No wonder he’s still eager, Worthy thought. I’ll give you six months. Then we’ll see how willing you are to stick your neck out.
Worthy picked up the phone and called Father Fortis. “Nick, do you have a minute?”
“Why not, my friend. This parish priest business is going to drive me insane. I mean, who gets anything done?”
“I can call back if you’d like.”
“No, no, forgive my frustration. How can I help?”
“I’m looking at the photo enlargements of the victim right now.”
“That was quick. I thought it might take a few days.”
“It seems computers have taken over here.”
“Don’t talk to me about computers, my friend. Did you find out about the book?”
“I’m not sure. The angle of that first shot is pretty poor. I can tell that the book is open, but that’s about it.”
“Nothing about the words?”
“No. So that means we won’t know much until we find it. But Nick, here’s an easier question. One of our new lab techs said he thinks Father Spiro is saying something that begins with a ‘w’ or a long ‘o.’ I’m guessing, ‘what the hell.’ ”
“No, I wouldn’t think so, Christopher.”
“You mean because he’s a priest?”
Father Fortis laughed loudly. “I can tell that you’ve never visited a seminary. No, I’m just thinking that Father Spiro was Greek-born. Surprise any immigrant, and he’ll probably use his first tongue.”
Worthy exhaled. “Of course. I forgot about that. Okay, let’s skip that for a moment. I did find something else on the other side of the desk—another book.”
“Really? Is it in Greek?”
“No. It was lying to the side, and it’s in all three of the photos.”
“Which means that Father Spiro wasn’t trying to hide it,” Father Fortis said.
“Very good, Watson. Now, explain this. It’s titled Remaining Jewish in America. Interesting, huh?”
Father Fortis didn’t answer for a moment. “I was just checking here. No, it’s not on the desk now, but I’ll ask Mrs. Hazelton.”
“Any idea why he’d have such a book?” Worthy asked.
“I have no idea. Hang on a minute. Here’s Mrs. Hazelton.”
Worthy gazed down at the enlargements of the priest’s mouth while he waited. “So you were reading about Judaism,” he whispered, “and you hid another book from us. How about a little help, old man?”
“Christopher? Were you talking to me?”
“No, no, Nick. What did she say?”
“It’s good news,” Father Fortis announced. “She knows the book. In fact, yes, here it is. Thank you so much, Mrs. Hazelton.”
“What’s it look like, Nick?”
“It’s a hardcover. Ah, this is probably what you want to know. On the first page there’s something handwritten. It says, ‘From one Orthodox to another. Your friend, S. Milkin.’ ”
“That could be a help,” Worthy said, as he wrote down the name. “Nick, does it look well-used?”
“I’m not sure what you mean. It looks like somebody has read it, if that’s what you mean.”
“Exactly.” Worthy thought for a moment. “Try this, Nick. Hold the book up and let it fall on your desk.”
“Really? Okay.”
Worthy heard a thud as the book hit the desk. “Did it open to a page?”
“Yes, Page 123. Let’s see. It’s part of a chapter on ethics. The page has a list of righteous deeds for every Jew to do in daily life.”
“Okay,” Worthy said. “Now do the same thing again and tell me what you find.”
He heard Nick’s heavy breathing and then the thud of the book hitting the desk again. “It opened to Page 175, on kosher laws.”
“Huh. Okay, a third time, Nick.”
Again, the sound of the book hitting the desk before Father Fortis spoke. “It’s back in the chapter on ethics, about two pages from the first time. Wait a minute. Yes, there’s some pencil underlining as well.”
“Really,” Worthy licked his lips. “Read it to me.”
“It says, ‘He who stands by and lets evil happen to another, it is as if he committed the evil himself.’ Hmm, wouldn’t we like to know why he underlined that?”
Worthy scribbled the phrase down on the folder. “Maybe there’s a way to find that out, Nick. Thanks.”
Worthy hung up and studied his notes. “S. Milkin.” He pulled down a city phone book and found four S. Milkins, with one, Sol A. Milkin, having two numbers—one on Conrad Street and one at Congregation Beth Israel. He turned back to the yellow pages under “Churches” before realizing his mistake. He flipped back to “Synagogues” and found Congregation Beth Israel’s listing.
A secretary answered and said that yes, Rabbi Milkin was on staff there, though he was retired and served only part-time.
“Could you tell me if Congregation Beth Israel is an Orthodox synagogue?” he asked.
“We certainly are,” the woman said proudly. “Would you like to know the times of our services?”
“No thank you,” Worthy said. “I’d like to know when I could talk with Rabbi Milkin.”
“Try him at home. That would be my suggestion.”
Worthy called the other number, and after the fourth ring heard the scratchy voice of an old man. “Rabbi Milkin. How may I serve you?”
“Yes sir, this is Lieutenant Christopher Worthy of the Detroit Police Department. I understand you were a friend of Father Spiro George.”
There was a moment of silence on the other end before the rabbi spoke. “Who did you say you were?”
Worthy explained again.
“How did you get this number?”
Worthy explained about finding the book with his name on the inside cover.
“Ah, yes, my poor friend Spiro. Such a tragedy. Perhaps I should have expected one day someone to call me.”
“Oh? Why’s that?”
“Because I know who killed him.”
Chapter Five
Worthy had taken up Rabbi Milkin’s invitation to meet early that Friday afternoon before Sabbath services began at sunset. With Father Fortis in tow, he exited I-696 and drove northwest out of downtown toward Bloomfield Hills. With each block, the lawns were greener, the sidewalks newer, straighter, whiter. KFCs and Popeyes yielded to ethnic and health food options. Leaving the actual city limits, Worthy took note of the glaring contrasts as he had a thousand times before. Drugstores with actual windows stood beside gas stations with attendants who no longer hid in bullet-proof bubbles. Delis with white wrought-iron furniture and sun umbrellas snuggled up next to wine bars and florists, while women nonchalantly pushed strollers, unaware they were no more than two miles from crack houses.
Volvoland, Worthy thought. In Detroit, the drive from third world to first world was shorter than the time it took to finish a Big Mac and fries.
“Christopher,” Father Fortis said, interrupting his thoughts, “I appreciate that you’re letting me come along to meet this rabbi. But what did you mean on the phone when you said not to get my hopes up?”
Worthy fished out the last few french fries from the bag sitting between them. “I’ve met his type all too often. They want so badly to do something to catch their friend’s killer that they begin to think of ways that they can. He’s going to have a lot to say, but statistically his type is hardly ever that helpful.”
“Statistically? Since when did that matter to you, Christopher? I mean, a rabbi and an Orthodox priest. Let me tell you, that’s not a very common friendship.”
“Two old guys. Who knows, maybe they met in a coffee shop.”
“Ah,” Father Fortis added, fingering his pectoral cross, “but don’t forget this particular ‘old guy’ gave Father Spiro some very unexpected reading material.”
They found the synagogue, a new building set low and unobtrusively within the residential neighborhood. On the façade, a stone-relief bush with copper flames bore
the name CONGREGATION BETH ISRAEL in English below Hebrew lettering.
The two walked through the front doors and followed the sign down a hallway to the rabbi’s offices. There, a man in his seventies with bushy white hair stood watering a fern. After introductions, the three went down the sunny hallway to an office.
The rabbi offered chairs to both visitors and then nodded in Worthy’s direction. “I see you brought my book back,” he said. “I’ve been wondering all day how to explain that. But just before you came, I realized something. How can you make sense of the book if you don’t know how Spiro and I became friends?”
Rabbi Milkin paced the office, moving from his desk to the windows overlooking the snow-covered lawn outside. Before speaking, he took out a handkerchief and blew noisily into it. “Imagine,” he said, pointing to the trees outside, “bare trees, and I’m still allergic. Spiro would have said it was penance for something.”
“Leah, Leah!” he called loudly to the open door. “Make us some coffee, please.” He turned to Father Fortis. “You’re his replacement?”
“Temporary replacement, just until the metropolitan—the bishop—makes a decision.”
“I’m glad you came along. You will maybe appreciate that our friendship was rare, yes?”
“I have wondered about that,” Father Fortis replied.
“By chance, strictly by chance. It was at one of those Jewish-Christian conferences, over at Allgemein College.” A look of disgust crossed the old man’s face. “Two or three years ago, who can remember? We both found a way to leave the same session and found ourselves drinking coffee. We felt the same way about the conference. A few intellectuals agreeing that your Jesus was a simple rabbi. As if that would solve everything. Spiro told me he found the whole thing silly. I said he was right.”
Father Fortis leaned back in his chair, realizing how right Worthy had been. Out of this man’s respect for his dead friend, the rabbi would spare no detail.
“We started to meet every two or three weeks for lunch and to commiserate about the pressures of our line of work. Sometimes we’d talk theology, but Spiro’s brand was too mystical for my blood. He was as bad as our Hasidic brothers and sisters,” Rabbi Milkin said with a laugh.
“When was the last time you saw him?” Worthy asked.
“If I answer that, what will you know? Nothing.”
The secretary came in with the three cups and a tray of cookies.
“Almond crescents,” Rabbi Milkin said. “Spiro’s favorite, right, Leah?”
“Bless his memory,” the secretary added as she left the room.
The rabbi slowly munched a cookie while continuing to gaze at Father Fortis. “My family emigrated from Russia to Palestine, then here. We were driven out by Russian Orthodox Christians, so you will understand that it was a miracle for Spiro and me to find friendship. But even miracles are fragile.”
He took a long sip from his cup as he stood by the window. “One night I couldn’t sleep. I turned on the TV and heard one of those late night preachers. I thought he was funny, but then he said God didn’t listen to the prayers of Jews. He said we weren’t saved. And in that moment I was a boy back in Russia, waiting for someone to knock on my door in the middle of the night. I didn’t sleep at all.”
After a moment’s pause, he continued. “The next day, I called Spiro and asked him to come here. He did. I told him what had happened. Then I demanded that he say the preacher had blasphemed. Do you know what he did, what my friend did?”
Father Fortis shook his head.
“He laughed and told me not to take the fundamentalists so seriously. I exploded and said something horrible. I said I knew what his liturgy—what your liturgy—calls us during your Holy Week.”
Father Fortis looked down at his cup of coffee but didn’t respond.
“You call us ‘the synagogue of Satan.’ Then I said it was people like him, like you, too,” he added, nodding toward Father Fortis, “who’d killed my grandfather.”
“When did you have this argument?” Worthy asked.
“Does it matter? Maybe a year ago, maybe a month or two more or less. The important thing is that four weeks ago, Spiro walked back into this office and asked for a cup of coffee. We embraced, I asked him to forgive me, and he asked me to forgive his people. We had some almond crescents and agreed to start meeting again. Like old times. But then someone killed him.”
“How did he seem that last time? Mentally, I mean?” Worthy asked.
“He’d lost more hair, and he was a man very proud of his hair,” the rabbi said. “I was surprised. I asked if he’d been ill. He said no. I told him to retire.”
Father Fortis and Worthy waited patiently while the rabbi continued to stare out the window. “What did he say to that?” Worthy asked.
“Something strange. He asked if offering forgiveness could ever be wrong, if there were times when absolution gave evil too many chances.”
Father Fortis remembered the underlined section of the book. “Did Father Spiro say why he wanted to know that?” he asked.
The rabbi shook his head. “May I show you something in the book, please?” After Worthy handed it to him, he opened it to a page before looking up. “This chapter discusses the limits of kindness, especially when faced with unrepentant evil.” The rabbi took out his handkerchief again and blew into it. “I told him to read it and we’d talk about it the next time we met. But—”
Father Fortis struggled to understand the odd concept of a limit to kindness. And did that mean Father Spiro had done something he was ashamed of? Or was he concerned about someone else, someone in the parish?
Worthy rose from his chair. “Rabbi Milkin, your friend Father Spiro faltered during the service on his final Sunday. He stopped midway in one of the processions. And from what we can tell, he never explained why that happened.”
Rabbit Milkin shrugged, looked out at the trees, and then laughed. “Maybe he had one of his mystical moments of illumination. What my Hasidic brothers call ‘the veil of the visible world being pulled back.’ I used to tell Father Spiro that he was too much like the Baal Shem Tov. Ah, I see you don’t know that name. The Baal Shem Tov was the founder of modern Hasidism, the most mystical form of Judaism.”
The rabbi took a pamphlet from off the desk and came around to hand it to Father Fortis. “This I want you to read. Maybe it is Spiro’s legacy, something he wrote during your Lent for his church newsletter. He explains the ancient origins of the anti-Jewish language of your Holy Week liturgy, which didn’t interest me at all, but then he writes something extraordinary. He tells his people the language of the liturgy must be changed. He laments how the language could promote anti-Semitism. Can you imagine?” The rabbi grabbed Father Fortis’ arm, and tears welled up in the old man’s eyes. “Your church is as tied to tradition as we are, yet Spiro was asking for this change. I will always cherish his memory, not just for friendship, but for his open heart.”
As the three said goodbye at the door, Worthy asked a final question. “You said on the phone you thought you knew who killed Father Spiro. Who is that?”
“Why, I thought I made that plain. On his last visit, Spiro gave me the impression—not in exact words, but there are other words, are there not?—that he was searching for the courage to face someone, someone who he’d come to believe was evil. I believe he did that, and that person killed him. Yes, of this I am sure. Someone in his church killed Spiro.”
Worthy sat in his tiny kitchen Friday night and all Saturday morning, the file of Sherrod’s three suspects open in front of him. But his attention was only moderately given to the fairly standard arrest sheets of Allen Lashad, Luther Rimes, and Carl Bales. Rather, he kept looking at the phone that never rang. His daughter Allyson and he wouldn’t be going to the cabin this weekend. Was I a fool to think she’d ever agree? he wondered.
In the years since the divorce, each had become an expert at keeping the other off balance. They seemed to be forever circling each other, but w
ith different goals in mind. Worthy wanted nothing more than to find some grip that would offer hope of a future relationship. Allyson seemed intent on staying clear of her father, yet always close enough to train her sharp tongue on him. Allyson was an equal opportunity abuser, lashing out at her mother as well as her younger sister Amy, who shared the same household. They too had received the clear message that Allyson wanted a bubble of privacy around her. But with her father, Allyson expressed through her therapist her desire that he stay away entirely. When he did, she chastised him for caring so little about his family. Worthy had hoped that a weekend at the family cabin, just the two of them, would allow him to figure out what she really wanted from him in this last year before college.
“Not this weekend, maybe never,” he said to his empty kitchen as the clock struck eleven.
He’d been unable to concentrate on the Suffolk file, finding more relief in replaying the rabbi’s conviction from the afternoon before. “Someone in his church killed Spiro.” He’d like to think Rabbi Milkin was right. That would account for the straightened vestment piece and perhaps be confirmed by the missing book, once found. If found, he corrected himself.
But there was a way of considering the rabbi’s accusation that led him to totally dismiss it. What he’d hoped to gain from Rabbi Milkin was some sense of Father Spiro’s state of mind in the weeks before he was killed. But all he’d really discovered was something of the rabbi’s state of mind as he ruminated on his friend’s murder. The man had leapt from Father Spiro’s odd taste in theological reading to a certainty that the killer was a parishioner. The fact that this man was himself a clergyman—no doubt with a trunk full of his own stories of run-ins with members of his synagogue—made his accusation all the more suspect.
Let the Dead Bury the Dead Page 6