The Question of the Absentee Father

by E. J. Copperman

  Sitting in the back seat of the police cruiser, my thoughts were not about possibly losing my father—I had never considered myself as having a father. I concentrated, therefore, on the reaction Mother would have because she clearly felt a strong connection to her husband. She had spent twenty-seven years alone and never even entertained the thought of divorcing the man who had left her alone with a small boy to raise. I could argue the logic of that decision but I could not contest the obvious dedication behind it.

  Mother loved Reuben Hoenig, and there was a very strong probability that I would now have to inform her that he was dead.

  “I’m sure he’s okay,” Ms. Washburn said. I did not ask for her train of thought leading to that conclusion; I had learned the answer would be unsatisfying to both of us. I nodded, although I immediately wanted to explain that it was not a means of agreeing with her statement. Perhaps to distract me from watching the house—which was now quiet and, if I was observing accurately, no longer sporting gun barrels through its turrets—she asked, “What made you think your father was here?”

  “He is the key to the counterfeiting operation,” I said. “He had an expertise in color transfer onto paper that was apparently unique in the industry. It required equipment that would be considered somewhat archaic in printing circles now, but which makes remarkably accurate reproductions of paper money. His abilities were what George Kaplan wanted to exploit, and Reuben’s drug-induced state of compliance indicates he might not always have been eager to participate. I believed he was here because when Kaplan is not otherwise occupying his time, Reuben is probably overseeing the printing of false capital.”

  The sound of the car door opening startled me; maybe Ms. Washburn’s attempt to distract me had been successful after all. I looked up and saw Detective LaGrange holding out his hand. He appeared to be beckoning to me to exit the police vehicle.

  “He wants to talk to you,” he said.

  Ms. Washburn’s hand grasped mine more tightly, and she would not release it even as I moved out onto the street.

  thirty

  “I did like you said when you whispered to me by the Chinese Theatre,” Reuben Hoenig told me. “I stopped taking my meds. Stuck them in my jaw and spit them out when nobody was looking.”

  I sat in the kitchen of the Kaplan Enterprises house while Reuben continued to crouch in the pantry closet amid empty shelves but for six packs of beer and containers of table salt. He was almost completely unharmed except for a bruise on his forehead, which Reuben said he had sustained when the gunshots rang out in the house and he had foolishly attempted to stand up, hitting his head on the shelf above him.

  “Did that help clear your mind?” I asked. “I noticed you have not been quoting The Maltese Falcon since we arrived.”

  Ms. Washburn, having let go of my hand, stood to my right side and watched Reuben closely. She seemed about to weep but I could not understand why. Reuben was not dead; he was not even seriously injured.

  The conversation I had been rehearsing to have with my mother would not be necessary.

  “I think I always knew Manny was using the drugs as a way to control me,” Reuben said, nodding. “At the beginning I thought it was just to calm me down. But when they started up the dosages, it was too late. I had pretty much lost my will at that point and I’d do whatever Manny wanted me to do.”

  “Who’s Manny?” asked Detective La Grange, who was standing behind Ms. Washburn and holding a voice recorder. Reuben had not been advised of his Miranda rights, so I was assuming he would not be charged with a crime and did not—at least not yet—need the services of a criminal attorney.

  Reuben Hoenig looked at him with an expression of disbelief. “The guy you arrested,” he said. “The one who was running this whole operation.” He waved his hand around in a grand gesture as if the simple house on Jamieson Avenue was the center of a vast criminal empire.

  “George Kaplan?” Mike asked. He was standing behind me, leaning against the far wall.

  I chuckled. I looked at Reuben Hoenig. “Do you want to say it, or shall I?” I asked him.

  My father turned and regarded him with a small smile. “Mr. Thornhill, there is no such person as George Kaplan.”

  “My name’s not Thornhill,” Mike replied.

  Ms. Washburn smiled back at him. “It’s from North by Northwest, Mike. But Mr. Hoenig, I thought the whole George Kaplan thing was your idea. You were the first man to use the name, weren’t you? When you moved here from Seattle?”

  Before he could answer there was a commotion from the basement. A uniformed officer appeared followed by the young man we had seen before, no longer wearing a bowling shirt identifying him as Nate. He was wearing plastic zip strips on his wrists, which were held behind his back. He appeared to be uninjured. They walked through the kitchen without saying a word, although Nate did glare at me unpleasantly as he walked.

  Reuben Hoenig turned his attention back to Ms. Washburn. “I never actually used that name in day-to-day life,” he explained. “I had the company create a payroll account in that name so I couldn’t be traced once I was transferred here. I got a bank account that I opened with ID I’d, let’s say obtained, bearing the name George Kaplan. Then I moved in here and used my own name everywhere but in official records. I figured I was safe.”

  “Safe from what?” LaGrange asked. “Were the Seattle police looking for you?”

  My father shook his head and held out his hands to dismiss the notion. “No. I never did anything illegal, except maybe obtaining that ID. No, I was trying to hide from Manny Hastert. He’d been bugging me about printing the whole time in Seattle. Wanted to know could I make something that looked like money. I’d talked to him in a bar one night after work and then he thought I was a mastermind or something.”

  “That should not warrant a false identity and a change of location,” I suggested. “Wasn’t it merely possible to refuse Hastert, or at worse to change your place of employment?”

  An Emergency Medical Technician in full uniform walked into the kitchen, noted Reuben’s head wound, and set about cleaning and bandaging it. He asked LaGrange if anyone else in the house was hurt more seriously and was told this was the only injury.

  While being attended to, my father looked at me. “Manny was persistent to the point of stalking,” he said. “He’d be outside my apartment at night. He’d be in the lunchroom whenever I went in for a break. He’d be standing next to my car in the parking lot after work. He’d call me twenty times a day. He told me that if I went to the police he would make a call and someone would put a bullet in my head. I had to get out.”

  “But he found you down here in Los Angeles,” Mike said.

  Reuben nodded. “I wasn’t very good at hiding. I didn’t want to be George Kaplan for real. He tracked me down and got himself transferred here and got after me about the funny money again. One time I said I was going to call the cops and there was a dead squirrel on my front step in the morning.”

  Another uniformed officer emerged from the basement, this time escorting the man I’d found operating the printing press when I’d ventured into the space. The young man was uninjured. Whatever gunfire had taken place appeared to have missed its intended targets. They too marched through the kitchen on the way to the front door, where four more Los Angeles Police Department vehicles were waiting.

  “You agreed to help after you were threatened?” LaGrange said to my father when they were gone.

  Reuben’s eyes narrowed. “Do I need a lawyer?”

  “Did you profit from the counterfeiting?” the detective asked. “Or were you coerced and forced to do what you did?”

  “I never made a dime from it, unless you count Manny moving me from one dingy rented room to the next so I wouldn’t be found. And after I outlined the process for him under threat of injury or death, he drugged me up so I was just coherent enough to oversee it but no
t enough to break away or get help.”

  “What about the army of George Kaplans?” Ms. Washburn asked.

  “Those were a smokescreen,” my father told us. “Manny figured the way to cover the profit he was making by supplying local criminals—drug dealers and others—with fake money was to launder it through his business selling ad time. But nobody was falling for that stupid scam, so he sent all these George Kaplans around to screw up other businesses that were doing roughly the same thing, only more legitimately. That made it look like he was getting all these new clients when the other businesses went belly-up. He’s crazy, but he always has a plan.” Then he looked at LaGrange again. “So? Do I need a lawyer, or have I already said too much?”

  “I’ll talk to the DA, but I don’t think you’re going to get charged,” LaGrange said. “I’m not reading you your rights, so even if you tell me something, we can’t use it in court. How’s that?”

  “I’m afraid it’s not enough, Detective,” I said. “Unless you can guarantee he will not be facing criminal charges, we will be seeking legal counsel for my father.”

  “Your father,” Reuben echoed faintly.

  “Your father.” Ms. Washburn looked quite pleased.

  “Then I won’t ask any more right now,” LaGrange said as the young Emergency Medical Technician finished his work. “I’ll call you tomorrow.”

  “We are flying back to New Jersey tomorrow,” I told him. “Flight 247, leaving at seven a.m.”

  Ms. Washburn rolled her eyes. “Oh yeah. Seven a.m.,” she said.

  “You never answered my question,” my mother said.

  She was lying on her bed in our house, her left leg extended on an electrical device that included a brace. Her knee was heavily bandaged. The device slowly bent and then straightened the knee continuously. When it bent most severely Mother grimaced just a little.

  “You didn’t tell me you were having knee replacement surgery,” I countered. “That was a devious thing to do, Mother.”

  “I know how you worry about me,” she said, waving a hand. “I figured since I had to be in the hospital overnight and you needed to be in Los Angeles—”

  “You insisted I go to California,” I said, not correcting Mother for referring to my destination as Los Angeles because technically Reseda is part of the city. “You planned this ahead of time so that I would be away when you were having surgery.”

  She shrugged. “It worked, didn’t it? You came back and you can see I’m fine.”

  I did not mention her wincing as she said that. Ms. Washburn would probably commend me on my display of tact when we spoke later. Right now, she was standing to the left of me, at the side of Mother’s bed.

  “So instead of letting me be concerned about your surgery, you decided to let me worry about your absence and your inability to communicate,” I scolded her gently. This constituted a kind of humor Mother and I have cultivated. It seemed as if I was angry with her, but I was not. I was only pretending. Please do not misinterpret. “I sent Mrs. Schiff to look for you and she did not call me back even when you returned home.”

  “I asked Claudia not to,” Mother said. “She came by as soon as the ambulance dropped me off here, but I was afraid you’d cut your trip short. It was important that you finish what you were doing out there.”

  It occurred to me that had we come home a day earlier we could have avoided being shot at, threatened, abducted, and almost arrested, but we had managed to liberate Reuben Hoenig from his semi-captivity under the thumb of Emmanuel Hastert, known to us previously as George Kaplan. That, I supposed, came close to balancing the scales.

  Detective LaGrange had indeed consulted with an assistant district attorney for Los Angeles County and it had been determined that Reuben should face no criminal charges. While he had technically provided Hastert with the means to produce counterfeit currency, it had been done under duress and the medications he was forced to take had diminished his capacity to make sound decisions. He would be more valuable as a witness than as a defendant.

  We’d had dinner with Reuben the night before we left California. The more his head cleared the more interested he was in Mother and me. He asked many questions, some of which I was not able to answer. I’d told him about Mother, how she had raised me with understanding and pride when many wouldn’t. Reuben looked down at his plate but did not take a bite of food.

  “I wasn’t there,” he said. “I left, but you have to know, Samuel, it wasn’t because of you.”

  I actually suspected the opposite was true. “I was not an easy son to have,” I said.

  Ms. Washburn did not take my hand because she knew it would embarrass me, but she looked at me with some sadness in her eyes. Mike the taxicab driver looked in another direction.

  “It was me,” Reuben continued. “I didn’t know how to be a husband or a father. You were just a little kid. Yeah, there were some problems when you played with other children but I didn’t have any trouble dealing with that. I just didn’t know how to stay in one place.”

  “You could have asked Mother to bring us along with you,” I countered.

  “I did.”

  That had not been mentioned when Mother had told me about her days with Reuben. She had never said he wanted us to come with him on his journey. “That is not what I have been told,” I said, assuming Reuben was trying to make himself seem more sympathetic.

  “It’s the truth. Did Vivian say I didn’t want you two to come?”

  I had to admit she had not. The subject had never been broached and now as an adult I wondered why I had not asked.

  “It’s not that she didn’t want us to all be together,” Reuben said. “But Vivian was rooted to our home. She liked it there and didn’t want to leave. I guess she thought I was just bluffing and I’d be back in six months. But it didn’t work out like that. I was always trying to find a way to support the two of you back home and maybe convince her to come out here. After a while, it just got to be the way things were.”

  “That is not a very precise explanation,” I pointed out.

  Ms. Washburn gasped a little. “Samuel,” she said.

  Reuben held up a hand, palm out. “He’s right, Janet. I’ve been doing that to myself for decades, justifying what I did. The fact is I was a young idiot who thought he was going to take over the world and didn’t want to be held down by a wife and child. And I acted on a stupid impulse and spent the last twenty-seven years trying to find a way back to apologize, but I didn’t know how to do it.”

  “It is simple to come back and apologize,” I told Reuben. “One simply goes to the place where the other person is located and expresses regret.” That seemed easy enough, assuming the apology was sincere, and perhaps even if it was not.

  But Reuben shook his head. “It’s too late,” he said. “We’ve each had these long separate lives.”

  That seemed illogical to me but it was outside my area of expertise. What had been important, as Mother was pointing out now, was to obtain some means of contact she could use to find my father when she wished to do so. I asked Reuben how it would be best for Mother to find him.

  “Well, I haven’t had an address or a real job for a while now, so it’s a little sketchy,” he said. “I’m going to have to start from scratch, and that’s not going to be easy at my age.”

  “I know a place you’d be welcome,” Ms. Washburn suggested.

  Reuben shook his head again. “That would be asking too much. I’ll manage. I know my way around a sales floor and a printing press. There isn’t a lot of use for the press anymore but selling will never go out of style. I’ll find something.”

  “What about a place to stay?” Mike asked.

  “It’s been my experience these things have a way of working themselves out,” Reuben Hoenig had said.

  I looked now at my mother, wincing a little more when the therapy devic
e bent her newly installed artificial knee joint, and shrugged. “I bought a prepaid cellular phone and gave it to Reuben Hoenig,” I told her. “I will give you the number if you wish to have it. Other than that I can offer very little in terms of contact information. He will answer if he decides to answer but he said more than once that he thought he had treated us badly and was ashamed to remain in touch. So I can guarantee nothing.”

  “It’s all right, Samuel,” Mother said. “I never really expected an answer. I just wanted you to meet your father, and you’ve done so much more than that. You went above and beyond with this question. But if you don’t mind, that machine is making me tired and the doctor said I need to rest up.” She asked that I disconnect the therapy device. I did so, reminding her that she’d need it again the next day, and then Ms. Washburn and I left the bedroom.

  I closed the door very carefully and quietly, then we walked to the kitchen, where Reuben Hoenig was sitting at the table looking nervous. His heel tapped quickly on the floor and he started when he was aware of Ms. Washburn and me.

  I said, “Your cellular phone will be ringing—”

  It rang before I could finish the sentence. Reuben looked at it in wonderment, then activated the device. He put it to his ear.

  “Hello?” he said. “Vivian.” He smiled broadly.

  Ms. Washburn and I left the kitchen and walked outside. Mike was waiting in his taxicab to drive Ms. Washburn back to her apartment. I walked by her side to the taxicab’s front passenger door.

  “Thank you for all your help on this question,” I said to Ms. Washburn and Mike. “I do not believe it would have been possible without you.”

  Indeed, the flight home itself would have proven beyond my capabilities if Ms. Washburn had not brought two bottles of spring water she bought inside the security area of Los Angeles International Airport and distracted me with one of my favorite films, The Seven-Per-Cent Solution to watch on the tablet computer she had on hand. The flight was fairly smooth and I refrained from looking through the window. I had to sit in the airport restroom, fully clothed and with latex gloves on my hands, to reduce the level of volume in my ears only once.