Big Silence

by Stuart M. Kaminsky

  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 match
es. 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.

  “A lot of money.”

  The man in the bed closed his eyes and was silent for about thirty seconds. Lieberman thought he was asleep, but with closed eyes Johnstone said quietly, “You see where I’m going with this?”

  “I think so. Someone paid you a lot of money for you to kill Gower. You’re going to give it to your grandchildren to go to college.”

  “A mind is a terrible thing to waste. Seen those ads?”

  “I donate to the United Negro College Fund,” Lieberman said. “Who paid you to shoot Gower?”

  “So the man I shot was named Gower? First name or last?”

  “Last.”

  “You had a photograph of Gower in your pocket.”

  “But not his name. Never knew his name till you just said it. You ever kill a man? I mean you being a cop?”

  “A couple of times.”

  “Thought I’d feel bad,” said Johnstone. “I do, but physical not mental. Ever been shot?”

  “No. The person who hired you to kill Gower wasn’t a good man,” said Lieberman.

  “Maybe so. Maybe no. But he was a man with money.”

  Johnstone leaned a little toward Lieberman and lowered his voice.

  “Between you
, me, and your Snickers bar, I already put the money where only my grandkids can get it. Add that to my insurance money and it’s a nice amount. You can’t take it from me.”

  The oscilloscope let out a series of blips. The green line was frantically drawing the dark landscape.

  “I don’t want to take your money. I want the name of the man who paid you.”

  “Can’t do it,” Johnstone said. “I think I better … there water in here?”

  “I’ll call the nurse. They told me not to give you water.”

  “But they didn’t say anything about candy bars?”

  “I’ll call the nurse.”

  “No.” He held up a thin arm, bone and veins showing. “No more talk now,” Johnstone whispered and then he was definitely asleep.

  Lieberman got up and moved toward the door. He would come back later.

  “You understand?” Monty said. Monty the barber looked like a twig, a bald twig with wide brown suspenders. Monty had blue eyes and peppermint breath. He popped Certs like Wayne’s cousin Kenneth had popped uppers back in the eighties when they were kids.

  “Yes,” said Wayne looking at himself in the mirror, watching the hair fall in ringlets as Monty cut and talked, narrow knobby shoulders huddled holding today’s suspenders.

  The Clean Cut was old, ceiling a patterned plaster, floor white tile blocks with cracks that ran like meandering rivers, walls covered in paper with repeating pictures of ancient airplanes.

  Monty was alone today. The other barber chairs sat empty and only Mr. Photopopolus, who lived in the Garden Gables Assisted Living Facility in a three-story off of Morse near the El, sat waiting. The bus had driven Mr. Photopopolus from the Garden Gables. It would be back for him in an hour. Mr. Photopopolus didn’t care if it was five hours. He liked the smell of the barbershop. He liked fingering the curled edges of the magazines that flopped on the small table next to him. He liked listening to Monty and throwing in an observation when he could.

  “So, it’s a miracle,” Monty said. “All this.”

  He paused to wave his comb and point it around the shop. Wayne could see him in the mirror.

  “You gotta think about it, Wayne,” he went on. “People were on the earth with nothing, nothing at all, no thing at all. Just people and the earth and the animals and whatever was growing. And they made from it houses and cars and computers and cake mixers.”