their eyes met. Rozier puzzled, weary, confused. George Patniks in panic. Rozier tried to rise, using the knife to prop himself up like an old man with a cane.

George's legs were trembling and nausea tickled inside his stomach and went for his throat. A sound came from George and he knew he was running, his feet sliding on the tile floor, knowing that if he went down, Rozier's knife would get him, that the dead woman's blood would snare and bind him. His back was turned to Rozier now, and he had no idea how close the man might be. George sucked in air and ran for the window through which he had cut the hole. He tucked his head between his arms and threw his body against glass and wood, hoping it would shatter, but it didn't, not completely. He tumbled into cool air, rolling on his back, arm cut. He caught a glimpse of Rozier's shadow at the window, a ghostly, sheeted shadow carrying a bloody knife, panting.