Lieberman's Folly (2 page)

Now James “Skettle” Harte watched as the two women, their breasts bouncing and erect, moved quickly. The older one, Guadalupe, pried the rifle from the late Juan Hernandez's hands. The younger one threw her gun to Skettle, who caught it in confusion as he was shot by the rifle Juan had brought into the room. Skettle was writhing in mortal pain with no idea what had happened to him or why.

Footsteps were coming. The sisters said not a word. The younger one picked up her sister's gun and stuffed it under the mattress; the other girl dropped the rifle on Juan's chest. The two of them had just managed to turn Juan's body back toward Skettle and the bed when the first innocent bystander filled the door. He was in his sixties, naked, thin with a big belly.

“Lord shit,” he said. “I'm gettin' out of here.”

Frank the bartender bulled his way in, looked at the dead men and the frightened sisters hugging each other and said, “You got someplace to go?”

“Sí,” the older sister said. “Yes.”

“Then go there,” he said, kneeling over to unbutton Juan's jacket and remove the money belt.

People were scrambling all over the place, grabbing for clothes, climbing through windows. The sisters put on their clothes quickly and went along the hallway Juan had come down less than two minutes before. They went through Heaven's Portal and past a pair of drunks in the corner who didn't seem to know anything out of the ordinary was going on.

Seven minutes and five blocks later the Madera sisters entered the home of the late Juan Hernandez De Barcelona.

They moved quickly, searching for the money they knew must be there. They did not fear the bartender or any of the other girls, none of whom had any reason to think Juan had his money in buckets at home. The older sister, Guadalupe, knew. She had heard him talk in his fevered sleep about the buckets on the night Doc Totaro had pulled the bullet from his gut and left him on Ludmilla's bed. Guadalupe had heard him and remembered and from that day the sisters had taken turns watching Juan when he went home in the morning and came to Babe O'Brien's the next afternoon. They watched him for months. They never saw him going to a bank. And then they had begun planning.

They moved quickly because they knew the police would come. They didn't know when, but the police would be here. Guadalupe guessed that it would take the cops at least an hour to figure out where Juan had lived and even then they might have no reason to come here. The situation, they hoped, was clear. Juan had been killed by and had killed a berserk john who the police would find had a record.

The sisters searched. The house was a mess. Piles of junk. Old lamps, broken radios, furniture. After about twenty minutes, the younger one found a can of bills inside a gutted television set. The older one found the next bucket on a shelf in the attic.

“The
hijode puta
has hidden them all over the place,” she cried in frustration. “It will take us all night.”

But they didn't have all night. In two hours they had found four buckets of money. They were dirty, frightened, and panting when they heard the siren. They threw the cans into a sheet and went out the back door, the younger sister, Estralda, carrying the sheet over her shoulder like a sack of laundry.

The siren wasn't heading their way, but they had no way of knowing this. Theirs was not the only felony in Corpus Christi that night. A woman named Phoebe Floyd had stabbed her husband Frazier in the neck with a barbecue fork when he changed the television channel on her while she was watching
The Sound of Music
. These sirens were for Phoebe. The sisters left the house and got out of town, never learning that more than forty cans of bills would be found by a sixty-five-year-old black cleaning woman named Clarise Rogers who was hired two weeks later by the Southern Pride Realty Company to clean the house of the deceased owner of Babe O'Brien's so it could be sold.

Clarise had quietly taken the cans home in her husband's truck at night and three weeks later moved just as quietly to Stockton, California. There she rented six very large safety deposit boxes, which she visited about once a month.

The Madera sisters discovered that they had cleared a total of $54,674. They split it evenly and began to worry about fingerprints, rumors, Frank the bartender, and what the other girls beyond Heaven's Portal might put together about what had happened.

It was agreed that they should part and not see each other again. They should part and go as far from Texas as they could get and they should not tell each other where they were going.

And so it was that Guadalupe took a bus to San Diego where she invested her money in an all-night diner. The diner didn't flop but it didn't flourish either. It just ate up the profits a nickel at a time. When the money ran out, she sold the diner and moved north to St. Louis where she went back into the business and met a man on vacation who said he loved her. He took her back to Chicago with him and she was happy to go.

Meanwhile, Estralda went to Miami, where she had no trouble finding work when her money was spent. From Miami she went to Phoenix and from there to Las Vegas and from there to Chicago, where she prospered and planned and dreamed of a new future in which she would someday own a business rather like Babe O'Brien's. And for almost ten years it seemed as if her dream would come true.

But the gods had very different plans.

“L
IEBERMAN?” THE WOMAN SAID
over the sound of the Cubs game from a radio.

When she had entered the T & L Delicatessen a few seconds earlier, the customers, six old men known to each other as the Alter Cockers, looked up and stopped talking.

Women of any kind were rare inside Maish's T & L Deli between the hours of ten and five, and it wasn't even two in the afternoon. And women like this just didn't happen into the place. They didn't even happen into this neighborhood. Oh yes, there were a few women who came before nine in the morning. Melody Rosen, Herschel's daughter, who clerked at Bass's Children's Shop down the street, often stopped for a toasted bagel and coffee. And Gert Bloombach, a sack of a woman who worked in a law office downtown, came by every Tuesday and Thursday at eight for a cup of tea and a lox omelette. And there was Howie Chen's granddaughter, Sylvie, a nice-looking girl with thick glasses, who came in once in a while, never ordering the same thing twice. They stopped on their way to work for coffee and a “What's new?” along with the neighborhood storekeepers, cab drivers, and an occasional cop.

The first of the Alter Cockers didn't really start coming in till around ten. The Alter Cockers were a clatch of old Jews and one old Chinese, Howie Chen. They had been given their informal club name by Maish and they bore it with pride, letting in a new member with reluctance and a long initiation.

“Lieberman?” the woman repeated to the overweight man, a somber-faced bulldog in a white apron behind the counter of the T & L Deli. Though the old men had stopped talking, the woman still had to raise her voice over the sound of an unseen radio.

Maish was too polite to stare at the woman. Besides, he had a reputation to uphold.

“Nothing bothers Maish,” Syd Levan said whenever the mood struck him. “We should call him Nothing-Bothers Maish. A guy could come in here with three heads asking for lobster bisque to go and Maish wouldn't bat an eye. Nothing-Bothers Maish.”

So, with the Alter Cockers looking at him, Maish had to honor his own reputation, but, the truth be told, he was bothered by this creature who belonged in a television ad for some make-up or bathing suit or diet cola.

The radio from nowhere blasted the sound of a crowd and the voice of Harry Caray as the woman waited for an answer from Maish, who seemed to have forgotten where he was. She looked around at the two old men at the counter, who smiled up at her more with memory than hope. One old man wearing a cap, none other than Herschel Rosen, nudged the other old man and said, “Which one?”

“Which one?” asked the woman.

“Which Lieberman?” said Herschel, the gnome, looking around for the approval of his cohorts as if he had made a brilliant play on words.

There were three booths. Four old guys, one of them Chinese, were in the first booth. The second booth was empty. A disembodied hand rose above the top of the third booth and motioned with a single finger to the woman.

Three minutes before the woman had entered the T & L, Ryne Sandberg had hit a double to drive in two runs in the eighth and Harry Caray had gone
meshugah
.

Abe Lieberman, as much as he usually enjoyed sitting in the heat of his brother Maish's deli, longed to be twenty minutes away in Wrigley Field, eating an Oscar Mayer, looking at the bare, tan shoulders and freckled backs of girls in the bleachers on their day off. It would have been even better to be thirty or forty years back watching Bill Nicholson or Hank Sauer swing on an underhand sidearm pitch from Ewell Blackwell and send it into the right-field bleachers.

It was no kind of August day to be in Maish's with the air conditioning out of order. Lieberman had both a fan on the table aiming at his face and a radio but the fan was tired and old and the radio sounded like it was suffering from Al Bloombach's asthma.

“I don't know about this, Davey,” Harry Caray had said on the radio.

“Trillo's not a bad choice in this situation,” assured Dave Nelson, who could always be counted on for a reassuring cliché.

“Not a bad choice?” Lieberman told Hanrahan. “He's the only choice Zimmer's got. He's the closest thing to a Mexican on that bench. I'm taking my grandchildren to the game Monday. You want to come? I'll get an extra ticket from MacMillan.”

Detective William Hanrahan had grunted, smiled, and shook his head no. This morning Hanrahan glowed with confidence, his cheeks pink, his usually unkempt dark hair cut short and brushed back. His face, a handsome flat Irish face, was puffy. His short-sleeved blue shirt was soaked through with sweat, but his tie was neatly pressed. Hanrahan was working extra hard today to convince himself, his partner, and the world that he didn't need a drink.

While Manny Trillo was stepping to the plate, the T & L door had opened with a bang. There was no spring on the door. The unwary who pushed it too hard often found it bouncing back in their faces. The spring had been removed about two weeks earlier by a duo of repairmen who had never reappeared. Speculation among the Alter Cockers was that the duo were doorspring thieves making their way across the nation.

The woman, her red hair billowing out, had flowed past the lethal door and asked her question. Now she was standing in front of Lieberman's booth. She wore a tight white dress with little flowers or something embroidered across the low neckline, over which the tops of her breasts glowed like brown moons.

“Lieberman,” she said.

“Valdez,” Lieberman said.

And Manny Trillo blasted one out of the park.

“Holy cow,” shouted Harry Caray.

Lieberman leaned back admiring life, the Cubs, and Estralda Valdez, the classiest prostitute on the near North Side.

“Have a seat, Estralda,” he said. “Can I get you something?”

“Something cold, no calories,
viejo
,” she said, sitting down in the booth next to Lieberman. “Got to watch the waist.”

She touched her flat stomach and looked at Sergeant Abe Lieberman, who motioned to the sad-faced man in the apron behind the counter.

Opinion was divided among the Alter Cockers as it was among the men and women of the Clark Street Station. There were those who thought the slightly dyspeptic Abe Lieberman looked exactly like a dachshund while the opposition claimed he resembled no animal more than a bloodhound, an underweight bloodhound perhaps, but a bloodhound nonetheless. Lieberman, it could not be denied, was not an imposing figure at five seven and hovering around 145 pounds. He looked a good five years older than his sixty years. Lieberman's wife thought his best features were his curly gray hair and the little white mustache, which she described as “distinguished.” She thought her husband looked more like a lawyer or an accountant than a policeman. Maish, on the other hand, thought his brother looked like an undernourished Harry James. Maish had once told this to a young cop who asked who Harry James was.

“The band leader with the trumpet,” Maish had explained. “The one who married Betty Grable.”

“Betty Grable?” the cop had asked and Maish had given up.

Now Maish brought a pitcher of iced tea and a fresh glass for Estralda. He filled her glass and Abe's and looked at Hanrahan.

“Another coffee,” said Hanrahan.

“Hungry?” Lieberman asked Estralda Valdez.

Maish hovered.

She shook her head no and Maish slouched away.

“What's his story?” Estralda said.

“Maish? Jealousy,” said Lieberman. “He's my brother. You like baseball?”

“It's OK,” she said with a shrug. “I like boxing.”

André Dawson struck out to end the inning. Lieberman reached over and turned off the radio. There wasn't a sound in the T & L but the whirr and clunk of the table fan. Conversation, usually loud and blustering on topics ranging from baseball to the price of pastrami to past and planned trips to Israel, had ceased while ears with little tufts of gray growing from them strained to hear what this painted vision wanted with Abe.

“Let's get on with it,” Hanrahan sighed, checking his cup to be sure there wasn't a last drop at the bottom before Maish returned to fill it.

“It's a hot day and the Cubs are ahead,” said Lieberman. “Let's savor the rare moment, William.”

Hanrahan grunted and waved at Maish who moved toward them with a half-full coffeepot.

Lieberman was in no hurry. He was reasonably comfortable in the little booth surrounded by the smell of kosher meat on the slicer, the sound of old men talking about nothing. He also knew that what Estralda had to say was important. She had told him it was, had asked to meet him outside of her territory, someplace safe where no one would be likely to recognize her.