Big Silence by Stuart M. Kaminsky Read Free Book Online Page A

than captain of detectives at the Clark Street station.
    Lieberman made his way around the desks and through the smells, past his own desk, and into the captain’s office with Kearney behind him. Kearney closed the door and faced Lieberman.
    “Your partner’s in deep shit again,” Kearney said. “The woman’s dead. The kid’s gone. The state attorney’s office thinks you better talk to our witness before whoever took his son gets to him. What are you working on?”
    “Convenience store robberies,” said Lieberman. “Salt and Pepper. One black, one white. Armed. About every other night. The black one is skinny, nervous, has a gun, uses good grammar. The white one is big. Hits the clerk with his fist. The last clerk looks like he has some brain damage. If it keeps going, I think Pepper’s going to start shooting and Salt is going to hit someone a little too hard.”
    “Stay with it,” Kearney said. “Press coverage on it?”
    “Nothing on television. A few small articles in the papers. At one I’m supposed to be at a house on the paving scam.”
    “Juggle,” said Kearney. “If you need help …”
    “I need Hanrahan,” said Lieberman.
    Kearney shrugged and said, “Gornitz is priority. Hanrahan’ll be back later in the morning. Go see what you can do with your old friend Mickey.”

CHAPTER 3
    “R EMEMBER HAL LITT?” MICKEY Gornitz asked.
    Mickey was thin, liked to wear cheap baggy clothes. He sat on the sofa, hands on his legs, clutching deep. Once he had been called Red Gornitz, but that was a long time ago. Gornitz still had hair, but not much of it and none of it red. Mickey had the face of a nervous accountant, which he was, and the perpetual half smile he wore since childhood as a mask.
    The hotel room they were in was a decent size with a view of Lake Michigan between a pair of high-rises along the lake. They were downtown, east of Michigan Avenue in a hotel that had been seen a lot and once been the luncheon meeting place of the Chicago Press Club. Lieberman had covered a murder here about twenty years back. A department chairman at Loyola had picked up a pair of young men. The closet gay professor had given in to his need. The pair of young men had robbed him and thrown him out the window. Catching the pair had been easy. Telling the professor’s family had been hard.
    Sitting here with Mickey wasn’t too bad, but Abe really had other things on his mind.
    “I remember him,” said Lieberman, sitting across from Mickey on an old fading sofa.
    “Crazy guy,” Mickey said, reaching into his pocket and then pulling it out as he remembered that he no longer smoked. According to Mickey, he had quit more than seven years ago. Old habits. “Took his clothes off on graduation night and stood in the middle of Roosevelt Road directing traffic. He wasn’t even drunk. What happened to him, Abe? You know?”
    “He got crazier,” said Lieberman. “He’s dead.”
    “I wonder what made me think about Hal,” Mickey said, looking down at his lap. “So?” he asked, looking around the room and slapping his legs.
    There was a young cop in plain clothes standing next to the door. Another cop, also in civilian clothes, stood outside in the hall pretending to read the Sun-Times. An investigator from the state attorney’s office was in the bedroom watching a monitor that showed the hotel’s lobby.
    Mickey had spent a life of anonymity. Old acquaintances didn’t recognize him in the street, and when he ran into someone from high school or college and stopped them to say hello, it was clear to him that he was not remembered.
    Now all that had changed and one of the Lieberman brothers, half of one of the best back-court duos in the history of Chicago high school basketball, was sitting across from him, talking about old times.
    Mickey had been an accountant for his father’s paper box factory when he got out of the University of Illinois and then, when his father died and the factory went into bankruptcy,