Dog is in the Details

by Neil S. Plakcy

  I wasn’t sure that I would appreciate someone addressing me in a foreign language in the United States, but then I didn’t speak Spanish. We talked for a few more minutes, and I got up and walked around the living room as I told Lili what I’d discovered in the translation.

  Rochester was agitated, and after I finished the call I sat on the sofa to pet him. He swished his big tail a couple of times and a bunch of papers flew off the coffee table. One of them was the Septa bus schedule I’d picked up at the library in Trenton.

  Joel Goldberg had ridden that bus just one week earlier. Rick had interviewed the driver and the passengers he’d been able to find. But what if someone only rode the bus on Tuesday nights? I knew lots of people whose routine deviated one or two nights a week, due to classes, clubs, or some other obligation.

  I looked at the clock. If I left in the next half hour, I could make it to the West Trenton railroad station in time to pick up the same bus Joel had taken. Was it worth the trouble, since Rick had already determined there were no leads there?

  Why not? Rochester had given me the clue, right? It was up to me to follow it.

  I was startled when my cell phone rang as I was about to leave the house with the distinctive ringtone I’d assigned to Rick. Did he know what I was about to do? I doubted he’d approve.

  But instead all he wanted to do was tell me that he had called the neighbor who’d reported seeing Joel Goldberg in Hiltonia the week before, but had to leave a voice mail message.

  We chatted for a minute or two then I ended the call and hurried out to my car. Rochester wasn’t happy to be left behind, but I doubted Septa would appreciate his presence on the bus.

  I boarded the bus while it idled in the station waiting for the train to arrive. I spoke briefly to the driver, who said he’d been off the night that Joel was killed, as Rick had discovered. I went over to the other half-dozen people on the bus, and none of them remembered anything unusual about the previous Thursday.

  The train pulled in and a guy in his twenties jumped off and hurried over to board the bus, a messenger bag slung over his shoulder. Before I could get up and speak to him, the bus pulled out, and I was on for the ride.

  I watched him for moment to feel out how to approach him, and while I did, he put his phone to his head and pulled a thick textbook from his bag. I realized he was going over material with someone on the other end, and he would probably shut me right down if I interrupted him.

  I’d have to wait until he hung up, or got off the bus, to speak with him. The bus moved onward through the darkness, the way forward lit only by the glow of its headlights, and the guy stayed on the phone.

  I pulled out the schedule, hoping that the bus was on a continuous loop, and that if I stayed on long enough, I’d be able to get back off at the train station on the next run.

  Oops. This was the last run of the night. The last stop was on the road to New Hope, a couple of miles north of Stewart’s Crossing. It was going to be a long walk home.

  As we pulled up to the stop beside Shomrei Torah, the young guy ended his call and closed his textbook. He jumped up, and I followed him off the bus. At least I was a lot closer to home there.

  “Excuse me,” I said. “I wonder if I could ask you a couple of questions.”

  He looked suspicious as the bus pulled out. He was a couple of inches shorter than I was, and about twenty years younger. He wore khaki pants and a polo shirt with a lanyard around his neck holding an ID card. There was something Asian about his face but I couldn’t place where he might have been from.

  “My name is Steve Levitan, and I’m helping a friend out. His brother was on this bus last Thursday—a guy in his late twenties, might have looked homeless. Do you remember him? His name was Joel Goldberg.”

  He picked up on the past tense right away. “I remember him. He was carrying an old backpack. You said was?”

  I nodded. “He was killed that night, here on the grounds of the synagogue. He was the rabbi’s brother.”

  His mouth opened, and he swallowed hard. "Wow. I’ve never known anyone who was killed. I mean, not that I knew him, but we talked for a minute when we got off the bus. He had this stone in his hand, a really pretty green one, and I asked him about it.”

  He shook his head. “I need to sit down.”

  He sat on the bus bench and after a moment I joined him there. “I’m Albert Paca,” he said. “You can call me Al.” He swallowed again.

  I nodded along. “You live somewhere nearby?”

  “Just on the other side of the hill. I work in Philly and I usually drive back and forth, but on Tuesday evenings I have a class at Temple.”

  I wasn’t sure if he laughed or hiccupped, and then he said, “Not a temple like this one. The university.”

  “You look pretty tired. I’m not surprised you wouldn’t want to drive. I won’t keep you for long, I promise. What did he say when you spoke to him?”

  “Just that he always carried the stone with him because it made him feel calmer. He kept rubbing his thumb over it, like he was really worried about something.”

  The malachite worry stone Rochester had found in the grass. Further evidence that the man Al had spoken to was Joel Goldberg.

  “I figured he was there to meet someone,” Al said. “Because as I was walking home a car passed me, going fast, and zoomed into the parking lot.”

  Had that been Joel’s killer, arriving to meet him? “Did you notice anything about the car?”

  He shook his head. “Just that it was going too fast for these dark roads.”

  Al Paca had nothing more to add. He stuffed his thick textbook into his messenger bag and stood up. “I hope they find whoever killed him,” he said. “Even homeless people are human beings.”

  “They are,” I said. I watched him walk away, and then called Rick. “Do me a favor? Come pick me up at Shomrei Torah?”

  “What are you doing there at this time of night?”

  “I met a guy who rode the bus with Joel Goldberg the night he was killed.”

  Rick let out a big sigh. “Hold that thought. I’ll be there in fifteen.”

  While I waited I walked up to the shul. Motion-sensor lights on the outside lit up, but I was able to stay in the shadows. I wondered if there were any security alarms on the property that might have been activated—but if there had been, then someone would have discovered Joel’s body earlier, and Rick or the rabbi would certainly have mentioned them.

  I tried to put myself back in the scene. Joel had gotten off the bus and begun walking toward the shul. Then the car Al Paca had seen had pulled into the parking lot.

  Was Joel expecting him? Or was the person in the car following him? How could he or she have known where Joel was going?

  Rick’s headlights swiped across the parking lot as he pulled in, and I walked over to his truck and climbed in. “How did you meet someone when I couldn’t?” he demanded.

  I shrugged. “I had this idea that maybe someone only rode the bus one day a week.” I explained what I had heard from Al Paca, about his Tuesday night class, his encounter with Joel, the fast-moving car that had pulled into the parking lot. “He said Joel had his backpack with him that night, but you never found it, did you? Wouldn’t that imply that the killer took the backpack?”

  “Imply is the right word.”

  By the time we got to the railroad station, Rick was mollified. “Give me the guy’s full name,” he said, and he wrote it down. “I’ll call him tomorrow and verify what you told me.”

  “I’m not trying to take over your job, you know,” I said. “I just had this hunch and I didn’t want to bother you with it.”

  “And the dog was involved somehow, wasn’t he?”

  “He knocked the bus schedule off the coffee table.”

  Rick shook his head. “You and the dog. You and the dog.”

  16 – First Fruits

  Rochester and I both overslept the next morning, and it was a scramble to get him fed and walked, scarf d
own some breakfast myself, and head to Shomrei Torah for my second week of Bible study. I also wanted to thank Daniel Epstein for helping with the Yiddish translation.

  Rabbi Goldberg had already started when Rochester and I arrived, though, so I slid into a chair beside Daniel with a quick apology. Rochester moved over to sniff Sadie and then slump down beside her. “Welcome,” Rabbi said. “We’ve just begun discussing this week’s parasha, a Torah reading called Ki Tavo. What God is telling us here is basically not to procrastinate, not to put off obeying God’s commandments, because we’re never going to have that stress-free day with no other responsibilities. We must utilize all our days to the maximum.”

  He sighed. “This parasha has special meaning to me, because of the recent death of my brother Joel. Did I spend time every day showing him that I loved him? No. Did I do my best to help him through his illness? I have to admit that I did not. There were always other pressures, from life, other family, members of the congregation. What God is telling us here is to realize those obligations, both to the great spirit and to those around us, and not procrastinate in fulfilling them.”

  I thought of Lili, in Florida with her mother. She had delayed in dealing with Senora Weinstock’s illness, and this was the result—an emergency visit to try and patch things up. That wasn’t good for either of them, or her brother and sister-in-law.

  What could she do, though, from Pennsylvania? There was only so much one could accomplish in a phone call. I knew that, from my regulated calls to my father from prison as he was in his last days. I had felt terrible about my inability to be there with him, blaming the California penal system rather than accepting the responsibility for my own actions. Since then I’d come to peace with the situation – my father knew that I loved him. He had someone to take care of him, and he didn’t linger in pain waiting for me to come to him.

  I was startled out of my reverie when Rochester came over to sniff my hand. I petted him and he settled beside me.

  “This parasha also mentions bikkurim, the first fruits,” the rabbi continued. “That it is our obligation to take our first ripened fruits to the Temple. But this is not a tithe, or a requirement to feed the priests. Instead, it’s a way to remind us that we are not the Creator, that all we have is a gift from God. Everything from the fruits of the vine to our loved ones.”

  We talked for a while, and then the rabbi wished us Shalom, and everyone stood up to leave. I walked over to him and asked, “Do you know where in Europe your family came from?”

  “Back then, it was all Russia,” he said. “My father’s parents came from Lithuania, and my mother’s father from Belarus. Not sure about my mother’s mother—we could never find a town by the name she mentioned on the map.”

  “But not Berlin? Or Germany?”

  He shook his head. “Why?”

  “Just something I’m working on.”

  The rabbi lowered his voice. “I’m worried. Aaron Feinberg has been pressing me for details about what the police know about Joel’s death. He has been cloaking it with the idea that he’s protecting the congregation, but I’m worried that he may be collecting evidence to get me removed as rabbi. Just like what happened in Milwaukee.”

  So the rabbi was worried about losing his job. Worried enough to have killed his brother to protect it? But then why ask me to snoop into Joel’s whereabouts and actions?

  And why was Feinberg so interested in Joel’s death? Did he know more about what had gone on that evening than he was letting on?

  “I was able to figure out Joel’s email password,” the rabbi continued. “I started looking through what he’d been reading and writing. He seemed to be focused on something that had happened during the Holocaust that still had reverberations today. But it was too upsetting for me to read.”

  He looked at me. “You have a computer background, don’t you? If I gave you the password, could you look through my brother’s email account and see if there’s anything there that might tell me what he wanted from me?”

  A tiny jolt of electricity buzzed through my brain. Offered access to someone’s private email? A password into someplace online I didn’t belong? That was just what had gotten me into trouble in the past. But because I was doing it on the rabbi’s behalf, it wouldn’t be illegal.

  But I might be able to help the rabbi, and maybe even help Rick bring Joel Goldberg’s killer to justice. Of course I had to say yes.

  I gave the rabbi my email address, thanked him and wished him shalom, and then put Rochester’s leash on and hurried out to catch up with Daniel Epstein. He was leaning heavily on his cane, his shoulders hunched, and his face looked grayer and more lined than it had only a few days before when I’d seen him at his home.

  “Thanks for the translation,” I said. “It’s very interesting.”

  “You’re welcome. It was a challenge to figure out some of the Yiddish.”

  Aaron Feinberg joined us then, wearing a dark suit, crisp white shirt and blood-red tie. “You’re a translator now?” he asked Epstein. “Ir leyenen Yiddish?”

  “I can read it, but not as well as I wish,” Daniel said. “Mostly I grew up speaking it with my parents. How about you?”

  “My father spoke German but not Yiddish,” Feinberg said. “He was raised in a secular family. But I learned a little from listening to my mother and her family. Can’t read any of it, though.”

  “Steve found a document in Yiddish he needed help understanding. A Holocaust survivor’s story.”

  Feinberg turned to me. “Why would you care about such a thing? That’s old news to someone your age.”

  So much for the “never forget” mantra that had been drilled into us in Sunday school. “I hope the Holocaust is still important for generations to come,” I said, a bit icily.

  Feinberg humphed and stalked away. “I think you offended our esteemed president,” Epstein said with a smile. “He’s getting more and more touchy lately.” He leaned close. “I think he’s worried someone younger will challenge him for synagogue presidency.”

  “Well, I believe what I said. George Santayana said those who forget history are doomed to repeat it, and I’d rather not get rounded up and placed in an internment camp or a gas chamber.”

  “I agree with that. I heard too many stories of the camps when I was a child.”

  “I’ve been thinking about that paper and how it might have ended up behind the wall at the old shul. Did you ever worship there?”

  “Oh, yes, it’s where I celebrated my bar mitzvah. The rabbi then reminds me a lot of our Rabbi Goldberg. Young and enthusiastic. What a terrible shame he was dead only a few years later.”

  “I read about his death when I was doing some research online, but I couldn’t find any information. Do you know what happened to him?”

  “I don’t remember the details, but I know no one ever found out who killed him. It was a real tragedy, that. I collected all the newspaper articles about his death, if you want to know more.”

  “I’d appreciate that. I’m not sure what I’m looking for but I feel like something happened back in the 1940s that might have some reverberations today.”

  “I’m going home now. Would you like to stop by? Or do you have to be at work?”

  “I’m my own boss,” I said, which was technically true, though I did report to the college president. “If you don’t mind that I bring Rochester with me, I can come by now.”

  Epstein reached down to scratch Rochester’s head with the hand that wasn’t balanced on the cane. “A sweet dog like you is always welcome at my house,” he said.

  I took Rochester over to the woods beside the sanctuary for a sniff and a pee, and by the time we got back to my car and drove to Epstein’s house, he was just pulling his battered Toyota sedan into his garage.

  “Everything is in my office, the second bedroom on the right,” Epstein said as he ushered us inside. He stopped to scratch behind Rochester’s ears, and the dog gave him a goofy grin. “Most of the documents from back
then are organized by years, piled on the shelves. You’ll forgive me if I don’t lead you up there.”

  “I’ll be fine.” I started up the stairs as Rochester followed Epstein into the living room. I knew that my dog would be well-taken care of while I immersed myself in whatever Epstein had collected.

  The second bedroom had a desk, an ergonomic chair, and built in cabinets along the walls. The desk was piled with papers, and there were shopping bags full of more paper in a neat row along one wall.

  I began sorting through Epstein’s folders to find the material from the time after the Second World War. I felt like an archaeologist sifting through layers of history.

  I sat on the floor with a teetering stack of newspapers, magazines and manila folders and began to go through them. I heard Epstein talking to Rochester, and the click of doggie toenails on a wooden floor somewhere, and then I was quickly lost in the 1940s.

  Daniel had been born in 1932, and graduated from Trenton High in 1948. I found the program from his graduation and scanned through the names, some of them the same as those I’d found in the archives of Jewtown.

  He had saved an article from the Trenton Times about the graduating class, and he was one of the few who was headed to college—New Jersey State Teachers College at Trenton, in his case. That was the predecessor to Trenton State, which had eventually become the College of New Jersey.

  Rochester came into the room and sniffed at the pile beside me. I reached out to pet him as I flipped through a lot of stuff from Epstein’s college years—old football programs, dance cards, papers he’d written and tests he’d taken. Man, this guy hadn’t thrown anything away, had he?

  Rochester lifted his paw and pushed the pile of material over, scattering everything on the tongue-and-groove flooring. “Oh, crap,” I said. He had his nose down on one particular folder, and when I picked it up I found that Epstein had labeled it “Rabbi Sapinsky.”