Another Three Dogs in a Row Read online

  One article called it a closed community – the streets rang with the sound of Yiddish, and kosher butchers, stores, milk dealers, and a synagogue and a mikveh ritual bath provided everything that residents needed. Rents were inexpensive, and sidewalks, street lights and indoor plumbing eventually appeared. A trolley car ran down Broad Street, providing a connection to the rest of the city.

  I relished the list of names of early residents – Lavine, Feinberg, Haveson, Silverstein, Levy, Kohn. Many of those reminded me of kids I’d gone to Hebrew school or Sunday school with, or people my mother had grown up with. This truly was my home, I thought.

  But I wasn’t at the archives for a stroll down memory lane. I was trying to figure out what Joel Goldberg was looking for. I moved more quickly through the microfilm, scanning for the names Aaron and Kalman.

  I found a butcher named Kalman Horowitz with a store in Jewtown called Liberty Meat Market. Was he the Kalman of the postcard? Not if the photo had been taken in Europe around the time of World War II.

  I found several albums of digitized photos that had been uploaded by community members. I didn’t recognize much, because most had been taken in that area of Jewtown that had been destroyed by urban renewal. The people in the photos were all strangers, too, until I saw my mother’s face, smiling from a photo of members of the Young Judea group for members in their late teens and early twenties, organized by Shomrei Torah.

  It was surprisingly poignant to see her image when I wasn’t expecting it. The occasion was a lecture by Kalman Feinberg, a Holocaust survivor. He had been lucky enough to avoid the camps, and spoke to the group about the years he had spent in hiding. Feinberg, a slim, dark-haired man in a business suit and black fedora, had then been given an award by the club’s officers. My mother, Sylvia Gordon, was the club secretary. From the date on the picture, she was about sixteen.

  Was he the Kalman I was looking for? He appeared to be in his mid to late thirties, so about the right age to match the boy in the photo. But I couldn’t find any other references to him in the database.

  I sat back in my chair. If he was the guy I was looking for, then he had a brother named Aaron Feinberg. Clearly his brother wasn’t the current president of Shomrei Torah—he was much too young. But suppose Kalman’s brother had died in the Holocaust? It made sense that he’d name his son after his late brother, in the Ashkenazi tradition.

  But then I remembered something my mother had told me, long before, when we were visiting graves in the cemetery in Trenton where my grandparents were buried. I was probably about seven or eight at that time, and I had pointed out a gravestone in the shape of a tree trunk, cut off with a horizontal slice. “That one’s pretty,” I’d said. “When I die I want a tombstone like that one.”

  “Don’t say that,” my mother had said. She spit twice on the ground in a gesture that frightened me. She explained that stones like that were erected to memorialize children whose lives had been cut short. “And that’s their only memorial. It’s bad luck to name a baby after a child who died young, so their name is never carried on.”

  If Kalman Feinberg’s brother had died young, then it was unlikely he’d have given his son the name. I still made a note of it.

  I read as much as I could about the history of Shomrei Torah. The rabbi in the 1940s was named Jacob Sapinsky, and he was involved with the Hebrew Sheltering Home, which provided a refuge for Holocaust survivors. He had died in 1948 at the age of fifty. I found only one reference which indicated that he had been murdered; most of what I read were tributes to him as a man of honor.

  Was his death connected to what Joel had found? Could Rabbi Sapinsky have been the one who secreted those documents behind the Belgian block wall? He was the rabbi of the congregation, and he had access to the area. But then, so could anyone else who belong to the shul at that time.

  The question was why hide those papers? And what did they mean?

  15 – Call Me Al

  I needed to speak to Rick about what I’d found, so I called him as I left the library in Trenton. “How would you feel about me bringing over pizza when I come for Rochester?” I asked.

  “That would be awesome. I’m just wrapping up here at work and I don’t have the energy to fix anything.”

  Rick had just gotten home when I arrived with the pizza, and he quickly pulled out the last two Dogfish Head Firefly Ales from the six pack. The dogs circled around us as if they hadn’t eaten in days, and as we ate we both fed them pieces of crust.

  I told him about speaking with Akiva the librarian. “So that might explain what brought Joel to Trenton. But something sidetracked him and I think it has to do with the documents he found at the old shul.” I munched a slice of pizza, the crust chewy, the toppings as gooey and delicious as I remembered. “You find anything interesting today?” I asked after a while.

  “I did some research on the bus ticket in Joel Goldberg’s pocket,” Rick said. “I wanted to see if I could figure out where he’d been. I called a buddy of mine on the Trenton PD and he told me that the police stopped Joel in Hiltonia because he was making a racket and banging on the door of a house in the neighborhood. He told the officers some story about needing a way to get to the train station and so they took him to the station in West Trenton and dropped him there.”

  “That makes sense,” I said. “He had looked up bus schedules at the library, so he knew there was a bus from the station that would take him to Shomrei Torah. Do you know the address where he was banging?”

  “It was a neighbor who called, and by then Joel had moved down the street, so they don’t have an exact address.”

  “But they have the neighbor’s address, right? You could contact the neighbor and find out who was being harassed.”

  “I can get it from my buddy but it means calling in a favor.”

  “I do. You ever track down that skinhead that Buddha McCarthy mentioned?”

  “Yeah. He ripped off a convenience store in West Trenton the day after he had his fight at the Rescue Mission. Been in jail ever since. And surprisingly enough, his name really is John White. At least that’s what’s on his ID.”

  By the time we were finished the dogs had eaten so much crust, and bits of sausage, that they weren’t interested in kibble. We took them out for a long walk around Rick’s neighborhood. Rochester was eager to investigate all the different smells and I kept having to tug him along to keep up with Rascal who was, as my father would have said, on a “mission: pishin’.”

  I took Rochester home soon after that, stopping at the mailboxes to pick up my mail. There was a letter from Daniel Epstein, and when I got home I opened it to find the original document I’d given him as well as his rough translation.

  As he had said, it was a testimony from a Holocaust survivor named Myer Hafetz, about the fates of the people from his neighborhood in Berlin.

  At last, I found the Aaron and Kalman I’d been looking for. They were brothers who had lived a few blocks from Hafetz. He described their childhood, how he and Kalman had celebrated their bar mitzvah the same year, 1938, right before the first round up of Jews.

  As teenagers, he and Kalman, and Kalman’s younger brother Aaron, had survived the increasing roundups that followed Kristallnacht when Jewish shops and synagogues were vandalized. They had tried to lay low, but in 1941, after Jews were forced to wear the yellow Star of David badges, they had been sent to Auschwitz. Aaron, who was a skinny youth, oysgedart in Yiddish, had been immediately sent to the gas chamber, while Kalman Feinberg was put to work at a nearby factory.

  Hafetz had been assigned to the camp’s kitchens, and his skill at creating the traditional German dishes he had learned from his mother kept him alive as he saw his old friend gradually decline. He tried to slip extra food to Kalman whenever he could but it was no use. Three months before the camp was liberated in 1945, thousands of internees were massacred by the camp’s guards, including Kalman Feinberg and many others from Hafetz’s neighborhood in Berlin. Hafetz only survived
because he was needed to cook for the staff.

  The sheer volume of names was chilling. Hafetz had brought to life his family, friends and neighbors, listing their approximate ages, their jobs, even physical details like red hair or a limp. I couldn’t imagine the strength that had been required to survive Auschwitz, let alone recreate the experience, and the deaths of so many.

  But how had that document, and the photo of the two boys, ended up at the old shul? I went back online to the immigration records and searched for Myer Hafetz. I discovered that he had spent two years after the liberation of Auschwitz in a camp for displaced persons and eventually been connected to a distant cousin in New York who had sponsored him to come to the United States.

  There the trail disappeared. What had happened to Hafetz? And how did what he wrote connect to Joel’s death?

  Lili called later that evening. “Hallelujah,” she said. “They released my mother to rehab this afternoon. A very nice facility not far from where Fedi and Sara live. Medicare will pay a hundred percent for the first three weeks.”

  “I’m delighted,” I said.

  “I’m going to stay at least another day, make sure she’s settled, then I’ll come home. Though I have to admit it’s been nice here, aside from the problems with my mother. It’s so warm and it’s always sunny. And there’s some kind of alchemy going on. Every time I walk into a store the clerks start speaking to me in Spanish. I like it.”

  I wasn’t sure that I would appreciate someone addressing me in a foreign language in the United States, but then I didn’t speak Spanish. We talked for a few more minutes, and I got up and walked around the living room as I told Lili what I’d discovered in the translation.

  Rochester was agitated, and after I finished the call I sat on the sofa to pet him. He swished his big tail a couple of times and a bunch of papers flew off the coffee table. One of them was the Septa bus schedule I’d picked up at the library in Trenton.

  Joel Goldberg had ridden that bus just one week earlier. Rick had interviewed the driver and the passengers he’d been able to find. But what if someone only rode the bus on Tuesday nights? I knew lots of people whose routine deviated one or two nights a week, due to classes, clubs, or some other obligation.

  I looked at the clock. If I left in the next half hour, I could make it to the West Trenton railroad station in time to pick up the same bus Joel had taken. Was it worth the trouble, since Rick had already determined there were no leads there?

  Why not? Rochester had given me the clue, right? It was up to me to follow it.

  I was startled when my cell phone rang as I was about to leave the house with the distinctive ringtone I’d assigned to Rick. Did he know what I was about to do? I doubted he’d approve.

  But instead all he wanted to do was tell me that he had called the neighbor who’d reported seeing Joel Goldberg in Hiltonia the week before, but had to leave a voice mail message.

  We chatted for a minute or two then I ended the call and hurried out to my car. Rochester wasn’t happy to be left behind, but I doubted Septa would appreciate his presence on the bus.

  I boarded the bus while it idled in the station waiting for the train to arrive. I spoke briefly to the driver, who said he’d been off the night that Joel was killed, as Rick had discovered. I went over to the other half-dozen people on the bus, and none of them remembered anything unusual about the previous Thursday.

  The train pulled in and a guy in his twenties jumped off and hurried over to board the bus, a messenger bag slung over his shoulder. Before I could get up and speak to him, the bus pulled out, and I was on for the ride.

  I watched him for moment to feel out how to approach him, and while I did, he put his phone to his head and pulled a thick textbook from his bag. I realized he was going over material with someone on the other end, and he would probably shut me right down if I interrupted him.

  I’d have to wait until he hung up, or got off the bus, to speak with him. The bus moved onward through the darkness, the way forward lit only by the glow of its headlights, and the guy stayed on the phone.

  I pulled out the schedule, hoping that the bus was on a continuous loop, and that if I stayed on long enough, I’d be able to get back off at the train station on the next run.

  Oops. This was the last run of the night. The last stop was on the road to New Hope, a couple of miles north of Stewart’s Crossing. It was going to be a long walk home.

  As we pulled up to the stop beside Shomrei Torah, the young guy ended his call and closed his textbook. He jumped up, and I followed him off the bus. At least I was a lot closer to home there.

  “Excuse me,” I said. “I wonder if I could ask you a couple of questions.”

  He looked suspicious as the bus pulled out. He was a couple of inches shorter than I was, and about twenty years younger. He wore khaki pants and a polo shirt with a lanyard around his neck holding an ID card. There was something Asian about his face but I couldn’t place where he might have been from.

  “My name is Steve Levitan, and I’m helping a friend out. His brother was on this bus last Thursday—a guy in his late twenties, might have looked homeless. Do you remember him? His name was Joel Goldberg.”

  He picked up on the past tense right away. “I remember him. He was carrying an old backpack. You said was?”

  I nodded. “He was killed that night, here on the grounds of the synagogue. He was the rabbi’s brother.”

  His mouth opened, and he swallowed hard. "Wow. I’ve never known anyone who was killed. I mean, not that I knew him, but we talked for a minute when we got off the bus. He had this stone in his hand, a really pretty green one, and I asked him about it.”

  He shook his head. “I need to sit down.”

  He sat on the bus bench and after a moment I joined him there. “I’m Albert Paca,” he said. “You can call me Al.” He swallowed again.

  I nodded along. “You live somewhere nearby?”

  “Just on the other side of the hill. I work in Philly and I usually drive back and forth, but on Tuesday evenings I have a class at Temple.”

  I wasn’t sure if he laughed or hiccupped, and then he said, “Not a temple like this one. The university.”

  “You look pretty tired. I’m not surprised you wouldn’t want to drive. I won’t keep you for long, I promise. What did he say when you spoke to him?”

  “Just that he always carried the stone with him because it made him feel calmer. He kept rubbing his thumb over it, like he was really worried about something.”

  The malachite worry stone Rochester had found in the grass. Further evidence that the man Al had spoken to was Joel Goldberg.

  “I figured he was there to meet someone,” Al said. “Because as I was walking home a car passed me, going fast, and zoomed into the parking lot.”

  Had that been Joel’s killer, arriving to meet him? “Did you notice anything about the car?”

  He shook his head. “Just that it was going too fast for these dark roads.”

  Al Paca had nothing more to add. He stuffed his thick textbook into his messenger bag and stood up. “I hope they find whoever killed him,” he said. “Even homeless people are human beings.”

  “They are,” I said. I watched him walk away, and then called Rick. “Do me a favor? Come pick me up at Shomrei Torah?”

  “What are you doing there at this time of night?”

  “I met a guy who rode the bus with Joel Goldberg the night he was killed.”

  Rick let out a big sigh. “Hold that thought. I’ll be there in fifteen.”

  While I waited I walked up to the shul. Motion-sensor lights on the outside lit up, but I was able to stay in the shadows. I wondered if there were any security alarms on the property that might have been activated—but if there had been, then someone would have discovered Joel’s body earlier, and Rick or the rabbi would certainly have mentioned them.

  I tried to put myself back in the scene. Joel had gotten off the bus and begun walking toward the shul. Then t
he car Al Paca had seen had pulled into the parking lot.

  Was Joel expecting him? Or was the person in the car following him? How could he or she have known where Joel was going?

  Rick’s headlights swiped across the parking lot as he pulled in, and I walked over to his truck and climbed in. “How did you meet someone when I couldn’t?” he demanded.

  I shrugged. “I had this idea that maybe someone only rode the bus one day a week.” I explained what I had heard from Al Paca, about his Tuesday night class, his encounter with Joel, the fast-moving car that had pulled into the parking lot. “He said Joel had his backpack with him that night, but you never found it, did you? Wouldn’t that imply that the killer took the backpack?”

  “Imply is the right word.”

  By the time we got to the railroad station, Rick was mollified. “Give me the guy’s full name,” he said, and he wrote it down. “I’ll call him tomorrow and verify what you told me.”

  “I’m not trying to take over your job, you know,” I said. “I just had this hunch and I didn’t want to bother you with it.”

  “And the dog was involved somehow, wasn’t he?”

  “He knocked the bus schedule off the coffee table.”

  Rick shook his head. “You and the dog. You and the dog.”

  16 – First Fruits

  Rochester and I both overslept the next morning, and it was a scramble to get him fed and walked, scarf down some breakfast myself, and head to Shomrei Torah for my second week of Bible study. I also wanted to thank Daniel Epstein for helping with the Yiddish translation.

  Rabbi Goldberg had already started when Rochester and I arrived, though, so I slid into a chair beside Daniel with a quick apology. Rochester moved over to sniff Sadie and then slump down beside her. “Welcome,” Rabbi said. “We’ve just begun discussing this week’s parasha, a Torah reading called Ki Tavo. What God is telling us here is basically not to procrastinate, not to put off obeying God’s commandments, because we’re never going to have that stress-free day with no other responsibilities. We must utilize all our days to the maximum.”