Mom Meets Her Maker

by James Yaffe

  A long silence at the other end of the line.

  “Mom? What’s the matter? Is there something wrong with my reasoning?”

  “What’s wrong,” Mom said, “is that this Candy is the one who tried to buy the Meyer house.”

  “But that’s the luckiest thing that’s happened to us so far!”

  “Fine, it’s lucky. But also it’s peculiar, it raises a question you have to clear up. Candy has been buying up houses in his neighborhood, five houses he’s already bought. How can he afford it? Houses aren’t ice cream sodas, it takes a lot of money to buy one, even more to buy five. Even if you borrow from a bank. And this Candy’s church is full of poor people, he isn’t one of the big-business ministers in town—would you expect him to have so much money at hand or such good credit at the bank?”

  “Maybe not, but he has been doing it.”

  “Exactly. So how has he been doing it? There’s somebody else behind him. Somebody who has got money on hand is using this Candy to buy up those houses. Somebody who’s so worried his name should come into it that he don’t even dare to make the offer himself. He doesn’t hide behind a real estate agent, he hides behind an agent who hides behind the real estate agent. Believe me, Davie, you shouldn’t be finished with this case of yours till you find out who’s the somebody.”

  “All right, Mom, I promise you I’ll look into it.”

  But I was humoring her. I was perfectly happy with what I’d just found out, and Ann would be happy with it too. It was enough to get our client off the hook: what else should we care about? We weren’t in the business of digging up Absolute Truth; we were in the business of getting acquittals.

  I looked at my watch after I hung up the phone. I was surprised to see that it wasn’t quite noon yet. The morning had been a full one.

  So I grabbed a sandwich at the coffee shop in the courthouse, and then, for the rest of the afternoon, I put Roger Meyer and Chuck Candy and Christmas on the back burner, while I finished up a lot of neglected paperwork. Then I had a drink at an outlying saloon with one of my under-the-table information sources. I pumped him in connection with a drunk-driving case—in which, in our opinion, our client wasn’t drunk and wasn’t driving—and the results were more than satisfactory.

  I didn’t get home till six o’clock, when I opened my door to a ringing phone.

  It was Ann. I started to tell her the good news that had come out of my meeting with Dwayne McKee, but I never got out a word. “Meet me down at the Meyers’ house, will you?” she asked. “You know the address?”

  I told her I did and asked her what was up.

  “Somebody shot the Reverend Chuck Candy,” she said. “He’s dead, and the cops are looking for Roger.”

  * * *

  On the way to the Meyers’ house, the downtown traffic slowed me considerably. Mesa Grande is one of the fastest-growing towns in the west, according to the statistics, so we’re naturally acquiring traffic jams, parking problems, an increased crime rate, and smog: all the refinements of big-city culture. What we haven’t acquired yet is a movie house that shows anything with subtitles, a restaurant where they serve you the salad after the main course, and a nightclub or coffee shop that’s open after eleven and doesn’t cater exclusively to teenagers.

  During this entire downtown trip, I crawled along behind a Plymouth station-wagon with a “Honk If You Love Jesus” sign attached to the rear bumper. Then I left downtown behind and started through some of the city’s nicer residential districts. Hanging across nearly every doorway were wreaths, large ones dripping with pine cones, small ones punctuated by red artificial cherries.

  I had got a glimpse of the Meyers’ house two nights ago, in the dark. Now it was twilight, and I could see it more clearly. Though it didn’t display any wreaths, it looked in every other respect like an old Saturday Evening Post cover: red-and-white shutters, neatly-trimmed hedges, puffs of smoke rising lazily from the chimney on the roof. I figured Abe and Sarah Meyer had been attracted to it for just that reason: for people of their generation what could the American dream look like except a painting by Norman Rockwell?

  Inside the house the atmosphere was more Old Testament than Saturday Evening Post. In the living room Sarah Meyer was on the sofa, clasping and unclasping a rolled-up wet handkerchief; tears smeared her red cheeks. Abe sat next to her, tightly holding onto her free hand, blinking in bewilderment at the opposite wall. Standing next to the sofa was Ann, with a grim look on her face.

  Perched on the edge of a chair was a little man—very little, scarcely taller than five feet. He was in his thirties, with a clean-shaven pinkish face, and he was wearing a light-gray suit and a black yarmalke.

  (A yarmalke, for the uninstructed, is one of those small round caps that a pious Jewish male wears indoors and out, because at all times he’s supposed to keep a covering between the top of his head and God. A Jewish female doesn’t have to follow this rule: God, apparently, doesn’t have anything against the top of her head.)

  This dapper delicate little man was our local rabbi, Eli Loewenstein. We had met before at various public occasions: the rabbi was a popular guest of honor at Rotary lunches, Chamber of Commerce dinners, and other affairs where the gentile establishment wants to display some official representative of the Jewish community. It’s a pretty small Jewish community in Mesa Grande; the synagogue has less than a hundred families in it, and the rabbi is obliged to conduct services that are a mixture of Orthodox, Conservative, and Reform. But small as the Jewish community is, its members are all conscientious voters, and from time to time the powers-that-be feel impelled to acknowledge its existence officially.

  I nodded at the rabbi, and he got to his feet, bustled across the room, and shook my hand, with a tactful mixture of heartiness (to show he was glad to see me) and restraint (to show he was aware of the solemnity of the occasion).

  “How’s your mother?” the rabbi said, with that throb in his voice that I’ve noticed in all the clergymen of my acquaintance, regardless of sect, creed, or denomination; as if their most trifling remark is being delivered from a pulpit. The ministerial tendency to imitate God’s rhetorical style seems to be perfectly ecumenical. “We’re expecting to see her at Oneg Shabbat tomorrow night. I think she’s supplying the potato pancakes.”

  “I wouldn’t be surprised,” I said. “It’s something she enjoys supplying.”

  “I was hoping to see her last Friday too,” the rabbi said. “Too bad she couldn’t make it. A woman like her who could contribute so much. Well, we should be thankful for what we do get of her, shouldn’t we?”

  The rabbi didn’t expect me to make any response to that. Long ago he had recognized the pointlessness of lecturing me about coming to synagogue. Now he conveyed the same message in the guise of talking to me about Mom.

  “We haven’t got much time,” Ann cut in. “You should be filled in, Dave.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry,” the rabbi said. “If you want me to go to another room until you’re finished—”

  Ann told him it was fine with her if he stayed. Then she turned to Abe Meyer and asked him to tell me what had happened.

  The weary mechanical way in which the old man ground out his story made it clear that he had been over it half a dozen times already, with Ann and various representatives of the law. “It was a couple of hours ago, maybe four-thirty, Sarah and I were sitting here in the living room. Roger was here too, looking at the basketball game on TV—”

  “Roger is a basketball fan?” I put in.

  “Between you and me, not much. He watches the games when I watch them. He knows it gives me pleasure so he pretends to care about them like I do.”

  “He’s a good boy,” said Sarah, and suddenly she started sobbing.

  “All right, all right,” Abe said, almost in exasperation. “Crying isn’t going to help. Facts. Only facts are going to help. Four-thirty, the basketball on TV. All of a sudden the phone rang. We were expecting long distance from our daughter who lives with her
husband in Los Angeles—”

  “He’s in the insurance business,” said Sarah, between sniffles. “He’s doing very nicely, a lot of those Hollywood stars are his clients.”

  “And what’s that got to do with the price of beans?” Abe said.

  “I’m only explaining—”

  “Explain when it’s something important, all right?”

  “It isn’t important that Jennifer’s husband is a successful man? It’s important to me. It’s important to her and to the children. And I can imagine how unimportant it would be to you if she happened to be married to a bum that couldn’t earn a decent living—”

  “All right, all right!” Abe raised his fists in the air, as if he were calling on God for mercy. “Now if you’ll give your permission, I’ll get back to the matter in hand. The phone rang, but it wasn’t our daughter from Los Angeles, it was somebody asking for Roger. A voice—”

  “Male or female?”

  “I couldn’t tell. The voice was whispering, you know like a low whisper, like somebody with a bad cold or too weak to speak up. To me it didn’t say much more than Roger’s name. I put him on, he listened in the receiver for only a couple seconds, then he hung up and said to us, ‘I’m going out. I’ll be back soon.’ Then he ran out of the house, throwing his coat on from the hall closet, and that’s the last we saw of him. After an hour he still didn’t come back, and all of a sudden a police car was pulling up in front of the house, and a man from the district attorney came in and asked us where Roger is. And when I told him we don’t know, he acted like we’re liars, he told a couple of other men to look through the house—”

  “Without a warrant,” Ann said. “Typical.”

  “They didn’t find him, naturally, because I don’t tell lies to the police. Or anybody else.” Abe’s bewildered look was overshadowed for a moment by a glitter of anger. “So then they told me there’s been a murder—somebody shot the minister, that no-good from down the street. And they told me Roger went into that house and did it, and now he’s running away. So first I called Mrs. Swenson, and then I called the rabbi—”

  A sob from Sarah cut Abe off for a moment. Then his voice rose, as if he were trying to drown her out. “Our boy Roger, he shot a man? Never! He never used a gun in his life! What do they think he is, one of these animal-hunters from this section of the country that pull out a gun and start shooting whenever the idea happens to come into their heads?”

  “He didn’t tell you where he was going, though, after he got that phone call?”

  “Not a word. We asked him, and he said some funny things—not where he was going or who he’d been talking to though. And to tell you the truth, it got put out of my mind, because the phone rang again right after he left, and this time it was long distance, our daughter from Los Angeles, so for the next hour or so we talked to her—”

  “Her baby has the flu,” Sarah said, “the doctor’s giving an antibiotic.”

  “Big deal!” Abe exploded. “Our son disappears, they’re saying he killed a man with a gun, and we got to listen to antibiotics!”

  “What funny things?” I said.

  “What?”

  “You just told us Roger said some funny things before he left the house. Can you remember what they were?”

  “I didn’t understand them, to tell you the truth. They were about Christmas. Let me make sure I got this straight. He said, ‘Christmas is the time for brotherly love and forgiveness. If the Christians can do it at this time of year, why can’t the Jews do it too?’ And then he ran out of the house.”

  There was a silence, then I said, “Did he take your car when he left?”

  “He’s got his own car,” Abe said. “An old piece of junk. He parks it in front of the house because our garage is big enough only for one. His piece of junk isn’t in front now, so I suppose he took it.”

  Ann moved up to me. “The Assistant DA is waiting for us in Candy’s house. He says we can look over the scene of the crime, as long as he stays with us. And he won’t be there for long, so I think we’d better get going.”

  We left quickly, assuring the Meyers we’d do what we could and urging them to get in touch with us immediately if they heard from Roger. We both tried putting on reassuring smiles, but if mine was as convincing as Ann’s, poor Abe and Sarah weren’t very reassured.

  Rabbi Loewenstein followed us out to the hall and spoke in a low voice. “The boy didn’t do it. It’s important you should believe that.”

  “How do you know?” Ann said.

  The rabbi smiled, a little sadly. “I’m supposed to believe that a boy like that would throw away his life and his parents’ happiness for a man like that? Sometimes God acts as if He’s cruel or unjust, but you’ll never convince me He’s capable of making stupid jokes!”

  * * *

  The Candy house, half a block’s walk down the street, looked very different this evening than it had looked last night, when I went driving by with all the other rubbernecks. The Christmas lights were out now, and you could see the front of the house covered with a web of wires and dead bulbs, like the debris scattered around a room the morning after a party. The reindeer on the front lawn weren’t gleaming and sparkling anymore; the Christ-child wasn’t giving out any childish squeals; these figures, still and shadowy in the twilight, were like leftover party guests, collapsed on the floor, sleeping it off. And no music blared from the loudspeakers on the roof.

  The rubbernecks were still out in force, though. Attracted, I supposed, by the first reports of the murder on the TV news. A few dozen of them, in cars or lined up, could be seen across the street, because the police weren’t letting them on the sidewalk that passed in front of the Candy house. Even the high-echelon well-paid rubbernecks—the TV crews, that is—were being kept at a distance.

  A uniformed guard let Ann and me up to the front door, and it was opened by Assistant District Attorney George Wolkowicz, one of Marvin McBride’s bright, nasty young henchmen. Rumors were that Wolkowicz was on the verge of getting an offer from the State’s Attorney’s Office in Pennsylvania, where he could hobnob with a higher and finer type of criminal, but at the moment he was forced to go on slumming in Mesa Grande. That didn’t improve his temper; with his thick black eyebrows, low forehead, and jutting jaw, he always reminded me of a pug dog about to bite.

  “So here you are,” said Wolkowicz. “Glad you could make it. What murder would be complete in this town without the two of you? Okay, you’ve got ten minutes, after that I’m pulling out. My wife’s got my dinner on the table, and Marvin’s expecting a report on his desk first thing tomorrow morning.”

  That was a joke. It’s been many years since our esteemed district attorney was in any condition to read reports, or even keep upright at his desk, first thing in the morning.

  “Thanks for your consideration, George,” Ann said. “It isn’t often the public defender gets a chance to look at the evidence this early in the case.”

  She knew damn well, of course, that the law required the DA to call her right away if one of her clients was involved. Or his case could get thrown out of court, which in fact had happened to him a few months ago.

  Wolkowicz grunted. “Hell of a lot of good it’s going to do that punk kid,” he said. “I’ll take you to the room where the body was found. It’s the family living room, right down the hall. The fingerprint people and the photographers have been over it already, and the body’s been removed for autopsy, of course, but otherwise it’s in the exact same condition as it was before we got here.”

  In other words, several herds of flatfooted buffalo had trampled all over the scene of the murder, efficiently wiping out any evidence they didn’t happen to notice themselves. Still, it never hurts to look. Sometimes, by accident, the vandals miss something.

  We didn’t get to the murder scene just yet though, because two figures suddenly appeared on the stairs at the end of the hallway. One of them was Chuck Candy’s son Gabe, the other was Gabe’s mother, “Ruthie.�
�� I recognized her from the framed photograph I’d seen this morning on Chuck Candy’s desk—a skinny woman in her fifties, with gray, disheveled hair. Her face was even paler and gaunter than in the photograph. Her eyes were red and bulging.

  The pudgy young man, holding onto her arm, was still wearing the suit and vest he’d been wearing this morning. But it was rumpled now, it looked as if he’d been sleeping in it.

  Wolkowicz introduced us, and as soon as he heard who Ann and I were Gabe Candy’s face got red. “These are the people defending that killer? You get them out of this house! This is a holy time of grief. Don’t you see my mother’s here, prostrate? How can you do this, Mr. Wolkowicz, bringing these minions of my Daddy’s bitter enemies into my mother’s house?”

  “I’m the public defender, my name is Ann Swenson,” said Ann, in her coolest voice. The more somebody tries to intimidate her, the cooler she always gets: it’s what makes her such a terror in the courtroom. “This gentleman is my chief investigator. Mr. Wolkowicz here will tell you that the law gives official recognition to our status as Roger Meyer’s legal representatives. We have the same authority to examine the scene of the crime as the police have.”

  “It’s not right, it just isn’t right!” Gabe Candy’s voice was rising to a squeak. He sounded like a desperate little kid. “Is that true, Mr. Wolkowicz, they can come into this house any time they please? It just isn’t right.” He shook his head a few times, and then a long low sigh came out of him and he passed his hand over his eyes.

  “We’ll be as quick as we can,” I said, for a moment feeling sorry for the guy. After all, he had just lost his father.

  He took his hand away from his eyes and put it on his mother’s arm. “Come along, Mama. We’ll sit upstairs awhile.” And he led her, not too steadily, up the stairs.

  Wolkowicz gave a grin. Anything amused him if it made us uncomfortable.

  * * *

  Then he took us through an archway into the living room. A large room, with a picture window looking out on the front street. This must have been where the late Reverend Candy stood at night, watching the crowds as they gawked at his Christmas display. And maybe thinking with satisfaction about the infidels who were tossing and turning in their beds next door.