The Mourning Sexton

by Michael Baron

  What's done is done, of course, and people move on with their lives, but that doesn't change the facts or make them any better. I'm proud that you haven't let that stuff get in your way. You were a wonderful little girl, Lauren, and you've become a wonderful young woman.

  He toyed with suggesting they meet for coffee somewhere—nothing big, just to talk.

  Not yet. Don't overwhelm her.

  I hope you have a happy 24th birthday, Lauren. May this be a good year and a sweet year for you.

  Love, Dad

  After a moment, he folded the letter, slid it into the envelope, and opened the drawer to get a stamp.

  CHAPTER 25

  Hirsch stayed after the morning service to help the rabbi straighten up.

  “You seem distracted,” Zev Saltzman said.

  Hirsch was putting the prayer books into the slots along the backs of the seats. He turned toward the rabbi.

  “I've been busy at work,” he said.

  The rabbi nodded sympathetically. “A father's yahrzeit is never easy.”

  “I suppose.”

  He hadn't considered it. His mourning sexton function had become so routine that the list of names read aloud by the rabbi before he led the minyan in Kaddish didn't always register with him. Yesterday the list had included Hirsch's father, who'd died that day years ago. He'd known it was his father's yahrzeit, of course—indeed, he'd lighted a yahrzeit candle at his apartment—but he hadn't allowed himself to linger over the memories. There'd been too much else on his mind.

  The rabbi turned off the shul lights, and they walked down the hall side by side.

  Hirsch smiled as he thought of his father. It had sometimes seemed that Milton Hirsch spent most of his final two decades bragging to his friends and his optometry patients and even the checkout ladies at the supermarket about his son David-the-Harvard-lawyer. If Hirsch won an important case or landed a big client or delivered a speech at some bar association function, he would eventually hear about it from someone who'd spoken with his father. Although his father's continuous bragging was no doubt a bore, people seemed to tolerate it from someone as good-natured and modest as Milton Hirsch.

  But the bragging ended with Hirsch's arrest, and a year after Hirsch entered prison, a massive heart attack sealed his father's lips forever. His mother, never one to miss an opportunity, wrote him in prison the day after the funeral. She wrote that his father died of a broken heart. She was dead as well, killed five years ago in an automobile accident in Florida.

  We're orphans now, his sister had written him after that funeral.

  “David,” the rabbi said, pausing near his office, “I had a visit yesterday from a lawyer. He was asking questions about Abe Shifrin.”

  That snapped him back to the present.

  “A lawyer”

  The rabbi nodded. “I thought you should know.”

  “What kind of questions?”

  “Mainly about his mental state.”

  Hirsch tensed. “Who was the lawyer?”

  “Felts, I think. Or maybe Folts. Something like that. He gave me his card.”

  “Do you still have it?”

  “In my desk. Come with me.”

  He followed Saltzman into his cluttered, book-lined office. The rabbi walked behind his desk, pulled open the top drawer, and lifted out a business card.

  “Here you go.”

  He handed the card to Hirsch.

  KENNETH M. FELTS, ESQ.

  ATTORNEY AT LAW

  According to the address, his office was in Clayton, a busy suburb of St. Louis and the county seat.

  Hirsch asked, “What did he want to know about Abe Shifrin's mental condition?”

  “He asked if I'd observed any decline in his mental functions. Did he seem more forgetful than before? Less focused? Less organized? That sort of thing.”

  “What did you tell him?”

  “I told him that I hadn't observed any big changes. I explained that Abe didn't come to services as often as he once had, and thus we didn't have an opportunity to spend much time together. I suggested that he talk with you. I explained that you were representing him in a lawsuit. He seemed to know about your lawsuit already.”

  “Did he tell you why he was asking these questions?”

  “I asked him that very question. He told me he was representing Abe's sister, Hannah. Hannah Goldenberg. He said she was worried about her brother, especially his mental condition. He said he'd been retained to help her out.”

  “That's how he put it? ‘Been retained'? Not retained by her?”

  Saltzman thought back. “I'm pretty sure he said ‘been retained.'”

  Hirsch stared at the business card as he mulled it over.

  He didn't know for sure, of course, but he'd been in enough of these litigation chess matches to sense what might be afoot on the other side of the board. Marvin Guttner may have just moved another dangerous piece into position. He ran through his options—none of them promising. Just a matter of time now.

  He handed the card back to Saltzman and stood up. “Thanks, Rabbi.”

  “You're welcome, David. I thought you might want to know about it.”

  Saltzman walked him to the front door.

  “David,” he said as Hirsch put on his coat, “is there anything else bothering you?”

  Hirsch concentrated on buttoning his coat as he weighed his response.

  Anything else? he said to himself. How much time do you have?

  He glanced at the rabbi, and suddenly he was too weary to be sardonic. Saltzman was a good man, a gentle rabbi who studied the Talmud and visited the sick and worked patiently with the bar mitzvah students. But he was no Pinky. Hirsch knew he would never find another Pinky.

  “David?”

  “I'm okay,” Hirsch said. “Just a lot going on.”

  Walking across the parking lot toward his car, he smiled as he thought again of Pincus Green. It was a sad smile.

  Oh, Pinky, he thought, I could use some of your guidance.

  Pinky had been the Allenwood Jewish chaplain—a young Conservative rabbi who made the three-hour drive from Philadelphia once a week to meet with the handful of Jewish inmates. At the warden's urging, Pinky scheduled a session with Hirsch, who'd been stuck in what the prison psychiatrist diagnosed as a mild depression.

  Hirsch had entered that first session with low expectations, made even lower when he saw the young rabbi, who perfectly matched Hirsch's stereotype: short, pudgy, bearded, thick eyeglasses, wrinkled dark suit. Hirsch told him right off that he was wasting his time. He didn't believe in God, he used to observe the High Holidays on his country club golf course, and the closest he'd ever come to a spiritual experience inside a synagogue was when his wife's cousin Arlene from Scottsdale gave him a blow job in a darkened classroom down the hall during the kiddush luncheon following his eldest daughter's bat mitzvah. He'd intentionally used the phrase blow job, determined to repel the young rabbi.

  But Pinky had listened with an expression of mild amusement. When Hirsch finished, Pinky assured him that God was losing no sleep over whether David Hirsch believed in Him, that there were worse venues than a golf course for confronting your shortcomings on the Day of Atonement, and that a blow job from a casual acquaintance was nothing compared to one from the woman you loved.

  “But enough about shtupping, David. They tell me you're from St. Louis. Let's talk about those Cardinals of yours.”

  Which is exactly what they did for the first few sessions. Pinky Green was a consummate sports fan whose encyclopedic knowledge far exceeded Hirsch's. Although the rabbi was not even born in 1964 when the Cardinals slid the pennant out from under the slumping Phillies, he knew the game-by-game details of the late-season swoon of his beloved team.

  Gradually, the rabbi steered the focus of their meetings from sports to Judaism, and Hirsch, to his surprise, responded. Within a year, he was lighting the candles on Friday night and reciting the Shabbas blessings. By the time of his parole, he was
keeping kosher, wearing a kippah, and studying Hebrew. For reasons he couldn't quite articulate, he'd found solace in the rituals and the teachings of the religion. Even so, he was troubled by his continuing doubts in God's existence.

  “God is patient,” Pinky had assured him during their final session, just two days before Hirsch's release. “He'll wait for you to come home, David.”

  A year later, while in Israel visiting his sister and her family, Pinky was killed when a suicide bomber blew himself up inside a Jerusalem café.

  Hirsch unlocked his car door.

  Well, Pinky, he thought, glancing upward, is God still waiting for me?

  CHAPTER 26

  Jimmy Beau Redding.

  Known to all as Jumbo Redding.

  They'd been the least likely twosome in the entire prison population: the national trial lawyer with the Harvard law degree and the small-town deputy with the GED. But by the end they were inseparable. Hirsch dearly loved the man. Loved him like the brother he never had.

  At first glance, Jumbo Redding seemed to fit a rather distinct stereotype. Southern drawl, scraggly goatee, enormous bald head, tattoos, fifty pounds overweight. A mouth breather as a result of a nose broken that was never reset. If you were asked where to find him at dinnertime, you'd guess perched on a stool at the counter of a diner hunched over a platter of grits and fried catfish, big spoon in that big fist, shoveling food into that big mouth.

  Indeed, even the solemn Japanese waiter was taken aback when Jumbo asked, without bothering to open his menu, “Y'all got some of that chutoro tonight?”

  “Uh, yes, sir. We do, yes.”

  “Glad to hear. What about your kanpachi? How's that lookin' tonight, pal?”

  “Very fresh, sir. Very fresh.”

  “Then give me some of them, too. And some tekka-maki, a little of that edomai-zushi, maybe couple of them hotategai, and, oh yeah, how about some nice pieces of that sawara.” He'd looked over at Hirsch and sighed with pleasure. “Sawara is Spanish mackerel, Rebbe, and that's some fine shit. Gives me a chubby just thinking about it.”

  Hirsch couldn't help but grin as he watched Jumbo eat his sushi, clearly savoring each piece. One might not expect deft to have any descriptive relevance to a three-hundred-pound ex-con, but there was no better way to describe Jumbo's skills with chopsticks.

  If told that he was presently employed, you'd conjure an image of him driving a forklift on a loading dock or hanging off the back end of a garbage truck. You'd be wrong. You'd be wrong about a lot when it came to Jumbo Redding. If told he'd served time, you'd guess a county jail for drunk and disorderly, and not a club fed for an embezzlement scam based on a software program he'd created—a program so innovative that he'd earned big bucks in prison selling the copyright to a major software company.

  You'd never guess he'd turned Hirsch on to In Search of Lost Time. His recommendation had been, well, classic Jumbo: “Give ol' Marcel a shot, Rebbe, 'cause ah swear that little French faggot can write like a motherfucker.”

  Despite fingers the size of knockwursts, he was a banjo virtuoso, as Hirsch learned during their prison jam sessions. Jumbo would soar off on elaborate riffs, his fingers a blur, and then glide back into the melody just at the right beat.

  And he was a blues fan, with a passion that extended far beyond a personal blues library of nearly five hundred CDs covering the greats from all periods and regions of the country. He'd made the pilgrimage to John Lee Hooker's birthplace in Clarksdale, Mississippi. He'd played “Come on in My Kitchen” with T-Model Ford in a juke joint in Water Valley, Mississippi. And the week after his release from prison, he'd driven south past Tunica to the crossroads of Highway 49 and Old Highway 61, gotten out of his car at midnight, and stared up at the full moon while imagining another midnight seventy years earlier when Robert Johnson stood at that same spot beneath that same moon and sold his soul to the devil for the guitar skills that made him father of the blues.

  “So how's your job?” Hirsch asked.

  “Indoor work, no heavy lifting.”

  Jumbo was chief of computer security for a Fortune 500 company that had recruited him from prison. On the morning of his release, a limo waiting outside the prison gate had whisked him to an airport near Allenwood, where his new employer had chartered a jet to fly him to its headquarters in Nashville. Heady stuff for a high school dropout.

  Jumbo shrugged. “It's that old theory in action, I guess. Hire a thief to catch a thief.”

  “But it must feel good to have their trust.”

  Jumbo chuckled. “Come on, Rebbe. Them Nashville boys trust me 'bout as fer as they can throw me, and those sumbitches can't even lift me.”

  “What makes you think they don't trust you?”

  “They hired a specialist to shadow me. Fellow named Ernie Strahan. Works for an outfit called eZone Security. Ol' Ernie checks in on me once or twice a week. Makes sure I'm not siphoning off the company's assets to some Swiss bank account.”

  “At least they told you about him.”

  “They didn't tell me jack.”

  “How'd you find out?”

  Jumbo smiled and took a chug of his Kirin beer. “Guy with my record, I figured they'd have someone shadowing me. Hell, wouldn't you? So I wrote me up this reverse shadow program that lets me know whenever Ernie is out there in cyberspace peering over my shoulder. He has no idea, of course. In fact, he has no idea my program's been monitoring his e-mails as well. Figure I might as well know what he's telling my bosses. Guess what else I found out? Turns out ol' Ernie's getting a little strange on the side. Her name is Sherry. Been tempted once or twice to send ol' Ernie an e-mail suggesting I might just tell his old lady 'bout lovely Sherry if he gets out of line. But I figure what the hell, no reason to rattle the poor bastard. They pay me good money and give me nice benefits and I ain't tempted. At all. You got to remember, Rebbe, I'd have never strayed if it weren't for Amber, God bless her perky little butt.”

  Jumbo had been deputy chief of the Jonesboro Police Department—a position he reached in just six years because of his astonishing computer skills, all self-taught. Among other things, he had redesigned the department's computer network and written a software program (eventually licensed to a major player in Silicon Valley) that enabled his department's computers to communicate with computers from other police departments around the state and across the Mississippi River into Tennessee. That feat brought him to the attention of three Memphis officials who'd been nosing around for a computer wizard to implement their scheme to embezzle money from the city's health insurance fund. To lure him into the conspiracy, they enlisted the services of a drop-dead-gorgeous hooker named Amber. Although she was expensive, they got their money's worth.

  So did Jumbo.

  “Amber done things to me that month,” he told Hirsch in prison, “that nearly make this jail time worth it.”

  The waiter removed their empty sushi platters and placed down Jumbo's order of shrimp and vegetable tempura. The man could eat.

  “So, Rebbe, let me hear 'bout this big case you got yourself into.”

  Hirsch started with Abe Shifrin's parking lot plea and brought him up to date.

  Jumbo pondered the situation as he chewed on a shrimp.

  “If that pathologist fellow is right, then the big question is ‘Why.' You think she was banging the judge, or you think she caught him in a compromising position in that big tire case?”

  “The latter. She was bothered about something having to do with the case. Whatever it was, it seemed to have soured her view of the judge as well.”

  “What makes you think she had anything worthwhile on her computer?”

  “She had no computer at home. She sent personal e-mails from her office. Maybe she used her computer for other purposes, too.”

  “If so, that stuff may still be floating around in that network. Judith Shifrin, eh?” he said, jotting her name down on a napkin.

  “You think you can get in the network?”

  “C
an I get in? Come on, Rebbe. Does the wild pope shit in the woods?” He took a long pull on his Kirin beer, set the bottle on the table, and gave Hirsch a wink.

  “Let's just say, ‘Been there, done that.'”

  “You already found a way in?”

  Jumbo smiled as he chewed on another piece of tempura.

  “When?” Hirsch asked.

  “This morning.”

  “From where?”

  “From Branson. Before checking out.”

  “You broke into the federal court Web site from your hotel room?”

  “I wouldn't exactly call it breaking in. That makes it sound kind of, well, intrusive, if you know what I mean. I just poked around a little on the outside, found me an unlocked door, and sort of poked my head inside and took a gander.”

  Hirsch shook his head in disbelief. “I thought the FBI was in charge of Internet security for the federal courts.”

  “That's what I hear.”

  “Will they be able to figure out you got in?”

  “I don't think so.”

  “What if they do?”

  “I suppose they'll try to plug the hole.”

  “But aren't you worried?”

  “I'll find another way in.”

  “No, I mean about them connecting you to the, uh, to the security breach?”

  Jumbo gave him a puzzled expression. “Connecting me?”

  “What if they trace it back to your hotel room?”

  Jumbo smiled. “Oh, I doubt that'll ever happen.”

  “How can you say that?”

  “They gotta first find some fingerprints in their network, and then they gotta figure out them fingerprints belong to someone who was in there without permission, and then they gotta figure out how to trace that someone back to his origin. That's a whole lotta figurin' for a federal employee, Rebbe. But even they do all that figurin', they'll end up at a computer in the Justice Department in Washington, D.C. That oughta stop 'em. But if some smart guy figures out that maybe somebody was accessing that computer from a remote location and then figures out how to track down that remote location, he's gonna learn the meaning of remote. He's gonna find hisself inside the computer network of a Nigerian telephone company. Believe me, Rebbe, the trail dies right there.”