Lieberman's Day

by Stuart M. Kaminsky

“I don’t really care what your friend likes,” said Melisa. “I think I wanna stay here.”

  Melisa, Barry, and Todd were all looking at Abe, who felt a strong desire to take a hot bath.

  “I’ll help you carry the bags out,” he said.

  “You don’t …” Todd began, but Abe had already moved to the closet by the front door and was plunging his stockinged feet into his boots.

  “Let’s go,” said Lieberman, throwing on his coat and taking the suitcase from Melisa.

  The sun was trying to turn the afternoon into less than a disaster but the sky was overcast and it didn’t stand a chance.

  “Careful on the steps,” said Lieberman, almost slipping.

  “Abe, I want to talk to you about …” Todd whispered, as the children moved cautiously toward the car whose engine purred at the curb in front of the fire hydrant. There was a woman in the front seat. She started to get out.

  “Faye,” Todd said too heartily and much too loud when the woman was out of the car and facing them, “this is Abe Lieberman. And this is Melisa and Barry.”

  “Nice to meet all of you,” said Faye, shivering.

  She was wearing a denim jacket just like Todd’s and a knit hat, but hers was bright red.

  Lieberman did not have to check the faces of his grandchildren to know that Todd Cresswell was in for a few rocky days.

  “I had plans for tonight,” Todd said, squinting first at Faye and then at Lieberman. Faye moved to the back of the car and opened the trunk with a key she pulled out of her pocket. “I couldn’t …”

  “You don’t owe me an explanation,” said Lieberman.

  “I just didn’t want you or the kids to think …”

  “Can’t stop people from thinking, Todd,” Lieberman said, plunging his hands in his pockets. “Besides …”

  The line didn’t need finishing. It had been Lieberman’s daughter, Lisa, who had left her husband. It had been Lisa who refused to get back together with him. There was no right or wrong to it as far as Lieberman was concerned. Todd didn’t owe him an explanation.

  Faye took the suitcases from the children, placed them in the trunk, and closed it as Todd said, “Faye’s comedy. I’m tragedy. Lisa’s tragedy too. I …”

  Abe touched his son-in-law’s arm and Todd stopped.

  Faye moved to the side of the car, opened the door, and held her palm out with a smile to usher the children into the rear seat.

  “We take turns sitting in the front,” said Melisa.

  “Melisa, I …” Todd began, but this time Faye cut him off.

  “Fine with me,” she said. “Barry, why don’t you go in the front? Melisa and I can talk in the back.”

  Barry hurried into the front seat and Melisa reluctantly let herself be guided into the back.

  “Good to meet you, Mr. Lieberman,” Faye said, waving. “Please accept my condolences.”

  “Thank you,” said Lieberman as the woman closed the back door of the car.

  “I know what you’re thinking, Abe,” said Todd, not meeting Abe’s eyes.

  “What am I thinking?”

  “Oedipus,” said Todd.

  “I was thinking gas from pastrami, Todd,” Lieberman said. “But since you mention it, Faye is a little older than you are. Or, put another way, I’d say Faye is a little younger than I am.”

  “I’ve got to go,” said Todd.

  “I like her,” said Lieberman. “At least what I see. You tell Bess or Lisa that and I’ll call you a liar. Are you happy?”

  “‘Count no mortal happy till he has passed the final limit of his life secure from pain.’ The last line of Oedipus Rex. Let’s say I’m doing better than I have been.”

  “This is getting awkward and I’m getting very cold,” said Lieberman. “I’ll talk to you tomorrow.”

  Todd nodded and ran around the car, relieved at escaping with so few bruises.

  Through the window of the car, Abe could see Faye listening seriously to something Melisa was saying. Then Faye looked up at him. Her smile slipped away and there was something of a plea in her eyes as they met Lieberman’s in the few seconds before the car pulled away from the curb.

  When Todd had turned the corner heading north toward Evanston, Lieberman went back into the house, prepared for about fifteen minutes of cleaning up the slush-stained floor where the kids had trod. But before he could get his shoes off again, the phone began to ring.

  Nestor Briggs had a lot on his mind and his hands. A woman speaking Russian or Polish or something stood in front of the intake desk at the Clark Street police station and jabbered away.

  Behind the woman, who was dressed in what looked like an Indian blanket with sleeves, stood a tall, bald man in his forties wearing an overcoat. The overcoat, lined with something that looked to Nestor like black fur, was open and under it was the best-looking gray charcoal suit and matching tie that Sergeant Nestor Briggs had ever seen in his more than thirty-five years as a Chicago cop. The tall, bald man was red-eyed and kept checking his watch, looking for help from God through the ceiling, and biting his lower lip. Nestor wanted to hear the man’s story. He wanted to answer the phone. He wanted to take a piss, but he had to listen to this woman yak at him in angry Serbian or Greek.

  She wasn’t a bad looker, a little too thin for Nestor, who hadn’t had a woman in more than six years, but what the hell. She was dark with a long neck and high cheekbones.

  “What language you talkin’, lady?” Nestor asked with mock patience, trying to catch the eye of the weeping man who might sympathize with his dilemma, might even, miraculously, speak Albanian or Croatian.

  The woman shouted louder, took off her jacket, and rolled up the sleeve of the blue and yellow plaid shirt she was wearing. Her arm was bruised and yellow. Nestor put on his glasses, stood up, and leaned over to look. There were no needle tracks.

  “Over there,” Nestor said slowly, pointing to the wooden bench against the wall. “Go sit over there.”

  The woman paused, looked at the bench, looked at Nestor, rolled down her sleeve, and answered Nestor in her language as he had spoken to her, slowly, clearly, as if speaking to a half-wit.

  “I’m a patient man, lady,” he said, “but I got business to … hold it.”

  He picked up the ringing phone, holding the woman off with hand gestures and a finger pointed at the bench.

  “Clark Street,” he said. “Right.”

  Nestor pulled his pad in front of him. There were already eight messages on it. He folded the pink pad back with his free hand, which gave leave to the Czech or Latvian woman to advance again.

  As the person on the other end of the line spoke, Nestor wrote the message for Lieberman.

  “I’ll let him know,” Nestor said, now holding his right hand over his ear to drown out the screams of the exasperated woman who was pounding on the desk.

  “Shut up, shut up, shut up,” the bald, well-dressed man behind her suddenly shouted.

  The woman paused in her diatribe and turned to face the man. Nestor couldn’t see her face with her back turned but he was sure that there was something akin to Rumanian madness in her eyes.

  “Shut up?” she said in almost flawless English.

  The phone was ringing again. Blankenship, Foster, and Meridiani came through the front door dragging a young Hispanic man whose eyes were open wide and blank and whose hands were handcuffed behind him. The Hispanic wasn’t fighting. He was a lump, a 250-pound lump of flesh wearing what looked like a World War II army uniform.

  Nestor came around the desk as fast as he could, which was none too fast considering the reason he was behind the desk in the first place was a ten-year-old hip operation that had left him with a permanent limp.

  “One of you guys give me a hand here,” he called as Foster, Blankenship, and Meridiani lugged their silent load across the floor.

  “On your own,” Blankenship grunted. “This asshole’s come to life three times and tried to kick the shit out of us. We’re locking him.”


  The Hungarian or Ukrainian woman was advancing on the weeping well-dressed man. She was silent, which, as Nestor well knew from experience, was a bad sign.

  The sound of the Hispanic man’s shoes scraping across the tile floor was cut off as the three cops got him through the door leading to the lockup. The door slammed behind them.

  “Hold it there,” Nestor called as the woman kept moving on the weeping man, who held his ground looking angry.

  “Shut up?” the woman said softly.

  “You think you have problems?” the man asked, hyperventilating. “You think you have problems? My wife just took every penny I’ve got, everything, right out of the bank, the drawers, every goddamn thing. And you know where she went? She ran away with my kid brother who hasn’t had a job for more than two fucking days in his life.”

  Nestor was between the man and the woman now, holding his hands up to stay the woman who, it was now clear, stood almost a head taller than the desk sergeant, who wanted nothing more than to get through the day alive, feed his cat, grill a chicken burger, and watch the Tonight show.

  “Ma’am,” Nestor said. “Just back it up. Sit down over there and I’ll find someone who can speak …”

  Then the tall, bald guy said something behind Nestor, but Nestor couldn’t understand it because it was in the same damned language that the woman had jabbered in, or one close to it.

  The woman exploded in fury, trying to claw her way past Nestor, shrieking.

  Nestor took a scratch on his right cheek and a knee to the thigh. He threw his arms around the woman and shouted, “Help out here.”

  The weeping man was now pulling at Nestor’s shirt, trying to get past Nestor to the woman.

  A punch went by Nestor’s face and hit the woman flush on her right ear.

  “That’s enough,” Nestor shouted, losing his glasses and control of the situation.

  The woman reached over Nestor, tore at his shirt, and tried to grab the thin man’s hair, but there wasn’t enough there for a meaningful attack.

  Then, suddenly, the weight of the tall, thin man behind him was lifted away. Nestor stepped back and the woman swung at him. Bill Hanrahan stepped in to grab her arm. Since Hanrahan’s right arm was engaged in a choke hold on the tall, bald man, he had to cope with the woman with his left. It took some doing, but she obliged by moving into him to get at the bald man.

  “Cuff her, Nestor,” Hanrahan said wearily.

  With some effort and another scratch, Nestor cuffed the woman. He stepped back, touched his cheek, looked at his scratch, and prayed fast to Jesus that the woman wasn’t HIV positive.

  “Where is everybody?” Hanrahan asked.

  Nestor, breathing hard now, tried to talk normally but couldn’t.

  “Don’t know … Foster, the others, came … I called. The damn phones.”

  The phone was ringing.

  “I thought we were gonna be goddamn automated,” Nestor said, pulling the jabbering woman to the bench and forcing her to sit “I thought everyone called nine-one-one these days. Nobody calls nine-one-one. They call me. They call me and they tear the shirt off my back.”

  He turned to Hanrahan and pointed to the bald man, whose face had turned crimson. Hanrahan loosened his grip and the man began to cough.

  “All these people speaking who the hell knows what,” said Nestor Briggs, brushing back his few remaining hairs. “And they can’t remember a simple goddamn number. They look up Nestor Briggs. They call the other stations and ask, ‘You know where I can find Nestor Briggs? I wanna make him earn his pension.’”

  Hanrahan led the gasping man to the bench on the opposite side of the lobby and sat him down.

  “I want back in lockup,” Nestor said. “I got years in. I got a right to some respect, don’t I?”

  “You got a right, Nestor,” Hanrahan said patiently.

  “You’re goddamn right I got a right. I’m telling Kearney. He don’t like it I can go over his head. I got friends. I … you think she’s a hooker, this one?”

  Hanrahan looked at the foreign woman who sat, her hands manacled behind her, glaring at the two policemen and the gagging man.

  “No,” said Hanrahan.

  The woman shouted something and Hanrahan looked at Nestor, who had found some Kleenex on his desk and was dabbing away at his wounds.

  “I don’t know what she’s talking about,” Nestor said.

  “She says she just killed her husband,” the bald man said in a rasping voice. “He’s better off. I’d be better off if my wife had just killed me.”

  “What’s she talking?” Hanrahan asked.

  “Bulgarian.” The bald man wept.

  “I knew it,” said Nestor.

  “I’ll send someone out for them,” said Hanrahan. “The phone’s ringing.”

  As Bill Hanrahan went up the stairs to the squad room, Nestor picked up the phone. He had completely forgotten the call for Lieberman.

  The squad room on the second floor of the Clark Street stationhouse was hot. No one knew how to regulate the temperature though many had tried and almost as many man-hours had gone into trying to get the maintenance crew and their bosses downtown to take care of the problem as had been spent in the investigation of armed robbery. The heat brought out the worst in the room, which still looked relatively new though it was more than a decade old. The smell of bodies, tobacco, forgotten lunches. And the room was full. Cold weather was supposed to keep people at home and out of other people’s pockets, but this day was an exception.

  “Hoff,” he called. “Nestor needs a hand.”

  Hoff, the new kid on the block, lean, black, and ready to take on anything, nodded, put down the report he was reading, and moved to the door through which Hanrahan had just come.

  Hanrahan moved to his desk in the corner. Lieberman who had the desk across from him, wasn’t in. His desk was a mess of reports, files, and scribbled notes. Hanrahan’s work was in a neat pile in front of him. He took off his coat, draped it over the chair next to his desk, and sat down.

  In one corner of the room, Pascalini and Ryan were talking to a frightened-looking dark young woman who looked like a hooker. She was smoking and looking around as if she expected something really bad to happen. From the look on her face, Hanrahan figured it already had.

  Porter and Berogoski were working on a report a few desks down. Berogoski, the fat one, was standing over the shoulder of Porter, the thin one, telling him that he was misspelling everything.

  Hanrahan took the first folder off the pile, opened it, and looked down. He should have gone home, made the bed in the living room, done the dishes. He should have … and that’s when Hanrahan, listening to one cop correct another’s spelling and a hooker sobbing about some “loony,” had a sudden revelation.

  “Decisions,” he said softly, aloud. “I can’t make decisions.”

  He was on the verge of exploring this insight when the words of the excited hooker broke through.

  “I told you. I told you.”

  “Tell us one more time, Jess,” Ryan said, his pockmarked Irish face as concerned as Spencer Tracy in any one of his priest roles.

  “He was kind of skinny, had on this, I don’t know, jacket,” she said. “Young, hair over his eyes, like pictures of that guy, you know, killed all those Jews back who knows.”

  “Hitler?” asked Ryan.

  “With the little mustache, yeah,” Jess said, crossing her legs and taking a deep drag. “Light blond hair, blue eyes, maybe gray, looked real crazy. Just sitting there looking out the window at Wendy’s right out there.”

  She turned in the chair and pointed at the wall.

  “Wendy’s?” said Pascalini, who looked a little like a picture Hanrahan had once seen of Edgar Allan Poe.

  “Yeah, right,” said Jess. “Then, out of nothing, J.J. says, ‘Hello kid, how are ya?’ Kid goes nuts. I never saw anything like that. Jumps on J.J., bites his fuckin’ ear off, and then starts beating on him with a chair. The way he looked at m
e …He’s still out there. I ain’t goin’ out there. He might be waiting for me.”

  “He have an accent?” came the next question.

  The two detectives and the woman looked up at Hanrahan.

  “Accent?” asked Jess nervously.

  “Like foreign or from the South,” asked Hanrahan.

  “Yeah,” Jess answered, remembering, “but more like … I don’t know, not like white nigger talk, you know?”

  “His nose,” said Hanrahan, “maybe pushed over to one side just a little?”

  The young woman looked up at Ryan, who nodded that she should answer the big man’s questions.

  “Maybe,” she said. “I don’t know. Maybe.”

  “What did he talk about?” asked Hanrahan.

  “Talk about?” Jess asked, looking at what was left of her cigarette. “He was a nut, a religious loony. Jesus stuff, you know. You run into them all the time. Some of ’em junkies who found religion. They’re the worst, man.”

  “I’ve got a picture to show you,” Hanrahan said, going back to his desk.

  Ryan waited a beat and then went back to his questioning.

  Porter pulled the report he was working on out of the typewriter and Berogoski took it from him gently with two fingers, saying, “Work of art.”

  Bill Hanrahan sat for a beat looking over at the young woman. Then he got up again and moved across and out of the room. He was back in less than five minutes holding a five-by-seven photograph in his hand. He walked over to Jess, who stopped in midsentence and looked up at Hanrahan as he turned the photograph toward her.

  “Yeah,” she said, her voice shaking. “That’s him. That’s him.”

  Hanrahan handed the photograph to Ryan, who turned it over to check the name. Hanrahan went back to his own desk and called Lieberman.

  It was Hanrahan’s call that Lieberman had come back to after watching the kids, Todd, and Faye drive off.

  “How’s it going, Rabbi?” asked Hanrahan.

  “Surviving, Father Murphy, surviving.”

  “Frankie Kraylaw’s back in town,” said Hanrahan.

  There was no answer on the other end of the line, so Hanrahan loosened his tie and went on, “He bit a guy’s ear off in Wendy’s next door to the station. Hooker who was there says he was watching the station. Way I see it there are maybe a couple of hundred reasons why he might be sitting in Wendy’s watching the station, but only one of them makes much sense.”