I would do anything to lift you up now.
* * *
“That reporter must have been some enemy with a grudge,” I said as we barreled across the Newburgh–Beacon Bridge on Route 84. “By the way, I’ve been meaning to tell you that my girlfriends have been confessing they have crushes on you. Really. Jill thinks you’re unbearably cute, Lila said you’re smarter than anyone except her husband, and Blair, well, Blair thinks you’re very hot,” I said. “And she loves your creative way of getting the bad guys. She thinks there ought to be a statue of you in Riverside Park, next to Eleanor Roosevelt.”
“That’s the last thing I want.”
“Well, sweetie,” I said, turning off the music and making my voice loud and clear. “No one deserves it like you do. Just think of the innocent children whose lives would have been ruined without you. The pundits who criticize you for ignoring street crime for white-collar crime, they’re idiots. They don’t get the picture; they don’t know that closing down banks that trade with big narcotics dealers protects schoolchildren. And the terrorists you’ve caught! Those you uncovered while investigating BCCI, for one thing. Then there are all those guys on death row, innocent guys, who didn’t go to the electric chair because you found ways not to charge them with murder one. You—Bob Morgenthau, one man—have set a million legal precedents because you wouldn’t be intimidated.”
“Are you writing my obituary?” he asked dryly.
“In the words of your father, nobody likes a wise-ass, or I should say a W.A.,” I teased.
“For God’s sakes, keep your eyes on the road! You’re riding the shoulder.”
* * *
Maybe I can go through the details of some of your best cases, be a mirror for the success you really are. You always refuse to tell reporters your favorite case. You say, “Each one is important to the victim.” But I know what things you particularly hate: rape, elder abuse, and being told you can’t win. This year has been a particularly good year for all three.
* * *
“Just look at the impossible prosecutions you did this year,” I said, as my speed leaped over the limit, “the Kimes murder convictions and the indictment of a rapist’s DNA footprint. The cases are so symmetrical. One without the body of the victim and the other without the body of the criminal! As though Balanchine had choreographed it or Ovid had put it in an ode. ‘It’s a beautiful thing,’ as Lila would say.”
“Okay, okay,” he groaned, but less strongly. He loved my exuberance; the sillier I got, the better.
“I’m just so proud of you; I want to pull over and put my arms around you.”
“Don’t!”
He leaned over. “There’s Route 32. Take a left.”
“I’m in the process of doing that. And I know where we’re going.”
“Ha,” he grunted. “You’ve gone steaming through intersections in every town from Bordeaux to Athens. Remember Alsace, when we went thirty miles out of our way? And the county in the west of Ireland where we almost drove off a cliff into the Atlantic Ocean?”
I started chuckling and didn’t stop, and then he grudgingly started too. “Nobody knows what I have to contend with in my personal driver.”
Then his smile turned to a frown again. He bit into a fresh Stayman apple picked from our trees. “No, it was really terrible.” He gave a little shake of his head and kept munching.
“Who are you talking about, sweetheart? Not me?”
“No!” he said. “What they did to this Irene Silverman.”
“Oh!” That was the “no body” conviction. A mother-son team named Kimes had murdered and stolen their way across the country, and nobody had been able to catch them. Then they came to New York, wormed their way into the life of an eighty-two-year-old lady named Irene Silverman, and killed her for her money. Unfortunately for them, their “perfect crime”—they had disposed of the corpse so well, nobody could find a trace of it—landed in the jurisdiction of my husband, who loved such impossible cases.
“What really went on in the office on that one?” I asked. “No, really, I can’t remember the details.”
“We didn’t have a case. There was no body, no confessions, no eyewitnesses, no bloodstains, no overturned chairs or weapons in the drainpipes, no physical evidence at all. Some in the office didn’t want to indict the Kimes duo. They seemed like reasonably normal people who just didn’t know where Silverman had gone.”
“So how did you persuade everyone again?”
“I knew they’d killed her,” he said, talking with a little animation now, “but we had no way of proving it. We searched for a body in every disposal site in four states. Nothing. I put four assistants and seventeen detectives working full-time, and they found stun guns, duct tape, handcuffs, knockout pills, and records of offshore bank accounts. The circumstantial evidence was wild.”
“Oh yes, yes, it was so strong,” I pealed.
“The Kimeses had convinced the old lady’s staff to give them her Social Security number, then they got her ID and credit cards and forged her handwriting. Sante Kimes dressed up in a red wig and frilly nightgown and told a notary she was Mrs. Silverman,” Bob said, laughing. “So he stamped the document, and all at once they held the deed to her eight-million-dollar town house. That property was what they wanted, why they killed her.”
Bob’s ADAs had interviewed four hundred witnesses—from the notary to friends to maids—and they got a unique verdict. From how I saw it, it was a homicide proved entirely by inference.
“The public didn’t know it, the newspapers never got hold of this, but the FBI nearly ruined the game. Halfway into the investigation, they decided to butt in and question the witnesses we had gathered. If a witness like the notary told one story to the DA and a slightly different one to the FBI, he’d be thrown out of court. I called Louis Freeh, you know who he was, the director of the FBI, and Freeh told FBI New York to ‘stand back.’”
* * *
He was better, my poor baby. But I was still so nervous—would it last?—I felt as if I had nothing under me but the gas pedal. In fact, I’d just run a red light; fortunately, he hadn’t noticed.
* * *
“How much time did they get?”
“Kenneth Kimes got 130 years to life and his mother, 127½ years to life,” he declared.
“It led to a landslide of convictions, right? Letting the worst murderers, the ones smart enough to erase all the evidence, know that they’d go down anyway.”
“Some time later,” Bob said, nodding, “we had a doctor who had thrown his wife out of a plane into the ocean. He remarried, relocated, had a child, and thought he was scot-free. It took us twelve years, but we got him. We had at least twenty-two more cases like that.”
“Wow, your memory always astonishes me, much better than mine.”
“No, you’re wrong. I can’t remember half what I used to.”
* * *
You are feeling your age. But you are determined to stay alive. No more steaks, no more pasta, only a tiresomely healthy regimen to keep yourself trim and well. People become impatient with your partial deafness, but what is it like for you to hear not a thing at a crowded party and to even be unable to join the conversation at small gatherings because you don’t know what people are talking about? I can imagine you working so strenuously to hear the strategic nuances of your bureau chiefs’ debates and thanking God that you will be able to guess what they are going to say before they say it. Working harder than anyone else, only to read a news essay headlined “Is Morgy Really Up to the Job?”
I wanted to go out and announce to the city, “He’s sharper than any of you.”
* * *
“You know you’re the only one in the family who’s always right,” I said. “You know that, don’t you? It doesn’t matter whether it’s directions to an inn or a criminal case, it’s uncanny—the way you not only do the right thing, morally, but you get the little daily things right.”
“I’m not smart. You’re the
smart one.”
“Why would you ever think that?” I asked.
“Because I’m stupid, that’s why,” he said, his voice again taking on the timbre of Eeyore.
I started to hyperventilate. “Sweetheart, did you forget that you set a second precedent? Like getting a rape indictment against something you can only see through a laboratory microscope?”
“You mean the East Side rapist? I suppose so.”
In March 2000, Bob’s office brought the first case against a rapist known only by his “DNA footprint.” The tool of DNA became widely used by prosecutors in 1994; it not only convicted criminals but freed the innocent. This rapist, who had terrorized the city’s East Side and victimized at least sixteen women in five years, had left his DNA all over the place. But nobody could catch him or even identify who he was.
“We had the DNA evidence for a conviction but no suspect to pair it with. And you know, there’s that five-year statute of limitations on most rape in the state of New York that I’ve been trying to get changed for years; I was afraid it would run out before the rapist was caught. So I indicted the DNA.” He finally looked pleased with himself.
“Wow, yes, how brilliant.”
“Well, it just infuriated me that murder, kidnapping, major drug sales, and even arson, they’re A felonies with no time limit on prosecution, but rape, which is one of the worst of all crimes, is a B felony with a short statute of limitations.”
“The rape statute is sexist. And damn unjust.” He was over it. He was high now, and so I was high too.
“We argued that rape did more permanent damage than any crime except murder and that if we indicted this rapist now, that indictment would stand no matter when he was caught.” And the grand jury agreed.
“I’m so proud of you for that, Tart. There’s no one who sticks up for women like you. I love you even more than I did twenty-four years ago.”
“You don’t think I’m an old fart? Past my prime?”
“Are you kidding? You’re eighty-one going on sixty. That’s what your doctor says.”
And after we arrived at the inn and climbed into our regal Victorian bed, the doctor would have been gratified to see he was right.
That afternoon, we went down to the lake to sit back in the Adirondack chairs, Bob to read Barron’s and me to crack open The Screwtape Letters by C. S. Lewis.
* * *
Oh hell, I can’t read this boring Christian character study of the devil. I believe in Christ but I also consider myself a Jew who aspires to do good. I’m hankering to dip into my latest spy novel. But what is this? Your chair is empty! Where are you, why didn’t you say where you were going? The minutes crawl by. Now it’s almost an hour. I can’t concentrate on Red Gold and the exploits of Furst’s hero, Jean Casson, either. What if you are still depressed, what if something terrible is happening to you that you didn’t want me to see? I feel panicked, hands turning to ice …
Oh, there! There you are! Coming down the hill. Very slow and deliberate … bowlegged … like a cowboy. Surely, that isn’t a gun in your hand?
But you’re getting closer, and now I see it’s a bunch of wildflowers! Blue salvia, white blooms like daisies, ferns, tall curvy grasses, and something with scarlet berries.
* * *
“I picked these for you,” he says with that shy little smile that slices into me. It is a beautiful wild autumn bouquet. He sees my face. “Don’t worry,” he says quickly, “I’m fine. Thanks to my wife.” He is pleased, happy, himself again. Thank God. Leaning into him, I can feel the blissful warmth of his body, and he knows it will become my warmth too.
* * *
One day not long after our anniversary, my father came to the farm. He sat at the dining table, blowing smoke rings for the benefit of the kids. He was taking his time telling us how he crept through the enemy-infested jungles of Guadalcanal. “The men in my unit were following the sound of these faint screams, which got louder and louder until we saw what was happening in a clearing ahead. They were women, screaming. The Japs had tied these women to trees and were using them for bayonet practice.” My father looked down for a minute, and when he looked up, there was the pain, the same pain I saw when not so long ago I would walk out of a room to avoid him. Jarring pain for such a deadpan face: a plea in his furrowed brows, his silvery-blue eyes swimming behind his thick glasses, the half-moon of his smile gone dull. “They were nuns and they were naked, some dead and some still alive, and they were covered in blood. We were only ten … we were outnumbered … there was nothing we could do about it but watch.”
Then he slapped his tobacco pouch angrily down on the table. “I’d never heard of anything like this. These weren’t the goddamn enemy; they were nuns!”
Everyone was silent. The kids looked dazed; I should have seen the gruesomeness of the story coming and told them to go outside, but I was obsessed with knowing every detail of what Dad had done in the war. And the rare times he felt like talking, you just had to freeze where you were and listen.
I started to ask a question when Bob interrupted. “I had some experience with that,” he said quietly. “We had a perpetrator who raped this nun repeatedly and then took a nail file and carved twenty-seven crosses on her body. She was so psychologically damaged—nightmares, phobias—that she was under constant psychiatric care.”
“I hope you got the monster who did it,” Dad said.
“Oh, we got him all right,” Bob said, an uncharacteristic tremor in his voice. We all stared at him. I couldn’t help but think of the story he always told reporters: “I never get emotionally involved in a case.”
“We wanted to spare her the trauma of testifying,” he continued. “So we plea-bargained. He was sentenced to ten to twenty years and was publicly registered as a sex offender for life.”
My father nodded slowly at his son-in-law. “You can’t forget it when you see a thing like that, Bob.”
At eighty-seven, Dad was still a tall, straight, poker-faced gentleman who, like my husband, was a protégé of Zeno’s. Stoics both, they were men who never shared what was bothering them, and with only six years separating them, they got along like brothers.
That was fine with me because the last thing I wanted was to feel my father’s pain. Unfortunately, I had to see it on his face anyway as it was almost exclusively directed at me, the furrowed entreating brows, the longing in his big eyes. He wanted what we hadn’t had since I was a child: a real relationship.
But I couldn’t. I would avoid him, drifting out of a room as soon as he came in. I would lie in bed in the morning and listen to him talk to Bob until he’d say “Where’s the sleeping princess?” and I knew I had to make an appearance. When alone with him, I felt I was talking to someone behind a glass window on one of those maximum-security prison phones. I tried to be friendly, affectionate, but I just couldn’t do it. He hadn’t been there for me since adolescence, when he was seldom home and never present when he was home.
I felt that he loved me for my money. After his steel business went belly-up when I was in my early twenties, he became an alcoholic and spent his savings not on rent, utilities, or nutritious food but on booze and boy toys—the newest Glock pistol or .25-caliber handgun for his championship silhouette shooting. We had a cycle going. He would let his bills pile up until his lights were cut off or he was about to be evicted so I would have to rush in and save the day. I was his enabler, no doubt about it, and I loathed the role. One day, I found all the news articles and notes I had sent him for years unopened. He had apparently just tossed them aside. I realized much later that though he loved my successes, they made him feel even more of a failure.
I felt that the order of the universe was upside down here; the father I was supposed to have was in actuality my child.
I had become intrigued, however, when in 1990 my father confided that he had helped liberate Ohrdruf, the first concentration camp discovered by the Allies. He had told a friend that what he had seen there he had never gotten over. B
ob and I persuaded him to give testimony to Bob’s Museum of Jewish Heritage. Hundreds of survivors had made taped confessions of their experiences for the museum, but few Christians had stepped up, and they were the Holocaust witnesses who would be judged as particularly impartial and believable.
But then I forgot about Ohrdruf until one day I was helping Dad clean out the cartons that had remained unpacked in his apartment since my mother had died fourteen years before. Under the pastel silk nightgowns Mom loved to wear, I pulled out strange things—a yellowed, old handwritten silk map, a trick compass, and then a military cap with skull and crossbones, a symbol of the Nazi Party.
I was completely confused. Had he been a Nazi sympathizer? Had this been the reason for his mysterious, detached behavior at home?
He stubbornly refused to talk about them. “I took an oath of silence,” he would say over and over again, like a POW telling the enemy only name, rank, and serial number. This set me on a six-year quest to find out who he really was. I took out all my reporter’s tricks and strategies to tease information out of him. It became a contest between us—one that ironically brought us emotionally closer. I put things together: his deadpan demeanor; his ability as a crack marksman who won trophies into his eighties; his photographic memory; his ability to quickly master languages and any new skill; his fluent German; the guns he had hid around the house, even one under my bed; the game of “writing smaller” we had played that he had learned as a secret courier delivering messages so small he could swallow them if threatened with capture.
I was so consumed by this process of reinventing my father, of revising my history of him; in one sense he had balanced out my life, even saved it, the only person who was consistently kind and accepting of me. But I knew the flaw that had led him to fail in life had condemned me too; no matter how much I had succeeded outside, inside a bad egg begets a bad egg. But perhaps neither of us was bad inside at all.
It was a race against time. After years of abusing his body with alcohol, pipes, and cigarillos, my father had gotten both Alzheimer’s and lung cancer. He was losing his short-term memory while remembering events of the past clearly and in detail. I drove the three hours to Milford every weekend to visit him, often bringing Amy, whose intelligence, huge smile, and Alice in Wonderland hair he loved. She was the only one who could get him to shed his holey bathrobe and don street clothes. It was she whom he now called “my little princess.”
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