Lieberman's Law (8 page)

Berk had spoken loudly to cheers: two of his brothers in the audience including Jimmy, Jr., people saying, “He's right,” laughter at his jokes. When he finished, he went with two of his people to an all-night place on Touhy where the waitress and manager weren't happy to see them, but treated them with polite blandness.

Three young men had approached Berk's group at a table, said they wanted to join. Berk welcomed them. So did the others. One said he'd probably lose his job clerking at a shoe store when he shaved his head but he wanted to be a Monger. Berk said he could get him other work.

That was when it happened. The waitress, a skinny rag in a wrinkled uniform with heavy bags under her eyes had come to the table and said, “One of you Berk?”

“Yeah,” Berk had said.

“Phone,” the waitress had said and then headed for the kitchen and their meager orders. She didn't expect much of a tip and was fairly sure they'd hang around until the place closed. She shuffled away and Berk went to the front of the coffee shop where one of the two pay phones was off the hook resting on the metal platform.

“Berk?” asked the man with a smile in his voice and the joy of a car salesman.

“Yeah.”

“Heard you talk tonight,” said the man who would never give his name but because of a slight Southern accent, Berk would always think of as Mr. Grits. “Son, you were good. Right up there with the best.”

“Thanks,” Berk said, going over the faces of the people who had been in the crowd, not being able to put one of those faces to this voice. Berk didn't ask how the man had found him, gotten the phone number. He knew the man must have followed him and must be calling from not very far away.

“You should be much bigger,” said Mr. Grits. “Doin' much bigger things. More doing, less talking. We've been talking about the niggers, the Jews, the Chinks, the Indians for more than a hundred and twenty years. It's time for doing.”

“Yeah?” said Berk not sure if he might be talking to a cop or even the FBI.

“I can get you cheap briefcases filled with unmarked money,” said Mr. Grits. “Not Washingtons wrapped in bank paper and lined up in neat lines so it looks like a lot but turns out to be a few thousand. I'm talking about big money for you, personally. Handle it the way you want. Just get a job done for us, a job that will fit quite nice with what I heard in the park tonight.”

“What jobs? How do I get the money?”

Mr. Grits had hung up. Berk had asked the night manager behind the counter, an older male duplicate of the waitress, if he had seen anyone come in and look at or use the phones. The man shrugged, said he'd gone to the can, thought maybe he had seen a man in a suit, wasn't sure.

Mr. Grits returned three days later. Berk had run three miles and went back to his apartment, his sweatshirt soaked. Pinned to the door was a note. The note said, “Bring this note with you. Go down to your mailbox. Take out the unstamped letter. Bring this note and the letter outside. When you finish reading the letter, burn it and this note right out on the street next to the fire hydrant.”

Berk had done as the note asked, feeling that the man he now called Mr. Grits was probably some kind of nut, but there had been cash in the envelope, a lot of cash. There was also a note asking him if he had thought about the call he had received and telling him he could keep the money no matter what.

Berk had walked outside, held up the letter and the note so that someone watching could see and burned them both. Mr. Grits was really watching out for his own ass. Berk decided to keep a couple of sheets of paper and some envelopes like the one he had just burned. If he got more messages from Mr. Grits, he would burn the fakes and pocket the real notes which might come in handy.

Berk visited his mother who was pushing seventy and working part-time at the Christian Resale Shop on Devon where the few dollars that were made went to the inner-city needy. Mrs. Berk didn't care if the needy were black, white, Jew, or Hindu. She had read the words of Jesus herself and heard Father Brian every week since before the boys were born. She had held her peace, kept to herself, and gone to work for the Resale Shop three weeks after her husband died in a parking garage fire.

Berk rarely visited his mother. She made him uncomfortable and he had the clear feeling that she was not always happy to see her youngest son. He always dressed neatly when he visited her and even took the earring out, but his shaven head and occasional pictures of him on television kept him from carrying off the role of peace-loving, dutiful Christian son.

Berk visited his mother that day, though. She was cordial, made him coffee, cut him a slice of cake, told him about his brothers and their families, and listened to him tell a few lies about what he was doing. Then, before he left and without his mother knowing, he hid the money from Mr. Grits inside the broken slat of wood at the back of his old closet. He had already put a few dollars there. He would put a lot more in that closet. Berk had plans beyond making speeches and getting into fights.

Then Berk waited, talking, marching, even doing a local television talk show and acting calm, intelligent, and highly and sincerely bigoted, insisting that his group never started violence, that they simply responded to it when someone tried to abridge their freedom to speak publicly, that it was television that had named him and his friends the Chicago Skinhead Hate Mongers. As far as the group was concerned, they were just friends who shared his ideas and wanted to protect the United States. He talked about the failure of immigration laws, the government's appeasement of lawbreakers if they were minorities—Mexicans, Haitians, Cubans, Chinese.

“They couldn't do anything about it if they even wanted to,” he had said on one show. “The law is too screwed up. There is no two-party system, just people out to get votes from foreigners so they can keep their jobs and their blood money. My grandparents came here legally. It should have stayed that way. Now, it's too late. It's people like us who have to take care of the problem.”

About a third of the audience, not counting his own people, had applauded. About half had booed and jeered, and the white-haired host had shaken her head at his statements.

And then he heard from Mr. Grits again. Little kid had stopped him on the street while he was running one morning handed him an envelope, and ran away. Berk had opened the envelope, found more money and a note saying, “Public phone on the right about half a block. Tear this up now into two pieces and dump it in the trash can on your left.”

Berk had done what he was told. He was beginning to understand Mr. Grits. The phone rang when he was no more than three feet from it. While he was on the phone, out of sight of the trash can, he was sure someone who worked for Mr. Grits was already picking up the torn note.

“Are you ready to talk seriously?” Mr. Grits said, as if this were the most beautiful day the world had yet experienced. “Or do I hang up and hope you make good use of the money you have been blessed with?”

“We talk.”

“Good,” said Mr. Grits. “There is a booth at the Burger King half a block away. Go there. Go to the toilet. Take your pants down. Lock the door. When no one else is in the room, we'll talk. If you try to see me, perhaps even succeed in seeing me, you'll never hear from me again. There will, however, come a time soon, when you will have accepted so much money from us that the option of ceasing our negotiations will be void.”

Mr. Grits hung up. Berk went to the toilet in the Burger King and talked to Mr. Grits in person though all he could see of the man were his neatly pressed tan slacks, brown socks, and expensive brown walking shoes.

The plan was a bit complex, but Berk understood. He would follow the plan and, in return, would receive a great deal of money and a substantial bonus when the job was done.

“After all, Mr. Grits said with a slight laugh, we don't expect you to plan the details of and execute the murder of perhaps several dozen people without reasonable compensation.”

And the money had come. Berk had planned and rethought his life. When he finished exercising that morning, Berk would practice the speech he planned to deliver that night to his followers. They would think he was making it up standing right up there at the front of the room, but he wrote it out longhand and memorized it, practiced in front of his mirror like Hitler, checked the time so he would not lose the real dummies who would be sitting there.

Berk thought he heard rain. That was fine with him. He would do his sit-ups and run another mile in the rain, feeling his T-shirt cling to and slap against his body. He'd laugh as he ran and people would get out of his way or cross the street if they saw him. He would run till he was exhausted and then go to Fran's apartment, wake her up, and screw her dripping wet, a little cold, tired. Fran's roommates would mind their business.

It would be a perfect morning.

Less than a year earlier, Alan Kearney looked like a young man. Dark groomed hair, strong chin, straight nose, Irish green eyes. Youth had left him fast after his ex-partner had been killed. Shepard had died cursing Kearney for seducing his wife.

Kearney, who had been headed for the top, including a well-placed society wife and a long-term move up to Commissioner, had gone empty. He was still Captain of Detectives and head of the brown brick police station on North Broadway. He did his job, put in the hours, praised, complained, pushed, and assigned, but Lieberman knew the ambition, the real fire, was out. Kearney might even marry yet. Every Irish cop, including Bill Hanrahan, had a woman for him, a cousin, a friend, a sister. Once in a while Kearney tried, but all the women reported that his idea of a good time was going to a bar, looking at his glass, and listening without saying much. It was even rumored that Kearney had made it to bed with Michael Horrigan's sister, Eva. The rumor was never confirmed and their single date never repeated.

At Bess's urging, Lieberman had once invited Kearney to the house for a Shabbat dinner. To his surprise, Kearney had accepted. That was when Lisa was home, separated from her husband. There had been no thought of matchmaking, at least on Lieberman's part, but Bess had been disappointed that Lisa and Kearney had little to say to each other and had left shortly after dinner. They paused only to say goodnight to Melisa and Barry, who had decided that Alan Kearney, their grandpa's boss, looked like a real policeman.

Now Kearney stood in the day room of the stone-walled Clark Street Station with very little day coming in through the narrow windows. The room was often used for interrogations. It looked like rain was coming. The sound of thunder grumbled far in the distance.

He stood in front of a white board, a red marker in his hand, and looked around the room. The whole squad of eight men and two women was present, plus a thin, dark man who sat at a scratched table. Kearney did not introduce him. No one looked at him or said anything.

“Lorber, you charge Gonzalez today by noon or he walks,” said Kearney. “You got enough to charge?” Kearney ticked off something with his marker on the yellow, lined pad before him on the table.

Lorber, who had once been a department weight-lifting champ, had kept in shape, but not the shape he had been in. Time had made the weights heavier. He was still strong enough to lift most perps off the ground and batter them against a wall, till they'd hear Chinese gongs, but station-house banter had Bill Hanrahan six to three if the two of them ever had to stand it out. Hanrahan had stopped drinking and held most of his strength as a gift of heredity rather than practice as Lorber had. Lorber was a station house grouse.

“I'm talking to a lawyer downtown today,” said Lorber, taking a drink from his Styrofoam coffee cup. “I think we've got enough for illegal possession, resisting and …”

“… but not for murder,” Kearney finished.

Lorber shrugged.

“We've got three Jewish synagogues desecrated in this district,” Kearney went on. “And a fourth in Albany Park.”

“And a fifth in Skokie,” added Lieberman, whose hands were folded in his lap.

“And a fifth in Skokie,” Kearney amended. “What do we have?”

“What we don't have is more to the point,” said Lieberman. “The FBI is taking prints. Most of them are matching congregants who don't like being printed. It's taking time. Perps may have worn gloves. We're working with the Skokie police. I stopped at B'nai Zion. Torn apart. The rabbi is old, the congregants are few and old. Rabbi Zechel was crying.”

Kearney nodded and passed around a stack of color photographs, each one marked on the back with the name of the desecrated synagogue where it was taken.

The squad looked over the photographs slowly and passed them along. The man none of them recognized looked especially closely at each photo before passing it on. Lieberman and Hanrahan did not look. They had seen them all, been in all of the desecrated synagogues.

“What's this?” asked Harley Buel, putting on his glasses.

“Which temple?” asked Lieberman.

Harley, a balding man in his forties who looked like a grade school principal, always seemed baffled by new information. Harley wanted his crimes clear, his suspects found quickly, and a quick plea bargain. Testifying in court was Harley's great fear. He had lost more than one case by his fear, which turned to surliness on the witness stand. He showed Lieberman the photo.

“That,” said Lieberman, “is a pile of shit.”

“They shit in the …?” Harley said, handing the photograph to Rene Catolino, a woman with the body of a model but a face that was hard and surrounded by a helmet of forbidding, straight, short black hair. She was, Lieberman thought, the best cop in the room other than Hanrahan and himself. Her father had been a cop. Lieberman had known him. Vince had gone through life in a blue police car showing no ambition and was happy when retirement came. Rene was different. She was ambitious.