Lieberman's Folly Read Free Page A

the approval of his cohorts as if he had made a brilliant play on words.
    There were three booths. Four old guys, one of them Chinese, were in the first booth. The second booth was empty. A disembodied hand rose above the top of the third booth and motioned with a single finger to the woman.
    Three minutes before the woman had entered the T & L, Ryne Sandberg had hit a double to drive in two runs in the eighth and Harry Caray had gone meshugah .
    Abe Lieberman, as much as he usually enjoyed sitting in the heat of his brother Maish’s deli, longed to be twenty minutes away in Wrigley Field, eating an Oscar Mayer, looking at the bare, tan shoulders and freckled backs of girls in the bleachers on their day off. It would have been even better to be thirty or forty years back watching Bill Nicholson or Hank Sauer swing on an underhand sidearm pitch from Ewell Blackwell and send it into the right-field bleachers.
    It was no kind of August day to be in Maish’s with the air conditioning out of order. Lieberman had both a fan on the table aiming at his face and a radio but the fan was tired and old and the radio sounded like it was suffering from Al Bloombach’s asthma.
    â€œI don’t know about this, Davey,” Harry Caray had said on the radio.
    â€œTrillo’s not a bad choice in this situation,” assured Dave Nelson, who could always be counted on for a reassuring cliché.
    â€œNot a bad choice?” Lieberman told Hanrahan. “He’s the only choice Zimmer’s got. He’s the closest thing to a Mexican on that bench. I’m taking my grandchildren to the game Monday. You want to come? I’ll get an extra ticket from MacMillan.”
    Detective William Hanrahan had grunted, smiled, and shook his head no. This morning Hanrahan glowed with confidence, his cheeks pink, his usually unkempt dark hair cut short and brushed back. His face, a handsome flat Irish face, was puffy. His short-sleeved blue shirt was soaked through with sweat, but his tie was neatly pressed. Hanrahan was working extra hard today to convince himself, his partner, and the world that he didn’t need a drink.
    While Manny Trillo was stepping to the plate, the T & L door had opened with a bang. There was no spring on the door. The unwary who pushed it too hard often found it bouncing back in their faces. The spring had been removed about two weeks earlier by a duo of repairmen who had never reappeared. Speculation among the Alter Cockers was that the duo were doorspring thieves making their way across the nation.
    The woman, her red hair billowing out, had flowed past the lethal door and asked her question. Now she was standing in front of Lieberman’s booth. She wore a tight white dress with little flowers or something embroidered across the low neckline, over which the tops of her breasts glowed like brown moons.
    â€œLieberman,” she said.
    â€œValdez,” Lieberman said.
    And Manny Trillo blasted one out of the park.
    â€œHoly cow,” shouted Harry Caray.
    Lieberman leaned back admiring life, the Cubs, and Estralda Valdez, the classiest prostitute on the near North Side.
    â€œHave a seat, Estralda,” he said. “Can I get you something?”
    â€œSomething cold, no calories, viejo ,” she said, sitting down in the booth next to Lieberman. “Got to watch the waist.”
    She touched her flat stomach and looked at Sergeant Abe Lieberman, who motioned to the sad-faced man in the apron behind the counter.
    Opinion was divided among the Alter Cockers as it was among the men and women of the Clark Street Station. There were those who thought the slightly dyspeptic Abe Lieberman looked exactly like a dachshund while the opposition claimed he resembled no animal more than a bloodhound, an underweight bloodhound perhaps, but a bloodhound nonetheless. Lieberman, it could not be denied, was not an imposing figure at five seven and hovering around 145 pounds. He looked a good five