Murder in the Melting Pot

by Jane Isenberg

  The second they walked in the door of his townhouse, she had stood still with her back against that door and her phone in her hand. She caught his eye and put one finger to her lips. Looking straight at him standing within easy earshot, she phoned the B & B and asked Darlene to spend the night there. Harry met her gaze and, without changing the bemused expression on his face, took off his jacket and put it on the bannister. With her eyes still locked on his, she pocketed her phone and let her purse slide to the floor. She kicked off her heels, threw her jacket on top of his, walked over to her host, wound her arms around his neck, and kissed him. She remembered him tossing his glasses on top of their coats and pulling her to him.

  She’d still been drunk. But not so drunk she didn’t remember how, following her up the stairs to his room, he asked, “Are you sure you want to do this now? I’m not going anywhere. I’ll be here when you, uh, sober up.”

  She’d actually retorted, “Good. We can do it again when I sober up.” Where had that line come from? On the morning after, alone in the queen-sized bed, she had to smile at the realization that she had more wit drunk than sober.

  Harry’d pulled a condom from a nightstand drawer and insisted on using it, even though she assured him she’d been wearing an IUD for years, another promise she’d made to Mona. Thinking of Mona made her decide to stop beating herself up. She’d wanted to have sex with Harry Ornstein and she did. They’d have breakfast, he’d drive her to her truck, and she’d go back to her B & B where she belonged.

  There she’d figure out a way to word a tip that would convince Crime Stoppers to at least consider the possibility that Isaac’s murder might have been a hate crime. The detective had mentioned that possibility to her early on, before the “evidence” seemed to implicate “viable” suspects who, surprise, surprise, just happened to be the usual ones. The county police were no more immune to hate-fueled bias than police in places like Seattle. She’d not wanted to think of her new home as a hotbed of barely-hidden hate and of herself as a paranoid Jew, so she’d ignored his warning, or had it been a threat? Whatever it was, she’d denied it. The good news in all this was that on TV if a murder is classified as a hate crime, the FBI often comes in and takes over the investigation.

  Miranda dried off and dressed in the clothes she’d worn the day before. She glanced at herself in the bathroom mirror to see if she looked any different now that she had finally lost her virginity. No. Her eyes were not aglow, her cheeks not ablaze, and her smile not more knowing. The only difference was that she had no eyebrow pencil with her to color her copper-colored brows black. She was glad she’d told Harry that she’d altered her appearance when she left Seattle.

  His bedroom was furnished simply with a few Ikea pieces. Only the sumptuous down quilt and memory foam mattress and pillows saved it from being spartan. She opened the bedroom door as soon as she heard the front door downstairs slam. She smelled coffee. Harry was halfway up the stairs. “Oh. There you are. I thought I heard the shower. I’m all yours now.” She wondered if he stood still on the stairs because he expected a kiss, but then he said, “I’ll make us omelets. Do you like omelets?”

  Miranda nodded. How could he know so much about her and yet so little? “I love omelets, especially when someone else makes them.”

  While he cooked, she poured herself a mug of coffee and toured the townhouse’s first floor, starting with the half-bath, a black-and-white tile cubicle with a decidedly earth-friendly soap in a spray bottle at the sink. There was what looked like a dining area reconfigured as a home office, complete with file cabinets, a double monitored PC, a printer, a copier, a shredder, and a recorder. Atop a bookcase Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Elena Kagen, Sonya Sotomayor, and Stephen Breyer looked on from a group photo between a couple of framed diplomas, one from Eastern Washington State and the other from the University of Washington School of Law. A portrait of Yakima-native Justice William C. Douglas hung on the wall. The living room was small and cozy with a sofa, a TV, and a couple of chairs. Ikea had probably been the chief beneficiary of Harry’s divorce. Back in the compact kitchen, Miranda enjoyed Julia’s bright drawings and photos covering the fridge door.

  A perfect vegetable omelet oozing some good cheese, along with a warm chocolate croissant, a tall glass of water, and a bottle of Tylenol awaited her on the tiny kitchen table. “Eat. Mine’s nearly ready.” Harry looked rested and at ease in jeans and a long-sleeved green sweatshirt. Mona would say he looked “at home in the world.” As he flipped his own omelet, he turned to face her and grinned. “I thought about kissing you good morning, but I didn’t want to break the spell. You might decide I’m a toad or something.” He chortled and shook his head as he spoke. “I sure as hell can’t figure you out.”

  Miranda sat down and picked up her fork. “What’s to figure? I’m sober now. Thanks for keeping me out of my truck last night and for putting me up.”

  His own omelet done and also perfect, Harry sat down across from her. “Any time, Miranda. But do you mind telling me what last night was all about? At our first meeting you were sobbing, at our next you were rude, and at our last you were in good client mode but not exactly personally accessible. Last night you were having visions but otherwise quite pleasant, and then you have a few glasses of wine and some noodle kugel and abracadabra! You’re so warm and charming that everybody at our table is smitten. Julia loves the drawings you made on her napkin. She was so glad to see you again. You have a little more wine, and you’re still charming, but I can’t let you drive. So I drive you here to sober up, and you turn siren on me and make me an offer that I couldn’t refuse even when I tried. And now I’m smitten, too. What was last night all about?” He caught her eye for just a moment before he stopped talking and attacked his omelet.

  Harry’s candid curiosity both pleased and alarmed Miranda. She appreciated his interest and wanted to give the right answer. It was her wish for his approval that, as soon as she recognized it, alarmed her.

  When she didn’t answer right away, he sipped his coffee, shrugged, and tried another tack. “It must be hard for the Markowitz family and for you to have Isaac’s murder still unsolved. It’s probably adversely affected your business already. I’m sorry.”

  This less personal comment she could handle. “Thanks. All day yesterday at the Valley’s Chamber of Commerce’s exposition for new businesses, people kept talking to me as if my B & B had already failed. It was pretty depressing. And then, as I mentioned, Rabbi Golden’s sermon really got to me. I felt as if it was directed at me.”

  “Maybe that’s why you drank so much. And why you wanted to get laid by a guy you hardly know. A little stress relief, right?”

  “Yes and not exactly. Does it matter?”

  “Yes. I’ve been trying to get to know you since I first met you on Yom Kippur. You have not been exactly encouraging, and then last night you…you were…very encouraging.” He grinned again.

  “Why on earth did you want to get to know me?”

  “I’m single. I found you attractive. I still do.”

  “Why?” Miranda wasn’t sure she was entitled to ask these questions, but her lack of dating experience made her really curious.

  “On Yom Kippur you were crying over people in your life you’ve cared about and lost. At that service we remember our dead loved ones, but most of us do that in a very controlled and contained way. You struck me as very passionate. But you were also quite distant. You kept putting me off. So why were you all of a sudden so hot to get me into bed last night? Was it just the wine? I’d appreciate a straight answer.”

  Miranda put down her coffee cup, took a deep breath, and looked at him across their empty plates. “Okay. I like the little I know of you. I feel safe with you. I am a lot stressed and I was a little drunk.” She hesitated and then blurted out her next words. “And I haven’t had sex in a very, very long time.”

  “Okay. I’ll take it. For now. But I want to get to know you better. And I want you to know me. Can
we make that happen, Miranda?”

  “Yes. I’d like that.” She looked across the table at him when she spoke.

  “Good.” He refilled their coffee mugs. “But right now I want to tell you what I learned about why Yakima County Sheriff’s Deputy Alex Ladin left SPD, okay?”

  “Sure.” Again she welcomed a topic of great interest to her but not so personal. And she was touched that he’d remembered to look into Detective Ladin’s background.

  “He left the SPD shortly after they hired their first female chief. A black burglar Ladin shot in the leg and arrested claimed Ladin shot him after he dropped his weapon and put his hands up. The burglar sued SPD. When questioned about it by the chief, Ladin claimed she “didn’t understand how we do things here.” Seattle paid up and she let Ladin go. She wrote a comment on his evaluation to the effect that he did use excessive force on unarmed blacks and that he didn’t seem receptive to the government-mandated changes or “comfortable working for or with women.”

  “Wow. So why would Sheriff Carson hire him here?”

  “Ladin’s had all that gang experience. And he’s from out here.”

  “Right. I get it. Thanks for checking him out.”

  “Well aren’t you going to report him? Charge him with harassment?”

  “No, Harry. I don’t want people to know I was arrested and charged with killing a toddler. I came here to leave my past behind, to start over.”

  “I think you’re making a mistake…”

  “Harry, you don’t understand what I went through. I don’t want to lose my business.”

  “But…”

  Miranda stood. “I have to get back, but that was a terrific breakfast.” She didn’t object though when Harry walked around the tiny table and kissed her. They didn’t leave his house for well over an hour.

  CHAPTER 16

  Guest book: “Looking for business site in the area and Breitner’s is a central base. Breakfasts healthy but still tasty, rooms comfortable, innkeeper pleasant but not intrusive. As for that murder across the street, I was two blocks from the Towers on 9/11. I don’t scare easy anymore.” Ex-New Yorker

  Back in Sunnyvale, Miranda was too busy to moon over not hearing from Harry right away. Now not one, but two rabbis wanted her to help figure out who killed Isaac Markowitz. That was a mandate she couldn’t ignore. She needed to talk to Rabbi Alinsky again, preferably face to face. So the next afternoon, she drove with Rusty to the Finest Western Motel and phoned him from the spacious lobby that served also as a breakfast area. She hoped he wasn’t at the processing plant and so was relieved to hear his voice.

  “Rabbi Alinsky here.”

  “Rabbi, this is Miranda Breitner. My dog and I are in the lobby of your motel. Could you join us down here for a few minutes? I have a new idea about how Isaac, may he rest in peace, was killed, and I’d like to run it by you.”

  “I’ll be right down.”

  Now that their meeting was imminent, she fought off her anxiety about playing detective, and with an Orthodox rabbi yet. She hoped she could use their shared faith to their mutual advantage and that she could avoid offending his traditional sensibility with her decidedly more modern one. To him a good Jew was one who fulfilled the Torah’s every commandment, even the most outdated, inconvenient, and seemingly irrelevant ones. To her, a good Jew was someone who adapted God’s word to modernity and tried to repair our broken world. What would he think of her, a single woman, spending most of Shabbat in bed with a man she hardly knew? He’d think the same thing her grandmother would have thought. Oy.

  To distract herself while she waited, Miranda strolled around the motel lobby. It was an outsized, newer, and less personal version of her B & B’s front room. Rusty, ever alert to scents that promised scraps, sniffed the floor near the counter while she visualized the metal food warmers filled with dry scrambled eggs and greasy bacon. There were toasters and a microwave where guests could heat bagels and waffles next to urns for coffee, and the hot water they could mix with sugar-laced oatmeal from paper packets to concoct a version of the hot cereal. Her own simple fresh breakfast offerings were so much tastier. And Breitner’s breakfast and check-in area was smaller, but way cozier. “Shabby chic,” Steve Galen had called her lobby. Well this place was a plastic palace probably serving plastic food.

  Miranda felt pretty smug until, seated at one of the tables near the floor-to-ceiling windows with Rusty at her feet, she looked out at the rows and rows of grapevines. Even bare they were an intriguing, more rustic sight than the fruit processing plant on view from Breitner’s breakfast area. These vines must have looked and smelled lovely when they were still graced by clusters of ripe purple grapes suspended amid green leaves and oozing juice. And to her knowledge no one had been bludgeoned to death in this vineyard.

  “Hope I didn’t keep you waiting, Ms Breitner.”

  She started at the rabbi’s voice.

  “We’re getting ready to check out early tomorrow. The grapes are all in and the last koshering shift finishes tonight at midnight. I’m glad you got ahold of me while I’m still in the Valley.” Rabbi Alinsky, his skullcap slightly askew, seated himself. He seemed more femisht rabbi than Kashrut Cowboy.

  “And hello to you too, Rabbi. Thanks for seeing me. I was out of town for a couple of days, so I didn’t realize the grapes were all in and that you would be leaving so soon.”

  “Yes, and, sad to say, not soon enough for us. Usually we hate to say goodbye to this beautiful valley, but this year…” He pinched his lips together, shook his head, and rolled his eyes. This triple display of dismay mirrored Miranda’s own misery over the terrible and as-yet-unsolved murder. “Tell me Ms Breitner, what’s this “new idea” you have? I’m going to New York to bring the Markowitzes Isaac’s things myself. I’d like very much to bring them some encouraging news about the progress of the investigation.”

  Ignoring his query for the moment, Miranda posed a question of her own. “Rabbi, do you or any of your crew have Isaac’s shofar?”

  “No. Some of my inspectors bring their own shofars, but most of them use the ordinary ones I supply. I keep those in my suite in a drawer in the room upstairs that serves as our common area. It’s where we cook and eat and study and pray together. But Isaac, may his life be for a blessing, brought his own special shofar. He kept it in his room. I was going to ask him to show it to me after the holidays, because it’s supposed to be a beauty.” He sighed. “Now the police have it along with his prayer shawl, his phone, his work clothes, shoes, and wallet. The rest of his things, his books and his other clothes, I’ll pack and bring to New York with me. But I plan to ask the police to return those things of Isaac’s that they still have to his family when the state crime lab finishes examining them. That includes his shofar. I hope they’ll do that.”

  Miranda pictured the cardboard cartons full of stored physical evidence on Cold Case and suspected that until Isaac’s killer was apprehended, Rabbi Alinsky’s request would be denied. Because this prediction was only a suspicion, she didn’t share it with him. Instead she gave him even worse news she believed to be true. “Rabbi, you know Nelson Thurston, the worker at the plant who found Isaac’s body, right?”

  “Yes. He’s very nice, very diligent, a devout Christian, and always very helpful to us. He and Isaac, may his life be for a blessing, used to discuss the Bible together.” The rabbi lowered his head.

  “Yes, and Isaac was meeting Nelson in the storage room on his break specifically to show him his shofar. But listen.” Miranda paused to give her next words more weight. “Nelson says when he got there he didn’t see the shofar with the body.”

  The rabbi raised his head and his eyebrows shot up. He sighed again, closed his eyes, and tugged at his beard.

  “Rabbi, I need you to picture something, okay?”

  She took his inhalation and the merest twitch of his head that accompanied it for a yes. “Okay. Here goes. Isaac comes into that room with his shofar t
o show Nelson.”

  Rabbi Alinsky mustered a recognizable nod.

  “He surprises an intruder there, and this intruder grabs the shofar, and hits Isaac over the head with it. The shofar, not the fish club, is the murder weapon.”

  The rabbi blinked rapidly as he struggled to take in this ugly new scenario in which the horn that called Jews to worship for thousands of years is used to kill the pious Jew who played it. “But…but why…?”

  Miranda held up her hand, imploring him to stop talking and keep listening. When he complied, she added a grisly finale to her already-disturbing word picture. “Then, because the shofar is bloody and has the killer’s fingerprints on it, this intruder, now a killer, takes it away with him in his sack or backpack. But before he goes, he bloodies the fish club which he’s recently stolen, and leaves it there to look like the murder weapon and throw off the police.”

  Rabbi Alinsky blanched and lowered his head to his hands. Miranda remained silent until he found a low voice and, finally, a few words. “Oy. Such madness! Who would do such a thing? And why? There’s nothing to steal in that storage room. It’s crazy.” He looked up and shrugged.

  Relieved that the rabbi was beginning to visualize her version of the crime, she let his speculation go without mentioning the copper wire so attractive to thieves. Instead she pursued her own line of inquiry. “Who among your crew has seen Isaac’s shofar and could describe it to me? Would Isaac’s family have a photo of it?”