Lieberman's Choice (9 page)

“Names, Lieberman,” came Shepard's voice.

“Giles, Craddock, and Ballentine,” said Lieberman.

“Abe, how long have you known me?” asked Shepard.

“We've been acquainted for about twenty-five, thirty years,” said Lieberman. “But that's not the same as knowing you, Bernie.”

“Tell Kearney to cut the crap,” said Shepard. “Giles works with a sound man named Nowitz or an old guy named Trout. There's no Ballentine at Channel Four.”

“He's new,” said Lieberman.

“If he wants to get old, he'd better not come through that door. You've got three minutes to get the right people up here or I start target practice. I know what Channel Four people look like.”

Lieberman tapped Ballentine on the shoulder and pointed down the stairs. Ballentine went down, handed the recorder to Nowitz, who snatched it from him, and stood next to the sniper.

“You got it, Bernie,” said Lieberman. “Open the door.”

On the roof, Shepard motioned the dog back to the concrete barrier.

“When I open,” he said, “the first one through is Giles, followed by the sound man, then the cameraman. When they get in, you close the door, Lieberman. And you stay out. Anything but that and we write new headlines.”

“Open,” said Lieberman.

“Tell Kearney he has fifteen hours.”

Shepard cradled the shotgun under one arm and slid the metal bar across the curved steel plates. He had to strain and the bar screeched, metal against metal, the fingernail of an angry giant against a massive blackboard. When the bar clattered onto the roof, Shepard shouted, “Wait.” He backed up to the concrete bunker, leveled his shotgun, and called, “Come ahead.”

Janice Giles came through first, squinting into the sun. Nowitz followed her with Craddock in back.

“Stop there,” called Shepard. “You, with the camera. Put it down.”

Craddock knelt and placed the camera on the roof. Janice Giles looked at Shepard and willed herself not to blink, which she could do quite well. Blinking in close-up was a sign of weakness.

“Now,” said Shepard. “Put the bar back in place on the door.”

Craddock didn't hesitate, though he had trouble lifting the heavy metal and sliding it across.

“Okay,” said Shepard. “The two of you strip to the waist, take off your shoes, and roll up your pants.”

Janice Giles watched the men do as they were told. When they were finished, Shepard rose and stepped forward through the concrete barrier, the dog at his side.

“If you hurry,” he said, “you can make the noon report.”

M
AYOR AARON JAMESON OF
the city of Chicago had been not only the leading black mayor of a major city but one of the national leaders of the Democratic party. Some talked about four years as the first black governor and then at least a run at the presidency. He would be no young stallion by then, but he'd still be six years younger than Reagan when he was elected.

That was almost four years ago, before the last election when Aaron Jameson had made it back into office by a few thousand votes and just ahead of a grand jury investigation.

Not that Jameson had taken any of the high hopes seriously. He never really figured he had a chance at the governor's mansion in Springfield, but the talk didn't hurt.

What hurt was lunatics, black and white, like the one on television.

“Turn it up,” Jameson said, leaning back in his leather swivel chair behind his enormous mahogany desk.

Ty Wheeler, tall, black, forty, bespectacled, a former Notre Dame wide receiver, and the mayor's administrative aide, turned up the volume and moved back to the chair across from the mayor. Wheeler made a church of his fingers and watched silently while the mayor, who had been on the wagon for almost two months, sipped a Diet Coke laced with nondairy creamer.

On the worn leather sofa against the wall Chief Marvin Hartz sat watching, unsure of whether to look supremely confident or massively nervous. He thought for an instant of the Fishery, his favorite restaurant in Key West, where he could stop for a beer and a cold grouper sandwich and talk to Pete Stowell about the bad old days.

“… earlier this morning,” Janice Giles said somberly, looking directly from the screen at more than a million people, “on the roof of the Shoreham Towers apartment building on the far North Side.”

Giles spoke from in front of a police barricade, beyond which uniformed officers stood ready or kept the growing crowd back. The picture changed and there was Giles talking to a burly man with graying hair blowing in the gentle wind, a shotgun cradled like a baby in his arms.

“This shouldn't take long,” Shepard said, his voice deep, controlled. “I came home in the middle of the night, found my wife in bed with a man. He went for a gun and I shot them both.”

“Then,” said Janice Giles, “you're claiming it was self-defense, unpremeditated?”

“Miss Giles,” Shepard said softly, “I walked into my apartment with a loaded shotgun. Look around you.”

Janice Giles turned toward the camera and motioned for it to scan the roof. The camera, and the eyes of the audience of Channel 4, found the concrete bunker, the pile of food and weapons, and the radio and bedroll.

“Kind of hard to call it unpremeditated,” said Shepard as the camera pulled back to bring him and Janice Giles into view.

“Then why …?” asked Giles.

“Young lady,” said Shepard.

“Now he's everybody's favorite uncle,” said the mayor with a sip and a sigh, glancing at Chief Hartz, who pretended to be so absorbed in the interview that he neither saw nor heard the mayor's sarcasm.

“This city,” Shepard said, looking directly into the camera, “hell, the whole country, has been sliding down a rusty razor blade for years. My wife said some things when we got married. The fella I shot said some things when he got married. Nothing counts much anymore. You kill someone or sell them drugs that kill them and you walk away. Women, married women, unmarried women, jump into bed with any guy they meet in the supermarket when they should be home …”

“Times have changed,” Giles said with some irritation. “Women no longer …”

“They shouldn't have changed,” Shepard came back calmly, sadly looking at the camera and not at Janice Giles.

“Hell,” said Mayor Jameson, “he's better than that Republican clown they ran against me. If they'd run Shepard, the son of a bitch might be sitting here and I might be up on some roof with a mangy dog.”

“I didn't agree to any damn changes,” Shepard went on. “The way I figure it, wives stay faithful to their husbands and best friends stay loyal to each other and don't go around … getting in bed with their friends' wives … Am I keeping this clean enough for you?”

“Best friends?” prompted Giles.

“My former partner,” said Shepard. “The newest captain in this town.”

“Alan Kearney?” asked Janice Giles.

“Alan Kearney,” Shepard confirmed. “The fair-haired boy of the department who's planning to marry into Chicago society, the man who introduced me to Livy—Olivia, my wife—and then turned her into a whore.”

“And you want …?”

“Kearney up on this roof at midnight, tonight. I want justice. You remember justice? Balancing the scales, making things right.”

“Lieutenant Shepard,” Giles said gently, humoring. “Do you really expect Alan Kearney to come up here and face you like some cowboy movie?”

Shepard paused, smiled sadly, and reached down to scratch the head of the dog.

“Dog's a stroke of goddamn genius,” said the mayor, looking at Ty Wheeler, who sat staring at the television screen.

“Nothing like that,” said Shepard. “I just want to talk to him, ruin his life the way he's ruined mine.”

“And how are you going to do that?”

“Lady,” Shepard said, nodding at the camera, “I've already started.”

“And if he doesn't come?”

Shepard shrugged, a shrug of deep regret.

“Then,” he said. “I blow up this building, myself, maybe a half a block or two of the lakeshore. And the city knows that Alan Kearney, if he were man enough, could have stopped it.”

The roof was suddenly gone and on the screen was the familiar newsroom of Channel 4 with anchor Jim Amacor on the right and Janice Giles on the left behind a curved desk.

“In spite of the horror of his actions,” Giles said, “the confusion of his ideas, you can see the pain and heartache in Bernie Shepard's face, and you can't help hoping that somehow he can be brought down from there with no one getting hurt.”

“Fascinating story, Janice,” Amacor said. “And what do the police and mayor's office say about the situation?”

Giles put her notes into a neat bundle.

“So far,” she said, “the police have made no official comment, and the mayor's office is not responding to …”

“Turn it off,” said the mayor, turning his swivel chair away from the television.

Ty Wheeler unchurched his long fingers, got up, and was at the television in two strides, turning it off.

“Why don't we just hire Shepard to handle our public relations?” said the mayor, laying his hands palms down on the desk. “He does a hell of a lot better job than Harley and his whole damned crew. You see that business with the dog? Man lives through this and he can run for goddamn governor. What are we doing about this?”

“We've got some options,” said Hartz.

“That's reassuring, Marvin,” said the mayor, looking at Ty Wheeler, who remained standing and gave no reaction.

“I've got men working on the door to the roof,” Hartz went on. “They're being very careful, very quiet, and that's going to take time. We can't get in close with a copter.”

“I heard,” said the mayor.

“But,” said Hartz with cautious enthusiasm, “we can get in high enough to drop a small bomb or launch one causing minimal damage unless he really does have the roof wired.”

“Does he?” asked the mayor.

“We don't know for sure,” Hartz said.

“No bombs.” Wheeler's voice came across the room. It was an impressive voice and Wheeler knew it. He had been, among other things, a late-night radio disc jockey. He had cultivated that smooth, decisive timbre, had learned to use it sparingly and at dramatic moments. It was a skill the mayor much appreciated.

“Remember the bomb in Philly took out more than that cult,” Wheeler continued. “It took out Mayor Wilson Goode's political career. No goddamn bombs. How is it going to look if we blow up a whole block to take out one cop who caught his wife in bed with another man?”

Hartz felt at a disadvantage sitting. He got up, moved to the mayor's desk, ignored Wheeler, and said to Jameson, “If he's bluffing about having the roof wired, we can just wait and starve him out. We've got snipers ready if he shows himself.”

Mayor Jameson folded his hands on his desk like a patient schoolteacher and looked at Ty Wheeler for an answer.

“That might take weeks,” Wheeler said. “He has food up there. With the area off-limits to the public, we'll probably have over a thousand people kept away from their homes tonight. If this goes on for three days, maybe even two days, and doesn't end peacefully, we can have middle-class refugee camps or city payments for motels that could run into the millions. Every day he sits up there and we look up at him with our thumbs up our asses we lose votes. A week of this can swing the election. Son of a bitch picked Ryan Conners's ward to roost in.”

“The primary is a month away,” said Hartz, looking at the mayor and seeing in his eyes that Wheeler was winning this battle.

“If it were tomorrow or the next day,” the mayor said, “we could tell the voters that we promised to have him down with no bloodshed on the morning after the election. Then if we screwed it up, Marvin, you could resign and head for Florida and the public would have two years to forget Shepard, but this could turn into Aaron Jameson's last mistake.”

“Look,” said Hartz standing straight, “I'm—”

“—a political compromise,” Wheeler jumped in, “a white concession to the police force and the people who didn't vote for us.”

Hartz looked at the mayor for support, saw none, went for the look of anger, and tried again with, “I'm not—”

This time it was the mayor himself who cut him off. “What about Kearney?”

“Kearney?” asked Hartz.

“Might Captain Kearney decide or be persuaded to take heroic action,” asked Wheeler, “if other options fail?”

“I can't order a man to go up there and face that lunatic,” Hartz said with dwindling indignation.

“Of course not,” returned Wheeler, moving to the mayor's desk and standing next to and half a head taller than the chief of police, “but a truly heroic and ambitious police officer who wanted to clear his name might well decide on his own to face the challenge.”

Hartz looked at Wheeler and then at the mayor and understood.

“Captain Kearney is on the scene, in charge,” Hartz said slowly, carefully. “We've set up a command post right across the street from the building. I'll go back there myself, get a full report from Captain Kearney, and remind him that I have made him fully responsible for handling this crisis.”

“The buck stops as far down the line as we can send it, Marvin,” explained the mayor. “That's politics.”

“There is one other possibility,” said Hartz. “A bit unconventional. One of Kearney's men knows someone who …”

“Take the initiative, Chief,” said the mayor, rising. “I do not wish to know the details of the professional operation. You have my complete confidence. But have that talk with Captain Kearney about his moral and civic responsibility in any case.” The mayor, standing now, picked up the phone on his desk. “It might be best to get things in motion as soon as possible,” the mayor went on, and Hartz knew he was being dismissed.