“So Tarpin liked the Baldwins?”
She rubbed her nose. “Tarpin liked the boys…not to fuck them, but he liked doing the camp thing. He liked to play Mr. Marine. I don’t think he’d hurt any of the boys, including Ernesto. And I can’t see him whacking the Baldwins.”
Decker formulated ideas. Had Tarpin threatened to expose the hacking scheme? Was that why he was murdered? If so, it had taken Darrell six months to do it. And then there was Ernesto. How’d he fit in? Decker asked Erin for her opinion.
She looked down at her lap. “Once…when Darrell thought I was sleeping, I overheard Ruby telling Darrell things…that Ernesto was a problem.”
“A problem…” Decker waited until he could make eye contact with the girl. A hard stare. “What did he say to that?”
“Maybe he said something like ‘Take care of him.’”
Take care of him.
“And what did that sound like to you, Erin?”
The teenager didn’t answer.
The little psychopath! She knew all along. Decker said, “Didn’t you just tell me that Ernesto’s death came as a shock to you?”
“It did!”
“Then I’ll repeat my question. What did ‘Take care of him’ mean to you?”
She began to cry. “I didn’t know Ernesto was going to die!”
“But you knew it wasn’t going to be good—”
“I thought Darrell was just…being cool or something.”
“To whack someone is to be cool?”
“You’re putting words into my mouth!” She was sobbing by then. Decker let her go for a while. Then he said, “So Ruby set Ernesto up?”
“How was I supposed to know? I’m just this dumb junkie living from fix to fix!”
A dumb, psycho, lying junkie, Decker wanted to add. He shut off the recorder, leaned forward, and grabbed the girl’s shoulders, his eyes staring into her blank pupils. “Erin, where can I find Darrell?”
“I don’t know,” she whimpered. “I swear.”
Decker let go of her arms and backed away, giving her some breathing room. His eyes continued to bore into hers. “Give me an idea, little girl! Something! Anything!”
“He’s probably hiding in the hills somewhere between Santa Barbara and Orange County. I don’t think he’s left Southern California—”
“Narrow it down!” Decker ordered.
“Stop yelling at me!” she screamed.
“What’s going on down there?” a disembodied voice yelled down. Doreen to the rescue. “I’m coming down right now!”
Decker glared at Erin. “You’re in trouble—”
“I don’t know where he is!” she bleated. “Go lean on Ruby Ranger, why don’t you? She’s known Darrell a lot longer than I have.”
Doreen appeared. “The questioning is over!”
“Fair enough. I’m taking her in—”
“What?” Doreen was outraged. “You can’t—”
“I can and I will. You can come along. As a matter of fact, it would be good if you came along.”
“I have kids here!”
“So don’t come.”
“So you’re just going to arrest her?” Doreen asked.
“Take her in for questioning,” Decker corrected. “Actually, I’m not going to take her in. I’m going to contact a female juvenile officer from Detectives to bring her in. It’ll take about an hour.” To Erin he said, “You have time to change and wash up if you want.” Give yourself a final fix was the unspoken message. “But you can’t lock the door to the bathroom. If you do, I’ll break it down.”
“Why?” Doreen asked.
“Policy,” Decker said. “I need to keep an eye on her.”
“I cooperated with you,” Erin said sulkily.
Decker snapped back. “That’s why I’m letting you go to the bathroom, Erin.”
“Okay. Then maybe I will…go to the bathroom.” Her eyes met Decker’s. “They’re probably together—Ruby and Darrell—but not the way you think.”
A sly smile spread across her face. Decker wanted to smack her. Instead he said, “Erin, this isn’t a game. You are in trouble. If I find out you’re holding back, I will not only nail you legally, but you can forget about a hospital—”
Doreen blurted out, “That’s enough!”
But Erin spoke anyway. “I told you I don’t know where he is.” A hesitation. “I’m fucking scared, you know!”
“You should be!” Decker answered. “You remember the things that happened at your stay in rehab. Do you think jail without medical care is going to be better?”
“You’re threatening her!” Doreen yelled.
“Telling her the facts.” Decker’s eyes bored into Erin’s. “Help me and I’ll help you. Makes your life easy.”
“I don’t know where they are,” Erin repeated. “I’d have no problem telling you, but I don’t know!”
“You’re repeating yourself. Tell me something new.”
“Okay, okay…uh, hey, how about this. Darrell considers Ruby’s mouth a problem.”
Decker took this in. “That’s good. How big a problem?”
“A real, real big problem.” Out came the grin. “She was part of Darrell’s operation. Now Darrell has to move on. So she’s a problem.” She snapped her fingers several times. “What’s the word he used? A libility?”
“Liability,” Decker corrected. “How much of a liability?”
Erin looked the other way. “Something that has to be taken care of. Darrell doesn’t like things hanging over his head. He likes…permanent solutions.”
“Meaning?”
She extended her first two fingers to form the barrel of a gun, then pantomimed the shot using a thumb for a trigger. Her grin turned into a savage smile aimed right at her aunt. “What the hell! I hated the bitch!”
33
He was one of those old men who had that incongruous young man’s hair: thick and luxurious except it was as white as Crisco. Way back when, he must have been a genuine blond. With his pale blue eyes and his pallid complexion, he could have easily passed for one of Hitler’s Übermenschen. Perhaps that was why he lasted so long before he was crammed into a railroad car and headed toward certain death. His existence was a testament to miracles.
Having lived a long life, Oscar Adler wore the battle decorations of age, face and hands riddled with liver spots. His forehead held several shiny pink depressions—scar tissue left over from the removal of growths. Rina’s father had had several basal-cell carcinomas removed from his face because he was also very fair. Both of her parents were light-complexioned and light-eyed, but her mother had always made a point of wearing a hat when she was in the sun. It had paid off. Mama had beautiful skin.
Oscar was older than both Mama and Papa. His cheeks clung to the skeletal structure underneath as tightly as a rubber mask. His eyes were sunken and framed by jaundiced folds of skin, the irises almost pinpoints under thick glasses. Remarkably, he still had his own teeth even if some of them were chipped, and all of them were as yellow as egg yolks. Rina knew about his teeth because Oscar was smiling as he slurped soup.
The man had a hearty appetite. He had managed to get down an entire rib of flanken. On the downside, he coughed back a third of it.
“You’re eating too fast,” she scolded.
“Nyaaah,” he answered back.
“You’re taking too big bites—”
“A bissel fleisch.”
“Not a bissel. Asach. Too much.”
He waved her off and tried to wolf down another piece of meat. Again Oscar started hacking. Rina gently patted his back. “Are you okay?”
“Yeah, yeah—”
She picked up the spoon. “Esse de kraut.”
“No protein in the cabbage.”
His voice was high. He had to strain to get the words out of his larynx.
“But lots of good vitamins,” Rina told him. “And it tastes good, right?”
Oscar didn’t answer.
“Rig
ht?”
“Right, right. You don’t have to talk Yiddish to me. I know English.”
“You were talking Yiddish to me.”
“A bissel fleisch isn’t Yiddish.”
“Oh. Then what language is it?”
“It’s…an expression.”
“An expression in Yiddish.”
“It’s…English. Bissel is English.”
“Only if you’re selling carpet shampooers.”
They were sitting in the rest home’s common dining room. Eighty Jewish people over eighty years of age, the vast majority of them women. Some of them could have been beauties in their youth—the features were even and placed geometrically on the face—but the passage of time had dumped them into the category of “elderly.” Which carried with it a certain amount of relief. Certainly for women the pressure was off. They didn’t have to worry about that extra piece of cake. If they ate and kept their weight up, that was a sign of good health. Not surprising, there was a wide variation in personal appearance. Some women were dolled up with makeup and jewelry, but others, and not necessarily the older ones, were content in housecoats and mules.
This is me in fifty years, Rina thought, if I’m lucky. No matter how important the present appeared, it soon turned to the past, and that was the eternal cycle. The perpetuity of life made her smile. Rina had witnessed too much untimely death to be depressed about aging.
Rina smoothed her red cotton skirt and hiked up the sleeves of her white blouse to her elbows. There was some air blowing, but it felt tepid. Too much of a cold breeze wouldn’t do well in the crowd with weak bones and swollen joints. So Rina tolerated the heat with understanding, happy that she was one of those lucky people who didn’t sweat much. Twenty tables were scattered about the room awash in fluorescent light. A couple of window shades were open, allowing Rina to catch a glimpse of the moon and stars. The checkered linoleum floor was discolored but clean; the walls had been recently papered with a rose-on-a-vine pattern. White-uniformed Hispanic women wheeled carts in between tables and doled out the soup of the day: chicken noodle.
This created a problem.
At first, the kitchen refused to allow Rina to serve her soup to Oscar, not due to health reasons—she had purposely made it without salt—but because the dietitian was afraid that Rina’s potage—thick and meaty—would start a rebellion among the residents. So Rina offered to serve it to Oscar up in his room. But that wasn’t acceptable, either. What if Oscar choked? (Apparently Oscar gagged a lot.) So then Rina offered to sit with Oscar out on the facility’s patio. Again she was refused.
After twenty minutes of begging and cajoling, the dietitian finally relented. Oscar could consume the soup in full view of the other diners.
This wasn’t sitting well with them. They eyed the food enviously. And it didn’t help that Oscar kept smacking his lips—accidentally on purpose.
“It’s good,” he announced.
“Of course. It’s homemade.”
“Not all homemade cabbage soup is good. Sometimes it’s greasy.”
“Not mine.”
“No, yours is not greasy.”
“Thank you.”
Oscar nodded, his head looking like a cotton ball waving on the stem of his scrawny neck. He wore a short-sleeved blue-and-red-striped shirt and tan slacks. His bony elbows were sharp enough to be lethal weapons. He ate noisily until the bowl was empty. He pushed it in front of Rina.
“You have more soup?” Oscar demanded.
“For tomorrow.”
“Why tomorrow?”
“The dietitian set a limit on just two bowls.”
“Why?”
Rina shrugged.
“I’m hungry now. Give me more soup.”
“I can’t do that. She told me two bowls. If I don’t listen to her, she’ll throw the rest of the pot away.”
“Why two bowls?”
Rina leaned over. “I think the others are jealous—”
“Nyaaah.”
“I think you can have some of the regular dinner if you want—”
“Nyaaah.”
“Do you want to go up to your room, Oscar?”
He thought a moment, then shook his head.
“Should we take a walk?”
Again the headshake.
“So we’ll sit here for a while?”
This time he nodded. One of the servers was a young Hispanic named Yolanda. She offered Rina something to eat.
“Just a cup of tea when you get a chance,” Rina answered. “You want tea, Oscar?”
“Tea is good.”
“Two teas.”
“Oscar likes his with honey,” Yolanda said. “How about you?”
“I’ll take honey,” Rina answered.
“Give me a minute.”
“Take your time,” Rina told her.
Oscar picked up the bowl and ran a finger around the inside rim, collecting a bit of the puree on the bony tip. He licked it eagerly. Rina sighed, snatched up the bowl, and stood up. “This is ridiculous.”
Oscar looked upset. “Where are you going?”
Like a kid who had done something wrong. “I’m getting you more soup.”
She marched into the kitchen. After ten minutes of finagling, she returned with half a bowl. “They are tyrants in there.”
Oscar nodded. “See what we have to put up with?”
It came out “See vat ve have to put up vit?”
Rina said, “Of course, they can’t go around letting everyone eat whatever they’d like.”
“Why not?”
“There are a lot of restricted diets here.”
“That’s not my problem.”
“It’s somebody’s problem,” Rina insisted.
“Somebody’s, yes…not mine.” Oscar finished the half-bowl. “Now I’m finished. Thank you.”
“You’re welcome.”
“You are a friend of Georgia’s?”
“I know Georgia, yes.”
“Are you nosy like her?”
“I take exception to that. Neither Georgia nor I are nosy…just curious.”
“Nyaaah. You come to pester me. Why you think you can bribe an old man with soup?”
“I have confidence in my cooking. My mother is an excellent cook.”
“So your mother is alive?”
“Both my parents. My mother is seventy-seven, my father is eighty-two.”
“Youngsters.”
“I’ll quote you on that.”
“Where were they born?”
“My mother was born in Germany; my father is Hungarian.” Rina paused. “Actually, my mother is way more Hungarian than German. She moved to Budapest when she was ten. Her mother died before the war in some kind of tragic accident. She doesn’t like to talk about it.”
“I don’t blame her.”
“Neither do I,” Rina said. “Still, it’s a shame. She has unique knowledge of family history that she’s not going to pass on. It’ll be lost forever.”
“Some things are better lost,” Oscar commented.
“I suppose.” But Rina’s facial expression belied her words.
“Why is the past so important?” Oscar said grumpily. “We say we learn from the past? We never learn from the past.”
“I don’t know if that’s totally true.”
“On good days, when my eyes can see, I read the paper. Then I wonder why I do it. The killing still goes on.”
“True.”
“The past…Hmmmph!” He waved twiggy fingers. “Nothing! Empty space.”
“That’s how my mother feels. But sometimes I think it eats away at her. Maybe if she faced it—”
“Nyaaah. She faces it. I know. It comes back in nightmares. Terrible, terrible dreams. Dreams you don’t talk away, dreams you don’t psychoanalyze away, dreams that aren’t helped by sleeping medicines. They are dreams that haunt forever. It’s terrible enough that it happens in sleep. Why do I have to think about it when I’m awake?”
Rina conce
ded that he was making valid points. Then she said, “I don’t know about you, Oscar, but maybe if my mother talked about them during the day, she wouldn’t have the nightmares.”
“No. You are wrong. Then she thinks about it in the day and has the bad dreams at night.” Oscar was breathing hard. “What camps were they in?”
Stated so matter-of-factly as if asking what state they were from. “Auschwitz. My father was at the Jewish side, but my Jewish mother was at the goyish side—Monowitz.”
Oscar looked blank.
“The labor part of the camp.” Rina bit her lip. “My mother has dark hair but light skin and blue eyes—”
“Your mother passed for one of them?”
“I think the Kommandant wanted her to pass. She was stunningly beautiful. He…liked her.”
“Oy.”
“Her looks probably saved her life. All her girlfriends went to the Jewish side—to Birkenau—and all of them were murdered. Also, because she spoke German, she had the definite advantage over the Hungarian girls. He put her to work in the kitchen. It was a horrible existence, but she didn’t starve. That’s how she met my father…she sneaked food to the other side. My father was the ‘food runner’ for the men’s side.”
“She would have been shot if she was found out.”
“Yes, she has some stories. She was very scared. She always told me the hardest part was taking the first step. After that, it was almost habit.”
“She’s a hero.”
“I think she was just in love. Papa was very handsome—even at one hundred and ten pounds.” Rina smiled. “She considered herself one of the lucky ones. She had bread and soup and an occasional bone to gnaw on. She had clean water and though they cut her hair off, her scalp was lice free except in the heat of the summer. She has often said that she felt like a queen compared to the Jewish inmates. I don’t know how they survived.”
“You do what you must.”
Rina shrugged.
Oscar’s eyes darkened. “You can see why it is hard to talk about it.”
“Yes, of course. It’s strange. My mother can talk about the Holocaust. It’s just her mother—”
Faye Kellerman_Decker & Lazarus 13 Page 34
