A Murder Too Close

by Penny Mickelbury

  Dave Epstein returned and my cell phone rang at the same time. I raised a finger to Dave, and took what I was certain would be Yolanda’s call; it was. She had Epstein’s contract ready and wanted to know where to bring it. I put the question to Epstein, and he hesitated before answering. “Sasha’s not doing too well right now. She doesn’t want to talk to you. I’m sorry.” I quickly processed that information and just as quickly made a couple of decisions. I told Yolanda to bring the contract here, closed the phone, and gave Dave Epstein a taste of what he was paying for.

  “I can only imagine how shitty that kid must be feeling right now, but I really need to talk to her while things are still fresh in her memory. I’ll check Sam’s room first, to give her a few more minutes to compose herself. By that time, Yolanda will be here with your contract, then we can get out of here and give you two some time alone. Like you said earlier, there are times when family needs to be with family.” I could tell the old man wasn’t enthusiastic about my decision-making but he knew he didn’t have any wiggle room. He also knew that throwing up roadblocks in an investigation before the contract was even signed was not the best way to begin a new relationship.

  “If you think this is the best way, Phil?” He made it a question.

  “Yes, sir, I do.” I gave him an answer.

  Chapter Four

  Though Yolanda and I hadn’t met until college, our maternal grandmothers had been best friends as young women in Spanish Harlem and still harbored the hope that one day she and I would become partners of a different kind, even though Yo had stopped being secretive about her sexual orientation many years ago: She was happily and proudly gay and everybody who knew her, knew that. “Deal with it or vacate my space,” was a favorite saying of hers. And even though we now both lived way downtown from East Harlem, Yo was relatively new to the area. Her family had remained Uptown while mine had migrated Downtown before I was born, so I have no personal history connected to living in Spanish Harlem. Alphabet City and Chinatown and the parks and playgrounds of the East River were my natural habitat, so Yo found the Stuyvesant Town history lesson of particular interest. “I’ve got to go exploring over there.”

  “It’s an interesting place. Some people think it’s too cookie-cutter, too utilitarian, while others think it Utopian.”

  She tilted her head to the side and gave me an appraising look. “I forget sometimes that you were a Sociology major, Phil.” Her glasses slid down her nose. She took them off and hooked the arm on to the front of her sweater. “How many people did you say lived there?”

  “I don’t know exactly how many. Twenty thousand, maybe? Maybe more. I know there are almost nine thousand apartment units in there, and that they all look the same, and that there’s grass and trees and fountains and that kids couldn’t play in the grass.” I knew this because after a certain age, kids, especially boys, chafe at the rules and restrictions of their lives, and lots of white—mostly Jewish boys—who lived in Stuy Town often sought out my group of friends to play ball and shoot marbles and go fishing with. And when we’d wonder why they wanted to play in the street when they had grass and fountains, they told us they couldn’t play in those parts of the complex. So, they played in the streets with us and we opened the fire hydrants or jumped into the East River to cool off in the scorching hot summer months. I smiled at the memory, the happiness of it almost eradicating the painful aspects of memory that I’d experienced the night before.

  “Life’s an interesting journey, isn’t it?” Yo said.

  “That didn’t sound very much like the musings of a business major,” I said.

  “Life can’t be all numbers.”

  “Let me write this down: Date, time, place. Yolanda Maria Aguierre actually said that life can’t be all numbers. Remember this next time you’re hassling me about expense accounts and receipts.”

  “Speaking of which,” she said, returning her glasses to the bridge of her nose and peering at me over the top of them, “it’s Thursday and I haven’t received a single receipt from you this week, and I know you’ve been in taxis and out to lunch.” She stuck her hand out toward me and wiggled her fingers.

  Muttering curses under my breath, I began my weekly receipt hunt: Digging in jacket and pants pockets, the folds of my wallet, the drawers of my desk. Where was that envelope I kept for receipts...?

  “Front door, Phil,” Yolanda said quietly and I looked up, certain that I was watching Frankie Patel’s father enter. Tall, thin, turbaned and bearded, he walked toward me with confidence, though as he got closer I could see the fatigue in his eyes and a slight slump in his shoulders.

  “Mr. Rodriquez?”

  “Mr. Patel?” He smiled and I could see the source of Frankie’s thousand-watt grin. We shook hands and I took his coat and offered him coffee or tea. He said he’d appreciate a cup of tea, if it was no trouble, and I went to the back to hang up his coat, make his tea, and confer with Yolanda. She raised her eyebrows in a question and I raised my shoulders in the only answer I had. Maybe the guy just wanted a cup of tea. But Yo’s curiosity was piqued. She told me to go talk to Patel, and she’d bring the tea when it was ready. I followed orders.

  Patel was standing where I’d left him and I led him to one of the sofas and waved him down. He sank gracefully and, I noted, gratefully. The man clearly was exhausted. “My partner will bring your tea, Mr. Patel.”

  “Thank you for seeing me, Mr. Rodriquez,” he said in a movie-star resonant voice, without the slightest hint of an accent. “I didn’t destroy my livelihood and my home and kill my cousin,” he said, making the reason for his visit crystal clear.

  “I don’t think you did those things, either, Mr. Patel, but I’m not the one who needs convincing.”

  “But why must I convince anyone of anything? I’m the one now reduced to living on another man’s charity. For which I’m extremely grateful.” He looked as if he couldn’t believe he’d said such a thing; as if he couldn’t believe the need for having to say it.

  “I’m sure I don’t have to tell you that the world—that this city—has more than a few dishonest people, Mr. Patel. And, hard as it may be for the honest ones like yourself to accept, the system is geared to deal with the dishonest ones. So, when a business burns to the ground in a matter of minutes and a large insurance payout is hanging in the balance, the insurance company looks very carefully at the situation.” I took a deliberate beat. “And I’m assuming that the insurance payout is large.” It wasn’t a question, and Patel didn’t answer what I hadn’t asked, which was all the answer I needed. “I promised Mr. Epstein that I would do what I could to speed the process along and I’ll do that, Mr. Patel, but understand that your idea of ‘speed’ may differ from the insurance company’s.”

  Patel looked sad and grim and angry. It was the angry that interested me; and as if he knew that, he said, “Then you should know that the Homeland Security people think that I’m a terrorist.”

  I was speechless. So was Yolanda, who was bringing the tray with Patel’s tea, and she halted mid-step. He looked up, saw her, and jumped to his feet to help her with the tray. They introduced themselves and Patel fixed himself a cup of tea while I rolled over in my mind the idea that the Federal government’s unleashed Rottweilers had Patel’s scent up their nostrils. Not only did this not bode well for him, his presence here had just dropped me into the shit pile, and I could tell by the look on Yo’s face that she’d reached the same conclusion. “Why do they think that, Mr. Patel?” Yolanda asked.

  “Because somebody called and told them. That same somebody or group of somebodies has reported at least half a dozen Hindus and Sikhs that I personally know to Homeland Security as potential threats to the country, and there have been others that I’ve only heard of.”

  “Other what?” I asked.

  “Other reports that innocent people are terrorist threats.”

  “Like who?” This was starting to stink worse than the Fulton Street fish market.

  “Like
some of the Muslims in Brooklyn and Queens, and the Buddhist monks in the Village, of all people!” This seemed to upset him. “Of all the unlikely people to accuse of being terrorists, these idiots point to the Bikshu Buddhists.”

  “What kind of Buddhists?”

  “Beggars!” He almost shouted the word. “They go out every morning with their bowls and beg. For food, money, whatever people wish to give, and whatever they get is all they have. They are among the most peaceful people in the world and some . . . some . . . evil-minded . . .” He couldn’t think of the words to describe people who would make such a dangerous accusation in the current climate, but I could, though they probably would be words that Patel had never spoken in his life. Maybe even were words he’d never heard.

  “Why would they target you, or the others?”

  He touched his head. “Because of this, because I am Hindu and my wife wears a sari, and because the Muslim women cover their heads and bodies, and because the Buddhists wear saffron robes and shave their heads and wear sandals even in winter.”

  I knew that what he was saying was possible but the pieces weren’t fitting together logically. At least all the pieces I had on the table. I could believe that hatred would ignite a fire and destroy a home and business. I could believe that hatred would wrongly accuse people because they behaved differently from the accuser. What didn’t fit was the setting fire to the unjustly accused. If Homeland Security thought that . . . what was Patel’s first name? Frankie? If Homeland Security thought he was a terrorist threat, would they think he’d torch his own place? Wouldn’t siccing Homeland Security on somebody be punishment enough? I’d be suspicious if a supposed terrorist all of sudden became a victim of terrorism. But suspicious of whom?

  “You’re not convinced, Mr. Rodriquez?”

  “I’m confused, Mr. Patel.”

  He looked at me for a moment, and then he laughed. “My son said he liked you. I trust his judgment. He has excellent instincts for one so young.” The lightness left him. “I would like to hire you to discover who destroyed my property. I have some savings, most of it in municipal bonds and Treasury notes. For Frankie’s college. I don’t know how long I’ll be unable to earn more money, but I can pay you to begin, and if I run out of money, you’ll have to stop. It is due solely to Mr. Epstein’s kindness and generosity that I’m able to pay you at all, because otherwise I’d be paying a hotel, but I must feel that I’m doing something more than sitting and waiting for some external force to return my life to me.”

  I understood that as completely as if the thought had come through my own brain and out of my own mouth.

  “Mr. Patel, what is your first name, if you don’t mind my asking?” Yo asked then.

  Patel was surprised but he clearly didn’t mind answering Yolanda’s question. In fact, I’ve yet to encounter the man who minded anything she said or did. “My name is Ravi,” he answered, and looked expectantly at her.

  She smiled and demonstrated that she could crank out the wattage, too. “I’m interested to know how Ravi Patel has a son named Frankie.”

  If they’d been in a high wattage contest Ravi Patel might just have won, so appreciative was he of Yolanda’s shifting of the tension, and placing his interest in what clearly was a more pleasant place. “He was named for his grandfather, my father.” And Ravi Patel told us how his grandfather and great uncle, brothers and the sons of Indian immigrants to England were named after Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt; their sisters were named Eleanor and Elizabeth. Then the brothers left England for Canada, and Franklin eventually found his way to New York. “They were remarkable men,” Patel said. “They considered it a great privilege to have had the opportunity to exchange British citizenship for Canadian and American citizenship, and to have had the ancient heritage of the Hindus of India as a cultural launching pad. I am as American as the two of you are, and as Indian as you are Puerto Rican.”

  I didn’t say what I wanted to say because it would have sounded too much like a cliché. In fact, even thinking it felt trite and cliché-ish. But so what? I’d think it anyway: That’s what being an American meant—that blend of the unique and the ordinary, men and women who’d come here from all the places on the globe, ordinary people bringing with them the unique aspects of their homelands, and blending in. I thought of my own family, and of the people I knew and cared about and respected: Basil Griffin and Arlene Edwards, Blacks from Trinidad and Jamaica, and Jeffrey Dahl, a white man born in Barbados; Jill Mason’s parents and Sandra Gillespie’s grandparents, Black American southerners whose ancestry may have been lost and destroyed but whose ancient history permeates every aspect of American culture; David Epstein, whose grandparents perished in Nazi concentration camps and whose daughter is buried in Israel; Carmine Aiello, a first generation American whose elderly mother, despite more than sixty years here, still is more comfortable speaking Italian; the Nigerian grocery store owners who work around the clock to earn a living for their families; and half the people I do business with in Chinatown—a combination of unique and ordinary, every one of them.

  “I’ll draw up Mr. Patel’s contract, Phil,” Yolanda said, rescuing me from the murky labyrinth of my thoughts.

  “And I’ll bring it to you later today. I need to see Epstein and if it’s convenient, I can drop it off—”

  He interrupted me with one of his smiles. “When you come to dinner. Both of you, and anybody you’d like to bring. Please! The lodgings provided by Mr. Epstein are almost exactly what we had above our restaurant and my wife feels so much at home that all she wants to do is cook. But without the restaurant, there’s nobody to eat so much food. So you must come to dinner. Everybody must come to dinner!”

  It was quite a feast the Patels laid on. Despite having been in residence less than twenty-four hours, Indira Patel had transformed a previously unoccupied space into an elegant home for her family. A few strategically placed rugs, pieces of fabric, statues, and wall hangings, along with the soft strains of sitar music in the background and the delicate scent of aromatic incense wafting all around, combined to create an elegant and peaceful yet comfortably homey setting. Yolanda and her long-time lover Sandra Gillespie had brought arm-loads of flowers, and Sandra, once a principal dancer with the Alvin Ailey Company, had brought a framed poster of women of all cultures dancing. Indira Patel, delighted, immediately got busy hanging the art and sent Frankie and Ravi to find vessels to hold all the flowers. Connie and I had stopped at a Puerto Rican bakery and bought one of everything and Mrs. Patel had to suspend her picture-hanging mission long enough to steer Frankie away from the dessert. A fifteen-year-old boy was a fifteen-year-old boy all over the world, and dessert before dinner had never spoiled the ability of one to eat like a racehorse when the dinner bell rang.

  Just as the flowers were arranged and the picture hung, knocks on the door signaled the arrival of the Epstein family. “Now we can eat!” Frankie yelled, and Ravi opened the door. Sasha, Ellie, and Dave entered and their eyes widened and their mouths opened and didn’t close for several seconds.

  “Wow!” Ellie said.

  “Amazing!” Dave said.

  “Holy shit!” Sasha said. And the party was on. It took all the women in the room—and there were more of them than there were of us—to get all the food to the table, and at that, there were still several pots on the stove with big ladles in them, ready for dipping. The Epstein family had brought a dozen bottles of wine, juice, seltzer, and cider. We filled our plates and glasses and found places to sit—most of us on cushions on the floor. Then we all filled our plates and glasses again. And again. And I’d thought I didn’t much care for Indian food. Where had I gotten that notion? When I whispered that thought to Connie she whispered back that I must not have been in the proper company on my visits to Indian restaurants. “Good food requires good company,” she told me with such a serious expression that I seriously began to consider the notion, until she poked me in the ribs with her elbow. She might have been joking bu
t I think she was onto something.

  Ravi Patel stood up and made a toast that had everyone sniffling and wiping their eyes. Then the men cleared away and washed the dirty dishes while the women made coffee and tea and got the dessert trays ready. Again Mrs. Patel spent most of her time shooing Frankie away from the sweets. I managed to grab a few private words with Ravi, Dave, and Sasha. It was almost midnight when we left. I hadn’t enjoyed a meal and the company of that many people since Thanksgiving. In fact, it had felt very much like a holiday gathering, greatly improved this time by the fact that Connie agreed that it would make sense for her to spend the night at my place since it was so late, rather than go all the way Uptown to the Bronx.