“I know,” I say. “She goes round and round. It never ends.”
“You must spend more time with her,” Carmen says. “I think she misses you. I’m okay, we’re friends, but you are her husband, you are the one she needs when she is all alone.”
“I wish I could be here more,” I say. “This case is starting to make me as crazy as she is.”
She puts her hand gently on my shoulder. Her eyes never waver and sometimes I think she is the wisest of women. “You should not be doing this kind of work, señor. This is my opinion only. I have seen too much. Too much malo. It frightens me to see you walk out the door in the morning.”
“It’s a job, Carmen.”
“But not a good job. Not for you.”
I haven’t told Carmen at length about what’s going on. Whatever she hears, it comes secondhand from listening to Loretta, and she’s learned long ago to discount most of what Loretta says. Still, the fear is there, waiting, pulsing just beneath her words. I take her hand and hold it briefly in my own. I want to unburden myself in the worst way, to tell her everything; she would understand if the facts came out. I open my mouth, then lapse instinctively back into silence. Maybe the facts aren’t so necessary, I think. I wish her goodnight and she closes the door behind her. Maybe the fear is all that really matters.
The phone rings an hour later. Malloy is in a better mood than he was earlier. “Okay, Amos, I did some dirty work for you. Don’t ask me why. You’re going to owe me a fancy dinner after this.”
“I seem to be buying lots of people dinner these days.”
“Yeah, well, I looked into Mr. Blanchard, and it’s kind of weird. We have nothing on him here in California, he’s clean, but I went to another database and it appears he was quite an activist in Kansas a few years ago.”
“What kind of activist?”
“Well, that’s what I can’t figure out. He’s from Wichita, to be specific. Did two tours in Iraq with the Army Rangers. Got out, tried school for a while, quit, and went to work at Walmart, then—or maybe this happened while he was in the service—he suddenly found God.”
“In Iraq?”
“Lots of guys discover God when people are shooting at them, Amos. That’s not so unusual, is it?”
“What about the activism, Bill?”
“Oh, right. So he joined this fundamentalist church there in Wichita. Next thing you know, he gets busted in Topeka for interfering with an abortion clinic. When they tried to put the cuffs on him, he got into a scuffle with the cops. There were some broken bones, and he ended up doing eight months for assaulting a police officer.”
“That’s it?”
“Let’s put it this way, Amos. There seems to be no curing this guy. Even after they released him, he kept turning up. He was a regular at political events. The FBI had him on a watch list because of his experience in Iraq. That, plus the fact that he was writing hate tracts for these people, giving interviews, talking about the end of days, how we had to arm ourselves and be ready, all that kinda shit. Point is, he was a known hothead—at least in Wichita.”
“Praise Jesus.”
“Right.”
“But I still don’t get it. What’s a guy like that doing following me around? And what’s his connection to the rabbi and Dr. Ewing and Jonah Siegel?”
“Maybe none,” says Malloy. “Maybe it’s a coincidence. Or maybe he’s just another drifter who moved to LA to win an Oscar. Maybe he came here to watch the world end. Wichita’s not exactly a ringside seat.”
“You don’t really believe that, do you?”
There’s a pause on the other end. “No, I think he’s somebody. I think he had a hand in this thing. If I had to guess, I’d say he was probably the one who pulled the trigger on that Siegel kid. But I don’t know why, and I sure as hell don’t know how we prove it. Fuck, I can’t even get a body dug up for an autopsy. What’s the world coming to?”
I ask him if they have any forensic results from looking at Jonah Siegel’s body, fingerprints, DNA, anything, but Malloy says no. “Whoever killed him did a thorough job. I’m actually surprised we found him at all.”
“Maybe in the end, the killer had a small pang of conscience,” I say.
“That’s not been my experience,” he says, “but yeah, maybe so.”
I ask him how long Blanchard has been in California and what he’s doing. He has no idea, only that he seems to have enough money to rent a nice apartment in Santa Monica and drive a nice new set of wheels.
“I’ll bet if you managed to dust off his car you’d find all sorts of good information,” I say. “I’ll bet Jonah Siegel’s blood work is readily available inside that Audi.”
“Amos,” Malloy says, and I can hear the exasperation in his voice, “we have nothing. Well, okay, not nothing. We have your word that this creep is following you around, and we suppose that the reason he’s following you around is because you’re involved in this case. Can we then go to a judge and secure a warrant to search this man’s car? I’m sorry, I don’t think so.”
We say our goodbyes, and I hang up the phone and change into my pajamas. Loretta has fallen asleep on the couch, and I have to lift her up and coax her into bed, even though it’s still pretty early. She’s been sleeping more and more lately, which worries me, but at least when she’s sleeping I know she’s safe.
On my desk there are still a few more sermons from the rabbi to wade through. I feel like I’m starting to get the drift of where he’s going, but it still doesn’t feel like he was about to launch a whole new religion. He was a careful fellow, I decide, a calculating chameleon of a man. Whatever his real attitude was, he seemed always to conceal it beneath a jumble of small, shiny facts.
This new essay I pick up talks specifically about pork. How five hundred years before the composition of the Torah, the Jews in the highlands west of Jordan were neither raising pigs nor eating pork. Archaeologists know this, it reads. Anthropologists know this. The science is absolute, incontrovertible. So what are we to think? At first glance, you might not imagine this particular habit to be that important. What difference does it make, after all, when we Jews stopped eating pork? So what if the Torah got it a little bit wrong? So what if it wasn’t something we abandoned the day after we left Egypt? Who cares? Ironically, our neighbors at the time, both east and west of us, were big consumers of pork. The Moabites, the Ammonites, the Philistines. But not the Jews. So the question becomes, From where did this custom arise?
I skip ahead to the end. The rabbi doesn’t dispense a single answer, I notice. That’s not his style. He just poses questions that no one—no one in his audience, at least—can answer.
Chapter 17
EARLY THE NEXT morning I line up my pills in a dutiful row, all six of them, on the kitchen table. A pink one, two different white ones, an octagonal gray one, a tiny yellow, and a green. High blood pressure, bad cholesterol, heart disease, and macular degeneration—that’s the rap sheet on yours truly. And all I know is I have to take them or Dr. Kalish tells me bad things could happen. Bad things have already happened, I tell him when he says this. I’m older and slower, I can’t pee like I used to, and I’m not one fucking inch closer to figuring out the meaning of life. And besides, I’m gonna die anyway, so what’s the point? Oh, I can guarantee you, Amos, someday you’re gonna die, he replies. I’ll bet you a nickel. But in the meantime, just take the pills, okay? Humor me.
The toast is heating, and I’m slurping my coffee and leafing slowly through the new, improved LA Times (which isn’t what it used to be) when I see it. There, tucked in the corner at the bottom of the page, right next to an ad for free termite inspections—“Young Man Found Near Tracks.” It’s not much of a piece. They don’t mention his name, but there’s no doubt who it is. A naked body on the Union Pacific line, just outside Pomona. Nothing about the bullet wound to the head. The police continue to investigate, the reporter writes. At this point their working assumption is that the unidentified man, who they think was per
haps in his early twenties, might have been either mentally ill or intoxicated at the time of his death. There’s a lot they don’t say, in fact. Yeah, he might have been doped up. And he might have sat down on the tracks and killed himself, if only someone hadn’t plugged him before the train ever got there. “Yeah, right,” I mumble. “So where’s the gun? And how’d he manage to get all the way to Pomona, buck naked?” To me, the only thing queer about the story is that Malloy didn’t call it murder. I guess the reason he didn’t was so he could buy himself some time. I grab a pair of scissors from out of the junk drawer where we keep batteries and flashlights and refrigerator magnets. Then I snip out the article and tuck it in my shirt pocket. Another souvenir from this crummy case. It’s like Hamlet, I think. The bodies just keep piling up. Who the hell is next, you gotta wonder.
The phone rings. “Amos? Howie Rothbart here. I’m sorry to call you so early. Do you think you could come down to my office this morning, say around 11 a.m.? Something’s come up. We need to talk.”
“Sure,” I tell him, “sure, I’ll be there. I have a few things to talk about with you, too.”
“Fine,” he says, “see you at eleven.”
“Fine.” I hang up and reach for my pills, one by one.
Later, Loretta catches me standing in front of the mirror choosing a tie. I don’t have many ties, but I like to wear them when I feel like I’m going to what may be a significant meeting. Not because they’re comfortable—they’re not. But with a tie around your neck, it’s like you’ve leveled the playing field.
“You’re going out again,” she says.
“I have to, honey. Duty calls.” I show her three ties. “So what do you think? The gray silk with the flowers? The maroon? Or this tan guy with the squares?”
“The tan guy.” She smiles. And when I hold it up to my neck, she adds, “Nice.”
I nod and start to put my look together.
“Where are you going?” Loretta wants to know.
“To see a lawyer. Do you remember Howie Rothbart? We met him a hundred years ago at Shir Emet.”
“I don’t remember.”
“Well, you met him, anyway. It was a long time ago.”
“Can I go with you?”
“To see Howie? No, darlin,’ that wouldn’t make sense. This is business. He’s the one who hired me for the case, remember?”
“To find the murderer.” She nods. It’s as if this most pertinent piece of information was wedged in a drawer and she suddenly yanked it out. Her face brightens. Now she remembers. “The one who killed the rabbi.”
“Uh-huh. And now a few others as well.”
“Take me with you.”
“Can’t. It’s a private meeting. No girls allowed.”
She considers this carefully. Then she finds her easy chair, to which I’ve added several throw pillows to make even more inviting. She tests the fabric with her hands and quietly curls up into a warm sweet ball. “Then bring me peanuts,” she says. “I like peanuts.”
“Okay. When I come back, you shall have nuts.”
“Not just nuts. Peanuts! You promise?” She crosses her heart.
“You better believe it.”
“You mean it?”
“Would I lie?” I say. When she first got sick, I was always bringing home treats like that from the Farmers Market. Peanut brittle, chocolates, dried fruit, whatever I could find. Partly this was my feeble attempt to help her gain weight; she had lost interest in eating, and people in white lab coats were coming up to me in private and telling me they were worried about her. But I discovered she was always too polite to turn down food as long as it was a gift. Now she was asking again. I make myself a mental note to call Dr. Ali in Beverly Hills and set up an appointment to see what it means.
Carmen stands by the door with Loretta’s pills in her hand and a tall glass of milk. I lay a twenty-dollar bill on the counter. “Think you could do me a favor? Take my wife on a field trip to the Farmers Market.”
“For what?”
“She has a hankering for a bag of nuts.”
“Okay,” says Carmen. “No problem. We were going to the Grove anyway. There’s a sale at Nordstrom, and besides, you know how she likes to ride the escalator.”
“Hey, who doesn’t?”
Gwendolyn is fiddling with the split ends of her long blond hair when I walk into Howie Rothbart’s outer office. She stops, slightly embarrassed. Then she recalls who I am and regards me warily. “It’s okay,” I say, “this time Mr. Rothbart really is expecting me. Scout’s honor. Eleven o’clock sharp. Go ahead and ask him.”
“I will,” she says, and slips through his door, shutting it firmly behind her.
I look around. There’s a small dapper Chinese guy all in black waiting on the leather couch beneath a large abstract painting. Lots of indiscriminant purple and yellow swirls that remind me of a tornado. Or not a tornado. Maybe an ice cream cone. Whatever it is, it probably cost a pretty penny, I think. I hate it.
Gwendolyn shows me in. Howie and I shake hands. He’s still trying to be as affable as ever. Today he’s dressed for the job. A nice light blue-gray Italian suit, no tie. If you just paid attention to the suit, you’d think maybe he was fine. His face, though, is worn, like he’s forgotten somehow what it’s like to sleep through the night.
“So who goes first?” I ask.
“Please, Amos, tell me what’s on your mind. What I have can wait a bit.”
I sink into my chair. “Well,” I say, “I guess I shouldn’t sugar coat why I came. That wouldn’t be professional.” I pull out the newspaper article from my coat and slide it across the desk. “I don’t suppose you saw this little piece. It wasn’t exactly frontpage news.”
Howie puts his glasses on and examines it. “I don’t understand,” he says at last, looking up. “How does this pertain—”
“It’s Jonah Siegel,” I say. “They found him on the tracks.”
The color drains from his face. “Oh dear God,” he says. “He killed himself?”
“Well, no,” I say. “Not exactly. A freight train hit him, but he was already dead.”
“What—what do you mean?”
“Somebody put a bullet in his head, stripped the body, and dumped him on the tracks. Maybe they thought that once the train did what trains do, well, there wouldn’t be enough left of him to tell how he died. They were wrong about that.”
“But it doesn’t say anything in this article about murder.”
“That’s true. They left that part out. Journalists aren’t what they used to be. Not since Watergate, in my opinion.”
“Then how can you be sure?”
“Trust me,” I say. “That’s who it is, and that’s how he died. There’s no question.”
“This is terrible. Terrible.” He shakes his head. “Do his parents know? Has anyone told them?”
“I don’t know, Howie. I imagine the police are taking care of that.” I look at him carefully. “What I know for sure is that whenever I seem to be getting close to something, all of a sudden I’m looking at another body. We now have three dead people to think about, and I’ll be honest with you, I don’t know where it ends.”
“Well, for you, Amos, I think it ends here.”
“What do you mean?”
He plants his fingertips lightly on the desk. “I met with the Board yesterday.”
“Yes. And?”
“And after much back and forth, we came to the conclusion that this whole thing has gotten out of hand.” He looks at me as if this remark is significant.
“Well, of course it’s gotten out of hand, Howie. It’s been out of hand from the very beginning, you want my opinion.”
“No,” he says, “no, you don’t understand.” He pulls open the drawer in front of him, produces a checkbook and starts writing. “We want to do the smart thing. That’s all we’ve ever wanted, really. And we decided that the best course, what we need to do now, is just step back. Let the police handle it from here on out.”
/>
He signs his name with a flourish, tears it carefully out of the book, and pushes it toward me. “Here,” he says. “This should cover your expenses and then some.” He looks at me intently for what seems like a long time, and I don’t know why, but I suddenly remember reading how some tribes in Africa hate it when you stare directly into their eyes. It’s the worst thing you could ever do. They think you’re stealing their souls. “And Amos,” Howie continues, “the Board didn’t sanction this, but I’ve added an extra two weeks onto your retainer, just so you know. You did a good job. A terrific job. There are no hard feelings.”
“You’re firing me?”
“It’s time we all moved on, my friend. Didn’t you just say this is getting dangerous?”
“Three people have been murdered, that’s true.”
“And we don’t want there to be any more.”
I finger the check for a moment. The number he wrote out is generous. In fact, it’s more than generous, which makes me suspicious. “So let me get this right—you think that if you take me out of the picture, if I’m no longer around to investigate, it will somehow calm things down? That the killer will relax, breathe easy, maybe fly off to Hawaii and work on his tan?”
He frowns. “I didn’t say that. But some problems are just that, aren’t they? Problems. They’re never solved. It’s like peeling an onion. When you get to the end, you have nothing.”
“And that’s what this case is all about?”
“I don’t know what it’s all about. I do know that it’s been very painful for everyone at the synagogue, and for me, in particular. I want it to end, Amos.”
“And that’s why you’re letting me go?”
He sighs. He’s got his executive face on. Clearly he doesn’t want there to be any further discussion. “I’m just telling you what the Board has told me. We’ve spent as much as we’re willing to. We appreciate all the time you’ve put in, but now we’re tired. The congregation is also tired, frankly. It doesn’t help to keep stirring the pot like this. I’m sure you can understand.”
An Old Man's Game Page 13