Benny turned to me, aghast. “That poor guy was your uncle?”
I shook my head. “Not mine. Ruth’s. The day I met her she had just said kaddish for him at the synagogue. Two Novembers ago.” I pointed toward the screen, where the date at the top of the newspaper page was visible. November 10, 1943. “We first met on Uncle Harry’s yabrzeit.”
Chapter Nineteen
It was soon apparent that the main value of my trip to Jefferson City was the solitude on the train. No phones, no interruptions, no distractions. I’d stuffed my briefcase with trial preparation materials and got more done on that two-and-a-half-hour train ride than I would have accomplished in a whole day at the office.
As for the sole purpose of the trip, it took less than thirty minutes with the Missouri Trade Commission’s file on Beckman Engineering to conclude that its 1978 investigation had nothing to do with the claims in my case. Apparently, some eager staff attorney named Robert Hennepin—no doubt an ambitious recent grad with a fuzzy grasp of antitrust law—decided that Beckman Engineering’s acquisition of a small engineering firm in Cape Girardeau posed a threat to free enterprise in southeast Missouri. Regardless of the merits of his concerns, it didn’t take long for a platoon of lawyers from Roth & Bowles to hit the beach armed with reports, charts, and affidavits from a Princeton economist and a University of Chicago professor of law. They drove their Sherman tanks right over poor Mr. Hennepin, leaving treadmarks across his back.
At least I was able to make good use of the extra time. I spent about an hour in the law library in the Missouri Supreme Court building running down a few legal issues in Ruth’s case, and then I located an open phone in the attorney room and spent another hour collecting and returning my phone calls. I caught up with Jonathan around three-thirty. He was still meeting with Paulie Metzger, so I took a seat in the waiting room outside the small conference room and pulled out another sheaf of pretrial materials.
At four-fifteen the door opened. I didn’t need a name tag to identify the fat, balding man in his late sixties who stepped out of the room shaking his head in exasperation. Paulie Metzger was wearing a plaid sports jacket, wrinkled brown slacks, and scuffed black shoes. He had a pencil mustache, a Mr. McGoo nose, and an unlit cigar clenched in his teeth.
A moment later, Jonathan appeared in the doorway, his tie loosened, his shirtsleeves rolled up to the elbow. He crossed his arms over his chest as he leaned against the doorjamb and stared at Metzger’s back.
“Your choice, Paulie,” he said.
“Come on, Wolf,” Metzger said in a raspy voice as he turned to Jonathan. “How many times I gotta tell you? I’m just the lawyer for the trust here.”
“Save your speech for the parole board, Paulie. You’re as much a suspect as any of them. Today’s Wednesday. The offer stays open until sundown Friday.”
“Sundown? What are you—Wyatt Earp?” And then he chuckled. “Oh, yeah, the Jew Sabbath, right?” He turned with a dismissive wave. “Don’t hold your breath, Wolf.”
I watched him board the elevator. When the doors slid closed, I turned to Jonathan. “What a creep.”
Jonathan pursed his lips together and nodded.
“Any luck?”
He shrugged. “We’ll see. I gave him some heavy stuff to mull over.”
On the drive home from Jefferson City I brought Jonathan up to date on the Harold Roth situation. He already knew Harold was dead—I’d told him yesterday before he left for Jefferson City—but the two homicides from the 1940s were news to him. I read him the articles I’d photocopied from the microfilm. He was intrigued. As we headed east on Highway 70, he called one of his contacts with the St. Louis police and asked him to see what he could find out about the results of the two homicide investigations.
***
What is it?” I asked.
We were about fifty miles outside St. Louis. Jonathan had been checking his rearview mirror with concern. I turned around to look. In the falling darkness I could make out a brown GMC van about a hundred feet behind us.
“Probably nothing,” he said. “It’s been back there since we left Jefferson City. Can you read the license plate?”
I squinted. “Looks like an Illinois plate, but it’s too dirty to read.”
Twenty minutes later, it was night. We’d just passed St. Charles and were now on the outskirts of St. Louis. The highway traffic was moving smoothly in the dark.
The first hint of peril came just beyond the Lindbergh exits off 1-70. We were in the right lane and I was flipping through the radio stations in search of a good song.
“What’s this?” Jonathan mumbled.
I turned to watch as a van pulled into the middle lane, passed us, and pulled back into our lane right in front of us.
“Is that the same one?” I asked.
He nodded. “Look at the plates.”
Illegible Illinois plates, covered with mud.
As we approached the airport exit, a large pickup truck pulled into the middle lane directly alongside our car. A quarter mile, a half mile—it was keeping exact pace with us. I glanced over at the speedometer: 64 miles per hour.
“What’s going on?” I said, peering through Jonathan’s window at the pickup. It was a dark-colored vehicle with a raised cab. The passenger window was opaque.
We had just entered the intricate network of overpasses at the I-70/I-170 interchange when our car was bathed in light, as if someone had set off a phosphorescent flare in the backseat. I turned and squinted into huge headlights. They were less than ten feet from the rear fender. I looked at Jonathan just as the headlights behind us jumped from high beam to spotlight. Momentarily blinded, Jonathan lowered his head to avoid the glare.
“Look out!” I yelled, pointing ahead.
The brake lights on the van in front had just come on. As Jonathan moved his foot off the gas toward the brakes, the pickup truck whipped to the right and rammed into us hard, knocking our car onto the shoulder. Jonathan’s window exploded into a thousand pieces. The wind howled as broken glass whistled through the car.
Jonathan had both hands on the steering wheel, fighting for control.
The pickup rammed us again. Our car careened to the right, wheels squealing.
“No!” I shouted, grasping for the dashboard as the car smashed through the guardrail.
We were airborne—
plunging—
the night sky above us—
below us—
above us—
then a crashing jolt…
***
I opened my eyes to the wailing.
There was a blurry image in front of me.
A tombstone?
I blinked.
A tombstone.
An upside-down tombstone, half sunk at an angle in the upside-down snow. A brightly illuminated tombstone. It cast a long, stark shadow.
I blinked again. The tombstone was still there. So was the loud wailing.
My brain seemed to be operating in slow motion. Gradually I realized the wailing sound was actually a car horn. I wasn’t dead. The tombstone wasn’t upside down. I was.
Something was pushed hard against me. I looked down—or was it up?—and felt with my hands. My sluggish brain processed the information: an inflated air bag was pressed against my body, holding it in place. I was strapped inside a car upside down, suspended by the seat belt.
I stared out at the tombstone. The faded engraving was all but unreadable, especially upside down. I could only make out the first name—Jeremiah—and the date of birth: March 8, 1897.
My head was throbbing. My neck was stiff. My hands were cold. Numb.
The wind was blowing. An icy winter breeze. I could feel it against my face, on my hands, ruffling my hair. The windshield was gone. Crystallized pieces of glass clung from the corners nearest me.
“Rach
el?”
It was a whisper, barely audible over the howling. At first I thought I was hearing voices—words from inside my head.
“Rachel?”
The voice was familiar. I frowned.
The wailing. The car horn. Jonathan’s car horn. Jonathan’s car.
Jonathan!
I turned my head, grimacing from the pain.
“Oh, no,” I moaned. “Oh, Jonathan.”
He was suspended at an odd angle by his seat belt, his upper torso crammed against the steering wheel. The roof had partially caved in on his side. His air bag hadn’t inflated. He turned his head toward me. There was blood on his forehead, blood in his hair, blood dripping slowly down—up?—onto the roof of the car.
“Rachel?” he asked softly.
“It’s me, Jonathan. Oh, my God.”
“Tell me what hurts.”
“What hurts?” I paused, and did an inventory. “My head. My neck.”
“Is anything broken?”
“What?”
“Try your arms and legs. Can you move them?”
I tried. I could. “They’re okay. But what about you?”
He winced. “My left wrist is broken. Maybe my ankle, too. The right one.”
“Oh, Jonathan.”
“My phone has to be somewhere.”
“I’ll find it for us.” I slid my hand down along the shoulder harness, looking for the buckle. “Oh, Jonathan, I’ll get us help. Don’t worry. You’ll be okay. I promise.”
It took me a full five minutes to unlatch the seat belt, brace myself against the roof, wrench the door open, and drag myself through it onto the frozen ground. I kneeled in the snow, drenched in perspiration as I tried to catch my breath. By the time I’d stopped panting, I was shivering. It took no time for the frigid air to seep through my silk blouse, gabardine skirt, stockings, and loafers. My coat was still in the car. I’d slipped it off on the drive back. My teeth were chattering as I crawled halfway into the car to retrieve it. Standing in the snow, I fumbled with the coat buttons, my fingers nearly crippled from the cold.
I climbed back in the car and checked on Jonathan. Fortunately, he’d kept his winter coat on during the drive. He told me he wasn’t cold, but I didn’t know whether to believe him.
I gave him a gentle kiss on his ear. “Hang on, Jonathan. I’ll find the phone and call for help.”
I searched inside the car but couldn’t find it. I clambered out and stood up to survey the area. Although the car’s engine had died upon impact, the headlights remained on, and they were illuminating a scene right out of a low-budget horror flick. The car had come to rest in the middle of Washington Park Cemetery, the run-down graveyard near the airport where several generations of poor black families are interred. The headlights were creepy stage lighting for the dilapidated burial grounds.
Massaging the back of my sore neck, I tried to get my bearings. The path of the car would likely dictate the location of any items flung from it. High above the cemetery grounds, the highways crisscrossed on their overpasses, the exit and entrance ramps looping in big sweeping arcs. I located the smashed guardrail. The rest of the path was easy to trace from the trail of broken glass, debris, and slide marks below. The car had tumbled down the embankment, hit a concrete drainage ditch, and flipped over, landing on its roof in the snow. It slid through the cemetery, barely missing several grave markers before coming to rest right in front of Jeremiah’s half-buried tombstone.
After twenty minutes of searching—during which I came across my purse and Jonathan’s sunglasses—I found his phone half buried in the snow on the near side of the drainage ditch. Stumbling through the snow, I carried it back to the car and kneeled in front of one of the headlights to see what I was doing. Holding my breath, I flipped the phone open and pressed the Power button. Nothing at first, and then the little number screen lit up, blinked several times, and flashed Ready.
I exhaled slowly. “Thank you,” I whispered as I pressed *55, the emergency number for the Highway Patrol.
Chapter Twenty
The emergency-room physician told me Jonathan never lost consciousness. Although he had suffered a severe concussion and a gash in his scalp when the car flipped over, along with a broken wrist, a broken ankle, and internal bruising, he’d remained conscious the whole time. Apparently, that was a good sign. The best sign, though, was that he was about to be transferred from intensive care to a regular hospital bed where I’d finally get to see him. By comparison, I’d come through the accident practically unscathed. Just a contusion on my forehead and a stiff neck that probably wasn’t whiplash.
Jonathan had certainly been conscious when the Highway Patrol and ambulance arrived. Indeed, by the time the ambulance reached the hospital, the paramedics had already called ahead, at Jonathan’s insistence, for two homicide detectives. Although the emergency-room physician refused to let the police near the patient until he’d been stitched and X-rayed, his broken bones set, and his condition stabilized, as soon as the doctor gave the okay, the detectives filed in with their notebooks and recorders.
I’d slept for about two hours on a waiting-room couch after the emergency-room physician came out to give me a status report at four a.m. The detectives woke me at 6:45 a.m. after they interviewed Jonathan. One of them was Poncho Israel, a huge black man with the build of an aging offensive tackle and a perpetually melancholy expression. We knew each other from a prior case.
Poncho tugged at his Fu Manchu mustache as he spoke. “An incident like that,” he said, shaking his head slowly, “car smashing through a railing, the Highway Patrol should get half a dozen calls from passersby on car phones. But not here. No one noticed a thing. That’s how they planned it, Rachel. Those trucks did more than pin you in. They screened you from view.”
“Skinheads?” I asked.
“Maybe, but Mr. Wolf put a lotta punks behind bars during his prosecutor years. Some of them don’t believe in letting bygones be bygones, especially now that he’s no longer in the U.S. Attorney’s office.”
“Come on, Poncho,” I said, shaking my head stubbornly, “it has to be the skinheads. They know he’s tracing their source of funds. That’s why he was down in Jeff City. They know he’s coming after them, and they’re getting nervous.” I crossed my arms over my chest and stared at both detectives. “That pickup truck has paint from Jonathan’s car scraped along the passenger side. And don’t forget about the brown van with the Illinois plates. Find one of those trucks and I’ll bet you’ll trace it right back to Spider.”
***
At the pay phone down the hall from his hospital room, I called Jonathan’s housekeeper again to give her a status report. Then I called my secretary to explain why I’d be in late.
“What can I do?”
“I’ll be okay,” I said, studying my pocket calendar. “You and Benny keep pressing ahead on the pretrial stuff. See if we can move the prep session with Steiner to after lunch, okay?”
“Oh, my God, Rachel.”
“Hang in there, Jacki. We’ll pull through this.”
Jonathan was still asleep when I tiptoed back into the hospital room. He was on his back with his arms at his side and his right leg suspended in a canvas sling about a foot above the mattress. The ankle cast ran from his foot to his knee. His left arm was in a cast up to the elbow. There were bruises on his face, his left eye was blackened, and his head was wrapped in gauze. He had an IV drip in his right arm and several monitor wires running from different parts of his body to a bank of machines on a cart beside the bed. Nevertheless, he seemed to be sleeping peacefully. Thank goodness.
As quietly as I could, I lowered myself into the chair next to his bed and closed my eyes. Not to sleep, even though I was totally exhausted. No, I closed my eyes to shut off the turmoil for just a moment. It didn’t work. I seemed to be running on autopilot somewhere out there along the
edge of chaos. I’d just survived an assassination attempt on Jonathan and an automobile crash right out of a stuntman’s bad dream. It was the kind of night that merited at least a week of recovery time, preferably on a warm beach somewhere in the Caribbean. Instead, I had the biggest trial of my life starting in four days. Faced with far too many pretrial tasks for the hours remaining, I didn’t have time to do what any normal person ought to do: enjoy a tidy little mental breakdown. I didn’t even have time to do what I really wanted to do: collapse into someone’s arms sobbing hysterically. Worse yet, the only person whose arms I wanted to collapse into had a cast on one and bandages on the other. So I did the next best thing: I sat there with my eyes closed and wallowed in self-pity.
“Good morning, Rachel.”
I opened my eyes. His were open, too. They looked drained. I stood and leaned over him, banishing my selfish thoughts.
“Hi,” I whispered. I kissed him softly on his nose.
“How’s your head?” he asked.
“Just a bump.” I shook my head nonchalantly, trying to conceal my neck pain. “It’s nothing.”
I gently laid my hand on his chest. He looked battered and worn, but he also looked resolute. I thought of his Golden Gloves days. He looked like he’d been pummeled hard for the first eleven rounds but was determined to answer the final bell.
“How bad does it hurt?” I asked.
“I can’t tell. They have me on painkillers.”
“Oh, Jonathan.”
“Don’t worry. It’ll be worth it.”
I gave him a puzzled look. “What will?”
“This.” With an effort, he turned his head to look down at his casts. He looked back at me, his green eyes fatigued but unyielding.
“What do you mean?”
“They’re not clever enough to cover all their tracks. We’ll find them. We’ll hunt them down and find them, and when we do, we’ll follow the chain of command right to the top. What they tried last night translates to two counts of attempted murder. That’ll put Kurt Robb behind bars for life. Then we squeeze Paulie Metzger again, cut off their source of funds, and Spider is history.”
Bearing Witness Page 19