A Hole In One

by Paul Weininger

  One of the stores in town was Tea, Crumpets & Ice Cream, as advertised in newspapers and tourist magazines at the local hotels. It was a lucrative, yet quaint, cozy eatery belonging to the Rabbi’s aunt Lorraine. It was open seven days a week. The first dollar bill she had earned years before was framed under glass and hung on the wall behind the register. Lorraine had four employees in her shop. Two assisted her during the days and two during the evening hours until the 8:00 p.m. closing. All four servers worked on weekends. The store held eight tables for four, and six tables for two. There was also one long eat-in counter with stools along the far right wall across from the bakery counter. The bakery counter displayed homemade cookies, crumpets, muffins, chocolates, Danishes, and donuts. Also on display were four different pies and eight flavors of ice cream that were delivered to her shop each morning, the selection changing every month. In addition, Lorraine also made tea, coffee and hot chocolate with homemade whipped cream and offered five different liquid flavoring creamers.

  Most weekends were so busy in the store that she requested Neil’s help after his golf game on Sundays, when customers often lined up outside the store waiting to get a seat for breakfast and early afternoon brunch. The Jewish customers always asked for the Rabbi to serve them rather than being served by someone else. After all, how many people in this country were able to say, “I was served tea, biscuits and ice cream by this waiter who also happened to be my Rabbi?”

  Bloom was nicknamed Putz by the rest of his golfing teammates when he played golf, referring to his poor putting game, but he felt more like a Klutz when he helped at the shop. This was because he’d dropped trays of tea and desserts on his way to serving a customer on more than one occasion. His aunt usually laughed it off and just called him “clumsy.” However, he knew that she must be concerned about the impression it would leave on her customers. She loved him enough to overlook it, knowing he meant well. She also realized how it would look to her customers if she fired her nephew who also happened to be a Rabbi. He often used the time after working in her shop on Sundays to meet Carol in his home in Flagstaff for their love trysts. This turned out to be easy, since Carol’s husband Jules usually stopped by the shop during the early afternoon while Neil was still there and bought a few biscuits and some ice cream to take home to Carol, thereby confirming to himself where the Rabbi had been.

  ◆◆◆

  The crime rate in Sedona was typically low, with murder and property crime well below national averages. Yet, not everything in Sedona was as delightful as it appeared. After all, two of the four golfing amigos had become victims of violent crime just recently and one more had escaped injury when shots had missed him.

  A rounded curtain encircled Jack’s bed, separating both patients in the room. He had asked Jimmy to pull the curtain over a bit so that he could watch television without disturbing his roommate, which Jimmy did before he left the room. Suddenly, Jack heard a voice come from the other bed behind the curtain.

  “What are you in for, pal?” asked the voice in the bed next to him.

  “I was shot by someone with a gun. I hope if I turn on the TV it won’t disturb you,” he replied.

  “No, the TV won’t bother me. Who shot you?” the neighboring bedfellow asked. “By the way, my name is Phil...Phil Heldegard.”

  “Hi, Phil, my name is Jack Green. I have no idea who it was, but I was told that they shot two bullets at me and luckily only one hit me.”

  “Are you with the Mafia or something like that?” asked Phil.

  “Shit no. Even if I had been with the Mafia, do you really think I would admit it to you?”

  “Good point! Well, you’ve got nothing to lose by telling me.”

  “What brings you in here, Phil?”

  “I’m here for a glioblastoma,” Phil responded, trying to sound courageous.

  “What’s that?” Jack inquired.

  “It’s a fucking brain tumor. The same that Senator John McCain and President Joe Biden’s son had, which killed them both. McCain ran for president once, you know.”

  “Does that mean that you’re going to die?” Green asked stupidly.

  “You bet your ass, probably within the next six months or sooner if I’m lucky. I was told that anyone with this kind of brain tumor faced a definite death penalty. We all die sooner or later. My usual preference has always been later. But now, I’m so old that I’ve outlived my wife and friends and have no other worthwhile family members. I’m alone, and any acquaintances I do have left are married and refuse to include a single man to join their get-togethers, card games, or even shuffleboard, especially if you have cancer. Now, my preference is the sooner the better,” Phil now sounded more alert than earlier.

  “Didn’t they offer you surgery, chemotherapy or radiation?” Jack asked.

  Phil thought, This guy hasn’t gotten any smarter. “Of course, they did, and I turned them all down. I asked my doctors if any of these procedures would keep me alive. Their answer made me want to hurt someone badly. They told me, ‘No, but you may last a number of months longer.’ None of those treatments would guarantee my survival but would likely have left me with no quality of life. I made the easy choice that I not permit any chemo, radiation, or further surgeries. In other words, no additional loss of hair, no vomiting four times a day, and no other negative side effects. I chose quality of life. If you consider just lying here in bed as quality. I expect next month they’ll give me hospice care. That just means they’ll try and keep me comfortable until my final steps up to St. Peter, if he’ll take me in. I also made sure they don’t try and resuscitate me.”

  “Do you have any family Phil? I haven’t seen anyone visit you since I’ve been here,” said Jack.

  “I’m a seventy-eight-year-old widower and all I have left is a brother-in-law who’s an asshole, and four stepchildren; each of ’em are adult SOBs now and just waiting for their share of the inheritance. Boy, are they gonna be surprised. After taking care of my wife for her last seven years with Alzheimer’s, it broke me financially. After my death, they’ll be able to split my entire fortune of $3500. All four of them will have to split that amount equally. I just wish I could see their faces when they find out what the shares of their inheritance will be, and maybe if there is an after-life, I will,” Phil said with a roaring laugh.

  Nurse Jimmy walked into Green’s room and checked the drip bags hanging from a T-bar, with various tubes of fluids such as plasma and a morphine drip. He then cleared the entrance tubes with saline coming from the syringe, all of which flowed into him through an IV in his left arm.

  As he lay there awake, Jimmy planted two items in Jack’s hand: a call button to call the nurse’s station and a remote control for the television. On the right side of the bed, the nurse placed a small button that he could press if he felt he needed more morphine for the pain. “Thanks, Jimmy,” he said. He would not be able to hit the button more than twice per hour, which permitted only measured doses to flow into him. This was a safety precaution to prevent him from accidentally overdosing.

  Jimmy then placed a blood pressure cuff on Jack’s right arm, which was also attached electronically and would routinely puff itself up and slowly decompress the pressure on his arm. There were also numerous electronic probes attached to his chest, connected to a loud monitor that beeped every few seconds indicating his cardiac rhythm by numerous electronic lines on a screen by his bed that only the doctors and nurses could understand. He also had a finger monitor measuring his oxygen level.

  He would have no concern, should the beeps cease their annoying tones. If they stopped, it could mean one of several things. Either the heart monitor was accidentally disconnected from the wall outlet or one of the heart monitor suction cups adhered to his chest disconnected. Another option was that the blood pressure cuff loosened. The last option was that he had died. Should the last option trigger frenzy among the hospital staff, Jack certainly wouldn’t know it or give a shit. After all, he had to be defibrillated twice du
ring surgery and survived through those. The nurse’s station also monitored all his vitals twenty-four hours per day, seven days per week.

  His nurse moved a rolling table beside Green’s bed and placed some crackers on it, a container of water, and a large container of apple juice with an empty cup with which he could help himself. It wasn’t altogether unpleasant.

  The nights were quite different though. He got little rest, with different nurses waking him up every two hours to check his blood pressure, temperature, and pulse at his bedside, though they had the same information at their station. They also checked the hanging drip bags on the T-bar to assure that all was working as it should be and that there were no clogs in any of the lines connected to him. These night nurses couldn’t have cared less that he was in the worst pain he ever experienced in his life. He practically turned purple each night with exasperation; no matter how often he rang for a nurse, no one came. They seemed to have the attitude of just do your job when you’re in with the patient, and then get the hell out of the room.

  Nine

  When Detective Pratt arrived to interview him the next day, Jack was sitting up in bed and complaining about the shitty hospital food. He hated that he was now required to drink buckets of water to push clear liquid through his kidneys. There were noticeable bloodstains on his pillows, sheet, and blanket. The cop assumed they were from leaky tubes, since he wasn’t brought into the room until after surgery, at which point he would have been all sewn up and bandaged.

  Pratt pulled the visitor’s low-seated leather armchair up to the bedside, sat down, placed one ankle over the opposing knee and began questioning Green.

  “Mind if I open the window a bit? It’s a little stuffy in here,” he asked.

  “Go ahead, if I can survive a bullet, I can survive a breath of fresh air.”

  Green was the city’s seventh shooting victim during all the years that Pratt had been a detective and had to conduct interviews with those victims. However, Jack told the rest of his golfing foursome that even though he was still recuperating, the interview felt more like an interrogation.

  The good news was that Jack would not be accused of adding to the list of shooting suspects. The bad news was that immediately after he regained consciousness from surgery Pratt had been waiting in his room to question him as soon as his wife and daughters left.

  The detective asked, “Why were you at the synagogue at a time after the doors were closed?”

  Jack explained, “I work for the Arizona State Insurance Co. It takes me three minutes to walk from my office over to the synagogue to have lunch with the Rabbi. That day, I was shot just after lunch as I was leaving the synagogue.”

  “Why do you think you were shot? Do you have any enemies that may want to see you dead?” asked Pratt. Groggy from extreme pain and still drowsy from the anesthesia, Jack was dumbfounded by the question.

  “Me, why would anyone want to see me dead, is that your question? What makes you think that they were shooting at me? Maybe they thought I was the Rabbi or the custodian. I really have no idea; I was just there to have lunch,” he reiterated. “Even Rabbis have to eat lunch. Neil is a good friend of mine and has a nice office in the rear of the Temple where we can both eat lunch three times a week undisturbed. I left the temple at about 12:50 p.m. When I exited the front doors, I felt a pain in the lower left side of my body. I didn’t know what hit me, since I don’t remember hearing a gunshot, but I did feel the pain that knocked me off my feet and made me fall unconscious. I’m guessing that Neil must have heard the gunshot and came out to see what happened and found me lying there. He probably got shot too. Is he going to be all right? Why do you think they were aiming just at me?”

  “We’re not sure if the shot was aimed at you. You may have just been in the way, or you may have been targeted,” said Pratt. “Yes sir, the Rabbi’s fine. He wasn’t shot, nor did he see anything. You were the only one shot. That’s why I was asking you if you could guess why it was you?”

  “He wasn’t shot? Just me? Did he find me and call you guys?”

  “No, the synagogue’s custodian Andre found you. He was cleaning up just inside of the front doors when he heard the shots and ran out to see what was happening. According to what he told the police officers who arrived at the scene before me, Andre said that he saw you laying on the ground and bleeding, so first he called 911 on his cell phone and then ran inside for some clean rags to press hard against your wound to slow down the bleeding, until medical help arrived.”

  Despite his evident disbelief that he might have been the target, Jack also suspected that the detective did not necessarily tell him everything. “Did Andre see who shot me?” he asked.

  “No, he didn’t, he just told us that he heard the shots from inside the synagogue and though thinking that it might be firecrackers, he still wanted to make sure the sounds he heard were not gunshots.”

  “Well,” Jack said, “I can’t think of anyone who might want to kill me, other than my golfing partners, who may have been aiming at my left elbow because I beat their scores so often. That’s just a joke, we are all great friends and none of us wishes to harm another. Is Andre here? I want to thank him for saving my life and ask him what happened.”

  “No, he’s not here. After he found your body lying in front of the temple, he kept you alive long enough for real medical attention to arrive. According to Andre, after the EMTs arrived, he went to throw out the bloody rags and wash his hands then locked up the synagogue, got in his car and sped home, out of fear for his own life. Mr. Green, I’m sorry I had to disturb you here in the hospital, but time is of the essence if we are to make progress in finding the shooter.”

  Just three hours after Green had been taken to the hospital, two detectives searched through every inch of the synagogue, finding it empty and the rear door locked. Since Rabbi Bloom didn’t see Jack after he was shot, they deduced he must have left through the rear door of the synagogue and locked it. They then searched the temple grounds looking for spent cartridges but came up empty handed. This created a new question for them. Where the hell were the casings?

  That left Jack Green as the possible target. It also told the detective the shooter was probably fingerprinted at one time since he left no shell casings. He must have suspected a fingerprint on the shell would lead directly to him. Pratt speculated the shooter probably wore gloves just in the event he couldn’t remove the shell casing before the police got to it.

  The police then drove back to the Rabbi’s home in Flagstaff. His house could only be described as one that belonged in Architectural Digest. He lived in a large U-shaped, one-story, ranch-style abode, with a wrought iron gate to enter his driveway, which ended at a three-car garage. The gate was just standing alone but had finely manicured six-foot tall fir shrubbery linked on both sides, therefore making it more difficult to enter by foot. As you walked inside the front door, you faced a wooden closet surrounded by a wall of fieldstone.

  The right wing led to four bedroom suites. The left wing led you to the dining room and a beautiful Brazilian walnut dining table, with seating for fourteen, and a huge kitchen with a grandiose center island made of the finest Italian marble with enough room to seat eight for breakfast. The floors were made of Carrera tiles and polished to a high-gloss. Facing the rear of the home was a living room with a massive cathedral ceiling. This room made up the entire rear width of the house and contained a granite fireplace made to look like the 1800s, meaning it was deep enough to cook inside by hanging outsized pots. On each side of the fireplace were large glass sliding doors opening to the backyard, which faced a golf course but was surrounded by very tall trees, providing total privacy around the property. The furniture was rustic-style comfort with tons of pillows, soft egg-shelled colored walls, and gentle music playing through speakers mounted in the ceiling of every room. Each room had its own dial to change the type of music and its volume.

  The detectives rang his bell and within two minutes the Rabbi answered
the door. They showed him their identification and he invited them to come in and sit down in his living room. “What can I do for you gentlemen?”

  “Tell us, Rabbi, are you aware that your friend Jack Green was shot outside your synagogue today?”

  The detective’s query stunned him to the core, “No, I didn’t know. Is he dead?”

  “He’s not dead, but he is seriously wounded, and in the hospital undergoing surgery right now,” they replied.

  “Why would anyone want to shoot Jack?” he asked worriedly. “Did you catch the person who shot him?”

  The younger of the department’s two lower-level detectives responded, “No sir, we haven’t caught the perpetrator, but we should be getting some leads soon; it might just be an anti-Semite. We don’t yet know who the target was. We are interviewing all potential witnesses. Rabbi, can you explain why you were at the synagogue on a non-Sabbath day? Did you hear any gunshots?”

  “No, I didn’t hear any gun shots,” replied Bloom. “As for why I was there that day, my office is in the synagogue, and I work there even on days when we may not conduct a service, just like a church where the priest has an office, too. That’s where I write my sermons, pray, provide religious lessons, prepare for a funeral, meet with family members of the deceased, meet with brides and grooms to be or handle bookkeeping and other matters. I was there because that is where I worked that day. I was giving three boys bar mitzvah lessons. Each boy was to have his bar mitzvah during separate upcoming weeks. I give their lessons together, including all the prayers, inflections, cadences and accents they will need to recite, both in Hebrew and then repeated in English. I finished with the lessons early and had sent the boys outside to be picked up by their parents. It was just about lunchtime when Jack entered my office in back, and we ate our lunches together as we usually do three times a week. After we ate, I sat in my desk chair and he sat on a sofa and we talked for about ten more minutes before he returned to work. I then left my office and went home.”