Lieberman's Day (6 page)

Frankie was ready. He had gone back to Tennessee, and there had frightened his family—brother Carl, sisters Beth and Luann, three aunts, an uncle, and even some cousins—into giving him enough money to buy Roy Willett's 1984 Honda pickup and still have enough left over for gas and living for maybe a week.

They had all thought Frankie's going back to Chicago for Jeanine and Charlie a good idea. They had encouraged him, told him he should get his family back and go someplace safe. They all assured him, every man, woman, and Pastor Griggs, that Codgetown would not be a safe place to bring his family. No, they said, in their own ways or together, the police would find him easily in Codgetown. Take some sandwiches, the cash, and a tankful of gas, and go with their blessing. Send a card, maybe, when it felt right, but go. And he had gone back to the cold and that which must be finished.

Cars came by, more as daylight neared. Policemen, never the right ones, came and went, sometimes in uniform, sometimes not, heads down against the cold and wind, holding on to their hats and holsters. A runaway aluminum garbage can came cling-clanging down Clark Street, caroming off parked cars, heading south out of sight.

Patience.

His plan was simple. When one of them came in and went out again by himself, Frankie would follow him in the Honda pickup, come on him when he was alone, with the old double-barrel shotgun his daddy had bought right after he came back from Korea, a shotgun Frankie had used to hunt with for years. Frankie would tell the sinner before him to tell him where Jeanine and Charlie were and then he would shoot him after he let the son of Satan pray. And if he didn't speak, if neither of them told where his family was, then Frankie would shoot them dead anyway, and be able to search the city for them without fear of the two policemen. Satan would probably make them watch from Hell while Frankie tracked his wife and son and made them understand their sins and come with him.

If Jeanine and Charlie didn't want to come, well, Frankie had beaten them before and it had put the fear of husband and God in them and he would beat them again and again and again and again …

Frankie was pounding his fists against his own chilled legs, pounding them so hard that the pain got through his reverie and made him stop.

And then although he thought he was saying it to himself, he muttered aloud, “Are you washed in the blood of the lamb?”

And far down Clark Street out of sight the aluminum garbage can running amok answered him by crashing through the window of a television repair shop.

As Frankie Kraylaw sat looking out of the window of the Sanchez Brothers' Reupholstery and Used Furniture Shop, Bill Hanrahan turned off the bubbling whirlpool machine that hung precariously over the edge of the old claw-foot bathtub. Then he hoisted himself up, the water cascading off him, and, holding on to the towel rack behind him, he tested first one knee and then the other. The results could have been better.

William “Hardrock” Hanrahan had been the fastest lineman on his Chicago Vocational High School football team, one of the fastest high school linemen in the whole state of Illinois, probably in the Midwest. In his senior year, Hanrahan had twisted his knee in a practice. The speed went; not overnight but in an instant. He had still gone on to a football scholarship at Southern Illinois, though he had been hoping for Notre Dame or Illinois; but even with a good knee a top-twenty school had been only an outside possibility. He had lasted two years at Southern, a journeyman lineman who lost his nickname and stopped finding the game a hell of a lot of fun. He had left Carbondale, left school, and come back to Chicago to join his father as a cop, as his father had joined his father before him.

More than twenty-five years after his last football game the knee still locked on him, went numb when it had a mind to, referred a longing ache to his other knee, and made walking a chore; but Hanrahan covered up the problem to his satisfaction.

He stood wet and aching, a hairy hulk of a man, wondering what his ex-wife Maureen was doing and with whom. He stepped carefully out of the tub onto the bath mat and dried himself. Jeanine had done the laundry. The towels were clean. But they didn't smell as good as when Bill did them. Jeanine had cleaned the floor and, he had to admit, done a good job, but not as good as Bill did.

Stepping into the clean jockey shorts he had laid out on the clothes hamper, Hanrahan considered, as he had done many times in the last month, what he was going to do about Jeanine and Charlie Kraylaw, who were now soundly asleep in the bedrooms upstairs.

He had taken in the pair when he and Lieberman had ridden Frankie Kraylaw out of town. There had been no doubt in either of their minds that Frankie, who had torn up the store of a man who felt sorry for Frankie's wife and son, was on the verge of doing something very crazy and very violent to his family. In the name of Jesus, Frankie had given signs of losing what little control he had been floating on.

They were quiet, the young mother and son, too quiet and too anxious to please. Jeanine had found work at the McDonald's on Western Avenue near Granville, gotten Charlie back in school, and begun to look like the pretty young woman she was instead of the frightened sheep who had come into the house Bill had once shared with Maureen.

Hanrahan pulled on his pants, listening to the jingle of his change and feeling the heft of his wallet in the back pocket.

Jeanine had said twice that she owed her and Charlie's lives to Bill Hanrahan. She had even made it clear that she would, if he wanted, share Bill's bed. Hanrahan had made it just as clear that he wanted no payment other than for her to work her way up to a job that would allow her to move into an apartment with her son. And so Jeanine stayed, saved a little money each week, and made Hanrahan extremely uncomfortable.

He put on his blue button-down shirt and looked at himself in the mirror over the bathroom sink. He saw a strong Irish face with a hint of the rose in his cheek and nose from the years of his friendship with the bottle. He saw the flat features of his father and grandfather, tempered just a bit by the warmer heart of his mother. All in all not a bad face to have.

Jeanine, he thought, sitting on the edge of the tub and putting on his socks, was a good kid, but not a very bright one. Conversation tended to be brief unless he could bring himself to listen to her recounting her day with the fillet-o-fish and Big Mac. Charlie seldom spoke. The few times they had gotten him together with Lieberman's grandchildren, Charlie had dutifully done what they had engaged him in and had soberly said “thank you” and announced in a whisper in the car that he had had a good time.

Truth was, Hanrahan admitted, turning off the light and moving into his bedroom, Jeanine and Charlie were innocent, gentle, and none too smart. They reminded him, in contrast, of the arguments, jokes, banter, and business that had filled this very house when Maureen had lived in it and the boys had grown up in it bringing home friends, battling, and leaving lights and television sets on all over the place.

The house now had the stillness of an Amtrak station at midnight. All creaks and howling wind, the lone sound of the television filling only a narrow band of cold space.

Hanrahan turned out all the lights but the one on the night stand and looked at the small television in the bedroom which showed him the silent scene of some distant war on CNN. He lay back on the bed, feeling the familiar indentation of his body on the mattress.

He had kept the house clean, perfect, neat, better even than Maureen had kept it, even when he had been on the needle edge of the worst of his sessions with the bottle. He had kept it for the moment that Maureen might drop in or one of the boys might pay an unexpected visit and find not that Hanrahan had gone the way of the slovenly bachelor but had and could make a commitment.

The first time she had seen it Iris had marveled at the house, at the shine on the polished hardwood floors, the nap of the area rugs, the lack of dust. Iris, her pretty, ageless Chinese face surveying the rooms politely as they spoke, had trodden carefully, lightly, as if in a museum. Which was what it was.

He and Iris had never made love. Neither wanted to, and the few nights she had stayed over she had spent in the room in which Jeanine Kraylaw was now asleep.

The knees felt better on the oversized pillow on which he had rested them. He closed his eyes, put his right arm over his face to block out the light, and sensed the flicker of changing images as the wind shook the bedroom windows and CNN careened around the world in thirty minutes with no one in the room watching.

George DuPelee, clinging to the dead man's fur hat as if it was a teddy bear, lay on his back on the battered sofa, snoring gently. Raymond Carrou sat at the table in the corner of the room in the dim light of the television on the table in front of him, considering whether or not he should beat George to death as he slept or let him live so Raymond could make him suffer.

Nothing had gone right, nothing. And now he sat in this small, cold room over a hardware store on Grand Avenue listening to George snore, watching the news, changing stations to see if their crime would make the television, and wondering if they were safe.

It was cold in the room, which he had been renting for almost two years. Not cold like outside, but cold enough. And Raymond had been afraid to get a space heater. Just one block away a whole Vietnamese family had died because of one of those space heaters. Raymond wasn't sure what it was about the space heater that had made them die, but he had seen it on the television and walked past the very building.

It was never cold like this in Trinidad. In La Brea he had been respected, not just another black face with an accent. He had been a shift boss at the Pitch Lake natural asphalt mine, one of the wonders of the world. Tourists had come to watch them work and marvel. But asphalt production declined in the 1980s. When he had started as a boy in 1970 they had produced 128,000 tons of asphalt in a single year, asphalt prized around the world and used for domestic roads and construction throughout the island and on Tobago. By 1985 asphalt production dropped to 21,000 tons and Raymond had been working few shifts and spending more time looking into the blue-green waters of the Gulf of Paria, picking up lonely older tourist women from England and the United States and wondering whether he should go inland in search of an oil job or take a boat over to Venezuela for whatever he could find.

In the end, he had spent all of his savings on bribing a U.S. immigration official to move him to the very top of the list for a work visa. He had made his way to New York City and then to Chicago in pursuit of a distant cousin who presumably lived there and owned a trio of music shops. He had found neither cousin nor work that suited him, and so he had taken the low-paying job in the sundries shop of the Stowell Building on Randolph Street.

Like his father and grandfather before him, Raymond was straight-backed, chocolate-skinned, handsome. He liked women and had little trouble drawing them to him.

And it was his woman, the woman he called Lilly because she reminded him of the flower. He had met her at work more than a year ago and in that year she had encouraged his ambition. He had begun by taking a night course at the downtown campus of Loyola University to show Lilly that he could become something. He would walk to the school from work even in a snowstorm and catch the subway a few blocks away after class. He had done well in that first class and in the next two, English and algebra, the following semester. He had begun to think he had a chance somewhere in the future to become a lawyer. He had told her of his plans and she had encouraged him while they lay in his bed trying to keep warm, and they had talked and planned for the future.

But life had changed so quickly.

And working in a matchbox shop in an office-building lobby paid little.

And people like George DuPelee were so easy to find.

And one was tempted to take a chance.

It would have gone perfectly had not George panicked and shot the woman. Raymond had no criminal record. He had a job. He was going to school. But, now …

Now what? Now where? In front of Raymond Carrou, gray-white in the light from the television, lay the money he had taken from the dead man, one hundred and eighty-seven dollars. The jewelry, worthless. To sell it would mean risking discovery by the police.

Raymond rubbed his forehead and looked at George.

Maybe there was still something to be done. Maybe the woman was not dead. Maybe the baby inside her was still alive. He was sure the man he had shot was dead. No doubt about it. But the woman. George had shot her once. Maybe, maybe …

He tried to think. Could someone have seen them get into the car when they had run from the crime? Could someone in a window have seen them, be able to identify them? Not likely. Two black men bundled in the cold. But the car, a distinctive wreck. It was parked now behind the building in the space reserved for the Ace hardware store's customers. He would have to move it in a few hours. The Haitian family that ran the hardware store wouldn't give him a hard time. They were afraid of the lean, handsome man from Trinidad who smiled knowingly at their women and hinted at a violence his eyes confirmed.

Now he should sleep. When the sun came up he would drink strong coffee and make a plan. He was much calmer now as he turned off the television set. He had possibilities to work with, the first jagged pieces of a plan that might allow him to survive or maybe even come out of this with What he had planned for, more than the sad pile of bills he now folded and shoved into his pocket.

The floor was cold even through Raymond's socks. He moved to the bed, not bothering to undress, and climbed in, curling over on one side, covering his exposed ear with a pillow to mute the sound of George's snoring.

When the sun came up, Raymond would have his plan.

When the sun came up.

A
BE WAS SURE EVEN
before he had fully opened the door that his wife and daughter knew about David and Carol.