Lieberman's Choice (6 page)

“Sorry,” said Frankie, getting up.

“Don't act so nuts,” the counterman said, leaning over. “My advice. You can control it, control it. If not, keep it home or take it someplace else.”

“I understand,” said Frankie, looking over at the old woman in the black hat.

He did not want to lose her. God had put her salvation in his hands. The man with the mint breath behind the counter should have his eyes plucked out, for he had no use for them. He was blind to the truth and the ways of the Lord.

Frankie smiled and walked to the door of the doughnut shop, and the counterman dreaded the thought that the kid with the goofy smile would probably be back the next day.

The living room of the sixth-floor apartment of the Shoreham Towers was a beer-bottle, ash-strewn mess. Officer Sandra Anxman opened the door with a passkey and stepped in with Officer Craig Pettigrew behind her, carrying a clipboard.

“And,” said Anxman, “he's all the time telling me it doesn't count as overtime, when the union contract says …”

The look and smell of the apartment hit her, and Anxman said, “Who the hell lives here—Porky Pig?”

“Binyon, Carl, and McAulife, David,” said Pettigrew, checking his clipboard.

Pettigrew put the clipboard under his arm, and the two officers began to check the apartment, looking behind sofas, opening closets.

“You'd think,” Anxman said, pushing open the bedroom door, “in a building like this … Look at this crap. Shepard shot the wrong fuckin' tenants. He would have done the health department a favor by painting the walls with the guys who live here.”

“I'm not touching anything,” said Pettigrew. “Smells like shit in here. Let's go.”

“Check it off,” Anxman agreed. “No one here.”

Anxman stepped out and Pettigrew took one last look at the apartment, shook his head, and said, “How do people live like this?”

Before the door was completely closed, Anxman was saying, “So I'm calling it overtime. I don't give a shit what Walsh calls it. He can talk to the union.”

When the voices of the two police officers had faded, a closet door in the apartment opened and Carl and Dave crawled out from beneath a pile of ratty blankets.

“Did you hear? Porky Pig? Christ, we did a search like that in Kuwait City, we'd be dead meat. Stupid-ass cops.”

Carl stood. He was no more than thirty, but life had not treated him well. Actually, life had treated him as he had treated it. His hair was naturally light and curly, which saved him from the impossible task of combing it. He liked to think that he looked a little like Chuck Norris, which wasn't the least bit true. Dave crawled out after him, a thin creature with a military haircut and no shirt. Dave had a single tattoo on his chest, an ice-cream bar with one bite missing. Dave began searching the rubble for something while Carl went on, “You think this room is a mess?”

“I can't find my shoes, Carl.”

Carl, brooding, cleared a space for himself on a chair and plopped down.

“That's not the fuckin' issue here, Dave. The issue here is sanitary conditions. You like the cops sayin' you're unsanitary is what I'm asking you?”

Dave pushed a pile of newspapers out of the way and realized by the pregnant pause that he was expected to supply some answer.

“I suppose I don't like it much.”

“Like what?” Carl said.

“Whatever we're talking about I'm not supposed to like. I'm looking for my shoes here, Carl. Give me a break.”

Dave stepped over a filthy pillow on the floor and saw his shoe.

“No one kicks us out of the place we pay rent for,” said Carl, hitting the arm of the sofa with the flat of his hand. “We've got our self-respect.”

Dave had one more shoe to find. Instead of the shoe, he turned up an unopened can of Miller beer.

“This,” he said, “should be in the refrigerator. God. I do not like being barefoot. Makes me feel …”

“… vulnerable,” Carl supplied. “That's what I was talking about, Dave. Your self-respect.”

Dave had heard it before.

“I know. I know. We get our jobs back. We get our self-respect.”

“I don't like hiding in closets, Dave. I tell you that for a fact. It doesn't become a man to hide in closets. We had enough hiding in that fuckin' desert. From now on …”

“We hide from no man,” Dave completed, finding his second shoe. “Hot damn.”

Dave displayed the shoe proudly, but Carl paid no attention.

“I'm getting an idea here, Dave,” Carl said, sitting up.

Carl looked up at the ceiling and Dave looked at Carl, not liking what he saw in his friend's face.

“Don't upset me, Carl. I just want to get my shoes on and …”

“When's the last time we cleaned the rifles?” asked Carl, and Dave knew he was in some deep, deep shit.

A
LAN KEARNEY CHECKED THE
clock on the dashboard of his car, opened the door of his glove compartment, and took out his electric razor. It was a minute or two before seven. He had come out of the apartment to be alone, have a cup of coffee, and try to think.

Behind him, at the far end of the street, the yellow-and-black wooden barriers were in place with two police cars behind them and a quartet of men and women in uniform keeping the curious out. The Shoreham apartments and all the apartments and houses on Fargo had been evacuated, the residents being promised motel money and a per diem that, Kearney knew, would be damned hard for them to collect.

He shaved, losing himself in the hum and the task, sorry when he had finished. He found a place he had missed under the chin, another near his right ear. He stroked them slowly, turned off the razor, and checked his cheek with his palm.

He had a spare shirt, a change of underwear, and a toothbrush in the trunk, emergency supplies. He would get to them later. Kearney got out of the car with his plastic foam cup of no-longer-hot coffee and walked toward the lake. The sky was clear and the September sun hot. An hour earlier Kearney had checked with the weather bureau. There was no reasonable possibility of rain. Kearney would have bet that Shepard had checked with the weather bureau before deciding that last night was the night to kill his wife and her lover.

He wandered out onto the beach, stopped near an overflowing garbage can, finished his coffee, and threw his crumpled cup atop the heap.

He had put it off long enough. Kearney walked back to his car, looking up at the empty windows, sensing the vacant apartments, wondering if there were cats and dogs who would, if this thing went on, howl inside with fright and hunger.

Kearney opened his car door, reached for his radio, pushed the button, and said, “Bernie, are you monitoring?”

There was a long pause and Shepard answered. “I hear you.”

“How about letting me up there now?” asked Kearney. “It's been a long night for both of us.”

“And we're looking at a longer day,” answered Shepard.

“Bernie …”

“Not now. Not on the radio. You sweat it out. I'll give you one change. Make it an hour earlier, midnight. You come up here at midnight. That's a time people will remember. Midnight.”

“Why, Bernie?”

“You know why,” Shepard said evenly. “And when I'm finished with you, everyone in the city'll know why. By the time you come up here tonight, you'll be like me. No reputation, no future, nothing. I'm making that a ten-four and out.”

There was a click, a shimmer of static, and nothing. Kearney shook his head. And then the radio came to life again and Hanrahan's voice said, “Channel Four's truck is here.”

Kearney looked back down the street at the white van. He couldn't see it, but he knew there was a lightning streak on the side and a big yellow 4.

“I see it. I'm on the way.”

Before heading back down the street, Kearney opened the trunk of his car, removed his clean shirt and tie, and tried not to wonder what the day would be like.

Bernie Shepard needed rest. He closed his eyes, willing himself to remain alert, not quite fall asleep.

And he remembered when his eyes were closed that he had once had a brother and a dog and a mother and father. And he remembered that by the time he was eighteen, all of them were dead.

Bernie's parents, Lorna and Harold, ran a cleaning store and laundry service on Twenty-second Street not far from Farragut High. Did a decent business in neighborhood trade and had a contract with the high school for uniforms. Harold, who had come over from Cardiff to escape the mines, considered himself a success and was considered a success by those in the Old Country. He had married a Scots girl his first year in the States. He had no dreams of an empire. A good house, three hearty meals, a safe wife, and sons who obeyed were the extent of his ambitions. And then the neighborhood began to change. Back in Cardiff neighborhoods did not change.

When the neighborhood started to go black and Hispanic, business actually got better, but living conditions for Bernie and his brother, Don, got worse.

Donnie was the big brother, at least the older brother by three years. They were both about the same size and when they could, outside of school and in, they traveled together with their dog. Harold told them, taught them by raised voice and example to take no “crap or folly” from any man. And so people knew the Shepard brothers, learned not to mess with them and the alley dog who acted a little crazy.

The brothers had purposely given the dog no name. They had seen
Hondo.
John Wayne's dog had no name in that one. And
The Rainmaker.
Wendell Corey's dog didn't have a name either. There was something a little scary about a dog who had no name, a dog who had nothing to lose.

The Shepard boys and their dog were tested just enough to prove they were not just putting on an act. Don spent four months in Juvenile for almost killing a black kid. The dog was shot by a policeman when it was trapped in an alley behind a grocery store on Ogden Avenue after tearing off the ear of a crazy named Ollie who tried to kick shit out of Bernie.

They never got another dog. That was when the Shepards decided to move north. It was the first move north. There were other moves later until they were at the very northwest corner of the city, and Harold Shepard, a somewhat dull-witted—even to his children—bull of a man vowed that they would move no more, that he would build a stone wall around his house and arm himself and his boys before he would move again.

Shepard's parents died in an automobile crash on Higgins Road in 1960 when Bernie was seventeen and Donnie was just getting out of jail. They sold the house and lived together in North Uptown. Bernie drove a drop-off truck for the
Chicago Tribune.
Donnie tried car sales and found he didn't have the knack for getting people to trust him.

Donnie found other ways to make money and even a way to lose his life. Bernie watched his brother's decline, watched his friends, watched his drug habit, knew and didn't want to know.

And then one day a cop was at his door, a cop with a bored pockmarked face, wearing a sweaty suit. The cop told him that Donnie was dead. The cop, whose name was Dickerson, could have simply said, “I'm sorry,” and walked away, but he didn't. He came in, talked patiently to the angry young man, invited him to his house for dinner and talk.

Bernie had said no, but he went. Dickerson lived alone, had never married, was a great cook and a decent housekeeper. Once, when he had first gone to see Dickerson, he had thought the cop was queer, but he was wrong. Dickerson had two women, both ugly, as ugly as he was. Either one would have married him. He would have none of it.

“Not built for it, kid,” he told Bernie. “Some are. Some aren't. You? I'd say you're not, but it's worth a try.”

And Bernie had, with Dickerson's help, become a cop. And without Dickerson's help he had decided, before he was even twenty, that he wanted a wife, a family, another dog. He wanted a perfect family, in the image of the one that had been taken from him.

He saw the filth of the city, the people who destroyed each other and the innocent, and Shepard decided that he would build his own world; and when he was forty-seven years old he decided that the world would begin with the girl named Olivia who had been introduced to him by his partner, Alan Kearney, his partner, who reminded him of his brother, Donnie.

“Nova's good, huh?” asked Maish, his somber bulldog face turned toward his brother. Maish was the overweight, white-aproned judge and jury of Maish's T&L Deli on Devon. He had presided over the T&L for more than twenty of his sixty-six years. Before that, he had a place on Roosevelt Road, kept it till he was the last white in the neighborhood and it wasn't safe anymore.

“Nova's good,” agreed Lieberman, digging into his lox, onion, and cream cheese omelette and guiding it down with a toasted onion bagel.

Kearney had told Lieberman to take two or three hours off, get some rest, and keep in touch. Lisa and the kids would be up now, getting ready for work and school. Bess might or might not be up. Abe Lieberman did not want to walk into the confusion of his grandchildren's requests or the paradoxes of his daughter. He would wait it out till they had left. He loved them, but he was beyond tired.

“So what is it this time?” asked Maish, pouring his brother a cup of coffee.

The place was empty except for Abe and the three women, Melody Rosen, Herschel's daughter, who clerked at Bass's Children's Shop down the street and always stopped for a toasted bagel and coffee; Gert Bloombach, a sack of a woman who worked in a law office downtown and came to the T&L every Tuesday and Thursday morning for a lox omelette and a cup of tea; and Sylvie Chen, Howie's daughter, a nice-looking girl with thick glasses who never ordered the same thing twice.

Early mornings at the T&L belonged to the working women and the cops Lieberman had introduced to the place. The Alter Cockers, all of them retired, on pensions, between jobs, started to drift in around ten.