Lieberman's Folly

by Stuart M. Kaminsky

  Jealousy echoed in her words.

  “Did Estralda ever mention a sister, Lupe or Guadalupe?” Hanrahan began.

  “No. Can you leave now?” asked Gwen Dysan.

  Hanrahan considered pushing just a little, but the woman folded her arms and set her jaw in a way Hanrahan had encountered hundreds of times. He might have broken through it but it wasn’t worth the effort, at least not now.

  “Sure,” he said, leaving the apartment.

  The door didn’t close behind him as he went for the elevator. He had a name, Vegas, and a neighborhood, and he remembered what Jules Van Beeber had said about Estralda saying something was under the house at her mother’s house. He also had another tenant to check out, Nikki Morales on eight. He had rung every bell and knocked on every door on eight, but none of the people who had answered were Nikki Morales.

  Hanrahan went back to the doorman, who was sitting at his desk and watching the video monitor that showed the garage entrance. Billy Tarton sat up when Hanrahan came through the door. Tarton didn’t smile, but he did look up with an eager-to-please curiosity.

  “Nikki Morales,” said Hanrahan.

  “Eight-ten,” answered the doorman. “But she’s not in. Went out early, carrying a couple of suitcases.”

  “Where was she going?” asked Hanrahan, glancing through the window toward the Black Moon Restaurant.

  The doorman shrugged.

  “Said she’d be away a while,” Tarton said. “But she’d be back for more of her things before she left town.”

  “What does she look like?”

  “Morales?” Tarton said getting up. A car was pulling into the driveway and making the turn to stop in front of the entrance. “Good-looking lady. Lives alone.”

  He moved toward the door and adjusted his hat.

  “Friend of Estralda Valdez?” asked Hanrahan.

  “Who knows? Could be. Never saw them together. Or maybe I did and don’t remember,” the doorman said, going out the door to help an old woman out of the backseat of a black Pontiac. The woman beamed at the doorman and touched his cheek. Billy Tarton smiled. Hanrahan wanted a drink, needed a drink.

  The old woman came in on the doorman’s arm.

  “Gotta help Mrs. Dinkst to her apartment,” he said.

  Hanrahan nodded.

  “Nikki Morales, she look anything like Estralda Valdez?” he asked as the doorman pushed the button to the inner lobby and moved slowly with Mrs. Dinkst on his arm.

  “Maybe,” said Tarton over his shoulder. “About the same height, weight, build. Miss Morales is a little younger, darker hair, maybe lighter skin. Who knows? You know what I mean?”

  “I know,” said Hanrahan, following the doorman and the old woman through the inner lobby door.

  Hanrahan could have called it a day and gone out looking but he wanted to check every door where someone was home. He took the elevator up to the third floor and got out, leaving the doorman and the old lady behind him. On the third floor, Hanrahan knocked at the first door and found himself facing Captain Dale Hughes in YMCA shorts and a white T-shirt. Captain Dale Hughes was sweating. Captain Dale Hughes was obviously also in good shape. A door was open behind Hughes to Hanrahan’s left. Inside it was a Nautilus machine or something that looked like one.

  “Hanrahan, what do you want?” he said panting.

  “Nothing,” said Hanrahan. “I’ve been knocking on doors. Forgot you were on this—”

  “You mean you hoped I wouldn’t be behind one of the doors,” said Hughes. “You could have asked the doorman where I lived and walked on by. Come in.”

  Hanrahan came in and Hughes closed the door.

  “You want a cold drink? Iced tea?” asked Hughes.

  “No thanks, Captain,” said Hanrahan.

  “I’ll finish mine.” Hughes moved through a door to his right and Hanrahan knew from the layout of the apartments he had been in that beyond the door was the kitchen. Hughes came back with a towel around his neck and a glass of iced tea in his hand. “Sure you don’t want one?”

  There were wedding pictures in the hallway. Hughes smiling in a tux, arm around the bride, his family surrounding the couple. Hughes took a sip and watched Hanrahan’s eyes.

  “I just talked to her, my wife,” Hughes said. “Told her about Van Beeber. She’ll come back home from her mother’s tomorrow. Don’t come back and talk to her. She thinks we have our killer.”

  “I understand,” said Hanrahan.

  “You and I and Lieberman don’t think we do,” said Hughes after a big satisfying gulp. “But we’ll just keep that to ourselves. You keep looking but officially we’ve got our prime suspect. Understood?”

  “Understood,” said Hanrahan.

  “You turn up anything, let me know. I’ll give you support,” said Hughes. “You fucked up, my man, but maybe you don’t have to go Ward Seven over it. Sure you don’t want a drink?”

  “No, Captain,” said Hanrahan. “There’s a woman lives on eight who Estralda Valdez knew, name’s Nikki Morales. You ever see her, you remember?”

  “I don’t know names,” Hughes said, brushing sweat from his nose. “A building like this isn’t one big happy family.”

  “This Nikki Morales packed up and left this morning,” said Hanrahan.

  “Shit,” said Hughes, shaking his head. “You want to go in and check the apartment?”

  “Yes sir,” said Hanrahan. Suddenly the image of his mother at the stove looking into a pot of boiling beef came to him. He could almost smell the beef.

  “You all right, Hanrahan?” asked Hughes.

  “Yeah,” said Hanrahan. “I’d like to get in there.”

  “You figure the Morales woman might be the one you saw getting in the cab?” asked Hughes. “The one dressed in Estralda Valdez’s clothes?”

  “It’s something to try,” said Hanrahan.

  “It’s something to try,” agreed Hughes. “I’ll give Judge Handelman a call. Go for the warrant. Handy maybe owes us one or two more. Nikki Morales, eight-ten?”

  “Yes sir,” said Hanrahan.

  After a brief report on what he had found, Hanrahan managed to make his escape from the captain. He went through the remaining apartments, made nine more contacts, none of them yielding information, and walked across the street to the Black Moon Restaurant. The night had cooled from the rain and a breeze coming off of the lake. Hanrahan thought he owed himself a drink, but decided not to pay the debt.

  He had missed the Saturday dinner rush. A few people were still eating, two couples at a back table, a pair of young women at a table in the front. He sat at a table where he could watch the entrance to Michigan Towers, smoothed the white cloth with his big hands, and looked up as Iris came out of the kitchen and saw him. She smiled and he smiled back.

  “You want to order?” she asked.

  “No,” he said, then, “I guess. What’s good?”

  “Moo shu pork,” said Iris. “You look tired.”

  “Working,” said Hanrahan. He ran his hand over his face. “I could use a bath and a shave.”

  “Last night,” she said. “You were tired too?”

  “I was drunk last night,” he said. “Can you sit down?”

  “No.”

  “I asked if you’d go out with me,” he said. “I meant it. I’m sober now and I mean it.”

  “I said yes,” she said. “I’ll get your moo shu.”

  When she returned with his moo shu, Hanrahan said, “You know what I like about you?”

  “No,” Iris said, deftly laying out the thin pancake and spooning a line of shredded pork, bamboo shoots, and vegetables down its middle.

  “You don’t remind me of anyone,” he said. “I mean that as a compliment.”

  “Then I feel complimented,” she said. “I have never done this before.”

  She rolled the pancake up with two wooden spoons.

  “You look as if you’ve been doing it all your life,” he said.

  “No,” she said, laughi
ng. “I don’t mean moo shu. I mean, you know, going out with a man.”

  “You’ve never been out?” he said, looking down at the crepe-like creation in front of him. “Do I pick this up like a taco?”

  “Yes,” she said. “I was married. My husband died. My father picked him out. I’m a grandmother.”

  “I’m a grandfather. You got pictures of the kids?”

  Hanrahan ate, drank tea, and exchanged compliments with Iris over their grandchildren. He was looking at a picture of her grandchildren, Walter and Mary Ho, when the woman got out of the cab across the street. She was dressed differently and wore no hat. Her hair was not the same color it was the night before and she was dressed in a lightweight suit. The doorman made no connection between this woman and the woman who had pretended to be Estralda Valdez. Hanrahan, had he been looking, would have known. He would have known by her walk, the way she held her shoulders, her height, her weight. He had been on hundreds of stakeouts, watched men, women, and those of androgynous bent through binoculars and with the naked eye at long distances. He would have known, but he was looking at a photograph of two young children and smiling, not the smile of a man seeing the folly of life in general and his own in particular, but the smile of a man who was enjoying the moment.

  When he did look up and out the window, the woman was gone. He wrote down Iris’s address and arranged to pick her up at six on Monday, the day the Black Moon was closed. And then Bill Hanrahan went home. In the morning he would call Abe. In the morning, they would track down Estralda Valdez’s mother. But first in the morning, Sunday morning, he would go to Mass at St. Bart’s church. Hanrahan also considered giving his son in Canada a call. It was a little late for that, though. He would, he decided, give him a call tomorrow afternoon.

  8

  LIEBERMAN WAS SURE THAT if the Committee to Select a Renovation Committee meeting went on for one more hour he would be calling Irving Hamel, Irwin Rommel. He would let it slip out accidentally once and apologize. Then it would happen again and he would, apologize again. Then, if God were watching as was His sacred duty, He would inform Irving Hamel that he should be quiet.

  Irving was not a bad man, but he was an irritating one. He was also young, not yet forty, and a lawyer. He had all his hair and it was black. He wore contact lenses. He stood tall and worked out every morning at the Jewish Community Center on Touhy. His wife was beautiful. His two kids, a boy and a girl, were beautiful. Irving Hamel would one day be king of Denmark or at least the first Jewish mayor of Chicago or a Supreme Court chief justice, but right now he was a pain in the ass.

  “People will not give for renovation,” he said. “They want their name on a rock wall, something.”

  “The building committee has the rooms and the walls,” said Syd Levan.

  The three men and a woman were seated in the little library and conference room around the oak table. Rabbi Wass smiled knowingly at everything that was said. Syd Levan was dedicated to proving that nothing was possible. Ida Katzman sat looking intently at whoever spoke. As the oldest person in the room and the wealthiest member of the congregation, which was why she was in the room in the first place, Ida had certain rights, among them the right to ignore the proceedings. Ancient Ida Katzman appeared to understand almost nothing of what was going on. Whenever young Rabbi Wass spoke, Ida looked at him through her thick glasses in the hope that divine guidance would come from his lips. She was always disappointed.

  “The furniture!” Lieberman tried. “We can put plaques on the furniture. This table right here has a plaque.” He pointed at a bronze plate at the head of the table where he, as acting chair of the committee, sat looking glumly but hopefully at Irving Hamel.

  “The building committee has asked for dedication rights for the furniture,” said Rabbi Wass.

  “The toilets,” Lieberman said, looking at his watch and seeing that it was after ten and nothing had been settled.

  “That’s in bad taste,” said Syd Levan.

  “The toilets also belong to the building committee,” said Rabbi Wass.

  “Las Vegas Night,” said Lieberman, who dreaded all fund-raising events.

  “Last one lost two hundred dollars,” said Hamel. “I was treasurer.”

  “Auction,” said Lieberman.

  Syd Levan was shaking his head slowly. Ida Katzman’s mouth had dropped open.

  “Lost money,” said Hamel.

  “Show a movie,” Lieberman tried. “The Frisco Kid, Hester Street, a Friday the 13th marathon.”

  “You know what it costs to rent a movie, get a projector, advertise?” said Hamel with a sigh. “And nobody comes. They have cable. Movies are a sure loser.”

  “Bingo,” said Lieberman with little confidence.

  “We’re Jews,” said Levan, shocked.

  “I’m aware of that,” said Lieberman. “But we have a building to renovate.”

  “No bingo,” said Hamel.

  “Why?” said Lieberman.

  “Who would come?” said Hamel.

  “Catholics,” said Lieberman. “I know lots of Catholics. My partner’s a Catholic.”

  “I don’t like it,” said Levan. “What do you say, Rabbi?”

  “I don’t think we should trivialize our endeavor,” said Rabbi Wass.

  Ida Katzman strained forward, tilting her head to one side like a little bird.

  “On the other hand,” the Rabbi went on, “pride has been the downfall of many a righteous man”—he looked at Ida Katzman and added with a knowing smile—“and woman.”

  Ida Katzman sat back satisfied.

  “I suggest we have a committee and we let the committee figure out where to get the money,” said Syd Levan.

  “We are the committee,” Lieberman said, looking at Hamel for support.

  “Strictly speaking,” said Hamel. “We are not. We are an ad hoc committee to make a recommendation possibly to appoint a committee.”

  “Rabbi,” said Lieberman. “You want to call this the committee? If not, it’s fine with me. I’d like to get home. My daughter and my grandchildren are staying with us. I’m working a homicide and I’m tired.”

  “It’s a committee,” said Rabbi Wass.

  “It can’t be,” said Hamel. “We have made no recommendation and we’ve not followed any rules of order. This has been an informal discussion by an ad hoc committee.”

  “He’s right,” said Levan.

  “We have renovations to fund,” said Rabbi Wass. “Renovations that could come to fifty thousand dollars over building costs.

  Ida Katzman reached into her cloth bag for something while Lieberman said, “Let’s throw a polka party.”

  “Abe, is this the time for jokes? I ask you?” asked Syd Levan.

  Ida Katzman was writing something behind her purse. Hamel glanced at her and prepared to call for a point of order. This, Lieberman decided, was the moment to blitzkrieg the king of Denmark who was about to be dubbed Irwin Rommel. But God and Ida Katzman intervened.

  “Is this enough?” she said, tearing out and handing a check across the table to Rabbi Wass.

  Wass looked at the check.

  “Exactly enough,” said the rabbi, passing the check made out to the synagogue around the table.

  “Can we go home now?” she asked standing up. “I’m going to miss Saturday Night Live. Someone has to drive me or get me a cab.”

  “We can go home,” said Lieberman. “Irving lives near you. He can give you a ride.”

  Hamel prepared to shoot a warning look at Lieberman but pulled it back before it showed to anyone but the detective.

  “I’ll be happy to drive Mrs. Katzman,” said Hamel.

  “I think we deserve some credit here,” said Syd Levan, reaching into his pocket for a cigar and putting it in his mouth. Syd thought it was all right to do this as long as he didn’t light up.

  “You’ve all done well,” said Rabbi Wass.

  And everyone departed except for the rabbi and the policeman.

  “
Rabbi,” Lieberman said. “I know a setup when I see one. You ever see The Sting?”

  “Mrs. Katzman was invited to join the committee because I knew she wanted to help in some way,” said the Rabbi.

  “I thought she already pledged a hundred fifty grand for the new building,” said Lieberman, standing and massaging his knees. “What does she get a plaque on?”

  “Kitchen,” said the Rabbi. “Abraham, Ida Katzman’s husband and son are dead. She has no grandchildren. This congregation is her family. And God is watching her deeds and we will thank him and praise him and he will bless her if our congregation does his will.”

  “You got me, Rabbi,” said Lieberman.

  “I hope so, Abraham,” said Rabbi Wass.

  When he got back to the house, Barry was in the living room with the lights out. The pullout bed was open and he sat cross-legged, a pillow on his lap, playing something he had earlier identified as a Game Boy while at the same time watching television.

  “Where’s Melisa?” Lieberman asked.

  “Sleeping in Mom’s bed,” Barry said.

  Lieberman threw his grandson a wrapped mint and said, “I stole it from the temple. Brush your teeth when you’re done.”

  “Come on,” said Barry without looking up. “You didn’t steal it.”

  “Alright, it was given to me as a reward for raising fifty thousand dollars. What’re you watching?”

  “Saturday Night Live,” said Barry.

  “So’s Ida Katzman,” said Lieberman. “I’m going to bed. I’ll see you in the morning. Good night.”

  “Damn,” said Barry whacking the pillow and glaring at the glowing game in his hand. “I almost had him. Sorry Grandpa. We still going to the Cub game Monday?”

  “Still going,” said Lieberman.

  “Good night,” Barry said without looking up.

  “Good night,” Lieberman answered.

  The light was on in the kitchen. Lieberman prayed silently. God owed him one. He hadn’t insulted Irving Hamel. He hadn’t threatened Syd Levan. He had participated in a charade to lead Mrs. Katzman on the path to fiscal righteousness. God could at least let him make it to the bedroom, to the sink, to his pajamas, and to bed without another trial.