Saturday the Rabbi Went Hungry

by Harry Kemelman

  Lanigan stared at the rabbi. “But that’s murder!”

  The rabbi nodded. . . .

  An hour later, they were still at it.

  “It’s crazy, Rabbi.”

  “But it fits all the facts. There are obvious objections to suicide, and similar strong arguments against acciden­tal death, but there are no logical arguments against murder. On the contrary, murder explains everything.”

  “And I thought I was in the clear,” said Lanigan ruefully.

  “Are you going to report it to the district attorney?” asked the rabbi.

  “I can’t right now. First I’ve got to check it out.”

  “Check it out how?”

  “I’ve got to talk to my boys. Maybe they didn’t shoot that picture as soon as they raised the garage door. Maybe they circled the car first, I don’t know, but I’ve got a lot of questions.”

  The chief was unhappy. “Hell, I’ll need some kind of legal proof. I can’t go to the D.A. and he can’t go to a jury with this—this chop logic of yours, Rabbi. I’m not even sure I could repeat it. I need something definite. I’ve got to be able to prove beyond a doubt that the barrel wasn’t moved. I’ve got to prove beyond a doubt that Hirsh couldn’t have got by that barrel. I’ve got to have accurate measurements.”

  “You said Hirsh was short, five feet three. The chances are the driver was taller,” said the rabbi. “Wouldn’t the position of the car seat—if it were pushed back, that is—indicate that someone else was driving?”

  “You would bring that up,” said Lanigan morosely. “Trouble is, the police officer who found the body could have changed the position. If not, we probably would have done so to get the body out. In any case, Sergeant Jeffers, who is close to six feet, would have pushed it back to drive the car to the station, and even if he remembered doing it I couldn’t accept that as evidence. No, we flubbed it all right.” He threw up his hands. “But how could we know it was anything except a straightforward case of suicide or accident?”

  “Fingerprints?” suggested Beam.

  Lanigan shook his head dolefully. “We didn’t take any. Why should we? The patrolman who found him opened the car door, and later we were all over the car getting him out. Any fingerprints would be on the door handles, the steering wheel, and the gear shift, and they would be obliterated.”

  “How about the light control?” asked the rabbi.

  “You mean for the headlights?”

  “Someone turned them off that night.”

  “So?”

  “Well, if the car was driven to the police garage by day, there’d be no need to put them on again.”

  “By God, you’re right, Rabbi! They would have no rea­son to touch the button. It’s a chance. The car has been under seal ever since.”

  He reached for the phone and dialed. “I’ll get Lieutenant Jennings—he’s our fingerprint expert.” Then into the phone, he said, “Eban, Lanigan. Meet me at the sta­tion house in five minutes. No, I’m not there yet but I’ll be there by the time you are. Come along, Rabbi?”

  “I think he’d better stay right here,” said Miriam.

  “Maybe you’re right. I’ll call you.”

  “Mind if I go along, Chief?” asked Beam.

  “Come on, if you’re sure you’re all through here.”

  Beam’s eyes all but vanished as he smiled. “The rabbi has convinced me it’s murder. But I’ll be staying in town a little while. There are a few points I want to clear up. When I talked to Mrs. Marcus, she said they called home to say they’d be late and there was no answer. They tried again when they arrived at their friends’ house, and the phone rang for the longest time before Mrs. Hirsh an­swered. She said she’d been napping.”

  “So?”

  “So maybe the reason she didn’t answer was not because she was asleep but because she wasn’t there.”

  “Mrs. Hirsh?” Lanigan exclaimed. “But how could she be involved? She doesn’t know how to drive.”

  “She doesn’t have to—only how to pull down the garage door.”

  “You mean she might have done it? Mrs. Hirsh?”

  “Done it, or helped to do it.”

  “Why do you want to pin it on her?”

  Beam smiled. “Because the law says a murderer can’t benefit from his crime.”

  “Rabbi?” It was Chief Lanigan calling from the station.

  “Yes?” He had been pacing the floor impatiently, waiting for the call. The moment the phone rang he snatched it up.

  “There were no prints on the light button.”

  “No prints? But there had to be. The car was driven at night, so somebody had to turn them off.”

  “Wiped clean,” said Lanigan grimly. “You know what that means?”

  “I—I think so.”

  “No chance of the driver saying he walked away and forgot to turn off the motor. He knew what he was doing, all right, which makes it first-degree murder.”

  CHAPTER

  TWENTY-FOUR

  The Reverend Peter Dodge stood framed in the door-way, one hand resting on either doorjamb like Samson about to collapse the temple.

  “Why, look who’s here, David,” Miriam said. “Come in.”

  His handsome head instinctively lowered to enter. “I heard you were a bit under the weather, David, and de­cided to include you in my pastoral calls.”

  “That was thoughtful of you, but it was just a touch of the virus. I’ll be going to services tomorrow.”

  “Your trouble, David, is you don’t get enough exercise. I wouldn’t recommend anything strenuous, but you ought at least to arrange time for a nice long walk every day. It will firm up your muscle tone. Now every evening without fail I take a regular walk over a regular route. It’s exactly four and six-tenths miles, and I do it in just over an hour, depending on whether I meet anyone. And most afternoons when I can manage it I get in a couple of sets of tennis.”

  “Where do you play?”

  “We have a court back of the Parish House. Any time you want, just give me a ring and we can volley for a while. It would do you good.”

  The rabbi laughed. “How do you think my congrega­tion would feel if their rabbi went to the Episcopal Church to play tennis?”

  “About the same way my people would feel if I came down to your temple.” He hesitated. “I hear you have been having a spot of trouble with them lately.”

  The rabbi and his wife both showed their surprise. Dodge chuckled. “You’re from New York, aren’t you? And I’m from South Bend. We’re city folks, so I don’t suppose we’ll ever get used to how fast news travels in a small town like Barnard’s Crossing. I was chaplain in a federal prison for a little while, and the grapevine there is the only thing comparable—”

  “What did you hear, Peter?” asked Miriam.

  Dodge became vague. “Oh, something to the effect that poor Ike Hirsh had committed suicide and you weren’t supposed to have buried him. It didn’t seem to make much sense to me, because how could David know he was a suicide, especially when the official police finding was death by accident? Surely your congregation can’t expect you to play detective every time someone passes away.”

  “You knew Hirsh?” asked the rabbi. “Of course you did—you were at the funeral, weren’t you?”

  “Hirsh? Oh, yes. He was in the movement.”

  “What movement?”

  “The Civil Rights movement. He made a small contri­bution and I went to see him. I try to make a personal visit to anyone like that—you’d be surprised how often they kick in with more. Besides, I pass by the Hirshes’ street on my regular walk, so I took a chance and just rang the bell. Well, talk about a small world, who should come to the door but Mrs. Hirsh who turns out to be Pat Maguire. We went to school together in South Bend. Af­ter that, I made it a habit to pop in from time to time, and had dinner there once.”

  “What sort of man was Hirsh?”

  “Oh, a very decent sort. I thought at first he was moti­vated more by his dislik
e of the South and Southerners—he had lived there for a while. But later, when I got to know him better, I felt he had a genuine sympathy for the oppressed. Once he even said something about going down to Alabama to join the demonstrators, but I don’t think he was really serious. It’s the sort of thing well­intentioned people say.”

  “Were you recruiting demonstrators for Alabama?” asked Miriam.

  “Oh, that goes on all the time. But right now, Miriam, I’m really involved. I am in charge of MOGRE for the entire North Shore.”

  “Mogah?”

  “M-O-G-R-E, Rabbi—Men of God for Racial Equality. It’s made up of ministers of all faiths. Although mostly Protestant, there’s a Greek Orthodox priest, and we’re ne­gotiating with the Archdiocese for a contingent of Catholic priests and we’ve got several rabbis.” He said ca­sually, “Interested, David?”

  The rabbi smiled.

  “Think it over.” He hitched his chair closer. “I’ll bet it might even solve your little problem here with your congregation.”

  “How would it do that?”

  “Well, as I heard it, you have forbidden them to build a special road, and they’re going ahead anyway. If you stand by and do nothing it’s going to be pretty embar­rassing. But if you’re down there, obviously you can’t do anything. Then when you come back, you’ll have got a lot of prestige which ought to give you more bargaining power with your congregation.”

  “If he comes back.”

  “What’s that, Miriam? Oh, I see what you mean. You’re thinking of the danger. Actually, there’s less than you might think, for our group at least. All of us will be clearly identified as ministers, men of God, my bunch and the Catholics and the Lutherans—we’ll have our cler­ical collars, and, as I understand it, the rabbis are plan­ning to wear the skullcap—what do you call it?”

  “Kipoh.”

  “That’s right, the rabbis will be wearing the Kipoh and, I believe, the prayer shawl.”

  “The tallis?”

  “That’s it. Even if they don’t recognize the regalia they’ll sense it has something to do with religion. Oh, there’ll be incidents, I suppose. But compared to the op­portunity to demonstrate for the sake of the Lord—”

  “I thought it was for the sake of the Negro.”

  He smiled to show he was aware that he was being twitted and that he could take a joke. “Same thing, David. For the glory of God manifested in man, in all men, black as well as white. What do you say?”

  The rabbi shook his head.

  “You’re not feeling up to it yet? The group is not leav­ing for a couple of days.”

  Again the rabbi declined.

  “Oh, you’re thinking of Miriam. It should be pretty soon now, shouldn’t it?”

  “It’s not so much that either,” said the rabbi. “You see, Peter, I’m not really a man of God, at least no more so than any other man. And what would I say? We don’t go in much for petitionary prayer. If I prayed in Hebrew, who would understand? And if I recited any of our regu­lar prayers in English, the Shema or the Kaddish or the Shimonesra, they don’t really apply. No, I’m afraid I couldn’t go down there as a rabbi. I could as an individ­ual, of course, like the college students; but you don’t want that.”

  “Well, of course we want you as a rabbi. There are rabbis who are coming down with us, and many have already been down and borne witness.”

  The rabbi shrugged. “We have no hierarchy to promul­gate belief. This is my view of the situation; other rabbis see it differently, I suppose. Some feel it their duty as spiritual leaders of their congregations—a habit of mind they picked up from you people, incidentally, or perhaps it was the congregations who then forced it on them. And others are so moved by the plight of the Negro that they don’t care to balance their attitudes as men and citizens against their attitudes as rabbis. Frankly, that may be just as well.”

  “Now you’ve lost me completely.”

  “People differ: there are the quiet ones and those who storm barricades. I’m afraid I’m one of the quiet ones, but I must admit that the other, the aggressive ones, are probably the ones who bring about changes in the world. I respect you for what you are doing, Peter, and I respect the others; but I don’t feel an urgency to thrust myself personally and physically into the battle any more than I feel an urgency to go to South Africa to help the Negro there. So if I did, it would be for some secondary reason like the one you suggested—to give me prestige in the eyes of my congregation—and that would be hypocritical.”

  “But this is more than just helping the southern Negro, David. It’s a new feeling, a new spirit that’s developing in the church, your church as well as mine, and we mustn’t let it die out. The church is coming out of its traditional shell. It’s burgeoning with new life. It’s giving up its self-satisfied praying and smug psalm singing to go out into the highways and byways of men to serve them, to help them to fulfill themselves. The Civil Rights movement is not for the Negro alone; it’s also for the church itself. And that’s why her ministers, priest and rabbi and pastor, are all involved.”

  “It’s not new to us, Peter,” the rabbi said softly. “We’ve been doing that for several thousand years, in fact, ever since we accepted Deuteronomy and the commandment, ‘Six days shalt thou labor . . . but the seventh day is the Sabbath in honor of the Lord; on it thou shalt not do any work, neither thou, nor thy son, nor servant, nor thy ox, nor thy ass, nor any of thy cattle, nor the stranger that is within thy gates; in order that thy man-servant and thy maid-servant may rest as well as thou.’ You people parted company with us a couple of thousand years ago when you fixed your eyes on Heaven. A little suffering here on this earth didn’t matter much to you, because compared to the infinite time in the next world, life here was a snap of the fingers, a blink of the eye. But we’ve always been involved with life on this earth and its many injustices. So I suppose you could say that we’ve been in the Civil Rights movement from the beginning.”

  “But haven’t you missed something in the process, David?”

  “Such as?”

  “Such as the inspiration of the blessed saints. Such as the inspiration of lives devoted to Heaven and God. Such as the handful of people who by their example brought mankind a little closer to the angels.”

  “Yes, I suppose we have, but we thought it was worth it. And now, it seems as though you people are beginning to think so, too.”

  CHAPTER

  TWENTY-FIVE

  The district attorney is not happy with me,” said Lani­gan. He had stopped by the Smalls on his way home. “And I don’t think he’s happy with you either, Rabbi.”

  “What have I done?”

  “A district attorney doesn’t mind going into court with a clear case and winning it. Just as a ballplayer doesn’t mind hitting a home run. But to dump a murder case in his lap, with no suspects and a good chance that the mur­derer may never be found, that he doesn’t like. And that’s why he’s not happy with you. And he’s not happy with me because he thinks I bungled it. It never occurred to me that it might be murder, so I didn’t take the normal pre-cautions on fingerprints and—”

  “But the fingerprints were wiped off.”

  “On the light button, yes, but what about the steering wheel and door handles and handles on the garage door? You might assume that if the murderer took the trouble to wipe the light button he’d wipe off the rest, but it doesn’t necessarily follow. You’d be amazed how often they slip up. And they can slip up on the most obvious thing while being scrupulously careful on the least likely. If I had thought there was a possibility of murder, I would have handled it differently. And I should have considered the possibility. No, I’m afraid I don’t look good in this case so far.”

  “That will make you look all the better when you find the culprit,” said Miriam.

  “That’s not going to be easy. This isn’t like any other case.”

  “How do you mean?” asked the rabbi.

  “Well, in any crime there are th
ree basic questions, three lines of investigation you might say, and where they meet, that’s your answer. There’s opportunity, there’s weapon, and there’s motive.” The chief ticked them off on his fingers. “Here, what was the weapon? The car. That means that anyone who can drive can be said to have ac­cess to the weapon. If you wanted to stretch it, he wouldn’t even have to know how to drive a car.”

  “I’m afraid I don’t follow you there.”

  “Well, say Hirsh had made it back to the garage and then passed out. Anyone passing, seeing him, could just pull down the garage door and that would do it.”

  “But then Hirsh would have been behind the wheel—not on the passenger seat,” the rabbi objected.

  “Yeah, that’s right. All right, so the murderer—or at least an accomplice—is anyone who can drive a car. That still leaves an awful lot of people. So we come to oppor­tunity. Well, considering how accessible or available the weapon was, it means it could be anyone who might have been at the Hirsh house or was passing by sometime around eight o’clock in the evening.” He grinned. “That kind of eliminates your people, Rabbi. Just their luck it was Yom Kippur and they were all in temple. It gives them a collective alibi.”

  The rabbi smiled faintly.

  “And so we come to motive. And that’s what makes the case particularly hard, because you see you don’t need much of a motive for this killing.”

  “Why is that?”

  “Because it doesn’t involve much doing—not much planning and not much nerve either. Look here, suppose you see a man drowning and although you’re a good swimmer and could easily reach him you just turn away. See what I mean? Deliberately to plan on drowning a man takes resolution and nerve; you wouldn’t do it un­less you hated him or had good reason for wishing him dead. But to just turn away—that you might do if you happened only to dislike him. Why should I go to the trouble, you’d say, especially if life would be easier with him gone.