An Old Man's Game

by Andy Weinberger

  “You’re too young,” I say. “Do you remember the Cold War?”

  “Which one was that?”

  “Okay, never mind. Maybe they just wanted to do something simple—get in and get out. Maybe they thought they could delete his record altogether. Medically, then, he’d be a blank slate at the time of death. A perfect crime. No muss, no fuss, no data, nothing.”

  “Except the doctor might remember something about how sick he was,” Omar says. “And his wife would probably still have his leftover prescription bottles in the bathroom. So forget that idea.”

  “Or here’s another theory,” I say, undeterred by his logic. “Maybe they didn’t want to steal anything. Maybe they wanted to slip something in, alter his record somehow, make him seem more prone to heart disease or stroke. Maybe that was what they were doing when Dr. Ewing arrived.”

  “Or maybe it’s simpler than any of that, hombre. Maybe they just killed her to send a message to any gray-haired detective like you who tries to get in their way. I think you give these guys too goddamn much credit.”

  Now it’s my turn to look incredulous. “They killed her to warn me off? Is that what you think? Really? Are you serious?”

  “People get themselves killed for all kinds of reasons,” he says with more solemnity than I’ve seen before. “Where I come from, you can get killed sometimes just for looking like a fool.”

  “Fine, but in that case, why didn’t they just kill me? If I’m such a thorn in their side, what are they keeping me alive for?”

  Omar puts his hands over his ears. “You ask too many questions, man. You’re giving me a headache with all these fucking questions.”

  Omar follows me back to Shir Emet after breakfast. I tell him to keep an eye out for the black Audi, and I do, too, but there’s no stranger in my rearview mirror. Whoever they are, they’re obviously not following me day and night. Only when it suits them.

  I come down La Cienega and make a gentle left onto Fountain. Omar’s about thirty yards behind me in the next lane. He tells me my questions are giving him a headache. What’s he complaining about? I say to myself. Hell, they’re even giving me a headache. I pass a tattoo parlor and gay clothing boutique and a dry cleaners and a hair salon and what looks like a hip Japanesefusion restaurant with lots of empty tables. I glance at my watch. It’s too early for the lunch crowd, I think. Or maybe nobody goes there. Maybe it’s still waiting to be discovered. I stop for a red light. The flotsam and jetsam of Los Angeles are on display. The sun is shining. The palm trees are swaying. No one knows there’s a killer out there. What’s worse is none of these people seem to care. And why should they? They all have mobile phones, they all have credit cards tucked away in their hip pockets, and they’re ambling across streets like there’s no tomorrow. They’re arm in arm with loved ones. Every morning they wake up in paradise. Death? Death is barely a word in their vocabulary. It’ll never happen to them, they think. Death is what happens to someone else. The light turns green. I press my foot to the gas pedal. The car rolls forward and my mind curls back to Jonah Siegel. I was hoping they’d find him alive, but now that he’s gone, it complicates things. My headache will never go away at this rate. And the truth is, he could have told us what this was all about. I’m sure of that. It would have been so simple if only we could just sit down somewhere quiet and talk it over.

  “You again?” Sophie Applebaum raises her eyebrows as Omar and I walk through the door. “What else do we have to talk about, Mr. Parisman?” She gives Omar a quick up and down. I can tell she doesn’t hold him in the highest esteem. I don’t know whether that’s because he’s Mexican or because he’s young and strong and has a ring in his ear. I don’t know what she thinks of men, period, but then I’m not much of an achiever in that department, either, the way she looks at me.

  “Sophie,” I begin, “this is my associate, Mr. Omar Villasenor. I can’t tell you how many times he’s saved my life.”

  “A lifeguard,” she says with a shrug. “That’s very nice.” There’s a three-inch stack of official-looking papers next to her computer, and the red light is blinking on the telephone. “Wait a second, sit down,” she points to the chairs in front of her desk. Then turning to Omar, “Mi casa es su casa. You know what I’m saying?” She sighs, turns to the confusion on her desk and picks up the blinking phone. For a full two minutes, she goes round and round with whoever’s on the other end. She says, yeah, so, nope, I don’t know, no, not yet, so what am I supposed to do, don’t be ridiculous, okay, okay, sure, I’ll get back to you, not to worry—and hangs up. “There now, gentlemen, what’s on your minds? Did you find Jonah? His parents called, you know. They’ve been calling nonstop.”

  “I’m not surprised.”

  “They’re worried sick,” she says. “Of course they are, who wouldn’t be? He’s an only child, did you know that? Bad enough he’s missing, but an only child.” She shakes her head. Then her whole body follows suit. It seems to tremble, like she’s already in mourning.

  “That’s why we’re here, Sophie. We need to ask you a few more questions.” I give a quick, cautionary glance over at Omar. He’s lost in his own world, studying the Hebrew posters on the wall. I didn’t remember to tell him to keep his mouth shut about Jonah Siegel. Not that he would just blurt something out, but you never know. I’m not going to be the one to poke a pin in Sophie’s balloon, I think. Let her hear it from the cops. Let her read about it in the newspaper. There’ll be plenty of time to grieve soon enough.

  “I understand,” she says, straightening up. “Ask me anything.”

  “You have a pretty special position here at Shir Emet,” I begin.

  “I’ve been here a long time, if that’s what you mean.”

  “No, what I mean is, you must know an awful lot about your students,” I say. “Not just how they perform on tests and in the classroom. They aren’t just names and numbers, are they? Not to you.”

  “Of course not.”

  “And I’m guessing you know who their friends are, and what they do for fun, and whether they’re rich or poor, or somewhere in between. I’m guessing you talk to them, don’t you, Sophie? I mean, nobody goes to this school without getting to know you. Am I right?”

  “We’ve always considered ourselves family.” She nods. “Many of the older boys, especially, when they come here, they’re all alone. It’s often their first time away from home. You have to do something, don’t you? You can’t just sit there.”

  “Strangers in the land of Egypt,” I agree. “We have to take care of them. There’s no getting around it.”

  “I thought you didn’t belong to a temple, Mr. Parisman.”

  “I don’t. Not anymore. Just between you and me, I don’t even believe in God, not after what I’ve seen. But I did go to Hebrew school once upon a time. And some of those bits and pieces from the Torah, well, they’re still floating around in my brain.”

  “They don’t call it the tree of life for nothing.”

  “No, they don’t. And those bits and pieces of Torah must mean a lot to Jonah Siegel, I’ll bet.”

  “He’s always been a good student, yes. A little fragile, I would say, but he cares so very much about the world. Not this world, maybe”—she waves dismissively at the computer and the phone and all the stuff in her office and at the parking lot beyond her window.

  “What world, then?”

  She thinks for a minute. “Israel is his world,” she says at last. “The Torah is everything to that boy. That’s what has always struck me when I think of him. Some of these kids, they pray, they study, sure. But they’re just going through the motions. I’ve been here a long time; you can always tell the difference. Some children want to be here, it’s true, but not everyone. It’s a game with them. The minute they think they’re by themselves, everything changes. Suddenly they’re acting like every other American teenager. They’re shoving each other and giggling and making rude noises.”

  “But not Jonah, right?”

 
“No. No, Jonah was never like that. He was looking for God, not—childish friendships.”

  “But he had friends here, didn’t he?”

  She thinks for a minute. “There was one boy, yes. Only one that I know of. Avi Posner.”

  “We’d like to talk with him, Sophie. It could mean a lot.”

  She looks up at me, pleading. Her eyes are moist, ready to weep. “Something’s happened, hasn’t it? You keep speaking of him in the past tense. Something’s very wrong.”

  “He’s missing, Sophie. He’s been missing for days. I’d say that’s never a good sign.”

  She nods, pulls a Kleenex from a box and softly blows her nose. Then she turns back to her computer. “You want to speak with Avi? Okay. Okay, I’ll get you the number.”

  Chapter 16

  AVI POSNER IS a tall, gangly, unpretentious kid who lives with his parents in a modest 1950s bungalow on Crenshaw near Olympic. He has a few pimples on his chin and long brown lanky hair. He’s wearing blue jeans and sneakers and a blue-and-yellow-checkered shirt he doesn’t bother to tuck in. Not that any of them do these days. Apart from the yarmulke on his head, he could be any other American kid. His mother meets us at the door, and even though we say we don’t need anything, she insists, and so we sit around on the L-shaped flowered couch in their living room with Avi while she busies herself in the kitchen making coffee and putting together a little platter of macaroons. This is all very familiar to me; it’s almost like coming home, in fact.

  “Mrs. Applebaum tells us you’re Jonah’s best friend in the whole world,” I start out.

  “I don’t know about the world,” he says. His hands are shoved deep inside his pockets, which makes him seem even more awkward than he already is. “But hey, at Shir Emet, let me tell you, I’m his only friend. It’s kinda odd, because I’m a year younger, you know.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” Omar asks.

  “Nothing,” Avi says. “Nothing at all. Just that he doesn’t like to fool around. Jonah’s always serious. And not many kids my age are like that.”

  “But he fooled around more or less with you, right? That was okay?”

  Avi shakes his head. “We don’t fool around. No, there’s none of that. I suppose we’re both pretty serious. We study together. We pray together. And he helped me write my essays. I’m not the greatest writer in the world, but you have to, you know, if you want to graduate. I did a paper on Spinoza last year. He helped me put it together.”

  “And you haven’t seen him in a while? When was the last time?”

  “Gosh, it’s been a couple of weeks. Everybody’s wondering what’s going on. His parents called here two nights ago. I didn’t talk with them, but my mom did.”

  His mother comes in just then with a pot of coffee and the macaroons. Her name is Helen. She says, “Please, call me Helen,” so I do. This house, this living room, this child, is her life’s work. I comment on the lovely red and yellow roses arranged in her vase, and she says, “Oh, I’m so glad you noticed.” Then she tells me they came right out of her garden in the backyard. That to be perfectly honest she hates being cooped up in the kitchen and if she only could, you know, she’d spend all day long out there in the sunshine; it’s really such a blessing. Omar sips his black coffee and chews silently on his macaroon. This is moving too slowly for him, I can tell. He’s tapping his foot. He wants to keep asking questions, but I look at him and he understands by my expression that some things take time and that he’ll just have to wait.

  When I’ve swallowed the last of my coffee and turned down Helen’s entreaties to take yet another macaroon, I turn once more to the boy squirming on the couch. “Did he have any other friends that you know of, Avi?”

  “Other friends at the temple? Like I told you, he was kind of a loner.”

  “What about people outside the temple? I don’t mean other kids his age. What about adults?”

  Avi lets his gaze drift briefly out the window. “Well, there was this one guy who came around once or twice when we were shooting hoops on the basketball court.”

  “Did you get his name?”

  “No.”

  “Think, Avi. Nobody ever once mentioned a name?”

  “Gee, I don’t remember. Probably not. The guy never spoke to me. And everything Jonah said seemed logical at the time. I let it go. But it was odd enough that it stuck in my mind.” He shrugs. “To be honest, I was more interested in playing basketball.”

  “All right, then. You never got his name. What’d he look like?”

  “Look like? Heck, I don’t know. He was old. Kind of skinny, I think. Wore a suit. Glasses. He called Jonah over from the sidelines. They talked for a while, then the old man usually gave him some money and they shook hands.”

  “And then?”

  “Then nothing, really. He just got in his car and went away. That’s all.”

  “And you didn’t ask Jonah about it afterwards? You didn’t think it was peculiar? He didn’t say anything about it?”

  “Well, yeah, I guess I was surprised. I’d never seen him talk to anyone, let alone strangers. I asked him what it was all about, you bet I did.”

  “And what did he say?”

  “He said the man was his uncle, that it was okay, he was just keeping tabs on him here in LA.”

  “And the money?” What was that for?”

  “He said his uncle gave him a little cash every now and then, just to make sure he had enough to get by. His parents are up in the Bay Area, you know. They sent him a certain amount every month, but he was always running short.”

  I turn to Omar now. “Where’s your cell phone, Omar? Can you show Avi those pictures you took at the restaurant?”

  Omar pulls the phone out of his pocket and flips through it. “You recognize these people?”

  Avi takes his hands out of his pockets. He holds the cell phone at arm’s length, stares, pushes the photos around, makes them bigger with his thumbs. “Not the one with the crew cut, no. But this other guy? Maybe. Yeah. Yeah, that’s him, all right. That’s his uncle.”

  Omar and I stand outside Avi Posner’s house afterwards and watch the clusters of kids trundling home from the nearby public elementary school with their backpacks and art projects. “I don’t know why, but somehow I doubt that the man in the restaurant is Jonah’s uncle,” I say.

  “I’ll bet he doesn’t even have an uncle,” Omar says.

  “I’m going to call Malloy. See if they’ve found out who that Audi belongs to”.

  “Then what?”

  “Then I’m going to pay him a visit.”

  “Not without me, you’re not.”

  “What’s the matter? You don’t think I can handle it by myself?”

  Omar punches my shoulder gently. “I worry about you,” he says. He’s silent for a moment. “Besides, I’ve seen these guys. You don’t want to mess with the big one. He’ll eat you alive.”

  “And you’re going to stop him, huh?”

  “Me and my pistol.” Omar smiles.

  “As I recall, that pistola in your pants belongs to me, amigo. But all right, you can come along.”

  Malloy tells me he’s looked into it, and the Audi is registered to someone named Eric Wayne Blanchard. He gives me an address on San Vicente, a few blocks from the beach in Santa Monica.

  “Have you talked with him yet?” I ask.

  “Why should I?” sniffs Malloy. “Because you say he’s following you around? Is that a crime?”

  “I don’t know,” I say, “probably not. But I have a witness who can link him to Jonah Siegel. Don’t you think that’s interesting?”

  “Fascinating,” he replies, which I take to mean, not fascinating in the least.

  Then I tell him about Avi Posner, how we got lucky and how he identified Eric Wayne Blanchard’s friend in the photos Omar took. I can sense by Malloy’s silence that he’s taking it all in, the wheels are turning, and some kind of dark pattern is emerging from the fog. He’s been in this business to
o long to dismiss what I’m saying. It’s not evidence, nothing that would survive a clever lawyer, we both know that. And I don’t want him to think I’m trampling all over his investigation either. I admit I don’t have much to go on, just loose threads really, but that’s been the case ever since they hired me.

  “Tell him you’re thinking about going to see him,” whispers Omar, who’s been listening to every word I’ve said. “Go on. Tell him what you told me.”

  “So, Bill,” I say, “Omar and I had this wild notion to go visit Mr. Blanchard. You know, now that he has a name and an address. We could drive out there and kind of sound him out. What do you think?”

  “What should I think?” he says. “You’re over twenty-one. You do whatever the hell you want.”

  “No, wait. I guess what I should have asked was, have you bothered to check him out? Does he have a record?”

  “No, but it’s easy enough to do. Keep your pants on. Don’t go anywhere just yet, okay? I’ll get back to you.”

  Omar and I walk down to the end of the block, where my car is parked under an enormous magnolia tree. A bird has anointed the windshield, which they say is good luck, but you couldn’t prove it by me. “You really wanna go to Santa Monica and talk to this guy?” says Omar. “Is that smart?”

  “Why? Weren’t you the one who wanted to take him on? You and my pistola? You think he’ll gun us down just for knocking on the door?”

  “No,” Omar says, “that’s not it. He probably won’t. But remember what happened at the doctor’s office? I guarantee you this guy’s gonna clam up just like she did. And what’s worse, if he’s in the middle of all this shit, then what have you done? You’ve just tipped him off.”

  I nod. “Okay. Okay, I hear you. So let’s wait a bit. I want to hear what Malloy comes up with, anyway.”

  That evening Carmen meets me at the front door. Her hands are moist from washing dishes and her face is flushed from cooking. “Loretta’s had a hard day,” she says. “I took her out to Griffith Park to watch the kids ride the ponies. We were sitting there eating our sandwiches and she started worrying that one of them was going to fall off. I told her no, no, no. It’s not possible, they strap them in good, and the little ponies, most of them are old, they don’t go so fast. But you know how she can be when she gets a thought in her brain.”