| |
As Rochester and I walked to the parking lot, I saw Rick working with a crime scene tech to block off an area near the bus sign with yellow tape. He met us halfway to my car, still wearing blue gloves on his hands.
“How’d you notice the stone?” he asked.
“Rochester.”
He groaned. “The death dog,” he said. “I swear sometimes I think we ought to just put a little uniform on him and let him do all the work.”
Rochester had what I called a nose for crime, and he’d found clues several times that had helped Rick solve cases. “He can’t use a computer,” I said. “His paws are too big for the keyboard. So there’d still be a job for you.”
“Ha-ha.”
“How come you’re out here, anyway?” I asked. “Isn’t this outside the Stewart’s Crossing town limits?”
“Yeah, this is Central Makefield Township out here, and their department handles DUI, home invasions, drugs in the schools, that kind of thing. They don’t have the staff or the skills to handle a possible homicide, so they come to us.”
“You think it’s murder?”
“Unless he banged himself on the head with some as yet unknown object, dropped it somewhere we haven’t looked yet, and then staggered over to the building.”
“The rabbi asked me to look into where Joel has been the last few days,” I said. “If that doesn’t interfere with your investigation, of course.”
“Whatever you can find. And I want to talk to you later, get some more background on this rabbi.”
I looked at my watch. “I should get to work. But I can meet you at the Drunken Hessian at six. First round’s on you.”
He grunted an assent, then petted Rochester and told him to get busy solving the case. Rochester licked Rick’s hand in response.
My dog and I drove up the River Road, where lush willows drooped over the banks and swamp maples held their vibrant green leaves for a few more weeks. I turned to Rochester, sitting beside me on the front passenger seat. “You found the place where the rabbi’s brother was hit. Any other clues?”
He sat with his nose pressed against the window and appeared to be fascinated by cows in a field. So, no help from him.
“Poor Rabbi Goldberg, having to live with a brother with mental illness, and then losing him,” I said to Rochester. Incidents like that made me glad that I was an only child, though I’d spent most of my youth wishing for a brother or a sister.
Rochester slumped down into the seat without voicing an opinion.
Dogs. What can you do?
I spent most of the day thinking about the immigration program and how I could incorporate Professor Del Presto’s research into an exploration of contemporary attitudes toward the topic. I got sidetracked, as often happens when I plunge into research, and read a lot about the restrictions that had been in place when my grandparents and Lili’s had left Eastern Europe, and how many of those restrictions were still in place. Lili’s ex-boyfriend, Van Driver, was a reporter for the Wall Street Journal, and I read an article he’d written about a Syrian refugee family that had been sponsored for settlement in Canada by a charitable group.
Now that the parents and their two children were safe, however, they were besieged by relatives back in Syria or in refugee camps in Lebanon, asking for help. “It is my brother,” the father of the family had said. “How can I refuse him? But while we still depend on charity, what can I do?”
I remembered a conversation with my grandmother once, when she expressed guilt that she had been able to escape before the Holocaust, while her cousins and other family members were sent to camps and murdered. She told me that her father had gone back to Lithuania to visit his younger brother, to convince him and his family to come to the United States, but they wouldn’t leave. That he hunted for years after the war to find out what had happened to them, eventually learning how they had died.
As far as I knew, I had no rabbis in my family tree, but back in Lithuania, my great-grandfather had been a tzadik, a righteous man who went to morning worship every day, a layman who had devoted himself to study while his wife ran their leather-tanning business. He’d probably have been pleased that at least one of his descendants was coming back into the flock.
Would he still look for answers in the Torah? I came from generations and generations of people of the book, who had looked to those ancient words for guidance on how to live their lives. And here I was, in the twenty-first century, doing the same thing by attending the sessions with Rabbi Goldberg.
Had we learned so little since those dark days of World War II? People were still suffering and dying all around the world. But the solution couldn’t be to bring them all here. My head began to ache at the complexity of it all. Perhaps Professor Del Presto could help a group of interested people make sense of it all. That was the point of Friar Lake, after all.
Around four o’clock Lili texted me that she had another marathon phone call scheduled with her brother that evening, and it might be a good idea if I went out, as she was likely to be in a bad mood when it ended.
I called her and let her know I’d made plans with Rick. “We’re meeting at the Drunken Hessian to talk about a body.”
“Not another one. Steve, don’t you find it disturbing how dead bodies keep dropping in your path? After all, these are real people, with families and friends, and their lives get cut short.”
“I know. And I’m starting to feel like this is almost a calling, to help those people have justice. But in this case, Rochester and I didn’t have anything to do with this one. We just happened to be at Talmud study when the body was discovered. It was Rabbi Goldberg’s brother – you know, the homeless man who showed up at the blessing of the animals on Sunday.”
“The poor man,” she said, and I wasn’t sure if she meant the rabbi or his brother. “Was it natural causes? Oh, wait, nobody around you dies of natural causes.”
“Then are you sure you want me to meet your mother?”
“Don’t get me started. When you speak to the rabbi next, be sure to send him my condolences.”
When I hung up the phone, I looked at Rochester, who had brought a pebble in from our lunchtime walk and was sniffing it. That reminded me of Joel Goldberg and his worry stone. I took the pebble away from Rochester so he wouldn’t break a tooth on it, and turned back to my computer.
From the SEPTA website, I checked the bus schedule for the night before. The latest bus Joel could have taken would have gotten him to Shomrei Torah shortly after eleven PM. Of course, it was possible that Joel had gotten there earlier, but according to Rabbi Goldberg the cantor had closed up the building at seven that evening. Unless Joel had arrived while she was tutoring, and hidden on the property, it was likely he’d gotten there after she had already left.
For a moment I considered her as a suspect. But I had seen her when I’d attended services, and she was a petite woman, not tall enough to have cracked Joel Goldberg over the head. She hadn’t been at the blessing of the animals, and I had no reason to suspect that she even knew of Joel’s existence. Even so, I sent a quick email to Rick with what I’d discovered.
Because Rick had asked about the rabbi, I Googled him and discovered that he was thirty years old and held an MA in Hebrew Letters and Literature from Hebrew Union College, the yeshiva for Reform rabbis. He had worked as a hospital chaplain in Seattle for two years after graduating, which tied in with his interest in Jewish healing.
Then he had been hired as assistant rabbi by an inner-city temple in Milwaukee coping with a declining membership. Soon after he left, the congregation had combined with another in the suburbs along Lake Michigan.
I wondered if his departure from the pulpit there had as much to do with demographics as with his brother’s outburst, but I couldn’t be sure.
The rabbi regularly blogged a version of his sermon, and maintained the temple’s website himself. He also tweeted tidbits of Jewish history and culture and posted photos of the temple’s sukkah and holiday celebrations on Instagram. In addition to the Talmud study group, he hosted a monthly Jewish-themed movie night, and took the youth group on field trips to places of Jewish interest like New York’s Lower East Side and The National Museum of American Jewish History in Philadelphia.
Quite impressive for a young rabbi, especially a single one without a wife to help him. But then, maybe his bachelorhood was the reason why he had so much time for the temple. I’d scaled back my outside activities once I had Lili in my life.
Or was his single status a result of his difficult family background? I imagined it would be tough enough to find a woman willing to take on the unpaid job of being a rebbetzin, a rabbi’s wife, without the additional burden of a mentally ill sibling.
I shut down my computer and stood up. The rabbi’s situation made my problems with Lili and her mother seem small by comparison. But at least I had some information to share with Rick that evening.
