Zaddik, page 4
“Why not?”
“The Hasid gave it to a setter in the same building. I know who, but I did not want to be hasty.”
“That was wise,” said Czartoryski, relaxing. “I am disappointed, of course, but I do not despair. All good things come to those who wait, is that not what they say? And how did you dispose of the diamond merchant?”
“As I said. Kosher.”
“Good. Excellent. Very amusing, really. So. We will just have to remain here a little longer, and what’s wrong with that? Such an exciting city.”
“Well, if we are going to stay here,” said Maria Radziwell, who had been the widow Rudenstein, emerging from the kitchen, “can we find a better place? This is—how do you say?—a real shithole.”
Chapter 6 Forty-seventh Street, Manhattan
Monday, September 6
MORRIS SCHUMACH arrived at work Monday morning, rested and revived from the Sabbath. He unlocked his office door and discovered the bodies of Zalman Gottleib and Shirley Stein. He phoned the police and looked for somewhere to sit down to wait for them. Not finding a place that didn’t look bloody, he left the office and sat down on the floor in the hallway, which is where Officer Mike Gallagher of the Eighteenth Precinct found him.
Moments after Gallagher went into the office, saw the bodies, and radioed homicide, Forty-seventh Street between Fifth and Sixth avenues was sealed off. Patrol cars blocked the intersection, diverting traffic. Uniformed officers stretched sawhorses across the sidewalk; men going to work and customers going to shop were informed that the street was temporarily off limits.
By the time the homicide team led by Sergeant Detective Frank Hill arrived, two uniforms were posted outside the entrance to 52 West Forty-seventh. Frank Hill nodded to the officers, and he and Detectives Art Jahnke and Harry White rode the elevator up to the fourteenth floor.
ID—photographers and forensics—waited outside, along with the medical examiner, while Hill, Jahnke, and White looked around the office, pulling on the surgical gloves from their evidence collection kits.
“Always makes me feel like the fucking Playtex lady,” said Hill, struggling with the gloves.
One look at Shirley Stein told them that she had been dead for a while, and the state of Zalman Gottleib’s body confirmed it. He had gone through rigor mortis and was turning soft. He smelled. The flesh around the rope binding his ankles was decomposing. Fly larvae were clearly visible in his nostrils, his mouth, and his eyes. The detectives returned to the outer office, silently impressed by the mute afterimages of the violence that had taken place here.
Harry White began sketching the crime scene in his pad, and Hill pointed to Stein’s breasts. “Sex crime?” he asked. “Somebody very fucking crazy had a hell of a party here.”
“Panties still on,” said Jahnke.
“So?” Hill said.
“Nothing,” said Jahnke.
“Dead at least a couple of days,” White said.
“I know,” said Hill. “So our perp is probably in Bangladesh by now.”
“Probably,” White agreed, looking up from his pad. “Or at least New Jersey.”
“Stinks in here,” said Hill. “Open a window.”
“Lookee here,” Jahnke said from the inner office. He pointed to the knife on the desk. “Guess he wanted us to find it. Either he wore gloves or his prints won’t mean anything to us or he’s so crazy he doesn’t give a shit.”
“More than one killer,” said Hill.
“Probably. Yeah, maybe two, three,” said Jahnke.
“Or one guy, very fucking strong.”
“Very fucking strong,” Jahnke agreed.
“Not a robbery,” said White, who had joined them, pointing at the diamonds scattered on the desk and the floor.
“Wanna bet?” said Jahnke. “Maybe robbery wasn’t the main idea, but something’s been taken. Something’s always taken. And something’s always left.”
“Yeah, the knife,” said Hill. “Rocks. Prints. Maybe the killer’s name and address and an autographed eight-by-ten glossy. My bet is none of it’s gonna do us any fucking good at all.”
“Maybe the guy’s a friend of his.” Hill jerked a thumb at Zalman Gottleib’s still-dangling corpse. “Pissed off. Maybe he fucked someone in a deal. These guys are always fucking some poor dumb goy.”
“Must have fucked him pretty good to do all this,” said White.
The three detectives examined Gottleib’s and Stein’s hands and fingernails, looking for signs of a struggle. They looked for anything odd in a crime scene as odd as any they’d ever seen. Slowly they fell silent and stopped walking around. Each one turned in on himself, checking to see how much damage this newest example of human savagery had done to his own soul. It was always bad, thought Hill, but this one was worse. He shook himself.
“You finished sketching, Harry?” he asked. At White’s nod Hill said, “Okay, let’s let the ID guys in. I’m gonna talk to the guy outside, what’s his name? Shoemaker? Then we’ll split up the floors, and then we’ll hit the streets, talk to everybody.”
“You know you’ll never get a straight answer in the diamond district,” Jahnke said. “They hate cops.”
“You’re just a fucking anti-Semite, Art,” said Hill, who was Irish. “Achtung!” he said, giving Jahnke, whom Hill loved to tease about his German ancestry, the straight-armed Hitler salute.
Morris Schumach wanted to help this policeman in the brown suit, but how could he? No, he didn’t know Gottleib well. No, really. They weren’t partners; they just split the rent and shared a secretary, poor, poor Miss Stein.
No, Zally had no wife, she died. Children? Probably, but he never talked about them, and there were no pictures. Brothers, sisters, cousins? Who knew? Enemies? Of course not. He was a pious man.
No, he really didn’t know much about Miss Stein either, except she was divorced. Zally had hired her. Her ex-husband? Who knew?
No, it wouldn’t do any good to look at Zally’s safe to see what was missing. Why should he know Zally’s inventory? They weren’t partners.
The diamonds, Schumach said, go to the Diamond Club. They’d take care of them; they’d know what to do.
How should he know who could have done such a thing? It was crazy, horrible, a holocaust. Must have been a crazy man, an anti-Semite, a Nazi.
No, he hadn’t come in to work on Friday. Was that unusual? A little. Did he tell Zally? No, he had tried, but he couldn’t reach him.
“My God,” said Morris Schumach, clapping his hand to his forehead. “Do you think, could it be that they were already, like this, when I called from Queens?”
Schumach gave the detective the name and address of the widow in Queens. Yes, he bought some jewelry from her, nothing special. Yes, he could give it to the police if they wanted. A receipt? No. He paid cash. No, that was not unusual.
No, he didn’t think anyone would have missed Zalman this weekend except maybe his friends in his synagogue. Sure, he could tell the detective which one, but he belonged to a different synagogue. Maybe he knew some people in Zalman’s congregation, maybe not. Of course he would give the officer his name and address.
And anything he could do, anything at all.
For the next three hours, the detectives interviewed everyone in the building. No, no one had seen anything unusual that Friday. Only an Ariel Levin had even seen Gottleib that morning. He had seemed normal to Levin. He had just dropped by to say hello.
The custodians? No, they never entered the offices unless invited.
Art Jahnke interviewed the Puerto Rican security guard who had been on duty that Friday. Yeah, sure, Zalman Gottleib’s last visitor had signed the book in the lobby at 1:05 P.M. Here’s the signature. I can’t make it out either. He may have been a Hasid. Tall, short, fat, thin, who knew? They all looked the same.
No, the guard had never seen Gottleib that day, either coming or going. He had seen Shirley Stein, the one with the big boobs. How did she look? She looked fine.
A shitload of evidence, Frank Hill told his captain back at the station house late that afternoon, but no witnesses and a lot of time had passed. Hill could smell a difficult case, and this one smelled real bad.
The medical examiner, he told the captain, confirmed that the bodies had been there over the weekend. The male victim’s partner said that he had called shortly after one and gotten no answer. We’re fixing the time of death around then until we hear from the medical examiner.
We’re running down both victims’ known relations and associates, said Hill. The woman had not been molested, although her tits were hanging out.
The male victim’s partner said he didn’t come into the office that day. Said he went to an address in Queens and then went home. We’re checking at both ends. There was nobody at the house in Queens. Odd about that. The neighbors had thought the place was empty. We’re looking for the landlord.
Forensics, Hill went on, says the knife we found is the murder weapon in both killings. Yes, there were prints all over the place, but that made Hill think the killer’s prints were not on file, otherwise he’d have been more careful.
Motive? He was going with robbery right now, but he didn’t like it. If theft was the point, why gut the guy like that? Why string him up? Why not string up the girl? It smelled like payback to Hill, a revenge killing. Sure, something was probably taken, some stones, but who knows what or how much? These people keep their records in their heads.
Hill and the captain stared at each other. “You were here for the Pinchos Jaroslawicz killing in ’77, weren’t you, Captain?” asked Hill. “Diamond dealer, right? Found in his office? Shot?”
The captain nodded.
“And…?” asked Hill.
“It was a fucking nightmare,” the captain said. “These fucking people,” he said, shaking his head. “A goddamn nightmare.”
Chapter 7 Sullivan Street,
between Prince and Spring,
SoHo, Manhattan
Tuesday, September 7
DOV TAYLOR, SON of Hank and Luba, formerly Private First Class Taylor of the Eighteenth Artillery Division, I-Corp, formerly Sergeant Detective Taylor of the New York City Police Department, attached to homicide, now just plain Dov Taylor, security guard at the First Bank of Williamsburg, in Brooklyn, climbed out of bed shortly after dawn. An hour later he was still fumbling with his brand-new tefillin, trying to remember how he was supposed to wrap the leather thong around his left hand, when Naomi sat up in bed and looked at her new boyfriend.
“That’s the strangest-looking thing I’ve ever seen,” she said.
“It only looks strange because you’re not used to it,” said Taylor. “Just let me finish.”
“Oh, no,” said Naomi, a tall, thin, auburn-haired young woman who was a teller in the bank, and whom Taylor had been seeing for a month and sleeping with since last weekend. “It’s really normal to tie a little black box to your head.”
“You got a thing for normal?”
“Obviously not,” said Naomi, coyly allowing the sheet to fall from her high, smallish breasts.
“This is not working,” said Taylor, getting up. “I’m going to go into the bathroom to finish.”
“Am I distracting you?” she asked, smiling.
“Yes,” he answered, not smiling.
In the bathroom, with the door closed, Taylor looked at himself in the mirror. It did look weird—the tefillin on his forehead and on his arm. What am I doing? he asked the mirror. Trying out for the road show of Fiddler on the Roof?
He stroked his month-old beard, still, to his surprise, more black than gray. I look like my great-grandfather, he thought, an old man, a ghost out of the nineteenth century, an antique Jew in a dusty photo album. Boo! he said to his face in the mirror. Or rather, he thought, Oy, boo!
Christ, I’m only forty. I’ve still got my strength. I feel good. And if I feel good after all the booze and Percodan I’ve done, I’m doing pretty good. Then why am I doing so shitty? Why am I sitting in my bathroom putting on these ridiculous things?
Obviously, he told himself, you drowned a few too many brain cells, and now you’re paying for it.
“Dov,” Naomi called from the bedroom. “Do you think God really cares if you put a box on your head every morning? Do you think God is inside the box?”
Knock, knock, thought Taylor, tapping the box on his forehead. Anybody home? You in there, God?
A little more than two years ago, Dov Taylor had a house in Eastchester, a blond wife, a degree in criminology, a law degree, and a blossoming career in the department. His colleagues respected him; they called him Super-Jew, and he liked it. Women followed him with their eyes, and he liked that, too. He was a leanly muscular six feet two. Blue-black hair still covered his head, hair the color of Superman’s in the comic strips. His eyes were sea green with flecks of ocher. His most distinctive feature was a vein that protruded slightly above his temple. It throbbed when he got angry. He called it his Tarzan vein.
The only fly in the ointment was a little trouble with booze and drugs. Not trouble, exactly. He just drank a little more than most people, and maybe most people didn’t eat twelve to fifteen Percodan a day. But he could stop if he wanted to. He had stopped for almost a year after he got back from Vietnam. He just didn’t want to. And, anyway, it was all manageable.
Sure.
That was just twenty-four months ago, thought Taylor. What happened?
The house? Gone. Traded in for a one-bedroom apartment in a basement on Sullivan Street in what used to be an Italian enclave and was now, to Taylor’s distress, SoHo’s hipster central.
Carol, his wife? Gone. Traded, it now seemed, for a succession of increasingly younger women whom he tired of with ever-increasing rapidity.
His career? Also gone.
His life? Well, that was better. He was sober. There was, he reminded himself, nothing, absolutely nothing, more important than that.
At least that’s what his Alcoholics Anonymous sponsor said.
Sometimes he even believed it.
But sometimes he didn’t. Maybe that was why, between daily AA meetings, he had been going two nights a week to a class for baalei teshuvah, literally “ones who have returned,” at the Mathew Rosenthal Lubavitcher Yeshiva on Eastern Parkway in Crown Heights. His teacher, Rabbi Jacob Kalman, thought that it was funny to have an ex-cop in the class along with all the earnest college boys and, on the other side of a curtain dividing the men from the women in the room, divorced matrons looking for meaning in their lives.
“They think He is going to save them,” Rabbi Kalman once told Taylor after class. “They think the Holy One, blessed is He, is a friendly, kindly old man whose heart is brimming with love and forgiveness. He is, of course, full of love, but He is also King of the Universe, and you approach Him with fear and trembling in your kishkes. It is hard to serve Him. This”—he snorted—“they don’t like.”
But Taylor wanted it to be hard. He remembered telling Alex, his sponsor, a criminal lawyer in a downtown firm and a former assistant district attorney, that that was what had appealed to him. All his life he had been taught that the Hasids were weird, smelly fanatics. That their brand of Judaism was too hard for the modern world. But fuck the modern world, Taylor had said. It almost killed me.
“And doesn’t the Big Book say to trust in your Higher Power?” Taylor had asked Alex. “Well, maybe my Higher Power doesn’t know from the Lord’s Prayer. Maybe my Higher Power might like it if I could talk to Him in His own language, which—excuse me, Alex, I know you’re a good Catholic, eat fish on Friday, got a million kids, and all that—but my Higher Power, whoever He is, probably does not speak Latin, which, believe me, I probably know better than Hebrew from hanging around cops all my life.”
Alex, of course, had said what he always said: Take it easy. Keep it simple. Don’t drink. Keep going to meetings.
Taylor studied his face in the mirror. On second thought, there was gray in the beard, and more than before on top of his head. Another signpost on the road to death.
That’s a pretty thought, Dov, he told himself. That’s the anxiety you used to treat with booze and drugs, the anxiety you’ve got to learn to live with sober. Not a lot of fun, but being an addict wasn’t much fun, either. Six of one, half a dozen of the other. Not true, he reminded himself. The booze didn’t kill the anxiety, it just masked it and at the same time fed it and encouraged it to grow bigger, stronger.
I’ll shave the beard, he thought. Rabbi Kalman will be disappointed, but the hell with it. After all, you’re not becoming a Hasid. You told Kalman that right off the bat. You’re just finding out about your roots, right? Like every other fucked-up middle-aged divorcé in New York.
Am I a divorcé? he wondered. Can men be divorcés, or only women?
Wait a second. Christ, thought Taylor. I’m not supposed to be wearing my tallis and tefillin in the bathroom. That’s a sin.
He left the bathroom and saw Naomi sitting up in bed. That’s a sin, too, he thought. Two sins, actually. The little sin is that I shouldn’t be saying prayers in the presence of a naked woman, not to mention one who isn’t my wife. The big sin is that I’m sleeping with someone I don’t care about, let alone love. I’m not even hot for her, he realized.
This tefillin stuff isn’t working, he thought. I’m too old to learn how to do it. Too old and too fucked up.
“Are you finished?” Naomi asked.
“Sure,” said Taylor, thinking that maybe he’d bag the baalei teshuvah classes entirely. Who are you trying to kid, Dov? he asked himself.
A few hours later he was alone in his efficiency kitchen. He had shaved off the beard, made the bed, washed last night’s dishes, dried them, and stacked them just so in his cupboard. Then he arranged the magazines on his coffee table. Over his third cup of coffee, he decided not to go to work. Partly he didn’t want to see Naomi, and partly he just enjoyed the feeling of having a day to himself, being free.
He turned to a sketchy New York Newsday story about the murder of a Forty-seventh Street diamond dealer and his secretary. Thank God, thought Dov Taylor, or my Higher Power, or whatever—I’m done with all that.
