Boston Cream

by Howard Shrier

  “You hadn’t heard about it till now?”

  “Being away from the shul, I’ve been a little out of touch. And that was my main connection to him.”

  “When did he join?”

  “He started coming maybe four years ago. He would have been in grad school, I guess. Shabbos services at first, and then a few other things, like our communal Friday-night dinners.”

  “How well did you know him?”

  He looked toward the kitchen, nostrils flaring as if trying to scent out our lunch. The waitress wasn’t in sight. “Adath Israel was a big congregation. Too big in the end, over a thousand families from the two dozen we started with. It’s one of the reasons I left. But we don’t have to get into that. You want to know how often we spoke.”

  “Yes.”

  “Not much at first. I could see right away he knew his stuff, and enjoyed doing it too. Especially the Torah service. He sang out, which not everyone does. Put his heart into it. You’re smiling. Why are you smiling?”

  “Because everyone describes him as shy, introverted. I’m having a hard time picturing him singing.”

  “Then picture it this way. A bright young man, very gifted, with tremendous responsibilities. Entirely self-imposed, you understand, but still very real. And once a week he can come and envelop himself in his tallis and close his eyes and sing melodies he has known since childhood.”

  “You’re making me want to come.”

  “So you’ll come to my new shul.”

  “Where is that?”

  “At this point, it’s more a question of when. I’m hoping to start something new, a little different, a little more intimate. There’s a place I have my eye on. But some things still have to come together. Another story for another time.”

  “Did he ever come to you for guidance?”

  “If he did, could I tell you? If David is in trouble, I would want to do everything I could to help him. But there is also the matter of confidentiality.”

  “Trust me, Rabbi, he is in trouble.”

  “You know this for a fact?”

  “I’m convinced.”

  “Is that the same as knowing?”

  “It is for me.”

  “Are you by any chance a student of Kabbalah?” he asked.

  “No.”

  “Okay. Are you familiar with Donald Rumsfeld?”

  “The former secretary of defence?”

  “Yes. I’m not sure how closely you Canadians followed the Iraqi war but he gave a rather famous speech in which he distinguished the things we know from the things we don’t know … you remember that?”

  “Yes. The known unknowns, the unknown unknowns.”

  “Exactly. Like Mr. Rumsfeld—and I am sure this is where the similarities end—Kabbalah teaches that there are many layers of understanding. Many layers of knowing. You may know in your heart that something has happened to David, but in my heart, I have to ask myself: What if I told you something that David wanted me to keep confidential, and then he turned up suddenly. Would I not have done him a tremendous disservice?”

  “Can you at least tell me if there was something he confided?”

  “Over the years, certainly.”

  “What about more recently? Did you see him in the days or weeks before he disappeared?”

  “When was that exactly?”

  “Last day of February.”

  “Let me think about that. I’m not always so good with dates. Ah, here comes the soup. Don’t tell your mother you liked this better.” He added salt and pepper to his without tasting it, filled his spoon, blew on it hard enough to send some of it back into the bowl and slurped it loudly. Beads of it glistened on his beard. When he spooned in half a matzo ball, I decided to wait until he had finished the soup before I asked any more questions.

  The waitress came and cleared our soup bowls and said she’d be right back with our sandwiches.

  “So,” he said. “Did I lie?”

  “About the soup? No,” I said. “So can you think of the last time you spoke to David?”

  He looked up at a ceiling tile. “The last time … at least a month ago.”

  “After you left Adath Israel.”

  “Now that you mention it.”

  “Was it at your home?”

  “It must have been. Yes, at home. In my study.”

  “It must have been important then.”

  “Why?”

  “For him to come to your house.”

  “A lot of people come to my house, Jonah. They come for dinner, to play guitar and sing, to welcome Shabbos, to say goodbye to Shabbos, to be with me and my daughter—who isn’t married, by the way. In fact, I thought for a time maybe she and David … but I guess there wasn’t a spark there. Maybe he just wasn’t ready.”

  Was he long-winded or avoiding answering the simplest of questions?

  “Did he seem different? Upset about something?”

  “We’re veering back into ethical problems.”

  “Please, Rabbi. His parents are going through such hell.” Might as well throw a little guilt on the fire. Always works on me.

  “As his rabbi, I—”

  “But you’re not his rabbi anymore. And you weren’t when you last saw him.”

  “I may not have been the head of his congregation, but I was still his rabbi.”

  “You won’t help me?”

  He sighed. “I’ll tell you what. Come to dinner tonight. We always make room at our table, especially Friday night. In the meantime, I’ll think it over. See if I can help you without doing David any disservice. You know Bartlett Crescent?”

  “Is it in Brookline?”

  “Yes. Not far from here.”

  “I’ll find it.”

  “Good. And if you want to have a glass of wine or two, leave your car and come on the T. We’re just up from the Washington Square stop.”

  CHAPTER 14

  “Sounds like a fix-up to me,” Jenn said.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “You and the rabbi’s daughter. Didn’t he mention she was single?”

  “Yes.”

  “Just dropped it into the conversation.”

  “In the context of David Fine. He wanted to fix David up, not me.”

  “Oh, Jonah,” she sighed. “How naive can you be?”

  “Why would he fix his daughter up with a guy who’s only in town on a job?”

  “Because you’re so darn eligible?”

  “I don’t think I’m rabbi’s daughter material.”

  “Pshaw. That’s not Yiddish, I suppose? Pshaw? It could be. It’s one of those spitting sounds you make when you explain the food.”

  I had come back to the hotel stuffed to the gills. The sandwiches at Rubin’s were huge. “They come in two sizes,” Rabbi Lerner had told me with a wink. “Large and larger.” Luckily I had only ordered the large. After the soup, I had barely finished half and brought the mountainous remains back for Jenn, who was eating it as I filled her in on the rabbi.

  “So you think David went to his house the night he disappeared,” she said.

  “We know he got off the trolley at Washington Square. The rabbi lives just up the street from there.”

  “And he wouldn’t tell you anything more?”

  “He didn’t even tell me that.”

  “What makes you think it’ll be any different tonight?”

  “He said he’d think it over. Maybe some text or other will convince him it’s the right thing to do.”

  “Man, that was good,” she said, as she balled up the wrapper of her sandwich. “And he ate a whole one?”

  “And quickly. Plus soup and a side of latkes.”

  “A man of appetite.”

  “Big one.”

  “So you’ll eat well tonight.”

  “I guess.”

  “While I languish here in the hotel.”

  “You don’t have to. You could come with me.”

  “And crowd your style? I think not. Anyway,
I’m still waiting for a callback from Tim Fitzpatrick. Maybe the congressman and his sweetheart wife will invite me to dinner.”

  My cellphone showed an incoming call from Hard Driver. I put it on speaker so Jenn could hear.

  “Karl,” I said. “How’s it going?”

  “Aw, dude, can you believe it?” he rasped. His voice is low and gravelly from years of shouting over the roar of engines; his great passion other than hacking is restoring and racing vintage motorcycles. “I broke my damn foot, man. I’m stuck behind my desk.”

  “So you’re working on our stuff.”

  “Fuck you, man. I’m in pain. And if Rosa finds out how I did it, I will be in such shit. Just because she’s pregnant.”

  “How did you do it?” Jenn asked.

  “Racing up at Mosport. My bike rolled over on me. And we’d had a pretty good relationship up to that point.”

  “You okay otherwise?” I asked.

  “Yeah, yeah. They make you wear a helmet at these things.”

  “Make you?” Jenn said. “You’d race without one?”

  “Do you wear a helmet every time you get on your bicycle?”

  “Yes!”

  “Even to the video store?”

  “Okay, no, but—”

  “See? It’s all about degree. Personal risk and personal choice. To me, cyberspace is fast, that’s where I live most of the time, but ground speed, man—when that is fast, it is something else entirely.”

  “You’re going to be a father!” Jenn said.

  “Not for three more months.”

  “Jenn,” I said, “let Karl grow up on his own time. He probably phoned about something important, like David’s computer?”

  “Right. The poker. Now that took a while, dude—the site he played on had major security. Major.”

  “But you got past it.”

  “That hurts,” he said. “That hint of doubt in your voice. Yes, I got past it, this is me here. I found his ID, I’ve seen all his transactions and I know his current balance. I’m just saying it took some time. For which you’re going to have to compensate me in full at the usual rate.”

  “Done.”

  “Doesn’t have to be the eighteen-year-old,” he said. “I don’t want to break you guys. The twelve will do.”

  The Macallan that cost a hundred instead of two-fifty. “You’re a gentleman.”

  “C’est moi. Okay, you saw the man’s credit card charges. Three fifty-dollar charges to allinpoker, all one word, dot com, fifty being the minimum buy-in. The first was last September, the next a week later, the third and final one a month after that. Conclusion?”

  “He was a quick study.”

  “Correct, sir. Each fifty-dollar payment lasted longer than the previous and he hasn’t had to re-buy since the third, so either he stopped playing or he figured out what he was doing. And the answer is, the latter. His account shows activity until a couple of days before he vanished.”

  “When did he have time to play poker?” Jenn said.

  “The early morning hours,” Karl said. “Usually between one and three.”

  “Didn’t he need sleep?”

  “Maybe he didn’t. Maybe he couldn’t. I can’t half the time. Anyway, he started off playing five-dollar tournaments and got bounced pretty fast in most of them so he scaled back to one- and two-dollar entries and did better. Started winning the odd one. When he earned house points, he used them to play in free rolls. Learning his game. Eventually he started moving back up to the five-dollar games. Winning those too. And then, finally, starting maybe a month ago, ten-dollar games. That’s as high as he ever went. But the payoffs are good: ninety if you win, forty-five for second, twenty-seven for third.”

  “He’d love that,” I said. “Ninety is five times eighteen, which spells life in Hebrew. What kind of player was he, can you tell?”

  “I couldn’t see what he played in any particular game—you know, what he went all in with, what he folded—but I can tell from his player stats, the percentage of flops he saw, that he was a cautious type. The kind of player you never hear from until he has a hand for real, then he knocks you out with kings or aces. What we enthusiasts call TAG, for tight-aggressive.”

  “Fits everything else about him,” Jenn said.

  “What’s his current balance?” I asked.

  “Almost eight-fifty.”

  “Eight hundred and fifty?”

  “Yes.”

  “Wow.”

  “I know,” Jenn said. “It’s nothing.”

  “I wasn’t being sarcastic. I mean wow. That’s almost twenty times his original stake. That can’t be easy to do.”

  “Trust me,” Karl said.

  “But he never charged back any winnings to his credit card. So as impressed as I am by his learning curve, there’s still no evidence he played for or won large amounts. Imagine if he’d had an actual stake.”

  “Maybe he did,” Jenn said. “We’ve been thinking that money in his closet might be winnings from poker. Maybe it wasn’t. Maybe it was a stake he was planning to use and never got to.”

  “Someone would have to have given it to him. Someone who knew he was good and wanted to use him to win. And where do you go to play big games?”

  “There any casinos there?” Karl asked.

  “There must be,” Jenn said. “We’ll check.”

  “Is it just me or does this all sound really far-fetched?” I said. “Isn’t it possible that he was just what he was, an overworked, overtired physician in training who needed to do something at night when he couldn’t sleep? It’s too big a leap from what he was doing, this five- and ten-dollar stuff, to gambling for thousands of dollars.”

  “I know,” Jenn said. “It’s a stretch.”

  “You want a stretch?” Karl said. “You should hear what I told Rosa about my foot.”

  Next time the phone rang, it was Mike Gianelli. “That picture you sent me,” he said. “Of the guy you think tried to grab David? I got something for you.”

  “Shoot.”

  “Not over the phone,” he said. “Come in and see me.”

  “Man, I just got back from Brookline.”

  “Sorry,” he said. “I only got the call now.”

  So back I went to Brookline, whence I had come. Considering I had never heard of it three days ago, I seemed to be wearing a rut in its direction.

  The same big side of beef, W. Kennedy, was on the desk. He looked at me like he’d never seen me before when I said I was there to see Gianelli. At least he didn’t hold up his finger to shush me. Just gave me a flat blue look, then picked up the phone, punched in four digits, waited, said, “He’s here. Okay,” then said to me without looking up, “He’ll be down.” And that was all the energy he had to expend on me that day.

  Gianelli came down more quickly this time and led me through a secure door behind Kennedy’s counter to an interrogation room. There were four chairs around a round table. He pointed to the one facing the door. “Sorry we can’t use my office right now, but we’re lucky this one’s free. You want a coffee?”

  “No, thanks.”

  “Bottle of water?”

  “Sure.”

  “Okay. While I’m going, can I see that licence of yours again?”

  I took it out of my wallet and handed it to him.

  “Won’t be a minute.”

  And he wasn’t. He was more like four or five, during which time I wondered if there was anyone behind the mirror in the wall to my left. There was a video recorder on a tripod in the far right corner, but no red light showed.

  When Gianelli came back, he had my water but not my licence.

  “Remember what I said about the Boston PD? They’re ready for you now.”

  CHAPTER 15

  There were two of them, each one uglier than the other. And one was a woman, built like one of those brick houses they put around high-voltage substations. She was about thirty-five, black with a shaved head and round rimless glasses, dressed in a baggy d
ark purple suit over a black shirt buttoned to the top. She was no more than five-five and probably outweighed me—and I’m carrying 190 now. Her partner was over forty and definitely outweighed me. Be hard not to, given he was a good six-three and not built small. Between them, they could more than handle me. They could stop a bullet train.

  “Jonah Geller, these are Detectives Betts and Simenko from the Boston police,” Gianelli said; Betts was the woman. “They’d like to ask you a couple of questions about the photos you emailed me.”

  “Why are the Boston police interested?”

  “We’ll sort out the jurisdictional issues later.”

  “There are no jurisdictional issues,” Betts said. Being short, she maintained an outward thrust of her chin that was probably supposed to intimidate people but just made her look defensive.

  Gianelli didn’t seem intimidated. “Like I said, we’ll sort that out later. Geller, you sent me this picture by email, right?” He placed a printout of the Kevin Walsh photo on the table.

  There was no point in denying it. The cyberlink was there. “Yes.”

  “And this one?”

  It was McCudden’s battered face, with blood coming out of his mouth and cheek.

  “Handsome devil,” Simenko said.

  “You said it was your belief that these men attempted to abduct David Fine on Summit Avenue in Brookline on the evening of February 28?”

  “This is starting to take on the rhythm of an interrogation,” I said.

  “It’s a conversation,” Gianelli said.

  “For now,” Simenko said. He took my licence out of the side pocket of his grey suit coat, examined it and dropped it back in, like that was supposed to make the score fifteen-love.

  “You further stated,” Gianelli said, “that they—”

  “Further stated?”

  “You told me you caught them following you yesterday and there was an altercation?”

  “Mostly verbal.”

  “That was why McCudden was sleeping,” Simenko said. “You talked him unconscious.”

  “Is that the last time you saw him?” Betts said.

  “McCudden?”

  “Him or Walsh.”

  “Yes, that’s the last I saw of either.”

  “No further altercations, verbal or otherwise?”

  “There’s that rhythm again.”