Another Three Dogs in a Row

by Neil S. Plakcy

  Rochester turned abruptly toward the parking lot and began to stalk there, nose to the ground. “What’s up, boy?” I asked, but I let him tug me forward.

  We crossed the paved lot, heading toward the street as cars whizzed past. He stopped and began to paw at the ground. “What’s there, Rochester?”

  He lowered his head to sniff at a beautiful green malachite stone like the one I’d seen on the rabbi’s desk, the striations of dark and light providing a beautiful pattern. When I crouched down to get a closer look, I could see that the depression in the center looked well-rubbed.

  In the past, Rochester had been very good at finding pieces of evidence that a human investigator might have overlooked, so I approached this situation with caution. Sure, the stone could have belonged to anyone, but it was only a couple of feet from the bus stop, and on Sunday Joel Goldberg had arrived at Shomrei Torah by bus. Add that to the matching stone on the rabbi’s desk, and there was a reasonable chance that the worry stone had belonged to Joel.

  I pulled a tissue from my pocket and wrapped the stone in it, careful not to smudge and potential fingerprints. I stood, and praised Rochester profusely, rubbing him behind his ears the way he loved.

  We began to walk back toward the synagogue. As we approached the door to the rabbi’s study, Rick and the rabbi came out, Sadie walking without a leash beside them. “Thank you for help,” Rick said. “And again, I’m very sorry for your loss.”

  The rabbi nodded. I walked over to them and opened the worry stone in my palm. “Do you recognize this?” I asked him.

  “That was my brother’s stone,” he said. He reached for it, but I pulled my hand back and instead handed the stone to Rick, who pulled an evidence bag from his pocket and took the stone from me.

  “Our parents went to Greece when we were teenagers and brought back one for each of us,” the rabbi said. “Joel still had it the last time I saw him. He said it calmed him down to hold it and rub his thumb over it.”

  “Where did you find this?” Rick asked.

  “Face the bus stop sign and then walk about three paces to the right.” I turned to the rabbi and asked, “Do you think it could have fallen from Joel’s pocket when he got off the bus?”

  “Joel wouldn’t have been that careless,” he said. “He’d have been holding it in his hand, especially if he’d just been on a bus. Traveling always made him nervous.”

  “Could someone have taken it from him?” Rick asked.

  “I don’t see why.”

  As Rochester and Sadie sniffed each other, I turned to the rabbi. “Why don’t I walk you back to your study, Rabbi. Is there someone you can call? You shouldn’t be alone at a time like this. The cantor? Another rabbi?”

  “I should call the cantor,” he said. “She’ll want to know.”

  Rick followed my directions toward the street, and the rabbi and I walked back to his office, accompanied by the two dogs. When we got inside, Rochester and Sadie settled together in a corner and the rabbi picked up the phone. I tried not to eavesdrop, but I did hear that the cantor would be there shortly.

  I was about to make my apologies and leave, when the rabbi stood up and began pacing around the office. “I just don’t understand,” he said. “Joel’s behavior was always somewhat opaque when he was suffering through an episode, but usually I could make sense of what he wanted.”

  He picked up a piece of paper from his desk. “Your detective friend left me something,” he said. “He said Joel had an old-fashioned photo postcard folded up in his shoe. He let me take a photo copy of it, but it doesn’t make any sense to me. Maybe you’ll have a different perspective.”

  He handed the paper to me. It was in sepia tones, and showed two dark-haired boys under a tree. They wore white shirts and shorts held up by suspenders. On the back “Kalman, 15 und Aaron, 10” had been written in a spidery hand.

  “You don’t recognize either of these boys?” I asked.

  “No. And no one in our family has those names. Why would my brother have that picture hidden in his shoe?”

  “Do you think this was what he wanted to show you?”

  “Perhaps. But why? Where did it come from?”

  “Could he have found it somewhere? And that’s why he came to this area, to find you and give it to you?”

  “I don’t even know how long he was here before he showed up on Sunday,” he said. He looked at me quizzically. “You told Aaron Feinberg that you were a bar mitzvah at the old shul in Trenton. Do you know the area well?”

  “I guess,” I said. “I was away for a long time.”

  “Joel showed up on Sunday on the bus from Trenton, and all he was carrying was his backpack. He had to have brought more with him—I know he had a ratty old winter coat he would never have given up, and he usually had a bag of books with him, too. Can you help me find out where he was staying, and find the rest of his personal effects for me? I don’t know Trenton at all, and I’d appreciate your help trying to navigate the city and understand where he was and what he was doing.”

  I felt a familiar tingle and the chance to explore the background of a crime. The rabbi had his congregation to tend to, and I was sure that the loss of his brother would weigh heavily on him. Seeing the places where his brother had been would probably be very upsetting.

  There was no question I could deny the rabbi’s request. And it would be a harmless way to indulge the curiosity that had gotten me into trouble so often in the past.

  “I’d be happy to help, Rabbi,” I said. “If he was homeless he might have been staying at one of the shelters in Trenton, and I can go over there for you. Do you have a recent photo of your brother you could email me?”

  “The newest one I have is a couple of years old, but it should serve.”

  I gave him my email address, then roused Rochester from his place by Sadie. “I’m so sorry, Rabbi,” I said. “I’m an only child, but I’m sure it must be devastating to lose a sibling.”

  “I lost Joel years ago,” he said sadly. “But now, with your help, maybe I can find a piece of him again.”

  8 – Death Dog

  As Rochester and I walked to the parking lot, I saw Rick working with a crime scene tech to block off an area near the bus sign with yellow tape. He met us halfway to my car, still wearing blue gloves on his hands.

  “How’d you notice the stone?” he asked.

  “Rochester.”

  He groaned. “The death dog,” he said. “I swear sometimes I think we ought to just put a little uniform on him and let him do all the work.”

  Rochester had what I called a nose for crime, and he’d found clues several times that had helped Rick solve cases. “He can’t use a computer,” I said. “His paws are too big for the keyboard. So there’d still be a job for you.”

  “Ha-ha.”

  “How come you’re out here, anyway?” I asked. “Isn’t this outside the Stewart’s Crossing town limits?”

  “Yeah, this is Central Makefield Township out here, and their department handles DUI, home invasions, drugs in the schools, that kind of thing. They don’t have the staff or the skills to handle a possible homicide, so they come to us.”

  “You think it’s murder?”

  “Unless he banged himself on the head with some as yet unknown object, dropped it somewhere we haven’t looked yet, and then staggered over to the building.”

  “The rabbi asked me to look into where Joel has been the last few days,” I said. “If that doesn’t interfere with your investigation, of course.”

  “Whatever you can find. And I want to talk to you later, get some more background on this rabbi.”

  I looked at my watch. “I should get to work. But I can meet you at the Drunken Hessian at six. First round’s on you.”

  He grunted an assent, then petted Rochester and told him to get busy solving the case. Rochester licked Rick’s hand in response.

  My dog and I drove up the River Road, where lush willows drooped over the banks and swamp maples held
their vibrant green leaves for a few more weeks. I turned to Rochester, sitting beside me on the front passenger seat. “You found the place where the rabbi’s brother was hit. Any other clues?”

  He sat with his nose pressed against the window and appeared to be fascinated by cows in a field. So, no help from him.

  “Poor Rabbi Goldberg, having to live with a brother with mental illness, and then losing him,” I said to Rochester. Incidents like that made me glad that I was an only child, though I’d spent most of my youth wishing for a brother or a sister.

  Rochester slumped down into the seat without voicing an opinion.

  Dogs. What can you do?

  I spent most of the day thinking about the immigration program and how I could incorporate Professor Del Presto’s research into an exploration of contemporary attitudes toward the topic. I got sidetracked, as often happens when I plunge into research, and read a lot about the restrictions that had been in place when my grandparents and Lili’s had left Eastern Europe, and how many of those restrictions were still in place. Lili’s ex-boyfriend, Van Driver, was a reporter for the Wall Street Journal, and I read an article he’d written about a Syrian refugee family that had been sponsored for settlement in Canada by a charitable group.

  Now that the parents and their two children were safe, however, they were besieged by relatives back in Syria or in refugee camps in Lebanon, asking for help. “It is my brother,” the father of the family had said. “How can I refuse him? But while we still depend on charity, what can I do?”

  I remembered a conversation with my grandmother once, when she expressed guilt that she had been able to escape before the Holocaust, while her cousins and other family members were sent to camps and murdered. She told me that her father had gone back to Lithuania to visit his younger brother, to convince him and his family to come to the United States, but they wouldn’t leave. That he hunted for years after the war to find out what had happened to them, eventually learning how they had died.

  As far as I knew, I had no rabbis in my family tree, but back in Lithuania, my great-grandfather had been a tzadik, a righteous man who went to morning worship every day, a layman who had devoted himself to study while his wife ran their leather-tanning business. He’d probably have been pleased that at least one of his descendants was coming back into the flock.

  Would he still look for answers in the Torah? I came from generations and generations of people of the book, who had looked to those ancient words for guidance on how to live their lives. And here I was, in the twenty-first century, doing the same thing by attending the sessions with Rabbi Goldberg.

  Had we learned so little since those dark days of World War II? People were still suffering and dying all around the world. But the solution couldn’t be to bring them all here. My head began to ache at the complexity of it all. Perhaps Professor Del Presto could help a group of interested people make sense of it all. That was the point of Friar Lake, after all.

  Around four o’clock Lili texted me that she had another marathon phone call scheduled with her brother that evening, and it might be a good idea if I went out, as she was likely to be in a bad mood when it ended.

  I called her and let her know I’d made plans with Rick. “We’re meeting at the Drunken Hessian to talk about a body.”

  “Not another one. Steve, don’t you find it disturbing how dead bodies keep dropping in your path? After all, these are real people, with families and friends, and their lives get cut short.”

  “I know. And I’m starting to feel like this is almost a calling, to help those people have justice. But in this case, Rochester and I didn’t have anything to do with this one. We just happened to be at Talmud study when the body was discovered. It was Rabbi Goldberg’s brother – you know, the homeless man who showed up at the blessing of the animals on Sunday.”

  “The poor man,” she said, and I wasn’t sure if she meant the rabbi or his brother. “Was it natural causes? Oh, wait, nobody around you dies of natural causes.”

  “Then are you sure you want me to meet your mother?”

  “Don’t get me started. When you speak to the rabbi next, be sure to send him my condolences.”

  When I hung up the phone, I looked at Rochester, who had brought a pebble in from our lunchtime walk and was sniffing it. That reminded me of Joel Goldberg and his worry stone. I took the pebble away from Rochester so he wouldn’t break a tooth on it, and turned back to my computer.

  From the SEPTA website, I checked the bus schedule for the night before. The latest bus Joel could have taken would have gotten him to Shomrei Torah shortly after eleven PM. Of course, it was possible that Joel had gotten there earlier, but according to Rabbi Goldberg the cantor had closed up the building at seven that evening. Unless Joel had arrived while she was tutoring, and hidden on the property, it was likely he’d gotten there after she had already left.

  For a moment I considered her as a suspect. But I had seen her when I’d attended services, and she was a petite woman, not tall enough to have cracked Joel Goldberg over the head. She hadn’t been at the blessing of the animals, and I had no reason to suspect that she even knew of Joel’s existence. Even so, I sent a quick email to Rick with what I’d discovered.

  Because Rick had asked about the rabbi, I Googled him and discovered that he was thirty years old and held an MA in Hebrew Letters and Literature from Hebrew Union College, the yeshiva for Reform rabbis. He had worked as a hospital chaplain in Seattle for two years after graduating, which tied in with his interest in Jewish healing.

  Then he had been hired as assistant rabbi by an inner-city temple in Milwaukee coping with a declining membership. Soon after he left, the congregation had combined with another in the suburbs along Lake Michigan.

  I wondered if his departure from the pulpit there had as much to do with demographics as with his brother’s outburst, but I couldn’t be sure.

  The rabbi regularly blogged a version of his sermon, and maintained the temple’s website himself. He also tweeted tidbits of Jewish history and culture and posted photos of the temple’s sukkah and holiday celebrations on Instagram. In addition to the Talmud study group, he hosted a monthly Jewish-themed movie night, and took the youth group on field trips to places of Jewish interest like New York’s Lower East Side and The National Museum of American Jewish History in Philadelphia.

  Quite impressive for a young rabbi, especially a single one without a wife to help him. But then, maybe his bachelorhood was the reason why he had so much time for the temple. I’d scaled back my outside activities once I had Lili in my life.

  Or was his single status a result of his difficult family background? I imagined it would be tough enough to find a woman willing to take on the unpaid job of being a rebbetzin, a rabbi’s wife, without the additional burden of a mentally ill sibling.

  I shut down my computer and stood up. The rabbi’s situation made my problems with Lili and her mother seem small by comparison. But at least I had some information to share with Rick that evening.

  9 – Tough Day

  After I took Rochester home, fed and walked him, and kissed Lili goodbye in the midst of her phone call with her brother, I drove into the center of Stewart’s Crossing. The Drunken Hessian has been at the corner of Main and Ferry Streets, right by the town’s only traffic light, since Revolutionary times. For Rick and me, it was more important as a part of our youth, when the drinking age in Pennsylvania was twenty-one but sometimes you could get a sympathetic bartender at the Hessian to slip you a beer on the sly.

  Rick was already in a booth in the back with a pitcher of beer and two glasses. I slid in across from him and poured a beer for myself. “Tough day?”

  He nodded. “Any day that begins with a dead body qualifies.”

  He lifted his glass I touched mine to his in a toast. “To both of us staying alive another day,” I said.

  He sipped his beer, then put it down. “So what were you doing at the synagogue this morning? I didn’t think you were
that religious.”

  I explained about going to Shomrei Torah as a kid and then returning for Yahrzeit prayers, and then the blessing of the animals on Sunday. “The rabbi invited me to join his study group, and when he said I could bring Rochester that clinched it for me.”

  “What do you know about him?” Rick asked.

  I passed on what I had learned about the rabbi’s background, as well as Joel’s outburst in Milwaukee, and the congregation’s refusal to continue his contract. But I added that the temple had closed down soon, so it was hard to be certain.

  “Do you think the rabbi had a motive to kill his brother?” Rick asked.

  “Is Rabbi Goldberg a suspect?” I asked.

  “I’m not eliminating anybody. The rabbi lives alone, and nobody can verify his whereabouts last night. He was pretty shaken up, and that could be grief—or guilt. Maybe he was worried that Joel would screw up this job for him. Sounds like he’s been working pretty hard to hold onto it.”

  “He wouldn’t be the first to commit fratricide,” I said. “That goes all the way back to Cain and Abel. He seems like a nice guy, and he was definitely broken up by his brother’s death.” I took another sip of beer. “You know what killed Joel?”

  “Preliminary report from the coroner is that he suffered a heavy blow to his head with a blunt object. Not much to go on.”

  “I assume you didn’t find any suspicious blunt objects around the body?”

  “Nope. I had the evidence techs comb the area but they didn’t come up with much. The guy had a couple of bucks in his pocket and a bus ticket stub, and that’s about it.”

  “And that photograph in his shoe. The rabbi showed me the copy you left with him. You think it’s a clue to something?”

  “No idea. The guy was schizophrenic, right? So it could mean anything or nothing.”

  “Time of death?” I asked.

  “Sometime late last night. Coroner will get a more precise time to me tomorrow.”

  “You got my email, right? If we eliminate the cantor as suspect, and assume that she wouldn’t have locked up and left the property if Joel was hanging around, then we can time his arrival at the temple between seven and the time of the last bus, around eleven PM.”