Another Three Dogs in a Row

by Neil S. Plakcy

  I lifted one corner of a breast up and peered at it. Looked pretty done to me. So I flipped both of them, with a satisfying sizzle as the raw meat hit the hot surface.

  Lili returned to the kitchen and took over, and my mind drifted back to the conversation we’d had in class about names, and then how Henry Namias had remembered my mother when I gave her maiden name.

  “Do you think Tamsen will change her name?” I asked Lili.

  “I doubt it. She’s already established in her career, and she has a son by that name. I doubt Rick would mind. Would you?”

  I shook my head. “These days it seems weird to me when a woman takes her husband’s name after marriage, the way Tamsen did. Every now and then I’ll be in some female faculty member’s office and see her diploma on the wall and realize that’s her maiden name. I wonder if it’s different when she’s coming into the marriage with another man’s last name.”

  “I never changed mine,” Lili said. “Thank god. At the time I didn’t want to bother with the paperwork. Now I’m grateful. If I’d started my career under either Philip’s or Adriano’s last name I’m not sure what I’d do.” She smiled. “Although my mother could never figure out why I didn’t. ‘You aren’t a real wife unless you take his name,’ she said, more than one time.” She shrugged. “I guess she was right, and I never was a real wife.”

  I was able to avoid that minefield because the breasts were done, and I had to help Lili serve them up over a bed of wild rice. As we ate, I asked, “How is your mother doing?”

  “She’s in therapy every morning. They have her up and moving around with a walker. She hates it, of course, but I keep reminding her that the quicker she gets better, the quicker she can go back to her apartment.”

  “Is she going back there? Or to Fed’s?”

  “I don’t know. If we can get an aide to stay with her, maybe she can stay in the apartment for a while longer. She doesn’t want to move in with Fedi and Sara, and I’m pretty sure Sara doesn’t want that either.”

  I understood Sara’s position, while at the same time I hoped that if her mother-in-law had to come live with them, she’d adjust. I’d never met the woman myself, but I knew from long experience what Jewish women were like. I remembered that Victor Namias had called his wife a balabusta, and I was pretty sure both Lili and Sara fit that category as well.

  The next morning, I took Rochester for a quick walk before I had to leave for Shomrei Torah. As we stopped and started around River Bend, I thought about names and what they said about us. My own name, Levitan, came from the Polish for Jew—Levite, plus a Slavic suffix of -an. Couldn’t get more Jewish than that.

  The most famous person I’d found with my name was a Russian landscape painter named Isaac Levitan, who had been born in Lithuania, where my ancestors had lived, though I had no idea if he was related to me. My mother’s maiden name, Gordon, was even more common, deriving, I believed, from the city of Grodno in modern-day Belarus. And of course there were tons of non-Jewish Gordons coming from England, Scotland and other countries.

  Rochester and I were among the first to arrive at Talmud study, and Rabbi Goldberg pulled me aside to asked if I’d made any progress in figuring out what had happened to Joel. I had to admit that I still had more questions than answers, but that I hoped to know more soon.

  I didn’t pay much attention to the conversation among the group, thinking about how I was going to approach Saul Benesch. I made sure to walk out with him, and as soon as we were away from the building, I said, “It’s so sad about Daniel Epstein. I can’t stop thinking about him. But at least he had a good sense of who he was, and where he belonged in the community.”

  “That’s true,” Benesch said. “We old-timers, we have deep roots here. I wish my children hadn’t moved away, that my grandchildren could grow up here, where our family history is, and all around each other.”

  “So you really know who you are,” I said.

  “I do.”

  “Then why did you use the online ID NotwhoIthinkIam?” I asked.

  He looked at me curiously. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  “You haven’t been searching through online databases for information about Holocaust survivors?”

  “Sonny, you’ve got the wrong guy. The only thing I do on the computer is send emails and look at pictures of my grandchildren on Facebook. I’m so computer illiterate that Aaron had to come over and set everything up for me.”

  The wheels started turning in my head. “So Aaron Feinberg knows your email ID and password?”

  Benesch appeared to have figured out what was going on, because he looked around furtively. “I can’t talk here.”

  “I’ll buy you a cup of coffee at the Chocolate Ear,” I said. “I can take Rochester inside there. I have some information you need to hear.”

  “I’m afraid of that,” Benesch said, but he agreed to meet me.

  28 – Three Shots

  On the way to the Chocolate Ear, I kept going back to NotwhoIthinkIam. If Aaron Feinberg knew Benesch’s ID and password, he could have used them to shield his identity for his online searching.

  What was he looking for, though? Was his father really Karl Kurtz? Why would he look online for verification otherwise?

  I got to the café before Benesch, and parked Rochester in the doggy annex. Then I met Benesch at the counter in the café. “What can I get for you?” I asked, as I pulled out my credit card.

  “Just a small coffee.” I ordered a grande mocha for myself and the coffee for him, and we stepped aside to wait.

  “All these fancy coffee drinks,” Benesch said. “Seems silly to me. Your generation, you’re so spoiled. You want everything the way you want it.”

  “And if we can afford it, why not?” I asked. “It must have been tough growing up in Trenton during the war years and afterwards.”

  “I saw a man be murdered,” Benesch said abruptly. “I never told anyone because I was too scared.”

  My heart skipped a couple of beats. Gail’s assistant handed us our coffees and I handed Benesch his. “I’d like to hear about that, if you feel like you can tell me.”

  “It’s time,” he said. He followed me into the annex and we sat down at a table, with Rochester on the floor beside me.

  “I wasn’t a very good Torah student,” he said after a moment or two. “All I wanted to do was play sports. Baseball, football, stickball. For my bar mitzvah, I had to study extra hours with Rabbi Sapinsky.”

  His eyes clouded over, as if he was remembering those days.

  “I used to have to go over there after school was out. But one day I joined a ball game and I was late. I got to the shul and went looking for the rabbi. I heard him arguing with someone and then a noise.”

  He stopped for a moment.

  “What kind of noise?” I asked gently.

  “Today I’d probably recognize it as a gunshot, but back then all I knew was that it was like the sound the bat makes when you hit the ball with it.” He took a deep breath. “And then a man came running past me. He didn’t see me, because I was in the corner. I didn’t recognize him but I was worried about the rabbi so I went back the way he’d come. I found the rabbi on the floor of his office, blood pouring out of his head.”

  Benesch began to shiver. “I was so scared, I didn’t know what to do. I rushed home and told my mother, and she went to the shul. When she came home she asked me, Solly, do you know what happened to the rabbi?”

  Of course. Saul, Solly. Saul Benesch was the boy mentioned in the police reports. I pulled out my cell phone while Benesch was lost in his memory and texted Rick, asking him to come to the Chocolate Ear ASAP. If he didn’t arrive to speak with Benesch himself, I’d have to make sure he heard Benesch’s story at some point.

  “I didn’t want to admit that I’d been playing ball when I should have been studying, and I was too scared that the man would come after me if I told anyone I had seen him. So I said nothing.”

  Then h
e looked up at me. “It wasn’t until years later, when my wife and I joined Shomrei Torah, that I recognized the man I saw running away from the rabbi.” He took a deep breath. “It was Kalman Feinberg, Aaron’s father.”

  “Have you ever told anyone else?”

  He shook his head. “Who can I tell? Aaron is my friend, and he idolized his father. It would destroy him if he learned something like this.”

  I had a feeling that Aaron had learned a lot more about his father.

  “Did you know a man named Myer Hafetz?” I asked. “He was a cousin of Henry Namias’s family.”

  “No. What about him?”

  “I think Kalman Feinberg killed him, too.”

  I explained my theory. “I think Aaron Feinberg’s father was really a German man named Karl Kurtz, who had been a guard at Auschwitz. After the real Kalman Feinberg died, Kurtz assumed his identity and came to the United States to start over. Then he ran into Myer Hafetz, who recognized him, and he killed Hafetz, and then the rabbi, to protect himself.”

  I looked up and saw Rick walk into the café, and motioned him over. As he petted Rochester hello, I introduced the two of them. “Mr. Benesch, would you tell Detective Stemper what you told me?”

  He nodded. “Yes, it’s time.”

  I stood up and Rick took my seat. I caught his eye and he nodded slightly.

  As I drove up to Friar Lake with Rochester by my side, I talked out my ideas with him. “Aaron Feinberg must be the man behind NotwhoIthinkIam,” I said. “He helped Benesch set up his email account so he knew the ID and password, and he could use it hide his own identity on line.”

  Rochester didn’t argue, so I continued.

  “He must have gotten suspicious about his father’s identity at some point and started looking for information. But that’s all in the past. Why would it matter now?”

  I stuck my hand out to stroke Rochester’s head, but instead he sat up and licked my fingers. I laughed. “You are such a love bug.” He yawned, and settled back in his seat.

  Love. I’d loved my father, to the point of idolizing him when I was young, something I was sure a lot of boys felt. How would my love for my father change if I found out he’d been lying to me all my life? Would I be sad? Angry? Take that anger out on others?

  It was his father’s secret – but it was his, too, wasn’t it? Suppose everyone in Trenton knew that Aaron Feinberg, big macher at Shomrei Torah and owner of several prosperous furniture stores in the suburbs, was the son of a concentration camp guard rather than a Holocaust survivor?

  It would be an explosive story that would ruin his family. He’d have to give up being temple president. It would be too much of a slap in the face of the congregation for him to continue. And he’d probably have to sell or shut down his business—who would want to buy from someone with his background?

  By the time we reached the office I felt sure that Aaron Feinberg had been behind the murders of Joel Goldberg and Daniel Epstein. I understood why he’d want to protect his secret, but I still couldn’t figure out what had set him on a collision course with his two victims.

  It was late that afternoon when my phone rang with an unknown number. “Steve? Aaron Feinberg here. Saul told me you’ve been talking to him.”

  I was stunned that Saul Benesch would have called Feinberg, after all we’d discussed. Wasn’t he worried about his own life? And how did I know that Feinberg hadn’t killed Benesch after that conversation?

  I decided to play dumb. “I have.”

  “Saul’s pretty upset about my using his email address and I’d like to explain the situation to you. Then maybe you can help me calm Saul down.”

  I hoped that meant Benesch was still alive.

  I doubted that there was anything Feinberg could say that would explain away everything that had happened, but I said, “Sure. When did you want to get together?”

  “We have a board meeting at Shomrei Torah tonight that I can’t get out of. You live in River Bend, don’t you? I have a friend who lives over there so I know it’s not too far from the temple. Maybe you could swing by when the meeting is over and we can talk? But don’t bring your dog, please. Take him for a walk before you leave.”

  Was that how he’d lured Joel Goldberg to his death, by arranging a meeting at Shomrei Torah? Hey, if it worked once. Only I’d make sure that Rick was there to look out for me.

  I agreed to meet him outside the rabbi’s study at nine o’clock that evening.

  Then I called Rick and explained the situation. “You’ll go with me, won’t you?” I asked.

  “Or I could just pull Mr. Feinberg in for questioning and leave you out of it.”

  “What are you going to question him about? You don’t have any evidence connecting him to either murder, do you? Everything we know is just supposition.”

  “I am a skilled investigator, remember? I do this for a living. I ask people questions and get answers.”

  I waited.

  “But you’re right,” he said eventually. “I can ask him all the questions I want but there’s no guarantee he’ll say anything that incriminates him.”

  We arranged that he’d pick me up at eight so that he could be in place to observe my meeting with Feinberg. “Do you want me to wear a wire?” I asked.

  He said he’d take care of everything, and as I drove home I thought about questions that I’d want to ask Aaron Feinberg. How could I ease my way into asking him about his father? I doubted that he’d admit he’d killed Joel or Daniel, but I wanted to get enough information so that Rick would have the ability to pull him in for interrogation.

  As we were driving into River Bend, I got a text from Lili that she had to stick around campus to meet with an adjunct who taught a night class, and that she’d be home late. When I stopped the car in my driveway, I texted her back a couple of kisses.

  “Looks like it’s just you and me, boy,” I said. I ate dinner, fed the hound, and then took him for a long walk, still trying to put together the questions I wanted to ask Feinberg. I was so caught up those thoughts that I didn’t worry too much about meeting with someone who might have killed twice already—I was younger than Feinberg, stronger, aware of what I was walking into, unlike Joel Goldberg or Daniel Epstein.

  And I’d have Rick watching my back.

  It was a cool night and I was glad to get back home. Rick arrived around eight and parked his truck beside my car. When I opened the door to him, Rochester kept nosing around, wondering why Rascal wasn’t with him.

  “Take off your shirt so I can hook up the wire,” Rick said. I did as asked, and he taped a wire to my chest. “Sorry, this is going to hurt when it comes off. Unless you want to shave your chest.”

  “I’ll suffer for justice.”

  The recorder went into my pants pocket, and then I put my shirt on. Rick opened a big bag and pulled out a black vest.

  “Is that what I think it is?”

  “Finest Kevlar,” he said. “Stops a bullet up to a .44 magnum. I borrowed it for you from one of the other guys.”

  The vest looked bulky, with a front panel made of something shiny with a cross-hatched pattern across the front.

  “You think I need this?”

  “If we’re correct, this guy has already shot and killed two men. I don’t want my best friend to be the third.”

  Aw, that was sweet. It was also kind of scary. I was glad I was leaving Rochester behind. I slipped the vest on, and Rick tightened the straps on the vest. For a moment I had trouble breathing. “Too tight?” he asked.

  “Yes,” I gasped.

  He loosened it a bit, then I put my windbreaker on over it. “Looks good,” he said. “Let’s hope he doesn’t try for a head shot.”

  “I don’t know about this, Rick,” I said. “Maybe you’re right, you should just pull him in for questioning.”

  “You know I don’t have enough evidence for that.”

  I looked at myself in the mirror. I looked bigger, tougher. Maybe that was just the vest, but
I felt more confident. “I should take Rochester out for a quick pee before we go.”

  “I’ll stay here. I have a couple of phone calls to make.”

  I put on Rochester’s leash and we went outside. The streets of River Bend were pretty narrow and there wasn’t much guest parking, so sometimes it was difficult to navigate around parked cars. To our right, a car idled on the other side of the street, its headlights on, waiting for someone to come out of the house, so we turned left instead.

  Rochester made a beeline for one of his favorite spots and lifted his leg. Behind me, I heard the car begin creeping forward, and I tugged Rochester’s leash and stepped onto a neighbor’s lawn to let the car pass.

  “Come on,” I said out loud. “Not you, boy. I hate it when cars go so slowly while we’re waiting for them to pass.” I turned around to look at the approaching headlights.

  Everything happened so quickly that it was hard to figure out what was going on. I heard three quick pops, and at first I thought the car was backfiring. Rochester freaked at the sound and tugged me away from the street, toward the neighbor’s house.

  Then it felt like someone had punched me, hard, in the back. Three times.

  I tripped over a low hedge and went down, and Rochester began to bark.

  29 – Dangerous Path

  I heard a door bang open, and Rick yell, “Steve!”

  “I’m okay,” I called, though I wasn’t sure I was. “Go after him!”

  Rick jumped into his truck, turned the flashing light on, and zoomed down the street in pursuit of whoever had been driving that car. Rochester licked my face, and I petted him. “I’m okay, boy,” I said, though my back hurt.

  I gingerly stood up. What in the world had just happened?

  It couldn’t have been Aaron Feinberg in that car. He was supposed to be at a temple board meeting. Who else? Saul Benesch? Henry Namias? Someone I hadn’t considered?

  I was surprised none of my neighbors came out as I limped back toward the house with Rochester close beside me. Hadn’t anyone heard the gunshots? It felt like I might have pulled a muscle in my leg when I fell. But if that was all that was wrong I was grateful.