Lieberman's Folly (20 page)

“Are you the Joker?” asked Melisa.

“His left-hand man,
niña
,” said El Perro. “They sell beer here or what?”

“Yeah,” said Lieberman.

“Rabbi,” said El Perro. “You know something? You look kinda cute in that baseball hat.”

“I know,” said Lieberman. “José Madera.”

Sutcliffe had struck out the first batter. Lieberman considered this a bad sign. But the next batter grounded out and the one after him hit a long fly to center field for the out.

“Why you think El Perro is here, Rabbi?” asked El Perro. “You think I just dropped in for an inning to catch the sun and see an old friend?”

“Can I tell you something?” Lieberman said, leaning over to El Perro as Ryne Sandberg came out to lead off the bottom of the first inning. “You've seen
Treasure of the Sierra Madre
too many times.”

“You think so? Thanks. I like that picture,” said El Perro. “Now, can I tell you something?”

“Tell,” said Lieberman as Sandberg led off with a first-pitch single to left.

“I'm a lovable person,” El Perro whispered. “Just ask anybody. But I got a deal to make. Yesterday you pulled my cousin and my brother in. They in the can now. Assault with a deadly weapon. Assault on a police officer.”

“Your brother look like Roberto Duran?”

“No, that's Ernesto, my cousin,” said El Perro. “They're kids, you know. They don't mean nothing. Besides your buddy broke his balls. Drop charges. I give you José Madera.”

“Your brother is an innocent victim of social injustice,” said Lieberman. “He and your cousin and their friend will be out by tonight.”

“I trust you, Rabbi,” said El Perro. “Here's where you can find Madera and his old lady.”

He handed Lieberman a piece of gray cardboard with an address written on it. Lieberman looked up just in time to see Mark Grace fly out to right field.

“Madera, he ain't one of my people,” said El Perro with a sigh. “Too loco in the
cabeza
.”

“Coming from you, that's quite a testimonial,” said Lieberman evenly.

“
Gracias
,” said El Perro. “My brother and the others are out by dark, right?”

“They'll be back looking for blood by the light of the full moon,” said Lieberman.

“You look cute, Rabbi,” said El Perro, getting up.

“Sit down,” said a scrawny woman in the row behind them.

El Perro turned to her with a smile and said,

“The sun is shining. I'm in a good mood. I just made a deal with the Rabbi here, so I'm not gonna cut your tongue out and make you eat it.”

The woman's eyes and mouth opened wide. The man at her side pretended to be completely absorbed in watching the center-field scoreboard. Lieberman turned to the woman and lifted his eyebrows to her in warning. She took the look and decided to not carry this any further. El Perro climbed the steps as André Dawson came to the plate with a man on second.

“Who was that guy?” asked Barry.

“Business,” said Lieberman. “I gotta make a phone call. Be right back.”

Dawson did something good. Lieberman could tell that from the sound of the crowd and the fact that people were standing and screaming, but he didn't look back. He went to a bank of phones across from a hot dog stand and called Hanrahan at the station. He gave Hanrahan the address and told him he'd meet him there at five after he dropped the kids at home. When he got back to his seat, it was the second inning and the Cubs were ahead two to nothing. Shawon Dunston bobbled a tough grounder and let the runner get to second with a throw that sailed into the left-field box seats. Barry groaned.

Lieberman took off his Cub cap and handed it to Barry, who put it on. Melisa was about to say something, but Lieberman put a finger to his lips and she nodded in a very adult way to show that she would not point out to Barry his change of heart about the cap.

This might, Lieberman thought, turn into a long afternoon.

Bill Hanrahan wasn't very early, only forty minutes early. He turned off of Ogden within earshot of the expressway and parked across the street from the address Lieberman had given him. The neighborhood was entirely
Latino
, almost entirely Mexican. Hanrahan stood out like a sore Irishman. Even then he might have sat tight if it hadn't been for the open door.

He sat for fifteen minutes thinking of Iris and last night. The day was hot and the street relatively empty. Two kids were playing catch on the sidewalk with a tennis ball. A trio of women, two fat, one thin, sat on the steps of a house near the corner. All the houses were small and from the outside looked clean. The grass, what little there was in the small fenced yards in front of each house, was crew-cut and green.

No one came in or out of the house he was watching, but the door was open and the three women on the corner were looking over at him. There were only four cars parked on the dead-end street. No place to wedge in and scrunch down.

Hanrahan got out of the car and stretched, looking around as if searching for an address. He pulled his notebook from his back pocket and pretended to check it before turning to his destination, the house with the wide-open door. Hanrahan put the notebook away, crossed the street, and marched straight up the steps to the front door.

The house was a one-story, recently painted white and green. Hanrahan rang the bell and waited with a smile, looking over at the three women on the steps. One of them, the skinny one, held one hand bridged over her eyes and squinted into the sun toward him.

No one answered the door, which was not only what Hanrahan expected but what he wanted. Hanrahan said, “Hello,” loud enough for the ladies of the afternoon to hear him, and stepped through the open door.

He found himself inside a living room, the furniture old, over-stuffed, clean, and flowery. A huge framed poster, a color photograph of the ruins of what looked like a castle surrounded by green-green forest, dominated the wall over the sofa. The white lettering on the poster indicated that this was Guadalajara.

“Anybody home?” asked Hanrahan, stepping in.

He had decided to identify himself as a cop if anyone answered. If no one was home and he got a look around and was caught, he'd still identify himself as a cop and say that he saw the door open and thought he saw a suspicious man enter. It wouldn't fool anyone but the chances were better than a hundred to one that no one in this neighborhood would file a complaint against a cop for walking through their open door.

“Hello,” Hanrahan called.

No answer.

He moved through the living room into a small dining room with a dark wooden table and six matching chairs. There was also a sideboard with a painting of Jesus over it. Jesus was looking toward the ceiling.

“Anybody here?” Hanrahan asked once more, though not as loud as his first call.

The kitchen, like the rest of the downstairs, was clean. No dishes in the drainer. No food on the small table. The faint smell of some spice reminded Hanrahan of his Aunt Aileen, his mother's sister, the cook in the family who had come to the United States at the age of seven and gone back to Dublin at the age of seventy-five.

A drink would have been nice. A small drink. Double gin and whiskey, a Gay and Frisky, as Aunt Aileen's husband Jack used to call his favorite drink.

Hanrahan moved through the kitchen. There were three doors off of a small alcove near the back door. Two of the doors were open. One led to a bedroom, dark lace and more pictures of Jesus. A second door led to darkness and stairs, a basement. The third door was pay dirt. He stepped in. The shade was down but enough light was coming through it to show that this was a woman's room, not an old woman's room like the one next door with dark lace and Jesus. The furniture was art deco and polished. The bed was oval and covered with a pink comforter. On top of the dresser in the corner, next to which stood a floor-to-ceiling mirror, were about a dozen photographs of Estralda Valdez at different ages. In almost all of them she was with a slightly older girl. Estralda, even at seven, had her hand on her hip and a knowing smile. The photos of Estralda and the other girl stopped at about the time Estralda was twenty. Then a gap and two photos of Estralda Valdez more or less as Hanrahan had seen her. It was definitely Estralda, but a subdued sun-dressed Estralda with sunglasses, little make-up, and her arm around an older, heavy woman squinting into the sun.

Interesting, yes, but more interesting was the doll house on the table in the corner near the window.

“Under the house in my mother's house,” Hanrahan said, allowing himself a very small smile.

He moved to the house, which looked familiar to him, a white mansion about two feet high. When he got close enough to touch it, Hanrahan put on his glasses.

“Tara,” he said softly, reading the plate above the small door.

Hanrahan leaned over and looked into one of the windows, but there wasn't enough light coming in from the drawn shades to see the miniature furniture very clearly. He found the corner of the house with the fingers of his left hand and started to lift. The little house was deceptively heavy. In addition, it stuck stubbornly to the table top, like a determined abalone he had pried loose from an underwater rock near Mendicino a thousand years ago when he and Maureen were on their honeymoon. That abalone had been delicious. He hoped that what he found under the house would have its own satisfying taste. Hanrahan pulled harder and the table top suddenly gave up. Tiny furniture clattered from the human earthquake.

Hanrahan held the house up and reached under with his right hand. Nothing. He groped around the edges and found it. The edges of a leather-bound book. He pulled the book out and let the house down gently. Book in hand, Hanrahan moved to the bed and sat down with his back to the open door. He opened the cover, found a withered, cracking newspaper article, looked at the photograph in the second column, read the headline, and was starting to read the article itself when he heard something behind him. Hanrahan started to turn, not at all sure of what he was going to say, when the bullet entered the back of his neck just below the skull between the two tendons which went into spasm as Hanrahan lurched forward onto the floor.

The man who had killed Estralda Valdez put the pistol in his pocket, moved around the bed, knelt, and pulled the book from William Hanrahan's fingers. Blood trickled out of the small entry hole in the policeman's neck. Blood also trickled out of the exit wound in the policeman's throat. Hanrahan's eyes were closed. The man searched the floor with his eyes and fingers. More light would have helped but he could not take a chance. It took him almost three minutes to find the spent bullet that had gone through Hanrahan.

With sweating hands the man put the bullet and small book in his pocket and left the room moving slowly, one hand on the pistol in one pocket, one hand on the book in the other. He went out the back door, through the yard, into the alley, and around to the side street where he had parked his car after following Hanrahan.

As he drove slowly down the street in front of the Madera house, he watched a car pull up behind the other cop's. Lieberman got out. He knew Lieberman. For an instant he considered turning around, going into the alley, getting back into the house, and shooting Lieberman when he came in. What difference did it make? One cop or two. But he decided against it as he drove further watching the dwindling image of Lieberman walking up the stairs.

He had what he needed and there was a risk to going back. A small risk, that's true, but a risk. He had waited too long and there was too much at stake to take even a small risk.

Four hours later, Abe Lieberman sat in Dr. Deep's small office in the surgery wing of the University of Chicago Hospitals. Dr. Kuldip Singh Dalawal, known to his friends, who included Abe Lieberman, as Deep, had operated on Hanrahan.

“Mostly a matter of cleaning up,” Deep had said outside the operating room. Deep was a short, dark Pakistani whose son had been arrested twice, both times for possession of cocaine. Lieberman had gotten the boy into a drug rehab program in California run by another former friend. That was five years ago. The boy was now a young man in his second year of medical school.

“Entry was clean,” Dr. Deep went on. “Bullet was on an angle like so, to the right. Missed his esophagus, cracked the bone right here. Danger was in his choking on his blood. Your clearing of the passage was essential. Trauma is over. The danger now is from infection and we will watch that most carefully.”

“He'll live?” Lieberman had asked.

“I would think so, yes,” said Dr. Deep.

Deep had given Lieberman the use of his office. Lieberman had called Bess, who wanted to come to the hospital, but he had told her not to, that Bill was asleep and likely to be so for quite a while. Bess had argued, but Lieberman had changed the subject, asked her about Lisa and Todd and the kids.

“Melisa says her stomach doesn't hurt,” said Bess.

“So?” asked Lieberman

“No one had asked her,” said Bess. “Which led me to the conclusion that …”

“… her stomach hurt and she wanted to hide it,” he concluded.

“But she also felt guilty and wanted me and her mother to know that she was hiding something. What did you give her at that ball game?”

“The illusion of restraint,” said Lieberman, looking across the desk at Dr. Deep's medical degree and surgical certificates on the wall.

“Lisa and Todd are out,” said Bess.

“Good,” said Lieberman.

“Not with each other,” said Bess.

“Ah,” said Lieberman, laying the torn newspaper clipping on Dr. Deep's desk and carefully flattening it with the palm of his hand. He had taken the crumpled paper from Hanrahan's fist when the medics came to put him on the cart.

“Abe, no,” said Bess. “They aren't out with other … I mean Lisa went to a movie with Yetta and Maish. Todd is … I don't know where. I tried to call him as soon as they left. I'm making late dinner for the kids. What did you give them to eat at the game?”