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Rochester looked up at me woefully from his position beside Joel Goldberg’s body. How long had the man been dead? Could we have saved him if I’d listened to my dog’s instincts? From the way the dark fluid had congealed on the ground, and the stiffness in Joel’s limbs from the onset of rigor mortis, even if we’d gotten there a half hour earlier, we couldn’t have done anything to save him.
The rabbi arrived behind us a moment later, Sadie by his side. “My God! Joel!” A dozen feet behind him the rest of the Talmud study group rushed toward us.
Rochester arose from his position on the ground and moved over to join Sadie by the rabbi’s side. Rabbi Goldberg began to kneel, but I took his arm. “In case this is a crime scene, Rabbi, better not to compromise it.”
“A crime scene? But why would someone kill my brother?”
“I don’t know,” I said gently. I pointed at the pool of congealed blood around Joel’s head. “But it looks to me like someone did.”
The rabbi looked down at his brother. “What were you doing here, Joel?” he asked. “What did you want from me?”
I looked at the rabbi. His face was a rictus of grief, his lips turned down, his eyes watering. His back was slightly hunched, as if he’d lost the will to stand upright.
I had a different question. When did Joel arrive at the temple? Buses did not run all night, so assuming he was still reliant on public transportation, he had to have gotten there the night before.
“When was the last time you saw your brother?” I asked.
“Sunday. He ran off before I could talk to him.”
A police cruiser arrived, lights flashing and a siren going.
The rabbi’s mouth dropped open, and he said, “My parents,” in a broken voice, as a uniformed officer got out of the car. “I’ll have to call them.”
He looked around as if he was searching for his phone, and I put my hand on his shoulder. “That can wait a few minutes,” I said. “They’re in Arizona, aren’t they?”
He nodded.
“Then it’s a couple of hours earlier. Let them have their sleep.”
The officer came up to us, a stocky young guy in a black uniform, his belt laden with the apparatus of criminal justice. The rabbi, the two dogs and I stepped back to allow him officer to examine Joel’s body, and it was clear from his face that Joel was dead.
As the other members of the Talmud study group came to comfort the rabbi, I pulled out my cell phone and hit the speed dial button for Rick Stemper. As one of only two detectives on the Stewart’s Crossing police force, he was likely to be called to this scene.
“Can’t talk now,” he said. “On my way to a dead body.”
“At Shomrei Torah. Rochester and I are here.”
He groaned. “Not the dog again. He didn’t find the body, did he?”
“Not for want of trying.” I explained how we’d been walking toward the rabbi’s study, and Rochester was eager to head off to where Joel’s body had been discovered.
“I’m almost there. Don’t go anywhere.”
When I hung up I looked over at Rabbi Goldberg, who was crying. Aaron Feinberg had his arm around the rabbi’s shoulders, speaking quietly to him. Walter Johnson and the group from Talmud study stood awkwardly aside, no one sure what to do.
The uniformed officer asked everyone to stay a few feet away from the body as he began laying out crime scene tape. Then Rick arrived, his police badge at his hip, right in front of his holstered pistol. He introduced himself and asked that everyone wait for the officer to get all our details, so that he could interview us later.
“Why us?” Saul Benesch asked. “We didn’t see anything.”
“How long will this take?” another man asked.
“I have to get to work,” one of the women said, though I was pretty sure the Talmud study group would have still been going on, if not for the interruption.
“We’ll get you on your way as soon as possible,” Rick said. He glared at me, which I took to mean that I was exempted from that order.
I didn’t want the rabbi to have to stand there in the dissipating fog and watch as his brother’s body was investigated by the police and the crime scene team. “The deceased is Rabbi Goldberg’s brother,” I said to Rick. “Why don’t Rochester and I take the rabbi into his study and wait for you there.”
Feinberg turned to me, in full presidential mode. “You know this detective?”
“I do,” I said. “Rick and I went to Pennsbury High together.”
“He’ll do a good job?” Out of the corner of my eye I saw Rick quirk an eyebrow at Feinberg’s question.
“The best,” I said.
“Good.”
The officer said, “If you’ll all follow me, please,” and he led the group out to the parking lot where his cruiser was parked.
Rochester sniffed at Sadie. By some mutual agreement, the two goldens turned back toward the rabbi’s office, and the rabbi and I followed them.
Once in his office, the rabbi collapsed into his chair, with Sadie on one side of him and Rochester on the other. Sadie sat up and nuzzled his hand. I knew how much that kind of contact could help when you were sad. Rochester had comforted me on many occasions in just the same way.
“I’m so sorry about your brother,” I said, as I sat in the middle of the semi-circle of folding chairs. “Do you want to talk about him while we wait?”
“Joel is three years older than I am.” He grimaced. “Was.”
Rochester rested his head on the rabbi’s knee, and the rabbi petted him.
“My big brother,” the rabbi said after a moment. “I idolized him when I was a kid. He was smart and funny, a champion debater in high school. He was going to be a lawyer, but his freshman year in college he had a breakdown.”
He reached for a tissue from a box on his desk, wiped his eyes and blew his nose. “It took two years to get a diagnosis. Paranoid schizophrenia. My parents worried that there was a genetic reason for his illness, but except for one set of grandparents who survived the camps, most of our family was wiped out in the Holocaust and all their records lost.”
The rabbi continued after a moment. “Joel was in and out of treatment facilities for years after that. When he took his medication, he was okay. My father was an optometrist, and Joel worked in his office when he could. But after a few months he’d start to feel like he was seeing the world through a fuzzy cloud, and he’d stop taking the pills and have an episode. Sometimes it was as simple as a kind of disorganization, losing track of what he was doing, losing his keys and wallet and anything else he carried. The worst were when he’d become paranoid—hearing voices in the walls, obsessing about the actions of a neighbor or a store clerk.”
I had a college friend with a schizophrenic sister, so I knew a little of what he was going through. “That must have been awful for your parents.”
“It was.” He stopped to blow his nose again. “My father had a heart attack a couple of years ago, and he and my mother retired to Florida, to one of those senior communities where you have to be fifty-five or older. They wouldn’t say so, but I know it was so that they’d have a reason not to have Joel come live with them again. My brother could be... difficult, especially when he was off his meds.”
“Did he live with you then?”
He shook his head, and I could see the sadness in his expression. “No, I had no idea where he was. The last time I saw him was when I was working in Milwaukee with a small congregation. Joel showed up in the middle of services one Saturday morning, looking pretty much like you saw him on Sunday. He began to yell, something about how the government was trying to lock people up in camps again. I had to leave the bema to take him out of the sanctuary. The cantor took over for me, and the next day Joel disappeared again, but after my year’s contract was up the temple chose not to renew it.”
I remembered that Saul Benesch had mentioned a problem in Milwaukee. “Just because of your brother?” I asked.
“It wasn’t the first time he’d caused problems, but it was the worst. I couldn’t promise them that Joel would never show up again.”
Of course he couldn’t. And what caring congregation would make such a demand?
“I tried to be a good brother,” the rabbi said. “When Joel was first diagnosed, I was sixteen, in confirmation class at our temple. I researched Jewish approaches to mental illness as my project. I thought there had to be a way to pray Joel back to health.”
“Where was Joel then?”
“In and out of rehab. After I graduated from rabbinical school I got a job as an assistant rabbi at a temple in Arizona, and I asked him to come live with me. He hated the heat and he disappeared after a couple of months. Since then, our contact has been sporadic.”
“You didn’t know he was in this area?”
“Not at all. Now I wonder—was he coming to see me this morning to ask for help? I saw all that blood around his head. Do you think maybe he took some kind of drug, or had a stroke or a heart attack or something, or then fell and hit his head?”
I didn’t want to get into the technical details of rigor mortis, but I said, “I don’t think he came here this morning. More likely he arrived last night. What time does the synagogue close?”
He sniffed, and thought for a moment. “The office closes at five, but sometimes we have evening events, or rent out the auditorium to outside groups. Let me check the schedule.”
He wheeled his chair back to his desk and typed at his computer for a moment. “The cantor was here until seven with bar mitzvah students. She would have locked up the building when she left.”
He began to cry quietly. “If I’d been here, maybe I could have helped him. Called an ambulance, taken him to an emergency room. Instead, he died. By himself.”
Both dogs sat up and nuzzled him. He petted them as the tears streamed down his face.
What if Joel hadn’t been alone when he died? There was no rock or other hard object near his body, and the blood around his head indicated to me that he had died where he lay. Could someone have killed him? And if so, who?
I waited until the rabbi had regained his composure to ask, “What was it Joel was so eager to show you on Sunday?”
“I don’t know. By the time I got back to my office after blessing all the animals, Joel was gone. But I did notice that he’d been using my computer.”
“How could you tell?”
“There were dozens of browser windows open, including the list of our board of directors, and at least two or three windows for each member. That was typical Joel. He never closed a browser window because he was always worried he’d need to go back.”
“Did you tell the board that Joel had been researching them? That they ought to be wary of him, let you know if he approached them?”
He shook his head. “You don’t know what it’s like to deal with a schizophrenic. Sometimes he gets – got – these ideas in his head and wouldn’t let go, but other times he’d completely forget what he was doing and move on to something else.” He took a deep breath. “I didn’t think there was really anything to worry about.”
There was a knock on the door, and when it opened Rick looked in. “Good morning, Rabbi. I’m sorry to trouble you now, but I need to ask you a few questions about your brother.”
“Was he – murdered?” Rabbi Goldberg asked.
“I can’t make a judgment right now, I’m afraid. I need to look at the evidence and investigate the situation. There appears to be some evidence of blunt force trauma to his head, and the coroner will have to perform an autopsy, as well as toxicology tests.”
“How long will it be before we can bury him?” Rabbi Goldberg asked. “It’s our tradition that we bury our dead as soon as possible.”
“I’m sorry, but I can’t say. The Coroner’s office will be in touch with you when they can release your brother’s body.”
“My parents will need time to make arrangements,” he said. “Can you ask them to let me know as soon as possible?”
Rick agreed, and I said, “Rochester and I will wait outside, in case there’s anything else we can do for you, Rabbi.”
I hooked up Rochester’s leash, and we walked outside. I let him lead the way, and we walked back to where Joel’s body rested. The police had placed small plastic markers around the body, and a woman in a Tyvek suit and booties was collecting evidence.
Rochester turned abruptly toward the parking lot and began to stalk there, nose to the ground. “What’s up, boy?” I asked, but I let him tug me forward.
We crossed the paved lot, heading toward the street as cars whizzed past. He stopped and began to paw at the ground. “What’s there, Rochester?”
He lowered his head to sniff at a beautiful green malachite stone like the one I’d seen on the rabbi’s desk, the striations of dark and light providing a beautiful pattern. When I crouched down to get a closer look, I could see that the depression in the center looked well-rubbed.
In the past, Rochester had been very good at finding pieces of evidence that a human investigator might have overlooked, so I approached this situation with caution. Sure, the stone could have belonged to anyone, but it was only a couple of feet from the bus stop, and on Sunday Joel Goldberg had arrived at Shomrei Torah by bus. Add that to the matching stone on the rabbi’s desk, and there was a reasonable chance that the worry stone had belonged to Joel.
I pulled a tissue from my pocket and wrapped the stone in it, careful not to smudge and potential fingerprints. I stood, and praised Rochester profusely, rubbing him behind his ears the way he loved.
We began to walk back toward the synagogue. As we approached the door to the rabbi’s study, Rick and the rabbi came out, Sadie walking without a leash beside them. “Thank you for help,” Rick said. “And again, I’m very sorry for your loss.”
The rabbi nodded. I walked over to them and opened the worry stone in my palm. “Do you recognize this?” I asked him.
“That was my brother’s stone,” he said. He reached for it, but I pulled my hand back and instead handed the stone to Rick, who pulled an evidence bag from his pocket and took the stone from me.
“Our parents went to Greece when we were teenagers and brought back one for each of us,” the rabbi said. “Joel still had it the last time I saw him. He said it calmed him down to hold it and rub his thumb over it.”
“Where did you find this?” Rick asked.
“Face the bus stop sign and then walk about three paces to the right.” I turned to the rabbi and asked, “Do you think it could have fallen from Joel’s pocket when he got off the bus?”
“Joel wouldn’t have been that careless,” he said. “He’d have been holding it in his hand, especially if he’d just been on a bus. Traveling always made him nervous.”
“Could someone have taken it from him?” Rick asked.
“I don’t see why.”
As Rochester and Sadie sniffed each other, I turned to the rabbi. “Why don’t I walk you back to your study, Rabbi. Is there someone you can call? You shouldn’t be alone at a time like this. The cantor? Another rabbi?”
“I should call the cantor,” he said. “She’ll want to know.”
Rick followed my directions toward the street, and the rabbi and I walked back to his office, accompanied by the two dogs. When we got inside, Rochester and Sadie settled together in a corner and the rabbi picked up the phone. I tried not to eavesdrop, but I did hear that the cantor would be there shortly.
I was about to make my apologies and leave, when the rabbi stood up and began pacing around the office. “I just don’t understand,” he said. “Joel’s behavior was always somewhat opaque when he was suffering through an episode, but usually I could make sense of what he wanted.”
He picked up a piece of paper from his desk. “Your detective friend left me something,” he said. “He said Joel had an old-fashioned photo postcard folded up in his shoe. He let me take a photo copy of it, but it doesn’t make any sense to me. Maybe you’ll have a different perspective.”
He handed the paper to me. It was in sepia tones, and showed two dark-haired boys under a tree. They wore white shirts and shorts held up by suspenders. On the back “Kalman, 15 und Aaron, 10” had been written in a spidery hand.
“You don’t recognize either of these boys?” I asked.
“No. And no one in our family has those names. Why would my brother have that picture hidden in his shoe?”
“Do you think this was what he wanted to show you?”
“Perhaps. But why? Where did it come from?”
“Could he have found it somewhere? And that’s why he came to this area, to find you and give it to you?”
“I don’t even know how long he was here before he showed up on Sunday,” he said. He looked at me quizzically. “You told Aaron Feinberg that you were a bar mitzvah at the old shul in Trenton. Do you know the area well?”
“I guess,” I said. “I was away for a long time.”
“Joel showed up on Sunday on the bus from Trenton, and all he was carrying was his backpack. He had to have brought more with him—I know he had a ratty old winter coat he would never have given up, and he usually had a bag of books with him, too. Can you help me find out where he was staying, and find the rest of his personal effects for me? I don’t know Trenton at all, and I’d appreciate your help trying to navigate the city and understand where he was and what he was doing.”
I felt a familiar tingle and the chance to explore the background of a crime. The rabbi had his congregation to tend to, and I was sure that the loss of his brother would weigh heavily on him. Seeing the places where his brother had been would probably be very upsetting.
There was no question I could deny the rabbi’s request. And it would be a harmless way to indulge the curiosity that had gotten me into trouble so often in the past.
“I’d be happy to help, Rabbi,” I said. “If he was homeless he might have been staying at one of the shelters in Trenton, and I can go over there for you. Do you have a recent photo of your brother you could email me?”
“The newest one I have is a couple of years old, but it should serve.”
I gave him my email address, then roused Rochester from his place by Sadie. “I’m so sorry, Rabbi,” I said. “I’m an only child, but I’m sure it must be devastating to lose a sibling.”
“I lost Joel years ago,” he said sadly. “But now, with your help, maybe I can find a piece of him again.”
