Big Silence (12 page)

There was no signature.

“What do you think it means?” asked Carbin, making it clear that he had his own ideas about what it meant.

“For some reason,” Lieberman said, “I’ve been picked to tell Mickey Gornitz that if he doesn’t commit suicide, whoever has his son will kill the boy. Which leads me to the next conclusion which is that there’s something wrapped in that towel meant to convince me and Mickey that they mean what they say.”

With that Kearney carefully peeled back the folds of the paper towel to reveal what Lieberman recognized as the neatly severed section of a finger.

“What do you make of that?” asked Carbin.

Lieberman took off his glasses and examined the finger joint without touching it. It was bloody at both ends, nearly white. The tip of the finger was missing. Lieberman looked closely and leaned back.

“Middle joint,” he said. “No fingertip, no fingerprint. May not be from the boy. Looks a little puffy to be from a seventeen-year-old. Forensics can tell us.”

“Why not send us one of the boy’s real fingers?” asked Carbin.

“Don’t want to risk killing him,” Lieberman guessed, “or making him so sick that they’ll need a doctor, a hospital, to keep him alive.”

“And?” Carbin asked, listening closely.

“Seems like a dumb move by Stashall,” said Abe, looking at the note and finger joint. “He’s no Sam Giancanna, but he’s no fool. He probably figures that we’ll know it’s not the kid’s. Maybe he’s giving us a chance to convince Mickey. Maybe the next package will be a piece of the kid.”

“The way you figure it?” Carbin asked Kearney.

“Yeah,” said Kearney, sitting back.

All three men were looking at the box, the note and the finger joint, hoping they’d give them an answer to what they should do next.

“I wonder whose it is,” Carbin said, looking at the center slice of finger.

“Forensics,” said Lieberman standing.

“I want you to talk to Gornitz,” said Carbin.

“You mean he wants to talk to me.”

“Whatever,” said the weary attorney. “Nothing about this. Tell him we plan to find his son alive. Stall while we put pressure on Stashall.”

“Pressure?” Lieberman repeated. “Stashall’s facing prison. Maybe worse. There are mob people out there who might think Jimmy Stashall would talk and go into witness protection. They might want him dead. It wouldn’t be the first.”

“Fifteen in the last five years,” said Carbin. “All dead. All mob. All unsolved.”

“I don’t see what he’s got to lose by trying to get to Mickey,” said Lieberman. “And I don’t see much we’ve got to pressure him with. Can I go now? I’ve got a family problem I’ve got to take care of.”

Kearney nodded. Lieberman got up and left the room. He would check with forensics later when they had time to look at the items on Kearney’s desk. In the squad room, Lieberman moved his .45 from his pocket to the holster under his jacket. Then he headed for his desk. He would pay a visit to Johnny Stashall, go see Mickey Gornitz again, and do what he could to take care of those family problems.

H
UANG CHEN COUNTED THE
fortune cookies to be sure each box contained the one hundred promised on the label. He had been buying them for the last year from a family of recent Korean immigrants. They charged little for the fortune cookies but shorted him on the allotted number frequently. Where was honor in this generation?

People did not notice Huang Chen and that was what he wished. He was small., wore dark slacks and a slightly frayed but always clean and well-pressed matching jacket over one of his off-white shirts. He seldom spoke unless spoken to and was content to run his restaurant and barely exist.

Huang Chen loved his daughter, though he never told her so.

Huang Chen did not like the idea that Iris was determined to marry the big American policeman. Not only was he white, but Hanrahan carried a heavy burden of guilt and tragedy that Huang Chen could feel in his presence.

Though he would never say so, he would far prefer that Iris marry Liao Woo, who was very rich and very old. He would take care of Iris. He would respect her. But this was America, and Huang Chen had learned long ago that the word of a father was of value only if his children agreed with him. It was a hollow respect.

Liao Woo had hinted that if Huang Chen wished it, the American could be persuaded to cease his attention to Iris. Iris’s father had indicated politely that he did not favor this approach. Yet the more he saw of the brooding Hanrahan, the more he considered that it might be his duty to protect his daughter whatever the consequences.

He finished counting. There were only ninety-seven cookies in the box.

Jimmy Stashall wasn’t hiding. He could usually be found in his home in Northbrook or his office on Montrose. His office on Montrose, not far from the El, was four rooms including a modern, well-furnished reception area where various members of Stashall’s operation, covering a good part of the near North Side, could be found sitting, talking, smoking. Lieberman knew them all and they knew him. The room behind the reception area was that of Stashall’s secretary-receptionist. She was young, though not as young as she looked, clean-looking with little makeup and darkly pretty. She had her own desk and computer and chairs for those who were going in to see her boss, who also was her mother’s brother and, thus, her uncle. Jimmy’s office was old wood, antiques, bookcases, photographs, and real paintings on the wall of scenes of the Mediterranean. The entire office suite was modeled after Clark Gable’s in
Boom Town,
though Jimmy had forgotten most of the details of the movie, which he hadn’t seen for at least fifteen years before he had the office decorated.

Jimmy Stashall’s more-or-less-honest job was running the J.S. Office and Factory Cleaning Service, a service that sent out crews at night to clean office buildings and factories that didn’t require a full-time staff. Both sides of his operation had employed Mickey Gornitz as bookkeeper and memory.

Lieberman tried to focus on Stashall as he headed south toward Montrose on the Outer Drive. He’d probably only have one good shot at Stashall, who would have his lawyer call Carbin’s office and complain about police harassment.

Before he had left the squad room, Lieberman had called home. Bess answered. He knew Lisa was probably home, but wouldn’t want to answer in case it was her ex-husband, Todd, or her current husband, Marvin.

“Everyone in the world suddenly seems to have a
loch en kopf,
a hole in the head,” said Bess. “I was just going out the door when the phone rang. I’ve got to run. Shirley Ovitz is waiting outside for me.”

Bess made it fast. She told him what Maish had done at the temple and urged Abe to go see his brother as soon as possible.

“Yetta is frantic,” Bess said. “Try to make it soon. And Lisa isn’t going back to California today. She wants to talk to you.”

“I look forward to it with great anticipation,” said Lieberman.

“Maish,” she reminded him. “Talk to him.”

That left only the call to El Perro. He recognized the number, the office of the bingo parlor Los Tentaculos had taken over. El Perro liked to call numbers himself at least two nights a week. He also liked to shoot and stab people who irritated him or got in the way of his illegal activities. It was less the money that motivated El Perro than the excuse to inflict pain. He had been known to go either loudly and violently mad or calmly and sadistically murderous toward perfectly innocent people who simply had the misfortune to have faces that irritated El Perro.

The oddity was that Emiliano “El Perro” Del Sol respected no one except his mother, who had fled from him five years earlier, and Abe Lieberman, whom he found tough, unafraid, and as good as his word. It amused the semi-mad gang leader that El Viejo was such a thin little man with such
cajones.
Their relationship was symbiotic. El Perro gave Lieberman information or got it for him when he needed it, and El Perro would take care of problems for El Viejo when the law was not sufficient to do it. In return, Lieberman offered El Perro and his gang a certain degree of protection. There was a line Emiliano was not allowed to cross, but he had mastered the art of walking its length with a smile on his scarred face. El Perro was crazy. He was not stupid.

“Emiliano Del Sol,” Lieberman had said when someone answered the phone at the bingo office.

“¿Quien es?”

“El Viejo.”

“Bueno.”

The person who had answered put the phone down and Lieberman had looked around the squad room. He didn’t have a hell of a lot of time if he and Hanrahan were going to pick Clark Mills up at three and get him downtown to the Greyhound station.

“¿Viejo?”
came El Perro’s happy voice, which might mean that he was happy to talk to the detective or had just maimed a storekeeper who had paid his protection money too slowly.

“Si,”
said Lieberman.

“The Cubs. They gonna to the World Series this year?”

“This’ll be the year,” said Lieberman.

“Por supuesto.
They got Mexicans, Venezuelans, more Hispanics than ever. They got Sammy. They gotta win.”

“We’ll go to opening day,” said Lieberman.

“You got a date. Wear your best dress.”

“If you wear yours, the one that shows your knees.”

El Perro laughed. It wasn’t exactly a laugh, more like the cackle of a mad rooster that knew his time was at hand and didn’t give a damn.

“I got business to go to,” said El Perro. “I’m talkin’ to you about the Korean, Kim.”

“I think I better call you back,” said Lieberman. “I’m at my desk and I’m swamped.”

“Yo comprendo,”
said El Perro.

Lieberman was well aware that the madman might say he had just murdered the one-armed Korean who was stalking Lieberman, or might propose that he do so or maybe remove Kim’s other arm. It was not the kind of thing Lieberman wanted to discuss on a police department phone.

“I’ll call you as soon as I can. Don’t do anything till we talk.”

“I’ll sit here on my ass and listen to CDs,” said El Perro. “When we talk, I need a favor maybe.”

“When we talk,” Lieberman had said.

Now the detective was parking illegally on Montrose, his sun visor with his police card showing. It was starting to get dark, but Lieberman thought that Stashall had a lot on his mind and probably would be brooding behind his desk. He didn’t know what, if anything, he could get from Stashall, but his partner was on the line, a woman had been killed, and a boy was being used to blackmail Mickey Gornitz into killing himself. As Lieberman often said, he took umbrage at this and wanted very much to talk to the most likely suspect, Jimmy Stashall.

Lieberman entered the door to the faded yellow-brick office building wedged between a supermarket and an electronics repair shop. There were names on the board in the clean white-tiled entry hall. Lieberman didn’t look at the board. He knew where he was going.

“You believe in curses, Sam?” Hanrahan said, looking at the last of his mug of coffee at Dunkin’ Donuts where they sat in a booth. The place wasn’t busy. A postman sat at the counter telling the old man serving coffee and doughnuts some of his adventures. Two women, an old woman, and an equally old man sat in another booth drinking coffee and talking softly.

“I believe that people can believe they’re cursed and that things will happen to confirm it if they believe,” said the priest, ignoring the plain doughnut on the plate before him and taking a drink from the first refill of coffee the old waitress had brought him.

“But no real curses?” Hanrahan pushed.

Father Parker shrugged. “Once in a while … who knows? Believe in God. Believe in the Devil. I don’t think you’re cursed, Bill.”

“My wife left me,” Hanrahan said, eyeing his second doughnut, chocolate frosted. “My kids left me. A woman died because I was drunk when I was supposed to be watching her. I murdered a man, tricked him into trying to break into my house, and then killed him. One of my boys is an alcoholic. And a day ago a woman I was supposed to be guarding had half her face blown into pulp and her son kidnapped with me in the next room.”

Sam Parker knew all this. After thirty years of falling away from the church, Hanrahan seemed to be returning cautiously and with some continued skepticism. He had confessed to all of this at length.

“What’s next? I’ll probably get my partner killed.”

“Or you might be there to save his life,” said the priest. “That’s happened too, hasn’t it? Saying you’re cursed is usually just an excuse for mistakes, bad decisions, and bad luck. A policeman’s bound to have all three. And, depending on how you look at it, you could also say you’re blessed. You’re going to get married. You’re no longer estranged from your son Michael. You’ve stopped drinking. You’re got your health, give or take a bad knee or two, and you’re relatively sane. Many who walk around with a smile can’t say as much.”

Hanrahan took a bite of the doughnut. Since he stopped drinking, chocolate had become almost irresistible. He had gained almost twenty pounds. Because there was a lot of Bill Hanrahan, it didn’t show yet, but it would. He could feel it when he had to run or climb a lot of stairs. He should get to the gym again.

“I’m convinced. Probably was before we had this talk. I don’t believe in curses,” Hanrahan said after finishing his mouthful of doughnut. “I believe I’m just a foul-up.”

“Well, that’s a start. You’re not blaming others. Line up the good with the bad in your life. It probably balances pretty well, as it does for most of us. By the way, I’ve noticed that neither you nor Abe use obscenities,” said Sam. “I thought it was mandatory for cops. Or are you just careful around me?”

“No,” said Bill, recognizing that the priest was changing the subject. “Abe and I are called the Street Angels behind our backs and sometimes to our faces. We’re no angels. Just our backgrounds. Father, I’m thinkin’ about quitting the force.”

Traffic was backed up on the street. The clanging of a bell let the two men know that the train gates were down a block away.

“Seriously thinking?” asked the priest.