Old News

by Ed Ifkovic

  “He never gave a reason…I always felt he wanted someone else. Like he was thinking already of someone else. But Leah liked me. We spent a lot of time in the kitchen. She once told me that maybe Ivan favored a rabbi’s daughter from North Chicago, Rabbi Goldman’s distant relative. Some money there. Living up on Calumet Avenue. But my parents and Leah arranged…”

  The more Minna talked, the more shrill her voice got, edged with a fury I’d not thought her capable of showing. She, this diffident woman, twittering around the Newmann family for years, had mettle. And spirit, though that spirit was tinged with smoldering resentment. A spitfire woman here, and I marveled at this delicious new revelation. Ad, the un-handyman of the neighborhood, would be no match for the redoubtable Minna Pittman, once aroused and passionate.

  “Ivan the Terrible,” I said.

  She rapped her knuckles on the table. “Herman was a coward, despite his bluster and yelling. ‘I don’t care what my father says’—that’s what he told me. But he kowtowed to his father, though Leah fought him—quietly. Ivan always talked to me like I was a dumb farm animal. I’ll never forget it.”

  I widened my eyes. “So Herman left you?”

  Ad was nodding furiously. “But lucky for me.”

  I didn’t know about that, frankly, a dull buffoon like Herman giving way to a layabout gadfly like Ad, two members of the male species who’d fallen out of the monkey tree.

  “He left me,” Minna thundered. Her eyes blazed. “He said he still loved me. He would always love me—the love of his life, said with the passion of a scared boy. Imagine that?” Her eyes got moist. “We did love each other. Then. I mean—then.”

  “Yeah, sure,” Ad said. “Herman was always a bump on a log.” He winked at Minna. “I remember when you and Herman courted.”

  Minna pursed her lips, unhappy with the depiction. “My parents were nervous about Ad marrying me.” She grinned. “I told them that he’d once thought of being a rabbi.”

  Ad laughed, too. “No one believes that. Jacob could never understand that dream of mine.”

  “I don’t see you as a Talmudic scholar, Ad,” I grinned.

  “I had a moment—way back then.” His eyes got sad, dark. “Long, long ago. Before Ivan’s murder. Jacob fought me. A baseball player, a hot dog vender, a ditch digger. But not a rabbi. ‘Don’t get crazy on me,’ he said. That was my holier-than-thou year, preaching and spouting Scripture like some Jewish Cotton Mather, thunder and lightning. God, you should have heard me at Nathan’s Meat Market.”

  “Why there?”

  “Because of old Levi Pinsky,” Ad told me. “You know, the ragpicker that still squats in the empty shop. A religious Jew, that one, fanatical, he wouldn’t even sneak a pretzel on fast days.” He chuckled. “He watched everyone, quiet mostly, except when he came in with some Biblical truth. He started talking to me about old Judaic lore, myth, superstitions, and I guess that’s what got my attention—for a while. But I couldn’t stay with it. He’s not happy with me to this day.”

  “What kind of teaching?”

  “Stories of how in Rome Jewish girls lined the Appian Way and sold dream charms and notions to those walking by. How demons carry on in the shade of trees—in the shadows cast by the moon. How demons are all around us, invisible, because, if seen, we’d go crazy. Demons everywhere, waiting, waiting. The night before a boy’s circumcision is the most dangerous one in his life.” Ad stopped, embarrassed by his enthusiasm. He dropped his eyes. “Stuff like that, designed to make a young man curious. I got…caught up. Most don’t know stuff like that. So I talked to our rabbi, but he wasn’t happy. He said Levi had some confused view of our religion—true stuff, but not what I should be focusing on.

  “The rabbi set me studying seriously, on the path that petered out. Once I got past the late-night spookiness of medieval Judaism—hocus pocus and razzmatazz—once I stopped boring my friends with bits and pieces of history, I lost interest. Hebrew floored me, made me black out. Not the memorized routines of the bar mitzvah but the sheer power of the language, the sheer weight of its history. Suddenly my religion was so…important. Magnificent. It was all so…beautiful, that history, so awesome. I couldn’t…” He shrugged his shoulders. “I couldn’t do it. I walked away.”

  “Hmm,” I said. “I suppose Levi thought he was doing the right thing. Levi the Teacher.”

  Ad’s voice a low rumble. “Yeah, the ragpicker prophet, sorting clothes on the butcher block tables where carcasses once lay. No one cares anymore. Morrie Wolfsy, a couple nights a month he’s there, alone, collecting rents, away from his wife and her French Provincial furniture and the gold-gilt bathroom fixtures, behind the locked doors of the upstairs apartment. Or he’s downstairs, sitting with old Levi, the two lost in the past over cigars and knishes bought from a cart on Maxwell.” He laughed. “Go in sometimes. The front door’s unlocked. A big bare room now.”

  “Obviously Levi’s still disappointed you abandoned your studies.”

  He thought about that. “He didn’t seem to notice at the time. After Ivan’s death, Morrie discouraged the men from haunting that back room, a place we loved. I loved—a place to hide away. Morrie lost interest. Even old Levi disappeared for a while. He was unhappy with the whole nightmare. ‘Jews killing Jews,’ he screamed one afternoon. ‘Is that what we do now? Ain’t it bad enough the Russians got a head start?’ Then, one day, I heard he was back. But Morrie told everyone to stay away. He wanted to close up shop. So I never returned there. Jacob, of course, stayed away. How could he go back there? Ivan was gone. Morrie liked the back room—the talk, talk, talk. Then he didn’t.” A dark smile. “Another thing Levi taught me. When bad luck touches you, you and your family can’t shake it off. It stays, grows.”

  “No one ever suspected Morrie of the murder?” I wondered out loud.

  “Yeah, of course. The partner? The man who wooed Ivan’s wife? We thought the cops would question him—but they didn’t. Nothing came of it.”

  I grumbled, “The police already named the murderer.”

  He nodded. “Yeah, on the spot.”

  “Tell me about the back room.”

  He raised his eyebrows, suspicious. “A place where we could smoke cigars and talk about things.”

  “Talk about women.”

  Ad squirmed. “Sometimes.” He sighed. “A refuge that wasn’t shul. I felt at home there. So did Jacob.”

  “The women never came in?” I asked.

  “Leah would step into the doorway, but Selma never did. Morrie’s wife. But the men would, you know, watch Leah…”

  “Barnyard antics,” Minna piped in.

  “She’d smile at us.” Ad reminisced.

  “I’ll never understand Leah’s…indiscretion—if that’s what it was—with Morrie, Ad.”

  Minna spoke up. “Edna, Morrie never liked Leah either. He thought her foolish, a distraction. He didn’t like it when she walked in. Everything in the shop went off kilter.”

  Ad went on. “He used to push the boys—me, others—to joke with her—to make her uncomfortable.”

  That news flabbergasted me. “Why then the…indiscretion?”

  Ad sat back, smug and confident. “You wanna know why? Simple. Because he could. Because he could take something away from Ivan. Ivan was talking of breaking up the shop, going out on his own. Morrie found a way to hurt him.”

  “My God!” I exclaimed.

  Minna concluded, “Little boys playing rough in the schoolyard. Nasty.” A wide grin on her face. “The land of the cavemen.”

  “C’mon, Minna,” Ad admonished her. “It wasn’t like that.”

  “Well, Ad, when you bar women from your door, you risk chaos in the land. You men won’t be content until you make yourselves extinct.”

  “That makes no sense, Minna.”

  Minna’s expression was blissful. “Edna understands wha
t I’m saying.”

  ***

  The land of the cavemen. The infernal back room. The dark recesses of the male species.

  Ad and Minna decided to look at the shop windows up and down Michigan Avenue, but the afternoon sun exhausted me. I headed home. Turning onto Monroe, I stopped at the corner by the entrance to the old meat market, caught by the dusty plate-glass window, the faded signs over the door, the yellowing cardboard notices in the window advertising chicken and beef for so much a pound. On sale this week. Today. A kosher market, unintelligible Hebrew (to me, at least) in black lettering, chipped now.

  On the hot afternoon the front door was wide open, a block of wood under the bottom of the door, securing it. Staring in, I expected to see old Levi sifting through piles of old, smelly clothing, hunched over, a Uriah Heep with the bony scalp and hawk nose.

  “Hello.” My voice echoed against the back wall—all those empty cabinets, those glass-topped display cases, the racks, the shelves, everything empty of the deadly paraphernalia of butchery. A shell of a store. No one answered.

  Too seductive, of course, an invitation to probe. That sacrosanct back room, the lair of the clubby men. “Hello,” though now I expected no response, and happily so. I stepped through the doorway and moved quickly into the back room, a cluttered hovel: mismatched chairs with torn fabric, a Franklin cast-iron stove with a broken hinge, tables with overflowing ashtrays, not emptied in years, stacks of newspapers and magazines, even a scurrilous Police Gazette propping up the uneven leg of a table. Empty bottles, dirty glasses, a turned-over box of hoar-frosted peanuts. The stench of unventilated mayhem. Along all the walls were the counters and cabinets where, doubtless, poultry and beef carcasses made their inglorious entrance from a back door, preamble to dissection and trussing with cleaver and twine. Three of the walls held cubbyholes and ramshackle drawers, some half-open with papers and receipts and yellowing pulp spilling out. One wall once held knifes, the slots empty now but menacing, a knife-thrower’s vaudeville act or, rather, the basement of the Spanish Inquisition. Torquemada’s private pleasure. Chills ran up my spine seeing that vacant wall of deadly weapons, stripped now, but haunting. Had the knife that pierced Ivan’s neck come from here?

  Standing there, overwhelmed by the packed and worthless accumulation, I thought: There are secrets here, a story unexplained, a room that no one wanted to touch. I doubted the police, in their hurry-up investigation, considered pulling out even one of the drawers—or peeking into one of those jam-packed cubbyholes.

  What notorious talk in this back room led to the murder? What questionable comment? Or did it?

  I sensed an answer buried among the mountains of decay and dread.

  My fingers gingerly touched the pull of an oak drawer, slightly ajar.

  A voice bellowed from behind me. A gargled grunt.

  I swirled around, my hand sweeping up thick gray dust, to face Morrie Wolfsy and Levi Pinsky, both furious.

  “What means this?” Levi bellowed, quaking. “Vos iz das?” The veins in his temples bulged dangerously, blue-black, purple. Nostrils flared. Shoulders shook. A bony finger accused. “Trespasser.”

  Morrie, arms folded over his chest, simply said, “Edna Ferber.” As though he were a jury foreman rehearsing a death sentence.

  “The door was open and I…”

  “Trespasser!” Levi screamed again. He sputtered, “You…you…noodsh.” A pest.

  Morrie approached me. “The stories come back to me, Miss Ferber. You befriend the murdering woman and they tell me you get ready to point the finger at me, the surviving partner. They tell me you suspect me.” He pointed to the rack that once held all those knives. “Morrie Wolfsy, he took a knife.” Almost a child’s chant, the words rhythmic. He said it again. “Morrie Wolfsy, he took a knife.” Singsong, Lizzie Borden—that awful refrain.

  And took from Ivan his precious life…

  Morrie Wolsy took a knife…

  “But I never…”

  “Word on the street, Miss Ferber.”

  “I give you my word.”

  “Ikh zed azoy lang lebn.” I should live so long.

  Levi rocked back and forth, this ninety-year-old hunched man, a bell-ringer of doom. “The good Jewish girl belongs in the home. Her mama’s kitchen. Not here.” His arthritic arm took in the cave. He shuddered. Disgust covered his features.

  In a flash, I realized that Levi, the old crusty celibate, despised women. An unhappy man. I thought: Ad studied at his feet and learned the persistent alienation of affection. Another thought: poor Minna found the back room amusing but didn’t realize it was most likely the wellspring of her perpetual engagement. She’d never walk down any aisle that was not stocked with gefilte fish and macaroons.

  I was through defending myself. I marched between the two men, striding boldly, Scylla and Charybdis parting seamlessly.

  “Goodbye.”

  Behind my back I could hear Levi cursing Leah. “Such beauty in so horrible a woman. Lilith, that demon woman with the long, long hair. Lilith who fled the Garden of Eden. A curse on all of us.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  Detective Tom O’Reilly’s name had been mentioned in the newspaper accounts of the murder, but fifteen years later, he was reluctant to talk to me. Ready to retire, he told me—“The old ticker needs Florida, Miss”—he sat behind a desk with two pieces of paper on it, one of which, doubtless, was his retirement application. The other paper a brochure of a clapboard beach home in Porto Gordo, Florida. He was a pot-bellied officer of the law with out-of-focus eyes surely in need of spectacles, and a few strands of vagrant white hair teased and encouraged over a bald head—a hopeless journey from one grotesque floppy ear to the other. A button red nose, speckled with polka-dot red blood vessels, and a tobacco’s chewer’s gamey breath. Detective O’Reilly eyed me with a look that suggested I’d interrupted a day of calculated idleness.

  “Miss Ferber,” he chortled, “they tell me you’re famous.”

  “Hardly. A novel of mine…”

  “I don’t read.”

  “I could have guessed that.”

  His eyes narrowed. “Captain Mooney ushered you in, all buzzing and waving his arms. He claims he knew you when.”

  “Yes, when my family first moved here after my father died in Appleton, Wisconsin, we lived with my mother’s family for a few years over to Calumet. Jimmy Mooney was a young patrolman on the block then, someone the neighborhood liked and respected.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” he broke in. “A real sweetheart, that Mooney. Blarneyed his way up to captain.”

  “He remembers the Brenner murder.”

  He sucked in his breath. “Not much to remember about it.”

  “You were the chief investigative lawman.”

  “Open-and-shut case, my dear.”

  “Are you sure of that?”

  That gave him pause, and considerable digestive surprise, given the rumbling and rasping and clucking that erupted from his throat and bursting belly. “Sort of dim in my memory—after all, this is Chicago where folks kill for sport. You have heard of our beloved mobsters, no?—a husband catches a wife in flagrante delicto, a spat breaks out, real messy, and the good wife kills cuckolded husband.”

  “In twenty words or less.”

  “You’re the reporter, lady.”

  “I am that. But if you’ll indulge me, sir, I’d like to review the evidence.”

  His eyes got wide. They flickered a moment as if I’d shined a light into them. “A young woman like you playing detective? My, my, my.” He chuckled. “How times change!”

  I didn’t chuckle. “As I say, sir, indulge me.”

  He’d been leaning back in his swivel chair, his tremendous girth suggesting imminent catastrophe, but now, quick as a slap to the brow, he shot up, spine rigid, and banged a fleshy fist on the desk. “I sent the killer away, Mis
s Ferber.”

  I smiled winsomely. “And now, would you believe, Detective O’Reilly, Leah Brenner is back home, cooking in her kitchen. Grinding poppy seed in a mortar and pestle.”

  “What?” He tapped the desk impatiently. “They let her out?” He stared over his shoulder as if he expected Leah Brenner, white-haired now and demonic, to smash through the wall, cleaver at the ready.

  “The asylum, I suppose, deemed her suitable for the safe streets of Chicago.”

  “Very funny.”

  “Thank you. Most of my humor is met with derision—or bafflement.”

  His face tightened. “Look, Miss Ferber, I heard all about you because of that novel you wrote about Chicago. So I suppose now this…this conversation we’re having is the stuff of a new book, though why you want to dredge up some domestic squabble is beyond me. You can read all about it in the papers”—I nodded—“but police business is police business.”

  “The news accounts in the Chicago Tribune suggest a rush to judgment.”

  “She was caught red-handed.”

  “Without a knife,” I broke in. “Without evidence. How is that red-handed?”

  He struggled to stand. “I don’t think I can help you, my dear.”

  “Sir…”

  He scratched his neck. “Oh, I don’t think so.”

  Unceremoniously, I was pointed out without any goodbye and certainly with no thanks from me, only to find myself downstairs facing a grinning Captain Mooney. Still with that red, boyish face and round blue eyes that I remembered from years ago, Captain Mooney was scratching his head. He watched my face, admittedly set in a stony grimace, and held out his arm. In it a green-backed folder, thin, bound with cords.

  “He’s a bastard,” Captain Mooney whispered. “And lazy.” He pushed the folder at me. “Here is what you want.”

  On my way in I’d told him my mission, though he’d not spoken a word. Clever boy, this old beat cop, and kind.

  “Sit in there”—he pointed to a small alcove, windowless but with a door—“and leave it on the table when you leave.”