The Dead Don't Lie is the latest in Edgar Award winner and MWA's Grand Master Stuart Kaminsky's Abe Lieberman mystery series. Lieberman and his partner, Bill Hanrahan, are hell or heaven bent on making the mean streets of Chicago just a little safer.
As usual they have their hands full. Three prominent members of the Turkish community are all brutally murdered and Lieberman works to find out what, if anything, ties these murders together. It doesn't help that the key to the puzzle might be an event that took place over a century ago.
Bill Hanrahan finds himself assigned to a case where a hospitalized chef claims to have been beaten by two people and shot by a third, a bespectacled Chinese man. As Bill digs deeper he finds himself at odds with an old nemesis, a man who has an unusual affinity for Bill's Asian wife.
Both men struggle to do the right thing even if it means bending the letter if not the spirit of the law.
At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
The Dead Don't Lie is the latest in Edgar Award winner and MWA's Grand Master Stuart Kaminsky's Abe Lieberman mystery series. Lieberman and his partner, Bill Hanrahan, are hell or heaven bent on making the mean streets of Chicago just a little safer.
As usual they have their hands full. Three prominent members of the Turkish community are all brutally murdered and Lieberman works to find out what, if anything, ties these murders together. It doesn't help that the key to the puzzle might be an event that took place over a century ago.
Bill Hanrahan finds himself assigned to a case where a hospitalized chef claims to have been beaten by two people and shot by a third, a bespectacled Chinese man. As Bill digs deeper he finds himself at odds with an old nemesis, a man who has an unusual affinity for Bill's Asian wife.
Both men struggle to do the right thing even if it means bending the letter if not the spirit of the law.
At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
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Overview
The Dead Don't Lie is the latest in Edgar Award winner and MWA's Grand Master Stuart Kaminsky's Abe Lieberman mystery series. Lieberman and his partner, Bill Hanrahan, are hell or heaven bent on making the mean streets of Chicago just a little safer.
As usual they have their hands full. Three prominent members of the Turkish community are all brutally murdered and Lieberman works to find out what, if anything, ties these murders together. It doesn't help that the key to the puzzle might be an event that took place over a century ago.
Bill Hanrahan finds himself assigned to a case where a hospitalized chef claims to have been beaten by two people and shot by a third, a bespectacled Chinese man. As Bill digs deeper he finds himself at odds with an old nemesis, a man who has an unusual affinity for Bill's Asian wife.
Both men struggle to do the right thing even if it means bending the letter if not the spirit of the law.
At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781429965705 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Tor Publishing Group |
| Publication date: | 09/30/2008 |
| Series: | Abe Lieberman Series , #10 |
| Sold by: | Macmillan |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 304 |
| Sales rank: | 926,837 |
| File size: | 257 KB |
About the Author
Stuart M. Kaminsky is a MWA Grand Master, as well as an Edgar Award-winning author. His series include the Lew Fonesca, Inspector Rostnikov, Toby Peters, and Abe Lieberman mysteries, which includes such titles as Terror Town, The Last Dark Place, and Not Quite Kosher. He lives with his family in Sarasota, Florida.
Stuart M. Kaminsky was the author of more than 60 novels and an Edgar Award winner who was given the coveted Grand Master Award by the Mystery Writers of America. His series include the Lew Fonesca, Inspector Rostnikov, Toby Peters, and Abe Lieberman mysteries, which includes such titles as Terror Town, The Last Dark Place, and Not Quite Kosher. He passed away in the fall of 2009.
Read an Excerpt
The Dead Don't Lie
An Abe Lieberman Mystery
By Stuart M. Kaminsky
Tom Doherty Associates
Copyright © 2007 Stuart M. KaminskyAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4299-6570-5
CHAPTER 1
Ankara, Turkey, 1915
Aziz Akan was deaf in his right ear and blind in his left eye.
Both the deafness and blindness were the result of a bomb dropped two years earlier on a cave just outside of Malik in Armenia. Aziz was in the cave with more than one hundred Armenians and two Greeks.
Twenty-two people, not the Greeks, emerged from the cave, including Aziz. When he emerged from the cave, dazed, screaming with pain, and soaked with his own blood and that of others, he had something in the pocket of his shredded jacket that he did not have when he had entered the cave.
Mistaken for an Armenian, as he wanted to be, he recovered slowly and not very well in a small ill-equipped Malik hospital. When they had taken his jacket, Aziz had ripped his prize from the pocket and clutched it to his chest where it stayed. He was released five days later.
When he made his way to Ankara, he found himself being called horoz, rooster, because he turned his head like a rooster. If he wanted to hear the person in front of him, he cocked his head left to present his good ear. Similarly, when he wanted to see, he turned his head in the opposite direction. The Rooster.
He didn't mind. What he minded was that he might be dead on this night.
He was on a narrow street in the Old Quarter, a street of haphazardly placed white stone blocks on the hill on which Ankara had stood for more than two thousand years. The stones had been worn down by more than twenty generations of merchants, shoppers, soldiers, and thieves. Aziz had cowered in alleys wider than this street.
His back was against a rough brick wall. There were a few windows on the street glowing dimly from oil lamps, which was good for Aziz. What was bad for Aziz who, praise God, would live through the night, was the almost full moon.
Aziz was in the shadows, but the two men at the end of the street knew he was there. They were waiting for him.
The two men, who had been sent by the Three Pashas who now ruled Turkey, were patient, even amused.
The Three Pashas, members of the Young Turk revolution of 1908, Ahmet Cemal, Ismail Enver, and Mehmet Talat, were rumored to have ordered the murder of more than 500,000 Armenians and 100,000 Greeks. Aziz believed the rumors. He had been in that cave, had been other places where he had seen, heard, felt, and hid from the Chetas. The Chetas were bands of Turkish refugees from Thrace, violent criminals released from prison and warrior Kurds on horseback. The Chetas had been recruited by Enver Pasha's Ministry of War to do just what they had done, massacre Armenians and Greeks.
The night was cool, but not cold. It was better to be a bit cold than to step into the light and be dead.
The two men at the end of the street were armed. They were enjoying themselves, talking, even laughing. No, it was more like chuckling. That was why they hadn't come down the street to simply drag him away or shoot him. They wanted him quivering with fright when he finally emerged, quivering, wetting his pants afraid and ready to talk.
From time to time a single word from the men could be heard by Aziz, who cocked his head to listen. Cinayet, murder, and Cehennem, Hell, were two words that made the most impression.
Aziz was in this fix because he had made a mistake. He had divulged his secret to Gani Bey Thothsis. Gani Bey, fat, jowls jiggling when he nodded yes, had been a conduit for Aziz in the past. Gani Bey had rank, far lower than a Pasha, but rank nonetheless. Gani Bey had traded a gold jewelry box for a passport. The passport description perfectly matched Aziz and the name that had been created suited him. There had been other mutually beneficial transactions with Gani Bey until this night, when Aziz became a commodity Gani Bey could sell to the secret police of the Three Pashas' government.
Aziz had moved freely through Greece, Turkey, and Armenia, selling secrets he seldom really had. But business had been bad for quite some time.
Aziz had been Greek, Armenian, Turk, and once, not very productively, he had been a Kurd. He had moved easily from Christian to Sunni Muslim to Greek Orthodox when he crossed borders. But now it was getting so that Aziz didn't know who to betray anymore. He had been Armenian when the attack on the cave took place. Wrong place, wrong time, wrong nationality.
Thankfully, he had lied to Gani Bey about where he had hidden his treasure from that cave. Gani Bey should have and probably did know Aziz had lied. Gani Bey expressed indifference. They had both lied. It had been civil.
Aziz knew he would not be able to bargain with the two men at the end of the alley. They would torture him.
He would talk. They would kill him.
He decided to look at the other end of the street, the end away from the men of the Three Pashas. To do this he would have to step out of the shadow and cock his head. He decided to chance it.
He did it swiftly. There was no one he could see blocking the distant end of the street. He ducked back in the shadow breathing rapidly.
"Ne ahmak esak, you stupid ass," one of the men called out. "We see you. This is no longer enjoyable."
Aziz was frozen with fear and then a light came from the shuttered window directly across from where he hid, a distance not much more than the length of a man. The window swung slowly open and a thin woman, a candle in her hand, leaned out.
"Who shouts?" she said. "Fevzi?"
The candlelight, weak as it was, exposed Aziz. His good eye met those of the woman who saw something there she definitely did not like. She closed and locked the shuttered window as Aziz began to run. The bomb that had turned him into Horaz the Rooster had not damaged his legs.
The two men behind him wore uniforms and carried weapons. Aziz was unencumbered and driven by a fear like no other he had ever felt.
He ran. Two shots were fired. One screamed past him into a moonlit wall. The other tore off a finger on Aziz's left hand. He was slowly losing his body to Turkish attacks. He ran faster, wondering if the finger that was gone had a ring on it. Except for some cash hidden with his treasure, Aziz had, since he was on his own at the age of fourteen, converted whatever cash or salable goods he had stolen into rings, which he wore at all times. Many of the Sunni looked with disfavor on the wearing of ornaments, but to punish all who did would require the condemnation of many thousand Effendim, Beys, and even some Pashas. Fortunately for Aziz, religion had taken a decided rest while the country fought ruthlessly for its existence and its expansion against Greeks, Armenians, Kurds, and Russians.
He could hear them behind him. It sounded to Aziz as if he had increased the distance between them. He had been too frightened to make any plan other than getting to a turn, hiding on another street in a doorway, or into a house where the door had been left unlocked.
But now, he could keep running. All he had to pray for was not being shot again, not leaving a bloody trail they could follow, and not passing out. He sent out a prayer using the words of two religions, Christian and Muslim, weaving them together and running.
His goal now was the left bank of Enguri Su, the tributary of the Sakarya River that ran alongside Ankara.
He knew a friendly storm drain, one that had supposedly been built by Alexander the Great when he paused in Ankara with his army. If he made it to the drain, Aziz vowed that he would also offer a prayer to Alexander. Deep down he knew he would offer no such prayer, but nearer the surface of thought, Aziz really meant it.
Two or three hundred yards farther, out of the partial protection of the darkness of the Old City streets, Aziz limped dizzily through a newer and only slightly better neighborhood than the one in which he had taken refuge.
The water was no more than another hundred yards away, but it looked like the distance to Mecca.
He stopped, took a chance, looked over his shoulder with his good eye. They weren't there. He turned his head the other way, straining to lull his panting, so he could hear. Echoing down the Old City street from which Aziz had emerged was a voice coming toward him. He held up his hand, the one with the missing finger. Blood, lots of blood, and a numbness, but he hadn't lost a ring. The ring on what had recently been his finger clung tightly to the stub of what remained.
He gulped, turned, and hobbled, tugging at the ring, but it didn't come off. The swelling had begun. That there was little pain did not surprise him. It would come, but he couldn't afford to have it come soon.
He passed no one on his way. It was sometime after midnight. He didn't know or care how much as long as the sun did not suddenly shine. At the bank, he didn't pause to catch his breath and look at the moonlight reflected in the still water.
He strode into the ankle-high water and moved sluggishly to his left. He knew where the stone drain was, how far he had to go. He knew there were still dangers. No more than three minutes later he faced the next danger and plunged into the cold water, dog-paddling across the water, fighting off the wish to simply close his eyes and float. When he did reach the other shore, one hand holding him steady on the rough stone, he looked back.
Two hundred paces back, the two uniformed men stood at the water's edge and argued about which way to go. Common sense would tell them to split up, common sense would eventually win because the two men had much to lose by failing to bring in Aziz Akan.
Aziz, water-soaked, in agony, pulled himself up slowly. As soon as his body cleared the lip of the narrow drain, he rolled himself into the darkness and began to crawl.
When he had rested at the far end of the drain, he would bind his finger and make his way, not back to the small room he had been renting, but to the shop on Necmi Caddesi, Necmi Street, where cheap furniture was sold, and where Aziz had hidden his cave treasure under a stone block against the wall. The owner of the shop, Habib, was a gentle soul, who would awaken in a few hours, go to his shop, find a window broken, and nothing missing.
That is, if Aziz had no further trouble on the way.
Then, having retrieved the package wrapped in waterproof leather, Aziz would be on his way out of Ankara, out of Turkey; perhaps if he could talk his way through it, he would be on his way to America.
What was certain, if he lived, tomorrow he would be celebrating his twenty-first birthday and on the way to somewhere.
CHAPTER 2Present-day Chicago
Someone knocked gently at the bathroom door and slowly began to push it open. Abe Lieberman, a slightly coffee-stained copy of the Wilson Quarterly in hand, lay naked in the bathtub. Warm water, which he replenished with a barrage of hot water about every ten minutes, surrounded him.
His grandson Barry pushed the door all the way open and entered. Barry was in his blue Jockey shorts and an oversized blue T-shirt with a Chicago Cubs logo.
"You want it closed?" Barry asked.
"That depends on whether or not you plan on attacking me with something heavy you're hiding behind your back. If you pull out a crowbar or a spatula of genuine chrome steel, I might make a mad leap out of the tub and run past you through the house screaming. If that should come to pass, what do you recommend I scream to get the attention of your sister and grandmother?"
"The British are coming," said Barry.
"No, the British no longer pose a threat. They'd be welcomed. I think I'll scream 'pancakes' or 'latkes.' What do you think?"
"I'm not a man," Barry said seriously.
Lieberman placed his magazine on the wooden stool next to the tub. The stool had been purchased almost twenty years ago in Cashiers, North Carolina, during one of Abe and Bess's infrequent attempts at a vacation. On the stool was also Abe's cell phone and his pocket watch. It was almost three in the morning.
Abe touched his white, almost pencil-line mustache, brushed back his full head of white hair, used the little finger of his right hand to remove a bubble of soap from his ear, and turned his spaniel-like face toward his grandson.
"You're not a man," Abe said. "Lots of possibilities here. Kafka. One day Barry woke up and discovered that he had been turned into a girl."
"No," Barry said patiently.
"All right," Lieberman said, "I'm a police officer. I should be able to deal with this. You've discovered your inner girl and you want to free her. You want a gender change. Well, I don't think the idea would sit well with your mother, your father, Grandma Bess peacefully sleeping in the other room, or your sister innocent of knowledge of this confession. And I'd refuse to let it happen till you were twenty-one. Remember, it's costly, painful, and takes a long time. And believe me, I've seen some poor souls who go through this and most of them come out looking like men in drag. There are exceptions. Antonia McIntyre, a lovely ... but not as lovely as your grandmother ..."
Abe nodded toward the closed door a few feet behind him, beyond which Bess lay sleeping.
"You look like Edward G. Robinson in Key Largo," said Barry. "When he took a bath."
"The difference is he was round, had a big cigar, and a drink. I am lean with a glass of water over there on the sink in case I feel dehydrated."
"I'm a boy," Barry said, crossing his arms, his hands clutching his elbows.
Though he had little contact with his and Melissa's father, Barry had some gestures like this one that were purely Todd Cresswell, Ph.D. Fortunately, he had few signs of being the child of Abe's only child and only daughter, Lisa, who now lived in California, now the wife of Marvin Alexander, M.D., a successful pathologist who wrote books, spoke Hebrew, and was black.
"Where were we?" Abe asked.
He wanted to make the tub water hotter, but he controlled the urge so he could hear his grandson.
"You told me I couldn't get a sex change operation till I was twenty-one," Barry said.
"You really want one?"
"No," Barry said with exasperation. "Grandpa, no more games."
"Speak," said Abe.
"You told me I couldn't have a sex change operation till I was twenty-one because I'm a kid. I'm thirteen years old. If I were really a man, I could make a decision like that on my own. I worked on my bar mitzvah for a year, and Rabbi Wass says I'm a man. I know it means I can be part of a minyan, which I am not planning to be. Grandpa, I feel like a kid. I am a kid. I want to be a kid for a while."
"You are a kid," Abe said solemnly.
The water had grown tepid. He wanted to reach over, drain some of it out, and replace it with hot water, but he waited.
"When I am a man, which won't be for a long time," Barry said, "I want to be like you."
"Insomniac with high cholesterol?" asked Abe.
"A police officer, a detective."
"I'm not opposed," said Abe. "But don't expect a show of wild abandon and celebration from your grandmother or your mother when you make the announcement."
"I know," said Barry. "Mom will blame you."
"She'll say, 'Better a sex change than being a cop,'" said Lieberman. "If you still feel like you want to be a policeman when you get closer to being a man, we'll talk about it and what it means to be a cop."
"About murderers you've caught?" asked Barry.
"About hours of sitting in a car watching the doorway of a building out of which your suspect never emerges. About regulations, piles of them. Rules that contradict each other. Senior officers who don't want to make tough decisions. About thirteen-year-olds who, like you, are not men but have murdered more than one person and are ready to do it again. About ... you get it."
"Yeah, but I still want to be a detective," Barry said. Lieberman looked at him. His grandson was still short, but he would soon spurt, tower over Abe. Barry already had the golden look of his father. Blue eyes, lean body, smile. Lieberman thought it was time to have another eye check for the boy. He was doomed by genetics to need glasses.
"Well, if your grandmother and your mother don't talk you out of it, we'll see. You'll still have to go to college."
"Northwestern," said Barry.
Todd taught at Northwestern, which was a twelve-minute drive from Lieberman's house in West Rogers Park.
Abe nodded. Barry was, indeed, thirteen. He might change his mind three or four times about being a cop and going to Northwestern by the time he graduated from high school. He might decide to become an anthropologist or a history teacher. He might decide he wanted to go to college in Hawaii or Texas. Money was being put away, invested, to cover both Barry and Melissa's education. Lieberman had inherited a few hundred thousand dollars when Ida Katzman died. Ida had been the foundation of Temple Mir Shavot. Lieberman had sat on many frustrating committees with Ida and they had become friends. The bequest had been as welcome a surprise as Ida Katzman's death at the age of eighty-eight had been an unwelcome one.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Dead Don't Lie by Stuart M. Kaminsky. Copyright © 2007 Stuart M. Kaminsky. Excerpted by permission of Tom Doherty Associates.
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