Dog is in the Details

by Neil S. Plakcy

  Who was my mother, anyway? A devout Jewish woman, in her way. We never kept kosher, but she and my father fasted on Yom Kippur for years, they observed the Yahrzeits of their parents, and she chauffeured me to Sunday school and Hebrew school for years.

  She spent her working life as a bookkeeper and secretary, read voraciously, and loved to garden. So little to sum up a life, and yet I was pretty sure she’d been happy with what she accomplished. A comfortable home, a loving marriage, an educated son.

  Like Victor Namias had described his wife Esther, my mother was a balabusta, a woman born to run the world. She volunteered at Shomrei Torah, chaired the Lakes Garden Club, looked after her elderly relatives, ran our household.

  And yet none of those things got to the essence of who she was. Do we ever really know our parents, no matter how much time we spend with them, how much we analyze their behavior?

  Those ideas continued to circle around in my head until I left Friar Lake around four, fed and walked Rochester, and then went to Shabbat services at Shomrei Torah. Daniel Epstein wasn’t at the door greeting congregants, and I didn’t see him in the pews either. I hoped he wasn’t feeling under the weather. I ought to give him a call, take Rochester over for a visit. I’d seen how the attentions of my generous golden had made Epstein look better.

  After the service was over, I approached Rabbi Goldberg, and I realized I had barely paid attention to the sermon, my mind full of my parents and my own history.

  But I wanted to talk about his brother, not his sermon. “That document I found at the old shul was a testimony from the Yad Vashem holocaust center,” I said. “Would Joel have recognized the Hebrew name of the center at the top of the page?”

  “I think so,” the rabbi said. “Like me, Joel took years of Hebrew and he often went to temple with me and our parents after his bar mitzvah. So he certainly knew the alphabet. And as I think I told you, he was very interested in the Holocaust, to the point where he was convinced that America was at risk of another one. All the political name-calling and putting blame on immigrants. He was afraid that if the wrong people got into power, they’d start going after the Jews again.”

  He sighed. “I know it was paranoia from his illness, but I can’t help believing there was some truth in what he believed.”

  Another congregant came over to speak to the rabbi, and I found Henry Namias by the platter of petit fours, a plastic cup of wine in his hand.

  “So you’re Sylvia Gordon’s boy,” he said. “I haven’t thought of her in a long time. A very smart young woman, a real go-getter.” He leaned forward and peered at my face. “You look like her, a little. The nose and mouth.”

  “I’ve been told that,” I said.

  “She was four years younger than I was,” Namias said. “I knew her from shul and I was excited when she asked to interview my father. I convinced him to say yes.”

  “I read the transcript,” I said. “Daniel Epstein saved it. Did you know him when you were a boy, too?”

  “Only by name. He’s much older than I am, you know. Six years. A lot to kids.”

  “He told me that you knew a man named Myer Hafetz. That you might be able to tell me something about him.”

  “Cousin Myer? What do you care about a man dead fifty, sixty years ago?”

  I explained about the testimony I’d found at the old shul, though I didn’t mention it was Rochester who’d nosed it out. “I was fascinated and I wanted to know more about him.”

  “I think I was ten years old when he came to stay with us. I don’t know how he was connected – maybe a landsman, maybe a distant cousin of my mother’s. He was German and had been in Auschwitz and he used to sit for hours talking to my mother in Yiddish and broken English. My father gave him a job at our family junkyard on New Street, and in the evening, after he had finished work and we had all had dinner, he told me stories of the old country so I could help him with his English.”

  Henry Namias got a faraway look in his eyes and I could see he was remembering those years. “He was a real raconteur, and Berlin before the war came alive in his stories. He was a very clever man, and he was able to evade the Nazis for years, hiding in abandoned houses, scavenging for food. One day he was so hungry that he dared to go out in the daytime, and he was stopped and the police demanded he drop his pants to see if he was circumcised. As soon as they saw, they arrested him, and he was sent to Auschwitz, with the rest of the Jews from Berlin.”

  I couldn’t help shivering. What must that have been like, living in constant fear? Most boys born around the time I was in the United States were circumcised, so my missing foreskin wasn’t as clear a symbol of my Jewish identity as it would have been for a German Jew in the 1940s. How would I have felt, being forced to drop my pants on a public street, knowing what it would reveal?

  “He was lucky,” Namias continued. “He was young and strong and they put him to work, and the war ended before they could wear him out and gas him. He felt like God had saved him for a reason, to tell his story. That’s why he filled out that form from Yad Vashem.” He peered at me. “You read Yiddish?”

  I shook my head. “I had Daniel Epstein translate it for me.” I paused for a moment. “How long did Hafetz stay with you?”

  “Only a few months,” Namias said. “Then one night he didn’t come home for dinner, and my mother sent me over to New Street to get him. The junkyard was locked up and I was confused. Where was cousin Myer? I called his name but he didn’t answer, so I started looking around. When I went into the alley beside the building I found him there, on the ground.”

  His voice quavered as he remembered. “I kneeled down and shook him but he didn’t wake up. There was blood coming out of his belly and I got some on my hands. I ran home like I was on fire and when my mother saw the blood she nearly fainted. She sent my father to the junkyard and she cleaned me up.”

  He looked me in the eyes. “That was the last time I saw Cousin Myer.”

  22 – Hardy Boys

  As I left the synagogue with Rochester I felt a chill—maybe from the cold air, or more likely from the story Henry Namias had told me. No one had been willing to tell him what happened to Hafetz when he was a boy, and by the time he was an adult he’d pushed away the dark memory of discovering the body.

  When I got home I went back over the police detective’s report on the death of Myer Hafetz. There was no mention of a boy discovering the body, and I assumed that the Namiases had kept their son out of the investigation. What else wasn’t mentioned? There was no way to know.

  By the time we returned from Shomrei Torah, Lili was home, and I pushed aside all thoughts of murder, past and present, to be there with her and my puppy.

  Saturday morning I took Rochester for a long walk, then snuggled back into bed beside Lili and dozed. Around ten, my phone trilled with Rick’s ring tone. Lili was closest to the phone so she reached for it. “I wonder if he proposed,” she said as she pressed the button to answer.

  “No, it’s Lili,” she said. “Have you asked her yet?”

  He said something that appeared to be no, and she continued, “What are you waiting for? I thought you were going to do it this week.”

  She listened for a moment, then said, with a deep sigh, “Oy. Here’s your brother from another mother.” She handed the phone to me. “Another murder. And I thought Stewart’s Crossing was such a safe little town when I agreed to move in with you.”

  “What happened?” I asked Rick.

  “The man who did that translation for you. What was his name again?”

  “Daniel Epstein. Why?”

  He groaned. “I thought that was it. I’m afraid someone made sure that Mr. Epstein would no longer be with us. I’m here at his house in Crossing Estates. Maid came in to clean this morning and discovered the body. Fortunately she called 911 before she started to clean up.”

  “You’re going to find my fingerprints there,” I said. “I spent a couple of hours at Epstein’s house on Wednesday morning, goin
g through some of his old files.”

  “Did you clean up after yourself?”

  “What are you, my mother? Of course I did. Why would you ask something like that?”

  “Because it looks like the person who killed Epstein ransacked his house, in particular his office on the second floor. Files dumped out, papers scattered everywhere.”

  “You want me to come over there? I can help you sort through everything.”

  “I can’t do that, Steve. Because your prints are going to be in the house, and in that office, I have to consider you a suspect.”

  “Me!”

  “Look, I know you, and I very much doubt you drove over to this old man’s house, hit him over the head, and ransacked his office. I wish I could use your help, but I have to play this one by the book.”

  My stomach roiled. Daniel Epstein was dead, and I was one of the last people to see him alive. Though he was elderly and somewhat frail, when I’d spoken with him he had been lively and animated. I’d visited his house, looked through his files, become a part of his life—and now he was dead.

  “Here’s what you can do,” Rick said. “Make a full inventory of the material you took away from Epstein’s house. Maybe you have what Epstein’s murderer was looking for.”

  Great. In a flash I had gone from suspected killer to potential victim.

  “You think it’s someone from Shomrei Torah?”

  “I’m not making any assumptions. Both Mr. Epstein and Joel Goldberg were connected to that synagogue, and my coincidence radar is ringing. But is it possible that the two deaths are unrelated, and I’m going to investigate every angle I find.”

  I heard him speak to someone in the house with him, and then he came back on the line and said he’d come over when he was finished.

  Rochester clambered up onto the bed and slumped down beside me, his head resting on my chest. “Who’s Daniel Epstein?” Lili asked. “You look very pale.”

  “A very nice older man from the Talmud study group at Shomrei Torah,” I said. “He’s the one who translated that piece in Yiddish for me.”

  “Sometimes I worry about you, Steve. People around you have a nasty habit of dying.”

  “I hardly knew the man,” I protested. “I met him at Talmud study, and then Rabbi Goldberg suggested him as a translator.”

  “And?”

  “And I went to his house with Rochester.”

  “Who Rick calls the Death Dog.”

  Rochester nuzzled me. “You don’t like that nickname,” I said as I scratched behind his ears. “Uncle Rick is just jealous of your crime-solving abilities.”

  I explained what Rick had told me, and that I’d have to go through Epstein’s files.

  “Did he have a family?”

  I told her what I knew about Epstein’s life. “He sounds like a very nice man, and it sounds like he lived well,” she said. “Try to remember that. My father would have called him a tzadik, a righteous man. We should all live to be remembered that way.”

  “You’re right. And he deserves to have justice for his death.”

  “You’re going to go need a good breakfast,” Lili said. “How about a cheese and mushroom omelet with a side of bacon?”

  Rochester’s ears perked up, whether because he heard breakfast or bacon.

  “That would be awesome,” I said. “There’s a roll of those quick-bake biscuits in the fridge, too.”

  “Don’t push your luck, Hardy Boy,” she said, but she smiled. “Come on, Rochester. Let’s go make breakfast.”

  I appreciated Lili’s offer, but I thought calling me a Hardy Boy was a little harsh, not just because a man I had met and liked was dead. It was one thing for Rick or me to call ourselves the Hardy Boys, but when Lili used the term it sounded demeaning, like we were kids playing at crime-solving. There were bad people out there, and Rick was one of the bulwarks who protected society from them. I was honored to be able to help now and then.

  I took a quick shower and got dressed, and by the time I got downstairs Lili had breakfast on the table. “What’s on your agenda today?” I asked.

  “I’m meeting Tamsen for a mani-pedi at eleven,” she said. “I need a little pampering after all that aggravation in Florida.”

  She left a short time later, and after I cleaned up the kitchen I sat down at the dining room table with my laptop and all of the files I’d taken from Daniel Epstein’s house. I opened a new spreadsheet and began cataloguing everything.

  Every now and then I’d stop and consider. Was it this file that the murderer had been looking for? This article, this clipping, this photograph?

  It all seemed so harmless to me, from so long ago. I saved the information on Rabbi Sapinsky’s murder for last. That had to be the connection, didn’t it? Suppose the rabbi’s killer was still alive, and believed that Epstein had incriminating evidence?

  But all Epstein had saved were a few newspaper clippings. Nothing that pointed to a particular individual.

  I opened a new file and began to type. “Who is still alive who might have known Rabbi Sapinsky?”

  I thought of the elderly men I knew from the Talmud study group. Aaron Feinberg, Saul Benesch and Henry Namias had been involved with Shomrei Torah for as long as I could remember. But had they worshipped at Shomrei Torah when they were younger?

  Epstein had told me that he had celebrated his bar mitzvah there, the service officiated by Rabbi Sapinsky. I went back to the oral history Victor Namias had dictated to my mother and scanned through it. Toward the end, I found a mention that because there was no Sephardic congregation in Trenton, Namias and his family had joined Shomrei Torah at Esther Namias’s urging.

  So Henry Namias had to have known the rabbi. But he was only ten years old—way too young to have committed murder.

  He was the one who had discovered Myer Hafetz’s body, though. So he was connected to both victims. Could his father have been the killer? Namias had told me that his mother and Myer Hafetz were close, spending hours together speaking Yiddish. What if Victor had gotten jealous and killed his rival? And then the rabbi found out, and had to be silenced as well?

  Pure speculation. And even if it was true, what would have prompted Namias to kill Joel Goldberg and Daniel Epstein? His father was long dead.

  I had finished my inventory by the time Rick arrived. He brought Rascal with him, and the dogs immediately began to romp together, chasing each other’s tails around the living room. I went into the kitchen to get tumblers of ice water for both of us, and when I returned to the living room, Rick was on the floor with both dogs jumping on him. He was laughing and scratching them, but when I came in he sobered up and stood.

  “When was the last time you saw Daniel Epstein?” he asked.

  “I joined this discussion group at Shomrei Torah a couple of weeks ago. We meet in the rabbi’s study on Wednesday mornings. After the session was over I spoke to Epstein and asked him if he knew anything about the death of Rabbi Sapinsky, back in the forties. He told me that he had a lot of files and invited me to his house to look through them.”

  I scratched behind Rochester’s ears. “I followed him to his house, and I was there until about noon on Wednesday. Do you know when he was killed?”

  “The ME will have to do an autopsy. The air conditioning was on in the house and the body was cold, so it’s hard to speculate, but at least a day or so.”

  “Were there any signs of forced entry?”

  Rick shook his head. “No broken windows, no pry marks on any door. So I’m assuming that Mr. Epstein knew his killer and let him into the house.”

  Rick had spoken to Epstein’s son and daughter. Neither of them knew anyone with a motive to kill their father, nor did they believe that their father kept anything in the house worth killing for. “He had a floor safe in the upstairs bedroom with some gold coins, legal papers and a couple hundred bucks in cash, but the safe wasn’t opened,” Rick said.

  “Do you have an inventory of what was stolen?”

 
“Not completely. The son is meeting me at the house tomorrow morning to go over the list the cleaning lady and I put together and see what else we can add to it.”

  “He hire any handymen or other workers in the last few weeks or months?”

  “I’ll be going over that with his son.”

  We went through the inventory of the files I had taken from Epstein’s house. “Nothing seems that damaging to anyone who’s alive today,” I said. I showed him the list I’d begun, of who might have known Rabbi Sapinsky.

  “What about these other two men,” Rick asked. “Benesch and Feinberg?”

  “I don’t know. I was thinking I’d try and speak with each of them, maybe at the study group, or maybe at Daniel Epstein’s funeral.”

  “Just be careful. From everything I’ve heard, Mr. Epstein was a kind man without enemies. If one of those men killed Epstein, you don’t want to put yourself in his sights.”

  23 – A Place to Rest

  The ME expedited the autopsy and released Daniel Epstein’s body quickly so that his funeral could be held on Sunday morning, graveside services in the same cemetery in Trenton where my parents were buried.

  It was a gray day, and a restless wind scattered dead leaves along the gravel paths between sections of the cemetery. I parked and headed toward the green awning in the oldest section, where aged granite tombstones, faded after years in all weathers, stood erect over the final resting places of generations of Trenton’s Jewish dead.

  Epstein’s son and daughter, along with their families, took the seats in front of the open grave, and Saul Benesch and Henry Namias sat behind them, along with other elderly people I assumed were Epstein’s contemporaries and friends. I stood in the back beside a woman I recognized from the Talmud study group.

  Rabbi Goldberg gave a brief eulogy, focusing on Daniel Epstein’s dedication to his family, his heritage and his synagogue. Then Epstein’s son spoke about the example his father had set for him.