Last Dark Place

by Stuart M. Kaminsky

  Billy Johnstone fired. Connie Gower jerked forward, pulling Lieberman with him. A second shot came and Connie went down. Lieberman tumbled forward and landed on his back.

  Lieberman hit his head on the tile floor as a third and fourth shot were fired. When he looked up, the old man, no longer wearing glasses, was on his knees and Parsons was standing with his Ruger in two hands.

  There was blood on the chest of the old man, who dropped the gun to the floor. Lieberman was aware of people screaming as the Yuma cop stepped forward and kicked the weapon, which had been dropped far beyond the reach or understanding of the old man, who slumped to his side, his eyes now searching out Lieberman.

  The old man said something as Lieberman, on his knees, touched Connie’s neck. Lieberman looked at the old man. Parsons was now standing over him.

  “He dead?” asked Johnstone.

  “He’s dead,” said the Yuma cop.

  The old man smiled, closed his eyes, and rolled over on his back.

  “He dead?” asked Lieberman, looking at the old man and searching his pockets for the key to the cuffs.

  “No,” said Parsons. “Not yet.”

  “Get an ambulance,” Lieberman shouted at the woman behind the checkin desk. Her mouth was open and her face dead white.

  3

  And a hard drinking woman or a slow thinking man will be the death of me yet.

  —“Hard Drinking Woman” by Lee Cole Carter

  WAYNE CZERBIAK WAS SANE. At least he was as sane as Monty Giopolus who stood behind the second of three chairs at the Clean Cut barbershop on Ridgeway in a small mall just off Howard Street. Eight dollars for a haircut, three barbers, no waiting. But sometimes there were only two barbers. Sometimes only one. Actually, there was usually only one, Monty. It didn’t matter. There was never much of a wait, if any, at the Clean Cut.

  Wayne listened to Monty talk as Monty cut his hair. Monty was a throwback. He had seen barbers in movies, old movies where the barber just talks and talks. That was a major reason Monty had become a barber. He liked to talk about anything. Baseball, the market, the latest gossip about drug abuse by some multimillion-dollar basketball player, Rhoda Brian’s stomach stapling. You name it, Monty had an opinion or little-known information on the subject.

  “Mayor’s thinking of putting in a park right over there,” Monty said, pointing through his shop window at an open space across the street. “It’s too small. Kids should have room to move around. But you know what I say?”

  He kept cutting but paused a beat so Wayne could respond by saying “What?”

  Wayne said nothing, just sat and listened. Songs ran through his head, background music that fit the scene. For Wayne, the major factor in his becoming a sign painter was that his father had been a sign painter till arthritis crippled him and he turned over his brushes and paints to Wayne three years ago and died a year later. Wayne had a natural talent and it was easier to just paint signs than do what was necessary to become a doctor or something. The fact was that Wayne couldn’t think fast on his feet. School had always been a puzzle he couldn’t solve, a game whose rules he could never learn.

  Besides, Wayne was proud of some of his work, the real challenges, like the sign he did a few months ago, black letters on yellow, Old English: PIECE OF CAKE, with a picture Wayne drew of a cake with white icing in a flowing, delicate pattern.

  The cake was vanilla with cherries inside. You couldn’t tell that by looking at the sign, but Wayne knew it. It was important to him to know things like that so he could make the cake look real. Without knowing what was inside, it was just a hollow shell.

  Sometimes Wayne felt like a hollow shell. When that happened, he quickly filled the shell with food. He was thinking of a Big Mac while Monty kept talking.

  “I say,” said Monty, “that it’s a payback to the alderman. Payback for things done, favors. You know what I mean?”

  Wayne didn’t answer. He was thinking of a Big Mac and how he was going to kill Lee Cole Carter.

  Bringing Sean O’Neil to the T&L deli was probably a bad idea. They were sitting in the back booth, the third booth that was semi-reserved for the friends and family of Abe Lieberman’s brother Maish, who owned and operated the T&L.

  Bill Hanrahan was sitting in the booth, facing the door. He looked across the table at the detective who was shaking his head and looking at the lox, onion, and cream cheese omelet in front of him.

  “What?” asked Hanrahan, a fork full of his own omelet almost to his mouth.

  “I dunno,” said O’Neil. “Jew food. I dunno. It doesn’t go down right. Know what I mean? Something about it just doesn’t go down right.”

  O’Neil was almost as big as Bill Hanrahan, who looked like the pro-football lineman he had almost been before the knee injury. O’Neil was about fifteen years younger than Bill, a few pounds lighter and a muscled weight lifter. Bill thought he could take the younger man on if it came to that. He didn’t think O’Neil had the deep stomach. He could be wrong.

  “No, what do you mean?” asked Hanrahan, chewing on a mouthful of omelet. “What doesn’t go down right?”

  People making their regular morning stop before heading for work filled the red leatherette swivel seats at the counter. At the eight-seat window table behind O’Neil, five old men were arguing loudly.

  “Come on,” said O’Neil, buttering his toasted bagel and nodding toward the loud old men. “Listen to them.”

  He turned his head to his right to indicate the group of old men. Hanrahan looked at the regular morning meeting of the alter cockers, all old Jews with the exception of Howie Chen, who was as old as most of them and spoke better Yiddish, the result of having owned a Chinese restaurant two blocks down on Devon for over forty years. Howie was a cousin of Hanrahan’s wife Iris. Iris’s father owned a Chinese restaurant on Sheridan Road. Hanrahan wondered what Sean O’Neil thought about the Chinese. Hanrahan’s eyes met those of Morris Hurwitz, PhD, not the oldest, nor most outspoken or even the unofficial leader of the alter cockers, but definitely the smartest.

  There was a fleeting contact of something like understanding between the Irish cop and the retired Jewish social worker. Herschel Rosen, the cockers’ would-be comic, followed Hurwitz’s eyes and said, “The Irish cop is here with reinforcements to protect him from the ancient mariners. When is Lieberman coming back?”

  O’Neil made a face.

  “Due back today,” Hanrahan said above the low level of talk at the counter and the clatter of dishes as Maish waddled around, sad-dog faced, delivering plates of food.

  Lieberman had introduced Bill to the T&L and the alter cockers four years ago. It had taken Hanrahan a few months to get used to the place, to the banter. The food he liked particularly, especially the herring in cream sauce.

  “None too soon,” said Red Bloomberg, who may have once been Irish-redheaded but was now bald. “How’s your cousin, the mayor? He going to get my Justin that job in City Hall?”

  Hanrahan was not the mayor’s cousin, but the mayor was Irish.

  “I’m working on it,” Hanrahan said, reaching for his coffee.

  “Boy,” said O’Neil. “Typical Jew crap, wanting special treatment. You related to Daley?”

  “No,” said Hanrahan after a sip of coffee. “And that old man knows it. It’s a joke, a running joke. Friendly.”

  O’Neil, who had professed his dislike of the Jew food, was doing a good job at finishing his bagel and butter with a thin slice of Nova lox. He was almost through with his omelet.

  “Funny,” said O’Neil emotionlessly.

  “Not the point,” said Hanrahan. “He’s making contact, showing everyone he knows a cop. It’s not much but it makes him happy. The man’s got colon cancer. It’s slowly killing him.”

  “Tough,” said O’Neil. “My dad died in Korea when a cook blew a hole in his back. Where was your Jew?”

  Hanrahan put down his cup and felt his fists tightening. O’Neil was Irish. His face was pure beefy no-neck Irish,
an Irish much like Hanrahan’s father and, yes, Hanrahan himself.

  “How about we talk about the case?” asked Hanrahan, unclenching his fists and finishing the last of his omelet.

  Hanrahan’s attention now turned to the bowl of herring in cream sauce he had been saving for last.

  “You really going to eat that?” asked O’Neil.

  “No, I’m just going to admire it,” said Bill, plunging his fork into a large piece of herring.

  O’Neil shook his head. A few weeks earlier he had been transferred to the Clark Street station from the Eighteenth, the East Chicago district a few blocks from Cabrini Green. When Lieberman went to pick up his prisoner in Yuma the day before, a bag lady had been killed in an alley on Sherwin. Hanrahan had caught the case and Captain Kearney had assigned O’Neil to him till Lieberman returned.

  Hanrahan would have preferred to take it as a 10-99 and work it alone, but Kearney had insisted on a two-officer unit, a 10-4.

  Bill worked slowly on his herring.

  “How about we get going?” said O’Neil. “I don’t feel all that comfortable in here. You know what I’m saying? Like the Palestinians surrounded by them.”

  “Cut that shit,” said Hanrahan.

  “Shit?”

  “About the Jews. Yesterday it was blacks and Hispanics.”

  “Niggers and spics,” O’Neil corrected. “They didn’t hear me.”

  “Not the point,” said Hanrahan. “I heard you. I don’t want to hear you again.”

  “About anything?”

  “About racial crap. We sit right here and go over it. I finish what I’m eating. Then we go.”

  O’Neil shrugged. Maish brought them refills on the coffee. Maish, whose son had been murdered by a black Jamaican a few years earlier, held no anger against blacks or Jamaicans. Hanrahan knew that. Maish saved his rage and anger for God.

  O’Neil sighed and pulled out his notebook.

  “While you were thinking about being fucking politically correct,” O’Neil said, looking at his notebook, “I talked to the uniform who found her. That’s all right with you right? I mean you did tell me …”

  “Fine,” said Hanrahan, pouring cream into his coffee.

  “And I went to see the body,” O’Neil went on. “Talked to the ME. That all right with you, too?”

  “When?”

  “About four this morning. I hear you have a new wife. Didn’t want to wake you before I had to. You know you could have been …”

  “What did you find?” asked Hanrahan, certain now that he could not handle a full day with this son of a bitch, Irish or no Irish.

  “You know that series of random beatings by a carful of teens?”

  “The Twentieth, Foster District,” said Hanrahan.

  The beatings in the Ravenswood neighborhood where Bill lived were getting worse. There had been five of them. Witnesses had given some identification. No one had been killed. At least not before the bag lady.

  But the bag lady had been killed in Bill’s territory, the Twenty-fourth, the Rogers Park District.

  “Wounds consistent with baseball bats like victims of the other beatings reported seeing,” said O’Neil.

  “No one saw this one,” Hanrahan said. “How do you know it’s the same …”

  “Intuition,” said O’Neil, biting his lower lip and winking. “Time of night matches. Wounds match. Nothing taken, at least nothing we know. Nothing taken in the other beatings either. Didn’t look like she had anything worth taking, not even her life.”

  “The uniform who took the call with his partner opened a cup of hot, steamy, and delicious black coffee sold by a crosseyed Indian with a cart who showed up to feed the crowd of gawkers. Very enterprising, those Indians.”

  Hanrahan stared at O’Neil, who smiled.

  “Want to know what he said? The uniform?”

  Hanrahan nodded.

  “He thinks he may know who did it. Says he and his partner ran down a carful of kids a few nights ago. Ticketed the driver for running a red light. Kids were white. Anyway, my uniform, for whom I had bought coffee, does a search, checks the trunk. Want to know what he found?”

  There were only two people left at the counter, but none of the alter cockers had left.

  “Baseball uniforms and shoes in the trunk,” said O’Neil.

  “And bats,” Bill guessed.

  “Irish smarts,” said O’Neil, tapping his own forehead.

  “You got the driver’s name?”

  “And address.” O’Neil pointed to his notebook.

  Hanrahan’s cell phone played the opening notes of “Danny Boy.” He pulled it from his pocket and said, “Hanrahan.”

  “Father Murph, I’ve got a delay.”

  “What happened?”

  “Gower’s dead. Shot. Not by me. I’ll fill in the holes later. I called Kearney. And Bess. It’ll be another day.”

  “Keep in touch, Rabbi,” said Hanrahan.

  Lieberman clicked off. So did Hanrahan.

  “Lieberman?” O’Neil asked.

  Hanrahan answered, “Let’s go.”

  They got up from the booth, paid the check, and heard Herschel Rosen call after them as they went through the door, “Go catch the bad guys, corned beef and cabbage. We’ll hold down the fort.”

  “We’ll man the barricades,” said Hurwitz.

  “Batten down the hatches,” added Hy Glick.

  Outside the sky was morning April-bright.

  “The uniform who told you all this. He Irish?”

  “Nope,” said O’Neil. “A wop.”

  There was a soft blue-green fluorescent bulb over the head of the bed in the recovery room. The oscilloscope hummed and blipped quietly, creating green mountains and valleys on a black background.

  Lieberman sat, cup of coffee in his hand, his eyes going from the thin black man in the bed to the screen.

  The man in the bed had been shot in the chest. The wound, Lieberman has been told, was serious but probably not critical. The bullet, which broke a rib and grazed a kidney, has been removed and internal bleeding stopped.

  His name was Billy Johnstone. He was almost seventy-one and, like Lieberman who was sixty-one, looked far older than his years. Johnstone’s mouth was partly open, eyes closed, a tube through his left nostril. The hospital gown was open enough so Lieberman could see the chest of curly white hair slowly heaving in and out.

  Lieberman drank some coffee. It wasn’t bad. It wasn’t good, but it was coffee. He wasn’t supposed to drink caffeinated coffee. He didn’t know if this coffee was decaffeinated. He didn’t care. He sipped and remembered his Snickers bars. He put his cardboard cup on the nightstand, pulled a candy bar from his pocket, unwrapped one end and took a bite.

  A uniformed Yuma police officer sat outside the closed door. Billy Johnstone wasn’t going anywhere, not for a while, and then to jail to wait for the legal wrangling, a deal to be made, or prison time. This was Yuma’s case, but Abe’s prisoner had been killed and he needed to know why, not only to satisfy his own curiosity but also to put in his report, a report he definitely was not looking forward to writing.

  Lieberman closed his eyes and heard a raspy thin voice say, “You got blood.”

  Lieberman looked at the man on the bed. His eyes were open but the lids were fluttering.

  “Enough to keep me going,” said Lieberman.

  “No, I mean you got blood on your shirt there.”

  Johnstone tried to raise a bony arm to point at Lieberman’s shirt.

  “Sorry ’bout that,” Johnstone said.

  “It’ll wash out.”

  “I know, but …”

  “Want a Snickers bar?” asked Lieberman.

  “Like ’em, but I don’t think I’m supposed to eat anything,” said Johnstone.

  “You want to talk?” asked Lieberman.

  “Not ’specially.”

  “Just a few questions.”

  The old man blinked his eyes and nodded, indicating a few questions would
be about all he could handle.

  “Why’d you shoot him?”

  “He’s dead? For sure?”

  “He’s dead.”

  The old man smiled and closed his eyes.

  “Thought I’d be, too. That was the plan. He was a bad man, a killer, that right?”

  “He was,” said Lieberman. “That why you killed him?”

  “Just felt like it.”

  “Just something to do on a rainy morning in Yuma,” said Lieberman flatly. “Get a gun, sneak it into the airport, shoot a bad man.”

  “Something like that,” Johnstone said.

  “Someone paid you.”

  “Hmm. You a baseball person?”

  “Yes,” said Lieberman.

  “Good. Two kinds of people. Baseball and not baseball. You know what I’m saying?”

  “Yes.”

  “Back some forty-five years ago it looked like I might make it to the major leagues,” Johnstone said. “You imagine that? Looking at me now, you imagine that?”

  “Who’d you play for?”

  “Kicked around some. Ended with a Red Sox Triple-A team. Thought I’d go up. Went down and out instead. My last season I drove in fifty-four runs and had a batting average of two-eighty right on the button, right on it. Got sent down. Just when things were lookin’ right. Shot down. Sent down. Down and out.”

  “Why did you shoot the man in the airport?”

  “You know I’ve got cancer of the liver and some other parts,” Johnstone said.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Not half as much as I am,” the old man said with a sigh.

  “The question,” said Lieberman.

  “You got children?” He squinted at Lieberman and said, “Grandchildren?”

  “A daughter. Two grandchildren.”

  “How old?”

  “Twelve and nine. Boy’s twelve. Girl’s nine.”

  “I’ve got three. Grandchildren. Smart. College smart.”

  Lieberman was about to speak when Johnstone raised his right hand palm up for him to stop.

  “Takes a lot of money to send kids to college,” Johnstone said.