Lieberman's thief

In Which Things Go Awry

Pitty-Pitty Patniks was wrong. Harvey Rozier had not been smiling. His evening had gone even worse than the burglar's. When he was sure that the madly retreating car of the burglar hadn't struck a tree, a house, or a pedestrian, Harvey turned back into the room, wiped the handle of the knife on his linen floor-length robe, and threw it in the general direction of his wife's body. He didn't want to look at her. It had taken months of fear and anger to go through with the murder, and now he wanted to, had to, convince himself, hypnotize himself as best he could into believing, that the lie he would tell was truth.

Harvey had seen many of his clients lie so convincingly to the press and the Internal Revenue Service that he was sure they had convinced themselves of the lie. Trudeau. Martin Trudeau, millionaire leader of the Evangelical Free Church of Christ, had lied to the IRS. Took a lie detector test Results were inconclusive. Could Harvey pass a lie detector test? Possibly, he thought, forcing himself to look at Dana's body once more to be sure she was dead. Possibly.

One thing to plan. Harvey was a great planner. Another thing to execute. He hadn't planned on Dana running down the stairs. He wanted it to look as if she had been surprised in bed by an intruder. Now he had a trail of blood, bloody footprints, and a goddamn witness.

She was dead.

He tried not to think about the burglar, at least not consciously at first. He had a plan. He had to execute the plan. He would… He had stripped naked except for the sneakers. He washed his bloody, surgically gloved hands, dried them on a relatively clean corner of the robe, and got a plastic Hefty garbage bag from under the sink. He threw in the white linen robe he'd purchased two weeks ago on a business trip to Lexington and carried ate bag to the back door, taking care that it picked up no blood. He opened die door, stepped out, and walked to the brick driveway, where be removed the sneakers and surgical gloves and dropped them into the plastic garbage bag. There was a faint trail of partially footprinted blood leading from the house.

If the burglar goes to the police, Harvey thought, hurrying barefoot up the stairs, he runs die risk of being accused of Dana's murder, but this guy was a burglar, not a murderer. Harvey got in the shower and turned on the hot water, letting it scald his chest. He covered himself with soap-liquid soap-head to toe. Had to be fast. Harvey was shivering, trembling. He heard something and threw open the shower curtains. Had some neighbor heard the damn burglar go through the dining room window and called the police? Nothing, no one, just the blare of music from the stereo speaker downstairs. He closed the curtains but not all the way, pushing back the fantasy of Dana as a blood-drenched zombie coming up the stairs with a knife in her stained hand.

And the burglar, the burglar, goddamn it, the burglar. The burglar might not be very bright. He might not think it through, might not realize that he was in big trouble if he stepped forward. He might go to the police and describe what he had seen, identify Harvey as Dana's killer. Would he be believed? Would he reemerge when he had calmed down in a week, two, a month, and try to blackmail him?

Harvey turned off the water and stepped out of the shower, reaching for a towel.

Had to hurry. Think on the way.

He was back in his tux and down the stairs, avoiding the trail of Dana's blood on the carpet. One last quick look around. The door to the kitchen was closed.

"All right," he said aloud, and the sound of his own voice made his hands tremble. "All right," he demanded, and his hands obeyed. "What have I forgotten? The toolbox."

He moved back to the kitchen door, opened it with his elbow, avoiding the bloody trail, and went straight to the burglar's toolbox. He wiped the box with a dish towel and left it sitting in the middle of the room for an instant, an island in a sea of blood. Then he picked up the toolbox, holding it away from his body, went to the sink, washed off the already-drying blood, and moved to the door to the garage, glancing at Dana's deep-red-against-white corpse. She had stopped bleeding. He hid the toolbox in plain sight, beginning to panic, already making up an excuse-loose bowels, nausea-if the concert was over when he got back to the Bismarck. He checked himself for blood stains and found none.

By the time he returned with the Franklins to discover Dana's body, the doorknob would be a blur of finger and palm prints.

It was the best he could do. It wasn't quite the way he had planned, but…

He went out the side door and walked barefoot to the head of the driveway. Behind the house, through the trees at the end of the cul-de-sac, Harvey made his way carefully along the narrow path. Not much light, but enough. A thin spring rain tapped against the trees, which were just starting to get a new coat of green leaves, black in the moonless and starless night. He was a dark Santa carrying a dark bag of blood. No one in sight on Kilgore, the next street south, where he had parked the rented Geo Prizm. He opened the trunk, threw in die bag, closed the trunk quietly, and got into the driver's seat, where he closed the door just hard enough to turn off the "door ajar" light. He put on the socks and shoes he had left on the passenger seat and drove away slowly, watching the dark houses on either side of the street, listening to the rain start to beat harder on the roof.

It wasn't till he hit Howard Street and was heading for the expressway that he slammed the door firmly.

Check the time. A little over an hour since he had left tiie men's room at the Bismarck and walked quickly to the Geo in the Grant Park underground lot. He was way off, but he still had more than an hour, even if the quartet were incompetent and rushed through the Mozart and the Vivaldi.

He pulled the baseball cap over his eyes and drove, Kennedy to Eisenhower, back into the Grant Park underground lot, careful not to break the speed limit. The night attendant didn't even glance at him.

Still twenty minutes. Should make it easily.

Park in a comer. Car door echoing. Car trunk echoing. No one hi sight. No sound of approaching cars. Lot not full but not empty for this hour. He would wait a few days, maybe a week, pick up the car, and return it to Hertz.

Harvey took the garbage bag in his arms and hurried to the garbage can near the escalator. No footsteps behind or in front. Nothing moving in the shadows of the concrete pillars. He shoved the bag into the garbage can and heaped empty bottles and stale food-covered McDonald's bags over it.

Time left. Time left.

He moved quickly but didn't run up the escalator and onto the street. The hotel was half a block away. Raining harder. He couldn't go back wet. He ran down the escalator, which fought him with each step, and searched frantically for something to cover himself with. A cardboard box lay limp behind the garbage can in which he had hidden the plastic bag. He grabbed the carton, ran to the street, shielded himself as the wind off the lake tried to tear his cover from his hands. Down the alley behind the hotel, he found the service entrance door he had propped open. It was still open. He dropped the soggy brown carton and went up the stairs, shoes resounding, the smell of something stale and sweet in the air.

He opened the door carefully and struggled to catch his breath. No one in sight to his left. Down the corridor two old men in tuxedos who had ducked out on the conceit stood smoking. He pulled out his comb, used it, and decided he couldn't wait to fully control his breath.

Harvey eased out of the stairwell and into the men's room. Empty. He washed his hands, looked at himself in the mirror, brushed back his wisps of hair, splashed his face with cold water, and stepped into the hall near the performance room. Empty except for the two men smoking and whispering, not looking his way.

Harvey slipped into the conceit room. Rows of backs were to him. No one seemed to turn. On the raised platform before the several hundred people on cushioned folding chairs, a thin, young Oriental woman attacked a violin, eyes closed to show her intensity and commitment. Harvey eased into the chair he had moved to the rear of the room. Ken and Betty Franklin were hi the second row, wedged in.

Harvey picked up the small tape recorder from the floor under the chair, clicked it off, and dropped it into his pocket. He would listen to the tape as soon as he could, listen for anything unusual, a slight mistake or miscue, a coughing fit, something he could refer to, to prove he had sat through the performance.

The instruments came to a shrill decision to end. Applause. He had made it back with more than twenty minutes to spare. The two old men who had been smoking in the corridor came in and stood, joining the applause and the bows of the performers.

People filed past Harvey, talking of where they were going to get coffee or a drink, making soft patter about the performance.

The Franklins found him. They were older than the Ro/iers by almost twenty years, a pair of surrogate parents and much more. She a handsome society joiner. He the senior partner of the law firm of Kyle, Timkin, and O'Doul, with offices on the same floor as Harvey's in the John Hancock Building. Harvey had left his Lexus in the garage "in case Dana might need it" and had reluctantly agreed to go with the Franklins and let Ken drive. This was shortly after Dana had become nauseated just before they were scheduled to leave. Nothing terrible, but nothing pleasant either.

Touch of the flu. It was going around. People had even been hospitalized.

When the Franklins had arrived, Harvey insisted on staying home. Dana insisted that he go and have a good time. The Franklins promised to bring him right home after the concert.

"Did you call Dana?" Betty asked.

"No," said Harvey.

"Perhaps you should…" Betty continued.

"I don't want to wake her if she's managed to get to sleep."

"Let's just get you back home and see how she's doing," said Ken.

Harvey let himself be driven, forced himself to engage in small talk about brunch on Sunday and whether they should try to get a box together for the opera season. The Lyric was doing two Verdis. Dana loved Verdi.

Thirty minutes after they left the Bismarck, they stepped out of the Franklins' Lincoln and saw the broken dining room window and bloody footprints in the driveway.

Harvey ran to the door. Unlocked. He opened it and ran in, being sure that Ken was right behind him and Betty a few steps behind, bleating like a goat.

Harvey started for the stairway.

'This way," Ken shouted and led the way along the trail of blood to the kitchen.

The long night had just begun for Harvey Rozier.