Lieberman's Folly by Stuart M. Kaminsky

said Hanrahan. He had trouble getting the name out clearly. Bill Hanrahan had been drinking. “I think you better get over here.”
    â€œIt’s Bill,” Lieberman said covering the mouthpiece. “The woman Herschel mentioned. She’s dead.”
    â€œThank God,” said Bess, sinking into the rabbi’s swivel chair. And then she realized what she had said.
    â€œI don’t mean,” she went on. “I’m just glad Lisa and the children aren’t …”
    Lieberman patted her shoulder.
    â€œWhere are you, Bill?” Lieberman asked.
    â€œWhere? Oh, at her apartment.”
    Lieberman hung up and put both hands on Bess’s shoulders.
    â€œI’ve got to go,” he said. “The Rosens will walk you home.”
    Bess looked up at him with a smile and still moist eyes.
    â€œYou’ll talk to Lisa tomorrow?”
    â€œI’ll talk to Lisa tomorrow,” he said. “Why don’t you sit here for a minute or two before you go back in?”
    â€œI’ll do that,” Bess said.
    The night air was still hot. The smell of curry from the Bombay Restaurant across California Avenue hit Lieberman as he headed back toward home and his car. Maybe it was time to think about moving, but he didn’t want to think about it. He didn’t want to think about his daughter’s troubles. He didn’t want to think about being chair of the temple’s renovation committee, but all of these were preferable to thinking that Estralda Valdez was dead. He remembered Estralda the last time he saw her, beautiful, joking, planning, that morning. Next to him in the booth. He had smelled her. He remembered her the first time he had seen her, beautiful, defiant, speaking broken English. He wasn’t looking forward to the next time he would see her.
    Exactly four minutes before Bill Hanrahan entered Estralda Valdez’s sixth floor apartment, Jules Van Beeber had lain drunk and apparently asleep a few feet from Estralda’s body. Someone, he knew, had given him a drink, had led him to this place on the floor. That someone had not reckoned with Jules Van Beeber’s needs. Jules had risen, oblivious to his surroundings, made his way to the kitchen, and downed the good part of a bottle of Scotch he found on the floor. Then, feeling more than a bit disoriented by the intake of something of reasonable quality, Jules had stumbled back through the living room to Estralda’s balcony, clutching a small blue table lamp he planned to take with him when he left. The night air and the breeze coming off the lake lured Jules to the railing.
    Jules had leaned over the railing and fallen just as Hanrahan had come through the door. Jules had spun three times in the air, cord of the lamp trailing behind him like a kite tail, and landed in a pile of Glad bags filled with grass.
    Cushioned and blanketed by green plastic shining in the moonlight, Jules looked up at the stars in the August sky over Lake Michigan, smiled, and passed out.
    At the same moment that Hanrahan entered the apartment and Jules Van Beeber went over the railing, not five blocks away, Ernest Ryan, a bartender known as Irish Ernie, fell down two steps after locking his tavern on Clark Street. Cold sober, Irish Ernie hit his head on the sidewalk and died. God makes some strange choices.
    Jules, clutching the lamp to his chest like a protective teddy bear, slept through the police cars and sirens, the television crews and small crowds. He dreamed of a line of amber bottles, an angry man, a soft bed, a beautiful woman who spoke to him in a strange language. He saw the woman lying naked before him and he felt himself walking to a door, feeling the night wind, smelling dead fish on the shore, and flying.
    The garbage bags Jules Van Beeber had fallen on were in the back of Sol Worth’s truck. Worth’s landscaping business had, after eight years, just started to turn a profit, partly because he had stopped