Mrs. Kaplan and the Matzoh Ball of Death

by Mark Reutlinger

  Something else I did not need to hear. I do not know exactly what is an “accessory,” but I am pretty sure it is something like the opposite of “innocent bystander.”

  “So I decided I would carry the message to Flo, without passing judgment on it or on you. Besides, I rationalized, if you couldn’t hire an honest burglar like Flo, you might try instead to hire one who wasn’t so trustworthy and who might take advantage of you.”

  It is true. As my mother would have said, better to be in bed with the wolf you know than the wolf you don’t.

  At this point Sara said she had to leave soon, so we should finish our business. She examined the notes she had taken, including those her friend had dictated, seemed satisfied, and then asked, “May I see the rooms in question, so I can describe their location to Flo?”

  “Of course, a good idea,” Mrs. K said. She rose. Sara had to help me up, as sitting on that stone bench did not do my back any good. Once I was straightened up, we walked over to the residential wing and made like we were having a casual stroll by the rooms in question.

  23

  The residential rooms are all on one floor. There are several sections of wide corridor, well lighted and separated by fire doors along the way. The apartment doors go down both sides of the corridor. Each door has a resident’s name next to it, and between the doors on one side are nice padded chairs, small square tables with fancy lamps that are always turned on, and several longer tables, each with a pretty vase or statue on it. To tell the truth, I do not understand why we need these bigger tables—they just make more work for the staff keeping them dusted. But perhaps they are supposed to make the Home look like the house of some rich macher: Who else can afford to have fancy tables on which he only puts a few flowers? Anyway, the other side of the corridor has only a wooden rail for people who cannot walk without holding on. At least on that side there are no useless tables to get in their way.

  We passed first Isaac Taubman’s room, which is closest to the common area, and then we proceeded down the hall past the rooms of Daisy Goldfarb, Mr. Isaac Klein, Mrs. Deborah McLean (her husband was not Jewish, but a mensch just the same), past my room and Mrs. K’s, around the corner past the door of Marian Levin, and finally, passing many more doors, all the way to the far end. In that section is Bertha Finkelstein’s room, which was locked up and waiting for her relatives to arrive and make an inventory of her belongings. The staff had already taken her nameplate off the wall next to her door. I do not like to think about it.

  Sara took more notes on her pad. She did not ask a lot of questions, so I assumed everything was clear and there were no problems she could foresee for her friend. And why should there be? What could be simpler than a well-lit corridor and a nice big door with the resident’s name next to it? No poking around in the dark looking for the door or how to get in!

  Next we went outside to the back lawn. We had to walk on the lawn itself—there is no path, I suppose because no one usually walks there except to mow the lawn and tend the flower beds. But the lawn is available to be used by the residents if they wish, and sometimes we stroll on it or even have a picnic on a nice day. A wooden fence about six feet high separates this back lawn area from the street. It is just an ordinary fence—none of that ugly wire with the sharp teeth that you see sometimes at the top of fences, which is a good thing, so it shouldn’t look like we are being held prisoner.

  We strolled by the outside windows in back of the rooms—there are two windows for each room—and Sara took still more notes. (Such a good secretary she must have made.) She frowned a bit, but again she did not ask any questions. I suppose when you’ve seen one window, you’ve seen them all.

  “Since these windows all look alike, at least to me, we’ll have to tell Flo the number of rooms, or windows, from the end of the building to the rooms you want her to search, in case she decides to go in from back here,” Sara said. Mrs. K nodded.

  Sara now seemed to be paying particular attention to the floodlights that are on the ends of the building, even tapping on the little tunnel that runs from the lights down the side and into the building. The lights were added after the Home was built, and I think this is where the electric wires were put.

  Sara asked where my room was. We had a little trouble deciding because, as Sara commented, all the windows do look alike, and both of us had closed our blinds to keep out the afternoon sun; but by looking inside one that was open we recognized whose it was and counted from there. Sara went right up to my room and seemed to be examining closely the window, which was open, and writing something down. I asked what she was looking for.

  “Well, Flo told me to notice the type of windows you had. These, you can see, are what they call awning windows, because of how they’re hinged at the top and open outward. They’re locked, as you know, by this handle thingy that turns and engages a slot at the bottom of the window frame.” She turned the handle and demonstrated. Of course, I know how to lock the window, but I never really thought much about how it worked. In fact, I seldom lock the window, and I doubt many others do, as there has never been any problem with break-ins (until now, of course). I told this to Sara and she immediately made a note of it.

  She then opened the window out as far as it would go, no doubt to see if her friend could fit through it. I didn’t think so, but I kept quiet and let Sara do her job. She looked especially closely at some writing on the handle, which I could not read without my reading glasses—ah, to have eyes like that again—and of course made a note.

  “Flo told me to be sure to find out the brand of lock the windows use. You can see the windows don’t open out very far. Flo says with the older style of window and with certain brands of lock, it’s relatively easy to defeat the detent mechanism that keeps them from opening wider, but with modern windows it’s much harder.”

  Who knew? An education in burglary we were getting.

  —

  We returned to the lounge, on the way counting the number of rooms to the important ones as Sara had asked. Sara said she would take all of the information back to her friend, and she would telephone me if she needed anything further. Then she gave me a kiss on the cheek, squeezed Mrs. K’s hand, and turned to leave. But Mrs. K still had hold of her hand, and she seemed reluctant to let it go.

  “Sara, dear,” she said, “you won’t say a word of this to anyone but your friend, will you? I feel very bad about asking someone to break the law like this, I who always pride myself on being a good citizen. I couldn’t stand it if anyone found out.” She sounded quite upset.

  It was not like Mrs. K, who as I have said is quite a strong person, to be this emotional, and it just showed what tsuris—distress—she was going through. For her sake, I hoped we were making a good decision.

  “You don’t have to worry about that, Rose,” Sara replied, putting her arm around Mrs. K. “I’ve had a lot of practice keeping Flo’s professional life a secret, and of course she isn’t likely to tell anyone. Even if she were somehow caught, she would never say she was there because of you.”

  The thought of the burglar lady being “caught” I had tried not to think until then. And even though Florence had told Sara there wasn’t much chance of it if she planned properly, it was always possible. Suddenly I was feeling a cold chill down my spine, and it was not because the air conditioning was on. Yes, what if this burglar was caught in one of the rooms? Then we would all be in the soup!

  Mrs. K, however, did not seem to be extra upset by what Sara said. And after giving both of us another hug, Sara was gone.

  I and Mrs. K looked at each other. We were both thinking the same thing.

  Like the Romans say: The cast it is dyed.

  24

  About an hour and a half after Sara left, I received a telephone call from her.

  I and Mrs. K had been anxious to hear what the burglar lady had said, and I got right to the point.

  “So what did your friend Florence say when you gave her the information?”

 
Sara sounded a bissel unhappy. “Well, it’s sort of good news and bad news.”

  Why is it that there is almost never just plain good news, but always it is this “good news and bad news” thing that spoils it?

  “Nu, so what is the good news?”

  “The good news is Flo is still willing to do the job.”

  “Mazel tov. And the bad news?”

  “The bad news is that Flo said she wouldn’t be able to search all of the rooms in the time you said she’d have.”

  “Not all the rooms? Are you sure?”

  “I’m sure. She was pretty adamant about it.”

  “But how long could it take to go in a few doors, look around, and come out again?”

  Sara laughed. “Turns out it’s not quite that simple. Maybe it’d be best if I repeat what Flo told me so you’ll understand, and you can explain to Mrs. Kaplan.”

  “Yes, please do that. I know she will not be happy about it, but I am sure there is a good reason.”

  “Okay, so first I described the ‘lay of the land,’ so to speak, what you had shown me about the rooms and the corridors and the back windows and all that.”

  “And was all of that satisfactory to her?” I asked.

  “Well, yes and no,” she answered. Again not a straight this way or that way, but a wishy-washy “a bissel this, a bissel that.” Nothing is simple these days. Never is there a straight answer.

  “I don’t know from ‘yes and no,’ ” I said. “Either she has the information she needs or she does not, no?”

  Again Sara laughed. “Well, yes, she does. It’s just not all that she would like it to be. For example, I told her there was a long corridor that jogs around a couple of corners, a good six feet wide and brightly lit by overhead lights and table lamps. Maybe fifty or more doors, all identical, along both sides of the corridor, each with a handicap-type handle and a deadbolt, and a nameplate next to it. I noticed that Flo didn’t seem pleased with the picture I was describing.

  “I asked her if something was wrong, because it seemed like a pretty simple setup to me.

  “She said, ‘Well, let me put it this way: If you were going to break into a house at night, would you choose to do it at a large, well-lighted front door with two sturdy locks, located right on the only sidewalk people in that neighborhood use?’

  “I saw what she meant and said no, I’d prefer a small, dark door with a cheap lock, located where no one ever bothers to pass by.”

  I had to admit I saw also what she meant.

  “So then I figured she’d probably want to hear about the back windows, since there are only the two ways into the rooms, front door and back window. Unless, of course, there’s a basement she could tunnel up from.”

  I assured her I was unaware of any such basement, but she said she was not serious about the tunnel anyway.

  “So I told her what I had noticed about the type of windows they were, the locks, the fence around the back lawn, all of that. She seemed to think it was not ideal, but she said it probably would be okay for her purposes.”

  “Okay is good enough,” I said. “So you were telling me about the bad news.”

  “Right. After I described everything, Flo wanted to know about how much time she would have to complete the job and get away. I said about two hours, while this opera singer is giving a recital in the social hall, and that just about everyone would be there.

  “She said, ‘I hope “just about” includes the people in these rooms.’ ”

  I said I was sure Mrs. Kaplan would’ve said if it didn’t. In fact, I remembered her mentioning that one of the rooms was occupied by a woman who they were sure would be at the recital, because she was one of the people who helped to arrange it.

  “Anyway, she said that two hours is not enough time to do all of these rooms, having to get the windows open and climb in and all. Not with the margin for error she would need to have.”

  “So how many rooms does she think she could search in that time?” I asked.

  Sara said, “Flo looked at the diagram and then closed her eyes and seemed to be picturing the scene. When she opened them again, she said, given that there are floodlights to deal with, and she doesn’t know about the window locks for sure, she’d need to have at least an hour for each room. So two rooms max.”

  “Only two?” I said. “You are right, this is not good news.”

  “Yes, I told Flo this would be a disappointment to you ladies, but I certainly wasn’t going to suggest that she take any more chances than she was comfortable with.”

  “Of course not,” I replied. “We appreciate what your friend is doing for us, and we will just have to be satisfied.”

  This was easy to say, but I knew Mrs. K would not be happy about it. She would have to choose where it was most important to snoop.

  I hoped she would choose to snoop the right ones.

  —

  I relayed to Mrs. K what Sara had told me. As expected, she was not happy to hear it, but she said she understood and that we should not look a gift horse in the pisk.

  “The only thing I can do,” she said, “is to decide which two rooms I most want the burglar to look at.”

  So after a few minutes of thinking about this, she looked up, sighed, and told me the two names that I should tell to Sara, who would tell them to her friend.

  And then we could only wait.

  25

  Tuesday evening was the big deal recital. Like Mrs. K said, everybody was there, like it was Rosh Hashanah, and dressed just as fancy. Well, everybody was there except those not able to leave their rooms, and for them the staff set up a recorder machine so they could see it at another time.

  Ordinarily, I and Mrs. K would have been enjoying Mr. Bernard’s recital (or Mr. Bernardi’s, if you prefer—so playing like he’s Italian makes him a better opera singer?), as we both like to go to the opera and we never hear a famous opera singer “close and personal,” as they say. But instead we both were shvitzing, perspiring like it was ninety degrees inside, because we knew that while the tenor was singing, our burglar was burglaring.

  I think we both now wanted to call off the snooping, to get Sara to tell her friend not to bother. We had the cold feet, in spite of our shvitzing!

  The recital was very nice, however, and when Bernardi was through singing everybody clapped loudly, which was probably just as well, because maybe it would warn the burglar lady that the recital was over and she should hurry up.

  We were even more nervous during the reception, because we were then even closer to finding out whether all of our shvitzing was for nothing. Neither of us could eat any of the delicious apple kugel; well, maybe we did have just a bissel to keep our spirits up. And a chocolate candy or two. And some coffee, although I would have preferred a nice cup of tea.

  Before long the reception too was over, and it was still about fifteen minutes short of the two hours that Mrs. K had estimated. We had no way to keep it going or to stop everyone from going back to their rooms, which they began to do. I was praying that the burglar lady had already finished her work and was a long time gone, and I am sure Mrs. K was doing the same, not that we would have expected God to help someone to break the law. But maybe this would be the exception, as it was in a good cause. It couldn’t hurt.

  Mrs. K and I made our way to the residential wing, almost having to hold each other up, so nervous we were when we passed the doors behind which might still be our burglar. Just as we reached the first such door, with several other residents nearby, there was a loud clunk noise that seemed to come from behind it. I was surprised my heart didn’t jump right out of my body, and I was ready to plotz right there on the spot.

  Mrs. K, however, she did not panic. What she did do was to drop her purse on the floor and say loudly to me, “What a klutz I am, not looking where I was going!” Several residents looked over and assumed the noise they heard was Mrs. K bumping into one of the tables against the wall.

  When no one showed any more interest i
n the noise that we heard, Mrs. K picked up her purse and, with a big sigh of “Oy vey,” took my arm and we continued down the hall.

  We went to our rooms and tried to sleep—we did not expect to hear from Sara until the next morning at the earliest. I did not sleep very well, and the time went by slowly. Both are unusual at my age.

  —

  In the morning, Mrs. K and I were too nervous to go to breakfast, but we took some chocolate macaroons and tea back to my room to wait. It was ten o’clock before the telephone finally rang. I almost spilled my tea as I quickly reached for the telephone and then almost dropped the receiver before I could say, “Hello, Sara?”

  At first there was silence, then, “No, this is Pupik. Is Mrs. Kaplan there with you?”

  What a disappointment. But I took a deep breath and said, “Yes, just a minute,” and I handed the telephone to Mrs. K, telling her, “It is Pupik. He wants to speak to you.” She looked puzzled but took the receiver and said, “Hello?”

  Mrs. K listened, and then she said, “Yes, all right, and I shall bring Mrs. Berkowitz with me again.” She then listened some more, her brow wrinkling like she was not very pleased at what she was hearing. To whatever Pupik had said, she replied, “You want I should bring my lawyer instead?” Whatever Pupik answered to that, it caused Mrs. K to smile. After she hung up the telephone, for a few moments she did not say anything. She just stared in front of her, like she was thinking deep thoughts. Finally I could not wait any longer.

  “Nu, so what did Pupik have to say already?”

  She seemed to snap out of her thinking and looked at me. “He told me he had just received a call from that Detective Corcoran. He and that other policeman will be here Friday morning, and Pupik wants me to come to his office ‘promptly at ten o’clock’ to meet with them.”