Professor Backus and I had a lively discussion as we looked at the rooms his group needed, and then we returned to my office and went over the rental agreement and discussed catering options.
“Can we bring in our own food to save money?” he asked.
“Absolutely.” He negotiated me down on everything he could, from audio visual equipment to promising they’d set up and take down all their own chairs. By mid-afternoon we had hammered out an agreement and I was delighted to see his Volvo, adorned with liberal bumper stickers, head out of the parking lot.
I checked my voice mail as I walked Rochester around the property, and saw a message from Rick. He’d received the toxicology results on Joel Goldberg, and it appeared that there was no trace of any of the anti-psychotic drugs in his blood. That didn’t mean he was experiencing an episode, but it increased the possibility.
By that afternoon, I was glad to be able to close Friar Lake up and head for home. I felt a vague sense of unease and I wasn’t sure what to attribute it to. Was it the situation with Lili’s mother? Or the death of Rabbi Goldberg’s brother? Or something else entirely that had yet to percolate its way to the surface?
That evening, Lili spoke to her brother briefly, but then we shared the sofa, both of us reading until it was time for Rochester’s late walk, and then bed. The next day at Friar Lake, I went through the discussion posts my lit students had made online, responding to a question I’d posed about ethnic literature in general. Was it a window into another culture? Or a way of ghettoizing the “other,” those who were out of the mainstream, not yet assimilated?
The responses were very politically correct, to be expected of young people with a liberal education. How was I going to break through that veneer to get to what they really thought? I considered my conversation with Professor Backus and came up with a couple of new questions based on what he’d said about the connection between religion and assimilation.
Friday was a sluggish day and I was glad to shut down Friar Lake and head for home. After a quick dinner, Lili and I drove to the modern stone and glass temple building. I couldn’t help looking toward the place where Joel Goldberg’s body had been found. The police cones were long gone, as was any evidence that a murder had happened there. I shivered at how easily the evidence had disappeared.
I was on edge as we parked and walked inside, worried that she wouldn’t enjoy the service, that she’d feel out of place because she didn’t have the same roots I had there.
Daniel Epstein, one of the elderly men from Talmud study, was in the foyer outside the sanctuary, and I greeted him and introduced him to Lili. I was impressed that he was able to multi-task so well at his advanced age—handing out prayerbooks, wishing everyone Shabbat Shalom, while balancing on his silver-topped cane.
“What a beautiful space,” Lili said, as we walked in. Early evening light streamed through the tall glass windows looking out at the nature preserve. A clerestory of stained glass cast multicolored shards on the wooden pews with their burgundy cushions. “It feels so warm and welcoming. I keep seeing angles I’d like to shoot it from.”
I squeezed her hand. “I’m glad you like it.”
The rabbi and cantor were already at the bema, preparing for the service, and Lili and I sat in a pew a few rows back. When the service started, she joined in whenever we recited from the prayer book, knew the words to some of the Hebrew and seemed to be enjoying herself.
As the cantor sang, I looked around the room. Was it possible that a member of the congregation, someone in the sanctuary, had killed Joel Goldberg? But what connection could he have to Shomrei Torah, other than that his brother led the worship there?
When the rabbi stepped up to the lectern for his sermon, he looked older than he had the previous Sunday, with a sadness in his face and a slight hunch to his shoulders.
He said some of the same things he’d spoken about at the Talmud study group – the way the old year was winding down, and we had to prepare to welcome the new one, and with it the introspection that came during the Days of Awe between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur.
“This is a time to consider the sins of the previous year and repent before Yom Kippur. One of the common greetings at the time will be ‘May you be inscribed in the Book of Life and sealed for a good year.’"
He looked out at the congregation. “We believe that God writes our names in this book on Rosh Hashanah, deciding who will have a good life in the new year, who will live and who will die. However, we have the ten days until Yom Kippur to change that decree, through acts of teshuvah, tefilah and tzedakah —repentance, prayer, and good deeds. Then the books are sealed and our fate determined until the following Rosh Hashanah.”
He took a deep breath. “Some of you may know that I lost my brother Joel this week. He suffered from mental illness, which made him difficult to love sometimes, and he will be in my thoughts during the Days of Awe. I hope that all of you will take this opportunity to let those you love know how you feel, to repair any old breaches and resolve to spend the next year in a state of joy with each other.”
I reached over and squeezed Lili’s hand once again. I could see in her face that she had been touched by the rabbi’s words, and perhaps was thinking of her mother and her brother. I continued to hold her hand until we stood for the final prayers.
“What do you think of Shomrei Torah?” I asked, after we had sung the Adon Olam hymn together with the congregation, Lili’s mezzo soprano joining with my tenor.
“It reminds me a lot of the synagogue we joined when it was time for Fedi’s bar mitzvah. And I was moved by the rabbi’s sermon.”
At the Oneg Shabbat, the gathering for food and drink after the service, I introduced her to Rabbi Goldberg. She shook his hand and repeated how moved she had been by his sermon. “I have a brother myself,” she said. “You’ve inspired me to be kinder in my dealings with him.”
“It’s music to a rabbi’s ears to know that I’ve reached a congregant,” he said. “I hope you’ll continue to join us for worship now and then.”
Then he turned to me and shook my hand. “Good to see you, Steve.”
“How are you doing?” I asked him.
“Still very troubled. I’ve been praying for guidance. I keep looking at that photo the police found in Joel’s shoe and wondering what it means.”
I moved in closer to the rabbi so no one could overhear us. “Detective Stemper said your brother might have stayed at a homeless shelter in Trenton near where he was arrested for vagrancy a couple of weeks ago. You could go over there and see if anyone remembers him. If he said anything that indicated why he was looking for you, or some reason why he was holding onto that photo.”
He took a deep breath. “I’m afraid of what I could find out,” he said. “I don’t know that I could face people who knew Joel, and the possibility that they’d judge me for abandoning him. I never felt that I had, you know. I just had to love him the best I could, and do what he’d let me do for him.”
“I could go for you,” I said, and I saw Lili shoot a glance at me. “Maybe as a disinterested party I could find out something that might help you feel better. And as you said, it’s good to perform acts of kindness for others.”
“I’d appreciate that very much,” he said, and then someone wanted his attention.
“You just can’t keep from sticking your nose into things, can you?” Lili said, as she laced her arm in mine. “But in this case I think you’re doing a mitzvah. The poor man is hurting, and maybe you’ll be able to find something to comfort him.”
She stepped back from me then. “Just be careful.”
11 – Rescue Mission
When we got home from services that evening, I was thinking about the conversation between Lili and the rabbi, how both of them had brothers. Growing up, I’d always wanted an older brother to show me the way, and I was envious of the relationship as boys that Rob and Joel Goldberg had shared, before Joel’s illness manifested itself.
But
the Bible reminded us that relationships with brothers weren’t always smooth, didn’t it? I realized that though I knew that Cain had killed his brother I didn’t remember why. I got up and searched my bookcase until I found the embossed Bible I’d been given at my bar mitzvah, and looked up the section in Genesis.
Considering this was such an important and familiar story, the text in the Bible was pretty sparse. Cain and Abel both made offerings to the Lord, and while the Lord liked Abel’s, he didn’t like Cain’s. So Cain got mad and killed Abel, presumably out of jealousy – a kind of “Dad likes you best” thing.
That couldn’t be all, could it? I turned to my laptop and searched through the commentaries online. The best I could come up with was an interpretation that Abel sacrificed his best lamb to the Lord, while Cain burned some dried up wheat. That explained why God preferred Abel’s offering, but it didn’t satisfy me. Why would a benevolent creator favor one brother over the other, to the point of causing a murder? Didn’t make God out to be that great a guy. I decided I’d have to ask Rabbi Goldberg the next time I saw him.
But then I stopped. Bringing up Cain and Abel so soon after the death of his own brother could be insensitive, maybe even suggest to him that I suspected him in Joel’s death.
Could there have been something between Rob and Joel that pushed the rabbi to kill his brother? Rob wanted to keep the job at Shomrei Torah, and Joel threatened that. I couldn’t reconcile the temperament that would lead someone to the rabbinate with that of a man who could kill his own brother in cold blood. And if that was the case, why kill Joel on the synagogue grounds, and leave his body there? It didn’t make any sense.
I left the Bible on the coffee table in case I wanted to go back to it, and went upstairs to Lili. “What are you going to do to help the rabbi?” Lili asked, as I sat down on the bed beside her.
“Rick thought Joel might have been staying at a homeless shelter in Trenton,” I said. “I’m going to drive over there tomorrow and see if that’s true, and if anyone there remembers him.”
“Just be careful,” Lili said. “I don’t want anything to happen to you.” Rochester jumped up on the bed and walked right between us, where he settled down on his side, his legs toward me. She scratched behind his ears. “Or you either, sweetheart.”
* * *
Saturday morning, I took Rochester for a long walk just after dawn. A wind had blown through the night before, and multi-colored leaves littered the ground. He was eager to stick his big nose into every pile and pee on it, and I had to keep reining him in.
Lili and I shared croissants and mugs of hot chocolate for breakfast, and after she left to meet Rick and go ring-shopping, I loaded Rochester into the car for the trip to Trenton. The memories began flooding past as we crossed the Scudder’s Falls Bridge into New Jersey and began to drive south along the river. “This is my past, puppy,” I said to him. “Not always a good thing to go digging through what’s dead and buried, though, is it?”
He didn’t respond, just stuck his head out the window as we passed Villa Victoria Academy, where I’d competed in speech and debate, mildly freaked out by the prevalence of crosses in the classrooms. Then we drove through the Jewish neighborhood of Hiltonia, where many of my mother’s childhood friends had moved after leaving the center of town.
Even though we lived in the suburbs, we were still umbilically connected to the city across the river. As we drove it became clear that though I’d left Trenton, it hadn’t left me. Decades had passed, but I still felt viscerally connected to the streets and landmarks. I remembered visiting family, attending Shomrei Torah before it moved to the suburbs, shopping at stores my mother had patronized since she was a girl.
So many landmarks had disappeared, most of them demolished in the name of urban renewal that the streets hardly looked familiar anymore. The house with the two red doors I’d mentioned to Rick had been replaced by a state office building. The old Sinclair gas station with its dinosaur statue out front was long gone, along with the bakery where I got an ice cream birthday cake every year.
I wondered how Rob and Joel Goldberg had celebrated their birthdays as kids. Did they share, squabble? I’d wanted a brother to play with when I was a lonely only child, tagging along behind my parents to adult events.
After driving a few minutes, I realized I had no idea how to get to the Rescue Mission, the homeless shelter Rick had mentioned. I looked up the address on my phone and plugged it into my GPS, which directed me to a four-story old brick warehouse in downtown Trenton, only a few blocks from where the fancy stores used to be on State Street. I parked in the adjacent lot, put Rochester on his leash and warned him to be on his best behavior.
When I walked in the foyer, the largest man I’d ever seen in real life stood in front of me, at least six-five, with huge shoulders, chest and belly. He held two men apart by the backs of their shirts. “No fighting here. You got that?”
He looked at the guy on his left, who said, “Yeah.” Then the guy on his right said the same thing. The big guy let them go, and they walked off in opposite directions. He dusted off his hands and looked at me. “Afternoon. How can I help you?”
I introduced myself and made sure it was okay to have Rochester with me.
“We can have dogs visit, but not stay overnight.”
“That’s okay, I’m not here to check in.” Rochester slumped to the floor beside me. “I’m interested in a guy who might have come through here in the past couple of weeks. White, early thirties, brown hair. Diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia.”
Something like recognition flickered on Buddha’s face. “You a cop?”
“Not at all. This gentleman died on Wednesday night, en route to see his brother, Rabbi Rob Goldberg of Shomrei Torah in Stewart’s Crossing. The rabbi’s very upset, as you can imagine, and he asked me to track his brother’s movements to see if I can find out what he wanted from the rabbi.”
“So you’re a private investigator?”
Rochester sat up. Maybe he was a private detective, but I wasn’t. How could I explain why the rabbi had asked me to do this? I went for the simplest explanation. “Just a friend of the rabbi’s. He’s too upset to do this himself, so he asked me to.”
The big man accepted that. “Buddha McCarthy,” he said, and he stuck out his hand for me to shake. It was so big that my hand felt puny in his. Then he turned to Rochester, and petted his head. Rochester opened his mouth and grinned.
“You’re the peacekeeper around here?” I asked Buddha.
“Among other things. I manage the shelter so my size is an advantage.”
He nodded his head toward an open door behind him. “I remember the guy you’re asking about. Joel, right?”
I nodded.
“Come into the office with me and I’ll dig up the information we have on him.”
Rochester and I followed him into a small room with lots of small photos on the white walls, of individuals and events. “Your success stories?” I asked, pointing at them.
“Some of them. Some couldn’t make it no matter how hard they tried, or we did. So I keep their pictures up there, too, to remind me.” He sat down behind the desk, and I sat across from him, with Rochester on the floor beside me.
“What happened to Joel?” he asked.
“He went out to the synagogue in Stewart’s Crossing and someone killed him before he could see his brother,” I said. “Blow to the head with a blunt object.”
Buddha sighed. “It’s a tough world out there. A lot of these folks are sick, or they have mental problems, or they’re ex-cons.”
“Tell me about it,” I said. “I did a year in California for computer hacking. If I hadn’t had the support of a couple of good people I might have ended up here myself.”
“No, I can tell by looking at you. White, smart, good attitude. You’d have made it.”
I was flattered, but I believed that if it hadn’t been for people like Lucas Roosevelt and Rick Stemper, I would have floundered, no matt
er my skin color or my intelligence level. And as for a good attitude, well, my parole officer would have disagreed with that. Despite his best efforts over the two years I had been assigned to him, I still hadn’t kicked my addiction to hacking, and I wasn’t sure I ever would.
Buddha opened a big logbook. “We keep a record of everybody who comes in,” he said. “We need it for legal purposes, as well as to show the people who fund us what kind of work we’re doing. You can see from how short the lists are that it’s been quiet for a while—not too hot or too cold, so a lot of folks have been living rough.” He motioned out the window, where gray clouds were massing. “Supposed to pour tonight, so we should get a few extra folks.”
He flipped through the pages, and I had to hold Rochester back, because he wanted to look, too. “Joel showed up here about week ago Thursday. It was a rainy day, and I remember he looked like a drowned rat. We got him dried out, washed his clothes, that kind of thing. At the time he didn’t show any signs of mental illness – he was very polite, well-spoken, apologetic.”
Was he still under the influence of his medications at the time? Or simply not yet in the grip of an episode?
Buddha closed his eyes, and I could see that childhood resemblance to his namesake remained. He exuded a kind of quiet warmth that I was sure many of the clients at the shelter responded well to.
When he opened them again, he said, “Joel said that he was looking for old records of Trenton, like lists of people who lived here back in the day. I sent him to the library down the street, and he stayed with us for a couple of days, doing well, spending lots of time with whatever research he was doing. But then last Saturday he appeared to be going into a manic phase. Talking non-stop, rambling about the Holocaust. His grandparents, who escaped, and some other man who didn’t—but then somehow he did, and he showed up in Trenton.”
Buddha sighed. “I have to admit I couldn’t pay much attention because we were busy, and it didn’t make a lot of sense.”
Dog is in the Details Page 7
