Lieberman's Day

by Stuart M. Kaminsky

  Just before his fingers touched the woman, she turned. The turn was sudden. George backed away, almost falling, and let out a yelp. The woman was white. Her belly was big. She was smiling at him. It was the woman he had shot. There was the hole. Right there in her stomach.

  Panic. His mother must not know, must not see this.

  He turned from the smiling white woman and found himself facing the two men from whom he had taken the money. They were sitting at a table, the same table they had been sitting at when he took their money.

  George looked for his mother and saw Raymond among the dark faces. Raymond was holding a gun. The gun was pointed at George. Raymond said something and George howled and opened his eyes to see a different white woman, a white woman in a white dress looking down at him.

  “You are one lucky man,” the woman said.

  She was heavy, more old than young, with hair too yellow to be natural.

  “Callaloo,” George tried to say, but it came out a dry rusty blur of pain. The pain was surrounded by a dream. The pain was in his chest, in his nose, in his arms.

  “You speak English?” the woman asked.

  George nodded.

  “Your throat’s a little sore. Tube. It’s out now,” the woman said, checking the glucose bottle that dripped into a tube leading to George’s right arm. “Can you understand English?”

  George nodded.

  “Good. Can you talk? Softly. Not a whisper.”

  “Yes,” George rasped. “I am in a hospital.”

  “Very observant,” said the woman, moving to the foot of his bed and picking up a chart.

  George turned his head as far as he could to the right. It wasn’t very far. There was another bed in the room. The other bed was empty.

  “Man wants to talk to you,” the nurse said, returning to his side and lifting his wrist to take his pulse.

  “Man?”

  “The Man,” the woman said. “Police. You had a couple of bullets in you. They have a certain curiosity about such things.”

  “I’m very tired,” said George, closing his eyes.

  “Man says he’ll only be a minute. Doctor says if you’re up and can talk we can go for it. I’ll cut in after a minute or two.”

  “Wait,” rasped George as the woman turned and left the room.

  George tried to pull his thoughts and lies together. It was a difficult task when he was well, whole, and undrugged.

  The door opened again and a man came in. The man was Chinese or something, in a leather jacket. He was hefty, compact, and about forty.

  “George,” the Chinese guy said, moving toward the bed. “You look terrible.”

  “I been shot.”

  “I know. Who shot you?”

  George shrugged.

  “You don’t know who shot you?”

  “Man,” said George. “White man. Robber.”

  “A white robber took you on in the middle of a prairie,” said the Chinese man. “Did he say what he wanted?”

  “Money,” said George.

  “Then why didn’t he take it?” asked the man.

  George’s eyes blinked and looked around for an answer. “He didn’t take any money?”

  “That I can’t say,” said the man. “But you were found on the side of the Dan Ryan Expressway with a bag of cash in your arms. Another question after you tell us who shot you: Where did you get the money?”

  “I am very tired,” said George, closing his eyes.

  “I’ll bet you are,” said the cop. “Talk with your eyes closed.”

  “I am very tired,” George repeated.

  “Doctor says you should be dead,” the Chinese cop said. “Another question: Where did you get that hat?”

  George’s hands went up to his head. The movement tugged at the needle in his arm and pulled at the stitches in his back. The hat was gone.

  “Robber,” George groaned wearily.

  “White guy who didn’t take your money,” the cop said flatly. “He gave you that hat?”

  “Yes. Well, no, man. He drop it or somethin’. Where am I?”

  “La Grange.”

  “Is that near Florida?”

  “Close,” said the cop.

  George smiled, ignored the cop, and let himself be carried back to drugged sleep.

  The policeman, whose name was Martin Fu, stood for a minute to be sure that George was really asleep, then he left the room and went to the nursing station.

  “Phone,” he said.

  “Local?” asked the older nurse with the tinted hair, looking at him over her glasses.

  “Chicago.”

  “All right,” the nurse said with a sigh, going back to the chart she was working on.

  Martin Fu took his notebook from his pocket, fingered through it for the number he needed, and placed the call. What he heard on the other end when the ringing stopped was a harried voice saying, “Sergeant Briggs, Clark Street station.”

  Beyond Briggs, Martin Fu could hear some woman screaming in Russian or something, then a man with a quivering voice in English.

  “Lieberman,” Fu said.

  “Not here,” said Briggs.

  “Give him this message. My name’s Fu, La Grange police. Got a guy in the hospital here fits the description that went on the line this morning.”

  “Right,” said Briggs, as the woman and man in the background raised the ante, again.

  Fu left his phone number and started to say that it might be urgent, but Sergeant Briggs had already hung up.

  “Thanks,” said Fu. “One more call. Local.”

  The nurse nodded and Fu called the station and informed his duty officer that he would be at the hospital waiting for a call from a Detective Lieberman in Chicago.

  “How’s the day, Francie?” asked Fu.

  “Long,” said the woman on the other end of the call. “Long.”

  Fu hung up, nodded at the top of the nurse’s head, and moved back to the door of George’s room. He had no real concern about George getting up and leaving, nor any real concern about whoever shot him tracking him down to finish the task. But if this was a suspect in the murder that had hit the noon news, it would not be a good idea to leave him unguarded.

  Fu found a chair inside George’s room and moved it outside the door. From the pocket of his leather jacket, he fished a compact electronic Tetris game his daughter had given him for Christmas. He pushed the button, heard the small ding, and sat down for what he hoped would be an hour or so of quiet meditation.

  The heater had stopped working in the pickup truck, so Frankie had to give up his view of the entrance to the apartment building where Big Bear had taken Angie. The apartment was in a three-story, yellow-brick-courtyard walk-up. Frankie had watched the windows when the Indian and the old woman had gone in and in the near darkness of the Chicago winter afternoon he had seen the light go on in the apartment on the second floor.

  The only thing left to do was wait and pray, but Big Bear didn’t come out and the heater didn’t work and Frankie knew he had to get out of the truck or freeze.

  He didn’t think it could possibly be colder outside the truck, but it was, so he decided that he would have to go up to the apartment even if Big Bear was there. He would simply carry the shotgun under his coat, and while it would stick out a little … He was opening the door to get the gun when he saw the lobby door open and the big Indian hurry out, hands in his pockets, collar up. He trotted out of the courtyard and onto the sidewalk as Frankie ducked behind the truck and watched until Big Bear was at the corner of the block at least forty yards away.

  Then Frankie walked quickly to the entrance, entered the lobby, and tried the inner door. It was locked. He would have punched a hole in one of the door’s glass panes but someone had beaten him to it. He reached in through the broken pane and unlocked the door from the inside. As he stepped in he smelled mildew and chill.

  The steps were covered with ragged carpeting and the light bulb on the first landing between the two ap
artments was bare, yellow, and dim. The second floor was the same. Very slowly, patiently, he tried the door of the apartment where the light had gone on. It was locked. He knocked.

  “Big Bear,” he called.

  No answer. He knocked again.

  “It’s me. Frankie.”

  Still no answer.

  “Come on,” Frankie coaxed. “I’ve got the money for you.”

  Beyond the door he heard movement, the creak of wooden floorboards.

  “Who’s there?” came Angle’s frightened voice.

  “Frankie. Tell Big Bear I’ve got the fifty dollars. I just want to give it to him and head back to Wyoming tonight.”

  “Fifty dollars?”

  “Fifty,” he confirmed.

  He had used the devil’s own tool, turned greed and corruption on the woman, tested her, and now, he was sure, she had been found wanting. A chain slipped, a lock turned, and the door opened just wide enough for Angle’s face to show. The face was a puffy white, the eyes brown with a near yellow where the white had once been. Her hair was straight, gray-white, and less tangled than Frankie had vaguely remembered. She squinted at him.

  “I know you from someplace?” she asked.

  “Not that I know of, ma’am.”

  “Give me the money. I’ll give it to the Indian.”

  Her hand came out of the crack of the partly open door.

  “Where is Big Bear?” Frankie asked with a smile, looking around the hall to be sure no one was listening.

  “Out,” she said. “I’m a friend. I’m stayin’ with him. I’ll give it to him.”

  “I can’t,” said Frankie with a sigh. “No offense, ma’am, but I don’t know you or what’s in your heart. I’d say it’s a good heart, but the devil does have powers.”

  “I do know you from someplace,” she said.

  “Well, now that I see you clear you look familiar to me, too, ma’am,” he said with a smile. “But I can’t be sure. Listen. Big Bear and I have a secret place we put money. You turn your back and I’ll put it there and when Big Bear comes back you just tell him Frankie was here and left the money in the hiding place. Fair?”

  “I don’t know,” Angie said.

  Frankie’s hand was on the door now, applying gentle pressure.

  “I’m sorry. I wish I could wait but I just don’t have the time and I know Big Bear needs the money, but if you say no, then …”

  The door opened and Angie, clutching the top of her purple sack of a dress, backed away to let him in. Frankie came in, closing the door behind him.

  “Thank you,” he said. “Now, you just turn your back.”

  Angie turned her back to the wall and Frankie looked around the apartment. It was neat, uncluttered. The furniture was old but clean. A faded Indian blanket covered the sofa and on the wall of the small living room was the photograph of an Indian family in full tribal dress. Frankie crossed to the sofa, bent down pretending to stuff something behind the pillows, and then stood up.

  “You can turn now,” he said, facing Angie, who shuffled about to face him.

  “Wait,” he said, looking at her. “Sure, I know you. You’re Angie, met you once or twice at the church in Evanston. You know, St. Catherine’s.”

  “Yeah,” she said, rocking on her feet and pointing at him. “I thought you looked familiar. You work there or something, right?”

  “I do God’s work,” Frankie said. “I must go now. I’ve been traveling, trying to get work. Came back to Chicago to find my wife and boy and bring them to Wyoming, but …”

  He shrugged.

  “Can’t find ’em?” she asked.

  He nodded his head yes, his eyes misting, a sincere mist of beginning tears.

  “Her name’s Jeanine. I heard she was working at a McDonald’s, but …”

  “Jeanine,” Angie said with excitement “I know her. I know her. I seen her.”

  “No,” said Frankie.

  “Yes,” said Angie. “Honest to God. On Western, up near what’s that street, Granville, something. Working the McDonald’s. Right there behind the counter. She’s the one who’s husb …”

  Angie’s mouth snapped shut.

  “Bless you,” said Frankie. “The Lord must have guided me to you. Repay an old debt and be rewarded.”

  Angie’s putty face was wrinkled now with thought and the recognition of some memory about Jeanine’s husband.

  “I’m thinkin’ something here. Rememberin’, you know. Ain’t it that she run away from you, somethin’, you know?”

  “No,” said Frankie. “I just had to do some traveling. Spreading the Lord’s truth.”

  “No,” Angie said, pointing at him with one doughy hand, holding her collar closed with the other. “You’re the one the Indian said was lookin’ for me. Oh shit, God. Christ.”

  Angie began to shake, to cry as Frankie came around a small table in the middle of the room and moved toward her. Suddenly, with a yelp like Ab Grunner’s dog when the semi ran over it, the old woman ran to the corner of the room and through the door. Frankie lunged after her but was a step too late as Angie threw the bolt on the bathroom door.

  “If I had time,” he said, standing in front of the bathroom door. “But I do not.”

  Beyond the door Angie was sobbing, an echoing sob. Frankie was sure she was sitting in the bathtub.

  He turned, found the kitchen, opened it, and pulled out a half-full jar of raspberry jam. He went back into the living room and, to the sound of frightened sobbing and wails, put his finger into the jam and moved to the wall, where he painted a jagged raspberry cross. He filled it in in the proper places, stepped back to admire it, and strode across the floor and out of the apartment.

  Six P.M.

  ONE GLASS OF RUM. That was all Raymond drank and he drank it slowly, sitting at one of the tables at the Biabou Restaurant on Division Street, being sure to eat all of his bean soup and sandwich.

  Others around him, all black, many with the accent of the Islands, ate chicken or fish, drank, and laughed amid photographs of the white Monastery of the Ancient Order of St. Benedict, a steel-drum band on the docks greeting tourists, and the Coroni Swamp, where he had seen oysters growing on trees, crabs crawling on branches, and pink-white egrets plucking shrimp from the shallow, murky waters. The one photograph that he did not like and that he was always careful to have behind his back and out of sight when he ate at the Biabou was of a street in the old section of Port of Spain, with its red-rusted roofs and wooden fence. It was like the street on which he had spent the first twenty-one years of his life. It was an image that he had been painfully erasing during the ten years he had spent in the United States, the last eight years of which were as an illegal alien.

  Raymond knew that he would have to return to work soon, that he would need to act as if nothing had happened, that he would need to blend in and wait.

  He looked at the book propped open before him to ward off conversation. The problems of Sammy Glick seemed less than meaningful.

  Raymond felt very tired. Was it yesterday, only yesterday when he had not yet committed a violent crime, had not yet killed one man, possibly two?

  He needed another rum, but the Biabou served no liquor, only food. You had to bring your own bottle and Raymond had done just that, but it was a bottle he had taken from the apartment, a bottle with but two small servings left in it, and it was now empty and he was still feeling pain.

  “You not eatin’ enough,” Henriette said, standing over Raymond, who looked at a couple at the next table trying to get their children to eat.

  “I’m not hungry,” said Raymond.

  Henriette, large, young, very black, and dressed in colorful Islands pink and red, shrugged. Like many other girls from the Islands she had a fancy for Raymond, but even if he were not worrying for his life, Henriette wouldn’t interest him, never had. Too young, too round, happy outside, ready, he was certain, to weep at the slightest cause. Raymond could not abide crying women—or crying men for that matter
.

  “You want me to take de bowl?”

  “Take the bowl,” said Raymond.

  “What happened to your friend?” Henriette asked, cleaning away the dishes.

  “Friend?”

  “Big fella. You know. George, from Trinidad. You come in with him few days back.”

  “Just someone I ran into,” Raymond said uncomfortably, trying to coax a few more drops from his bottle of rum. “No friend of mine.”

  “No matter to me,” Henriette said, shrugging again. “Mama and Doc-Doc said they seen him with you this morning in you car and he be wearin’ a furry hat and a look on his face like a scared owl.”

  Raymond didn’t bother to answer.

  Henriette shook her head and carried the dishes away toward the kitchen.

  All I need, Raymond thought. All I need.

  He got up, paid with some of the money he had taken from the body of the dead man, and headed for the door, almost bumping into two Latinos, one big, dumb, looking for a fight, the other nervous, thin, hair brushed back. Raymond avoided them as they headed for the kitchen. When their backs were to him, Raymond saw that the big dumb-looking one had an octopus painted on the back of his leather jacket. The thin Latino turned suddenly, looking toward him, but Raymond managed to avoid his eyes and step into the cold.

  The sweet smell disappeared behind him in the crackle of icy air. Raymond’s ears went cold and he reached into his pocket to fish out the red earmuffs.

  The car was around the corner past a grocery that sold both Islands and Chinese food. He had once bought a bottle of Chinese medicine in the store when he had a headache. It had cured his headache and every other headache he got until he ran out of the pills. When he had gone back to the store, the Chinese woman had said they could get no more of the pills from China, that they had a substitute. The substitute had not worked. Raymond had never gone back into the store.