Lieberman's Day (7 page)

Across the living room, sitting at the dining room table, dressed in a no-nonsense gray suit with a white blouse, her dark hair tied severely back, was his daughter, Lisa. It was too early for Lisa to be dressed. It was too early for Lisa to be up unless they knew.

He closed the door and looked across the room at his daughter, who shivered at the chill he had brought in.

“Your mother?” asked Lieberman, taking off his rubbers.

“With Aunt Yetta,” said Lisa, pale, composed.

“And Maish?” Lieberman added, removing his coat and hat.

“Aunt Yetta says Uncle Maish walked out of the hospital without saying where he was going.”

“Was he dressed warm? Did they say?”

“I don't know,” said Lisa.

In more than thirty years of dealing with sudden, violent, and unexpected death, Abe had seen a range of reactions from complete denial of reality to protective glee at the freeing of the soul of the victim from the troubles of the imperfect world. He had seen an old man and woman take each others' hands when informed of the death of their only grandchild and walk out of the front door of their apartment never to be seen again. One young wife, a black woman with an astonishingly beautiful Egyptian face, who had been told that her cab driver husband had been murdered for eighteen dollars by a big, white, red-headed man, had walked the streets with a gun until she encountered a man vaguely fitting the description and shot him in the face. The black woman had been a lawyer. The red-headed victim had been a Red Cross worker.

“Bess is angry with you,” Lisa said as her father padded across the carpeted living room.

“I didn't want to wake her,” said Lieberman, standing over his daughter. “David is dead. Your mother needed rest so she could help with the living.”

“That should be her choice,” said Lisa seriously. Lisa had always been serious, even as a child, seldom smiling. Biochemistry suited her. And though he had not thought so at first, Todd Cresswell suited her, too. Todd, tall, blond, brooding, saw in his wife the tragic bearing of the Greek tragedies he knew, taught, and loved. The sense of tragedy was there. What Todd had failed to see was the fire, which was not Greek but Semitic.

“How are you doing?” he asked.

Lisa shrugged and tapped her red fingernails on the polished dark tabletop.

“David is … really …” she said, looking up at him. Her eyes were wide and brown, moist but not crying, a glint of light on her contact lenses.

Lieberman nodded his head yes and Lisa stopped tapping, stood up, and faced him. He held his arms open and she stepped forward to hug him. Lisa was not a world-class hugger. She held back, always held back, but this was better than most other times and she let Abe hold on for almost ten seconds before she stepped back. Her eyes were no longer moist.

“You? How are you?” she asked.

“The truth?”

“No, a lie,” she said.

“The question was rhetorical,” Abe said with a sad smile.

“Really,” Lisa answered with her own sad smile. “How are you, Abe?”

“Tired, cold, especially my feet, wondering why I'm not angrier than I am, wondering what I'm going to say to your mother and how long she'll stay angry and hurt, readying myself to get dressed again and be with Maish for an hour or two, anxious to find the people who killed my nephew, my brother's son, to find them, get in their faces and repeat ‘why, why, why' for hours or days till they sink to the floor crying the way Yetta and Maish must be crying. Am I making sense here or am I just rambling like a …”

“Classics professor,” said Lisa, moving toward the kitchen. “Coffee's hot.”

Lieberman followed his daughter knowing what she knew, that he wouldn't go back to bed or even rest, that he would look at the
Tribune
if it had been delivered yet, have a couple of cups of coffee, and be out the door again.

“Kids know?” he asked, moving to the table and sitting on the red-leatherette and chrome chair.

“No,” said Lisa. “I'll tell them when they get up. I think I should let them go to school.”

“Yeah,” agreed Lieberman, accepting the hot cup his daughter handed him.

“I feel guilty,” Lisa said, still standing, her arms folded over her breasts. “I'm feeling guilty that I'm not feeling more. You know if Carol will …?”

“Doctor thinks so,” said Lieberman.

“The baby?”

“Looks good,” he said, after taking a long sip. “No promises.”

The phone rang suddenly, piercingly. Father and daughter looked at it without reaction for two rings and then Lisa stepped to the wall and answered.

“For you,” she said, holding out the phone.

The long cord reached to the table, but the receiver had to be held firmly or it would, as it had more than a dozen times, go skittering and crashing back toward the wall as if it were tied by a thick rubber band.

“Hello,” he said.

“Abe?”

The voice was familiar. A man.

“Syd Levan here. Say, I'm sorry to call you at home, a morning like this. Let me say how sincerely sorry I am for your family's loss.”

“Thank you, Syd.”

Syd was one of the morning crowd of old men with nothing more to do with their lives than hang around Maish's T&L Deli on Devon. The group, known in the neighborhood as the Alter Cockers, consisted of Jews, with the exception of Howie Chen, whose family had owned the Peking Lantern Chinese Restaurant one block down just off California. Howie and his wife were the last of their clan in the neighborhood. Two sons and a daughter had all moved to California, where they were all engineers.

Syd had been the one who had dubbed Abe's brother Nothing-Bothers Maish back when they were kids on the West Side. That name had preceded the founding of the Alter Cockers, had gone back to the days in the '40s when Syd had been a classmate of Maish's back at Marshall High School.

“We're at the T and L,” said Syd. “Maish is here. And he's acting, if I can say it, a little
meshugah.
He's got a right, considering. He's got a right, but we're …”

“I understand, Syd,” said Abe, watching Lisa pour herself a cup of orange juice.

“Well, that's it,” Syd whispered. “He's acting maybe not quite
meshugah,
but … He's acting like it's a day like any day, you know? And this is not a day like any other day.”

“I'll be there in ten minutes,” said Abe.

Lisa reached over to take the phone and crossed the room to hang it up as Abe drained his cup and stood up with a sigh.

“I gotta go,” he said.

“Uncle Maish went to work?”

Lieberman nodded and walked toward the kitchen door, his feet not yet fully warmed in his thick white socks.

“If I got murdered on the street, would you go to work?” she asked.

“If something happened to you,” Lieberman said, with a shudder he hoped did not show, “I'd find my own way to go crazy with grief. You tell Todd about David?” he asked, stepping past her.

“He has other interests,” she said. “Other distractions.”

Lieberman stopped and looked at his daughter, who turned from him and sat in the chair he had just vacated.

“Other interests?”

“A woman,” Lisa said. “A new faculty member. Alice Stephens told me.”

“Ah,” said Lieberman.

“Ah,” repeated Lisa, raising her eyebrows. “I walk out on him with the kids, tell him I want a new life. He chases me, pleads, begs, humiliates himself for five whole weeks, and then goes out and …”

Lieberman resisted the urge to check his watch.

“You think I'm being selfish,” she said.

“No,” said Lieberman.

“I don't want him, but I don't want anyone else to have him, at least not till I have someone first, if I wanted someone, which I do not.”

“So you're not going to tell him,” said Lieberman.

“You think he should know? He should know. He liked David. At least he said he liked David. I don't think they met more than two or three times, but … Can you tell him, Abe?”

“In my spare time,” Lieberman said.

“I'll leave a message for him at his office,” she said. “I'm not going to work today. I'll help Bess with Aunt Yetta, things.”

“I'll tell Todd,” said Lieberman.

Lisa looked down. “I can't stop thinking about myself,” she said.

“Someone close dies,” he said. “Sometimes you think about the time you've got and what you're going to do with it.”

Lisa smiled. “You've been reading philosophy?”

“No, Mike Royko. I gotta go, Lisa. Tell Barry and Melisa I'll bring them something tonight.”

“Are they going to have to go see David's body?” she whispered, so softly that he barely heard her.

“No,” he said.

She nodded and drank her coffee, knowing that there was no point in asking the next question, that she would have to go.

Lieberman thought he heard the first faint stirrings of his grandchildren in the room above him as he shuffled to the closet, put on his still-chilled overcoat, and slipped into his shoes and wet boots.

The day was just starting.

“Get up.”

George was aware of something, some presence, a voice, angry like his mother when he got up late for work back in Trinidad.

“Mmbunnn,” he mumbled, pushing away the hand that rocked him by the shoulder.

“Get up,” Raymond repeated.

George tried to open his eyes. He tried very hard and then made a special effort, spewing air from his puffed-out cheeks.

His eyes did not want to open, did not want to see, did not want to start a new day that would make him remember something he did not want to remember.

Raymond shoved him now, poked him with a long, thin finger.

“Get up. We've got work.”

“Work?”

There was something different about Raymond this morning. George had only known him for about a week and Raymond had seemed like other people he knew from the Islands, even if he did have a look in his eyes and did always have a book with him. But there was something since last night, a look George did not like, and yes, Raymond was talking differently, talking like a white American.

Now George did open his eyes.

“It's morning. What we gonna do in the morning?”

Raymond was dressed as he had been during the night. He was cleaning his glasses with a wad of toilet paper and staring at George, who suddenly remembered, remembered and reached for his forehead as he sat up with a start, his head buzzing painfully from an ache and the memory. Yes, atop his head was a soft reminder of warm fur.

“Oh, my God. We killed them. Raymond, we killed them both dead.”

“She may not be dead. The baby may not be dead,” said Raymond.

“Pregnant … Oh God, yes. I remember. She be having a baby,” said George.

Raymond looked angry. Raymond looked disgusted. But why should Raymond be angry? He had shot the man with the hat before George had shot the woman. He had shot the man with the hat when there had been no reason to shoot the man. George had simply lost his mind, his senses, but Raymond had …

“What are you thinking?” asked Raymond, looking down at his temporary partner.

“Nothin',” said George, planting his bare feet on the chilled floor and rubbing his face.

George needed a shave. He needed coffee. He needed food. He needed Raymond to tell him that they were safe, but Raymond had said something about working. How could they hide and work?

The sun was just coming up, gray through the dirty curtained windows. George wanted to sleep.

“What kind of work?” he asked.

“We need money. We need money to get out of here, get as far from here as we can, back to the Islands,” Raymond said, walking to the wall and putting his forehead against it as he clenched his fists. “I called in to my job, left a message I'm sick.”

“I don't know, man,” George said, blinking his eyes.

“No, you don't know,” Raymond agreed. “We're going down Sedgwick, over near Division. You know where that is?”

George nodded that he knew, but he had no idea what area of the city Raymond was talking about. George had been in Chicago for a few months and knew almost no streets or landmarks.

“We're going to rob three, four places fast, in-out, cash places that have morning money, Dunkin' Donuts, McDonald's. We've got nothing to lose if we get caught. What can they get on us worse than killing a white guy and his pregnant wife?”

Raymond turned from the wall to look at George like the sorry fool he was.

“That's what put us on Channel 5 this morning and maybe put us on the front pages,” said Raymond. “They're going to have descriptions, maybe fingerprints, who knows. We've got to get money and get out of here fast.”

“To the Islands?” asked George, stepping toward Raymond and looking ridiculous as he stood shirtless with a Russian fur hat clamped down to the top of his eyes.

“If we get enough,” said Raymond. Then he moved on to his lie. “Now here's how we're gonna to do this. They got a good description of me, maybe from the woman you shot.”

“Shot? She not dead?” asked George, stepping in front of Raymond, towering over him, shutting out the gray dawning light from the window. “Why didn't you start with that, man?”

Raymond strode past the giant and found a bag of pretzels on the cluttered table. He pulled out a handful, popped them in his mouth, and talked as he crunched with his back turned to George to be sure his face wouldn't betray him.

“I drive up to the place, keep the motor running. You run in, gun out, put it in the manager's face, have him …”

“Sometimes women run those …”

“Him, her, what difference does it make? You run in, gun up someone's nose, clean out the drawer into the bag I'm going to give you, and then you tear ass back to the car and we're on the way to the next Dunkin' Donuts before the cops even know we're still out there.”