Considering this was such an important and familiar story, the text in the Bible was pretty sparse. Cain and Abel both made offerings to the Lord, and while the Lord liked Abel’s, he didn’t like Cain’s. So Cain got mad and killed Abel, presumably out of jealousy – a kind of “Dad likes you best” thing.
That couldn’t be all, could it? I turned to my laptop and searched through the commentaries online. The best I could come up with was an interpretation that Abel sacrificed his best lamb to the Lord, while Cain burned some dried up wheat. That explained why God preferred Abel’s offering, but it didn’t satisfy me. Why would a benevolent creator favor one brother over the other, to the point of causing a murder? Didn’t make God out to be that great a guy. I decided I’d have to ask Rabbi Goldberg the next time I saw him.
But then I stopped. Bringing up Cain and Abel so soon after the death of his own brother could be insensitive, maybe even suggest to him that I suspected him in Joel’s death.
Could there have been something between Rob and Joel that pushed the rabbi to kill his brother? Rob wanted to keep the job at Shomrei Torah, and Joel threatened that. I couldn’t reconcile the temperament that would lead someone to the rabbinate with that of a man who could kill his own brother in cold blood. And if that was the case, why kill Joel on the synagogue grounds, and leave his body there? It didn’t make any sense.
I left the Bible on the coffee table in case I wanted to go back to it, and went upstairs to Lili. “What are you going to do to help the rabbi?” Lili asked, as I sat down on the bed beside her.
“Rick thought Joel might have been staying at a homeless shelter in Trenton,” I said. “I’m going to drive over there tomorrow and see if that’s true, and if anyone there remembers him.”
“Just be careful,” Lili said. “I don’t want anything to happen to you.” Rochester jumped up on the bed and walked right between us, where he settled down on his side, his legs toward me. She scratched behind his ears. “Or you either, sweetheart.”
* * *
Saturday morning, I took Rochester for a long walk just after dawn. A wind had blown through the night before, and multi-colored leaves littered the ground. He was eager to stick his big nose into every pile and pee on it, and I had to keep reining him in.
Lili and I shared croissants and mugs of hot chocolate for breakfast, and after she left to meet Rick and go ring-shopping, I loaded Rochester into the car for the trip to Trenton. The memories began flooding past as we crossed the Scudder’s Falls Bridge into New Jersey and began to drive south along the river. “This is my past, puppy,” I said to him. “Not always a good thing to go digging through what’s dead and buried, though, is it?”
He didn’t respond, just stuck his head out the window as we passed Villa Victoria Academy, where I’d competed in speech and debate, mildly freaked out by the prevalence of crosses in the classrooms. Then we drove through the Jewish neighborhood of Hiltonia, where many of my mother’s childhood friends had moved after leaving the center of town.
Even though we lived in the suburbs, we were still umbilically connected to the city across the river. As we drove it became clear that though I’d left Trenton, it hadn’t left me. Decades had passed, but I still felt viscerally connected to the streets and landmarks. I remembered visiting family, attending Shomrei Torah before it moved to the suburbs, shopping at stores my mother had patronized since she was a girl.
So many landmarks had disappeared, most of them demolished in the name of urban renewal that the streets hardly looked familiar anymore. The house with the two red doors I’d mentioned to Rick had been replaced by a state office building. The old Sinclair gas station with its dinosaur statue out front was long gone, along with the bakery where I got an ice cream birthday cake every year.
I wondered how Rob and Joel Goldberg had celebrated their birthdays as kids. Did they share, squabble? I’d wanted a brother to play with when I was a lonely only child, tagging along behind my parents to adult events.
After driving a few minutes, I realized I had no idea how to get to the Rescue Mission, the homeless shelter Rick had mentioned. I looked up the address on my phone and plugged it into my GPS, which directed me to a four-story old brick warehouse in downtown Trenton, only a few blocks from where the fancy stores used to be on State Street. I parked in the adjacent lot, put Rochester on his leash and warned him to be on his best behavior.
When I walked in the foyer, the largest man I’d ever seen in real life stood in front of me, at least six-five, with huge shoulders, chest and belly. He held two men apart by the backs of their shirts. “No fighting here. You got that?”
He looked at the guy on his left, who said, “Yeah.” Then the guy on his right said the same thing. The big guy let them go, and they walked off in opposite directions. He dusted off his hands and looked at me. “Afternoon. How can I help you?”
I introduced myself and made sure it was okay to have Rochester with me.
“We can have dogs visit, but not stay overnight.”
“That’s okay, I’m not here to check in.” Rochester slumped to the floor beside me. “I’m interested in a guy who might have come through here in the past couple of weeks. White, early thirties, brown hair. Diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia.”
Something like recognition flickered on Buddha’s face. “You a cop?”
“Not at all. This gentleman died on Wednesday night, en route to see his brother, Rabbi Rob Goldberg of Shomrei Torah in Stewart’s Crossing. The rabbi’s very upset, as you can imagine, and he asked me to track his brother’s movements to see if I can find out what he wanted from the rabbi.”
“So you’re a private investigator?”
Rochester sat up. Maybe he was a private detective, but I wasn’t. How could I explain why the rabbi had asked me to do this? I went for the simplest explanation. “Just a friend of the rabbi’s. He’s too upset to do this himself, so he asked me to.”
The big man accepted that. “Buddha McCarthy,” he said, and he stuck out his hand for me to shake. It was so big that my hand felt puny in his. Then he turned to Rochester, and petted his head. Rochester opened his mouth and grinned.
“You’re the peacekeeper around here?” I asked Buddha.
“Among other things. I manage the shelter so my size is an advantage.”
He nodded his head toward an open door behind him. “I remember the guy you’re asking about. Joel, right?”
I nodded.
“Come into the office with me and I’ll dig up the information we have on him.”
Rochester and I followed him into a small room with lots of small photos on the white walls, of individuals and events. “Your success stories?” I asked, pointing at them.
“Some of them. Some couldn’t make it no matter how hard they tried, or we did. So I keep their pictures up there, too, to remind me.” He sat down behind the desk, and I sat across from him, with Rochester on the floor beside me.
“What happened to Joel?” he asked.
“He went out to the synagogue in Stewart’s Crossing and someone killed him before he could see his brother,” I said. “Blow to the head with a blunt object.”
Buddha sighed. “It’s a tough world out there. A lot of these folks are sick, or they have mental problems, or they’re ex-cons.”
“Tell me about it,” I said. “I did a year in California for computer hacking. If I hadn’t had the support of a couple of good people I might have ended up here myself.”
“No, I can tell by looking at you. White, smart, good attitude. You’d have made it.”
I was flattered, but I believed that if it hadn’t been for people like Lucas Roosevelt and Rick Stemper, I would have floundered, no matter my skin color or my intelligence level. And as for a good attitude, well, my parole officer would have disagreed with that. Despite his best efforts over the two years I had been assigned to him, I still hadn’t kicked my addiction to hacking, and I wasn’t sure I ever would.
Buddha opened a big l
ogbook. “We keep a record of everybody who comes in,” he said. “We need it for legal purposes, as well as to show the people who fund us what kind of work we’re doing. You can see from how short the lists are that it’s been quiet for a while—not too hot or too cold, so a lot of folks have been living rough.” He motioned out the window, where gray clouds were massing. “Supposed to pour tonight, so we should get a few extra folks.”
He flipped through the pages, and I had to hold Rochester back, because he wanted to look, too. “Joel showed up here about week ago Thursday. It was a rainy day, and I remember he looked like a drowned rat. We got him dried out, washed his clothes, that kind of thing. At the time he didn’t show any signs of mental illness – he was very polite, well-spoken, apologetic.”
Was he still under the influence of his medications at the time? Or simply not yet in the grip of an episode?
Buddha closed his eyes, and I could see that childhood resemblance to his namesake remained. He exuded a kind of quiet warmth that I was sure many of the clients at the shelter responded well to.
When he opened them again, he said, “Joel said that he was looking for old records of Trenton, like lists of people who lived here back in the day. I sent him to the library down the street, and he stayed with us for a couple of days, doing well, spending lots of time with whatever research he was doing. But then last Saturday he appeared to be going into a manic phase. Talking non-stop, rambling about the Holocaust. His grandparents, who escaped, and some other man who didn’t—but then somehow he did, and he showed up in Trenton.”
Buddha sighed. “I have to admit I couldn’t pay much attention because we were busy, and it didn’t make a lot of sense.”
Rochester got up and stretched, then began to nose around Buddha’s office. I watched as he nosed at a photo of a man and two young boys, and I remembered the photo postcard that had been found folded up in Joel’s shoe.
“Did Joel mention the names Aaron or Kalman while he was here?”
“Not that I remember. Family members?”
As I explained about the picture of the two boys, Rochester slumped back beside me.
“He told me he’d been hanging around the ruins of this old temple. There were still a couple of walls up and he was sheltering there, said he could still feel the religious vibrations. Maybe he found the picture there.”
“You know where it is?”
“No idea.” He sighed. “Sunday morning he got into a scrap with another guy. He was one of these neo-Nazi types, shaved head and a swastika tattooed on his wrist, and when Joel saw that he went kind of ape-shit.”
“Did they fight?”
“They both got a couple of punches in before I could pull them apart. Joel grabbed his stuff and got out, and the skinhead, who gave his name as John White, left that night. Neither of them came back since.”
“When you say ‘gave his name as’ – you don’t think that was his real name?”
“I doubt it. A lot of our residents don’t have ID so we accept what they say.”
I wrote down Rick’s name and phone number and handed it to Buddha. “If this White guy comes back, can you call the detective who’s investigating Joel’s death?”
He looked at the piece of paper, which seemed tiny in his giant hand. “If he comes back.”
Had this guy run into Joel again? What if their argument had erupted once more? But what would a skinhead with a swastika tattoo be doing at Shomrei Torah? Could Joel have interrupted him preparing to deface the building, and gotten killed while defending his brother’s temple? Maybe Joel had been angry at his brother, and somehow recruited this skinhead to help?
They both seemed pretty far-fetched, but I had to consider them as possibilities.
“A real shame about Joel,” Buddha said. “But I can’t say I’m surprised. We see a fair number of mentally ill folks here, and there’s rarely a happy ending for them.”
I thanked Buddha for his help and left him my card in case he thought of anything else. As I walked back to the car, I called Rick and told him about John White.
“That’s a good lead,” he said. “I’ll call the other shelters in the area and see if he’s shown up anywhere else. And I’ll call this McCarthy guy and see if he can give me a better description, particularly of the tattoo. Guy like that, he probably has a record somewhere.”
I hung up and looked down at Rochester. “Thanks for reminding me about the photograph, boy,” I said, and I scratched behind his ears. “You want to see if we can find this place where Joel was squatting?”
He looked up at me with his doggy grin, his tongue lolling out of his mouth, and I figured that was a yes.
It began to drizzle as I walked Rochester over to a stand of trees for a quick pee. When we got back to the car, he settled on the front seat beside me and I wondered if Joel had been squatting at the old home of Shomrei Torah, where I’d had my bar mitzvah.
When my grandparents first arrived in Trenton in the early part of the twentieth century, they lived in a neighborhood near the Delaware called Jewtown, a warren of narrow streets where Yiddish was the lingua franca. In the 1960s, urban renewal had swept much of the area away, replacing it with a complex of government buildings and a highway linking the city and the suburbs.
Though I’d been to the old shul a thousand times in my childhood, it took some navigating to find it again, and Rochester sat beside me on the front seat, eagerly peering out the window. The building didn’t look much like what I remembered, and I felt my heart pierced. Most of the simple structure of white stone had been demolished, in preparation for the construction of a convenience store. The entire front wall was gone, and with it the double doors beneath a semi-circular stained glass window of a six-pointed Star of David.
Gone too were the two tall stained glass windows that had flanked the door and the triangular pediment above those. All that remained was the wall along the right side, a few feet of the rear wall, and a bit of roof above them. I could see how Joel Goldberg might have found shelter there.
The rain had stopped spitting, so Rochester and I got out of the car. The warehouse building across the street was shuttered, the lots on either side empty. There was no one around to tell us we couldn’t snoop, so we did.
We walked up to the covered space, and I saw signs that someone had been living there—a couple of fast food wrappers, a used condom, and an empty beer bottle. I looked around as much as I could but I couldn’t find anything that connected to Joel Goldberg, or that indicated if he’d found the photograph there.
Rochester kept straining to go to the Belgian block wall along the rear of the property. Those rectangular blocks, in shades of gray and purple, had been brought to the new world as ballast in ships, and then used for building. I knew about them because my father had collected them, using them to build the lakefront wall behind our house.
When I was a kid, there was an old wall, like the one behind the shul, on an empty lot on the way to my grandmother’s house in Trenton. My father would often stop if he saw one of the blocks had come loose and he’d retrieve it and take it home with us. I never thought anything of it at the time, but of course it was theft. Maybe I came by my criminal tendencies honestly.
I let Rochester lead me over to the wall, where he sniffed at one of the blocks and then sat on his haunches in front of it. He raised his right paw to the block, and it wobbled. “Something behind there?” I asked him. I grabbed the block and was surprised at how easily it came loose. Shades of my father, I thought.
Behind the block a spot had been hollowed out in the dirt. A small metal box, of the kind I used to keep three by five cards in, rested inside. I looked around. A couple of cars passed on the street, but there was no one nearby. I reached in and pulled the box out.
With Rochester trying to nose his way in, I opened the box. I opened the box without considering I’d be leaving fingerprints. There was a single piece of yellowed paper inside, folded many times. It was written in Hebrew, but even
after all the years studying the language in preparation for my bar mitzvah, my Hebrew was limited to prayers and the occasional phrase remembered from dusty afternoons where our teachers used picture books about Israeli children to school us in conjugating verbs.
I stared at the heading on the page because I felt like I ought to recognize it. Hebrew reads from right to left, and the left-most character was the yod, which looked like an apostrophe and represented the letter Y. The next letter was the dalet, or D. That word I knew – it was “yad,” which meant “hand,” and also was the name of the pointer used when reading from the Torah.
The next letter, a straight line with a sort of curlicue at the top, was the vav, the letter V. Then the shin, the “sh” sound, and the mem, the M. Vishim? Vashem? Va-shem. Of course. Yad Vashem was the Holocaust memorial site in Israel.
That tied in to what both Buddha and Rabbi Goldberg had said—that Joel was interested in something relating to the Holocaust. Had whatever he’d found pushed him into a manic phase? Or was it just that he’d stopped taking his meds?
Had there been more in the box? The photo of the two boys, for instance? And if Joel had taken that, why would he have left this document behind? Because he couldn’t read it? Or perhaps there had been an English translation with it, that he had taken, and then lost?
I replaced the Belgian block, grabbed the box and Rochester’s leash, and hot-footed it back to my car. I’d gone to prison once and wasn’t eager to get picked up for petty theft.
12 – Se Habla Yiddish
As soon as I got home, I opened my laptop and turned to Google Translate. Using a virtual Hebrew keyboard, I typed in a few words from the paper I’d found behind the Belgian block, but I got no results that made any sense.
I sat back and looked over at Rochester. “It’s like hieroglyphics,” I said to him. “I need something to help me figure out what stands for what. You didn’t find a Rosetta Stone near that worry stone, did you?”
Another Three Dogs in a Row Page 27
