An Old Man's Game

by Andy Weinberger

  “Sure, you bet,” I say, as I get slowly to my feet.

  Howie holds out his hand for me to shake. “I hope this isn’t the last time I ever see you, Amos. I hope you’ll think about coming around on Shabbat. We’re looking for a new permanent rabbi. It won’t be easy, of course, filling Ezra’s shoes, but like I say, it’s time to move on. You’d be a welcome addition, I hope you know that.”

  “I’ll mull on it,” I say. “I will. But you have to understand something about me. What I do. Who I am. When I agree to take a case, it’s not just a job. Not like driving a bus or selling luggage at Macy’s. I don’t work nine to five. I don’t go home at the end of the day and kick off my shoes and turn on a ball game. That’s not me.”

  “I’m sure you think about it.”

  “You’re damn right I think about it. Some nights I even dream about it. Three people dead. Three lives. They’re never coming back.” I can feel the bile churning around in the pit of my stomach, and I must be shouting, because he’s paying close attention. “And I don’t care what you say. You want to move on? That’s great, that’s fucking marvelous. But you know something—their parents and children, their wives and friends, their loved ones are never moving on. You understand? Never. There’s always going to be a hole in their heart.”

  I take his check off the desktop and slip it into my jacket pocket. “So thanks for the invite. Like I told you before, I’m not a believer. I may be back. But I’ve still got a whole lot of stuff to sort out before I get to that point.”

  “Sure, sure. Whatever.”

  We’re both on our feet now. I turn to go and he’s staring after me. He tries to smile. He would much prefer to play the gracious host again, but he doesn’t have the strength. Not anymore. He’s like a boxer who’s just heard the bell ring for round twelve. He’s standing, but just barely. His shoulders are drooping, and I know he’ll be relieved to see the door finally close behind me.

  Chapter 18

  FOR TWO DAYS and nights afterwards, I sit around on my living room couch in a fog. Loretta and Carmen are both glad to have me back, but I hardly notice. I’m half-dressed and I still haven’t shaved. The check Howie wrote is pinned at eye level on the refrigerator by a magnet. I see it whenever I open the door to get myself another beer, and every time I do, I wonder what they really talked about at that Board meeting. Did they really say, enough already? Had someone really raised his hand and said I’d had my chance? That it’s time to move on? That if you can’t find a vicious killer in three weeks, hey, why bother? Or had the bean counters taken charge once more? I could almost believe that. I mean, it’s true. If you look at it a certain way, my profession is sort of redundant. Why pay a private eye for what the cops are supposed to do?

  Only the cops weren’t doing their job, I think, that’s why. If the cops were doing their job, they would have asked more questions. They would have worked a lot faster. They would have picked up Jonah Siegel before they found him in pieces on the railroad tracks. They might have gotten their hands on the rabbi’s medical file. And maybe, if they’d asked around, they’d have figured out by now why someone would be so angry, he’d want to kill another person just for opening his mouth.

  These are the kinds of thoughts that keep ricocheting around my brain. Then, on the third day, I wake up with a brand-new idea. I pick up the phone and call Howie at his office. Blondie answers. She tells me she’s sorry, but Mr. Rothbart is ill today and probably won’t be in for the rest of the week.

  “I’m sorry to hear that,” I say and hang up. Then I go into the bathroom and throw some cold water on my face. I put a fresh blade in my razor. I shave very carefully. I get dressed. I look myself over in the mirror and then I walk out the door and ride the elevator nine stories down.

  I pull up at last in front of his house. Nothing has changed on Windsor. The sun is shining relentlessly. The gardeners are out with their edgers and rakes and leaf blowers. There is the same fevered effort to keep the neighborhood spotless and beautiful, even though almost no one is ever home and there’s never any time to enjoy it. I ring the doorbell, and after a minute or two, he cracks it open. If he’s surprised to see me standing there on a Thursday morning a few days after he fired me, his face doesn’t show it. What shows instead is how pale and worn-out he still looks. There’s not an ounce of color in his cheeks, no life at all in his voice. It’s almost like I’m talking to a golem, a lost, shapeless soul.

  “Oh,” Howie says, “it’s you, Amos. Come in. Come in.” He’s barefoot and he’s wearing black sweat pants and a sleeveless lemon silk T-shirt. He flops down on his enormous couch. I take a spot nearby. “I haven’t been well lately. I meant to go to work, but you know how it is. Sometimes you just have to give it a rest.”

  I nod, and we look at each other calmly for a moment. The house is cool and quiet, and I guess that his wife has already left for the office. He’s all curled up comfortably on the couch. His feet are tucked under some pillows. He’s had a pretty good life, I think, and he’s not a bad guy when it comes down to it. He wants to do the right thing, even if he doesn’t always know what it is. Under other circumstances, I imagine we might even be friends. Not now, though.

  I get right to the point. “Why’d you hire me, Howie?”

  He looks startled at first, like I’m being completely naive, like it’s the kind of thing a six-year-old would ask. Why is the sky blue? Why do I have to go to school? But maybe because he’s Jewish, maybe because his life has been a series of arguments and counter-arguments, he’s unable to just blithely shrug it off or fling it back in my face. He gives it some thought. “Why did I hire you? Why? To find the truth,” he says.

  “No,” I say. “That’s not it.”

  “Why then?”

  “You hired me because you didn’t think I’d ever find the truth. You hired me because you thought this would be too big a nut for me to crack.”

  I let that sink in for a moment. Neither of us speak. Somewhere, from another room, I can hear the soft ticking of a clock. Howie extends one arm as though he wants now to include me in his world. “All right,” he says, “you win, Amos. It’s just as you say. We thought we should investigate. We were pretty sure, in fact, that the police couldn’t do it alone. Why should they? They had the coroner’s report. The family wanted him buried. Let it go. But still, we knew it was the right thing to do, to investigate. The moral thing.” He raises both hands, then claps them together contemplatively. His eyes shift back and forth. He’s not being deceptive, it’s more like he’s trying, the way gin players do, to fit the spades in one place and the hearts in another. “Look, I’ve known these Board members for years. We’ve been through a lot. We’re all good people. You have to keep that in mind. We. Are. Honorable. People. But what happened to the rabbi, well, it was just too much.”

  “And so?”

  “And so we brought you in.”

  “Yes, but you could have brought in anyone. There are dozens of top-notch agencies in LA. Why call me, Howie? I haven’t done this kind of work in years.”

  “So you think the whole thing was a ruse? That we hired you because we wanted you to fail?”

  “Maybe. That’s what it looks like.”

  He rubs some dirt from his eyes. “Some of us had doubts. Some thought you might fail, it’s true. And maybe one or two even wanted you to fail, I don’t know for sure.”

  “You want to tell me their names, Howie? The doubters?”

  “I can’t recall who said what exactly at the meeting. Does it matter? We voted to hire you. We wanted you to look. To make an effort. The police weren’t going to lift a finger. We needed our own investigation. We were worried that something like this could go beyond the death of one man. If we didn’t have some resolution, some way to explain, well, we thought it could destroy the whole synagogue.”

  “That makes sense,” I say. “In fact, that’s about the first thing you’ve said so far that does.”

  “We were torn, Amos. Please try
to understand. We wanted an answer. We did. But we also didn’t think we could bear to hear it.”

  “Because?”

  He looks at me directly. “Because…because we were afraid. We were afraid we already knew what it was.”

  “And what would that be?”

  “That someone—someone we trusted—wanted to see the rabbi dead.” The words tumbling out of his mouth seem to upset him. He tenses up and shuts his eyes, whispers what sounds to me like a Hebrew prayer under his breath. Then he looks up. “What do you do with that kind of knowledge?” he asks. “What does anyone do? All we ever wanted was for the hurt to go away. Right now, it hurts.”

  I run a hand through my hair. “It can’t possibly hurt as much as what happened to those folks who died, can it?”

  He shrugs. “I don’t know about their pain. I can’t speak to that. I’m sure it was terrible, and I feel badly, Amos. Please, all of this stuff is just welling up inside of me. It’s like a volcano. There’s no way to stop it. I feel badly for Jonah Siegel. For his parents. I feel awful about Dora. I miss her so much, you know. I think. I think. Oh God. There are times in the middle of the day, I don’t know how to say this, I’ll hear a tune on the radio, or sometimes I’ll be driving along and I turn my head and I’ll see a young woman walking her dog. That’s all it takes, really. I’ll see something and I break. I do. I burst into tears.”

  He covers his face with his hands and sobs silently. After a while, he wipes his eyes, sniffs, grabs a Kleenex to blow his nose, and recovers his composure. “Well, now,” he says, “that was certainly embarrassing.” He smiles weakly. “Where do we go from here?”

  “I don’t know, Howie. You tell me.”

  He laughs, shakes his head. “Well, you’re the lucky one, my friend. You’re feeling sorry for yourself, but the truth is, you’re out of the loop. You’ve been fired. Me, I’ve got to keep trudging on. Did I tell you my wife is leaving me? Last night I sat down with Ellie and decided to be honest. Make a clean breast of it all. That’s not something a lawyer does naturally, huh?”

  “You told her about Dora?”

  “Everything there was to tell,” he says. “And now the movers are coming next week. She’s very efficient, my Eleanor. Not heartless, just efficient. Thirty-three years we’ve been together, do you believe that?”

  We spend the next two hours talking it through. Mostly, I listen. Listen and nod. He talks about his wife, Ellie. About Dora. Sometimes I can’t tell which one he’s talking about, the pain and the stories are all mushed together. When he finally settles down, I start in on what I really came for.

  “I know I’m not working for you anymore, Howie, but I want you and your Board to know that even so, I’m not quitting.”

  “You’re not?”

  “No, it’s not what I do. Quit, that is.”

  He gives me an amazed look. “Okay, then. Fine. It’s your funeral.” He pauses. “Oh hey, sorry. You know what I mean.”

  I tell him about Enrique Avila, the little boy who disappeared in Alhambra forty years ago. How I still have his picture in my office. How I’m still on the hunt. I tell him I’m not afraid of the truth and I’m not afraid to die.

  “That’s good,” he says, “because honestly, I worry about you, Amos. After what’s already happened, I hope you’re taking, you know, precautions.”

  “I have a gun, Howie, if that’s what you mean. And I have friends and coworkers who also worry about me.”

  “Good. I own a gun too, you know. Of course, I don’t really know how to use it. Maybe…maybe you could show me sometime.”

  “I could show you. It’s not that hard.”

  “Right now it just sits in the glove compartment of my car. There’s a booklet that came with it. I should probably look at that, in case I need it, in case somebody—I don’t know—starts following me around.”

  “That’s the other thing I wanted to talk to you about, Howie. As it happens, someone has been following me around pretty regular. Maybe you even know who he is. Big brute with short reddish hair. Could have been a football player once upon a time. Drives a black Audi. And he has a companion, I understand. A skinny little weasel of a guy with glasses. I’m guessing he’s Jewish. The weasel, that is. Any of that ring a bell?”

  “Not immediately,” Howie says.

  “Only reason I ask is because whenever you and I talk, then it’s a funny coincidence maybe, but not long after that, the black Audi shows up. They’re very interested—the big brute and the weasel—where I go and who I talk to. I just figured there might be a connection.”

  “Let me think about it,” says Howie.

  “You do that,” I say.

  I tell him again how sorry I am that his marriage is breaking up, and he nods, thanks me, gives me a big platonic hug to make it plain he appreciates my kindness. Then, as I’m getting into my car, I start having second thoughts. And third thoughts. Thoughts that won’t go away. This is really his own goddamn pain, I think. As self-inflicted a wound as I ever saw. What do I mean? I mean there was no reason for him to start fooling around with Dora Ewing, except that she was young and pretty and he was maybe bored. Okay, that happens now and then. But Dora’s dead, so why would he just toss his marriage and everything he owned overboard? Why now? He didn’t have to tell his wife, did he? I wasn’t going to say anything, and the cops, I’m sure, could care even less. Really, what was Dora Ewing, after all? An affair. His mistress. How unusual. Okay, they may have been in love, and he probably does feel like shit that she’s dead. But so what? Does that mean you go and blurt everything out to your wife? Why would you do that? Why would a buttoned-down lawyer like Howie Rothbart, someone who is always weighing the pros and cons, do that if he didn’t have to? These are the things I’m wondering as I drive to Boyle Heights to pick up Omar.

  We stop first at El Tepeyac on Evergreen. We sit at the counter and end up splitting a Garbage Burrito that’s probably enough for four people. Then we climb back in the Honda. “Do you still have my weapon?” I say as he gets in beside me.

  “What do you think?”

  “I’m hoping you do,” I say. “I’m also hoping it’s loaded.”

  “Why? Are our friends following us?” He checks the rearview mirror.

  “Not today,” I say. “Today it’s our turn to go after them.”

  I could take the freeway, but these days, unless you’re working the graveyard shift or you’re lucky enough to be cruising around at three in the morning, you’re likely to be caught in some version of the LA rush hour. Rush hour lasts from 6 a.m. to midnight. Traffic appears out of nowhere, for no earthly reason. It passes all understanding. It didn’t used to be this way, I say all the time, that’s the tragedy. I’ve tried to talk to Omar about this, but he’s too young to remember. Traffic is a red flag between us. He rolls his eyes whenever he hears the word. I dunno, maybe he thinks I’m talking about San Diego. Or maybe he thinks I’m crazy.

  We spend a long time driving steadily west on Wilshire until we cross under the shadow of the San Diego Freeway, then take a right, which leads us onto San Vicente. I crank down the window. The air is cooler and sweeter here. Soon we’re rolling past manicured apartment complexes and lines of carefully planted trees and shrubs. There’s a lovely grassy apron that separates four lanes of cars, and wherever you turn, on either side of the street, there are cyclists, joggers in shorts and fancy European track shoes, and nubile women in sunglasses staring straight ahead, grimly surging forward with their Labradors in the sunlight.

  Omar shrinks down in his seat. “Too rich for my blood, hombre. Take me back to Boyle Heights.”

  I chuckle. “Too late for that, my friend. Besides, I told you before, you need to learn how to get along with the rich and famous.”

  “Fuck the rich and famous,” he says now, and spits out the window.

  The apartments on San Vicente all have a soft, sculpted look, and the people who live in them now have more money than God. Either that, or they’re in seriou
s debt. The buildings are all about three stories high. Some have little balconies and are carefully set back from the street for extra privacy. They have romantic names like the Wyndham or Bella Vista, and you can’t just walk in; no, you need to punch your code into a special code box if you have any thoughts of getting past the main door. We pull up near the address Malloy gave me. It’s a tan Moorish-looking thing called Costa del Sol. Not bad, I think, for a bachelor pad. It has a profusion of tropical plants and a series of broad, flat concrete steps that form a semicircle leading up to an iron-grilled gate.

  This is not going to be a pushover like breaking into Jonah Siegel’s. These places are all protected. Though I don’t spot any, I wouldn’t be surprised if they had surveillance cameras. I ask Omar to check and see if there’s maybe a side wall he can scale.

  “You want me to climb over a wall and let you in?”

  “That’s the idea.”

  “What if somebody sees me?”

  “Well, then, you jump back over the wall and run away. I can’t do that kind of thing; that’s your job.”

  He pulls the Glock from the back of his pants and hands it to me. “You keep this, then. I’ll take it back when we’re inside the gate.”

  I watch him disappear into the narrow space between the buildings. Just then my cell phone rings. I don’t recognize the number, but no one ever calls me by accident.

  “Oh hi,” she says. “Mr. Parisman? This is Ruth. Ruth Diamant.”

  “Well, hello. I didn’t expect to hear from you again.”

  “You probably wouldn’t, but I was talking to my sister yesterday.”

  “I thought you had stopped speaking to your family.”