Last Dark Place

by Stuart M. Kaminsky

  There was no talking to the Puerto Ricans and their madman leader, Woo had said. That he would leave to Lieberman. He would, however, reluctantly add his presence to the planned site of carnage to defuse the situation. It would be Lieberman’s job to keep the incident from the public eye and to arrange, with Woo’s support, a truce, a cease-fire, perhaps even a meeting.

  The meeting was scheduled, if possible, to take place the next day. Lieberman didn’t put much hope in such a get-together. He had seen El Perro and Parker Liao face each other on the street.

  Bess turned out the downstairs lights, leaving only the night-light in the bathroom and the light over the sink in the kitchen.

  Abe and Bess moved to their bedroom on the first floor beyond the dining room. The stairs leading to the children’s rooms was outside their door. Lisa was doubling up with her daughter, and Barry, three days from officially being a man in the eyes of God, was in his own room.

  Lieberman removed his gun and holster, placed them in the drawer of the night table on his side of the bed, and locked the drawer with the key he wore around his neck.

  Bess moved to the closet.

  “A long day,” she said, taking off her dress.

  “A long day,” Abe agreed, sitting on the bed to take off his trousers.

  “You’re going to try to sleep?” she said, removing her slip.

  “I’ll take a bath, read a little,” he said, folding his trousers.

  “Why not try the pills Dr. Feinberg gave you to sleep?”

  The reasons why he did not take the pills were convoluted and not completely known to Abraham Lieberman. He said he didn’t like the idea of being helpless and sedated. Another reason supported his insomnia. He had a love-hate relationship with his affliction. He was frequently tired from too little sleep, but he was also comfortable in his late-night fatigue, the solitary time in the hot water of a bath reading whatever he had accumulated, or sitting in the living room in front of the television watching black-and-white movies he had seen years before and often since. His insomnia was his alone, his comforting partner, and his enemy.

  When they were in their pajamas, Lieberman kissed his wife, said “good night,” and turned off the light. A heavy weariness settled on him and he considered actually trying to sleep, an attempt that usually left him frustrated.

  This time the weariness brought to mind Billy Johnstone in a hospital bed in Yuma, Arizona. Lieberman lay back, closed his eyes, and fell asleep. The old man in the bed in Yuma winked at him.

  12

  BETWEEN THE TIME ABE went to sleep a few minutes before three in the morning and was awakened by the humming of his alarm clock at six, the following had taken place inside the city limits of Chicago:

  A twenty-two-year-old named Daryl McCracken, who had moved to the city from Dry Oak, Tennessee, five months earlier, was beaten to death by Simon Pardee, fifty-three, the boyfriend of Daryl’s mother. All three had been drinking in the mother’s house in the Lakeview District. They got into an argument over Daryl’s lack of employment and the fact that Simon paid all the bills. Simon used his fists. Daryl’s mother, Martha Ann, was too drunk to remember any of it.

  Mario Stancini, a twenty-one-year veteran of the Chicago police department, was shot to death by seventy-seven-year-old Martin Terwiliger while serving a subpoena for Terwiliger to appear in housing court. Terwiliger’s two-flat apartment building just off of Cicero Avenue near Midway Airport was in serious need of repair. Sancini was assigned to District 17 but was “detailed” to the Corporation Council’s Office. District 17 had been overloaded and Stancini’s detailing was considered to be a few weeks of easy duty.

  Arida Royce, thirty, killed her boyfriend and the father of their two children, ages six and four, in their apartment in a public housing complex on Roosevelt Road. She claimed he was angry because she came home at two in the morning after working a double shift at an all-night Wendy’s nearby on Jackson just outside the Loop. She claimed he threatened her. She claimed it was self-defense. The boyfriend was found in bed and appeared to have been sleeping. She had hit him in the head fifteen times with a baseball bat. He had been out of jail for one week for a drug conviction and had been found not guilty on two counts of homicide the year before. The state’s attorney had no intention of pursuing the circumstances of the death.

  At two in the morning, a seventeen-year-old girl and a sixteen-year-old girl were shot in the 8000 block of South Woodlawn in the South Shore District south of the University of Chicago. Both were shot once in the back when someone started to shoot into a group of teens congregated in front of an all-night liquor store. The seventeen-year-old died. The sixteen-year-old was alive and being treated in Christ Hospital. The seventeen-year-old had a one-year-old daughter. In three days, the police would find and arrest two men who said they had been shooting at two men the girls had been talking to. The four men had been in a bar fight two hours earlier. Neither the dead girl nor the one who survived had been in the bar.

  Hope Simmon, seventy-five, was shot in the head just after midnight in a home invasion on the South Side. Hope and her eighty-four-year-old brother sold candy from her apartment in a housing project. Everyone in the project knew it, including Roy Tomkins, sixteen, who forced his way into her apartment wearing a mask. Hope recognized him, addressed him by name. Tomkins fired, grabbed thirty-seven dollars and a box of M&M’s, Junior Mints, and Tootsie Rolls, and left forgetting to shoot the weeping brother. The police went to Tomkins’s home. Easy to find. Mask and gun in the garage. He had robbed the Simmon apartment eight months earlier. That time he got away with forty-two dollars and four Snickers bars.

  At the furthest edge of the city almost into Calumet, there was a three-way shoot-out between the Latin Dragons, the Latin Counts, and the Latin Kings. Someone was on the wrong turf. The only one hit by a bullet was a city bus driver named Leroy Vanescuva who was asleep in bed when the stray shot went through his first-floor bedroom window. The bullet took off the little finger on his left hand. It was the fifth exchange of gunfire between the three gangs in the last six days. They had taken Sunday off out of respect for their parents.

  James Murray Bendner, thirty-two, a Gangster Disciple, released from prison one day earlier after serving three years on a drug charge, was shot at one-fifteen in the morning inside a home he was visiting. Two males in hoods and masks invaded the home and shot Bendner six times. There were ten witnesses. It was a known crack house. On their way out, the perpetrators robbed and pistol-whipped a man sitting in front of the house who said the shooters were Black Gangster Disciples. Ten minutes later the injured man changed his mind.

  At two in the morning, an unidentified man randomly shot two people on Hollywood Avenue on the North Side. The shooter drove a fenderless old Chevy to a nearby motel. The hostage barricade terrorist team hit the killer’s room and found the man dead of a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head. There was no identification in his pockets or in the room and he had registered as Thomas Aquinas.

  Just after midnight, Paul Berg, known as Blue by the few friends he had, a number that had been reduced by two the day before with the shooting death of Comedy and Easy Dan, was arrested by two uniformed officers as he lay on a bench at a bus stop at the corner of Lawrence and Broadway. He gave them no trouble and withdrew the gun from his pocket with thumb and finger as he was told.

  He laid the gun down gently on the bench as both officers leveled their weapons at him. Before six in the morning, the gun would definitely be identified as the one that had killed Comedy and Easy Dan.

  At five A.M. the phone in Iris and Bill Hanrahan’s bedroom rang. The dog sleeping near the door woke up and Bill, sitting up, could see its green eyes looking at him. Bill picked up the phone on the third ring. He was used to calls in the middle of the night. He was a cop.

  “Got the guy with the gun, one that killed those two on Rockwell,” came the weary voice of Detective Stan Green. “Want to come in?”

  “Be there in an
hour,” Bill said, hanging up and swinging his legs over the side of the bed.

  He was aware of Iris sitting up beside him, her hand resting on his shoulder. He reached back to pat her hand reassuringly. The dog ambled to the bed. Bill touched its head.

  “Got to get up,” he said.

  He had started to rise when the phone rang again. He picked it up.

  “Yeah, Stan,” he said.

  “Is your wife awake?” came the soft voice of what sounded like a young man. The words were precise and distinctly articulated.

  “Who is this?” Bill asked.

  “A person calling from a phone in the lobby of the Drake Hotel,” he answered.

  “What do you want with her?” Hanrahan said.

  “I’d prefer to tell her. Just say it is the concerned individual who spoke to her earlier about the difficulties certain children face when they are brought into the world by parents who have not considered the consequences of their actions.”

  “Why don’t you just tell me,” Bill said, looking back at Iris, who had turned on the light on the table near her side of the bed.

  “Very well,” said the man amiably. “The child she will bear, if you allow that to happen, will be a mongrel, perhaps a fair and even handsome or beautiful mongrel, but a mongrel nonetheless. It is not a good idea to have a child who will have to face the scorn of two hostile cultures. And there are far greater consequences. I tell you this as a friend.”

  “Well, friend,” said Bill, forcing himself to be as amiable as the caller. “You are a little squeal of a bastard. I intend to find you and do you some much-deserved bodily harm.”

  “I’ll call again,” the man said. “This seems to be a bad time.”

  He hung up. Bill pressed *99 and waited while the phone rang. He let it ring, reaching back to take Iris’s hand. It rang six times, seven times, eight times. And then someone said, “Yeah?”

  “Who are you?” asked Hanrahan.

  “Who am … I’m a person on the way up to my room from the bar is who I am. Who are you?”

  The man sounded mildly drunk.

  “The police,” said Bill. “Did you see a man walking away from this phone?”

  “A … only other person I see is a guy walking across the lobby. It’s I-don’t-know-what-time-in-the-morning. Not many people wandering around.”

  “Describe him,” said Hanrahan.

  “The guy walking across the lobby?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I don’t know. About thirty maybe, maybe more. Nice sport jacket. His back’s to me. Dark hair. He’s turning a little, looking back at me.”

  There was a pause.

  “What’s going on?” asked Bill.

  “I’m waving to him to come back,” the man said. “You want to talk to him, right?”

  “Is he coming?”

  “No, but he smiled. He’s leaving the hotel now.”

  “Would you recognize him if you saw him again?” asked Bill.

  “Don’t think so, but maybe. Did I tell you my name?”

  “What’s your name?”

  “Sorry,” said the man. “I’m not getting involved in whatever this is. I’m hanging up and going to my room.”

  “Wait,” said Hanrahan.

  “Oh,” said the man. “The guy in the lobby. He’s Chinese, Japanese, something like that.”

  The man hung up. So did Bill.

  “Don’t answer the phone,” he said to Iris. “I’ll call and have the number changed. You know who that was?”

  “A person who called me earlier,” she said. “I didn’t want you to know.”

  “Our phone number’s not listed,” he said.

  “It doesn’t matter,” Iris said. “I know who the caller is. I recognized his voice.”

  Abe showered, shampooed, shaved, dressed, got his gun out of the night-table drawer, and kissed his wife. Bess opened her eyes.

  “Good morning,” he said.

  “That’s a kiss?” she said.

  He kissed her again, this time with what started as a desire to please her that turned into a desire to please himself.

  “Hold that thought, Lieberman,” she said.

  “Maybe we can get to bed early tonight,” he said. “I can always get up later if I can’t sleep.”

  “Something to look forward to,” she said. “I’m going back to sleep.”

  He carried his shoes in his left hand, closed the bedroom door behind him, and went silently in his socks to the kitchen to microwave a cup of coffee in his small Starbucks thermos cup before heading to the T&L, where he would savor a lox and onion omelet before heading for the station.

  He opened the kitchen door. Lisa was sitting in her white terry cloth robe, a cup of coffee nested in her two hands.

  “You know where I got this robe?” she asked.

  “Your mother and I gave it to you when you were sixteen,” he said, moving to the rack near the sink where his thermos sat. “We got it from a hotel in New York where we went to your cousin Sol’s wedding. It’s got Taft Hotel written on the back. It’s been hanging at the back of your closet for more than ten years.”

  “You stole it from the hotel,” said Lisa.

  Lieberman scratched his chin.

  “No,” he said. “We paid for it as a gift for you. All this time you thought we stole it?”

  “I’m not sure I believe you,” she said.

  Lieberman poured himself some of yesterday’s coffee from the glass pot nestled into the machine near the microwave.

  “Ask your mother,” he said. “You got up to accuse me of a ten-year-old misdemeanor?”

  “Almost fifteen years old,” she said. “And that’s not why I’m up. Couldn’t sleep. I think I’ve got your insomnia.”

  Another item on my daughter’s list of grievances against her father, Lieberman thought.

  Lieberman filled the thermos with the remainder of yesterday’s coffee, put the thermos into the microwave, set it for one minute, and pushed the start button. He turned to face his daughter while it hummed away.

  “He’s coming,” she said.

  “The Messiah?” he asked blandly.

  “That’s not funny, Abe.”

  “It’s early in the morning. Who’s coming?”

  “My husband,” she said. “He’ll be here this afternoon. He wants me to come back. God knows why.”

  “You sure God knows why? You ever wonder how God stores all this information?” he said. “Or why?”

  “Abe.”

  “Sorry, bad night and I’ve got some things that are going to make it a bad day. And I have a headache. And my stomach …”

  “What am I going to do?” Lisa asked, looking at him for an answer she would almost certainly ignore in favor of whatever one was dwelling inside her ready to pop out when she gave it half a chance.

  The microwave binged to let him know his coffee was ready.

  “I like him,” Lieberman said.

  “And me?”

  “You I love.”

  “Why?”

  “Why?” he repeated. “You’re my only child. You are half a lifetime of memories that give meaning to my existence. You are the mother of my beloved grandchildren. When I look at you I pray to whatever God or Gods may be that nothing happens to you.”

  “Do you like me?” she asked earnestly.

  “Most of the time,” he said. “About seventy-five percent. The question, however, is ‘Do you like me?’”

  “I love you, Abe,” she said.

  “Give me a ‘like’ percentage,” he said, taking the thermos out of the microwave and pressing on the top.

  “Fifty?” she said.

  “An improvement over the last time,” he said. “Progress.”

  “I asked you for advice,” she said.

  He walked over to her, thermos in his left hand, and put out his right to touch his daughter’s cheek. She didn’t turn away.

  “Stop being angry at yourself,” he said. “Whatever you’ve done wr
ong is in the past. And not everything you’ve done is wrong. And you’ve got a lot of years to do what’s right.”

  “Yeah,” she said, smiling.

  It wasn’t much of a smile but it was real.

  “And,” he added, “if you stop being angry at yourself, I can hope you’ll stop being angry at me for my countless parental misdeeds.”

  “I think I’ll go back to sleep,” she said. “The kids will be up in a few hours.”

  “Your mother will get them to school,” he said.

  “I think I’ll let her sleep.”

  There was nothing more to say. Not at the moment. Lieberman left the house.

  “This is the day,” Wayne said aloud as he lay in bed and watched the gray twi-morning turn to sunny bright.

  Definitely today. He would shower, shave, spend a little time carefully deciding what to wear, have breakfast out. Yes, definitely. This was an important day, the day he would kill Lee Cole Carter.

  He wanted to see people, let them know how he felt, how important he felt, how alive he felt. He had been alone too long. Well, not actually alone. He had people he knew, people he did signs for, people he got his haircuts from, but not people to sit across from in his own kitchen in the morning and talk about what was in the Tribune or what was on Good Morning America.

  Maybe, if he lived, just maybe, he would get to meet Charlie Gibson and Diane Sawyer. He would be on the show, sitting in one of those comfortable-looking chairs, and they would be sympathetic. They would try to understand. And when he was off he would watch them commenting on the interview.

  Maybe Diane would say, “A heartbreaking story.”

  And Charlie would answer, “And he seems so upbeat, likable.”

  No, it would not be live. It would have to be a remote, probably from the jail. There was no way they would let him go to New York to be on Good Morning America.

  When his father died, Wayne had been given a cat by Sam Vigroner at the Master Cleaner’s. He had tried to love the cat, talk to it, but it was just a cat, which reminded him that he had no person to talk to, laugh with. The cat didn’t laugh or smile or understand. It wasn’t that he didn’t like the cat. He just didn’t like the idea of people … He didn’t like people saying, “There goes Wayne Czerbiak, the one with the cat.”