Another Three Dogs in a Row

by Neil S. Plakcy

  The waiter brought out a platter of amuse-bouches, compliments of the chef -- small rectangles of grilled salmon crusted with peppercorns. After he left, Gail grimaced. “I hate to turn down a gift of food, but don’t those look like little coffins?”

  “You have a very active imagination,” Declan said, and Lili shot me a sidelong look. That was a trait she felt I had as well.

  “Sorry, but I just heard that one of my favorite customers passed away and his funeral was today.”

  “Not Daniel Epstein?” I didn’t have the same compunction about the food, and I speared one of the salmon rectangles and put it on my plate.

  “You know him?”

  “It’s a small town, my love,” Declan said, in his Kiwi accent. “Haven’t we figured out that everyone knows everyone else?”

  “We’re not quite that inbred,” I said. “There are nearly ten thousand people in Stewart’s Crossing and I doubt any of us know that big a percentage.”

  “But you knew Daniel?” Gail asked. “He used to come in the café quite often, always for a big mug of hot chocolate with sugar-free raspberry syrup, and a pain aux raisins.”

  I’d never had Gail’s hot chocolate, but I’d tried the snail-shaped pastry studded with juicy raisins, so I figured Daniel Epstein had good taste.

  “The last few times I saw him, he was looking more and more frail,” Gail said. “So I guess his death shouldn’t be a shock.”

  “He didn’t die of old age.” I lowered my voice. “He was killed during a burglary at his house in Crossing Estates.”

  Gail’s mouth opened. “That’s awful!” she said, and Declan took her hand. “Is Rick investigating?”

  Rick and I often met at the Chocolate Ear, so both she and Declan knew him. “He is.” I sliced a piece of the salmon and put it in my mouth. The peppery coating was a great contrast to the smoothness of the fish.

  “I wonder,” Gail said.

  “About what?” I asked.

  “He met several times with this woman, and I was surprised – she didn’t look like someone he would know.”

  “Why did you think that?”

  “I don’t know. She was young, only in her late teens or early twenties, an African-American woman with this elaborate hairstyle, a coil of braids on top of her head that reminded me of Medusa and her snakes.”

  I hadn’t noticed anyone of that description at Epstein’s funeral.

  She shivered. “Maybe that was it, that evil-looking hairdo. I worried that maybe she was trying to romance Daniel or take advantage of him. He was such a good man.”

  The same term that Rabbi Goldberg had used to me – a good man. I hoped that my goodness, such as it was, wouldn’t lead me to the same end as Daniel Epstein.

  “You should tell Rick about her,” I said. “I’m not saying she had any connection to his death, but I’m sure Rick wants to know everyone Daniel was in contact with recently.”

  Gail promised that she would, and we all focused on eating, and on more positive topics. Lili told us a funny story about Miami. Declan had been there on a business trip and he chimed in, and I zoned out for a bit, wondering when I would get to Miami and when I would meet Lili’s mother.

  Would I ever call Senora Weinstock my mother-in-law? I’d finally stopped calling Lili my girlfriend—I just introduced her, or mentioned her, and let whoever I was talking with draw their own conclusions. We weren’t teenagers, after all, and the English language had yet to come up with an acceptable word for us to use. Companion sounded like a paid position, and partner was too businesslike. Most of the time it was used between same-sex couples.

  Lili had suggested we use the Spanish terms “novio” and “novia,” which had a variety of meanings from fiancé to sweetheart. But this was Pennsylvania, and Spanish terms weren’t as well-known as they might be in Miami.

  After dinner, we walked out into the parking lot together, and I held Lili’s hand. I’d enjoyed the meal and the chance to spend time with friends. But a chilly wind swept through the parking lot, reminding me that two men I had a tangential connection to had died recently. Would someone even closer to me be next?

  * * *

  It was seven-thirty the next morning, and I’d just gotten back from walking Rochester when my cell phone rang with Rick’s tone. I stuck the phone to my ear as I juggled pouring Rochester’s kibble into his bowl.

  “Do me a favor?” Rick asked. His voice was raspy, as if he’d smoked a pack of cigarettes, though I knew he was too careful about his body to smoke. “I had to leave the house fast this morning and I didn’t get a chance to feed Rascal.”

  “Sure. I can stop by on my way to work. Developments in a case?”

  “Not exactly. I’m at St. Mary’s Hospital in Langhorne. In the ER.” He started to cough, and when he stopped he said, “My heart started going crazy this morning and I freaked out and called 911. They brought me here.”

  “Jesus, Rick. You should have called me. I’ll feed Rascal and come right over there.”

  “You don’t need to. They’re just running some tests. The doc thinks it’s just stress.”

  “Even so. You’ll need a ride home when they’re finished with you.”

  I scrambled upstairs, showered and dressed and told Lili where I was going. “Send him my love,” she said.

  With Rick out of action, I knew what I needed to do. Before I left the house I retrieved my laptop with the hacking tools from its hiding place in the attic. I knew there had to be clues somewhere to the two murders in the past – and perhaps how they connected to the two in the present. I was tired of resisting the temptation to hack my way to a solution online. I had these skills, and someone needed my help. I’d put my conscience aside and see what I could find.

  I fed Rascal and left Rochester there with him to keep him company. Then I picked up I-95 in Yardley and headed inland toward Newtown. In high school, when I’d stayed late for speech and debate club or the math team, I’d ridden the late bus home. It followed a wide path around Newtown, Yardley and Stewart’s Crossing, dropping off individual kids all around the area, and though I’d become familiar with all those back roads, many of them now were nearly unrecognizable as farms had been replaced with housing developments and shopping centers.

  I parked in the garage at the rear of the hospital property and walked to the emergency room. The triage nurse at the front desk directed me to the curtained area where I found Rick propped up on a gurney. He wore a pale green gown in place of his shirt, and I could see leads attached to a heart monitor, and a regular up-and-down display on the monitor beside him.

  “How are you feeling?”

  “Better. As soon as I told the doctor what my job is, she decided it was some kind of stress-related thing. And I didn’t even get to tell her about the unsolved homicides.”

  “Don’t worry about them. Focus on keeping your heart rate steady. When they let you out, you should call Tamsen. Take the day off and stay home with Rascal. Petting Rochester and playing with him always calms me down when I’m stressed.”

  “Not sure the chief of police will see it that way.”

  I sat on the stool beside his bed. “Things are slow at Friar Lake, so I’ve got some flexible time. Anything I can do to help you out?”

  “Ask Rochester for a clue? Or use your online mojo to find me a murderer?”

  “Working on it.” I told him about looking through Joel Goldberg’s emails and online posts. “There’s a guy I want to track down. He’s got a weird screen name, Not Who I Think I Am, and Joel’s been emailing him about Holocaust survivors in Trenton.”

  The doctor returned then, a young Chinese woman who barely looked old enough for college. Her name tag indicated she was Dr. Chen, and she had a California surfer lilt to her voice.

  I stood back as she scanned through Rick’s chart and then glanced at the monitor. “Your signs are all stable,” she said. “I can write you a prescription for an SSRI to relieve some of your stress, but the best thing you can do
is work out ways to relieve it yourself.”

  Rick nodded. “I know. Exercise. Play with the dog.”

  “You’re single?” she asked.

  “He’s almost engaged,” I said. “About to propose.”

  “Are you experiencing stress from that situation?” she asked Rick.

  He pursed his lips for a moment. “In a way. Not about the proposal, you know. I’m sure I want to marry Tamsen. Just making the time to do it right.”

  “This is a good reason to spend some time with your almost-fiancée. Kissing and cuddling are great stress relievers.”

  She electronically prescribed a medication for him. “I’ll have the nurse come in and disconnect you, and then you’re good to go.” She wagged a finger at him. “I don’t want to see you back here, Mr. Stemper. You take care of yourself.”

  She left with a swish of her white coat.

  “Have you called Tamsen yet?” I asked.

  “I don’t want to worry her. Don’t want her to think I’m some sick old guy she’s going to have to take care of.”

  “I doubt she’ll think that. And I’m sure she’d want to know you’re here.”

  He looked at his watch. “Justin left for school a half hour ago, so she’s probably sitting at her kitchen table with a cup of coffee, reading email on her phone.”

  I liked the way Rick was already so familiar with Tamsen’s schedule. “Then call her. I’ll wait out in the lobby for you to finish up and then I’ll drive you home.”

  While I waited for Rick, I checked my college email on my phone. What did we do before we were so tethered? I was able to answer a couple of messages without even opening a computer.

  “I spoke to Tam,” Rick said, when he walked out of the ER door. “You were right, she expected me to call her instead of you. She’s going to come over later and check in on me.”

  “Good. Be sure to get in some of that stress relief the doctor was talking about.”

  As we drove back to Stewart’s Crossing I told Rick what I’d learned from Saul Benesch. “I think he knows something more than he’s telling,” I said. “I can’t say how—just a feeling.”

  “Maybe I should give Mr. Benesch a call,” Rick said.

  “No, hold off for a day or so. Let me work on him first. There is someone you ought to talk to, though.” I told him about the young woman with the Medusa hair that Gail had mentioned the night before. “Gail was worried she might be trying to take advantage of Daniel Epstein.”

  “Great. Racial profiling?”

  “I don’t think the girl’s race matters. The way Gail described seeing them together made her uneasy. That’s all.”

  “I’ll give her a call. Epstein’s son gave me his father’s phone records so maybe I can match her up to someone he was in contact with recently.”

  I dropped Rick at his house and retrieved Rochester, and then drove up River Road to Friar Lake. The willows along the river had lost most of their leaves, and I could see the water between the barren branches. Winter was coming.

  And I had some hacking to do.

  25 – What’s in a Name

  After a cursory glance at incoming emails and my own to-do list, I knuckled down to make a plan. What did I know, and what did I want to know?

  First on my list was the mysterious person Joel Goldberg had been emailing with, NotwhoIthinkIam. Who indeed?

  I started surfing through a list of genealogy websites, hoping that Notwho had used the same handle in various sites. I found that he’d posted on several threads. The most interesting concerned people who had changed their names after the Holocaust.

  Some had changed for pragmatic reasons – difficulty in spelling, or a desire not to wear their Jewish name in a world that had proved hostile to their people. Others had patriotic reasons – film producer Menahem Golan had changed his surname from Globus in honor of the Golan Heights. Others had changed as a way to start over again in a new place, leaving their old identity behind.

  NotWho had asked Joel if he knew anything about someone named Karl Kurtz, and Joel hadn’t been able to find anything. But I had a few more tricks up my sleeve than Joel did. My fingers tingled with the thrill of hacking as flexed them, then hunted through my hard drive for a program that could break into a poorly-guarded database.

  I was doing exactly what had sent me to prison in the first place—breaking into places I didn’t belong in service of what I believed was a greater good. I hoped that I’d learned a few things since then—how to hide my tracks better, for example. And this time I was determined that I would take down this killer before anyone else died.

  Once I had the program initiated, I entered the addresses for several databases and told the program to search for both Kurtz and Feinberg, then pop up a message with the results.

  While that worked in the background, I went to one of the forums where NotWho had participated. With a couple of keystrokes, I was able to view the information the user had provided when setting up the ID. I was stunned to find that the email address used belonged to Saul Benesch.

  Was that what Benesch was hiding? That he wasn’t who he thought he was? And what did that mean, anyway?

  I needed to talk to Benesch again, but I didn’t know him well enough to call him or drop in on him. I didn’t even have the connection that I had with Henry Namias, who had known my mother. I’d have to wait until the Talmud study group on Wednesday.

  Suddenly my laptop pinged with an incoming alert from the website where I’d left the query about Kurtz earlier. The name Karl Kurtz had been found in a database for a displaced persons camp called Feldafing, near Munich, in what was in those immediate post-war years the American zone of occupation.

  The record was skimpy. Kurtz said that he was a Jew aged twenty-two, a native of Berlin, and that he had been living underground under an assumed name. He wanted to emigrate to the United States.

  That was it. No record of whatever happened to him.

  When I looked up, Rochester was on the floor with the translation between his paws. “That does not belong to you,” I said, pulling it away from him. Fortunately he hadn’t chewed it, though there was a big drop of drool on the page, nearly covering the name Kalman Feinberg.

  Why did that name resonate with me? I read through the document carefully. Aaron Feinberg had died at Auschwitz soon after he, his brother and Hafetz had been locked up there, but Kalman and Hafetz had been put to work.

  My brain finally made the connection. Aaron Feinberg was the president of Shomrei Torah. Was he descended from Aaron and Kalman Feinberg?

  But he couldn’t be. According to Hafetz, Kalman had died at Auschwitz about six months before the camp was liberated. I remembered the photo I’d found that included my mother, the one from a speech by a Holocaust survivor named Kalman Feinberg.

  Had to be a different man. Feinberg was a common Jewish name, as was Aaron. Kalman was less familiar to me, but perhaps it had been popular in Berlin at the time. I had certainly seen certain names recurring in my classes at Eastern – Jessica, Kyle, Justin and so on.

  The Feldafing database was still open on my laptop, and on a whim I typed in the name Kalman Feinberg. I was stunned to see a result, a form filled out when someone left the camp.

  Kalman Feinberg, a Jew aged twenty-three and native of Berlin, had been granted a visa to emigrate to the United States. The Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society had found a place for him to live and a job.

  In Trenton, New Jersey.

  My brain buzzed with connections. This was the man, then, who had spoken to the youth group my mother belonged to about his experience during the Holocaust. The father of Aaron Feinberg, president of Shomrei Torah. He had been in Feldafing at the same time as this mysterious Karl Kurtz. Did they know each other? They were the same age, both Jews from Berlin.

  Could Myer Hafetz have been mistaken, and Aaron Feinberg survived? Perhaps he’d simply been transferred to another camp, and Hafetz had lost track of him.

  I went back through
the database looking for an entry form for Feinberg, but couldn’t find one.

  I looked at Rochester. “Kurtz went into the camp but never left. Feinberg never entered the camp, but left it.”

  He looked up at me, then rolled back on his side. “Don’t you see it, puppy? Maybe Kurtz and Feinberg are the same person. And Kurtz was German, not Jewish.”

  He yawned.

  Was his disinterest because I was on the wrong track? Or just that he wanted to take a nap?

  When he entered the camp, Kurtz admitted that he had been living under a different name in hiding. Perhaps during his stay he had merely reappropriated his own name? Or like many others, he’d chosen a new name to go with his new life. Nothing illegal or immoral about that.

  I had too many ideas buzzing in my brain and I needed to talk to Rick. How was I going to tell him that I’d gotten this information? Should I be honest? After all, he’d asked me to work my online mojo. He knew that meant hacking, didn’t he? Or was he so certain that I was following a straight and narrow path that he hadn’t warned me to be honest?

  I left Friar Lake early and headed to Rick’s house. “I’m fine,” he protested, as he opened the door. “Tam was here for a few hours. She cleaned up and made me dinner to heat up later.”

  Rochester romped past me to play with Rascal, and I followed Rick into the living room. “I’m glad you’re better because I need to talk to you,” I said.

  By then I had decided I’d tell Rick how I had searched the databases, without mentioning that I’d had to break in. If he asked, I’d be honest. But I didn’t want us to get sidetracked in a discussion of my problems if I didn’t have to.

  I laid out the situation between Kurtz and Feinberg. “One man comes into the camp, another goes out,” I said.

  “Wasn’t one of them the guy in that document you had translated?” he asked.