Lieberman's Folly (3 page)

Lieberman had decided that a good place to meet would be the T & L, which was only five blocks from his house and where the likelihood of anyone coming in who knew Estralda was nil.

Lieberman didn't want to hurry Estralda or himself. He had stayed up late watching a tape of
Zoo in Budapest
with Loretta Young. Bess had watched with him for an hour, then left, saying she was going to catch Koppel and then going to sleep. Lieberman had finished the movie and the last box of Tam-Tam crackers. By the time he got to bed it was almost one and Bess was snoring softly. Lieberman had slept four hours, a good night for him.

“What time is it?” Bess had said when he got up, rolling over and reaching for her glasses.

“Four-thirty,” he had said.

“You getting up? You're taking your physical today?”

“That's tomorrow. Go back to sleep, Bess. I'll make your coffee,” he said, leaning over to kiss her. She was asleep before he reached the bedroom door.

He had ground the coffee beans in the new little electric thing, put the hot water on, stuck the filter in the Melita, and read the
Tribune
while he waited for the coffee to trickle down. Lieberman liked the smell of coffee. Coffee itself he could do without.

He had called in to the Clark Street Station at six and Nestor Briggs had told him about Estralda Valdez's call. Lieberman had then called Estralda and set up this meeting. And now here he was looking at her, his most reliable informant and certainly the best-looking one he had ever had. If she had something to say, she could say it better at her own pace.

“I got a guy on the line who won't take no for an answer,” she said, reaching air at the bottom of her second glass of iced tea. She played with the cubes with her red fingernails and paused. “I tell him we're through. I tell him really nice. Kiss him on the forehead. Tickle his
cojones
. Give him a good night, you know, but he's got a temper. I think he might turn up and get nuts. I'm pulling out,
viejo
.”

“Give us his name and we'll have a talk with him,” Hanrahan said as Maish returned with coffee. “You don't have to pull out.”

“I got other reasons for wanting to get out,” she said, touching her red lips with her even redder fingernails. “Besides, you don't talk to this one,” she said laughing, her eyes on the fascinating rapidly melting ice cubes. “I got a deal for you. You watch over me tonight. I got money put away someone's bringing me. I clear out in the morning. When I get where I'm going in Texas, I let you know where to find my book of clients.”

“Including the one who's chasing you out?” asked Hanrahan, two-handing the cup of coffee.

“Including,” said Estralda, “but that's one name won't do you any good. And I told you. I got other reasons for getting out.”

“Whole thing won't do us any good,” said Hanrahan. “No offense, señorita, but what can we do with the names of a whore's clients?”

“Could get you a big promotion or thanks,
borrocho
,” she said. “You let the Johns on the list know you're tearing it up and they make you both chief of police.”

“I'm too old to be chief of police, Estralda,” said Lieberman. “You really think this guy is dangerous?”

“I know it,” she said, pushing the glass away and looking at Lieberman. “But even if he wasn't, it's time for me to get somewhere warm. Winter's not that far, you know?”

“We'll miss you,” Lieberman said.

Estralda shrugged.

“I'll miss you too,
viejo
,” she said. “I've put a few dollars away. Maybe I can go back home and start a fingernail-painting shop or something.”

She turned and looked over her shoulder out the window. Lieberman turned to see what she was looking at but there was nothing outside but passing cars, the sky, and the empty lot across the street where they'd torn down the Walgreen's last year.

“What about Escamillo?” Lieberman tried. Escamillo Silk was a boxer, a middleweight with a big smile and a little promise if he could stay away from coke. Although he was married and living with his wife, Silk, whose real name was Leon Cascabella, liked to wear Estralda on his arm and Estralda liked to be seen in public. Since she couldn't advertise, being with Silk was good business. She had a nose for business. And maybe Escamillo had something else to offer.

“Can't count on him,” she said. And she was right. “We're not, like, that together, you know? Besides, I don't want him knowing I'm pulling out. I'll be gone and maybe a week from now he'll notice. You got to get to my place before midnight,” she said.

She looked out the window again but this time Lieberman knew she wasn't looking at something that was there. She was seeing something or someone she couldn't shake.

“This guy gets off work at nine-thirty this week,” she said. “He could come any time till one in the morning, maybe later.”

“We'll be there quarter to nine,” Lieberman assured her.

“There's a motel across the street with a Chinese restaurant,” Estralda said. “You can see the front entrance to my apartment building and lobby from it.”

“We can see better from the lobby,” said Hanrahan.

“And you can be seen better,” she said. “I don't want no trouble with the condo committee. I gotta sell that place. I been real careful. Cops sitting around the lobby … I don't need it. Besides, you can see my window from the Chinese place. You can't see it from the lobby. Just be near if I need you. Give me a call when you get there. It's OK any time before nine-thirty. You got my number.”

Lieberman looked at Hanrahan, who gave an enormous put-upon sigh, and nodded. Lieberman conveyed the nod to Estralda even though she couldn't have missed it.

“Then that's it,” she said, standing and giving Lieberman the full view with capped-teeth smile. “You don't believe I'll go straight in Texas, do you
viejo
?”

“Why not?” asked Lieberman.

“Maybe I won't,” she said with a sigh, straightening her tight dress as she stood. “I'm all I got to sell. We don't stay young forever and don't live forever, none of us,
verdad
?”

“Lady,” Hanrahan said, “what are you pulling here? We all know you could pay some street junkie four bills to have the guy knocked off.”

“No,” she said with a laugh and took a step toward the door. “If I went around paying to have every crazy I link with killed, I'd go broke and we'd be ass-high in bodies. Be on time,
viejo
.”

“We'll be there,” Lieberman said, and she walked out special for the Alter Cockers, slow with memories. The phone behind the counter was ringing before she reached the door. Maish took his time answering and didn't pick it up till Estralda was out of sight and the Alter Cockers were beginning their post-Estralda critique.

“We don't need her book, Abe,” Hanrahan said, shifting in the booth and turning the fan so that it would hit him too. “I figure we're lucky if half that story about the John is true.”

“Let's say we're giving her a farewell present. We owe her,” said Lieberman.

“Abe,” Maish shouted. “For you.”

Lieberman got up slowly, knowing the warning ache of arthritis in his knees was inevitable after sitting in one position for an hour.

“Who's the girlfriend, Abeleh?” asked the old man at the counter in the cap.

“Maish,” called Harry from the Alter Cocker table, “give Bess a call. Tell her her Abe is gallivanting with Rita Hayworth's daughter, Princess …”

“… Caroline,” Howie Chen supplied.

“Jasmine,” said Syd Levan, who looked a little like Nikita Khrushchev.

“Abe?” came a woman's voice on the phone.

“You got me, Louise,” Lieberman said.

“Call just came in,” said Officer Louise Jackson. “José Ruiz's son saw Del Sol in the Chapultapec Restaurant less than an hour ago.”

Emiliano “El Perro” Del Sol was known to have beaten Sylvie Estaban nearly to death with a telephone for talking while Julio Iglesias was singing on the radio. El Perro was reported to have cut the throat of one of the Varga brothers for accidentally stepping on his shoes. More than one person Lieberman knew had been in the Dos Hermanos bar the night El Perro beat into pleading senselessness two construction workers who had dared look at him while he was painfully and slowly composing a letter to his mother in Panama. El Perro was the leader of the Tentaculos, the tentacles, the gang that believed it owned North Avenue.

“Thanks, Louise. We're on the way.”

Lieberman hung up and nodded to Hanrahan, who slid out of the booth.

“El Perro,” said Lieberman. “The Chapultapec on North.”

“It's going to be one of those days, Abraham,” said Hanrahan with a sigh.

“Let's hope so, Father Murphy,” said Lieberman. “Maish, I'll drop back later maybe.”

Maish shrugged and Herschel Rosen, buoyed by his earlier foray into the world of sit-down comedy, said, “Come back without the tootsie and Chen'll kung-fu you into the street. Right, Chen?”

“Don't I always?” said Chen to general laughter as the two cops went out onto Devon Avenue.

Lieberman and Hanrahan moved down the sidewalk to their car, a steel-gray Buick whose brakes cried when you stepped on them. They were parked in front of Hinky's Bike Shop. Hinky, like most of the Jews in the neighborhood, including Lieberman, had migrated north from the West Side to Albany Park thirty years earlier. The poor southern whites and East Indians had driven them further north to Rogers Park and now Rogers Park was starting to show signs of change. East Rogers Park, from Lake Michigan to Ridge Road, was already given up as lost to Russian immigrants, Vietnamese, Hispanics, and white dropouts. West Rogers Park, where Lieberman lived, was holding on. The Chinese and Koreans had helped to stabilize the neighborhood, but the Jewish migration continued. Skokie was still the place to go if you couldn't afford to go even further into Wilmette or Highland Park.

With each move, false memories of the good old days in Lawndale, “Jew Town,” before the blacks moved in were evident in small ways in Rogers Park. The small white lettering on Hinky's sign said, “Formerly on Roosevelt and Central Park.” Sam and Harry's Hot Dogs on Western Avenue had topped that. In the middle of the store was a replica of a street sign from the old neighborhood.

Lieberman drove knowing both he and Hanrahan knew that Hanrahan wouldn't be steady till after lunch.

El Perro's offense was a minor one. He owed Sam Resnick two hundred dollars. Resnick, an old friend of Lieberman's from the West Side, owned a hardware store on North Avenue. El Perro had put a variety of tools and knives “on the cuff.” The cuff was old and frayed and Resnick knew he had to collect or lose face and respect in the neighborhood and move out. It wasn't the amount as much as the existence of the debt that threatened Resnick. Officially, the neighborhood where Resnick had his hardware store was well out of Lieberman's domain. Until five years ago it had been familiar territory to Lieberman, but age had earned him a transfer closer to home if not a promotion.

“Life is hard,” said Hanrahan, looking out of the window at the string of sari shops and Indian restaurants as they neared Western Avenue.

“It's supposed to be,” Lieberman said. “You got a song that goes with that or are you just feeling particularly Father Murphy this morning?”

“Prices go up. Stock goes bad. People shoplift, an apple here, a can of tomatoes there. They add up to ruin,” Hanrahan said. “The saints don't hear your prayers. And children? They desert you in the hour of your greatest need. When you are lying in your deathbed, candles at your head and feet, they'll be there, asking for your blessing, weeping, and you know what you should tell them? What I should tell them?”

“No, Bill, what should you tell them?”

Lieberman pushed his glasses back on his nose and headed south on Western. The smell of Dunkin' Donuts wafted through the open windows and Lieberman felt a belch coming on.

“Go away,” Hanrahan said majestically. “Where were you when I needed you?”

“Which kid?” Lieberman said.

“Michael,” sighed Hanrahan. “The one who lives in Buffalo. Supposed to come in for a few weeks, bring the wife, the kid. Know what they decide to do?”

“Emigrate to Australia,” Lieberman tried.

“Close,” said Hanrahan. “Disney World. Bunch of tin music and robots look like zombies. Scare the kid half to hell and back. If I had anything to disown them with … What time you got?”

“About two-thirty,” said Lieberman.

“Want to stop at Simi's on the way?” said Hanrahan, looking casually at a fascinating Pontiac showroom. “Burger and a beer?”

“I don't want to miss El Perro,” Lieberman said.

“I understand,” Hanrahan said softly, holding up his hand and giving a pained smile. “I understand. Why should one's friends be any more loyal than one's children. Why should obligations and promises be met? You know what today is?”

“Friday,” said Lieberman.

“Seven years and six days since the dry cleaner,” said Hanrahan.

“You don't know how many days, Murphy,” said Lieberman.

“Give or take one or two, Rabbi. Give or take one or two.”

The incident in the six-store mall had been on a routine call. Argument, shouts in a dry-cleaning shop on Petersen. Pizza shop next door had called in the complaint, said the shouting was scaring customers away. Lieberman and Hanrahan had taken the call on the way to a follow-up with a robbery victim. They'd hit the shop at a little after three, heard voices arguing inside. Lieberman had knocked. He had been ignored.

Lieberman had knocked again and someone had come to the door. The someone had a very large gun, a Hopkins & Allen .38 five-shot, in his very small hand. The gun had been pointed at Lieberman. The sight was comic. A little shaking man with wild curly hair and a big gun. Behind the man inside the shop stood a big black man in some kind of delivery uniform.