I shrug. “Look Bill, I’m with you on this. I’d like to see some proof. But, hey, they’re writing my paycheck,” I say. “That fact alone puts me in a pickle.”
“Yeah,” he says, “I got that.”
“Tell you the truth, I have no idea what tipped the scales exactly. But if you ask them, it doesn’t add up.”
His eyes flash. “You wanna know something, Amos? We wouldn’t be having this conversation, we wouldn’t be this involved at all, only we got a call from someone on your blessed fucking Board. Please look into this further. ‘Please, we’d so appreciate it.’ The man was already dead and buried, for Christ’s sake. They’re never satisfied, are they?”
“They’re a stubborn crowd, I admit.”
“Yeah, but just because somebody drops dead, that doesn’t mean it’s murder.”
“No, of course not.”
“What happened to the rabbi was a tragedy, fair enough. I’m sure his whole temple is in an uproar. But it was an accident, pure and simple. It’s still an accident, you ask me. Now just let it go.”
“I can’t do that. Not on my first day at work, anyway. What would people think?”
He gives me a quizzical look. It’s hard for him to shift gears. He understands more or less where I’m going, but whenever I joke around, it makes him uneasy.
“They all have day jobs, Bill. That’s the only reason they called me in. They’re doctors and lawyers and CPAs. They own bonds and real estate. They’re careful. Every button should be in place just so. You know what I’m saying? Believe me, they wouldn’t waste the synagogue’s money on this if they didn’t have to.”
“They need closure, maybe,” says Malloy.
“Did you read that in a book, Lieutenant? Because, you know what, that’s the very word I’m looking for,” I say, reaching over for the check. “Closure.”
Chapter 2
I HAVE A FRIEND down at the fire station on 3rd, and the next morning I spend some time on the phone talking to one of the EMTs there, a young man named Randy, who had responded to the call about the rabbi. He doesn’t remember that much, only that they did what they could and it wasn’t enough. They couldn’t find a pulse anywhere; they rolled up his pant leg and gave him a shot, of course, but the man was already clinically dead by the time they wheeled him out.
After I finish with him, I take a deep breath and call the Diamant home. I’m not really expecting to talk with his widow. I figure she’s still bound up in grief, but who knows? Instead, I have a pleasant, meandering chat with her kid sister, Leah, who’s just flown into town from Minneapolis. Leah has three children, two of them grown. She still works part-time for a cosmetics company, but eventually, when her husband retires, they’re planning to buy an RV and hit the road. I ask her how she likes Southern California, and she says the weather here is so much nicer than the Midwest, although both places have plenty of things you could recommend, don’t they…. After ten minutes of this, it turns out she doesn’t want to talk about what happened to her brother-in-law; it’s just too painful, she says. She tells me that she’s here to protect her sister. She hopes I understand.
Dov Boorstein and Alan Ross own a string of Israeli-style kosher doughnut shops, three or four in Hollywood and another dozen tucked away in strip malls in the San Fernando Valley. They’re called Van’s, and people line up for them at all hours of the day and night; don’t ask me why. Both men are on the Shir Emet Board, which is why I want to talk with them. I don’t mention on the phone that I never touch their doughnuts. Once was enough.
I take the 16 Bus on 3rd and hike a couple of blocks down to their temporary headquarters on Larchmont. It’s an upscale neighborhood; they’re working out of a building that used to be some kind of mental health facility, looks like. An arrow still up on the wall points you to Psychiatry, which is empty now except for a copying machine. Because it’s Larchmont, the rent is killing them, they tell me, and they’re just waiting, waiting and walking around on shpilkes until their new offices in North Hollywood are finally ready. They haven’t bothered to unpack much. There are cardboard boxes scattered around the beige carpet, and everything is bare except for a couple of cubicles in which young determined women are staring at screens and pounding away at computer keyboards.
My brain must be playing tricks on me. I somehow imagined that anyone in the business they’re in would naturally be older and well, okay, pudgy. But no. For doughnut mavens they’re both very slender and glowing, like they just stepped out of a shower. They’re also only in their late thirties or early forties. They’re both wearing identical black slacks and white dress shirts, and they both have small blue yarmulkes pinned to the top of their heads. There’s a seriousness in their eyes that seems to undercut the joy and levity I automatically associate with doughnuts. When we shake hands, the first thing I’m thinking is, gosh, they don’t eat their product, either.
We’re sitting at a large round Formica table in what was maybe a group therapy room a month ago. Now the walls are covered with posters—professional close-ups of gluten-free banana doughnuts, baked doughnuts, cottage cheese doughnuts, and the one that put them on the map, sufganiyah—a cranberry jelly doughnut, from a secret recipe smuggled out of Tel Aviv. Someone has set down a mixed platter of these things, and there’s a large blue coffee urn and a stack of Styrofoam cups. Please, they say. I shake my head, tell them I can’t, I’m on a diet. They are too, they say. We trade polite commiserations over the rabbi. Alan seems genuinely upset that he’s gone. “Such a brilliant man,” he says, “snatched away before his time.”
Dov nods. “It’s sad, yes, but I must tell you, I don’t believe I was ever quite as smitten with him as my partner here,” he says.
“He was a poet,” says Alan. “He thought like a poet. That was the problem. Admit it, you hate poetry.”
“Guilty as charged,” Dov says.
I pull out a mechanical pencil and my little spiral cardboard notebook. “So I was hired, I suppose, because someone on the Board thought there were—irregularities, I guess you might say—about his death. You wanted me to follow up on the police inquiry. Is that about right?”
“The police did nothing,” Alan says, “absolutely nothing. They wouldn’t have bothered to show up at all if we hadn’t gotten down on our knees and begged.”
“But I guess my question is, why did you think you needed a police investigation in the first place? Or an outside detective?”
Dov glances at Alan before he answers. “You’re a landsman, Mr. Parisman, a member of the tribe. So I’ll spell it out as best I can. Not everyone on our Board, and certainly not every person in the congregation, had such warm feelings for the rabbi.”
“He had enemies?”
“Enemies? That’s a word we could talk about. Let’s just say there were a few individuals who disagreed with him from time to time. I wouldn’t call them enemies. But you know what I mean.”
“Rabbi Ezra was a dynamic and forceful leader,” Alan chimes in. “You always knew when he was in the room. He took charge.”
“And some people in the temple resented that?”
“Not just the temple,” Dov says. “He was also a frequent guest speaker at interfaith gatherings. Jews and Muslims. Jews and Christians. He was on a panel to end homelessness in Hollywood. He even reached out to the Palestinian community here. There’ve been breakfasts and dinners. That kind of thing.”
I stop taking notes and look at them. “And why is that a problem? Isn’t that what rabbis do? Reach out? Try to build bridges? Keep faith with those who sleep in the dust?”
“Ah,” says Dov, “you remember your Torah, Mr. Parisman. That’s wonderful.”
“I try.”
“Torah’s important, but it isn’t the only thing. You should also remember your history. On the Board, you know, we believe we have a special obligation to do that. We try our best to think through all the scenarios. So when our very controversial rabbi—a man who goes everywhere, a man who makes head
lines and churns up raw emotions every time he opens his mouth—when a man like that all of a sudden drops dead, well, it affects us. What can I tell you? We stop. We wonder why. Is that so hard to understand?”
I scratch my head in disbelief. “It’s not hard to understand that he’s gone. I get that. What I don’t get is why you guys on the Board are so skeptical. You read the obituary, I’m sure. People die all the time. There’s no rhyme or reason for that. God does what he wants, right? And my friends at the LAPD tell me he wasn’t healthy to begin with.”
“He smoked,” Alan concedes. “And he could have dropped a few pounds, it’s true.”
“So why all the tsimmis? Why are you upset? Was he threatened?”
“He made waves, sometimes,” Dov says. “People whispered things about him at the shul, and I have to assume, in other places, too. There was always a little gossip in the air.”
“What kind of gossip?”
“Oh, I couldn’t tell you, really. I don’t listen to that kind of thing.”
“Okay, fine. I’m just trying to get my arms around the whole scope of this, and what I’m hearing is that you both believe that somebody—either in the shul or outside the shul—might have had a reason to kill the rabbi. That’s an enemy. You may not call him an enemy, but I’ll do it for you. So my question is simply, why?”
“Why is not a simple question,” Alan says, “I’m sorry.”
“Well, then are we leaning toward a personal vendetta? Did he upset someone in the congregation? Or could it be larger than that? Anti-Semitism? Anti-Semitism, right here in the middle of Los Angeles? Is that where you’re going? Because I have to tell you, from where I’m sitting, that’s crazy.”
Dov doesn’t respond immediately. He pours himself half a cup of coffee, warms his hands around it. Did I want some? No? Oh well. “We take our obligations to the temple, and especially to the children at the temple, very seriously, Mr. Parisman.” He takes a sip. “We’re building something, something important, and we don’t want things to go wrong. We don’t care for surprises. When the future of your people is on the line, the fact is, you can’t afford surprises.”
“And what happened to the rabbi was a surprise.”
Both of them look at me.
“That’s about the size of it,” Dov says.
Chapter 3
I HAVE TO DRIVE to Dora Ewing’s the next day, so right after I take my pills and Carmen shows up to fix Loretta her coffee and morning oatmeal, and after she’s settled down all warm and comfy in front of the television, I sift through my top dresser drawer, where the socks are, to find my car keys. I haven’t driven all that much since we came to Park La Brea. It’s not retirement exactly, more like the system is quietly shutting down all on its own. We live pretty simple: there’s a Ralph’s down on Wilshire for the daily basics and a Kmart for everything else. I don’t need anything, tell you the truth. The last time I splurged and bought myself a brand-new pair of pants, Reagan was still eating jelly beans at the White House.
But Dr. Ewing is another story. She’s in Culver City, not so far away, but still a place that used to be considered nowhere. Now I guess you could argue the other way around. People like it in Culver City because, I dunno, maybe it reminds them of the small town they left behind to come to LA. Or because someone has decided that the nondescript tract homes there are suddenly worth millions. Or maybe because it now has the fragrance of fresh money. Lots of trees and fountains in Culver City. Lots of colorful shops. Or shoppes, as they’d probably rather call them. And cute restaurants that serve tiny rich French food on even tinier plates. Which would be a problem for guys like me, if I ever went there, which I do, every ten years or so.
I drive a blue Honda Accord from the previous century. It’s got at least two hundred thousand miles on it, and it’s not fast or pretty, but then neither am I anymore. The thing about my car is, it’s so old and ugly and beat to hell no one in their right mind would ever try to steal it. I could leave it unlocked anywhere in LA and it would still be sitting there when I got back. Okay, I’ve never put that idea to the test, but I know this much: you’d have to be crazy or desperate or both to want what I have.
I plug a mix tape in the slot above the radio and punch the plastic buttons until the tune I want comes on. James Taylor. Just yesterday morning they let me know you were gone. Suzanne, the plans they made put an end to you. I can’t tell you how much I love that song, even though it always floats me back to Vietnam. I’ve seen fire and I’ve seen rain. I’ve seen sunny days that I thought would never end. God, it doesn’t get any more beautiful than that. And if I listen to it more than once in an afternoon, it’ll make me cry.
I go down Hauser and roll nice and leisurely along Venice, past the old Helms Bakery building. It’s still standing, still majestic, if a little downtrodden. They’re shuffling other businesses in there right now, furniture and bedding outlets, and they look to be doing okay. But it’s such a barn of a place. In my book the handwriting’s on the wall. Sooner or later you gotta figure it’ll end up being dust and cobwebs and broken windows. Or maybe Walmart or Costco will come in someday and decide to take it over. That’s the American way, not that it matters.
The clinic Dr. Ewing works out of is a redbrick three-story affair just off the main drag. It might have been a shoe factory once upon a time. There’s free parking with validation in the back lot. I take the stub the machine spits out and pull into a shady space near an old sycamore tree. Downstairs there’s a sporting-gear place called Good to Go and a rare-stamp dealer named Marvin P. Watts, By Appointment Only. Dr. Ewing is on the second floor. I take the elevator and in no time at all I’m in an air-conditioned, pastel-colored room with abstract art on the walls and easy-listening music piping through. I’m leaning on the counter and making nice with her receptionist, a black woman in a tight pink sweater named Magnolia. That’s what it says on her name tag anyway. I’m too old to think about such things, but just so you know, Magnolia was made for that sweater.
“Amos Parisman. I have a ten o’clock with Dr. Ewing. I may be just a little early.”
She hands me a cheap ballpoint pen and a pale blue health form to fill out. “Tell me again what you said on the phone, Mr. Parisman,” she says, “what’s the reason for your visit?”
“Well now,” I say, in between reading and checking off the endless yes/no questions on the form—diabetes, cancer, heart disease, trouble passing urine—“it’s kind of personal, you know what I mean?”
“Uh-huh.” She wriggles her pink sweater closer to her hips. “That’s usually code for some sort of man problem.” When I don’t respond to this, she looks annoyed. “It’s okay,” she says. “You can tell me, I’ve heard everything. Or just about. Anyway, we’ve got to put something down there for doctor to look at. So what’ll it be?”
“Let’s see.” I bite my lip. “Why don’t you put down ‘mortality.’ That’s a huge concern of mine at the moment.”
“Mortality?”
“Yeah, mortality.” I flash her my best goofy old man smile and turn in the completed questionnaire. “We’re all gonna die, right?”
She shakes her head, shrugs, and fills in the blank.
Fifteen minutes go by before Dr. Ewing steps into the waiting room, and her eyes light on me. She’s holding a clipboard against her chest, inscribed, I presume, with my very own chosen malady. “Mr. Parisman?” she says. “Right this way.”
She opens a door that leads us into a small antiseptic cubicle. There’s the usual padded table covered by a broad white sheet of sanitizing paper, a stainless steel sink in the corner, a stand-up scale with adjustable weights, a cardboard box of pullout disposable gloves, a blood pressure cuff, and other paraphernalia. On the far wall, there’s also a full-sized, full-color poster of a grown man’s interior organs—thorax, lungs, kidneys, right down to his nuts.
“So,” Dr. Ewing says, a little perplexed, “we were going to do the usual routine—check your weight and blood pressure,
ask about your meds. But first, what’s all this about mortality?”
Even in heels she’s only a bit over five feet, and at first her short spiky blond hair makes me wonder. Still, there’s something oddly beautiful about her. A rebelliousness in her eyes, and in the way she carries herself. Jason and Remo got that right. The lab coat is out of place, however. Starched and clean, but the sleeves are rolled back, as if meant for someone much taller. She seems painfully aware of this.
“Your receptionist said we had to put something down,” I tell her. “Fill in the blank, you know. Me, I’m more of an essay-question kind of guy. That was the first thing that popped into my head. Sorry.”
“So you’re not about to die?”
“I don’t think so.” I take the liberty of plopping down on the examining table. “Is this okay? I don’t want to spoil your sheets.”
She nods, checks something else on her clipboard, looks up again. “And you also didn’t bother to list your date of birth, Mr. Parisman. Why’s that?”
“Oh, vanity, I suppose. I was thirty-nine for the longest time. I studied with Jack Benny.” I try winking at her. Nothing. “Now I’m a little older.”
She offers up a faint smile. Of course she’s not nearly old enough to know who Jack Benny was, but still she has this pasted-on professional smile; in an alternate universe, I imagine, where people of her generation read books and listened to broadcasts of old-time radio shows, she might know. In any case, she’s exquisite looking, and her smile is telling me all things are possible. “So there’s nothing wrong with you then. No specific complaints?”
“Actually, doc, there is something wrong,” I say. “I’m here to ask you for your help. You have another patient.”
An Old Man's Game Page 2