Lieberman's Choice (21 page)

So Abe went through the yard, opened the screen door as quietly as he could. Bess had left the small porch light on, thank God. He opened the door, pushed it open slowly, carefully, gently, and went into the kitchen.

The twenty-watt night-light over the stove was on. Lieberman closed the door gently, moved to the door of the living room, closed it, and turned on the kitchen light.

There was a note on the table and a can of Coke. Lieberman read the note:

Abe,

Maish dropped by with soup, pickled fish, kishke, and some fresh rolls. Eat what you like, but remember don't use the microwave. Lisa wants to talk to you in the morning.

Love, Bess

Lieberman went to the refrigerator, took out the whitefish and a bottle of caffeine-free Diet Coke, and went back to the table, trying to decide whether it was worth going to bed for an hour or two or just waiting till the sun came up.

The Coke can on the table was wearing glasses. It had a little black button on top where the tab should have been. Abe took a bite of whitefish and pushed the button.

A voice crackled through the room with the name, “Sergeant Bernard Shepard.”

Lieberman, forkful of whitefish almost to his mouth, stared at the Coke can, which crinkled and danced to the voice of an early morning news report on WBBM.

“… shot at least seven times by …”

Lieberman pulled himself together, reached over, and turned off the Coke-can radio. The can crinkled back into shape.

“It's Barry's,” Lisa whispered from the kitchen doorway. “He thought you'd find it funny.”

“I cannot tell you how amused I am,” Lieberman told his daughter as she closed the kitchen door gently.

He watched her warily as he returned to his whitefish plate and opened the half-full bottle of Diet Coke. She moved to the table and sat across from him. She was wearing a blue terry-cloth robe, and he remembered how she had liked a purple terry-cloth robe of his when she was three or four years old. She had called it his towel robe.

Now she sat silently across from him, watching him eat.

“We saw about Sergeant Shepard on the news,” she said. “Mom was worried.”

“Worried?”

“You were up on the roof. Guns, explosives. Why are you incredulous?”

“I don't know,” he said. “Lack of sleep. Inherent stupidity. I'll talk to her.”

“Take her on vacation,” said Lisa.

“I thought your degree was in biochemistry, not family counseling,” he said.

“Is that a comment on how I've managed my marriage?” she asked without rancor.

Lieberman looked up from his food. Lisa should have been seething by now.

“No,” he said.

“You talked to Todd today.”

“Yesterday,” he said. “It's already tomorrow.”

“You think I'm wrong,” she said.

“About …?”

“Leaving Todd,” she concluded.

“Who knows? I don't have to live with him. I think he's a decent man. I think he loves you and the kids. I think he doesn't know what you want. I also think, if we're being honest here, that he can drive someone nuts. He's as depressive as those Greeks he can't stop quoting. So who knows?”

“Be honest about me,” she said.

Lieberman looked at his daughter and sighed. It was almost four in the morning, about the time he usually woke up knowing that he would get no more sleep, unwilling to leave Bess and the bed in the hope that sleep might come. He was in the gray dawn area of mistakes one regrets.

“You're my daughter. I find you very difficult.”

“That's it?” she asked softly, hurt.

Abe looked at his fizzing glass of Diet Coke and then at the Coke can with glasses.

“I love you. I don't think walking away from your husband with two kids is going to make you happy, but who knows? I don't know if anyone is supposed to be happy. People go around looking for happy and not finding it when they should be looking for content.”

“‘Hope for the best. Expect the worst,'” she said. “Mel Brooks.”

“A variation on my philosophy at four in the morning after a very tough night,” he explained.

“Are you happy, Dad?”

“I am. … There are deep holes and high notes,” he said. “I'm not unhappy.”

Lisa got up.

“‘The unrighteous are never really fortunate. Our hopes for safety depend upon our doing right,'” she said. “Euripides.
Helen,
act one. He has me doing it.”

“Use
Euripides
in a sentence,” he asked.

She shrugged.

“Euripides pants. I breaka you neck,” he said flatly without a hint of humor.

“Thanks, Dad,” she said with a groan. “I'm going back to bed.”

“You're welcome,” said Lieberman. “I don't know what I said, but I'm glad it helped.”

She came around the table, leaned over, and kissed his forehead.

Ten minutes later Lieberman had shaved, showered, changed into his robe, and tiptoed to his and Bess's room. He opened the door gently and closed it, making his way to the bed and placing his pistol in the drawer, which he locked with the key he wore around his neck.

And then he climbed into bed.

“Lieberman,” said Bess in the dark.

“I woke you,” he said.

“I wanted to be wakened. I thought it would be nice to know that you were still alive. What time is it?”

“A little after four. I'm still alive,” he said.

They said nothing for a minute or two.

“How was your meeting?” he asked.

“Ida Katzman and Rabbi Wass want you back on the building committee,” she said. “So does the president of Temple Mir Shavot, which is me.”

“Rabbi Wass wants me back on the building committee because Ida Katzman wants me on the committee. Rabbi Wass thinks I am an atheist.”

“He doesn't know you like I do.”

“Do you think I'm an atheist?”

“Who knows?” she said. “I think you need some sleep.”

“I think I need a vacation.”

“Sounds good to me,” said Bess. “Wednesday we're taking Barry and Melisa to the zoo. Can you make it?”

“There's a boy about Barry's age and a young woman staying a few days with Bill Hanrahan. Maybe they can come with?”

“Why not?” said Bess. “Abraham?”

“Yes.”

“It's all right,” said Bess.

And without knowing what she meant, he understood and wept.

Turn the page to continue reading from the Abe Lieberman Mysteries

C
OLD.

The frozen-fingered wind goes mad and howls, beating the lid of the overflowing green dumpster in a metal-against-metal tattoo. Ba-bom,
boom-boom.

Through the narrow slit between the concrete of the two high-rise buildings, Lake Michigan, not quite frozen at the shore, throws dirty ice chunks onto the narrow beach and retreats with a warning roar.

“It is cold, man. I tell you. I don't care what you say. I don't care how you say. It is cold.”

George DuPelee, his huge body shivering, his shiny black face contorted and taut, shifted from booted foot to booted foot. George wore a knit hat pulled down over his ears and an oversized olive drab military overcoat draped down to his ankles. He was hugging himself with unmatched wool gloves, one red and white, the other solid purple.

Boom-boom.

George grabbed the frigid rusting metal of the dumpster lid and pushed it down on the frozen plastic sacks of garbage inside it. The angry wind rattled the lid in his hand and it broke free. Boom-boom-boom-boom.

“What are you doing?” Raymond whispered irritably, adjusting his glasses.

“Goddamn noise driving me nuts,” George whispered back. “I don't like none of this none. I don't like this cold.”

George certainly looked cold to Raymond Carrou, who stood beside him in the nook behind the massive garbage cans. Raymond was lean, not an ounce of fat to protect him under his Eddie Bauer jacket, and he, too, was cold; not as cold as George DuPelee, but cold.

It was December in Chicago. It was supposed to be cold. People like George and Raymond didn't come here from Trinidad to enjoy the warm days and cool nights. People came to the States to make a dollar or to get away from something.

George DuPelee was a complainer. Raymond had known George for only a few days and he was now deciding that, however this business turned out, after tonight he would deal no more with the whining giant whose teeth rattled loudly as the two men waited for an acceptable victim to come out of the apartment building.

By the dim light of the mist-shrouded streetlamp, George watched the cars no more than twenty yards away on Sheridan Road lug through the slush, sending sprays of filthy ice over the sidewalk. Sheridan Road at this point north of Lawrence was a canyon of high-rise condominiums through which the wind yowled at the cars that passed through on the way to Evanston going north or downtown going south.

“Tell me you ain't cold,” George challenged. “Tell me. Skinny thing like you. Got no fat. Wind go through your bones and you no more used of this than me.” George concluded with a grunt of limited satisfaction, pulling his hat more tightly over his ears and continuing his steady foot-to-foot shuffle.

“Cold never bothered me much,” said Raymond, watching as the door to the building opened and an old couple came out already leaning into the night as the blast of icy air ran frozen across their faces and down their backs.

“Them, they old, rich, no trouble, no bubble,” said George, his bulky body nudging Raymond toward the light beyond the shadows of the buildings and the dumpster.

Raymond watched the old couple struggle against the cold wind. The old man almost toppled over, but caught his balance just in time and moved cautiously forward, gasping through the wind, reaching behind him to pull the old woman with him.

“No,” said Raymond, stepping back into the shadow so the old couple wouldn't see him.

“No,” moaned George, turning completely around in a circle like a frustrated child. “No. Man, what we come all the way down here for? Places closer. Over back there on Chestnut, you know? Look at those old olds. They got money, rings, stuff. Just take it, throw them old people in the air and let the wind take them.”

“Up,” said Raymond, his eyes back on the entrance to the high-rise condo building.

“Up?”

“Up,” said Raymond. “We came uptown, north, not downtown.”

George stopped turning and looked as if he was going to cry.

“Up, down, what's the difference here? I got no watch. I got no need. I got no job like you got.”

Raymond ignored him and looked up one-two-three-four-five-six floors to a lighted window covered with frost. A shape, a woman, stood in the window.

“Carol?”

Carol turned away from the window and faced Charlotte Flynn.

“Carol, are you all right?” Charlotte said. “You look …”

“Fine,” said Carol, touching the older woman's hand and giving her a small, pained smile. “Just tired.”

“God,” said Charlotte looking at her watch. “I … It's past midnight. Poor thing. You must be exhausted.”

Carol shrugged.

Charlotte was a sleek, elegant woman in a simple black dress. Charlotte was plastic-surgery taut with a cap of perfect silver hair. Charlotte had been the wife of a television station manager for more years than Carol had been on earth. And Charlotte's husband was, for another month, the boss of Carol's husband, David. In one month, David was being transferred by the network to New York City where he would be program manager. Not exactly higher in rank or salary than Bernie Flynn, the jobs were not parallel, but certainly equal to Bernie with the promise, no, the likelihood, that David would one day be Bernie's boss if Bernie did not retire or move on.

And so, the evening had been, as Carol knew it would be awkward. Awkward and long. Carol wondered at least five times, through poached salmon she could barely touch and conversation that had an edge sharp enough to cut a throat, whether she could keep from screaming.

“I think David should get you home,” Charlotte said gently, taking Carol's hand. “Your hands are freezing.”

“Circulation,” said Carol. “Doctor says its normal.”

“I don't remember,” Charlotte said. “My last, youngest, Megan, is thirty-four. I have a vague sense of being pregnant for two or three years and suffering two hours of something white and loud that must have been pain.”

Carol nodded.

“Oh, God,” Charlotte said, closing her eyes and shaking her head. “That was a stupid thing for me to say.”

“It's all right,” Carol said. “Really. I think we should go.”

“Sit down,” Charlotte said. “I'll get David and your coat.”

The older woman strode confidently through the thick-gray-carpeted living room/dining room furnished in contemporary Scandinavian white wood, the look broken up only by the out-of-place yet tasteful eighteenth-century English oak sideboard that Bernie Flynn had brought back from England a decade ago when he covered a summit meeting in London. The sideboard had been converted to a bar. Bernie had converted to Republican conservatism, and Charlotte had converted to three drinks in the afternoon and Catholicism. At least that was what David told Carol, and the conversation had tended to support his observations.