Boston Cream jg-3

by Howard Shrier

  “That leaves girls,” Jenn said. “He ever talk about any?”

  “None that I can think of,” Sheldon said.

  “He didn’t date at all?”

  Sheldon shrugged. “Don’t sound so surprised. Few of us have the time to get around much. I don’t know what he does all the time. I don’t share my love life with him, largely because I have none at the moment and don’t expect to until I’m done my residency.”

  “He ever bring anyone home?”

  “No.”

  “Never flirted with anyone at work?” Jenn asked.

  “No. That would require looking up from his notes.”

  “Anyone else he might talk to or confide in?”

  “About a girl?”

  “About anything.”

  “Depends what it was about. If it’s medical, Dr. Stayner. I think they have a pretty good relationship. He also likes the rabbi at Adath Israel, Ed something. Maybe Warner? Ed Warner? They can tell you. They’re around the corner on Harvard.”

  “What about the night he disappeared?” I asked. “What do you remember?”

  “What I told the detective from Brookline. It was a Thursday evening. Last day of February. I went by David’s office to see if he wanted to walk home but he said he had to go to the lab first.”

  “You know what lab?”

  “Probably serology or immunology. I might be able to find out for you.”

  “Please do. And he never got back that night.”

  “No.”

  “No word from him since?”

  “None.”

  “You know his bank account hasn’t been used or his credit cards. Anything else he could have done to get money? Anything missing around the house, like a cash float?”

  “Cash float! Good one. Look, are we done? As it is, Dr. Figueroa is probably fitting me for a new asshole.”

  “We need to look at his room,” I said.

  Sheldon sighed. He went into the kitchen and fished around in one of the drawers. “All right,” he said, coming back with a single brass key. “When you’re done, lock up and slip this through the mail slot. Make sure the deadbolt downstairs catches because it sticks a little sometimes.”

  “Where can we reach you if we have other questions?” Jenn asked.

  “At work,” he said. “Where else?”

  David Fine’s room was large enough to hold a bed, a dresser and two bedside tables, as well as a computer hutch between two sagging bookcases-and small enough to feel crowded with all that in it. The dresser and tables didn’t tell us much, other than that he kept his clothes neat and precisely folded. There was nothing under the mattress or stuffed in it. The bookcase on the left of the computer held medical texts and research papers piled in stacks. I leafed through the first few abstracts: the best blood-type crossmatches for transplant candidates; barriers to cadaveric transplants among Boston’s main ethnic groups; and the financial and health outcomes for people in India who had sold organs through middlemen who kept most of the proceeds.

  Don’t we all read stuff like this?

  The bookcase on the right was virtually all Judaica. The Five Books of Moses. A daily prayer book. Books on traditional Jewish practice, on Halacha, the laws that govern daily living. Books on Kabbalah, the Jewish mysticism embraced by many and truly understood by a few. Books with a more modern take on what it means to be a Jew in the twenty-first century. About a third of the books were in Hebrew, and they must have been handed down to David because they seemed older than he was, their spines cracked, the lettering faded to near invisibility. Books by rabbis and thinkers I had heard of and many I hadn’t. Not one work of fiction, secular non-fiction or poetry. Not a single Western, thriller, mystery or horror novel. There were, however, three books on poker. Texas Hold ’Em, specifically.

  There was nothing tucked in among his clothes, in his drawers, under his mattress or among his books, except for his Canadian passport, which he had slid between Maimonides’s Guide for the Perplexed and Herman Wouk’s This Is My God.

  If he hadn’t taken his passport, he certainly hadn’t planned on going home.

  He also hadn’t taken his laptop, which was sitting on his desk. Jenn got to work on it while I stuffed all of David’s phone, credit card and bank statements into my knapsack, along with any other paper on his desk that might have bearing on his whereabouts. I also took three flash drives in a bowl on top of a bookshelf. Then I checked his telephone handset and wrote down the last twenty numbers that had called him, and the last twenty he had called. Most of the incoming calls were from the hospital, but they showed a general switchboard number, no extensions. Useless. A few said Blocked Call or Private Number. No way to get those, unless we sent the SIM card to Toronto. One number, though, had called several times and it showed up in the registry as Carol-Ann Meacham.

  I dialled it. After four rings, it switched over to voice mail. A woman’s voice answered: “This is Carol-Ann. I can’t take your call right now. Please leave a message and I’ll get back to you as soon as I can.”

  I left my name and cell number, as well as our number at the hotel, and asked her to get in touch as soon as possible regarding an urgent matter. When I hung up, I asked Jenn about David’s laptop.

  “Very well protected,” she said. “I can’t get past his log-in.”

  “Let’s ship it home,” I said. “Tell Colin to get Karl on it.” Karl Thompson was our company’s computer supplier and hacking enthusiast.

  David’s closet was divided into sections that held his clothes, all neatly folded and hung, towels and linens, and cans of soup, tinned fish and other dry goods. We found nothing among his plain shirts, grey and black slacks, muted sweaters or sturdy shoes. Nothing between any sheets or towels. Nothing behind the egg noodles or tinned soups.

  We opened the fridge door and were forced back by a harsh stink. I held my breath and peered in at tired-looking herring in a cloudy jar, milk that smelled sour from a foot away and hardened cheese.

  On one of the shelves above the canned goods were silver candlesticks, blackened around their tops, and a box of seventy-two plain white candles for Shabbos, almost full. And-oh, damn-two blue velvet bags: one for his tallis and a smaller one for his tefillin.

  If he was going somewhere of his own volition, he would never have left these behind. A devout Jew like him would wear his tallis, or prayer shawl, while saying his daily prayers. And every morning except Saturday he’d put on tefillin: two long black leather straps attached to boxes that contain parchment scrolls inscribed with prayers. He’d wrap one around his head, the other around his left bicep, forearm and fingers, the box pressed close to the heart. It’s one of the most important rituals in Judaism-which is your first clue that I don’t do it-a reminder of the binding contract between God and his people, and the need to unite your head and heart in whatever quest you are on. That part I can get behind; it’s the contract I avoid. But David would have put tefillin on every day while reciting the Shema, the proclamation that there is only one God. He would never have left them behind.

  I told Jenn what it meant.

  “So he’s really missing,” she said. “Not off on a spree somewhere.”

  “No. Either he’s on the run from something or he was abducted.” The thought of which sickened me. Because anyone taken two weeks ago would be dead by now if no ransom had been demanded.

  I opened the smaller bag and looked at the leather straps of his tefillin, worn bone white in places from endless wrapping. The large bag held his tallis and a beautiful silk yarmulke laced with gold thread in the shape of a Star of David.

  And exactly five thousand dollars in a thick stack of hundreds held together by an elastic band, doubled.

  This from a guy who wasn’t allowed to moonlight.

  CHAPTER 5

  Jenn was right. Harvard Street around Coolidge Corner was a lot like Eglinton West in Toronto. For five or six blocks, almost every shop catered to observant Jewish life. Kosher butcher, fish shop,
Judaica stores. Restaurants from deli to Chinese. And we couldn’t have picked a busier time to canvass. Thursdays is when Jewish women shop for the Shabbos dinner: their chickens and briskets, challahs and fish, onions, celery and dill for soup, kosher wine sweet enough to serve on pancakes. They want it all done by Friday noon at the latest, and they don’t care who gets hurt in the process. If a shopping cart bangs your shins while an older woman swerves in to get a jar of chopped liver, who told you to stand there?

  We each took one side of the street, stopping in at every store, sometimes having to wait and be jostled, showing the picture, asking the questions, asking if we could post a flyer in the window or on a bulletin board. Some of the buildings had murals depicting early Jewish life in the urban east. One showed a zaftig woman merrily making bread. Many of the women in the streets wore wigs; only their husbands should see their true beauty. Their clothing came down to the wrists, their skirts down past the knee.

  On my side of the street, many merchants knew David’s face, if not his name. He was particularly well known at the deli, where he often took out prepared foods for his meals, and at Irving’s Judaica, a sprawling place on a corner that had one wing devoted to books, the other to household items from menorahs to mezuzahs to baseball caps with Red Sox written in Hebrew. The woman who ran the book section was about my age, dark-haired and petite and bristling with a feisty intelligence that sparkled in her brown eyes. The sparkle died a little when I told her David Fine was missing. They had talked on a number of occasions, she said. “Almost always about books, new arrivals, things I might recommend. He’s very eclectic in his reading.”

  “So I noticed. Did he seem drawn to any books that would suggest depression?”

  “David? Depressed? Never. Most people, in my humble opinion, are depressed because they’ve taken the wrong path in their life and they don’t have the courage to turn back. David is one of the surest people I’ve met. Quiet but very determined. He is going to save people’s lives through surgery. Period. Everything else will come.”

  “Did he ever ask you out?”

  “Why on earth would you ask me that?”

  “The way you talked about him. And you’re probably the same age as him. A nice Jewish girl. I guess if I were him I think I would have asked you out.”

  “If you were him.”

  She let me put a poster in the entrance, as did most of the neighbouring stores. At the end of the first block, I flagged Jenn down and crossed to her side of the street and compared notes. “He isn’t known in any of the clothing or fashion stores, but he sometimes goes into the fish store for smoked whitefish, herring, and gefilte fish-did I pronounce that right?”

  “Perfect.”

  “There’s also a cafe where he sometimes comes and reads newspapers. The manager said he occasionally has coffee and cake with Rabbi Ed from Adath Israel.”

  “Him again. That’s a good sign.”

  “That he’s someone David might have talked to?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do Jews confess to rabbis the way Catholics do to priests?”

  “No, we prefer to wallow in our guilt. You can’t shut us up about it, but it doesn’t count as confession.”

  We handed out laser photos and put posters up for another two blocks in each direction. In a few spots I found flyers Ron had put up the week before, covered over now by ads for tutoring, piano lessons and handyman services. When we were done, we sat in the car and used the GPS to locate the nearest FedEx so we could get David’s computer home. I dropped Jenn there and navigated my way over to the Brookline Police Department, a tall narrow old row house made awkwardly modern with a glass front and a glass-and-metal awning. On one side of it was Brookline’s municipal centre and an old dark-brick courthouse with three bland arches and a severe triangular roof that was plain as a Puritan’s hat. On the other side, what had probably been an early fire station, with doors wide and tall enough to admit a horse-drawn wagon.

  The police station lobby had been made over with dark tile and pale wood. On the wall were plaques remembering the only two officers to have fallen in Brookline’s long line of policing, and a glass case with photos of sex offenders who had skipped bail or were otherwise known to be in the area.

  I approached the desk, where a big blond man sat pecking at a keyboard with stiff blunt fingers. His hair was shaved close to the scalp everywhere but on top, where it grew thick as indoor-outdoor carpeting, and he looked like he spent more time training for mixed martial arts than in customer service seminars. He didn’t say anything or look up or otherwise acknowledge my presence, just stabbed at the keys. His name tag said W. Kennedy.

  I said, “Good morning.”

  He held up a finger to silence me and resumed tapping, using both index fingers and occasionally a thumb on the space bar. It was a good thing no crime spree erupted in the streets of Brookline. He kept pecking until he was good and finished. Then he looked up and said, “Help you?” like he almost meant it.

  “I’d like to speak to Detective Mike Gianelli, please.”

  He said, “Because?”

  “Because he’s in charge of the David Fine investigation.”

  “The David Fine investigation.”

  “A missing persons case. I’m a private investigator. Hired by his parents-”

  “Your licence.”

  I got it out and slid it across the counter. I said, “His parents-”

  He held up the same finger again while he took in the details of my Ontario licence. He didn’t seem to think any faster than he typed.

  “Sir, are you armed?”

  “No.”

  “No weapons on your person?”

  “None.”

  “You have another piece of ID?”

  I gave him my passport.

  He took in its details at his usual speed and told me to have a seat at one of three chairs facing a large wall-mounted screen that was at present turned off. Kennedy picked up the phone and spoke into it at a level I couldn’t hear. Nodded. The man had a neck and shoulders you could break a log on. And wouldn’t it be fun to try?

  He got off the phone and said, “Detective Gianelli will be down in a minute.”

  Which turned out to be twelve.

  “Jonah Geller?”

  A man in a suit was holding my licence and passport. He was about my height, six feet, but heavier where it counted, the chest and shoulders. He came over and offered his hand; his grip was strong but he didn’t try to show off with it. He had thick dark hair, parted in the centre and held back by gel.

  “I’m Mike Gianelli,” he said. “You wanted to speak to me?”

  “David Fine’s parents hired me.”

  “Ron and Sheila, huh? Yeah, nice people. Good people. They’ve been very cooperative, very supportive of our efforts.” He handed back my documents, which I pocketed. “And you’re from up there?”

  “Yes.”

  “Because this licence of yours, as far as the Commonwealth of Massachusetts and the Town of Brookline are concerned, isn’t valid here, so right away we have a problem. We got no reciprocal agreements with Ontario-I checked. You carrying a weapon?”

  “No.”

  “You have one where you’re staying?”

  “No.”

  “Didn’t bring one?”

  “No.”

  “Because we have very strict gun laws here.”

  “So does Ontario. I don’t carry a gun there either. I never have.”

  “Better be careful where you go then. Some parts of Boston, I wouldn’t go unarmed.”

  “Thank you. As for my accreditation, I’m just here to help his parents,” I said.

  “At some fancy rate, I’ll bet.”

  “It’s not like that. They’re friends of the family.”

  “Says you. Look, I happen to like his parents and I feel bad for them. I really do. Their son sounds like a decent kid. Better than decent. But we did what we could. We interviewed his roommate, his neighbours,
we even got an audience with his boss at work. Three minutes with the great man.”

  “And?”

  “The bottom line is, no crime scene,” Gianelli said. “Anywhere. No evidence of any kind that he’s met foul play. Not at his apartment or his place of work. No demands have ever been made to the family.”

  “What about in between?”

  “In between what?”

  “The hospital and his apartment. He usually walks home.”

  “That’s nearly two miles and only part of it is Brookline. There’s also a section that’s Boston.”

  “I’m convinced he didn’t leave of his own accord,” I said.

  “Based on what?”

  “He is a very devout man,” I said.

  “And?”

  “We found religious articles in his closet that he never would leave behind if he were leaving of his own accord. He’d need them every day.”

  “So he has spares or bought new ones.”

  “It’s not like that. His own would have special meaning to him.”

  I wondered whether I should tell Gianelli about the money in David’s tallis bag. But he might want it as evidence, and if David was truly gone, I wanted it to go to his parents: you could almost bury a man for that much.

  “You got much experience with missing persons?” Gianelli asked.

  “I’ve found a few,” I said.

  “Let me guess,” he said. “Mostly runaways.”

  “Mostly.”

  “That’s because most missing persons turn out to be runaways. Boston, Toronto, doesn’t matter. The statistics are always the same. Then you get the elderly who wander off. Kids caught up in custody fights. Guys who owe money or stole money or are about to be arraigned for something. You get the ones about to get married, usually guys, need to have one last kick at the can, they disappear for a week. David Fine doesn’t fit any of these. He has no criminal history of any kind. No budgetary control at the hospital. No money missing there that anyone knew about. See, we did ask. We checked everything. But we found nothing. There is no reason for him to be missing, but he is. And I am frustrated by that and I do worry about him. But there is one thing I want to make clear.”