Grave Endings

by Rochelle Krich

  The other men resumed their prayers, but Dr. Lasher removed and folded his tallit and slipped it into a large blue velvet bag. (My father later told me that from the time Dr. Lasher heard that Aggie was dead until after her funeral, according to Jewish law he was an onen, absolved of all ritual observance and mitzvot.) He unwound his tefillin and, with tears streaming down his cheeks, kissed the leather boxes before winding their leather straps and tucking them into a small velvet bag that he placed into a larger one. Then he knelt at his wife’s side, adjusted the blanket someone had spread over her, held her hand, and whispered to her for a few minutes before he left with the officers to identify his daughter’s body.

  I have wondered over the years whether Dr. Lasher kissed the boxes that morning out of habit, or acceptance of God’s will. I remember being awed by and envious of the rocklike faith that enabled him to get through those first days. The urgent but quiet phone calls to his rabbi and others when the coroner’s office insisted on an autopsy; more calls after the autopsy to the director of the Chevra Kadisha burial society, who assured him that all the organs had been returned to the body before it was transferred to the mortuary, where the body was ritually prepared by women for burial. The funeral. The burial, where Dr. Lasher rent his garment and threw shovelful after shovelful of red dirt onto the grave. I think he found more solace kissing those little black boxes than his wife did from the sedatives in his black bag.

  “I hear that everyone at B’nai Yeshurun is very happy with Zack,” Mrs. Lasher said now. “He looks like a fine young man. And the Abramses seem very nice. What are their first names? I forgot.”

  “Larry and Sandy.”

  “Very, very nice. My husband said so, too. They’re both attorneys, my husband said. Zack was going to be a lawyer, too, wasn’t he? And then he learned in Israel. Everything is bashert. Which yeshiva?”

  I told her. “Is Dr. Lasher home? I’d like to talk to him.”

  “Your throat hurts?” She smiled. “How many times did he check your throat? Twenty? Thirty? And your brother—I think Dr. Lasher gave him stitches. Twice, I think. Which brother was that? Noah?”

  “Joey.” She knows I’m here about Aggie, I thought. “Is Dr. Lasher busy?”

  “He’s learning. I hate to interrupt him when he’s learning, Molly. He’s so busy all week, late into the night, and sometimes weekends, too. When he finds a few hours for Torah, it’s a luxury.”

  “Mrs. Lasher—”

  “Remember how sad you were when things didn’t work out with Zack? And now they did. Everything is bashert. I heard your sister Edie made the shidduch.” The match. “She has three children, right? I was thinking of taking one of her Israeli dance classes. My friends tell me she’s a terrific teacher. And Mindy? How many children does she have, bli ayin hara?”

  “Two girls and a boy.” Bli ayin hara, I echoed silently.

  “Beautiful, kenehoreh, beautiful.” She smiled again. “I’m sure your parents have a lot of naches from all of you. And Liora?”

  “She goes on dates all the time. She hasn’t met the right person yet.” There was a desperate quality to Mrs. Lasher’s small talk, to her smiles. “I need to ask Dr. Lasher one or two questions, Mrs. Lasher. I won’t take much of his time.”

  “Maybe I can help you?”

  I hesitated. “I just wanted to know what the detective told him.”

  “You’re a good friend to worry so much.” Mrs. Lasher took my hands. “He told us about this man Creeley. He needed money for drugs. He saw our Aggie walking. . . .”

  Was it possible that she didn’t know? Had Connors showed the letter that accompanied the locket to Dr. Lasher? Don’t tell my wife, she won’t be able to bear it.

  “I really need to talk to your husband,” I said.

  She nodded and released my hands. “I’ll tell him. I’m so glad you came by, Molly.”

  twenty-seven

  DR. LASHER WAS SITTING BEHIND HIS DESK WHEN I ENTERED the study, a wood-paneled room lined with built-in mahogany bookcases filled with a collection of medical and Judaic texts. It’s an impressive collection, and Dr. Lasher is an impressive man. He’s tall and somewhat hunched, and he has a narrow face and high forehead and gold-rimmed bifocals that he wears low on his nose. He’s in his mid-sixties, but looks older, because of his thinning hair, which has more white than gray, and because of the beard he decided not to shave after the thirty days of mourning for Aggie were over.

  “It’s been a long time since you’ve been here,” he said when I was seated. “You look wonderful, Molly. You’re happy?”

  “Very.”

  “Good.” He nodded. “I spoke to your chossen at the kiddush. I can see why you picked him.” He shut the text that had lain open in front of him. “Mrs. Lasher says you came to talk to me about Aggie?”

  “Yes.” Aggie’s father had always been direct. Now I was the one who craved small talk. On the way here I’d rehearsed my opening, but it had flown out of my head.

  “You’re nervous, Molly? Don’t be. What do they say—‘I’m a doctor, you can tell me anything’?” He smiled briefly, a forced effort. “Detective Connors told me you’re bothered about this man who killed Aggie. You want to know more about him. You want to know what happened.”

  “I was at his funeral,” I said. “I was surprised you came. I saw your name in the guest book.”

  Dr. Lasher nodded. “I surprised myself. I almost didn’t go. Mrs. Lasher and I don’t know the family, they don’t know us. But we’re connected, whether we like it or not. Our daughter, their son. A terrible link, but a link. I wanted to show them I don’t hold them responsible for what he did. Why were you there?”

  “I’m not sure.” Randy’s mother, Doreen. It was too complicated to explain. “I didn’t see you at the service.”

  “No.” He shook his head.

  “I talked to Randy’s father and sister, Dr. Lasher. They told me Aggie knew Randy, from Rachel’s Tent. Did you know that all these years?”

  He picked up a letter opener and ran his fingers across the blade. “When Aggie was killed, the police asked us about Creeley. We told them the truth. Aggie never said anything about him. We’d never even heard his name.”

  “Why—?” I stopped.

  “Why didn’t we tell you the police asked us about him? There was nothing to tell, Molly. Creeley had a solid alibi.”

  Not so solid, I thought. I licked my lips. “The sister told me Aggie and Randy had a relationship.”

  Dr. Lasher put down the letter opener. “And you believed her?” His wise eyes were full of reproach.

  My face was warm. “She said they dated a few times. She said Randy wrote to you about it before he died.”

  “Detective Connors showed us the letter Creeley wrote to us, and the locket they found on him. The one you gave her, Molly. But you know that.” He cleared his throat. “He was infatuated with Aggie. He probably told her he had feelings for her. . . .”

  “Not that letter,” I said, wishing I were somewhere else, hating the fact that I’d caught my best friend’s father in a lie. “The one he mailed a week before he died. The one where he talked about his relationship with Aggie.”

  Dr. Lasher’s face was flushed. “There was no relationship,” he said firmly. “The letter wasn’t signed. It had just the initial R. The writer was sorry for our loss. He meant to write to us when she died. He knew we were good parents, that we wanted what was best for Aggie, that we must have been very proud of her.”

  This sounded like the letter Trina had described. I was relieved to know she’d told the truth, at least about that. But I was surprised Randy hadn’t signed the letter. “Did you tell the police about the letter?”

  “About a condolence letter six years after the fact? I tossed it out.”

  “Then why did Randy phone you, Dr. Lasher? I have his cell phone,” I added before he could deny it. I had no interest in trapping him in another lie. “I recognized your phone number.”

  Dr. La
sher removed his bifocals and set them on his desk. “You’ve been in this room many times, Molly. There are hundreds of books here. Medicine and Torah. You think they’re just books? They’re my life, Molly. You think I would spend forty years trying to heal people, you think I would study the Torah for over fifty years, that I would study God’s laws and violate them, that I would take a man’s life?” He sounded more sad than angry.

  “I need to know about the phone call.”

  “You want to know. You don’t need to know. All you need to know is that I didn’t kill Randy Creeley.”

  I thought about the gentle, caring man sitting five feet away from me, about the way he’d kissed the black leather boxes, about the black bag with its syringes and vials.

  “About the phone,” I said. “It shows other calls Randy received, and some that he made. They might be evidence.”

  “Evidence of what? The police say he overdosed.”

  “I have to give the phone to the police, Dr. Lasher. I wanted to tell you before I call Detective Connors.”

  “Are you asking me or telling me, Molly?” He put on his glasses. “If you’re asking, my answer is: Do what you think is right.”

  What was right? I’d been agonizing for hours over giving Connors the phone and subjecting Dr. Lasher to police scrutiny. I’d eliminated the call to the Lashers, but Connors could get a complete list of Randy’s calls from the cell phone company. In a way I’d tampered with evidence—accidentally—but the call was evidence only if there was a crime, which Connors kept telling me wasn’t the case. But if Dr. Lasher had nothing to fear . . . ?

  “Did you talk to Randy, Dr. Lasher?”

  “Will my answer help you decide?” He sounded as close to sarcastic as I’d ever heard him. “Creeley phoned the house the Tuesday evening before he died. Thank goodness I answered the phone, not Mrs. Lasher.”

  “What did he say?”

  “He told me he was the author of the letter I’d received. For a second I didn’t know who he was. Then he said he’d worked with Aggie at Rachel’s Tent. He was trying to make amends for things he’d done wrong. He had something of Aggie’s and wanted to return it. It wasn’t his to keep.”

  My heart thumped. “The locket?”

  “He didn’t say. That’s what I assumed. He told me how much he had liked Aggie, how sad he was about what happened. He’d written another letter, but he needed to see me. I told him I’d think about it and said I would call him back. My mind was reeling. How did this man get Aggie’s locket unless he killed her? But maybe it wasn’t the locket? Maybe he’d taken something from Aggie’s desk. Creeley had a solid alibi. He sounded genuinely upset about Aggie. He was almost crying when he talked about her.”

  “And then you phoned him back,” I said, phrasing my guess as fact.

  Dr. Lasher nodded. “Early Wednesday morning. I was catching up with paperwork at home. He sounded nervous and said he couldn’t talk long. He told me again that he felt terrible about Aggie’s death. I asked him if he had her locket. He said yes. I asked him, ‘Did you kill my daughter?’ It was a surreal conversation, Molly. He swore he didn’t. He asked me to give him one day and he would tell me everything. He had to take care of something first, to make sure he wouldn’t be putting someone in danger.”

  The package, I thought, with a thrill of alarm.

  “I didn’t know what to believe. I thought, if he did kill Aggie, maybe he would confess to me more easily than to the police. Because he phoned me, right? He wanted to talk. Thursday morning I phoned Detective Porter, but he was out. I didn’t leave a message. I was going to ask them to put a wire on me, you know? Like in a detective movie. Crazy.” Dr. Lasher shook his head. “A few hours later Detective Connors came here and told my wife that Creeley was dead, and that he had killed Aggie. I suppose Creeley was trying to do teshuvah.” Repentance. “I have to give him credit for that.”

  “Did you tell Detective Connors about the phone calls?”

  “To what end? Creeley was dead.”

  “What if he didn’t kill Aggie? You said he sounded genuinely upset.”

  “That doesn’t mean he didn’t kill her, Molly. Just the opposite. He couldn’t live with the guilt. Connors showed me the letter. Creeley said he wished he could undo what he did. Halevai. I wish it, too.”

  “But what if he didn’t?” I don’t know why I was fighting Creeley’s guilt. Because of the package, I think. And Trina’s trashed apartment, and the redhead in the parking lot. “Don’t you want her killer to be caught?”

  Dr. Lasher looked stricken. “Can you even ask that, Molly?” he said with a profound sadness that shamed me and made me wish I could retract the question. “The first year that was my waking thought, and my last before I fell asleep. I davened to Hashem, ‘Let the police find the man who did this and bring him to justice.’ And after that I davened, ‘Let me sleep one night without nightmares, or if not a night, a few hours. Let my wife laugh again. Let her walk into our daughter’s room without crying. Let her go to someone’s simcha and be able to share their joy with a full heart.’ ”

  I blinked back tears. “I’m sorry.”

  “Do I want Aggie’s killer caught? I think Hashem caught him. You know how I know? Because Thursday night I slept, Molly. And the next night, and the next. And Shabbos my wife said, ‘Let’s go to Molly’s chossen’s aufruf.’ So we went. And she’s thinking about getting a new dress for your wedding. So I know.”

  I should have left the room then, but I had one more question. “When you phoned me that night, Dr. Lasher, you told me no one had seen Aggie at the vigil.”

  “Right.” He sounded cautious.

  “You said something I never thought about till now. You asked me if I had any idea where Aggie might have gone. And then you said, ‘If you know something, Molly, please tell us.’ And I was just wondering, why would you say that?”

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  There was a warning note in his voice, my last chance to back off. “Why would you think there was something I would keep from you and Mrs. Lasher? Unless you suspected that Aggie was seeing someone you wouldn’t approve of, that she told me what she couldn’t tell you.”

  Dr. Lasher was looking somewhere beyond me. Then he smiled, and shook his head.

  “I always told my wife, ‘Molly is bright, she doesn’t miss anything.’ ” Now he was looking at me, and I could see deep pain in his eyes. “A few months before she died, Aggie wasn’t herself. I asked her what was wrong. She said the job was making her stressed. But one night I picked up the phone and heard her talking to a man, laughing with him, arranging a date for Saturday night. I waited for her to tell us about the date. She always told us. But she didn’t say anything, not to me, not to my wife. Saturday night she said she was going with a friend to the movies. Which friend? I asked. Oh, you don’t know her, another social worker. Her, not him. The next week she had to stay late for a meeting at work. How was it? I asked when she came home. Again, I knew she was lying, she was dating a man she couldn’t bring home. And then all of a sudden it was over, and Aggie was Aggie again. I don’t know what happened, why it ended. I didn’t ask. She never said anything to you?”

  I shook my head.

  “Two dates, three dates—that’s not a relationship. In the end Aggie knew what was right for her. She made her own decision. Creeley is dead, it’s over. I’m not interested in finding out why he killed her. He loved her, he hated her.” Dr. Lasher shrugged. “It doesn’t make a difference. I don’t want Aggie’s name in the papers. It’s a good story. A sheltered, beautiful young woman falls in love with a handsome drug addict who kills her because her Orthodox Jewish parents forbid her to see him and six years later kills himself because he can’t live with the guilt. It’s not exactly the truth, but it’s a good story. Maybe they’ll write a book, or make a television movie. Is that what you want, Molly? For Aggie, for her mother?”

  twenty-eight

  Monday, February 23. 9:12 A.M. 1200 b
lock of North Vermont Avenue. A man walked up to a woman on the street and said, “You’re gonna be sorry, you and your wonderful family,” then fled. The suspect is described as a 49-year-old African-American man standing 5 feet tall and weighing 165 pounds. (Northeast)

  HORTON ENTERPRISES OCCUPIED THE TENTH FLOOR IN one of those large office buildings on Wilshire east of Vermont, halfway to downtown and a block from the old Bullocks Wilshire where my mom bought the Priscilla of Boston wedding gown that none of us Blume girls would have worn even if it hadn’t turned yellow in the garage.

  The reception area was sleek—gray leather chairs, glass-and-chrome coffee and end tables, abstract art on walls papered in pale gray with a subtle burgundy stripe. The receptionist, an attractive woman in her thirties with shiny auburn hair and cognac-framed glasses so narrow that I wondered what she could see through them, offered me magazines and a cup of coffee.

  “It might be a while,” she said.

  From the apology in her voice I sensed I’d be in for a long wait, but after five minutes and only a few sips of very hot, very good coffee that I would have liked to finish, she told me Horton was ready to see me.

  In person Horton was taller than he’d appeared in the photo in Bramer’s office. Nine years had added lines and jowls to a face with a ruddy complexion and had thinned his silver-gray hair, which had been styled to camouflage the thinning. But he had an electric energy—his voice, his smile, the spring in his step—that a photo couldn’t capture and that made him appear much younger.

  After pumping my hand as though it were an oil derrick, he introduced me to his son, Jason, who was several inches shorter than Dad—around five-ten—with a slimmer face and dark hair. I had a moment of nervousness, but Jason didn’t recognize me from the funeral. Both men were wearing navy suits that fit so perfectly they must have been custom tailored.