Conviction

by Julia Dahl

“Do you have a picture of him?” I ask.

  “The yeshiva should have a class photograph,” says Naftali.

  “Good,” I say. “I know a woman who can tell us for sure.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  September 1992

  Crown Heights, Brooklyn

  Isaiah kept the signatures in a safe deposit box along with his birth certificate, his citizenship papers, and $750,000 in gold bars. The bars he had been amassing since the late 1970s. They were the only insurance policy a Jew in this world could rely on. With gold bars, a man need not stay longer than is safe in a country whose leadership has suddenly changed. Gold could get Isaiah and his wife plane tickets and new identities in Mexico, or Indonesia, or South Africa. His mother’s entire family perished together in 1941, lined up and shot by Nazis along with 35,000 other Jews at the lip of a mass grave outside Minsk. Somehow, the spray of bullets only grazed eighteen-year-old Sonia Baran. For hours she lay still beneath a thin layer of sand, bodies below and beside and atop her, many still writhing and moaning. At nightfall, she climbed out and ran through the forest. She made it to a suburb where no one on the streets wore a yellow star. What she needed were papers that did not identify her as Jewish. With those, she could escape to Israel or America. For two days, she hid in a storage shed behind a bakery. The smell of the bread coming from the ovens nearly felled her—Isaiah remembers her telling him that she hadn’t eaten bread that didn’t chip her teeth in a year—but she remained out of sight, watching the proprietor and his family through a crack in the door. The baker and his wife appeared to have only one child, a daughter about her age. On the third night, after two days eating the flour and sugar dust off the floor of the shed, she broke the window of the bakery, stuffed yesterday’s bread down her shirt and, while the family was downstairs assessing the damage, snuck into the apartment above. She found the daughter’s identification documents folded neatly in a leather envelope on the bureau in her bedroom. For six months, until she got to Israel, Sonia Baran, born in 1923, became Dasha Garmash, born in 1925.

  Isaiah was born in Tel Aviv in 1944. Many of his peers’ parents had stories like his mother’s, and each took something different as a moral. The Rebbe taught that, more important than searching for lessons from the Holocaust, one should guard against despair. If the Jews who survived sunk into despair, they became victims of the Nazis, too. Jews should live with joy; serve God with joy. Isaiah agreed with the Rebbe, of course, but he also believed that after Hitler, a Jew who did not plan for a quick escape was a fool. And Isaiah Grunwald was no fool.

  So when Joe Weiss came to work grinning in the days after the Davis murders appeared in the newspaper, Isaiah experienced not just the shock of what had been done in his name, and the fear of the consequences for himself and his fellow Lubavitchers, but the unmooring knowledge that he so badly misjudged this man. How could he have failed to see what he had let into his life? For two days he did not eat; he lay in bed and could not sleep. He had taken a step—many steps—in the wrong direction. He had crossed lines. He had sinned. The sins had seemed minor; the victims removed from his daily life, the actions not technically his. But there could be no doubt that he set into motion the series of events that led to the slaughter of three innocent people. It mattered little that he had not intended for Joe to commit murder. What had he intended when he instructed him to make the problem go away? A threat. What kind of threat? If he wanted someone to reason with the Davises, he could have tasked Daniel. But he chose Joe. Would he have approved of a black eye? A broken leg? A menacing note handed to a child? Where did what was moral turn into what was immoral? He turned these questions over in his mind until he realized that the answers made no difference. He had not intended the specific outcome, but should have foreseen it. He had encouraged—or at least allowed—Joe and the others who worked for him to think of the people in his buildings as unworthy of the help they would give fellow Jews. If they were lesser human beings, it was just another few steps to barely human at all.

  He avoided Joe for three days. The California boy with the handsome face was a monster, and now Isaiah had a decision to make.

  When Joe came to his office with the newspaper and the signatures he had taken from the Davis home, Isaiah did not give the speech he had been constructing in his mind. He did not yell or even question. Standing on the other side of his desk, Joe felt to him like a bomb about to explode. The longer Joe remained in Crown Heights, the more likely what he had done would be discovered. And if it were discovered, Isaiah feared that what had happened the summer before—the fires and the stabbings and the mayhem; the hate writ large on every face—would be repeated, magnified. With the match lit by a Jew, he knew that whatever sympathy the police and the goyim of the city had for his community would be obliterated. The death of that poor little boy on Utica Avenue had been an accident. This was murder. And he and his fellow Jews would be made to pay for it.

  So Isaiah told Joe to go. Go and never come back.

  “You have done the wrong thing,” he said as the young man turned to leave his office. If Joe heard his boss, he did not respond. Isaiah remembered that Joe had the newspaper tucked beneath his arm, folded open to the page with the photograph of the mourners. As if he was proud.

  When enough time passed that it didn’t look suspicious, Isaiah asked Naftali Rothstein for the file on the murdered family and learned that the police did not appear to have anything that could connect him—or Joe—to the crime. After that, he did what he could do, what was all too easy for him: he wrote three checks. One was made out to Glorious Gospel, with the words “In memory of Malcolm and Sabrina Davis, and Kenya Gregory” written on the note line. The second, mailed in the same envelope as the first, was made out to Ontario Amos, “For the care and education of the child.” The final check he took to an attorney outside the community. He instructed the man to create a trust for DeShawn Perkins. Invest it, he said, and send a little to his prison account each month. Isaiah knew DeShawn had been sentenced to life, but perhaps someday he would get out. If he did, he would need money.

  The checks came from a bank account for “The Canada Fund, LLC,” but all a curious soul would find if he went searching for the entity was a PO box on the Lower East Side. A PO box that Isaiah closed once the checks were cashed. He named the fund for Ontario, the little boy left behind. Maybe, he reasoned, the boy’s mother had a connection there. Maybe she named him for a good memory.

  Over the next few years, he sold his interest in most of the apartment buildings Joe and Daniel had visited. Let his former partners manage the tenants. Let them make those daily decisions that had led to this. By the summer of 2014, when the article about DeShawn appeared in the Tribune, Isaiah Grunwald owned only the four-story building on Kingston Avenue that housed his office on the second floor and his home on Crown Street. The rent from the storefront and two apartments at the Kingston address was enough to live on. He was getting old, and the gold bars meant he didn’t need more for his family’s security. Certainly, he did not deserve more.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  I am sitting in a café on the ground floor of the Jewish Children’s Museum on Eastern Parkway when Henrietta calls.

  “That’s him,” she says. “How’d you find him?”

  “It’s a long story. You’re sure that’s who paid you to lie to the police?”

  “Positive. I almost forgot how young he was. But he scared me good. Little shit.” She pauses. I can hear slot machines ringing in the background. “I gotta get off before my shift manager sees me talking.”

  Henrietta hangs up before I can ask if she’ll go on the record. I call back, but she sends me to voice mail.

  I look at the photo of this man who I now know likely murdered three people and got away with it. He is, I have to admit, attractive. Large hazel eyes and a heart-shaped face. A man you would feel safe opening the door for. He is smiling at the camera in the portrait. Chin up, like he is proud; preening almost. Naftali and
Daniel and the other Lubavitch men milling around me wear a black-brimmed hat that is slightly different from the ones the men in Borough Park and Roseville wear—it is angled down at the front, more like a fedora than a top hat. It occurs to me that that hat, which always seemed so stodgy and old-fashioned, is also, on Joe at least, almost rakish.

  Mike calls at noon, and he isn’t happy.

  “The Ledger just went live with a story about some guy planting evidence in your cold case,” he says. “They’ve got a surveillance photo and a comment from Michaels’ office. Why don’t we have this?”

  “I … um … I actually had it, but I wanted to confirm…”

  “You had it? What the fuck! We need to get this up now. And we need to advance.”

  I make the decision quickly. The photo is out there; if someone sees past the sunglasses and identifies Saul, I’m screwed. It’ll look like I withheld the information because of my relationship with him. Which, of course, I did.

  “I know who it is.”

  “What? Who? Is it on the record?”

  “It’s Saul Katz.”

  “Saul Katz. Why do I know that name?”

  “Because he was my source on the Rivka Mendelssohn murder.”

  “Who?”

  “Crane lady.”

  “Crane … oh, Jesus! You’re kidding me. The disgraced cop?”

  I figure I might as well go all in. “He’s dating my mother.”

  “Fucking fuck, Rebekah. I … I’ll call you back. Do not call the DA’s office. You are off this story.”

  He hangs up and I sit, listening to the roar in my ears. My face is hot; it feels like needles are poking into and out of my skin.

  My hands are shaking as I call Saul’s cell.

  “Where are you?” I ask. We left Naftali’s office only an hour ago.

  “I am home.”

  “You’re going to get a call from the Trib.”

  “I see.”

  “I’m sorry. The Ledger has the photo online. Someone in the DA’s office must have given it to them. It was only a matter of time before someone recognized you.”

  “Perhaps.”

  “Henrietta just called and she ID’d Joseph from the photo Naftali gave us. That’s the man who paid her to lie to you. If he didn’t kill the Davises, he knows who did.”

  I expect Saul to respond, but he doesn’t.

  “Saul?”

  “I’m going to have to call you back, Rebekah. I need to make some arrangements.”

  And he’s gone.

  I e-mail the Trib’s library and ask them to run a backgrounder on Joseph Weiss, originally from California (He’d be 40-something now. Lived in Brooklyn in 1991–1992ish), and then pack up and head to Isaiah Grunwald’s office. It’s a little bit cooler out than the last few days, and the yeshiva students—all male, of course—are lingering on the sidewalks, chatting, sipping sodas, typing on smartphones. Two women, each pushing a double stroller, walk past with purpose.

  The door to 318 Kingston is slightly ajar, so I push in. A bulletin board just inside lists Grunwald Management as being on the second floor. Halfway up the stairs, I hear a woman screaming.

  “I don’t know!” She says something else but I can’t make out the words above the howls of another female voice. “Please! Come now! Help!”

  I step inside the door marked Grunwald Management and find a woman in the reception area kneeling over a man who is splayed on the carpet, convulsing. Her arms to her elbows are blood smeared, and I can see her underwear beneath her flesh-colored pantyhose. She appears to have pulled off her skirt in order to press it against the man’s chest. The man, I realize as I step closer, is Naftali.

  “Give me your shirt!” screams the woman when she sees me. I pull my flimsy H&M blouse over my head and hand it to her. She presses it against Naftali and it is soaked through in seconds. She tries to pull her own shirt off, but her hands are shaking so violently she cannot control her fingers to grasp the blood-slick buttons.

  “Did you call 911?” I ask.

  “Yes! Yes!” The woman turns to her colleague, a much younger woman—probably a teenager—who has her back pressed against the wall. Her eyes are wide and she is huffing a half-scream half-grunt with each breath. I watch as her face turns from white to purple.

  “Hella!” shouts the woman on the floor. “Give me your skirt!”

  But Hella can only gasp for air.

  I look around for something else to press against Naftali’s chest. Through a doorway about ten feet away I see the tail of a black coat. I crawl toward it and realize it is attached to a man. A dead man. Daniel. And he is not the only dead man in the office. An older man is bent backward over the arm of a leather desk chair, his eyes frozen open, a pink ring across his forehead where his hat pressed into his skin.

  “What happened?” I whisper, almost to myself.

  “He just started shooting!”

  “Who?”

  “I don’t know! I don’t know! Hella! Give me your skirt!”

  But Hella’s skirt won’t help. Naftali is gone.

  * * *

  When help arrives, the only person they are able to assist is Hella, who gets oxygen, a stretcher down the stairs, and whisked away in one of the waiting Hatzolah ambulances. Someone brings the other woman, Goldy, a blanket to cover herself. I sit, shivering in my bra until an EMT hands me an FDNY T-shirt that is four sizes too big. The blood is everywhere. I won’t be able to get it out of my cuticles for days.

  Goldy tells the detectives that Naftali and Daniel came to the office unannounced—probably immediately after meeting with me and Saul—and that the three of them had been behind closed doors when the man with the gun arrived.

  “Do you have any idea who he was?” asks the detective, Anne Richter.

  “He was frum, but I never saw him before.”

  I pull out my phone and scroll to the photo of Joseph Weiss.

  “Was this him?”

  She looks hard for several seconds. “Maybe,” she says. “Hella was the one who greeted him. I was at the photocopier.”

  Detective Richter turns to me. “Who is this?”

  I explain, and when they are finished questioning me I call Henrietta, but she doesn’t pick up. I leave a rambling message, then boil it down in a text:

  Joe might have just shot 3 people in Brooklyn. Be careful.

  On my way home in a livery cab, I text Amanda:

  I’ve got some info on a shooting in Crown Heights

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  Spring 1993–August 2014

  He’d been lucky, and smart, and he’d stayed out of prison. He didn’t have to do jobs more than three or four times a year to live the way he wanted—which was alone. After Chicago, he rented a house on Martha’s Vineyard during the off-season and returned most winters. He walked on the beach for miles and didn’t see a soul. The people he met in bars, the girls who came over to fuck—paid and unpaid, though there was overlap—didn’t ask a lot of questions.

  But in Brooklyn, they had his real name, and they might even have his DNA. He avoided the borough entirely for twenty years; in 2002 he actually turned down fifty grand for an easy job in Bay Ridge because he knew that his first kills had been careless. He kept up on the news, however, and when he saw the article that said they’d found the letters he sent the Davises, he knew he needed to take care of it. Immediately.

  He ordered the black pants and jacket and hat online, and two days later, at just after noon, he parked his car—a silver Hyundai; forgettable, dependable, with all the interior bells and whistles, and the registration and insurance up to date—along the eastern edge of Prospect Park. He walked toward Kingston Avenue with his gun in his pocket.

  Isaiah and Daniel did not have time to recognize him. The third man, well, that was his bad luck. The woman who asked him to wait at reception must have hidden herself when she heard the shots, and he decided it was not worth hunting her down. The sooner he was out of Brooklyn, the better.
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br />   His buddy with the tech job at the FBI had gotten him Hunny’s new address. He figured he had less than twelve hours to execute before she got word there’d been a shooting in Crown Heights and got on her guard.

  There was a gas station across the street from her apartment complex, and he stopped there to watch. At sunset, she drove into the parking lot and took the stairs to the second floor. She’d gained weight, but not as much as some women. Maybe, he thought, she’d want to fuck him. For old time’s sake.

  He was taking a risk approaching without being certain she was alone, but he wanted to be south of Richmond by midnight, with Brooklyn behind him forever.

  He wiggled out of the Chabad uniform in the driver’s seat; donned a plain black T-shirt, cargo shorts, and his Dodgers hat. He knocked twice at apartment eight, and he was raising his arm for a third rap when the bullet pierced his chest.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  August 2014

  Atlantic City, New Jersey

  A lot of things had changed in her life since the summer Joe the Jew stuck a gun in her mouth, but a lot of things hadn’t. She made better choices now, but still woke up every morning wanting to get high. She’d accepted that she always would, which was why she went to church, and why she kept fucking poor Marcus Reeves, with his bad knees and dopey anniversary celebrations. But she was no fool. Henrietta Day in 2014 may not do the same things Hunny Eubanks did in 1992, but she had seen the same things and felt the same pain and learned the same lessons. One of those lessons was that when she was sober, her gut was pretty good at detecting danger. And when she read that reporter’s story in the newspaper, she knew shit was gonna come home to roost. If he was still alive, he’d have to try to get rid of her.

  So she pulled Roger the night janitorial supervisor aside, and he got her a gun. Gina had one for a little while back when they lived together in Bushwick. A guy she used to see came by late one night and asked her to hold it. He didn’t even wanna fuck, just needed to stash the thing. After a week, she sold it for a hundred dollars and they got high. Gina was dead now. Long dead. Like most of the people Hunny used to know. But not Hunny. Not yet.