Conviction

by Julia Dahl

  The next Passover he told his mother that he was no longer going to eat “traif.”

  “Where did you learn that word?” asked his father.

  “It’s Yiddish. It means food that’s not kosher.”

  “I know what it means. Did your friend Ethan teach you that?”

  “No,” he said. “God gets insulted when you don’t keep kosher.” Joe didn’t care whether God—if he existed—felt insulted. He figured that if there was some sort of omniscient, omnipotent entity in the sky he wouldn’t find silly humans like Jessica and his parents important enough to be insulted by. But Joe liked to stand out. He was different, and although he couldn’t advertise his real difference, he wanted his family to see him that way.

  “Who told you that?” asked his mother.

  “Shimon.”

  “Shimon?”

  “From the Chabad House.” He prounced Chabad with a guttural flair.

  “The Chabad House? How do you know someone at the Chabad House?”

  “What’s the Chabad House?” asked Jessica.

  “I don’t like living in a home where God is always being insulted.”

  His parents looked at each other.

  “What’s the Chabad House!”

  “It’s for Hasidic Jews,” said his father.

  “Hasidic?”

  “You’re so fucking stupid, Jessica. How can you know nothing about your heritage?”

  “My heritage?”

  “Do not call your sister stupid, Joe. And don’t swear.”

  “She’s ignorant. That’s the same as stupid.”

  “Jessica is not ignorant,” said his father.

  “Obviously she is.” He knew he would get nowhere with his family, so he dropped the subject. But he stopped hiding his trips to the Chabad House and he began preparing his own meals. By the end of his junior year he rarely ate at home. Shimon and his wife, Sarah, had him for Shabbos dinner most weeks, and after the couple’s two small children were in bed, Shimon and Joe would talk late into the night. It was Shimon who suggested Joe apply to the yeshiva at the Chabad World Headquarters in Brooklyn.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Henrietta tells me that she knew the man who paid her to lie as “Joe.”

  “Sometimes a week goes by and I don’t think about him,” she says. “Then I’ll see something—every once in a while those Jews come into the casino—and I get all jumpy. I still don’t know why he didn’t kill me. I don’t know what stopped him. Maybe he just liked knowing he could, you know?”

  “Do you think he was the one who killed the Davises?”

  Henrietta shrugs. “Maybe. Or maybe he was working for somebody who did.”

  “Do you remember where he worked?”

  “I never knew.”

  “How old was he?”

  “Not old,” she says. “Twenty, maybe, back then.”

  We both fall silent. I have to get her on the record.

  “I don’t want to, like, pressure you,” I say. “But, this kid, DeShawn. He’s been in prison for twenty years. All you have to do is tell police what you told me, and you could set him free.”

  Henrietta shakes her head. “And I’d go to prison.”

  “Not necessarily…”

  “I’m gonna tell the NYPD I lied? I watch Law & Order. You can go to jail for perjury.”

  “I think maybe there’s a statute of limitations on that,” I say.

  “Did you not hear me when I told you he put a gun in my mouth? He was watching me. Those postcards. Sometimes they came every couple days. Half the reason I moved and changed my name was ’cause of him. Last thing I want is Joe—or anybody from back then—knowing where I am. I don’t mean nothing to him. If he can shoot a little baby girl, what he gonna do to me?”

  I decide to leave it there. I know DeShawn didn’t do it. And I have a lead on the man who might have. I write my phone number down for Henrietta, and she reluctantly agrees to give me hers.

  Iris is asleep in the driver’s seat when I open the door.

  “How’d it go?” she asks, rubbing her face. “Are you ready to head back to the hotel? I think I’m hungry.”

  “Drive,” I say, pulling my notebook out of my purse. “She basically told me she completely lied to the cops.”

  “Holy shit!” she says. “So, you’ve got your story!”

  “Not really,” I say, scribbling. “She won’t let me use her name or anything she said. And she says she won’t go to the cops. But it gets better. Or worse, actually. She said a guy—a Jew, like, a black hat—who used to be one of her johns, paid her to lie. I gotta get all this down before I forget.”

  “Wait, like, one of your mom’s Jews?”

  “That’s what she said.”

  “Jesus, you can’t get away from this shit, can you?”

  Right?

  “Just drive,” I say.

  By the time we get back to the hotel I’ve got four pages of notes, everything I can remember about our conversation: what she said about Joe’s schedule, his approximate age, why she picked DeShawn in the lineup, and where she said she was the night of the murders.

  Iris heads to the boardwalk for food and a little beach time. I tell her I’ll join her in an hour or two. I want to call Amanda and figure out what to do next.

  Amanda picks up after three rings. Children are crying in the background.

  “Hold on … Jonathan—can you deal with them? I gotta talk to Rebekah.” Footsteps, and a door closing. “Okay. I’m safe in the bathroom. Tell me everything.”

  I do.

  “Two things strike me. First, most of the time people get killed by somebody they know. And with this case it definitely seems personal. Nothing was stolen, and he shot them in their bed, for fuck’s sake. So my question is, how did the Davises know a Hasid?”

  “The people at Glorious Gospel mentioned something about, like, an interfaith dialogue thing with the Jews in the neighborhood after the riots.”

  “Go back to them. You can’t use what Henrietta said in print yet, but you can tell people what she said. It’s gonna be really hard for anybody who actually knew them to ignore all this now. They know DeShawn has always said his confession was coerced, they just didn’t believe him. Add this, and unless they’re total assholes, they’re gonna want to get involved and help make it right.”

  “Totally,” I say. I scribble: call pastor green, dorothy morris into my notebook. “What was the other thing?”

  “The other thing?”

  “You said two things struck you.”

  “Oh! Yeah. Shit. I forget! Oh my God, my brain on pregnancy…”

  I laugh. “It’s cool.”

  “I’ll remember and call you back, I promise.”

  “I really appreciate your help,” I say.

  “I can’t believe you got that woman to admit she lied. That’s pretty awesome.”

  “I’m not sure how much good it’ll do,” I say.

  “I bet she comes around. Seriously. You’ve planted the seed. In my experience, people can’t live forever with lies.”

  We hang up, and just as I’m stuffing a hotel towel into a beach bag, she calls back.

  “I remembered the other thing! Did she tell you the guy’s name? The one who paid her?”

  “Yeah,” I say. “Joe. But who knows if that’s even his name.”

  “Well, it might be his name. What kind of paperwork do you have on the case?”

  “So far just what DeShawn sent you, which isn’t much. He said he’s sending me more, though. And Judge Sanchez was going to help me get the appeal file.”

  “Good. There might be something in there—maybe they interviewed someone named Joe, or he was a neighbor or something. And keep in touch with this woman, the witness. If you go interview her again, bring donuts or something. Call her every few days to check in. She may not agree to talk to the police, but I guarantee she’ll be thinking about it. And the more comfortable she feels with you, the more likely she is to go on the rec
ord.”

  I find Iris lying on her stomach, bikini straps undone, reading a W magazine. I set my towel down beside her and sit, pulling my knees to my chest like it’s cold.

  “Anxious?” she asks.

  I nod.

  “What does Saul say?”

  “Saul?”

  “This was his case, right?”

  “Right. But I haven’t actually told him I’m looking at it.”

  “What? Why?” She turns over and props herself up on her elbows, holding her top with one forearm.

  “I was waiting until I knew more. I didn’t want to make a big deal out of nothing.”

  “Don’t you think he deserves to know? I mean, it affects him, clearly.”

  “Yeah.”

  “I don’t get it. I thought the whole point was that this was something he could help you with. You said the blog girl gave you files from a bunch of different people. Were they, like, less interesting?”

  She does get to the heart of it, doesn’t she?

  “No,” I say.

  For a few moments neither of us says anything. I look out at the ocean and watch a woman with a parrot tattoo that covers her entire calf stand still, letting the water carve out sinkholes for her feet. I remember that it seemed like a big secret when my dad showed me how the tide could make your toes disappear. I never stood still long enough to get buried to my ankles like he and my brother did, though. The wet sand felt constrictive, and I always hopped out of the slippery pockets with a feeling like something was chasing me.

  “This is about your mom, isn’t it?” says Iris. She sits up, fastening her top with one hand. “You’re not calling because you don’t want to talk to her.”

  “I don’t know,” I say. “I feel like … I don’t think she likes me very much.”

  Iris sighs, pulling her sunglasses down over her eyes and turning her face away from me. “It doesn’t fucking matter if she likes you. Or if you like her. She is yours. You are hers. Like what you can, focus on that. Focus on the fact that you found her. She’s alive.”

  Iris’s mother died of breast cancer when we were in college. Back then it would have been inconceivable that one of us would reject a mother should she somehow appear. But that’s exactly what I’m doing. And I haven’t given a thought to what it must feel like to Iris.

  “I’m sorry,” I say, putting my hand on her leg.

  “You don’t have to be best friends,” she says. “But you can’t avoid her so hard it, like, negatively impacts your life. This is your work. Your fucking career. You could be missing something major by not talking to Saul. If it wasn’t for your mom you would have called him, right?”

  Right.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  Instead of telling Saul about Henrietta over the phone, I text and ask him if I can come by Sunday night after Iris and I get home. He texts back that I’m welcome for dinner, and that my mom is going to be there, too.

  She’s looking forward to seeing you.

  I get off the Q train at Brighton Beach at a little before seven. It’s probably at least five degrees cooler out here by the ocean. At the entrance to Saul’s high-rise, a half-dozen wispy-haired women in visors sit on low beach chairs fanning themselves with magazines.

  “Is that Rebekah or Aviva?” says the woman in the open-toe terry cloth slippers.

  “It’s Rebekah, Evie! Jesus!” says the woman with the root-beer-colored hair.

  “What, what? They look so much alike!”

  Does it make me a bad person that I have no desire to learn the names of these women?

  “Rebekah,” I say, pushing out a smile.

  “That’s what I said!”

  “I heard you!”

  “Enjoying the sunshine?” I ask, because, polite.

  “Oh, we are!” says cloth slippers. “Tell your handsome man to come visit with us sometime. We never see him!”

  “He’s not her handsome man! She could be his daughter!”

  “She knows what I mean! You know what I mean!”

  “I do,” I say. “I’ll let him know.”

  Saul calls the ladies “the force.” There is a security desk in the lobby, but I’ve never seen anyone behind it. Saul says the ladies are better guards than a bored former transit cop any day.

  I can smell the meal the minute I get off the elevator. Aviva cooked for me a couple times at her house in New Paltz, and she really gets into it. My mother is kind of an all-or-nothing person. She either brings home fast food for dinner or spends all day in the kitchen fixing half a dozen elaborate dishes that she’ll freeze or give away.

  It’s been almost three months since I’ve seen either of them, and I hesitate before knocking on Saul’s door. Part of the reason I didn’t call when I read his name in DeShawn’s file was because I liked the feeling of knowing something he didn’t. Saul and Aviva have always been a couple steps ahead of me. He knew my mother was alive and in New York weeks before he told me. And for two decades she had the power to appear in my life anytime she wanted. It wasn’t until Iris reacted with such surprise to the fact that I hadn’t been communicating with Saul about the case all along that I realized I’d probably made the wrong decision by avoiding him—not to mention, for the wrong reason. It’s time to come clean.

  Saul answers the door to 16H wearing a mildly ridiculous pair of mirrored aviator sunglasses.

  “Nice glasses,” I say.

  “Your mother got them for me,” he says. Saul has lost weight since he and Aviva fell in love. I don’t think she specifically encouraged it, but I get the sense that he feels lucky to have a girlfriend who is ten years younger than he is, and he wants to keep himself fit for her. It’s kind of cute.

  I relay the ladies’ message, and Saul escorts me into the kitchen where Aviva, barefoot and dressed in denim shorts and a Coney Island Mermaid Parade T-shirt, is stirring a pitcher of iced tea. She smiles when she sees me, but waits for me to come and hug her. I do.

  “Smells amazing,” I say.

  “You’ll have to take some home. I made too much. Tea?”

  “Sure,” I say.

  “There is wine, too.”

  “Tea’s good for now,” I say.

  “Everything’s all ready if you and Saul want to go sit down. I’ll bring the borscht.”

  “Can I help?”

  “No, no,” she says. “Just make yourself at home. I’ll bring the borscht right out. Do you like borscht?”

  “That’s soup, right?”

  “Cold soup. There is sour cream or horseradish to put on top.”

  “Sounds good,” I say.

  Saul picks up the pitcher of tea, and I follow him to the table on the balcony. He goes back into the kitchen and I sit, looking through the metal bars at the ocean. Someone I can’t see is flying a kite—a big orange and red bird with long streamers flapping behind it. Tomorrow is a workday, but there are hundreds of people still on the beach; blankets and umbrellas and little nylon tents stretch into the distance in both directions. I can see the Ferris wheel and the parachute jump, and hear the rumble of the Cyclone and the screams of the passengers as a train of cars rushes down the old roller coaster’s rickety track.

  Saul returns, and while we wait for Aviva to bring dinner, we chitchat about my job and his. He’s still doing freelance private investigation work. He talks more than I do; it’s probably apparent I’m a little nervous.

  “Save room,” says Aviva, carrying bowls of pink soup onto the balcony. “I’ve got brisket and asparagus, and sweet kugel for dessert.”

  “You hit the jackpot didn’t you, Saul,” I say.

  “I’m a lucky man.” He looks at Aviva and smiles. She waves him off. Aside from the time I saw them embracing on the grounds of the school where Connie Hall shot seven people in Roseville last year, I’ve never seen Saul touch my mother. Nor, for that matter, have I seen her touch him.

  After we eat the brisket, I decide it’s time to bring up Henrietta.

  “So,” I say to Saul,
“I actually wanted to talk to you about a possible story.” I tell him about the Center’s cocktail party, and meeting Amanda. “I’ve been looking for something interesting—a feature, you know, something more than the day-stories at the Trib. Anyway, I’ve been reading a lot about wrongful convictions. People getting exonerated now that we have DNA evidence and stuff. So this girl, Amanda, we were talking and she gave me some letters she’s gotten from people who say they’re innocent.” I lean over and pull DeShawn’s envelope out of my bag. “She gave me this.”

  “You’d like an ex-cop’s eye?”

  “Well, yeah. But … it’s a case you worked on.”

  “Ah.” He bends forward and pulls the papers out of the envelope. “Just a minute,” he says. “I need my reading glasses.” He gets up and while he’s gone Aviva takes our plates to the kitchen.

  “Let’s see,” he says, sitting back down, putting on his glasses.

  “I hope you’re not…”

  “It’s all right, Rebekah,” he says, not looking up. “I’m not offended.”

  Aviva returns with three small plates of kugel. I pick at mine while Saul reads DeShawn’s letter, then glances at the reports.

  “I remember this case. The day after the Fourth of July. Horrible, horrible scene. It was the first murdered child I’d ever seen.”

  “So what do you think?”

  “What do I think about the letter? I think this is a man with nothing but time on his hands. There was an eyewitness in this case. That’s hard to argue with.”

  “What if I told you the witness lied.”

  “Lied?”

  “I tracked her down. She’s in Atlantic City now. She said somebody paid her to lie.”

  “And you believe her?”

  “I think so,” I say. “I’m not sure why she’d lie now.”