“Carters expecting you, Wayne?” asked Richie.
“No.”
“Gotta call them up then,” he said with a deep sigh as if the sigh were a major task.
The elevator doors opened when Richie was dialing. Out stepped Lee Cole Carter. He was wearing a cowboy hat, nice tan one with a black band and a tiny feather. His face was shaved clean, a concession to his parents, because when he did his videos or TV appearances Lee Cole always looked like he needed a shave.
He was also wearing clean new-looking jeans and a Dallas Cowboys shirt, not the T-kind but a white one with a collar and just a little Dallas Cowboys insignia on the pocket.
He was smoking, looked deep in thought, didn’t see Richie or Wayne. He walked past them toward the door.
“Mr. Carter,” Richie called.
Lee Cole paused and turned, his mind still somewhere, maybe upstairs with his parents, maybe in some studio in Nashville or in bed with some girl. He looked at Richie.
“Wayne wants to shoot you,” Richie said. “That all right?”
Lee Cole Carter looked at Wayne, head to foot, maybe recognizing something.
“Shoot me?”
“Picture, photograph, you know,” Richie explained.
Wayne’s hand was in his pocket. The gun felt surprisingly warm. He imagined, tasted gun metal in his mouth, on his tongue.
“Wayne Czerbiak?” asked Lee Cole, taking a step toward Wayne.
Wayne nodded.
“You painted the horse on the sidewalk in front of Lakeview High for the homecoming when I graduated.”
“Yeah,” said Wayne.
Lee Cole smiled.
“Great horse. Forgot about that till just now. Funny how you forget things and they just come back.”
“I’ve got a poem about a horse,” Richie lied. “I can get it to you at the hotel before you leave.”
Lee Cole wasn’t listening.
“You still painting?” Lee Cole asked, taking a deep drag on his cigarette.
“Signs,” said Wayne.
“That horse,” Lee Cole said, looking up at the ceiling, maybe trying to see the horse. “All white and wide-eyed. It had wings or a horn on its head or something.”
“Both,” said Wayne. “A flying unicorn.”
“Flying unicorn,” Lee Cole repeated almost to himself.
“Well, I’ll be damned,” Richie lied again. “My poem is about a white flying unicorn.”
“It’d make a good album cover,” Lee Cole said, looking at Wayne. “I could write a song about homecoming, that horse, Connie Appleton, but I wouldn’t use her name. You know.”
Richie sighed. He wasn’t getting through. He knew it. He was doomed by his uniform.
“You got a card?” Lee Cole asked.
“No,” said Wayne.
“Well, you can write your name and number down for me and I’ll have someone call you.”
“You’d forget,” said Wayne. “You’d shove it in your pocket and forget and five months from now you’d forget why you wrote my name and number and throw it away.”
Lee Cole adjusted his cowboy hat and grinned.
“You may be right, but don’t count on it. You want to take my picture?”
“No,” said Wayne, taking the gun out of his pocket and aiming it at the singer.
There were several ways to go about this. Lieberman could have done it at the station in the interrogation room or he could have borrowed Captain Kearney’s office. He could have done it at the Berg house. Scene of the crime. He could have done it at Berg’s Burgers. All had drawbacks. He wasn’t going for intimidation and he didn’t want to create an atmosphere of fear or horror. He wanted intimacy.
He settled on a small park where they could sit under the roof of a pavilion. It was still early. There were only a few people in the park, young mothers with their babies talking at a bench, a trio of old men, two of whom had canes, one of whom had a walker.
The wooden table of the pavilion had been painted recently to cover the rough graffiti, crudely carved hearts, tic-tac-toe games played with knives. The painting was a regular event to try to keep the parks looking like parks and not the first day of the end of days.
Abe and Bill sat on one side of the bench, Paul Berg and his grandmother across from them. A tape recorder lay on the table between them.
The woman, who was probably only a few years older than Lieberman, was pale; her hair needed combing. She hugged herself as if she were cold, but it wasn’t cold. Her grandson, wearing a gray sweatshirt with little black letters reading Bay Yacht Club folded his hands on the table.
“Meeting here okay with you?” asked Lieberman.
“I don’t know,” Paul Berg said, looking around uncomfortably. “You asked us to come here.”
“We can go to the station,” Abe said.
“No, here is fine.”
Lieberman pushed the on button.
“I’m Detective Abraham Lieberman. My partner is …”
“Detective William Hanrahan,” Bill supplied.
“And,” Lieberman continued, “we’re talking to Bert Berg and his mother Trudy Berg.”
Lieberman stated the date and time and said, “Paul has confessed to the murder of his friends.”
“We know,” said Bert, looking away.
Trudy Berg nodded her head.
“Paul’s done some very bad things,” said Lieberman. “You know what they are.”
“We know what the police told us they are,” said Trudy. “He didn’t do those things. I don’t mean he’s innocent. He was there, but it was the other two, the crazy, stupid … they did those things. Those other two. Paul went along, drove the car. He was afraid. That’s no excuse, but …”
“He was the leader, wasn’t he,” said Abe.
“Leader?” said Trudy. “If you mean he was smarter than they were, yes, but they were dangerous.”
“So he decided yesterday to kill them?” asked Lieberman.
“They probably threatened to kill Paul if he stopped,” Trudy said, urging the detectives to understand, to believe.
“So he just picked yesterday, invited them over, brought the gun from your store, and killed them,” Lieberman said.
“Ask him,” said Trudy. “They had raped that poor woman in front of her kid. Broke her arm. That poor policeman. He … Yes, Pauly had enough. He took the gun from the shop, went home, and shot them.”
“No,” said Lieberman.
“No?” asked Trudy, looking at Hanrahan.
“No,” Lieberman repeated. “Too many holes in the tale. My partner asked himself why a person like Paul would confess to a crime he didn’t commit, a double murder. And why he would refuse to confess to a handful of muggings, rapes, and a murder he did commit. My partner couldn’t think it was for anything honorable because, let us face it, Paul is not a decent or honorable young man.”
“He is,” Trudy Berg said emphatically, looking at Lieberman.
“Well,” said Lieberman. “Maybe he is for once. Here’s the way my partner sees it. Mrs. Berg, you got up in the morning and read in the papers or saw the story of the policeman’s wife being attacked. You knew Paul and his friends were at your house. You took the gun, went home, walked into your living room, and shot them.”
“You’re …,” Berg began, and started to rise.
His mother put her hand on his. He looked at her, a question in his eyes, and sat again.
“Were you going to shoot your grandson, too?” asked Lieberman.
“We want a lawyer,” said Bert Berg, starting to rise again.
“You can have one,” said Lieberman. “You don’t have to say a word. Just listen. Can you do that? Will you do that?”
“We don’t say a word without a lawyer.”
“Understood,” said Lieberman.
There was a long pause and Lieberman continued, “You were standing there with a gun in your hand. Your grandson took it from you and fired it into the wall.”
“Why would …?” Bert began
, and then remembered his vow of silence.
“Residue,” said Lieberman. “When we caught him, and he knew we would, he wanted the evidence to show that he had fired the gun. He wanted to have that gun when he was found. Your grandson was protecting you, Mrs. Berg. He’s still trying to protect you.”
She opened her mouth to speak but her son said, “Ma,” and she closed her mouth again, though her lower lip was now quivering.
“Did he say anything to you, Mrs. Berg? Did your grandson say anything to you?”
“He …”
“Ma,” Bert warned.
She shrugged him off and said, “Pauly said that he was going to go to jail for the things he had been doing. He said things wouldn’t be worse for his being the one who shot his friends. The police didn’t care about his two friends.”
“Ma,” Bert said, but it was no longer a warning. It was a deep sigh of defeat.
“He said,” she went on, “that he didn’t want me to go to jail or have a trial. He made me promise to say he had shot them, but then this policeman …” She looked at Hanrahan. “And the other big one came through the front door and Pauly, he ran and I said I hadn’t seen the shooting.”
Berg reached over and turned off the tape recorder.
“We should have had a lawyer,” he said. “I watch Law and Order. You’ll never be allowed to use this tape and my mother isn’t going to speak about this.”
“Then your son goes to jail for the rest of his life,” said Lieberman.
“Maybe that’s where he should be. Maybe it’s my fault.”
“There’s plenty of guilt to go around,” said Lieberman.
“Let’s go,” said Bert, now taking his mother’s arm.
She removed his hand from her arm, looked at Lieberman, and said, “You have grandchildren?”
“Two.”
“Are they good kids?”
“Yes,” said Lieberman.
“Our Pauly was bar mitzvahed,” she said. “Did you know that?”
“No,” said Lieberman. “My grandson Barry has his bar mitzvah this weekend.”
“I hope he takes his vows seriously,” said Trudy. “I knew when Pauly had his bar mitzvah he was just saying words.”
There was nothing to say. Lieberman, still sitting next to Hanrahan, nodded.
“I’ll say it all again, about the shooting,” she said. “Whenever you like if you need it. Pauly’s done his good deed. But it’s too late.”
“Can we go now?” asked Berg. His eyes were moist now.
He took his mother’s hand, looked at the ground and then up at Lieberman.
“Are you going to arrest me?” she asked.
“Your grandson confessed,” Lieberman said. “That’s enough to convict him. Getting him on the other murder, the murder of a woman about your age, will be a lot harder, and rape trials are always tough on the victims. And, as you said, it’ll be hard to get this tape admitted into evidence.”
“So …?” Bert began.
“We’ll let you know,” said Lieberman.
The detectives stayed at the bench watching mother and son, hand in hand, walk slowly down the path through the grass, past the old men on one bench and the young mothers and their small children at the other.
“Thanks, Rabbi,” said Hanrahan.
It was unspoken. It needed no words. Bill had asked his partner to conduct the meeting because he was Jewish like Trudy, because he looked and sounded like the kind of person you want to confess to. Bill was not that kind of person.
“You’re welcome, Father Murph,” he said. “What do we do with it? It’s your call.”
“We’ve got a confession,” said Hanrahan.
“That we have,” Lieberman agreed as they walked.
“From a rapist and murderer,” Hanrahan said.
“No more need be said,” said Lieberman, removing the tape from the recorder and handing it to his partner.
“Now there’s one you can do for me,” said Lieberman.
Emiliano “El Perro” Del Sol was wearing a suit and tie. The suit had been a gift from Gerardo Econecho Lopez, who had a clothing store one block from El Perro’s bingo parlor headquarters next door to El Perro’s restaurant.
People in the neighborhood gave El Perro gifts. Some of the gifts were given to ward off the Tentaculo leader’s bursts of madness. Some of the gifts were given out of a real sense of gratitude. While the Tentaculos might prey on the Latino community in their territory, they did not bleed the shop and business owners. Well, not much. And the other gangs and the shaky kids looking for drug money or something they could sell stayed out of Tentaculo territory.
And so Emiliano Del Sol, king of North Avenue, had dressed in a suit and tie and ordered three of his men to do the same. Even Piedras was wearing a suit and tie.
“We look fuckin’ guapo,” said El Perro. “You called Taibo?”
Juan Hernandez said, “Sí. He’ll be there.”
“Bueno,” said El Perro, admiring himself in the mirror of the men’s room of the bingo parlor. “Let’s go show them chinks some cool.”
“Wayne,” Richie cried out from behind the desk.
Lee Cole Carter looked at the gun and lost his grin.
“Hold it, Wayne. I’ve got about five hundred dollars in the wallet. I’ll just pull it out and hand it over. Put the gun away and we’ll call it a loan, no, a first payment for the flying-horse album cover.”
“Not about money,” said Wayne. “I’ve got eleven thousand four hundred and six dollars in savings at the Bank of America.”
“I do something to you?” asked Lee Cole. “I mean you got a grudge, something? I knock up your sister or cousin or something, insult you or your family? Hell, I was a kid.”
“You’re everybody,” Wayne said as Lee Cole started to raise his arms, though no one had asked him to.
Lee Cole glanced at Richie for help. Richie had none.
The idea had just come to Wayne. Right out of the blue, nowhere. Lee Cole Carter was everybody. Lee Cole Carter wasn’t just a country singer who used to live in Bardo, Texas. Lee Cole was Texas, was the United States, was the world. The world had no meaning. That’s what had started Wayne down this gun-weighted road. It was all made up. All a story people told each other to make them forget they were going to die and the world was going to blow up or blow away or freeze or burn someday.
Maybe Monty had said something like this once and the idea had just slept all curled up inside him and woke up just now wondering what was going on.
Wayne was going to be a shooting star. He was going to be a bright light for a few seconds. He was going to shoot a star. He was going to be a star. It was that or just keep painting signs till his fingers got too much arthritis like his father’s had and then he’d live alone in the house and watch television and eat cereal with freeze-dried fruit in it that got soggy when you added milk.
Richie said, “Wayne, no.”
Wayne pulled the trigger. He was no more than a dozen feet from Lee Cole Carter, but he had never fired a gun before and missed, shattering the window behind the man who had written and sung “Hard Drinking Woman.”
Through the shattered window, Wayne could see a man who had frozen midstep on the sidewalk. The man was pulling out a gun. Wayne recognized the man. He was a policeman named O’Neil whom he had seen two or three times in the Clean Cut barbershop.
15
BESS ANSWERED HER RECENTLY acquired cell phone after the third ring.
“Hello,” she said.
“I’ve got to go to Yuma,” said Lieberman.
“Can you talk a little louder,” she said. “I’m at the temple with Lisa. We’re going over … Did you say you’ve got to go to Yuma?”
“Yes,” he said.
“When?”
“Tonight.”
“The bar mitzvah is in two days, Abe. It can’t wait?”
“I don’t think so,” he said.
“Where are you?”
“On the way to
a meeting,” he said.
“I don’t like it, Abe.”
“Can’t be helped,” he said.
She paused, considering whether to open up the question of whether or not the trip to Yuma could be helped, postponed, avoided, ignored. She considered reminding him that they had only one grandson and that if he was delayed or there was an airplane strike, or bad weather …
“I’ll be back in time,” he said.
“Will you pick Marvin up at the airport today?”
“Bill will do it.”
“You’ve got it all worked out,” she said with a sigh, looking at the sample blue-and-gold napkin Morrie Greenblatt was holding up for her final decision. She nodded her approval.
“Travel arrangements, yes,” Abe said. “Approval from Kearney, yes. Airfare, no. We’ll have to put it on the American Express and I’ll put in for reimbursement.”
“And you’ll get it?”
“Probably not,” he said. “But we’re nearly rich, remember?”
“You have to go?” she asked with resignation.
“I have to go,” he said.
“What time are you going home to pack?”
“When I can.”
“I’ll pack for you. The overnight will be at the door,” she said.
“What would I do without you?”
“Eat badly and have a heart attack. Forget to do your laundry till the last minute. Chase after loose women.”
“Two out of three,” he said.
“Which two?” Bess asked as Morrie Greenblatt shuffled toward her with a sample of the table decoration for Friday night. It was hideous, blue aluminum foil around a flowerpot with a single planted plastic Israeli flag next to a white flower.
“The flower will be real,” Morrie said.
“Abe, I’ve got to go. Don’t eat Mexican food in Yuma.”
“I promise.”
They hung up.
Abe checked his watch and looked across the squad room for Bill. He was late and Abe had to hurry. No more time. He put on his jacket and told Ezra McDonough to tell Bill to … and Bill Hanrahan came through the squad room door.
“Let’s go,” said Lieberman.
“Sorry I’m late,” said Hanrahan, who looked tired.
They went to the parking lot and got into Lieberman’s car.
“You saw Paul Berg?” said Lieberman, turning south on Clark.
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