Lieberman's thief al-4 Page 4

  When the policeman was gone, Jacob felt a fingernail of fear along his spine. Lieberman had worn a pistol in the holster under his jacket. He took it off for the examination and Jacob glanced at it. The gun was frightening and fascinating. He would definitely feel better with one in his drawer, a gun he could pull out, show, feel protected by.

  Jacob Berry took the four steps to the outer door and locked it. He had fallen into the habit of leaving his examining room door open and asking patients to identify themselves through the outer door before he let them in.

  He went back to his office and pulled the blinds, sending the room from sun to fluorescent, shadowless light.

  A Morning of Denial

  George Patniks was upset. George Patniks was shaking. He had sketched out the scene without thinking. Sketched it hi pencil directly onto the only piece of canvas he had stretched and ready-about three feet high and two feet wide. The kitchen, counters, phone, table, his own toolbox, and the figure of the man hi the white robe standing over the fallen, pleading woman, who tried to protect herself with a thin arm.

  He had removed the painting of the sad, smoking woman from his easel and placed it against the wall near his dresser.

  He paused for a spark of time and looked at what he was doing. He had not sketched hi the blood. Not yet. That would come later, when the color was right, when he felt it pulsing in his own veins.

  But now he was nearly feverish. Above him his mother played the television, blaring, vibrating his ceiling like the top of a huge drum. Oprah, Donahue, Jenny Jones, Maury. George's mother was addicted and afflicted-addicted to television junk and afflicted with enormous diabetic legs.

  Her furniture was fifty years old and the curlicue pattern was worn down to the hint of a memory from two generations of overweight Eupatniaks' bodies. George was an exception to the family rule. Maybe fat would suddenly spring on him when he wasn't prepared and he would wake up one morning looking like his mother, his Aunt Rosie, or his father until the cancer had chiseled him into a knotty stick, before it had taken him. George's room was a mess, a clutter of paintings leaning against one another on one wall-at least fifty paintings- paper on the floor, tubes of paint, capped but stained from previous bleedings of pigment, two palettes on the heavily and colorfully stained wooden table next to the easel near the window.

  His bed, dresser, and a reasonably comfortable chair cramped themselves into a nook near die closet. He had his own bathroom with a toilet and shower. There were moments when it struck George mat he had arranged and furnished his room so that it would look like a slightly larger version of his cell in Stateville.

  But now, now he had a problem. He couldn't get the blue right. He mixed colors on his pallet with an ancient spoon. Whites, blues, even a little yellow, but he couldn't get the hue of the table and matching countertop in the Rozier kitchen. He had to find it. He couldn't compromise. He wiped hair from his eyes, sure that he was accidentally and incidentally painting himself like a movie Indian about to go to war against Custer.

  His hands were blue now. He looked at the sketch of death on canvas and felt the as-yet-unfinished dead woman in the painting calling to him to get it right, telling him mat he would be given no peace till he captured the scene in paint. It was worse than not remembering the tune of some song, the name of your first cell mate, the phone number of a woman you met at Unikle's Tap who wrote it down on something you stuck in your pocket and couldn't find.

  "I'll get it. I'll get it I'll get it," he muttered, competing with an angry, semiliterate skinhead on "Oprah" audible from above. George had known skinheads, pinheads, and Steelhead, heard them coughing and cursing, threatening and sobbing from nightmares in the cell block. He had heard them pitty-pat barefoot early in the morning like caged tigers at the Lincoln Park Zoo.

  "Close," George said aloud. "Very close. Maybe."

  He tried the blue he had mixed on the sketched tabletop. Decisions. Would it be just that little bit lighter on the canvas? Should the woman's eyes be open or closed? He had seen them both ways.

  "All right," he sighed, clenching his fists hi triumph. That's the blue."

  And he worked without knowing to words why. Ideas came and floated briefly, shimmering and flying away before he could examine them. Colors, shapes, and shadows demanded their place before him.

  Maybe the painting would free him from the memory. He had offered a deal to whatever gods might be, but he was fast coming to the conclusion that there couldn't be any deals because there weren't any gods, though demons were a certainty. The deal had to be with the dead woman, a deal whereby the memory would be transferred from him to the canvas. Purged, clean. He would keep the painting, face to the wall, pay homage to it by looking at it from time to time, probably on a regular basis, same time each day or week. He could never sell it, probably never even show it to anyone.

  "Can't keep you here," he said to the painting. "Not free, open, facing the fucking world. Can't show you. Can't sell you."

  The memory of the woman pleading, dying, and nun standing trapped, helpless inside the pantry had brought him awake four times in the short hours of the night before. He had fallen asleep quickly, easily as always, and slept lightly, as he had learned to do behind the walls and wire. George Patniks was not much of a dreamer, but last night…

  The table was almost finished. He had slopped a bit over the lines that marked the edge of the table, but he would cover that when he painted the floor of the kitchen. The ter-razzo floor would be a challenge. He wasn't quite sure of the pattern. He dug for it in his memory, begged, coaxed, and pleaded it forward. He looked at the rough sketch of the woman. She pleaded with him. No, she insisted.

  George had seen violence, death, blood, and horror, but it had always been desperate or crazy men doing desperate and crazy things to one another with sharpened spoons, recreation yard stones, pipes unscrewed from the sink near the shoe shop. Throats cut, faces bashed. George had seen the pain of sodomy and the ecstasy of bleeding-nosed death from a crack overdose. A black guy named Corren who had raped a ten-year-old girl had his penis whacked off by another black guy named Zed-Zed who had a nine-year-old daughter on the outside. George had heard Corren scream, had seen him writhing, hands on the bloody stump, as two trustees hurried him on a stretcher down to the infirmary, holding the mutilated man away from the accompanying guard, who didn't want to get blood on his uniform. Those memories had passed and maybe this one would too, but he was sure it needed help, a lot of help.

  Blue to the countertop.

  "If that's what women want, I give it to 'em is all," a smug, insolent voice came from above, challenging Phil's, Oprah's, Bertice's, or Ricki's ready-for-battle and indignant audience.

  He couldn't stand it, but he couldn't stop. He wanted to grab his jacket and run down to Unikle's, but the perfect blue had to go down on the canvas now. He would never be able to match it again. Fools and sinners laughed over his head. George knew that sound well. He painted thickly but in control and then and then and then the blue was down, finished, and George knew he was sweating through his floppy gray Mickey Mouse sweatshirt.

  He wiped his brush on the stained chamois, rested it in the shell of thin turpentine, crossed the room, opened the door, and hurried up the narrow wooden steps.

  When he hit the tiny kitchen, the voice of the insolent, shouting man was ricocheting off the walls. George stepped through the archway and moved past his mother, who sat half on her hip in her favorite chair. George turned the volume down on the TV and saw the face of a man who used to be a woman. Right under his face on the screen it said, "Kyle Anther, Used to Be a Woman." Kyle Anther was very young, crew cut, ring in one ear, tight jeans. He never did time, George thought, never saw, felt, or feared what should be feared.

  "It was too loud?" his mother asked as George turned.

  Wanda Eupatniaks Skutnik sat, a sad balloon of a woman in a purple sack dress and faded purple slippers decorated with wilting purple satin flowers clinging to the toes
. Wanda's dyed red hair was pulled back in a bun tied with a purple ribbon. She was color coordinated but it looked off. Her round face showed concern. Her eyes met her son's. She looked like a dish of blueberry ice cream with a cherry on top.

  "It was a little too loud, Ma," he said. "Hard for me to… I'm painting."

  She nodded.

  "You look like a wild Indian," she said.

  It was George's turn to nod.

  Her son's painting, which did not please her, was the source of his income. Her son was a moderately successful artist. She told her sisters and brother, her other children, the few friends she still had, and the people at St. Agnes's Church that her son Gregor was a painter-not houses, but pictures people paid for.

  "You hungry?" she asked.

  "Don't know."

  "I'll make you something," she said, starting to grunt herself out of the chair.

  "No, Ma. I'll make you something."

  But she was up and hobbling toward the kitchen. There was no stopping her, no point in argument. She would prepare scrambled eggs with onions and thick sausage. She had promised him this, a favorite.

  "I'll turn the sound back up," he said, following her into the kitchen.

  "Just a little," she said. "When we finish eating."

  He sat, defeated, at the table, thinking about the white of the dead woman's nightgown, how he would capture the shadows and shade of that bloody gown. A commercial blared beyond the door and a woman with the voice of a young girl shouted a promise of forever clean teeth.

  Onions, sausage frying. His mother cracking, stirring eggs and adding salt, salt she shouldn't eat. She selected a clove of garlic and shuffled for her garlic press.

  Take the television and the taste of my food and what do I have left?" she had asked more than once.

  "No one's taking your television," George always said.

  "You never know," his mother answered.

  At the kitchen table, a small, square-topped collection of mismatched boards his grandfather and father had made, George folded his blue hands and tried to think.

  Could the police find him? Maybe. Maybe not. There were no fingerprints on the toolbox or in the kitchen of the Roziers' house. But you didn't know anymore. It might not be fingerprints. They had machines, tests, gadgets, science.

  Would they think he had killed the woman if they found him? Yes.

  Would they believe what had happened when he told them? No.

  And the murderer. George had seen his face and he had seen George's. Would he try to find George? Could he? George's name wasn't on the toolbox.

  Wanda Skutnik hummed "Jezebel" softly as she worked, occasionally interrupting the hum with a few words she remembered.

  "If ever a devil was born, without a pair of horns, hmm, hmm, hmmm, hmmm, hmmm. You know Frankie Laine is almost dead. Heart. I saw his picture. Is he a Negro?"

  Maybe I should call Rozier, tell him I won't talk to the police, tell him I don't want anything, just to be left alone. I leave you alone and you live with what you did and you leave me alone and I live with what you did. Can't bring her back.

  "He couldn't find me," George said.

  "What? Gregor, you said? Frankie Laine couldn't find you?"

  The frying pan sizzled and steamed.

  "Nothing, Ma. Just something else."

  He was hungry now. Garlic, onion, and sausage hungry. Two slabs of bread hungry. George would eat quickly and get back to the painting.

  "Ma, how you feel about maybe going to visit Tommy?

  You and me. We just pack, take off. Don't tell anyone where we're going."

  Wanda turned completely around, ignoring the almost-finished meal simmering behind her.

  "Gregor, you in trouble again?"

  "No," he said, shaking his head. "There's a dealer in Seattle interested in my paintings. Could mean a lot of money."

  Her wide deer eyes found his. He forced himself not to turn away.

  "I'll ask Dr. Swoboda."

  "We're not taking Dr. Swoboda," he said.

  Wanda laughed.

  "Get the plates and Coke," she said happily. "We can talk about it."

  In Which a Door Closes

  "He got somethin'. Scared we seen it. I tell you straight out. Seen it in his face. You did too. Tell me yes. Tell me no."

  "You mean the ghost in the window?" Dalbert said.

  "Straight out," Lonny said, shaking his head emphatically. "He's a fuckin' doctor. No lie. He's got somethin' worth somethin'."

  "The white guy we seen from the el yesterday?" asked lago. "In the blue shirt. Doctor or somethin'?"

  "The same," said Lonny. "I showed him the blade and he shit nickels. No lie. You seen."

  Dalbert shrugged, a what-the-hell-we've-got-nothing-better-to-do shrug.

  Lonny Wayne, Albert "Dalbert" Davis, and lago Simms sat in the Wayne apartment on Thirty-eighth. The view from the window was four square blocks of flattened rubble. Some said the city had leveled it to put in more public housing. Others said a trade or grade school was scheduled, but it looked more like a buffer zone between the ghetto and the hospital beyond. Lonny spent hours at the window fascinated by the emptiness, the children, and the garbage sifters turning over rocks and hoping for rats, sometimes even during the day. The Dysan brothers on six were all the time shooting rats from the window. Crazy mothers, Lonny thought, could kill someone. One rumor was that a new hospital was supposed to rise from the ashes, but Michael Reese Hospital was only a few blocks away. The four square blocks had been leveled more than three years ago.

  "I say he got shit on toast is what I say," lago said.

  "An' me and Dalbert say we gonna take him and break him. He won't give us no trouble. Fuckin' A, all we gotta worry about is him havin' a fuckin' heart attack."

  The apartment had two bedrooms, one for Lonny's mother and father, who were off working all the time in that damn suitcase factory for the damn Jews. The other bedroom was for Lonny's sister, but since Charletta was off at college in Urbana, Lonny had moved from the living room couch to Charletta's room, at least when she wasn't back on vacations.

  The living room was big, the furniture old and heavy and ready to say, Sorry. No thanks. I've had enough of sagging and struggling under your feet and asses. I give up.

  There was a photograph of Charletta and Lonny taken four years ago. Lonny hated it. The kid hi the picture was all smiling teeth and no hair.

  Lonny looked at the television. It was a Yogi Bear cartoon. The sound was turned off but lago couldn't keep his eyes from the screen. Lonny turned to the window, looked out, and watched five little kids trekking over the rocks.

  One day, last year, in the summer, a crazy old bum had built a little shack out of bricks and four rusted slabs of metal. The bum had made it through the first night, but on the second someone had kicked the place to shit and taken the bum's clothes and whatever else he had.

  Charletta had been home for the summer, going to school at the U of I off the Dan Ryan, and Lonny had been sleeping on the couch with the window open. The bum's screaming woke him up. There wasn't much light to see by, but Lonny had seen two, maybe three figures running away and laughing. He would have swore one of them was lago, but it was none of Lonny's business. He didn't even know lago very well back then. The bum had danced around howling for what seemed like an hour, Lonny had closed the window and covered his head, but it hadn't done much good. Then the howling had stopped and Lonny was sure the bum was crying.

  God, Lord Almighty, Lonny wished at the time and still did that he had been one of those three or four figures in the night.

  Rap sheet summaries:

  Lonny Wayne, 18, six feet one, 190 pounds. African-American. Distinguishing characteristics: wide space between his top front teeth, pink knife scar on his right arm running from elbow to wrist, small dark scar shaped like a lightning bolt that runs through his right eyebrow. High school dropout. Arrests: sixteen, for crimes ranging from shoplifting, assault, and robbery to damage t
o a stolen vehicle. Convictions: none. Residence: mother's apartment.

  Albert "Dalbert" Davis, 19, five feet eight, 202 pounds. African-American, Hispanic-Native American. Distinguishing characteristics: looks like a very dark Native American. Arrests: twenty-one, for crimes including attempted rape, breaking and entering, assault with intent to kill, armed robbery, and trafficking in stolen goods. Convictions: two, both for breaking and entering. Served eighteen months in the youth correction center in St. Charles. No known address. lago Simms, 14, five feet five, 140 pounds. African-American. Distinguishing characteristics: left side of face sags slightly from nerve damage resulting from a beating from his mother's boyfriend when Simms was six. Arrests: two, for breaking and entering. Convictions: two; remanded to parental custody on both occasions. No time served. Residence: mother's apartment.

  "I say we do it," Lonny said, still looking out the window but pulling down his Oakland Raiders cap to emphasize his determination.

  "What the hell, you know? We do it," Dalbert said with a shrug.

  "What the hell," added lago. "When?" 'Tomorrow. Why we gotta wait?" asked Dalbert, turning to face his friends.

  "That's fresh froze with me," said Dalbert, watching Yogi Bear shoot up on a geyser. Lago shrugged.

  It was fate, destiny, dumb luck, something. Less than five hours after Abe Lieberman had left his office, Dr. Jacob Berry, late of Lansing, Michigan, had a gun.

  The morning schedule had been light. Four uneventful physical exams for police officers, two off-the-street patients, both Vietnamese, one with a severely strained back, the other with cuts on his arm from an exploding jar. Both of the Vietnamese had paid in cash, which, when they left, Jacob Berry had folded and tucked into the pocket of the money strap tied to his ankle and hidden by his sock. Jacob also kept his driver's license, credit cards, and Blue Cross cards in the hidden pocket. In his wallet he kept around fifty dollars, some family photographs, and a few store credit cards from East Lansing. He had purchased the hidden pocket four days after coming to an initial understanding of where his practice was located.