Spider - Michael Morley [97]
Fernandez desperately wanted to join Jack and Howie in beating up ‘Toxic Tariq’ as she called him, but Howie told her that her mission of the morning was to chase up the other loose ends. Manny Lieberman was top of her list. The FBI had its own in-house forensic documents examiners but almost anyone who knew Manny, used Manny. He was eighty-two but his eyes were still as sharp as a fox on a midnight run to the hen house.
Fernandez knew there was no point ringing him. Whenever Manny was busy he ignored the phone; in fact he ignored everything. She grabbed her stuff, diverted her calls and made her way to his office off Liberty Avenue near the Jewish Cemetery. The black lettering on the frosted window declared the business to be Lieberman & Son & Daughter. The ‘& Daughter’ had been added two years earlier when Annie, his ‘Princess’, as he referred to her, had graduated and finally decided that she did want to work with the old man after all. As Manny would tell you, it had been a toss-up between him and taxidermy, and he had been forced to use all his charm, wealth and family connections in order to narrowly defeat a stuffed animal. What could he say? The Liebermans specialized in all forms of handwriting analysis, including detecting forged signatures, validating signatures, spotting alterations to wills, land titles, deeds and all manner of other business documents.
The walls of his tiny reception area were plastered with hundreds of forged cheques that he’d spotted and that the cops had given him as mementos of successful prosecutions. Beneath the bottom line of cheques, worth a total of about $2 million, Manny’s son David answered phones and ran the admin. David was drop-dead gorgeous and gayer than Elton John. Such a waste, thought Fernandez, as she stared into his baby blues and waited for him to hang up.
David Lieberman cupped his hand over the phone and whispered to her, ‘Go straight through, Agent Fernandez, my dad won’t mind.’
‘Thanks,’ she said, wondering whether it would be possible to ‘convert’ him. What the hell, even if she couldn’t she wouldn’t mind trying.
Fernandez knocked on a cheap wooden door, pushed it open and walked into an even cheaper-looking room. Manny wasn’t big on spending money on anything other than essentials and that was a category he reserved solely for the tools of his trade. Lately, his hearing had virtually gone and he didn’t even look up from his work as Fernandez stood in the open doorway, waiting to be invited in.
The old man sat behind an uncluttered desk, with bright angle-poise lights and a variety of hugely expensive, long-handled magnifying lenses strewn across it like discarded lollipops. He wore an ancient dark blue jacket, white shirt and blue tie, pulled tight into the collar. ‘Look professional, act professional’ he’d always told his family.
‘Morning, Mr L,’ chirped Fernandez.
The head of thinning white hair half cocked towards her, one eye still focused on his M-glass and the paper beneath it.
‘Morning, Agent Fernandez, come on in. Are you here to harass an old man?’
‘Not at all,’ she lied, moving into the heart of the room. ‘In fact, I’ve come to make him very happy.’ She dug into her purse and produced a paper bag containing a quarter of iced gem biscuits, a type only available at a local baker near her parents’ home out on Staten Island.
Lieberman now gave her his full attention. ‘Aaah, you’re an angel fallen from the clouds of heaven,’ he said as he took them off her. The iced gems were a running joke between them, going back to the first case they’d worked together, when Manny had helped Angelita bag a top burglar and a bent jeweller from Manhattan. The jeweller would sell high-quality diamonds to wealthy clients, and give the burglar the addresses where the ‘ice’ was. The burglar would steal