Lieberman's Law (15 page)

“First,” said Lieberman, looking at Bess who strained to understand what was going on from Lieberman's side of the conversation. “I accept the responsibility. I have no choice. Second, there were a few times when I heard threats about you and your mother. They were all just street punks who threatened everyone when they were caught, including me, the judge, the mayor, and their own families. When they went back on the street, they forgot threats, remembered that they hadn't lost face in front of the police. I was threatened on a regular basis. Still am.”

“An honest answer,” Lisa said, as if she were holding a checklist to see if her father would score the requisite one hundred points that meant she could leave her children with him and her mother.

Lieberman moved carefully into the conversation knowing his daughter wanted him to score high, didn't want to come flying back to Chicago to be responsible for her children. But if Abe didn't make the score, she might have to start making reservations.

“They're trying to scare me, Bill, the department, into letting them have their kingdom,” said Lieberman, looking at Todd.

“They?” asked Lisa.

“A Korean gang,” explained Lieberman. “I've already made plans to take care of the problem, maybe in the next day or two.”

“What are you going to do? Have Bill kick down their door and the two of you go in with a gun in each hand, shooting surprised Koreans?”

“No. Hard diplomacy with something to back it up,” said Lieberman. “That's all I can say. The kids will be safe.”

“If anything happens to them …” Lisa continued.

“I'll have Bill kick down a door and shoot surprised Koreans,” said Lieberman. “Then I'll shoot myself. But maybe first I'll shoot the furnace repairman who has been making his retirement money off of me and your mother. Then I shoot Sergeant Hurley, Curly Hurley, remember him? Works out of the Hyde Park. Anti-Semitic. Remember me telling you about him?”

“I remember, Abe,” Lisa said impatiently. “I don't find you funny.”

“You never did,” said Abe with a sigh. “It was my curse. The kids will be fine.”

“It would be hard to come right now,” Lisa said formally. “I just accepted some additional lab responsibility, DNA testing for felony cases. But I might be making a trip soon for a few days. I'll be bringing a friend.”

Abe had no idea where Lisa was working or on what. She had never volunteered the information and she had made it quite clear she didn't want to be asked.

“DNA, felony cases. You're a criminalist?” asked Abe.

“Los Angeles,” she said. “I did a little work on the O. J. Simpson case.”

There was a challenge in his daughter's voice that Lieberman did not want to face. His biochemist daughter who hated and was ashamed of her father being a policeman was now building a career in law enforcement.

“Your mother and Todd are here. Your mother wants to talk. You want to talk to Todd?”

“To Bess, not Todd.”

Lieberman handed the phone to his wife and whispered to Todd, “She doesn't want to talk to you.”

Todd's relief was punctured by a gentle exhalation, as if he had been holding his breath.

“So,” said Bess. “Are you going to be staying here when you come in for Barry's bar mitzvah?”

Lisa spoke. She spoke for a long time.

“Socialism is a meaningless dying ritual,” said Bess calmly. “Bar mitzvahs have been going on for over four thousand years. Are you coming? Are you not coming? You want to think it over some more? Think it over?”

This time Lisa did not speak long.

“The cleanup is going fine,” Bess said. “It hit Rabbi Wass and Ida Katzman hard. They were just here. The children told you?”

Lisa answered.

“The children will stay with Maish and Yetta for a few days. I'll call you. What's the best time? Can I reach you at work?”

Lisa spoke and Bess motioned to Abe for something to write with. He handed her his pen. She put on her glasses and wrote some phone numbers on the back of a telephone bill.

“I'm not going to tell you not to worry,” said Bess to her daughter. “I'm not going to tell you to pray, which you wouldn't do in any case. I'm going to tell you that you should have faith in your father. He knows what he is doing. I love you.”

Bess hung up looking slightly stunned.

“She said, ‘I love you too,' ” said Bess.

“Our daughter warms with age,” said Abe, taking back his pen and clicking it closed. “The kids told her about the desecrations?”

Bess nodded her head.

“It was also in the
Los Angeles Times,
on television,” she said. “Abe, I didn't tell you, but I agreed to let ABC interview me for the late news. They said they might even want me for ‘Nightline' to talk about what happened.”

“Ted Koppel used to be a Jew,” said Todd.

“There's no such thing as ‘used to be a Jew,' ” said Lieberman, feeling decidedly hungry. “You are born a Jew. You call yourself what you want but everyone calls you Jew and when you die, even if you're a Franciscan monk, your fellow monks say prayers and call you the Jewish Brother.”

“How do you know that?” asked Todd.

“I don't know it,” said Lieberman sitting back. “I made it up like Sophocles.”

Todd nodded. “Can I see the kids?”

“Whenever you want,” said Bess. “You know that.”

Todd got up and headed for the stairs. Looking back, he said, “What do you want me to tell them?”

“Whatever you want to tell them,” said Lieberman. “Whatever you have to tell them. Whatever they ask. I'll take care of the problem.”

“Dare death with us,” said Todd, “which awaits you anyway. By your great soul, I challenge you, old friend. The man who sticks it out against his fate shows spirit, but the spirit of a fool. No man alive can budge necessity.”

“More Euripides, I suppose,” said Lieberman.

“Yes,
Heracles.
” Todd ran up the stairs.

“He's feeling very Euripides today,” said Lieberman, hearing the door upstairs open and Melisa shout, “Daddy!” in happy surprise.

“Avrum,” Bess said, leaning toward her husband and taking his hand. “Are the children in real danger?”

“I'll see to it that they're not,” said Lieberman.

Bess shook her head.

“So,” he said. “What are you going to wear for Ted Koppel?”

“If they call me back, and if I do it,” she said. “Very businesslike. Gray suit.”

“With the pearls,” said Lieberman.

“With the pearls,” Bess said with her first smile of the day, albeit a small one. And once again, the phone rang.

“I'll get it,” said Lieberman. “I'm expecting.” He picked up the phone.

“Por supuesto,”
he said.
“Quisas. Pero. … Deme cinco secundos.”

Lieberman put down the phone and moved across the living room to the front door. The Asian in the car was still there. He walked past Bess in the dining room holding up a hand asking her to be patient. He pushed open the kitchen door, and she heard him cross the room and open the back door. It closed almost immediately and when Lieberman returned he held a white envelope. He picked up the phone and said.
“Si, yo lo tengo. Hasta luego.
Yes, I'll say a Jew prayer for Sammy Sosa.”

Lieberman hung up the phone, looked at his wife and bit his lower lip.

“Lieberman,” she started, and then above them Barry let out an enormous cackling laugh. Bess changed her mind about asking her husband what he was planning to do. All she cared about was that it resulted in her grandchildren and her husband being safe.

“Don't do anything foolish, Avrum,” she said.

“No man alive can budge necessity,” Lieberman said. “You suppose a cheese and onion omelette from a woman who's going to be on ‘Nightline' might be beneath her?”

“Sharp cheddar? Egg Beaters?”

“Perfect,” he said, putting the envelope in his pocket.

“B
IG PILE,” SAID LIEBERMAN
, looking down at the photographs on his partner's desk.

Hanrahan nodded. They had already exchanged information and had cups of strong coffee, Nestor Briggs's special brew, which required that the pots never be cleaned. Lieberman's stomach hurt after the second sip.

In the photographs, there were faces, puzzled faces, angry faces, faces Lieberman recognized, including his own. Lieberman didn't like looking at pictures of himself. The man in the pictures and the man he saw in the mirror was not Abe Lieberman. It was Abe Lieberman's grandfather. It was the silent, sad-looking man serving up his famous hot dogs with everything in the always packed hole-in-the-wall on Central Park in the heart of Jew Town.

Lieberman shook his head, kept flipping through photos, and found Ibraham Said and Rene Catolino, who the camera was kind to. It took most of the hard edge from her face. And here was Eli Towser holding his arm in pain. And the muscular Israeli blond. And there were three young men he hadn't noticed in the crowd. They were wearing berets and arm bands. And there were multiple pictures of the two people who had stood on the steps, the young woman and the young man. In some pictures she was tight jawed. In others she looked passionate. Lieberman gathered the photographs and put them in a large envelope along with a half-dozen movie stills and then made a phone call before they left in Lieberman's car.

On the way, Lieberman talked with Hanrahan about the threat from the Asian man.

“The Koreans,” Hanrahan said. “Kim?”

“It would seem so,” said Lieberman.

“And you left one of them sitting in the car at your house?”

Lieberman went straight up Clark till it turned into Chicago Avenue in Evanston and then kept going along the elevated train embankment on his left and then the business district leading toward downtown Evanston. He turned on Dempster and headed west.

“We could scare the shit out of him,” Hanrahan suggested.

“It wouldn't work,” said Lieberman.

“No,” Hanrahan agreed. “It wouldn't work. Round the clock shift on the house, Bess and the kids.”

“Think we can justify it on the basis of an Asian man talking to my grandson and another Asian sitting in a car near my house? Kearney would lose his job.”

“Volunteers,” said Hanrahan. “Off duties. I could set it up.”

“No,” said Lieberman. “It's got to end. I'm taking care of it.”

“Meanwhile …?”

“I've got someone watching the guy in the car,” said Lieberman crossing McCormick into Skokie. “If he moves toward the house or the kids or Bess, he'll have a very big surprise. But I think he's parked out there to scare us off the Kim case.”

“They don't understand, do they?” said Hanrahan with a shake of his head.

“No,” said Lieberman, checking his car clock as he pulled into the small strip mall parking lot across from Temple Mir Shavot. “Bess is going to be on ‘Nightline' tonight, maybe. About …”

Lieberman looked at the bank that had been converted less than a year ago into a temple and desecrated the day before. Hanrahan also looked at the temple building. A Skokie police car was parked in front of the door with two uniformed cops inside.

“We, Iris and me, are going to have both a Unitarian and a Chinese wedding,” said Hanrahan, leading his partner through a door between a hardware store and a baseball trading card shop.

“
Mazel Tov
,” said Lieberman, as they moved up the stairs.

“If they have best men in Chinese weddings,” said Hanrahan. “Would you …?”

“I would take great umbrage if you asked anyone else,” said Lieberman.

Hanrahan knocked at the door at the top of the steps. Anne Crawfield Ready opened the door, smiled politely, and backed away so the two men could enter. Leo Benishay was standing in the middle of the room. The policemen shook hands.

“You know Mrs. Ready has a collection of ceramic frogs in that cabinet,” said Benishay. “Fascinating. And her husband, look at those photographs, professional. But those frogs.” Leo Benishay was a con man from way back.

Mrs. Ready, smiling proudly, went to the cabinet in the corner and opened it, revealing shelves of ceramic, porcelain, and other frogs in neat lines. She stood back so the two policemen who had just come in could admire her collection.

On the bottom shelf were a camera and a bag.

“Frogs are mine,” she said. “Camera was Carl's. You can touch that but please don't touch any of the frogs. I'll tell you about any ones that interest you.”

“The tiny one, here on top, size of a pea,” said Lieberman with genuine interest.

“Probably my most valuable,” Mrs. Ready said beaming. “Perfect scale, perfect detail, Chinese, about two hundred years old, probably made for a member of the ruling class, possibly even an emperor or someone in his family. I've seen ones like it, but not as good, priced at seven hundred dollars in catalogs. But I'd never sell any of them.” She reached out and touched one of the larger frogs. Most of them were standard green or gray-green, a few were bright yellow or even white, and some had spots.

“What got you into this?” Hanrahan said.

“I haven't the faintest idea,” Mrs. Ready said with a smile and a shake of the head to indicate this great mystery. “I think my husband gave me one once and I've picked them up ever since at garage sales, flea markets. Once in a while, my nephew from Salt Lake City will bring me one when he comes to Chicago on business.”

“Magnificent collection.” Lieberman said, as she closed the cabinet door gently and turned the key in the lock.

“Magnificent,” Leo Benishay concurred with an appreciative smile.

“Could we show you some photographs, ma'am?” asked Hanrahan, looking for permission at Benishay, who nodded.