Bearing Witness

by Michael A. Kahn

  It took another forty minutes, but finally one of the homicide detectives, a forty-something black man named Ray, was able to leave the scene to come with me to the branch office of Mercantile Bank that was two blocks from Harold’s apartment. The reason? The receipt. We’d found a battered leather briefcase in the corner of Harold’s living room. There was nothing inside it but a Mercantile Bank receipt for the withdrawal of $100. According to the receipt, Harold had withdrawn the cash from the branch office at 9:28 a.m. that morning.

  The bank had its procedures. Even when faced with an irascible homicide detective and an impatient attorney, it took more than an hour for the bureaucracy to disgorge someone with sufficient authority to drill open Harold Roth’s safe-deposit box. By then it was a mere formality. Whatever we might find in there, I knew what we wouldn’t find. According to the security guard I talked to while we waited, Harold Roth had been standing at the entrance when the bank opened at nine o’clock. He hurried straight to the safe-deposit vault where, according to the log, he’d signed in at 9:05 a.m. and signed out thirteen minutes later. The vault clerk remembered that Harold showed up with an old leather briefcase, took his safe-deposit box to one of the privacy cubicles, and stayed in there for about two minutes. He came back out acting furtive and clutching the briefcase against his chest.

  “Here we go, Detective.” It was one of the bank vice presidents. He was holding a safe-deposit box. “If you don’t mind,” he said, gesturing toward a dour, gray-haired woman standing behind him, “Vera here will take an inventory of what you find inside.”

  The contents proved easy enough to verify: thirty shares of May Company stock, five Israel bonds (total face value: $3,400), $2,050 in fifties, an expired passport, and a photocopy of the Last Will and Testament of Harold A. Roth.

  “Anything else?” Vera asked.

  I held up the empty box so that she could see inside.

  ***

  I stormed past the flustered receptionist, not even bothering to identify myself.

  “Oh, ma’am,” she called after me.

  I headed down the corridor, ignoring her. I’d been on this floor often enough to know the exact location of his corner office with its panoramic view of the Arch and the riverfront. In fact, he was standing by that window when I came storming in.

  He turned, surprised, just as a male voice came booming over his speakerphone. “They just might go for that approach, Stanley. I like it.”

  He leaned over and quickly lifted the receiver. His courtly smile faded, no doubt in reaction to the wild expression on my face. “Run it by the mayor first,” he said, his voice smooth. “See whether he thinks it’ll fly. You’ll be at the dinner tonight, right? We’ll talk then. Got to run, Donny. Be sure to give your lovely bride a big hello from me. Certainly. Take care, Donny.”

  He hung up and gestured toward the upholstered chair in front of his antique table desk. “Well, hello, Rachel. I wasn’t expecting you.”

  I remained standing. “Who did you tell?” I demanded.

  He looked perplexed. “Tell? About what?”

  “About what I told you yesterday. About your uncle Harold.”

  He settled into his high-back chair and steepled his hands beneath his chin. “I don’t believe I am following you.” He spoke cautiously.

  “Did you tell your client? Did you tell Conrad Beckman?”

  He took his time, seeming to contemplate the question. “Rachel, I certainly do not want to seem evasive, but I believe that question crosses the boundary. I should think that any discussion I may have had on the subject of Harold Roth is protected by the work product privilege and the attorney-client privilege.”

  “I want an answer,” I said, practically shouting.

  “What makes you think you are entitled to one?” he responded, trying to sound self-righteous, to reclaim the high ground.

  “Because of what happened, that’s why.”

  “Ah,” he said with the hint of smile, “has someone served my uncle with a subpoena?”

  I stared down at him. “No, Stanley. Someone has killed your uncle with a gun.”

  He lurched back his chair. “My God. When?”

  “This morning. Sometime before eleven. Who did you tell?”

  “Maybe it was a burglar.” His voice was unsteady.

  “Come on.”

  He looked at me, perplexed, defensive. “Why do you doubt that?”

  “Because the police found his wallet on top of the bedroom dresser. In plain view. With one hundred seventeen dollars still in it. Whoever killed him wasn’t looking for money. Answer my question, Stanley. Did you tell Conrad Beckman?”

  He stood up and walked over to the window. After staring out at the Mississippi River for a moment, he turned back to me. “Rachel,” he said, his mask partly back in place, “the death of my sole surviving uncle comes as a complete shock to me.” He came back to his desk and took a seat behind it. “I can assure you that I have absolutely no reason to believe that our conversation yesterday afternoon or any subsequent conversation I may have had played any role whatsoever in his death.” He stared at me calmly. “Accordingly, I am afraid we have nothing further to discuss today.”

  I placed my hands on his desk and leaned toward him. “Your own uncle.” I shook my head in revulsion. “My God, Stanley, what runs through your veins? Antifreeze?”

  I straightened up and stared down at him.

  He said nothing, his face expressionless. He tried to meet my stare, but after a moment he looked down at his desk and picked up his Mont Blanc fountain pen.

  I turned and left.

  Chapter Eighteen

  “Why Hitler’s birthday?” Benny asked.

  I shrugged. “Seems as good a place as any to start.”

  This was the last thing I had time for. It was Tuesday night—T-minus six days to trial—but I was totally consumed by the vision from that morning of Harold Roth in his easy chair. I had an eight-page list of pretrial tasks to complete by Monday morning, I was going to be in Jefferson City most of tomorrow, and I’d already given up an hour I didn’t have tonight to drop by Jonathan’s house to read his daughters a bedtime story and, in the process, to check on the level of police security in place during his absence. (He’d left for Jefferson City that afternoon.) My schedule was so hectic that my dinner tonight had been an apple and a Snickers bar on the drive to the library. But none of that mattered now. I was obsessed with Harold Roth’s missing journal. I had to see whether I could reconstruct it, or at least certain parts of it, and Benny, God bless him, had agreed to help. We were in the main library at Wash U.

  I gestured toward Harold Roth’s last undercover report, the half page of typed material concerning his unsuccessful efforts to obtain information about the SS-Death’s Head Formation unit in St. Louis. That was the report in which he repeated Herman Warnholtz’s boast that his storm troopers were prepared to do violence in furtherance of the cause of Nazism.

  “Why Hitler’s birthday?” Benny asked again.

  “Harold was kind of cagey, but he seemed to confirm that there was some act of violence—maybe more than one. When I asked when, he told me to focus on Nazi celebration days. What could be bigger than Hitler’s birthday?”

  Benny nodded thoughtfully. “It’s worth a try.”

  We were seated at one of the microfilm readers. Benny got up and went over to the file drawers filled with microfilm of issues of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch dating back to the 1920s. He turned to me and with a frown, “When was that scumbag born?”

  “April 20, 1889.”

  “April twenty,” he repeated as he kneeled down to study the dates on the file drawer labels. “Which year should we start with?”

  I glanced at the date at the top of Harold Roth’s final report: February 27, 1942,

  “Nineteen forty-two,” I said.

 
; Benny returned with a roll of microfilm and threaded it into the machine. “So if something happened on April twentieth,” he mused aloud as he used the fast-forward button to advance the film in starts and spurts, “it’d be reported in the April twenty-first edition.”

  When one of his fast-forward spurts landed us in the middle of the features section for April 20, 1942, he slowly advanced the film until we were staring at the front page of the April 21 edition of the Post-Dispatch. The headline immediately yanked us back to World War II:

  U.S. AND FILIPINO FORCES

  FALL BACK IN PANAY BATTLE

  SOVIET GAINS IN LENINGRAD

  AND CENTRAL PARTS CLAIMED

  We carefully scanned each page, looking for an act of violence that could somehow be linked to the American Nazis. As we moved through the newspaper, page by page, the black-and-white images pulled me back into an era before I was born, to a time that seemed in some ways more exotic than ancient Rome. All the men wore hats, the women gloves. Lawrence Welk and his Champagne Music were held over at the Casa-Loma Ballroom on Cherokee, admission 50 cents. Wool sweaters were on sale at Stix, Baer & Fuller for $3.59, and “luxurious furs” were available at Scruggs•Vandervoort• Barney for $69.95. A fifth of Hiram Walker cost $1.79. The Esquire was showing Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn in Woman of the Year. The Uptown had Robert Taylor and Lana Turner in Johnny Eager. According to the box scores, the Browns had beaten the Indians the day before, and the Cards had knocked off the Reds.

  “Oh, Jesus,” Benny said quietly, pointing at the small headline on the screen.

  The headline read:

  MAN DIES IN PAWNSHOP FIRE

  OFFICIALS SUSPECT ARSON

  The story was just three paragraphs, cobbled together in time for the deadline. Myron Bernstein, owner of the Southside Pawnshop, had died when flames consumed his place of business late on the night of Monday, April 20. He was fifty-seven years old, married, and the father of five children, all grown. His wife said he usually stayed down after hours on Monday nights to count his inventory, do his books for the prior week, and go over his records. The article reported that the fire marshal and the police believed the fire was deliberately set, that the arson squad had opened a file, and that the police captain had assigned two homicide detectives to the matter. Nevertheless, the article was silent as to what had triggered that level of investigative activity so promptly.

  The reasons began to emerge over the next several days of coverage as Benny and I followed the story on microfilm. The presence of several empty gasoline cans strewn around the store was strong evidence of arson. The homicide part was just as obvious: the dead man’s feet and arms had been bound by baling wire. Then came the Nazi connection. On the day of the fire, a city desk reporter at the Globe-Democrat received an anonymous telephone call announcing that in honor of Adolf Hitler’s birthday, “we’re going to barbecue a fat Jewish pig tonight.” The reporter had dismissed it as a kook call—one of many he received each day—until he learned of the fire that night. The connection seemed clinched by the pair of dripping red swastikas painted on the outer side walls of the building.

  The horrible crime possessed the city, or at least the newspaper, for several weeks. The mayor, the governor, and both U.S. senators denounced the crime and condemned the perpetrators. There were daily front-page updates on the investigation for nearly three weeks. But then, like most such crimes that aren’t solved quickly, it dropped from view. The last investigation update appeared on May 27, 1942. We skimmed through another month’s worth of newspapers but found no further mention of it.

  With a sense of unease, we moved ahead one year to April 21, 1943. Had those Hitler celebrants struck again? But there was nothing in that day’s edition of the Post-Dispatch or, for that, matter, the rest of the week. Nor was there any mention of the arson murder that had occurred the prior year. The institutional memory of a newspaper didn’t seem to extend that far.

  We checked the 1944 and 1945 editions as well, but Hitler’s birthday seemed to have passed both years without incident.

  “I wonder if they ever solved it,” I said to Benny as he rewound the roll of microfilm that included the edition for April 21, 1945.

  “It could take us forever to find out,” Benny said. “There’s no index for this microfilm.”

  “I’ll ask Jonathan. He has plenty of contacts with the police and prosecutors. Maybe one of the older guys will remember.”

  Benny walked over to the file drawers and put the roll of microfilm back in its slot. “Any other Nazi holidays?” he asked.

  “Let’s try May first,” I said. “I read in one of those reports that Hitler declared May Day a Nazi holiday.”

  Benny shrugged. “Worth a shot.”

  But we came up empty. We searched through the first week in May for the years 1942 through 1945, but found no acts of violence that appeared to be in any way related to the American Nazis.

  Benny turned to me as he held the rewind button for the May 1-15, 1945, roll. “Nu?”

  I leaned back in my chair and crossed my arms over my chest. I frowned in thought. “You know what that arson job reminded me of?”

  “What?”

  I gazed at Benny. “Kristallnacht.”

  He raised his eyebrows and nodded solemnly. “When was it?”

  “Sometime in the late thirties, right? Toward the end of the year, I think.”

  We confirmed it with an encyclopedia. Kristallnacht, or the “Night of Broken Glass,” began on the evening of November 9/10, 1938. Joseph Goebbels’s SS troops, urged on by his denunciations of the Jews, poured into the streets to wreak vengeance. Other Germans joined the SS troops, and soon an angry mob was raging through the streets in a frenzy of anti-Semitism. By the following morning, 91 Jews were dead and hundreds seriously injured, 177 synagogues were burned or demolished, and nearly 7,500 Jewish businesses destroyed.

  We started with 1942. Benny threaded the microfilm and advanced it until we were staring at the front page of the November 10, 1942, edition of the Post-Dispatch:

  YANKS TAKE ORAN; DARLAN CAPTURED

  ______________________________

  Another American Column Drives

  Toward Rommel Army in Libya

  ______________________________

  Gen. Eisenhower’s Mother Hopes

  “Dwight Will Be Good,” Return Soon

  We paged slowly through the issue, but there were no reports of any violent crime in St. Louis for the prior day. Or for any of the remaining days that week.

  “Try one more year,” I told Benny.

  He came back with the microfilm roll covering November 1 through 15, 1943. As I watched him thread it into the reader, I said, “Did I tell you that Harold Roth knew about San Carlos de Bariloche?”

  Benny glanced over at me. “How?”

  I shook my head. “He wouldn’t say, but he guessed the town’s name as soon as I told him about the joint venture in a South American resort town.”

  “That’s weird.”

  I nodded. “It tells me that there’s another piece of the puzzle we’re missing. And remember, Beckman Engineering wasn’t the only one involved in a joint venture down there. Beek Contracting did that floodwater system on the lake down there in 1968.”

  “Oh, yeah.”

  “That one was a money loser, too, according to my expert witnesses.”

  Benny squinted at the screen, which was displaying the second page of the sports section for November 8, 1943. “Maybe I’ll do some poking around tomorrow,” he said as he pressed the fast-forward button. “See if I can find out anything else about that town.”

  “There,” I said as the film stopped at the front page for November 10, 1943. I pointed at a smaller headline near the bottom of the page:

  Action In Boston Urged

  On Tracts Against Jews

  The on
e-paragraph blurb reported that the Massachusetts Public Safety Commissioner had urged Boston officials to confiscate anti-Semitic pamphlets in the wake of nearly forty assaults on Jews throughout the city over the past several weeks.

  A small article on page three described a memorial service held for the German Jews who had perished on that night five years ago on Kristallnacht. The service had been lead by Rabbi Abram Levine of Temple Shalom. With a twinge of poignancy, I saw his portrait again—that face glaring into the camera, pipe clenched between his teeth, those dark bushy eyebrows over fierce eyes. It made me sad.

  “I wonder whether Harold Roth was at that service,” I said.

  Benny silently advanced the microfilm page by page. We found it on the first page of the city section:

  JEWELER MURDERED ON SOUTH SIDE

  POLICE SUSPECT NAZI SYMPATHIZERS

  In a crime that had veteran police officers shaking their heads in shock, the unclothed corpse of a south side jeweler was dumped from a moving car outside the third district police headquarters at midnight last night. The corpse was riddled with bullet holes and painted with swastikas, the symbol of the German Nazis.

  The victim was identified as Harry Rosenthal, age 51, of the 5900 block of Enright. Rosenthal was the proprietor of Mound City Jewelry on the 3200 block of South Meramec.

  According to the police, a missing persons alert on Rosenthal had been issued by 9 p.m. after the police received a report from a passerby who claimed to have seen Rosenthal grabbed outside his jewelry store by a masked man around 6 p.m. The witness said that Rosenthal was dragged into the alley and shoved into a car, which promptly drove off.

  Police Captain Clarence O’Bannion said that the list of suspects included every known Nazi sympathizer in the area. He said his investigators would begin bringing in suspects for questioning beginning today.

  Rosenthal is survived by his mother, a sister, his wife and two sons.

  ***

  I leaned back in my chair, numb. “That’s Uncle Harry.”