Last Dark Place Read online

  Kearney knew that Lieberman had just gotten back the night before and had had little time to do anything. He was pushing and letting Lieberman know he would keep pushing.

  “Shooter was a janitor at the Yuma airport,” said Lieberman. “Hired by a guy with a disfigured right thumbnail.”

  Lieberman held up his right hand and tapped his thumbnail with his little finger.

  “Shooter says the guy who hired him was heading to Chicago,” Lieberman continued.

  “You believe him?” asked Kearney.

  “No reason to lie.”

  “Mob job?” asked Kearney.

  “Could be, probably, but our Connie put away a lot of people for one reason,” said Lieberman.

  “Cash,” said Kearney. “See the papers yesterday, today? Local news, WGN?”

  If it appeared on WGN, it was national news. WGN, owned and operated by the World’s Greatest Newspaper, the Chicago Tribune, was a cable superstation.

  “No,” said Lieberman.

  “Let’s see …,” Kearney began.

  “Hit Man Hit,” said O’Neil. “While in custody of Chicago police. Something like that.”

  O’Neil looked at Lieberman with false sympathy.

  “Sent out an all-stations,” said Lieberman. “Man with a distinctive right thumbnail. I’ll check my sources.”

  “Find him fast. Wrap it up,” said Kearney, turning to Hanrahan. “Bag lady. How hard is it to find a carful of roaming idiots with baseball bats? Very hard. Hard. Relatively hard. Easy. Impossible. Pick one.”

  The glance between Abe and Bill was quick, hardly perceptible. Kearney wasn’t quite coming apart but he wasn’t quite hanging on either.

  “We’ve got descriptions of the car and the leader,” said Hanrahan. “And a burger place on Irving Park they sometimes turn up.”

  “We’ve got them within an eight-block radius off of Irving Park and Western,” said O’Neil.

  “I’ve got some breaking news for you,” said Kearney. “It’ll hit television later this morning. Your merry men raped a young mother last night and broke her arm. You know who watched?”

  He paused as if he actually expected an answer, his eyebrows raised.

  “Her five-year-old son,” said Kearney. “You know who the husband is?”

  He gave them time again, knowing there would be no answering, wanting them to anticipate the worst. It came.

  “Hugh Morton. Name ring a bell?”

  “Detective sergeant in the Fourth,” said Lieberman.

  The name had also registered with Hanrahan. Morton was young, black, on the upward ladder Kearney had fallen off of. Morton held a law degree from DePaul and had won two commendations, one for talking a young Greek kid who had killed his sister into letting three hostages go, and another for arresting a deranged Gulf War vet who was planning to shoot the governor the afternoon Morton tracked him down.

  Morton was a hero.

  Morton was a rising star.

  Morton was black. A columnist in the Sun-Times had called him the Colin Powell of Chicago’s war against crime.

  Morton’s wife had been raped in front of their son.

  “Shit,” mumbled O’Neil.

  “Your shit,” Kearney said, looking at Bill and O’Neil. “And mine. Find them fast, real fast. You know why?”

  “Yeah,” said O’Neil.

  “No,” said Kearney. “You don’t know why. Hugh Morton told the chief of police this morning that he plans to get the people who did this. ‘Get.’ That means he plans to kill them. The chief doesn’t want that. I don’t want it. You can understand it, but you can’t want it. The public wants it. Ergo …?”

  “We catch the perps fast,” said Bill. “Before Morton finds them.”

  “And you know what the problem with that is?” asked Kearney. “Morton is damned good. Morton, in fact, is better than I was. Morton is likely to get them before you do. He’ll end up in jail. Then what, Abe?”

  “He’ll probably be elected mayor,” said Lieberman.

  No one laughed.

  “O’Neil, you stay on the case,” said Kearney. “Abe, get the man with the golden thumb. Any questions?”

  Kearney didn’t want any and it wouldn’t have been a good idea to come up with one, but Abe did.

  “I’ve got a funeral to go to,” he said.

  “When?” asked Kearney.

  “In a few hours.”

  “Who?”

  “An old woman. A friend.”

  “How long?”

  Lieberman looked at three Irishmen. For them, he knew from Hanrahan and other Irishmen who had taken him to funerals and wakes, a funeral and its aftermath were often long hours of lamentation, celebration, and drinking.

  “A few hours,” said Lieberman.

  Kearney shrugged.

  “One more thing,” said Kearney. “A Chinese kid, one of the Twin Dragons, was shot and flew, fell, or was thrown out of a window in Ravenswood Hospital. Name was David Sen. Another bell rung?”

  Abe and Bill knew the name.

  “One of Parker Liao’s whips,” said Kearney. Abe had been on the street when the Tentaculos and the Twin Dragons had almost gone to war on North Avenue. Liao, outnumbered and out of his territory, had been forced to leave under the eyes of dozens of Puerto Ricans and Mexicans who had been watching. It was a moment Liao would not forget and hadn’t.

  “You know who’s in the hospital?” asked Kearney. “Room four floors up from where Sen was found?”

  They knew.

  “Del Sol,” said Hanrahan.

  “El Perro,” Kearney confirmed, “with a bullet hole in his arm put there, so I’ve been told, by one of the Twin Dragons. Which means …?”

  “War,” said Lieberman wearily.

  “Want to pay a visit to your old friend, the crazy Puerto Rican?” Kearney asked Lieberman.

  “As soon as …,” Lieberman began.

  “Now would be a good time,” said Kearney. “Convince him to give peace a chance. Give him the V sign with your fingers. Make nice. Scare the crap out of him. Pull him in for something creative. Stop the war before it starts.”

  Kearney looked at his watch.

  “Go,” said Kearney, putting his palms flat on the desk and looking at each of them. The three detectives got up.

  “Put the chair back,” Kearney said.

  Hanrahan put the chair back.

  Lieberman closed the door gently as they left.

  “What’s up his ass?” asked O’Neil, looking at the closed door.

  “A lot of people who’d like to see him scoop his desk drawers into a cardboard box and head for Calumet City or points a lot further south,” said Lieberman.

  The squad room was just starting to get busy, but a slow busy as if perps and victims were just waking up. A few detectives were settling into their chairs, looking at computer screens, talking to people including a young black street hustler named Dewey Jackson who had witnessed a shooting the night before.

  “I am leveling with you, man,” Dewey said, leaning toward a bored, large detective named Smiley whose thumbs played with his yellow suspenders as he patiently waited for Dewey to get through the preliminary denials before they got down to business.

  “O’Neil,” a detective named Wolniak called from a desk near the door. “You got a call on ‘eight.’”

  O’Neil moved to a phone on an empty desk.

  “Want me to go with you to the hospital?” asked Hanrahan.

  “No,” said Lieberman. “Work the Morton case. I’ll keep in touch. Iris okay with the baby?”

  “Happy,” Bill said.

  “You, Father Murph?”

  “Don’t know, Rabbi. Who died?”

  “Ida Katzman,” said Lieberman.

  “The one with the big gelt,” said Hanrahan.

  “A nice lady,” said Lieberman. “Let’s go get the bad guys.”

  “I’ll give you a call,” said Hanrahan.

  “I don’t know,” said Monty Giopolus. �
�Maybe it’s nothing. Maybe it’s something. Don’t want it on my conscience if it’s something. You know?”

  Sean O’Neil had been getting his hair cut at the Clean Cut barbershop since he was a kid and Monty’s father had been doing the cutting. Then the neighborhood had been all Irish and Monty and his father had been the tolerated Greek barbers.

  Now when Sean got his hair cut, there were Greeks, Jews, Italians. When the Mexicans started coming, that would be the last Monty saw of Sean O’Neil.

  “What?” asked O’Neil, looking at Lieberman and Hanrahan, sure they were talking about him.

  “Guy,” said Monty. “Regular. Wayne Czerbiak. Must have seen him around. Kind of big. Round kid face?”

  “Maybe.”

  “He says he’s going to kill someone,” said Monty.

  “Who?”

  “Some singer whose parents live in the neighborhood.”

  “Why?”

  “Didn’t say. Seemed kind of happy about it. Not a bad guy, but I think maybe he’s not so all right in the head some reason or other.”

  “You believe him?”

  “Don’t know,” said Monty. “Like I say, maybe. Look, I told you. Good citizen and everything. Cover my ass in case.”

  “Czerbiak have a gun?”

  “How would I know?” said Monty. “Man says he has a gun is all I know.”

  “I’ll check it out,” said O’Neil.

  “He’s not a bad guy,” said Monty.

  O’Neil hung up. He had bad guys to catch. Very bad guys who had raped a cop’s wife. Didn’t matter she was black. She was a cop’s wife. That made a difference. At least it did to him.

  Lieberman stood at the foot of the hospital bed looking at the young Puerto Rican with his arm in a cast. The young man did not look happy.

  “So?” asked El Perro. “What’d you think?”

  “About what?”

  El Perro stood at the detective’s side and shook his head.

  “That’s my cousin Raul,” said El Perro, nodding at the young man in the bed. “He’s my spit and image, right?”

  Raul was at least six years younger than El Perro, bore no white scar on his face, and was decidedly good-looking. El Perro could make no reasonable claim to good looks.

  “The resemblance is uncanny,” Lieberman said.

  “Got the idea from that Saddam bastard whose ass we kicked in Iraq,” said El Perro, admiring his cousin. “Doubles. Chinks can’t tell us apart anyway, you know? And we can’t tell them apart. So who’s going to know? They come after me, see Raul, and we get them.”

  Lieberman nodded.

  “Got another guy looks just like me,” said El Perro. “For backup.”

  “And what if the Dragons kill Raul?” asked Lieberman.

  Raul was wide-eyed and clearly frightened.

  “Hey, you take chances in life, you know?” said El Perro. “We’ll take care of Raul though. Verdad, Raul?”

  Raul nodded weakly.

  El Perro sat on the edge of the bed and Piedras moved to the door.

  “So, you came to see how I’m doing, Viejo.”

  “Among other things. I don’t want a war with the Twin Dragons.”

  El Perro lifted his uncast hand and said, “Who wants war? Not me, right, Piedras?”

  Lieberman looked at the big man at the door who may or may not have nodded.

  “See?”

  “One of the Dragons hit the sidewalk out that window yesterday,” said Lieberman.

  “I heard,” said El Perro. “That’s a coincidence, isn’t it?”

  “Of major proportions,” said Lieberman. “I’d like to reduce the coincidences in my life. How about a meeting. You, me, Parker Liao?”

  “Put Sammy Sosa in that lineup and I’ll be there,” El Perro said with a laugh, looking at Piedras, whose right cheek twitched in what may have been an homage to a smile. “I got nothing to say to the chink.”

  “Can I tell you what kind of day I’m having?” asked Lieberman, moving to the room’s only chair, uncomfortable-looking aluminum and dull purple plastic.

  “Sure.”

  “I have insomnia. I got about two hours sleep last night. I sat in the tub and read a very disappointing book. Then this morning I was severely berated by my captain for getting a prisoner I was bringing back from Yuma killed. I’ve got to find a man with a bad right thumbnail who doesn’t want to be found. You know a man with a bad right thumbnail?”

  El Perro pursed his lips and thought.

  “I know a guy, Cisneros on the South Side, got no thumb, three fingers.”

  El Perro held up his hand with two fingers curled down to indicate which fingers Cisneros was missing.

  “Wanna know how Cisneros lost his fingers, Viejo?”

  “I’ll not rest till I hear the tale.”

  “In a cop car,” said El Perro with a smile. “You imagine that?”

  “I’m trying.”

  “Cops were hauling him in for dealing,” said El Perro, scratching his cast. “Put him in the backseat. Guy on the street got a hard-on against Cisneros. Shoots through the window of the cop car, takes out three fingers.”

  “I remember,” said Lieberman. “Shooter have a name?”

  “Everybody has a name,” said El Perro. “Cisneros is your guy maybe.”

  Lieberman shook his head “no.”

  “Maybe I think of someone else. I’ll have people look around.”

  “I’d appreciate that,” said Lieberman. “Before I came here I got four calls from four different districts about men with arthritic thumbs, broken thumbs, missing thumbs, diseased thumbs, and multiple fingers.”

  “So that’s what you’re pissed off about?”

  “My daughter is going to meet me for lunch.”

  “That’s good,” said El Perro.

  “No, it is not,” said Lieberman. “It is very bad. My daughter is not known as a carrier of good tidings, especially to me. For my daughter I am the cause of all that is ill in the world.”

  “She’s wrong, Viejo,” said El Perro seriously.

  “I like to think so. She’s having problems with her husband.”

  “You want him to have an accident?”

  “No,” said Lieberman. “It is my considered opinion that my daughter is almost certainly responsible for whatever troubles she is having. …”

  “The black guy,” said El Perro, snapping his fingers. “She’s married to that black guy I saw at your house that time.”

  “She is.”

  “He seemed okay to me.”

  “And me,” Lieberman agreed. “My grandson’s bar mitzvah is coming up in a few days. It’s going to cost me what I was saving to fix the roof.”

  “Hey, I can give you a loan,” said El Perro, looking at Raul this time.

  Raul tried to smile. He was no better at it than Piedras but then again Piedras wasn’t facing the prospect of being gunned down on the street by the Twin Dragons.

  “For reasons that I think you will understand,” said Lieberman, “that is not an option.”

  “Oh, yeah, right,” said El Perro with a too-bad shake of his head.

  “We add to that the fact that I am reduced to eating the most tasteless foods in the world because of the cholesterol problem God in his infinite irony has given to me and you have a man who is definitely not in the best of humor.”

  “And a sit-down between me and the chinks will make you feel better?” asked El Perro, suddenly slapping Raul’s leg.

  Raul let out a small shriek.

  “It will save some part of a day I have rued.”

  El Perro got up, paced the floor holding his cast against his chest with his free hand, and then, after touching Piedras’s shoulder, said, “I’ll sit down with them. No promises. You know? They kiss my ass and we’ll make peace.”

  “That sounds very promising,” said Lieberman. “Will you kiss his ass, too?”

  “That’s a joke, right? With you sometimes I can’t tell. You don’t smile. Y
ou don’t laugh. Viejo, the world is a funny place.”

  “Hilarious,” said Lieberman, standing up. “Many’s the night when, unable to sleep, I’ve thought of something funny that happened during the day, and I laugh myself to sleep.”

  El Perro let out a massive sigh and said, “You know you’re a crazy man? You know that? I knew it when you shot that guy in the foot in the Cuban bar. You’re not crazy like me, but you’re crazy.”

  “I’ll take that as a compliment coming from one who knows,” said Lieberman.

  “We meet at my bingo castle,” said El Perro.

  “We meet someplace neutral,” said Lieberman.

  “No promises,” El Perro said, tilting his head to one side to examine Lieberman from a slightly different perspective.

  “None expected. I’ll get back to you.”

  Lieberman stepped past Piedras and into the hall. The next step would be to convince Parker Liao that a meeting with El Perro was worth his time. Lieberman had an idea about someone who might be able to persuade the leader of the Twin Dragons.

  7

  IF SOMEONE WERE TO ask Wayne why he wanted to kill Lee Cole Carter, he would have had an answer. He would have had a different answer for whoever asked the question. He had a list of answers in his head depending on the questioner and when they asked him. He wondered what, if anything, he would tell the police. He was curious about how the system would work once he was under arrest. He looked forward to being questioned, talking to a lawyer, getting a uniform, lying on a cell cot, going to trial. He would definitely plead “not guilty.” No plea-bargaining. What was the point in plea-bargaining when, in some way, part of the point was seeing himself on trial?

  He tried to hum “Hard Drinking Woman” as he nodded at Richie Strawn, who manned the desk, wore a uniform, and was responsible for security. Richie liked his uniform, his job. Gave him plenty of time to write poetry. He had given a lot of it to Lee Cole Carter when the famous singer came to see his parents in apartment 4G. Lee Cole had always taken the ring binder filled with what Richie was certain, or at least hoped, were lyrics for a big hit.

  “Who you going to see, Wayne?” Richie asked.

  “Going to shoot Lee Cole Carter.”

  Richie looked up at Wayne. Wayne was smiling pleasantly. Not much of a joke, but Wayne had never been known for his sense of humor. Richie shook his head saying, “Not today you’re not. He just left.”