“Anybody there,” I call, forcing myself to sound brave.
No answer.
Then I remember. There’s another door in the warehouse—to the bathroom. Brandishing the flashlight over my head, I tiptoe down the aisle, turn right and walk past a long shelf that holds clear plastic storage bins and food carts. I breathe heavily and my knees feel weak. When I reach the bathroom, I throw the door open.
Standing there, aiming a gun at my chest, is my father.
“Jesus Christ,” we yell in unison and jump back. He trips and lands firmly on the toilet, dropping his gun on the floor. I remain on my feet and stare at him with my mouth open. He’s managed to hang on to a manila folder, but a pile of newspaper clippings are scattered across the ground. As filthy as the cement floor is, I squat and pick them up while my father heaves himself off the toilet. I can hear him panting over the pounding of my heart.
“What are you doing here?” he says once he’s caught his breath. “Don’t you know this neighborhood’s dangerous?”
“I could be asking you the same question.”
He looks toward his gun, which I’ve left on the floor, and turns pale. My God, I could’ve shot you.” He picks it up and slips it in his pants pocket. “I came to get my file. I didn’t want it falling into the wrong hands.”
“Who’d come to this dump looking for it?” I say, and then laugh. I’m the wrong hands to which he refers.
Tootsie shakes his head. “You are something else, Doll. Let’s get the hell out of here before the ceiling falls in.”
It’s a relief to step outside into the fresh air. After we lock up, he gets in my car and we drive around the block to the S&S diner, where he left his car. Mashed Potatoes is manning her corner at Second and Sixteenth, schmoozing the drivers for a couple of bucks. She blesses my father when he hands her a ten and he blesses her back.
“So what’s with all these articles?” I ask once we’re settled at the U-shaped counter and Irma, a waitress who knows my father from the old days, has parked cups of coffee on our placemats. My father leafs through the manila file. Some of the articles have disintegrated to little more than piles of dust and quite a few are too faded to read. As I’m leaning in to look at a photo, my father slaps his hand over the clipping.
“What’re you doing?” I say. “I spent a half hour in that filthy warehouse looking for those articles. I deserve to read them.”
“No one invited you.”
“That’s not the point.”
“Then what is?”
I take a moment to gather my thoughts. The clippings are his property after all. “When those articles were left in my bedroom and my house was ransacked—” I hesitate a moment—“they became my business.”
Tootsie shrugs. “Fair enough.” Then he rips the article he’s holding into small pieces.
I’m so angry that I leap out of my seat and reach for the file. Tootsie anticipates my move and flips the manila folder closed before pulling it toward him.
“You son of a . . .” I stop at the look I get from Irma. Tootsie and I glare at each other.
“That’s great,” I say. “Keep your stupid folder. And your secrets. I’ll talk to Abe and your hoodlum friends myself.”
I stomp out of the restaurant, leaving my father alone with his precious file.
Then I drive home, where I take my time showering away the cobwebs, rat feces, and nasty mood I acquired in my father’s warehouse.
----
31
----
It’s six o’clock on Friday night and my head’s pounding. I haven’t eaten since seven this morning and I’m in no mood for Tootsie’s games. He joined Congregation B’nai David a week ago and invited me to attend services with him. I figure he’s changed his mind and is letting me read the clippings. When I press him about it on the ride over, he says they’re none of my business. I’m tempted to drop him at the temple and take off. But I wouldn’t feel right about letting him walk into the synagogue for the first time alone. He hasn’t been in a temple since my mother’s funeral.
The chairs at B’nai David are deep and seductively comfortable, with wide arm rests and plush, velvet-upholstered seats in which it’s almost impossible to stay awake. But the cantor has an operatic voice and, judging from the stillness of the audience, the congregants are as enraptured as I am by his throaty baritone. His voice soars toward the rafters of the synagogue’s tall beamed ceiling then descends in a series of arpeggios as he weaves his silken tones through the ancient melodies. I feel transported in time and imagine the chant emanating from the lips of a white-robed priest on a golden hill in Jerusalem.
When Tootsie elbows me in the ribs and leans over to whisper in my ear, I ignore him. I withdraw my elbow from our mutual armrest and turn so my back is toward him. Instead of taking the hint, his voice grows louder, rising to a hoarse whisper that draws a loud shush from the gentleman behind us. I blush. My father, if he notices, doesn’t care.
“Itzhak Cohen,” he says, pointing his chin at the front of the room and drawing an angry glare from the woman in front of us. Tootsie winks at her and she twists back around. “I haven’t seen that putz in years.”
I follow my father’s gaze toward the bimah, the raised area at the front of the synagogue. An elderly man waits at the bottom of the richly carpeted purple stairs that lead to the ark, the ornamental enclosure where the Torah is kept. When the cantor’s solo comes to a close, the old man mounts the steps. He’s bent so far over he faces the floor and struggles to surmount each stair. His elbow is supported by a middle-aged man I assume is his son. The senior Cohen is well into his nineties and the overhead lights throw reflections across the pale freckled pate on which a tiny white yarmulke tenuously rests. It inches down the back of his head and slips toward his neck as he mounts the stairs. I’m surprised he reaches the bimah with the yarmulke still in place.
My father seems to be equally engaged by the yarmulke’s progress because he doesn’t speak until Cohen shuffles across the upraised stage.
“Fifty years ago, the old bastard probably led prayers at Sing Sing.” My father speaks louder than he needs to. I don’t know if it’s deliberate or his hearing aid is set too low. Either way, he’s attracted an audience.
“Dad, this is not the place,” I whisper loud enough so people in adjacent seats know I’m not a party to his rudeness.
His eyebrows rise in mock surprise. “Who are you? The rebbetzin?” He picks up the prayer book and pretends to find his place. “I’ll tell you about it on the way to the Marmelsteins.”
I do my best to read responsively with the old man. But it does no good. I’m trying to picture this Itzhak Cohen in a jail cell at Sing Sing. And as my stomach lets out a growl that can be heard five seats down, I think longingly of the Shabbat dinner we’re heading to once services are done.
Between Tootsie’s stop in the men’s room and his insistence on schmoozing with old friends in the lobby outside the sanctuary, it takes a good half hour to make our way to the car once services are over. The parking lot is empty, but a security guard mans the entrance and watches us get in the Mercedes.
The Marmelsteins don’t attend Sabbath services but invited us to come over for dinner when we’re through with ours. They still live in Coral Gables, down the street from the house in which I grew up. Neither Tootsie nor I have seen them since my mother’s funeral years earlier and I’m looking forward to reminiscing about the old neighborhood and my mom. Mrs. Marmelstein, who played on my mother’s tennis team, saw my food column two weeks earlier and invited me to join her family for Friday night dinner. It was obvious from her brief silence that she was caught off guard when I mentioned I was going to temple with Tootsie that night. She said to bring him along, which was generous given that she knows about his cheating. Naturally, I have not shared her hesitancy with my father.
“So who’s th
is Itzhak Cohen?” I ask my father once we’re on the expressway heading south. “It’s pretty hard to picture the old guy in prison.”
“He’s not much to look at now but he was a big son of a bitch in the old days. I saw him two, maybe three times. Built like a barrel back then, thick through the chest and short. But all muscle.” Tootsie wipes his forehead with a handkerchief, then aims the air-conditioning vent toward his face. “I met him in New York.”
“Last year?”
He gives me a confused stare, then laughs. “Yeah sure. On the way to your cousin Harriet’s wedding, I stopped to see Itzhak. Don’t be an idiot. In the forties. Just after your sister was born.”
“When you were working on the docks in New York?”
“You got a good memory, Doll. I had the occasional day off. And for once my boss, Sammy, had the decency to show me around.”
My father fiddles with the vent again. I can’t actually hear the cogs turning but from the way he flips his head from side to side, it’s obvious he’s mining his brain. Every time we get together now, he’s got a new story for me. It’s as though his revelations about Fat Louie opened the floodgates. I suspect he’s trying to explain himself, to justify his behavior by walking me through his past.
“I don’t want you to repeat this,” he says as we mount the ramp onto I-95, “because I doubt his wife or son know the story.”
I smile. There’s not much chance of that.
“It was about halfway through my stint on the docks. I guess Sammy wanted to reward me for working so hard, because he called on a Friday to let me know he’d pick me up at my apartment Saturday night. He said we were going to see the real New York.
“That sounded good to me so I put on a fresh shirt, my best suit, and a red tie your mother bought for me before I left. I was waiting downstairs in front of my building when Sammy pulled up in a shiny black Packard driven by a man in a chauffeur outfit. Very classy. I didn’t know my boss was such a big shot. I slid into the back seat next to Sammy, who wore a tux and looked sharp for an old guy.” Tootsie laughs. “He was probably forty-five to my twenty-five.
“We headed north on the West Side Highway toward the Bronx but I was too busy checking out the car to notice where we were going. When I looked up from the wood paneling and leather seats, the driver was already cruising through a neighborhood I’d never been in. We drove for a while, maybe an hour, through a hilly area with estates set back from the road. I figured Sammy was taking me out to some ritzy restaurant in the suburbs so I was shocked when the driver headed up a long driveway to this dump. The paint was peeling and the lawn was infested with weeds. It was big but looked like nobody had taken care of it in years. At this point, I didn’t feel so great. I could think of plenty of reasons Sammy’d drag me to a pit in the boondocks and none of them were good.”
“Did you try to get away?”
“I considered it but there was nowhere to go. Plus when the driver maneuvered to the back of the house and parked in an open field packed with Caddys and Rolls Royces, I figured I’d be okay. Sammy wouldn’t kill me around all these rich people. And he seemed jazzed, not angry. I was stunned when he knocked on the door of what looked like a two-car garage and a guy in white tails opened it.
“I couldn’t believe it. Sammy’d taken me to a carpet joint. I’d heard about these swanky casinos that operated outside the law, but I’d never been to one. Men and women in tuxedos and evening gowns. Gorgeous broads. I’d never been there but it looked how I imagined the Palace of Versailles would look. Crystal chandeliers. Oil paintings. Could have been Old Masters for all I knew. Of course, I played it cool, didn’t let on to Sammy that I was bowled over—even after he led me to this fancy buffet table loaded with caviar and champagne.
“Did you pay to go inside?” I say, imagining a scene from The Great Gatsby. We’re ten minutes from the Marmelstein’s and I’m eager to hear the end of the story.
“I didn’t. But Sammy arranged everything. He may have.
“I’d never been much of a gambler but I did okay at blackjack so I played a couple of hands before losing twenty bucks and calling it quits. I looked around for Sammy, who’d started at the table with me but disappeared. I figured he was playing craps or poker so I roamed around the casino. It was larger than I’d figured, with a leather bar that ran the length of the room and a dozen tables that faced a stage where a fat broad sang. But Sammy was nowhere to be found. I didn’t know a soul in the place and I was pretty uncomfortable around the swells with their tuxes and gorgeous dames. Which, I’m fairly certain, were not their wives.”
“He left without you?”
“That’s what I thought at first. Then I noticed a door to the left of the bar. It was set into a tufted burgundy leather wall. You couldn’t see it unless you were looking hard, which I was. I figured it was the john and Sammy was in there so I went in. Well I found him all right, at a green baize table where he was talking to a couple of mugs. It didn’t look like they were playing poker. This bull of a man—Itzhak Cohen—scowled when I entered the room. You could tell he was the boss because all the goons glanced at him. The room was small and windowless, with just enough space for the poker table and a couple of chairs. It stunk of cigar smoke. I mumbled “sorry” and turned to leave, but Sammy stopped me.
“ ‘It’s okay, Tootsie,’ he said, ‘I got some friends you should meet.’ ”
“There wasn’t much I could do at this point, so I stood by the table as Sammy made his introductions. I caught a couple of names, but Itzhak’s was the only one that stuck. The men nodded at me but seemed relieved when Sammy said he’d join me in an hour. I went to the bar and lingered over a scotch and soda until he came out.
“On the drive home, Sammy looked at me, eyebrows scrunched and serious. ‘I can count on you to keep your mouth shut, right?’
“I don’t know what he’s talking about but, of course, I agree.”
The traffic becomes more congested as Tootsie and I leave I-95 for Dixie Highway and drive past a neighborhood with ten-foot walls. Fences crushed beneath trees when Hurricane Andrew struck eight years ago have been rebuilt and already are concealed by South Florida’s rapacious vegetation. It’s remarkable how quickly Miami adjusts to change. People rarely spoke Spanish when I grew up here, but the thousands of Cubans who made it across the Straits of Florida changed that. Now more than half of Miami’s citizens claim Spanish as their first language. And Brickell Avenue—once an elegant boulevard lined with gracious estates—has been taken over by behemoth banking institutions that house the wealth of Latin American oligarchs. Whatever grows here—foliage, culture, crime, money—expands rapidly and supplants what came before.
My father coughs, drawing my attention. “You listening?”
“Yes.”
“As I was saying, in the tumult of working the docks and getting through a miserable winter without your mother, I didn’t think much about the night at the casino. Sammy brought me to a few joints after that, but I never ran into any of those goons and kept my nose out of his business.
“When my job was over a few weeks later, I returned to Miami to your mother and sister. What a relief that was.” He smiles. “Esther learned to sit up while I was gone and I spent every free moment with her. On my third day home, though, I was reading The Miami News and nearly gagged on my coffee. Right there on the front page was a mug shot of a clown I’d seen at the casino with Itzhak Cohen. The article said a fellow named Boom Boom Goldberg was charged in the murder of a Miami gangster, Harvey Pollock. I hadn’t paid much attention to Boom Boom that night in the casino, but even I could tell the schmuck was a mouth-breather. I figured the other goons set this fat head up for the murder of Pollock, knowing he wouldn’t rat them out.”
“Did you tell the police?”
My father gives me his what are you, stupid sneer. “Hell, no. It wasn’t my problem. I met the yuk once, in New York
, what did I care? But when your mother read about Pollock’s murder, she had her own ideas. She informed me we were going to the man’s funeral. I almost fell off my chair. Turns out your mother knows his wife. Ethel Pollock belonged to her Hadassah chapter. They became friendly when Mrs. Pollock hosted a Hadassah luncheon and your mother, such a sweetheart, was the only one who showed up.”
“Why didn’t the other women attend?”
“Mrs. Pollock told your mother the old yentas snubbed her because of her husband’s business associates. She didn’t say the Jewish mob, mind you, but your mother figured it out. Ethel swore her husband was no longer involved in the game, but it didn’t matter. The Hadassah ladies didn’t want to knows from her.”
“You think Mom knew before she went?”
“She was a generous person. I wouldn’t be surprised.
“What could I do?” Tootsie continues. “I hadn’t told your mother about that night in the casino, and I sure as hell wasn’t saying anything about recognizing Boom Boom. So that Sunday we went to Congregation B’nai David for the funeral. I sent your mother inside to grab a seat while I had a cigarette. I was standing in front of the shul, minding my own business, when I felt a tap on my shoulder. I turned and almost jumped out of my shoes. It was Itzhak Cohen. He was in slacks and a polo shirt and it was obvious he wasn’t heading into the temple.
“ ‘Can you offer my condolences?’ he asked. I hadn’t heard him talk before and was stunned by the falsetto that came out of this thick-chested ape. I was too surprised to do anything but nod. See, I didn’t know that he was responsible for the hit on the deceased, but I had my suspicions.
“ ‘I can’t go in,’ he said. ‘I’m a Cohen,’ he told me then waited. When I didn’t say anything, he tapped himself on the chest. ‘A kohanim. Can’t go near the dead. It’s Jewish law. We can’t defile ourselves.’
The Yiddish Gangster's Daughter (A Becks Ruchinsky Mystery Book 1) Page 21
