“For real?” said Morris.
“Of course. Would I joke about such a thing? He’s at Einstein as we speak. As we speak.”
“Some chazzers, they’ll do anything to keep from giving.”
“Mr. Rabbinowitz,” I said, interrupting. The Reddman books were sitting at the other end of the table, forlorn and alone.
He looked up at me and smiled. “Call me Yitzhak, please, Victor, now that we are working together.”
Working? “Well then, Yitzhak, I was just wondering how we are doing on the books. Have you found anything yet? I’m sort of in a hurry on this.”
“It’s going very well, Victor. Very well, and almost we’re ready to show you some things. Not quite but almost.”
“You want maybe some coffee, Yitzhak?” asked Morris.
“Yes, that would be terrific,” said Rabbinowitz, smiling at me. “Cream and sugar, Victor, and don’t be stingy with the sugar.”
“Anything else?” I said flatly.
“A doughnut or a pitsel cake, would be nice. Anything for you, Morris?”
“Just a water, my stomach still is not what it should be.”
“You know your problem,” said Rabbinowitz to Morris. “Too much fiber. It gives gas.”
“Tell me something I don’t already know.”
“A coffee with cream and extra sugar,” I said. “A pitsel cake and water.”
“You’re very kind, Victor. Thank you,” said Rabbinowitz. He turned his attention back to Morris, as if I had been dismissed. “So as soon as we’re finished here I’m going over to give Herman a visit up at the hospital. Coming so close to his Maker, maybe it will have softened him up. I tell you, Morris, it was a miracle, really. I think now I can get from him the ten.”
“Sit down, Victor,” said Yitzhak Rabbinowitz when I came back from the Wawa with the coffee and an Entenmann’s cake and a bottle of mineral water. “We’ll show you now what we found.”
“You’re ready?”
“It was rather clever, but not so very well hidden. I’m surprised that Poole didn’t catch it himself. The key was learning when it was that this Reddman started keeping the books.”
“We think we have it now,” said Morris. “We were forced to match the handwriting in the earlier journals with some letters we found in the books and from later journals, after he bought control.”
“Kapustin here was a big help,” said Rabbinowitz, “which surprised me, really, because generally he is absolutely useless.”
“Don’t be such the cham,” said Morris. “You, you’re less than useless. The last stock he convinced me to buy, Victor, it didn’t split, it crumbled.”
“Tell me something, Morris,” said Rabbinowitz. “If ignorance is bliss, why aren’t you ecstatic?”
“Are you guys finished with your vaudeville,” I said, “because the day is short, the task is great, the workmen are lazy…”
Rabbinowitz looked at Morris, who looked back and shrugged.
“He doesn’t find us entertaining,” said Morris. “I’m surprised because I find us very entertaining.”
“Sit down, Victor,” said Rabbinowitz, putting on a pair of half-glasses. “Sit down and we’ll show you what we found.”
I sat at the conference table and Rabbinowitz placed two of the books in front of me. One was a heavy old ledger, the other was smaller, and when he opened the books an ancient scent erupted, something mildewed and rotted and rich with must. The pages in each book were yellowed and cracking in the corners, some of the numbers were obliterated by time, but the handwriting in those entries that remained legible was careful and precise.
“This is the disbursement journal and the general ledger for 1896,” said Rabbinowitz. “Before Reddman started doing for himself the books.” He pointed out to me the meaning of the various entries in the disbursement journal and then went to a long list of figures for January. “These are the amounts paid to specific suppliers each month. We used the amounts in this book as baseline figures. Maybe you’ll notice, Victor, that the monthly amounts paid to each supplier, they stay about the same, adjusted seasonally. More produce was bought in the late summer and fall when the harvests came in so more was paid out then, but everything went up roughly proportionally with each of the farmers.”
“That makes sense,” I said.
“The monthly totals in the disbursement journal were posted at the end of the month to the general ledger. If you also notice, at the back of the general ledger, there is a final trial balance for the year. Assets of course equal liabilities and everything seems in order. All stock at the time, as listed in the general ledger’s stock register, was owned by E. J. Poole. Stockholder equity, in less sophisticated times a rough measure of the value of the company, was surprisingly high for such a business. All in all, I would have to say that the E. J. Poole Preserve Company was well and tightly run in 1896.”
Rabbinowitz took two more books from the pile, the disbursement journal and general ledger for 1897, and placed them in front of me. The same hand had made the entries in these books, though a little less precisely. Rabbinowitz again went through the monthly entries in the disbursement journal, comparing the amounts paid each supplier with that paid the year before. Everything seemed in order, the monthly totals were duly posted to the general ledger, and the trial balance at year’s end again showed a healthy company, all the shares of which were still owned by Elisha Poole.
He then placed the books for 1898 in front of me. As of March of that year the handwriting of the entries changed. “This is when, as best as Morris could tell, Reddman started keeping the books.”
“Any indication of why?” I asked.
“None,” said Morris, “but you might have noticed that Poole’s handwriting, it had started to deteriorate. We think maybe that might indicate a reason.”
“Any extra monies started being paid directly to Reddman?” I asked.
“No,” said Rabbinowitz. “That, of course, was the first thing we checked. Reddman, he received only modest raises all along until he finally bought the company outright. He started as an apprentice tinsmith and, even though he took on more responsibility, his pay remained rather miserly. But I want to show you something here.” He pointed to an entry in the disbursement journal for payments made to a farmer named Anderson. “Notice here that shortly after Reddman started doing the books, the disbursements to Anderson jumped up slightly in proportion to the amounts paid to the other farmers, just a few hundred dollars, but still an increase.”
“Maybe Anderson started expanding his output.”
“That of course is possible,” said Rabbinowitz, who immediately turned to the back of the general ledger. “But notice, in the trial balance sheet for that year, stockholder equity didn’t rise even though sales had actually improved.”
“Interesting,” I said.
Rabbinowitz brought out the disbursement journal for 1899 and dropped it on top of the other books, dust rising when it fell. I sneezed and then sneezed again. Morris handed me a tissue while Rabbinowitz showed me the disbursement entries, month by month, for 1899. Everything seemed stable until we got to June. Rabbinowitz tried to turn the page to find July but I grabbed hold of his wrist.
“What’s that?” I asked
“I told you he’d notice it,” said Morris. “He’s no yutz.”
“An unexplained jump in the amount paid to this Anderson,” said Rabbinowitz with a flourish, as if we had discovered a great scientific secret. “Fifteen hundred dollars more than you would expect to see for that month.”
“Any supplier decrease its payable in a similar amount?” I asked.
“Good question,” said Rabbinowitz. “And the answer, it is no.” He took me through the book page by page, showing that the increase was maintained for every month through the whole of the year. “Almost ten thousand dollars by year’s end. Now I want to show you two things in the general ledger.” He brought out another volume and paged to the trial balance at the end of th
e book. “First, shareholder equity dropped by about ten thousand dollars at year’s end, approximately twenty percent.”
“Almost the exact amount of the unexplained bonus paid to Anderson.”
“Exactly right,” said Rabbinowitz. “And look at this in the stock register. Eighteen ninety-nine was the first time Reddman started buying shares of stock from Poole. He bought five shares, or five percent of the company, for six thousand dollars.”
“Where did a tin cutter with a pittance of a salary get six thousand dollars?” I asked, even though by then I figured I knew the answer.
“What we guess, Victor,” said Morris, “is that this Reddman, he volunteered to take control of the books so that he could slip his friend Anderson a little bonus and get for himself a kickback. For some reason he figured he could get away with even more and then he hit on the idea of using the money to buy the company outright, so he raised the payoff and started buying stock. The beauty of it for him was that while he was stealing from the company, the company was losing profits and its value was decreasing, making the price he was to pay less and less. I bet he was able to convince Poole that he was doing him such a favor because of how terrible the company, it was doing.”
“So, in effect,” I said, “Reddman was stealing from Poole and using the money to buy Poole’s company. Very clever.”
“Clever, yes,” said Rabbinowitz. “For a thief.”
The other volumes showed the same thing, inexplicably large payments to Anderson, weakening shareholder equity, increasingly large purchases of stock by Reddman that would have been impossible on the salary he was listed as receiving in the books. By 1904, Reddman owned forty-five percent of the stock.
“How did he get the rest?” I asked.
“He apparently took out a loan, mortgaging his stock holdings and the stock he was going to purchase,” said Morris. “He used the money to buy the remaining shares held by Poole in 1905.”
“A leveraged buyout,” said Rabbinowitz. “Like something out of the eighties, the nineteen-eighties. This Reddman he was a thief, yes, but a thief ahead of his time.”
“And listen to this, Victor,” said Morris. “Right after Reddman, he bought all the stock, the sale of pickles it went meshugge, more than tripling in one year. Almost as if someone was keeping production low to maintain unprofitability until the entire stock of the company could be bought at a bargain price.”
“So that’s it,” I said. “Poole was right all along. Reddman stole the company right out from under him.”
“So it would seem,” said Morris.
“If it was so easy for us to see it, how come Poole didn’t figure it out?”
“That’s a mystery,” said Morris. “To solve such a mystery it will take more than looking in books.”
We sat for a moment in silence, the three of us. There were still questions to be answered, of course, and there was nothing in the books that would convince a jury of anything beyond a reasonable doubt, but it was pretty clear to me. Everything about the Reddmans was based on a crime and it was as if that crime, instead of disappearing into the mists of history, had remained alive and virulent and had infected the Reddman house and the Reddman family and the Reddman legacy with a crippling rot.
“Two more things you should know, Victor,” said Morris. “First, I tried, as soon as Yitzhak started growing suspicious, I tried to find out if there might be records from this farmer Anderson for us to look at. A farm he owned, in New Jersey, in Cumberland County. Through old newspapers I had Sheldon look until he found it. Very disturbing.”
“What?” I asked.
“The farmhouse it burned down in 1907, with three dead, including this Anderson.”
“My God,” I said.
“And something else, Victor,” said Rabbinowitz. “We are not the first to go through these records and discover what it is we have discovered. I could see traces of another’s journey through the same books, old pencil marks, old notations, old notes stuck in the pages. Someone else, they took the very same route we took through the numbers. Your friend Morris, he thinks he knows,” said Rabbinowitz.
I turned and looked at Morris.
“One of the notes,” he said. “The writing it matches.”
“Matches what?”
“I’m no handwriting expert,” said Morris, “but the letters ‘s’ and ‘t,’ they are very close and the ‘g,’ it is identical.”
“Matches what?”
“The pages of the diary we found in the box,” said Morris. “She who wrote the diary, she too knew about what this Reddman had done. He was her father, no? What it must have been like for her to find out that everything she had was purchased by a crime. I shudder, Victor, shudder to even think about it.”
45
AFTER RABBINOWITZ LEFT for the hospital to visit his good friend Herman Hopfenschmidt, I decided to take a spin around Eakins Oval and along Kelly Drive, past Boathouse Row, to one of the sculpture gardens planted along the banks of the Schuylkill. It was now late afternoon and I sat on a stone bench, just in front of a statue of a massively muscled man groaning forward, a representation of the Spirit of Enterprise, and watched the scullers bend with their oars as their shells skimmed across the river’s surface like the water boatmen I had seen on the pond at Veritas. I had needed to get away from the office, to sit among the silent sculptures on the river’s edge and watch the sun dip into the west and think about what I had learned that day. Morris had offered to trail along and I hadn’t minded. I found having Morris around made me feel better, though I couldn’t really say why. But Morris knew enough to stroll quietly among the statuary for a while and let me be.
I had been told that beneath every great fortune lies a great crime but it was still a shock to be confronted with the truth of that maxim so vividly. If I had wondered before what it was that had turned the Reddman family so brutally wrong I needed only to learn the origin of its wealth and power. I didn’t yet understand the instrument of the family’s undoing but I had little doubt that the tragedies that erupted in its history had their root in Claudius Reddman’s deception of and thievery from Elisha Poole. And the question that inevitably sprung to mind was, in light of the fortune gained and the tragedies incurred, whether or not it was worth it.
I was hip-deep now in Reddman excretion and I couldn’t help but imagine myself bobbing for my own little coins. I had been promised the five percent from Oleanna if I could clear her and her people of the murder and get the insurance death benefit paid. I had been promised a kickback from Peckworth, the used undergarment procurer, for any reduction I could wile from his street tax. Then there was the wrongful death suit I would file on behalf of Caroline Shaw against whoever it was who had ordered the murder of her sister and probably her brother too, a suit I would bring just as soon as I determined who had hired Cressi, and as soon as Caroline signed the fee agreement I so desperately wanted her to sign. And of course, it was undeniable that I was sleeping with an heiress, even if Kingsley’s vasectomy made her only an ostensible heiress. It didn’t take a practiced gigolo to know where that could lead. Yes, there was a lot of coin adrift in the Reddman muck to be snatched between my teeth.
“Do you know what his last words were before he died?” I asked Morris after he wandered over to the stone bench and sat beside me.
“Who now are we talking about?” said Morris.
“Claudius Reddman. His dying words were, ‘It was only business.’ ”
Morris sat there for a moment, shaking his head. “Such words have justified more crime than even religion.”
“Did you ever want to be rich, Morris?”
“Who is rich? As the scholar Ben Zoma once said, ‘He who is content with his lot.’ ”
I looked up at him, at the calm expression on his face, the expression of a man who seemed truly content with his life and at peace with his place in the world.
“So you never wanted to be rich?” I asked.
“What, you think I’m me
shuggener,” said Morris. “Of course I wanted to be rich. I still do. Give me a million dollars, Victor, and see if I turn it down. Give me two, maybe. Give me thirty over six years with a signing bonus like a baseball pitcher and see if I push it away. Believe you me, Victor, I won’t push it away.”
“That’s good to know,” I said, and turned back to the water. “I was getting worried. What would you buy?”
He thought on that for a moment. “There was a man in Pinsk,” he said finally, “who used to make the most perfect shoes in the world. I never saw a pair mind you, but I heard of them from someone whose cousin had actually held a pair in his very hands. Soft like a woman’s skin, he said, and as comfortable as a warm bath. I always wanted a pair of shoes from the man in Pinsk. Of course this was before the war. I don’t know now what happened to him, he is probably dead. Pinsk was not a good place to be a Jew during the war. But I have heard rumors now of a man in Morocco whose shoes, they say, are close to those of the man in Pinsk.”
“You could buy anything you want and what you’d buy is shoes?”
“Not just any shoes, Victor, not the scraps of leather you wear on your feet. These shoes are a mechaieh, they are the shoes of a king.”
“So you want to be rich so you can buy a pair of shoes,” I said, nodding to myself. “I guess that makes as much sense as anything else. At least you know.”
“Yes and no. With such shoes, Victor, when could I wear them? Not every day, they are too precious for everyday. I would wear them only on the Shabbos maybe, and not even every Shabbos, because even then they would wear out too soon. I would spend more time taking care of them than wearing them, I think, waxing the leather, polishing, keeping them stretched and warm. Such shoes would be more burden than anything else. As Hillel said, ‘The more flesh, the more worms. The more property, the more anxiety. The more wives, the more witchcraft.’ ”
Bitter Truth Page 41