“You could have let it be, but you still had Mr. Bloom quietly putting the arm on you. You were still paying him back for the student loan money and the jewelry and all of that. You’d be paying him back for the next ten years. And it might not end, even then.”
“That’s just not so. As I said before, I owed him a fixed amount. It was a loan. And I was paying it off. It’s as simple as that.”
“Come on, Howie. Malcolm Bloom may be well read, but when it comes right down to it, he’s not a prince of a guy. He knew all about you and your love nest. And because he’s meticulous, he probably even has proof. Maybe he had his man Eric follow you around. Maybe he has a little collection of snapshots, a family album. Maybe he even let you see it. You and Dr. Ewing. Shopping together. Dancing. Holding hands. Nothing too racy, but it doesn’t have to be, does it? Just enough to show your wife if necessary. That’s all he needed. And that’s why you had to tell her about the affair, right? It didn’t matter that Dora was dead. In Bloom’s universe, that kind of information is like social security. The monthly payment never stops.”
“I still don’t understand where you’re going with all this, Amos. And I don’t understand how you could think I’d be involved in what happened to Jonah Siegel.”
“Okay. Let’s talk about Jonah Siegel. The cops might not be so terrific, but they were never going to quit. And I told you myself that I was never going to quit, even after you fired me.”
“So?”
“So you had an epiphany. You realized that if this was ever going to end, you needed to step up. You needed to solve your own crime.”
“Once again, you’re losing me, Amos.”
I look at him point blank. “The only way you were ever going to get me and the police to back off would be if we found the killer. Only it couldn’t be you, naturally. So what did you do? What would any conscientious lawyer do? You led us to the killer. Or at least someone plausible, someone we might imagine was the killer.”
“And you’re telling me that Jonah Siegel fit that description? That I chose him because he was—what—convenient?”
“No, Howie. I think in a just and balanced world you would have really liked to pin everything on Malcolm Bloom. But he wasn’t convenient at all; he was too clever, too insulated. And besides, he knew too much about you. You couldn’t touch Malcolm. Jonah, on the other hand, now Jonah was perfect. He wasn’t simply honest and trustworthy, he was naive. He had no friends. He lived completely inside his head. If you were looking for a lunatic, or at least an unstable person to go on a killing spree, you really couldn’t come up with a better candidate than him.”
Rothbart folds his arms across his chest. The legal back and forth is drawing him in. He’s still waiting for me to land a punch, and I’m just dancing around the ring like Muhammad Ali. I’m all talk and he knows it. It’s devolving into a game, something he’s good at, something familiar he’s played for years. “But obviously, you’re inferring now that this young man just wasn’t up to the task. That I must have made a mistake. I’m curious, Amos. What was wrong with my supposed choice?”
“The evidence, my friend.”
“Evidence?”
“What you left behind at Jonah Siegel’s apartment—the crowbar, the medical file. It just didn’t add up.” I lean forward. “If you wanted Jonah Siegel to be the fall guy, he’d have to find a way to get to Culver City that night so he could do the breakin and murder your girlfriend. Doesn’t that make sense? Only thing is, Jonah Siegel couldn’t drive. He didn’t have a car. He’d have no way of knowing if the rabbi even had a doctor, let alone where her office was, and why it might matter to steal his file.”
Howie Rothbart nods. “No, I suppose not,” he says.
“And then, on top of that, you fucked up his disappearance. It was supposed to look like he snapped, wandered away into the wilderness like Jesus, took his clothes off, and presented himself to a train. But you and I know it didn’t happen that way.”
“Oh. And how did it happen?”
“Well, here’s my theory. After the rabbi died, the kid was understandably upset. He was holed up in his apartment for days. He’d already packed his clothes, he’d been thinking of quitting school, running away, maybe going back home to his parents in the Bay Area, maybe finding a new life in Israel. He didn’t know, he was just at sixes and sevens. You drove over to see him. It made sense: as president of the shul, you took an interest in the welfare of all your students, didn’t you? And here was one who had just watched his rebbe keel over. He’d stopped coming to class. It was your duty to help. So you paid a house call. You brought him and his luggage over to your place. You were going to help him get through this. You shouldn’t be alone, Jonah. That’s what you told him. And then you sat him down and talked to him, you plied him with lemonade or tea or whatever. And there was probably something in the drink to knock him out, something you swiped from Dr. Ewing’s office, I’ll bet.
“I did that, huh?”
“You did. Then when he collapsed in your living room, you panicked. You didn’t know what to do next. So you grabbed everything associated with Dora’s murder—the crowbar, the medical file, and you threw them into the trunk of your car, along with the boy and his suitcase, and you started driving. You drove as far away as you could imagine, which turned out to be those train tracks near Pomona. You decided to leave him there, but the crowbar and the file would be out of place; they needed to be tucked away in his apartment. That’s where you wanted the police to find them. You had the keys to his apartment, you could do that later. All you needed was a little time. And because you didn’t want him identified right away, you stripped the body and laid him out on the tracks to wait. This was going to be the resolution of it all. This was going to look like a sad, lonely twisted kid who couldn’t take it anymore and did himself in, right?”
He nods. Or seems to nod.
“But there was a problem. He wasn’t quite dead, was he, Howie?”
“No,” Rothbart mumbles now. His eyes are vacant, downcast. I don’t know what he’s thinking, the connection is very faint, like I’m talking to him from Mars. “Yes. I mean, no. He was still breathing.”
“He wasn’t dead, and you were afraid. If you left him lying there like that, he might just wake up before a train arrived. He might survive, and then you’d be in trouble.”
“I—I guess so.”
“You had an ethical dilemma. A serious problem. You couldn’t let him survive. And you also didn’t want him to suffer, did you?”
“No,” he says. He’s still not looking at me. The words are slipping softly out of his mouth, but someone else is forming them. “It would be wrong. Just a boy. He didn’t need to suffer.”
“And that’s when you remembered the gun in your glove compartment,” I say. That’s when you shot him behind the ear. It was quick, efficient. You thought you knew how to do it. You were careful. You made sure the bullet exited the head. You didn’t think they’d find anything once the freight train did its business. You even collected the spent shell afterwards. Then you tossed his clothes and the suitcase in a garbage bin somewhere and drove back to his apartment on Kingsley and laid out all the evidence. That’s more or less what you did, Howie. Am I right?”
Now he’s staring down at the floor. He’s not a broken man, exactly; somewhere inside his brain, he’s still thinking it through. He still believes he’s an ethical human being. That in the end God will forgive him. That he only did what he had to do under the circumstances. The bare minimum. That he did it with as much kindness as he possibly could.
I want to bring this to an end. A little symbolism is in order. Because I’m older than he is and not in the best of shape, I pull out my Glock 9 and set it down on the table. It makes an emphatic little thunk. He raises his eyebrows incredulously. “Is that necessary, Amos? Who do you think I am? Do you think I’m going to try to run away?”
I give him a wan smile, lift my hand off the gun. He’s right; force isn’t
necessary. I’m a professional. We’re both professionals. No reason why we can’t do this in a civilized manner. We stare at each other for a moment, and even though it’s a gloomy conversation we’re having, my mood is lifting. It’s growing lighter by the minute. “You know what my problem is, Howie?” I say. “My problem is I’m still fond of you. I’d be a million times happier if Bloom and his buddy Blanchard were the guilty ones. They’re gangsters. You’re not like that. You got lost. You took a wrong turn, is all. It happens.”
He glances up at the light streaming in from the octagonal windows near the ceiling, and without thinking, I follow where his eyes are going. The next thing I know he’s pointing my gun straight at my chest. “I have to do this, Amos,” he says. “I’m sorry. I can’t spend the rest of my life in prison, and you’re not going to stop me.”
I sit there. I raise my arms in the air reflexively, even though he hasn’t asked me to; it just seems like the thing to do. “So how do you intend to wiggle out of this one, Howie? Are you going to shoot me, right here in the shul?” I glance up at the clock on the wall. I just have to keep talking a little bit longer. “At 11:30? In broad daylight? On Shabbat? On Saturday morning? Really? That gun makes a pretty loud bang, you know. People will hear. They’ll come running.”
“I don’t care. I don’t care, I’m getting out now.” He steps away from the table and the scattered chairs and glides slowly backward toward the door. He’s holding the gun tightly. In fact, he’s got both hands wrapped around it, and it’s still pointed very much in my direction.
“I need to tell you something, Howie. I didn’t come here alone.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean any second now my backup will be walking through that door. Believe me, you don’t want to mess with Omar. He’s invincible. And you’re not going anywhere. So how about this? Why don’t you just take a nice deep breath, say whatever prayer you like, and put that thing down?”
“No, I—”
The door opens then and in walks Omar. Howie wheels around and levels the gun at his chest. “Get back,” he demands, but Omar keeps advancing. Howie shuts his eyes, pulls the trigger. Click. And again. Click. Omar takes a step forward and plants a perfect kick to his groin, right where the zipper meets the belt. Howie crumbles to the floor. He rolls around from side to side. His face is white with pain. The gun drops from his hand.
Omar picks it up, looks down at Howie, then glares at me. “Okay, what the fuck is going on here?”
“Relax,” I say. “Do you think I’d ever bring a loaded weapon into a synagogue? I told you it was a prop.”
“Yeah, but I didn’t—”
“I just wanted to show it to him, that’s all, in case he thought I was too old, or that I didn’t mean business.”
“You coulda got me killed,” he says now, shaking his head. “Scared the shit out of me.”
I pull out my cell phone and punch up Malloy’s number. “Nah, not you, Omar, never. We’re pals, remember? I take care of my pals.”
Chapter 25
I’VE THOUGHT an awful lot about murder. How it’s done. Why it’s done. Not crimes of passion, forget about that, there’s no accounting for those. But there are plenty of people out there like Howard Rothbart, attorney-at-law. People who work on the eleventh floor of air-conditioned offices in Beverly Hills. Educated, well-mannered people. People whose credit card is never denied, people with cash in their wallets. Pillars of the community. Sure, they’re like all of us, they make mistakes. Exhibit One, your Honor: they get stuck in a bad marriage and find the love of their life twenty, thirty years later, when they’re already on the downhill slope. A lot of folks would say, that’s the way it is. You made your bed, get over it, own it. Not Howie. He painted himself into a corner and eventually he reached a point where he had to choose. He wasn’t crazy. Your average murderer probably isn’t crazy. But Howie’s smarter or more cunning than most, and he’s for damn sure a narcissist. He lives in a world full of mirrors. He doesn’t believe he’ll ever get caught, and if he does, he’ll never spend two moments behind bars. None of that’s true, of course, but try telling a murderer that. The other thing is, they honestly don’t believe they’ve done anything wrong. Howie Rothbart didn’t think so, not at first. If you ask him, it was more like he was a philosopher, or a mathematician. Like he was standing in front of a giant blackboard with a piece of chalk and a big thorny problem, and the solution, well, it just happened to involve murder. What can you do?
Right now I’m looking at Lieutenant Malloy. He’s in a good mood. In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever seen him with a happier face, except once maybe, years ago, at a Christmas party, before he went into AA, when he was three sheets to the wind. He’s animated now, and his Irish eyes are beaming. We’re huddled together at Canter’s, both of us with hot pastrami on rye and kasha varnishkes, which is a first for him. “I need to thank you, Amos. You may not be much of a detective at your age, but you know what? You’re a helluva magician.”
“What are you talking about, Bill?”
“What am I talking about? We got Howard Rothbart’s full confession yesterday afternoon. He copped to everything, absolutely. It’s all there in black and white. End of story. But the truth is, it’s just lucky you sat down with him and wormed it out. A smart fella like that, he might have walked.”
“So how much of what I said was true?”
“Most of it. You went out on a limb when you told him about how he killed Jonah. That was a fable, and there were a few other details that didn’t fit, but yeah, damn near all of it. Of course, you were taking a huge risk, you know, going in blind like that. He could have just put on his attorney’s face and waded right through.”
I take a hefty forkful of my coleslaw and chew on it for a while. “Maybe if he was only an attorney, that would be a problem. But the truth, if you can handle it, is that someday, when this whole thing is all over, Howie Rothbart’s going to get paroled. You know that. Seven years, ten years from now. Whenever. Someday he’s going to walk out of prison. He won’t be a lawyer anymore, but he’ll still have time left to cobble things together. That’s when he’ll go back to being a decent guy again.”
Malloy raises his eyebrows and frowns.
“Okay, maybe decent is the wrong word. I stand corrected. He wasn’t born to kill. That’s my point.”
“I don’t know where you’re going with that, Amos.”
“I’m saying he made a hot mess of his life. He screwed up. He wasn’t perfect. But you name me someone who is.”
Malloy’s face turns red. “I can hand you the whole fucking LA phone book. It’s full of people who’ve never killed a soul.”
“This isn’t about leniency, Bill. I’m just trying to make sense of things. He was coasting along, doing just fine. He had a nice sweet life until he got tangled up with that girl. It’s like he put his toe in the water because it was inviting, and then—next thing he knew he was being dragged out to sea.”
“You’re making excuses.”
“No, I’m not. He had it made and he blew it. And he’s going to spend a long time thinking about that. But in his mind, in his own twisted way, he wanted to do the right thing—the honorable thing—that’s what he said.”
“Not much honorable about the way he offed those two.”
“Yeah, well. I can’t justify what he did, you’re right. Murder is murder. But there was a logic to it. He had his reasons.” I hold up my open hands in a peace offering. “All I’m saying.”
“I don’t care about his goddamn reasons. That’s over and done with. Anyway, what I’m saying is, it was a bold thing you did, to break him down like that.” He takes a sip of coffee. “And the gun. The empty gun.” He points his finger and makes like a gun. “That was a stroke of genius. That was magical.”
“It was a cheap carnival trick. Call it magic if you want to.”
“I do. Even more than magic. It’s heroic.”
I take the last bite of my kasha var
nishkes, lay down my fork, and dab my mouth with a paper napkin. “You’re full of it, Bill. Nothing heroic about me. I was just spinning around like a dreidel. Now, Omar? That’s a hero. Lawyers like Howie get rich talking till the clock runs out. They argue this point, that point. Hell, once in a blue moon, they’ll even threaten to kill you. Omar wasn’t having any of it. If you could have seen how he walked in. Not an ounce of fear. Know what I mean? Just walked right in and leveled him. That was impressive.”
“Especially when he didn’t know a thing about the gun.” The lieutenant shakes his head. “Guy’s got guts.”
“Which reminds me,” I say. Then I tell him how Omar called me the night before last to tell me he’d made a big decision. He’d been thinking it over, he said, the way his life was going. He was thirty-two years old, he’d finally found a girlfriend who seemed real, someone who wasn’t just looking for a night out on the town, and now, believe it or not, he wanted to join the police force. “Pretty amazing, huh?”
Malloy nods. His eyes move quickly back and forth like he’s figuring the odds, making a rough calculation. “You know something? If his record’s clean, I’d take him in a minute.”
“He’s got no convictions,” I say. “You guys tried a couple of times, but you had the wrong man. I’ll vouch for him, whatever that’s worth.” I wink at Bill. “And besides, he’s bilingual. Isn’t that what LA is all about these days?”
Malloy smiles. “Tell him to come by and see me before he fills out the application. I’ll see what I can do.”
“You’re going to have to testify,” Malloy continues. “Same with Omar. But we’re also developing some solid evidence besides. Just in case he decides to recant.”
“Such as?”
“We had a forensics team go over his car. They found Jonah Seigel’s DNA all over the inside of the trunk. Also, they got some interesting possible fingerprint matchups at Dr. Ewing’s. Turns out Rothbart wasn’t quite as sanitary as he shoulda been. And my boys, Jason and Remo, went through his bedroom and found the stash of Schedule II drugs he swiped from her office. Also, her laptop. Stuff like that.”
An Old Man's Game Page 21