Another Three Dogs in a Row Read online

  He smiled. “Unfortunately saying Torah, prayer, and deeds of kindness doesn’t give that satisfying sense of alliteration.”

  Now the rabbi was speaking my language – peppering English-major terms like alliteration into his speech, and it didn’t look like there would be any reading. I relaxed.

  It had been a tumultuous year since last Rosh Hashanah, I thought. Rochester and I had been involved in several murder investigations, and we’d put ourselves in danger more than I was comfortable with. I hoped that the new year would be one of peace.

  Then the rabbi continued. “The blessings for this service are found in this week’s Torah portion, Parshas Ki Seitzei. This deals with a Jew’s ‘going out to war,’ i.e., going out to involvement within our material world.”

  Uh-oh. That didn’t sound good. Rochester and I had seen enough of our own kind of war.

  We began to talk in Socratic fashion, as Rabbi asked us how we thought we could spread tzedakah, or blessings, in the material world, to prepare our souls for our reckoning with God during the Days of Awe between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur.

  Rochester eventually settled down between me and an older man named Daniel Epstein, whose name I knew because he was often listed in the program for Sabbath services as the greeter, who handed out prayer books and welcomed everyone to shul.

  In response to the rabbi’s question about tzedakah, Epstein said that in the past he’d made his charitable contributions at the end of the calendar year, for tax purposes. “But I’ve begun to spread them out during the year,” he said. “I know a lot of charities rely on contributions to function, and it’s hard to budget if all your donations come in during a few weeks in December.”

  “That’s an interesting approach,” Rabbi Goldberg said. “And it provides you the blessing of tzedakah throughout the year, instead of just in a short period.”

  “When I was in Sunday school here, my parents gave me a dime every week for keren ami,” I said. “Do kids still do that?”

  The rabbi laughed. “Yes, we still collect charitable contributions for the State of Israel from Sunday school students, though they usually bring a dollar now. You’re right, it’s an excellent way to get them into the habit of making regular charitable contributions, though most often that money comes from their parents rather than their own pockets.” He sat back in his chair. “And you, Steve? How do you prepare?”

  “Well, I work for Eastern College,” I said. “So I’m still in that academic routine of believing that the year starts in September, like on the Jewish calendar. My regular job involves computer work and administration, but I occasionally teach a course as an adjunct instructor. This fall I’m teaching one on Jewish American Literature, so I’ve been reading a lot about the immigrant experience and thinking about my own family history, in the old country, in Trenton, and here at Shomrei Torah.”

  We continued around the room. Feinberg spoke about how his father survived the Holocaust and what that meant to him. I noticed that Henry Namias glared at him as he spoke, and I wondered why. Was it bragging to say you had a survivor in your family? Why would Namias be bothered?

  My reverie was interrupted by a knock on the door, followed by a middle-aged black man stepping inside. “I’m sorry to interrupt, rabbi, but there’s a problem.” He was out of breath, as if he’d been running, and his hands were shaking.

  The man was dressed like I was, in khaki slacks and a polo shirt, but his was embossed Temple Shomrei Torah, and he wore a name tag that identified him as Walter Johnson, Facility Manager.

  “What is it, Walter?” the rabbi asked.

  “I had to call the police. There’s a man’s body behind the sanctuary. I found him when I was walking around the property.”

  “What do you mean, a body?” Feinberg demanded.

  “He’s dead, Mr. Feinberg.”

  The group erupted in murmurs to each other as Johnson moved over to the rabbi to speak more closely to him. Johnson had left the door to the study open, and as he passed me, Rochester jumped up and took off out the door.

  “Rochester!” I scrambled out of my seat. “Sorry, sorry,” I said as I moved past Johnson and hurried out the door, leaving behind a hubbub. I followed Rochester’s erect, plumy tail as he rushed along the side of the sanctuary building. Then he disappeared around the corner.

  That was the direction where he’d been trying to go as we walked in. Had he scented the body and tried to tell me about it? Dumb human that I was, I had only about five million scent glands in my nose, whereas a large breed like the golden retriever had nearly three hundred million. So I hadn’t sniffed out the problem the way he had, and instead of following his instincts, I’d dragged him into the rabbi’s study.

  I heard a siren in the distance as I rounded the corner. Tendrils of fog still hung in the air, but I saw Rochester sitting at his alert position beside a man’s body, on the ground beside the back wall. The man’s face was turned away from me, but as I observed him I got a sinking feeling. He wore a gray T-shirt torn at the neck, then a plaid shirt, with a pea coat over that. His jeans were ragged at the cuffs, and he wore stained white tennis shoes. His brown hair was shaggy and his beard was unkempt. There was a dark stain on the grass beside him that I thought was probably blood.

  When I moved around so that I could see his face, I realized my instinct had been correct. It was Joel Goldberg. The rabbi’s brother.

  7 – Bad Times

  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 wa
s 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.