Wednesday the Rabbi Got Wet

by Harry Kemelman

  “Try one of these,” the rabbi urged. “It’s called kichel. It goes well with coffee.”

  “Mmm, very nice. What do you call it? Kichel? You’re right, it does go well with coffee. Maybe you could give Amy the recipe.”

  “Glad to,” Miriam said.

  The chief sipped at his coffee and sighed contentedly. “This is the first restful moment I’ve had in the last forty-eight hours. We were all day Wednesday preparing for the storm, and all day yesterday cleaning up.”

  “Isn’t it mostly the town repair crews that are involved?” asked Miriam.

  The chief laughed shortly. “Sure, they do the actual work—clearing away a fallen tree or fixing a water main. But it’s the police who are notified what roads are blocked. We check them out and tell the department that’s going to do the repair work. Say a store window gets broken. We’ve got to stand by and guard it until they can get it boarded up. Take the harbor, we had the two police boats working around the clock checking moorings and chasing boats that had broken free. There are auto accidents, and people get hurt and we have to get them to the hospital. Take old man Kestler, who was buried yesterday. Well, it was the officer in the cruising car who delivered his medicine to him. And late that same night we had to send the ambulance to take him to the hospital. So you had two police services there for that one man. By the way, just as a matter of idle curiosity, why did they bury him yesterday? I mean, he dies Wednesday night, and you bury him the next day. Was there any special reason they couldn’t wait?”

  The rabbi shook his head. “We always bury the dead the next day, or as soon as possible. We don’t embalm, you see. It’s traditional, because the land of Israel is tropical or semitropical, I suppose. So it would be for a special reason if we waited.”

  “You don’t hold a wake? You don’t let him lie in state for the family and friends to take a last look at him?”

  The rabbi went to the bookcase and reached for a dictionary. He thumbed it, found the word, and read, “Here it is: ‘Wake—to keep a watch or a vigil, as over a corpse.’ It comes from an Old English root that means to watch. Well, we do that. It’s considered a good deed, what we call a mitzvah. In most communities there’s a sort of society, Chevurai Kedusha, that undertakes to wash the body, dress it in grave vestments and then sit with the corpse all through the night reading from the Book of Lamentations. Normally, we do not arrange to view the body. That’s contrary to our tradition, which holds that once the spirit is gone, the body is just clay.”

  “And yet,” Chief Lanigan interjected, “according to Sergeant Jenkins, when the doctor suggested an autopsy, Joe Kestler made an awful fuss about it, claimed it was against his religion.”

  The rabbi nodded. “I didn’t think Joe Kestler was overly concerned with religion, but it’s in keeping with our general tradition. We don’t approve of autopsy unless there is a clear indication that from an examination of the remains, someone else’s life can be saved or that something specific can be learned. Man is made in the image of God, so to cut up the body is to desecrate the image.”

  “That doesn’t seem to square with the idea that the body is just clay once the spirit is gone,” the chief pointed out.

  “No, it doesn’t.” The rabbi grinned. “Our attitude is a little ambivalent there. Our tradition isn’t a planned system, you know, where every item jibes with every other. It developed over the centuries. The aversion to cutting up the body, or to cremating it for that matter, is bound up with the idea that some Jews have of the resurrection that will take place when the Messiah comes. They mean resurrection of the body as well as of the spirit. So it’s important that the whole body be there in the grave, ready to spring back to life.”

  “That seems kind of hard on those who died some time ago,” Lanigan observed, “or those who lost limbs in battle.”

  “It does, rather.”

  “Was there any reason why you didn’t do the honors on old Kestler?” asked the chief.

  “Only that he came from Revere originally and was still a member of the synagogue there.”

  “What a subject for conversation,” Miriam exclaimed. “And over coffee!”

  “I imagine the chief is working around to something,” her husband said with a smile.

  Lanigan gave him a quick look from under bushy eyebrows and emitted a short laugh of embarrassment. “Well, there is something.”

  The rabbi nodded encouragingly.

  “Do you want to speak to David alone?” Miriam asked.

  “Oh no. Nothing like that. Please stay.” Chief Lanigan leaned back in his chair. “I’ve been doctoring with Dr. Daniel Cohen practically ever since he came here about a year ago—well, because I like him. Besides, he’s a general practitioner, practically the only young one in town, and I like the idea of having a family doctor. Everybody else around is a specialist. So I go to him for most things, and so does Amy. I’m sure if anything really serious happened to either of us and he didn’t feel he was quite up to treating it, he wouldn’t hesitate to have us call in a specialist.”

  Miriam nodded sympathetically.

  “Today, I went to see him for a checkup. Nothing the matter, you understand. I try to go about once a year. It’s a good idea.”

  “You ought to do it, too, David,” said Miriam automatically.

  “So I’m sitting there in his office, and the phone rings,” the chief continued. “It’s the switchboard operator, and she says she’s got someone on the line who insists on talking to him right away. He says to put him on, and immediately I hear, because he’s shouting at the top of his voice, ‘You got a hellova nerve sending me a bill.’ Well, it was sort of embarrassing and if it weren’t that I was in my undershirt and shorts, I would have eased out so he could have his conversation in private. But I couldn’t very well go out in the corridor where other patients were waiting so I stayed, and I could hear as plain as the doctor was hearing. It was Joe Kestler, and he was mad because he’d just got a bill for services. You sec, these four doctors, they each have their own practice and their own examining room, but they share a bookkeeper as well as a nurse and technician. It’s like a clinic. And it’s the clinic that sends out the bills.”

  “I know the general arrangement,” said the rabbi.

  “Yeah, it’s a common setup these days. Well, Kestler got his monthly statement and was full of indignation, because he felt the doctor’s treatment had resulted in his father’s death. I gathered he figured what happened to his father canceled all the family’s debts to the doctor. He went on to say that he was going to sue him for malpractice—‘for every cent you’ve got’ is the way he put it and that he had absolute proof because Rabbi Small was there when he gave him the pill—”

  “I see. That’s how I come into the picture.”

  Lanigan nodded. “That’s right. Well, I didn’t say anything to the doctor when he hung up. I could see he was embarrassed. But I thought I’d look into it a little.” He laughed apologetically. “It’s not really a police matter, I suppose, because no one has reported anything to us. If Kestler wants to bring a malpractice suit against Dr. Cohen, that’s a civil suit, and it’s his right. On the other hand, hearing Kestler on the phone and knowing him a little, he’s apt to go shooting off his big mouth, and that could ruin a doctor, especially a man like Cohen who is shy and being new in the area hasn’t built up a following as yet.”

  “I see.”

  “The police are also involved in another way,” Lanigan continued. “It was the officer in the cruising car that delivered the pills—”

  “Yes, I saw the cruiser drive up. How did that happen?”

  “Well, the doctor called the prescription in to the drugstore and one of their customers, a Mr. Safferstein—” he cocked an eye at the rabbi.

  “Yes, I know him. Nice fellow.”

  “Yes, well, Safferstein agreed to deliver the medicine because they were busy at the store and Kestler’s house was on his way home. But then the storm started and Safferste
in stopped under a lamppost because the rain was coming down so hard. The cruising car spotted him and stopped to see if everything was all right, and he asked the officer to deliver the pills.”

  “I see.”

  “Then the police were involved again when the ambulance crew came to take the old man to the hospital. Kestler began his accusations right there in the bedroom where his father lay dead. He insisted it was the pill that had killed him. So the doctor who came with the ambulance suggested that the police should take charge of the pills.” Lanigan reached into his back pocket for his wallet and drew from it a slip of paper, which he tossed on the coffee table. “That’s a copy of the receipt the sergeant wrote out for him.”

  The rabbi picked it up and read aloud, “‘Received from Joseph Kestler for official custody a bottle containing eighteen pills.’” He broke off and looked at Lanigan. “Eighteen?”

  “You caught that, I see.”

  “Chai,” Miriam murmured, and her husband smiled.

  The chief looked at them inquiringly.

  The rabbi proceeded to explain. “Chai means eighteen in Hebrew, and it also means life. It’s a sort of numerology some of the old rabbis used to play with. You see, the Hebrew alphabet is also a number system, like A is one, B two, C three and so on. So AB would be twelve and BC twenty-three and ABC would be a hundred and twenty-three.”

  “I understand.”

  “Some of the numbers spell out words, which gave rise to a lot of involved and mystical biblical interpretation. Some of those word-number relationships stuck and came into common usage. One of them was chai, eighteen, which is also the word for life. People frequently make charitable contributions in eighteen or multiples of eighteen.” He smiled. “And it’s useful. If someone offers, say, fifteen dollars for charity, it’s easy to jack up the contribution by suggesting they make it chai dollars, which would be eighteen, a net gain of three dollars and practically painless.”

  “What if he planned to give twenty? Mightn’t he then reduce it to eighteen for the same reason?” asked the chief.

  Miriam laughed. “A good fund raiser would try to jack him up to thirty-six, double chai.” She took the receipt from her husband and studied it. “Chai seems kind of inappropriate in this business, though. What’s so special about eighteen pills?”

  The chief looked at her fondly. “Well, if there are eighteen and he took one, that would mean there were nineteen originally, and that’s a funny number to prescribe. As a matter of fact, the label on the bottle said they were to be taken four times a day, so nineteen—”

  “I see,” said Miriam excitedly. “You think they gave him two and that may have done it.”

  “How about it, David?” The chief turned to the rabbi. “You were there.”

  The rabbi’s brow furrowed as he strove to remember. “Let’s see. I heard the doorbell and I looked out the window and saw the cruising car. Then Mrs. Kestler came up with the pills. I remember her twisting the cap off the bottle and teasing out the cotton-batting plug.” He shook his head. “That’s all. I turned my head at that point.”

  “Why? Did something happen?”

  The rabbi shook his head. “Nothing special. You see, he was an old man and his hands shook, but more when someone was watching him. So I turned away when she banded him the glass of water.”

  “Then you didn’t see whether she gave him one pill or two?” the chief asked.

  The rabbi shook his head regretfully. “What did you have in mind?”

  “Well, I haven’t checked it out with the doctor yet,” said Lanigan, “but it occurred to me that while one pill might be harmless, two might not be. From what the sergeant told me, it seems that the old man had an allergic reaction. Now you know that people who are sensitive to certain things can go for years taking them and suffer no bad effects. And then they take a little more than normal and they get a reaction.”

  “I see.” The rabbi nodded. “And why would Mrs. Kestler give the old gentleman two pills when the prescription called for one?”

  Lanigan sat back expansively in his chair. “Now there you enter the realm of possibilities, and I see two. The first and most likely is that she gave him two because she thought two was better than one. My father was apt to do something like that. He always took a little more than the doctor prescribed on the general theory, I guess, that the dosage was the minimum that a patient could be expected to take. In those days all medicines tasted anywhere from bad to horrible. He wanted to show, as a lesson in character for my brother Pat and me, he could take it.”

  “No bad effects, I trust?” said the rabbi, smiling.

  Lanigan chuckled. “My guess is that as bad as they tasted, medicines weren’t so powerful in those days, except maybe for castor oil.”

  “And the second possibility?”

  “I get the feeling that the care of the old man rested largely on his daughter-in-law’s shoulders. Suppose she gets tired of being the drudge. Suppose she gets tired of waiting on the old man hand and foot. A sick old man can be troublesome, demanding. So what if she gave him two pills with the idea of getting rid of him?”

  The rabbi shrugged. “And how would she know that two pills would do it?”

  “She could have assumed it. Possibly the doctor might have cautioned them not to give him more than the prescribed dose.”

  “But that would be murder,” exclaimed Miriam.

  “If it were proved. A good lawyer could make it manslaughter or a mercy killing,” said Lanigan. “But you’d be surprised at the number of those kind of killings that are committed, a nitroglycerin tablet knocked out of a man’s hand while he’s having a heart attack, a piece of candy withheld from a diabetic going into insulin shock, that business a few years back with Isaac Hirsh here in town. Very few of them ever come to the courts, but we hear about them in the police.”

  “Do you check the possibilities of murder every time someone dies even though it’s almost certain to be death from natural causes?” asked Miriam.

  “Of course not. But if the death is awfully convenient for someone, or if someone is going to get badly hurt by it as Dr. Cohen might be in this case, I can’t help wondering. And sometimes I inquire around a little.”

  “And those are your two possibilities?” asked the rabbi. “Surely, there are any number of others.”

  “Like what?”

  Again the rabbi shrugged. “The most likely is that the drugstore put only nineteen pills in the bottle. Or Joe Kestler might have told his wife to give his father a couple of pills.”

  “Why would he do that?”

  “For the same reason you suggested she might have done the same thing. And that could account for Joe Kestler making a fuss about the autopsy. Of course, two pills would probably have done him no great harm in the first place.”

  “I think you’re right,” said Lanigan regretfully. “It’s just that Dr. Cohen is in a jam and I’d like to help him.”

  “Well, if you’re considering possibilities—”

  “Go on.”

  “The pharmaceutical house that manufactured the pills might have made a slight change in the formulation. Or that particular batch could have gone bad. Or the pill could have interacted with something the old man took unbeknownst to Dr. Cohen. Want more?”

  “No, I get the point.” Lanigan grinned sheepishly. “I wasn’t trying to pin a murder rap on the Kestlers. It just occurred to me that I might be able to use it to keep Joe Kestler from shooting off his big mouth and hurting a nice fellow like the doctor.”

  The rabbi considered. “Well, you could still use it for that purpose. But the danger is that if you pointed out there was a pill missing and it suggested that old Kestler might have taken two, contrary to the doctor’s orders, Joe might wonder about his wife. It could go hard with her.”

  “You’re always so damn helpful, David,” said Lanigan ruefully as he lounged to his feet.

  When he left, Miriam asked, “Do you really think he happened in just because he
was in the neighborhood, David?”

  “Not if he went to the trouble of making a copy of the sergeant’s receipt. And that suggests that Lanigan is suspicious of Kestler’s death.”

  “I don’t see—”

  “My car has been in the driveway ever since I returned from the morning service around half past seven. All right. Lanigan goes to Dr. Cohen’s office in Lynn. Say he had the first appointment, which I suppose would be around nine. Why didn’t he stop by on his way back? Instead he went to the police station, and then came here.”

  “How do you know? Maybe his appointment was for later. Maybe he had just left the doctor’s office and did stop here because he saw the car.”

  “Then he wouldn’t have had a typed copy of the sergeant’s receipt with him,” said the rabbi triumphantly. “No, there’s something bothering Lanigan. And it’s not just that Kestler might gossip about Dr. Cohen. All this questioning about burying the old man the next day suggests that he thinks there’s something wrong.”

  “You mean he believes the old man was murdered?”

  The rabbi pursed his lips and considered. “Lanigan has been a policeman all his life. When you’ve been practicing a trade or profession for a long time, you develop a sixth sense about things that relate to it. A little warning bell goes off in your mind. Yesterday, for example, Kaplan was telling me about the funeral and how Joe Kestler acted. His lawyer’s sixth sense told him that Kestler was planning to institute a malpractice suit. Something he said tripped that warning bell. Well, it’s my opinion that Lanigan heard a bell, too.”

  18

  Friday noon, Chester Kaplan called Safferstein. “That guy that took your coat, Billy, he just brought it back. It was the fellow who came with Cy Perlow. I took the liberty of going through the pockets and I found the envelope with the bottle of pills. You’ll be glad to know that the envelope had your name on it, and the label on the bottle also had your name on it, or rather Mona’s. So you worried for nothing.”