Murder in the Melting Pot

by Jane Isenberg

  She threw on her parka, leashed her dog, and the three of them crossed the road and stood at the gate, staring through the chain links of the fencing. “See the big square in the side of the plant? That’s the door where the fruit containers, the kosherers, and most of the other workers go in and out. The front entrance is just a normal-sized door on the other side. Now look at those fruit crates stacked all over. See the three over there?” Miranda pointed. “There’s a little space between those three stacks where one former employee used to go on her break to smoke. Just file that picture in your head.”

  Rusty had peed, so they crossed the street again and Miranda pointed at the old farmhouse. “Check out the windows in the B & B that face the processing plant.” She brought the dog inside and left the disconsolate pooch lying at the front door gnawing a fake bone and already waiting for her return.

  “Follow me. Then you’ll have your car.” For reasons she didn’t care to explore, it was important to Miranda for Harry to see that she could limit her drinking so as to be able to drive herself home and for her to remember that they were going their separate ways right after dinner.

  Was it disappointment or surprise that widened Harry’s eyes for a second? “Whatever you say.”

  CHAPTER 20

  Guest book: “Here to evaluate area mental health services. Maybe if those who need counseling could get it, there wouldn’t have been such a tragedy across the street from this comfortable and affordable B & B.” Maude Finch, PhD, Olympia, WA.

  They entered the restaurant together. “Hi, Annette. Good to see you again. We have a reservation for two under my name.”

  “Sure. Nice to see you too, Miranda.” The glance she gave Harry was in-quisitive. “Right this way please.”

  When a young man came by to take their drink order, Miranda requested a glass of Roussanne from Coyote Canyon, a winery in Horse Heaven Hills. She also asked for separate checks.

  Harry flinched and ordered a cup of black coffee. “I don’t drink when I’m working.”

  Miranda thought he sounded self-righteous. Anyway she was used to drinking alone. Her own wine couldn’t come soon enough.

  “What’s good here?”

  “The lasagna. It’s homemade.” She hesitated for barely a second before she heard herself saying, “But Harry, are you ill? You look terrible. What’s wrong?”

  “This is how I look every time my life turns to shit. Just listen.” She had no choice. His words rushed out too fast to interrupt. “About an hour after I kissed you goodbye and you took off in your truck that Saturday, I got a call from my dad, who was traveling in Amsterdam with my mom.” His voice turned husky. “She’d thought returning to a place he’d once enjoyed would jog his memory, rejuvenate him. Ha. She died over there in her sleep. He was in his PJs, lying on the bed next to her corpse when he called me. Phoning me was the last rational thing he did.”

  “Oh my God, Harry.” Miranda was helpless to prevent her eyes from tearing up. She pulled a Kleenex out of her pocket and dabbed at them.

  “It’s weird. She died in his sleep, too. Poor guy. I mean, he woke up and there she was, still lying right next to him, but dead.” Harry’s voice softened. “He’s been losing it for about a year and she’d never been really sick, so he wasn’t expecting this. Neither was I. He’s the one with the heart condition. Go figure.”

  “Were you and your mom close?”

  Harry held up two fingers and crossed them. “But my mother not only died, she died six thousand miles away. It was totally surreal. If my dad hadn’t been demented already, this shock would have unhinged him.” He clenched his fists as if to defend himself from this memory. “I called Julia’s mom and my sister Holly in Seattle and booked a flight to London. Then I drove to the airport. From there I called my part-time secretary to ask her to postpone everything. I flew to London, and then to Amsterdam. I got there very, very late the next night.” Harry’s voice lowered. “When I walked into my parents’ hotel room, my poor dad was still in his PJs on the bed talking to my mom’s corpse! Jesus!”

  Miranda reached across the table and took his hand.

  “I tried to make him understand that she wasn’t going to answer him. Ever. But I didn’t want him to have a damn heart attack. Then I had to get a doctor to declare her dead, make the Dutch cops understand that my dad hadn’t killed her, change their flight arrangements, and get all of us back to Seattle. I should have called you then.” He frowned at this missed opportunity.

  “Harry…” Miranda squeezed his hand. When their server returned, she ordered lasagna for them both.

  “Let me finish. I stayed with my dad in their condo arranging my mom’s funeral while Holly worked the phone. My aunt and uncle came from Toronto with their kids and grandkids. Julia and her mom drove over, too, with a couple of my dad’s brothers and my mom’s cousin, who was her best friend. We had a private graveside service and sat shiva for two days in my parents’ condo. I should have tried to reach you and at least left a message, but I was in this bubble of family and funeral and…” Harry grimaced.

  “Harry…”

  “The night of the funeral my dad left the condo in his PJs to look for my mother. My uncles and I had to go out and search for him. I found him outside a Starbucks she liked, waiting for it to open.” Miranda kept squeezing his hand. “Holly moved into his condo for a while and we hired an agency to send caregivers there while she’s at work. Then we started trying to figure out how and where dad should live so he could be safe and not too miserable and not make Holly crazy either. We don’t think he’s going to get better.” Again Harry’s face contorted. “Holly’s fabulous and super-close to my dad, but she’s got a demanding job that keeps her sane. Besides, my sister will tell you herself, she’s not exactly caregiver material. She doesn’t want kids. She doesn’t even have a pet.”

  Miranda was tempted to tell Harry how her dad took off and her mom needed her to look after nutsy Grandma Fanny, but she wanted to hear more of Harry’s story and he clearly needed to tell it.

  “When I got back to Yakima, I really should have called you and explained everything. But I had to catch up with a few clients I’d bugged out on and at the same time deal with Julia’s total despair.” Harry took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. “Julia and my mom were very close too.” He inhaled as if hoping to gather strength from the air. “Would you believe my poor five-year-old kid is wetting her bed again and seeing a goddamn grief counselor?”

  “With so many people to worry about, no wonder you look so terrible. I just wish I’d known. Maybe I could have helped somehow.”

  Harry’s reply was barely audible, so Miranda leaned closer to listen. “I sure could have used at least a text from you wondering what happened, why I didn’t call. Once I got back here, I felt like I’d waited so long that I’d broken that spell we had, our spell.” He actually hung his head. “I figured either you weren’t really interested in a serious relationship with me or you were hurt and pissed at me. I imagined all that passion that attracted me to you in the first place turned against me. And I was right. It was.” He ran his hand through his hair and looked up. “But Julia kept asking about you, and then last weekend she wanted to know if you’d died like her nana.” He lowered his eyes. “That really got to me, so I manned up enough to e-mail you.”

  Julia’s obvious affection for Miranda was as precious to her as Harry’s attraction. “I’m very glad you did.”

  Harry actually smiled. “You could’ve fooled me.” But his smile faded, and when he spoke next his voice was still low but surprisingly stern. “Listen, if a girlfriend of yours said she’d be in touch and didn’t follow through, you’d have worried about her, tried to reach her, right?”

  “I guess so, but I’m not exactly up to date on how to communicate with friends or dates. Since I was thirteen, I lived a kind of monastic life with my mom and my grandma.”

  “You did mention that you were shunned by your peer group
for a while.”

  “For years. I was a pariah. Even my dad actually thought I’d shaken little Timmy Schwartz to death. My parents divorced and I felt that was my fault. My dad married a much younger woman and they had a baby, a little girl. When his trophy wife wouldn’t let me pick that infant up or be alone with her, my dad didn’t contradict her. That’s when I began cutting myself, but you know that.”

  “I wondered about why. Did it help?”

  “It helped for a few seconds. But then that little relief wasn’t enough and I wanted to die. I slit my throat.”

  “Yeah. I saw that too. At the Canyon. Right under your jaw. The line. Was that a cry for help?”

  “It must have been, because it worked. My mom was a fixer, a PT. She fixed people for a living. She got me to a therapist who specialized in adolescent depression and also home-schooled me so I didn’t have to go to high school. She encouraged me to apply to college and graduate. I did, but I was so worried about being Googled that I kept a very low profile. After that, when I couldn’t get work, my mom made me a caregiver for my grandma and kept me on at home. She encouraged me to sue the SPD, to move and open a B & B. Last year she died of lung cancer.” Miranda paused. “I’m telling you this not to get your sympathy but so you’ll understand why I don’t always do or say the right thing.”

  “Sometimes the truth is the right thing.” Now it was his turn to squeeze her hand.

  Miranda nodded and was relieved when Harry changed the subject. “So what’s this urgent legal matter you want my opinion about?”

  “I’ve been looking into the murder of Isaac Markowitz, and what I learned points to a different suspect than the only one the county sheriff and his detective are still considering. I want to take Rabbi Golden’s advice and inform Sheriff Carson of my findings and make him understand that Isaac was a victim of a hate crime. Then he’ll have to expand their investigation. But before I submit this tip to Crime Stoppers, I want to run my findings by you.”

  She didn’t stop except to shovel food into her mouth until they had each polished off lasagna and salad. She was ordering espresso when Harry spoke. “Okay. So I’m going to recap what I heard to be sure I understand. First. The sheriff’s currently considering only one suspect, a wannabe gangbanger with no priors who’s disappeared. So Carson’s investigation seems to have stalled.

  “Second. You listened to two different rabbis talk about anti-Semitism, read one book on hate groups, and heard about a single local incident involving racial slurs. Your business is hurting. So on a hunch you maneuvered your way into the home of a respectable local family with possible ties to Aryan su-premacists, one of whom you think is an art restorer. This individual was here to remove tags from the Toppenish murals and was in residence at your B & B on the day of the murder. Without your hosts’ knowledge or consent, you took photos in their home and then stole a flyer advertising an Aryan supremacist event.”

  Miranda registered his sarcasm but didn’t take offense. It was a lawyer’s job to be skeptical.

  “Third. You don’t believe that the murder weapon is a bloody fish club found at the crime scene. Instead you think the real murder weapon is a shofar that was not found at the scene. You shared this suspicion with the sheriff via Crime Stoppers. Now you’ve paid some east coast online shofar-selling stranger almost four thousand dollars to send you what you suspect is this “real” murder weapon which you hope arrives tomorrow.

  “Fourth. You know a woman who saw the art restorer flee the crime scene around the time of the murder but she’s unwilling to even talk to the police let alone testify, because she’s harboring an undocumented Mexican relative. She also fears reprisal if the man she saw in a yarmulke is somehow gang-connected.”

  Miranda admitted to herself that Harry’s accurate recitation of her findings did make them seem preposterous. And he wasn’t done.

  “Finally you want to go to Sheriff Carson with the photo, the flyer, the shofar, and the names of your suspect and his accomplices and the name of the reluctant witness and say what?”

  “That he should use these findings as a basis for widening his stalled homicide investigation, that Isaac Markowitz interrupted a hate crime and was collateral damage. Sheriff Carson should be looking into a hate crime, maybe even a series of hate crimes. Look, Harry, I know the city and county cops depend on the Washington State Crime Lab for practically everything, but it’s notoriously overbooked. So, if this crime is treated as a hate crime and the man who committed it operates in many states, which I believe he does, Carson might get the FBI to lend their people and their fancy lab equipment to dig deeper into Steve Galen.

  “All his references seem okay, but most of them are from officials in little rural towns where he’s worked. These towns are like Sunnyvale in that they have small undertrained and overextended local and county police patrolling huge areas. She hesitated, suddenly aware that her voice had become insistent, strident. “And maybe they’re also a little biased against people who seem different. We’re surely aware that some cops aren’t immune to bias.” Warming to her topic, she couldn’t resist adding, “Seattle cops are finally being monitored by the feds for, among other things, excessive use of force against minorities.” She was gratified to see Harry nod.

  Encouraged by that small gesture of agreement and energized by her espresso, Miranda kept talking. “So I bet if the FBI looked, they might discover that while Steve Galen was in those little burgs, bad things happened to some of the area’s minorities. Maybe he worked in cahoots with their local hidden haters to orchestrate crimes that would never be associated with someone as ‘respectable’ as he is. I poked around online this afternoon and in just a few hours I found a burning cross on the lawn of a lesbian couple, a bomb in a knapsack on the parade route for Martin Luther King Day, and swastikas on the windows of a shoe store owned by a Jewish family. These events all happened in places Steve Galen worked at the time he worked there. But to do that research in depth would take me ages. A good forensics lab has the software and the people to do it quickly and, probably, more accurately. Also they could use facial recognition software on Mr. Galen. He’s probably using an alias.”

  Miranda considered it a victory of sorts that when he spoke, Harry’s tone was slightly less sarcastic than it had been. “Somewhere between the lasagna and the salad, you said something about how you thought this Steve Galen didn’t go to the plant that morning to kill a Jew but only did so when Isaac surprised him. What do you think he was ‘really’ up to when Isaac walked in on him?”

  “The nurse who bandaged my hand works nights at the local hospital. She probably has access to poisons….”

  “So you think he went there to poison the grape juice? Like in that vision you had? That makes you a prophetess!” Harry’s tone was incredulous again, but his eyes narrowed.

  His conflicting reactions mirrored what Miranda knew. The scenario she described, like that vision she’d had, was both preposterous and possible, like flying jet passenger planes into the Twin Towers or incinerating millions of men, women, and kids. “I think he was experimenting to see how much of what poison would work. If he got away with it, a different person could return every autumn, stay at my B & B, sneak into that plant, and poison more grape juice, more Jewish kids.” She shuddered. “And no one would ever suspect him. Of course now that Hindgrout’s ramped up security I doubt that can happen. But if Isaac hadn’t walked in on him….”

  “How would your hypothetical poisoner know if he succeeded? That grape juice is shipped all over the country, all over the world in fact. And, if I under-stood you, the enzymes get diluted when they’re poured into those vats.”

  “He’d do a search of Jewish newspapers and blogs to see if there’s a reference to children getting sick after the Shabbat kiddish. Think about it, Harry. Every Friday evening, Jewish kids like your Julia drink grape juice at synagogue or at home. If he got the right amount of the right stuff into the enzymes, eventually some of
those kids are going to get sick, maybe even die. There might not be enough of the poison to do in an adult, but even a little bit might make a kid sick. Until then, what has he to lose? He’d never be suspected. Here everybody blames the gangs for everything.”

  “That’s because the gangs do a lot of bad things, kill a lot of people. They’re a big problem here and everywhere else they go. Think about it, Miranda, if it weren’t for some gangbanger tagging those murals, the art restorer wouldn’t have had a reason to come to our valley.”

  “Oh my God, Harry!”

  “What?”

  “The local cops are trying to blame the same gang wannabe for tagging the murals. But suppose he didn’t. Suppose no gangbanger did. They never touched those murals before this. Instead, suppose this art restorer came to town and stayed with his friends in the pumpkin house and went out one night and tagged those murals himself? Late at night I bet there’s hardly anybody there. Hell, there’s hardly anybody in downtown Toppenish in the daytime.” She felt her face flush with excitement as her words rushed to keep up with her thoughts. “An agile artist dressed in black with a can of spray paint could tag those murals real fast with nobody the wiser. Gangbangers tag stuff all the time without anybody catching them at it. Steve Galen knew everybody would blame the gangs and he’d have a legitimate reason to come here.” She finished her espresso, dazzled anew by her latest realization.

  Harry sat opposite her, shaking his head. But she couldn’t stop. If she couldn’t convince him, how would she convince the cops? “Listen, Harry, I have a couple of samples of this guy’s handwriting. One is in a New Testament he left in the drawer of his night table and the other is his review in my guest book. I’ll Xerox them too. Maybe a handwriting expert could compare them to the photos of the tags on the murals or other handwriting of his.”

  “That would be a twofer.” When she looked puzzled, Harry explained. “If he tagged the murals, he’d inflict pain on two targets on his most-hated list, Mexican immigrants and Jews.” He paused. “Okay, just suppose you’re right. How did this art restorer get the Toppenish gig? I’m sure the Toppenish Public Art Association had a search committee and that they put this job out to bid.”