A Murder Too Close

by Penny Mickelbury

  “Ellie called me this morning at five, I was on a plane at seven.” Suddenly, all the energy left him and he slumped. I still had an arm around his shoulder and he sagged into me. I caught him, supported him, and led him to one of the sofas.

  “Did you have any breakfast, Mr. Epstein?” Yolanda asked him and, judging the answer from the look on his face, “Do you prefer coffee or tea, and a bagel or an English muffin? Cream cheese or strawberry preserves?”

  He looked up at her and managed a rakish grin and a come-hither twinkle. “I heard about you, Miss Aguierre. I heard you were a real looker. But I gotta tell ya, your notices don’t do you justice.” He slowly dropped the lid of his left eye closed, then opened it again. “Coffee, black, and a bagel, toasted, with anything you got that’ll taste good on it. I trust your judgment.”

  Yolanda returned his wicked wink, asked if I wanted bagel or muffin, and retreated to the kitchen, where I knew she wouldn’t miss a word of whatever David Epstein and I were about to discuss. And he got right to it. “This business with Sammy,” he started but couldn’t seem to get any farther.

  “Still no word?”

  He shook his head and wisps of snow white hair danced about. I sat in one of the desk chairs and rolled it across the carpeted floor to the sofa, placing myself directly in front of Epstein, so close that our knees were touching. He’d always had gentle brown eyes and bushy dark eyebrows and lots of bushy dark hair. He wasn’t a big man, or tall, but he’d had a forceful personality and he’d always radiated energy. Just now, for a moment, we’d been treated to the energy and the personality, but it had been for Yo’s benefit. Once she disappeared, so did the Epstein of old. “Tell me what you know, Phil,” said the old man looking at me with watery eyes topped with white eyebrows. A heavily veined, age-spotted hand grabbed mine and let me know that strength still resided with David Epstein. I told him what I knew, what I thought, what I suspected, and what I feared. When I finished talking, he sat staring straight ahead at nothing.

  “We had four children, Esther and me. Two girls, two boys. Sammy is all we’ve got left.” He hadn’t been staring straight ahead, he’d been looking back, into memory. “It will kill Esther if we’ve lost him, too.”

  There was nothing I could say to that so I didn’t try. Instead, I thought of my own grandparents and tried to imagine how they’d react if all their children had died before them. I looked again at Epstein. Esther wasn’t the only one in danger of expiration.

  “A hand, please, Phil,” I heard from the kitchen. I got quickly to my feet and with a pat on the shoulder for David Epstein, hurried back to help Yolanda, who, I was certain, didn’t need any help from me.

  “He thinks Sam is dead?” She had two trays loaded with coffee, juice, bagels and English muffins and she really did need my help. But she also wanted to know before we faced Epstein again whether I shared the old man’s fears.

  “I think he’s had so much practice preparing himself for the worst that he just does it automatically. And who knows? Maybe it’s not a bad way to approach things.”

  Yo picked up a tray and I grabbed the other one and followed her out. “It’s an awful way to approach things,” she muttered.

  Epstein looked asleep as we approached him. His head was thrown back and his legs were stretched out in front and his hands were folded on top of his round little pot belly, but his eyes popped open when we reached him with the trays. He sat up straight and sighed deeply. I used my foot to move one of the tables toward him and he reached for it and pulled it in close, then he watched Yolanda place his food on it—orange juice, coffee, two toasted bagels with cream cheese and strawberry preserves. “Thank you, Miss Aguierre,” he said.

  “You’re welcome, Mr. Epstein,” she said, and none of us said any more until the food was history and we all were on our second cups of coffee. Epstein looked revived and I felt that way. He wiped his mouth and hands on a napkin, then folded it neatly and placed it dead center on his plate, right beside the knife and fork. My friend Mike Smith, the ex-cop, did the exact same thing and I asked him about it once. He wasn’t even aware that he did it. Then he shook his head and gave a little laugh and told me that if I was lucky, one day I’d know what it felt like to have been married a lot of years to a good woman. “You pick up good habits from good women,” Mike had said.

  “You said Sammy wanted you to do him a favor,” Dave Epstein said quietly and gravely. “People in business don’t do favors or they won’t be in business very long. I want to hire you. I can pay whatever you charge. I want you to find Sammy and bring him home, and I want you to find out who burned that restaurant. If it was Sammy . . .” He shook his head. “I still can’t believe he’d do something like that, but if he did, well, I need to know that. But more than anything, I need him back. We need him back, Esther and me. Because he’s all we’ve got left. Him and Sasha.” Then he was crying.

  I gave him a moment and he struggled to pull himself together. Enough that I could be certain he understood what I was telling him. “You should file a missing person report with the police, Mr. Epstein.”

  “No way!”

  “Why not? The police have experts in missing persons.”

  “He’s not missing! And I don’t want the cops sticking their noses in this.”

  I gave him a moment again, hoping he’d realize how ridiculous what he just said was. He didn’t. “If he’s not missing, Mr. Epstein, where is he? Sam’s a little old to have run away from home. And you don’t want the cops sticking their noses into what?”

  “You know what, Rodriquez! I tell them Sammy’s missing, I gotta tell ’em about the fire and how you think Sammy did it!”

  I felt like I was standing in a shit pond in my bare feet. “You don’t have to tell them anything but when, where, and with whom Sammy was last seen. Then, if they get far enough along in an investigation and arrows start pointing in a specific direction, and that direction is a burned out restaurant, then yeah, you’ve got to tell them, if they ask, that Sam had a connection to the restaurant.”

  “I’m not filing a missing person report because my son is not missing.”

  “But you’re paying me to find him.”

  The old man exploded. “If he’s scared, if he’s embarrassed, if he’s hiding somewhere, you can find him and tell him to come home, tell him nobody’s mad at him.”

  Which would be a lie because if he torched the Taste of India I was mad as hell at him, but I couldn’t take it out on an old man. “Mr. Epstein, you have to know that the chances of a positive outcome lessen the longer a person is missing.” He began to cry again, silently, with tears running down his face. I loaded the trays and took them to the kitchen and did the dishes while Yolanda got Mr. Epstein back in control of himself. I heard her assuring him that he had nothing to apologize for, tell him that we understood his feelings, tell him that we shared his fears, promise him that we’d do everything possible to find his son. Then I heard him go into the bathroom and Yolanda came to find me. I was almost done with the dishes.

  “Keep that up, Connie might marry you,” she said.

  There was time in my very recent past when those words and the thought they produced would have caused a gag reflex. “You think?” I said, and she wrapped me in big bear hug from behind and I would have bet money that I heard her stifle a sniffle. “Do you want to draw up a contract while I take the old man back to the cleaners?”

  “He needs to go home and go to bed, Phil. He’s about to collapse.”

  “Yeah, I know. But he won’t leave Ellie alone in the store.”

  “And he will leave Sasha alone in that apartment? He needs to get some rest and he needs to be there when she gets home from school.”

  “He needs to call the cops and file a missing person report.”

  “Maybe when he gets some rest, he’ll be thinking more clearly. But right now, he’s got to make Sasha his top priority.”

  She had a point. The store wasn’t a fourteen-year-old girl who
’d lost her mother and now may have lost the uncle who was her rescuer. They could pay somebody to help run the store—promote one of their long-time employees who already knew the business. It wasn’t so easy to find a suitable stand-in parent for a grieving girl. I heard Epstein come out of the bathroom.

  “Yolanda’s going to draw up a contract for you, Mr. Epstein, and bring it to you. And I’ll take you home so you can get some rest.”

  He waved me off. “I gotta get back to the store, give Ellie a hand. I told her I’d come back and help her close up.”

  “Mr. Epstein, I’m going to need all the help you can give me on this, and you’re going to need all your strength to get us both through it. That lady who was helping Ellie this morning—”

  “That was Viv. Vivian Henderson. She’s been with us for over twenty years.”

  I nodded. “I could tell. She worked the cash register and the customers like a pro. Make her an assistant manager, give her a raise, let her take some of the weight off Ellie. And off you. You need to rest, sir.” And I need you to let me inside that apartment, into Sammy’s private space, into Sammy’s computer, into Sammy’s head.

  He looked at me with eyes that no longer were old man’s eyes but the sharply focused, flinty, unblinking gaze of one who knew the score of more than one of life’s games. Then he blew air through his lips at me. “You might look your grandpa Vega but you got stones like the Rodriquez one. He was one tough customer, I gotta tell ya.”

  “I’ve heard that about him,” I said.

  “I’ve seen it in action,” he said.

  “Tell me about it.”

  “I’ll tell you one story. This happened way back before you were born, when your Pop used to bring the uniforms for cleaning. Only this one Saturday your Grandpa brought ’em in. It was during a heat wave, I remember that. Even at six in the morning we had the doors and windows open and still couldn’t get any relief from the steam coming from the back. We had just opened and your Grandpa’s one of the first in the line. Behind him is Mrs. McKinney. She’s dead now, and better off for it if you ask me, married all those years to that sorry excuse for a man, Aloysius McKinney. She’s waiting to pick up her husband’s work clothes—this is back when we did as much laundry as dry cleaning. Now I know and she knows he’s gonna be late ’cause he’s due on the docks at seven. He shoulda picked up his clothes the night before but he always went to some watering hole after work instead of going home like a good husband and father. She worked at one of the hotels way up on the East Side cleaning rooms and she didn’t get home until after we closed. Anyway, here she is, gettin’ his clothes and he roars in, still drunk from the night before, cussin’ and screamin’ and callin’ her all kinds of names. She tries to calm him and quiet him and what does he do but give her a slap, right across the face. Your Grandpa grabbed him and heaved him outta the door like he didn’t weigh close to two hundred pounds.” Epstein stopped his story to catch his breath, then he finished his story, speaking slowly and not in the jumble of words like before. “So, like I said, the door’s wide open and everybody in the store can hear McKinney out on the sidewalk, still cussin’ like a madman. Then he yells, ‘You stupid, stinkin’ Spic! I better not ever see you again!’ And what does your Grandpa do? Strolls out the door, kicks McKinney in the ass, then offers to walk Mrs. McKinney home.” And Epstein held his right arm out, crooked at an angle, like he was waiting for a woman to join arms with him, and began a mincing stroll-like imitation.

  I was laughing so hard my stomach hurt. “There’s a second part to this story,” I managed to say. “I’ll tell it to you on the way to your place.”

  Epstein loved my Aloysius McKinney story so much he made me tell it three more times in the taxi on the way to his—to Sammy’s—apartment, and he howled with each telling, clapping his hands and rubbing them together. “You gotta tell your Grandpa that story,” he said, and I promised that I would. “He’ll love it,” the old man said. We were outside the door to the apartment he’d lived in for over forty years and he hesitated before putting his key into the lock. “Sasha might be home,” he muttered, then rang the bell and inserted the key at the same time.

  Sasha was home. So was Frankie Patel. She looked up, expecting Sammy and for a moment she couldn’t react. Then her face reacted in about a dozen ways, from surprise to happy excitement to dread: If Grandpa was home, that meant that Uncle Sammy was . . .

  Epstein and his only grandchild rushed each other and their embrace made both me and Frankie avert our eyes. “Your Grandma misses you so much.”

  “I miss her, too. And you, too, Grandpa! And where’s Uncle Sammy? What’s happened to him? Why hasn’t he come home?”

  Old Dave Epstein wasn’t about to have that conversation in front of a stranger. He eyed Frankie. “Who’s this young man?”

  “This is my friend, Frankie Patel—”

  “Oh!” Epstein was speechless for a moment but he recovered like a champ. “I’m very sorry about what happened. Is your family all right?”

  Frankie swiped at his eyes with the back of his hands, both eyes simultaneously, and nodded his head. “They don’t have any place to live, Grandpa, and no clothes or food or anything, and they’re all piled into one hotel room,” Sasha wailed. “And Frankie’s laptop and books and school stuff got burned up.” Frankie’s tears started again and he just stood there, letting them fall, not making a sound, not trying to wipe them away, just looking down at the floor and silently weeping. I was feeling helpless and useless. Dave Epstein wasn’t. The man, was after all, the father of four children. He put his arms around these two and drew them into him and held them and let them cry out their pain and fear and sorrow and whatever else they were feeling, all the while saying things to them in a low, soothing voice that I couldn’t hear but that must have made a difference to Sasha and Frankie because they stopped heaving. Dave looked over at me, his eyes filled with compassion and love and his own sorrow, both for his loss and for Frankie Patel’s loss.

  “We could use some wet towels here, Rodriquez,” he said, and I hurried to the kitchen, wet a handful of paper towels, and hurried back. Eye drying and nose blowing took a moment. Then Epstein said, “There’s a large apartment over the cleaners and nobody’s living there right now. You and your family are welcome to stay as long as necessary, Frankie.”

  “We don’t have any money to pay you, and maybe we won’t ever have any. The insurance people think my father started the fire so they won’t pay the claim.”

  “I’m not looking for money, son. Make sure you tell your parents that, and I’ll tell ’em myself later tonight or tomorrow. In the meantime, you all get settled in. There’s some furniture there, and sheets and towels and kitchen stuff. And it’s clean—or it should be. It better be!” Epstein was in his element now. He took a key off the ring in his pocket and gave it to Frankie. He wrote down the alarm code. Then he took a wad of bills from his wallet which Frankie first refused to accept. “You said your folks didn’t have any money and you need food and . . . and . . . things. There are things you gotta have to live. Now take the money, son, and go to your folks and help ’em get their bearings. Go on,” he said pushing the money into Frankie’s hand and pushing him toward the door. The boy stopped and hugged the old man, then he looked at Sasha and gave her a smile that almost made me fall in love with him.

  “I’ll come with you, Frankie,” she said.

  Epstein held her back. “They need to be alone as a family right now, sweetheart. You can see them tomorrow.”

  Sasha wanted to argue but her heart wasn’t in it. She watched Frankie leave, then turned away from me and her grandfather and headed down the hallway to what I guessed was her room. “What do you make of that business about the insurance?” Dave asked as soon as his granddaughter was out of earshot.

  “They know it was arson and they have to be certain Patel didn’t torch his own place. They’ll make his life miserable for a couple of weeks, checking his financials, digging into his
lifestyle, poking through his sock and underwear drawer.” I’d done enough of this kind of work for insurance companies to know that they’d be looking for signs that the Patels spent more money than they earned at the Taste of India, that he had a gambling habit or that she was a shopaholic or that everybody had a coke habit. And after the adjusters satisfied themselves that the Patels weren’t the arsonists, they’d pay up. But it wasn’t the insurance company I was worried about; it was the Homeland Security knuckleheads. Once they got fixated on an idea or a theory, no matter how absurd or unlikely, they didn’t let go. They were Rottweilers in that respect. So I first had to find out why the Feds were interested in this particular fire, then, if I could, divert their attention away from the Patels. And, of course, there was the Sammy factor. I didn’t think the Patels burned their own restaurant, but had Sam Epstein done it? And how would I manage any of this and keep myself off the Homeland Security radar, because Yolanda was dead-on right in her assessment of how things worked these days. I damn sure wouldn’t be of any use to anybody in a cell five stories underground.

  “That was some deep thought,” Epstein said.

  “That was a very good thing you did for the Patel family,” I said.

  “It was the least I could do.”

  Yeah, right, I thought, especially if it was your son who destroyed their home. “I need to see Sam’s room, and I need to talk to Sasha about the last time she saw him.”

  He hesitated for just a moment; he knew what I was asking and he didn’t like it, the idea of a stranger pawing through his son’s private belongings, but he also knew he didn’t have a choice. He’d hired me to do a job, and he needed to let me do it. He nodded and walked out of the room, following Sasha’s earlier path. I took advantage of the chance to scrutinize the Epstein home. I’d never been inside a Stuyvesant Town apartment before, despite its massive, looming presence as practically the gateway to the neighborhood. For almost sixty years the complex has stood, virtually unchanged, except that it now rents to people of color; but for many years, like many other places in New York and America, non-whites were personas non grata. And I, like many other black and brown people, still carry around a lot of the hurt and anger born of that time and place. But in this time and place, a man whose family had lived in Stuyvesant Town almost since its inception was paying me a lot of money to do a job for him, and I needed to keep my focus on the fact that the Epstein apartment was on the southwestern side of the Stuyvesant complex, right at 14th Street and First Avenue, about ten blocks due north of where the Taste of India now was a smoldering, stinking, ugly hole. I walked to the window and looked down. The Epsteins lived on the tenth floor and looking out, all I could see was more Stuyvesant Town: The place was its own city, its own town, in reality as well as in name. Almost nine thousand apartments in three dozen buildings, eating up eighteen square blocks of Lower East Side Manhattan. As insular as this place was, I knew that nobody would ever tell me if, when, or whether they’d seen Sam Epstein yesterday, the day before, or at any time in the more than thirty years he’d lived here.