Dog is in the Details Page 9

  “Daniel Epstein probably could,” he said. “Do you remember him from Talmud study? The elderly man who walks with a cane?”

  “Sure. He’s the one who was so sweet to Rochester. Could you call and ask him?”

  He did, and Mr. Epstein extended an invitation to Rochester and me to come over to his house and show him the paper.

  “I appreciate what you’re doing, Steve. I feel like I’m getting closer to Joel with every detail you find.”

  “Have you been able to make funeral arrangements?” I asked.

  He nodded. “Joel’s body was released by the medical examiner yesterday afternoon. My parents want him to be buried near them, in Scottsdale, so the body will be shipped there today. I’m flying out this afternoon and we’ll have the funeral tomorrow.”

  “Your parents must be very upset.”

  “They are. It’s hard to lose a child—I’ve counseled many parents through that. But we all have to believe that Joel will be at peace now.”

  He thanked me again, and I led Rochester back out to the car and plugged Daniel Epstein’s address into my phone, reminded as I did that Lili would be doing the same thing once she landed in Miami.

  The directions led me down toward the river, on the other side of Stewart’s Crossing from River Bend. Epstein lived in Crossing Estates, a development of large homes on what had been farmland when I was growing up.

  I parked in the driveway on an imposing two-story in a faux Tudor style, and he appeared at the front door, leaning on the burnished wood cane I’d seen him use at the rabbi’s study.

  He greeted Rochester first, sticking his hand out for my golden to sniff, then petting him. “I wish I could have another dog,” he said. “But I can’t manage the walking.”

  “Thanks for agreeing to look at this paper,” I said as he led us into a two-story foyer with a staircase in front of us. On the wall I noted a couple of framed sepia-toned photographs of the area where my grandparents had lived when they came to Trenton. “That’s New Street, isn’t it?” I asked, looking at one photo.

  “You recognize it?”

  “My great-uncle had a junkyard there. It was gone by the time I was born, but we had some old pictures. Nothing as nice as these, though.”

  “I took these pictures myself,” Epstein said proudly. “When I was in college, for a history project. I found them a few years ago, had them blown up and framed. Always good to remember where we come from.”

  I agreed with that as I looked around the house. “You have a beautiful home.”

  “I love it,” he said. “My children want me to sell it and move somewhere more manageable, but I’m not quite there yet. I have a bedroom and a full bath on this level, and I rarely climb the stairs anymore.”

  Rochester and I followed him into the living room, where the walls were lined with so much art that it reminded me of pictures I’d seen of Gertrude Stein’s salon. I recognized an Andy Warhol of green Coca-Cola bottles, what looked like a Rothko with big blobs of color, and a couple of photo-realist works I knew Lili would love.

  Epstein motioned me to an overstuffed armchair and sat at a small antique desk, with the paper in front of him.

  As he pulled out a pair of reading glasses, I noticed a postcard beside his desk, what looked like a sign from a store in a tropical location. It read “Se habla Yiddish,” and even I could get the joke. Must have been Miami, where Hispanics and Jews melded. The card was a good sign—I hoped it meant that Mr. Epstein had a real familiarity with the language.

  While he read, Rochester sprawled on the floor beside him. “Hmm, hmm,” Epstein said. Then he looked up at me. “This is a documentation form for Yad Vashem. You know what that is?”

  “The Holocaust center in Israel?”

  “The largest collection of Holocaust documentation in the world. Volunteers used to go to people in the resettlement camps after the war, and to survivors, and ask them to fill out forms about their family and friends and neighbors, who was lost in the Shoah and who was saved. Where did you find this?”

  I explained about the metal box behind the Belgian block wall. “Any indication who wrote the document?” I asked.

  “Myer Hafetz, native of Berlin, Germany.”

  Had Joel Goldberg’s family come from Berlin? I’d have to ask the rabbi. “Is there any indication of who hid it there? Or a reason why someone would have hidden it?”

  “I can’t speculate without translating the whole document. I can do that for you, if you like.”

  “I’d appreciate that. Maybe one of the names will trigger something.”

  He made a photocopy of the document and returned the original to me. He wasn’t big on using email, so I gave him my mailing address, and he promised to mail the translation to me in the next couple of days.

  It was strange to return home with Rochester and not have Lili there to meet us. The house seemed emptier somehow. How had I lived on my own at first, and then with Rochester, before she had joined us?

  To stave off any loneliness, I called Rick and invited him to bring Rascal over. I made a big pan of lasagna and put it in the oven.

  Since many immigration records had been digitized, I wondered if I could find anything on line about Myer Hafetz. He was from Berlin, Epstein had said, and I knew that Hafetz had to be in Trenton by September 1948, when the document was dated.

  The National Archives included many immigration records for arrivals to the United States from foreign ports between approximately 1820 and 1982, but they were all on microfilm. I had to go to one of the ancestry sites for online records, and there were way too many places to look and too little information to narrow a search.

  I made a couple of quick tries but then Lili called and I gave up. “It’s chaos here,” she said. “My mother is very agitated, and Fedi and Sara are worn out, so it’s all on me.”

  “I wish I could be there to help out,” I said.

  “She’s supposed to have an oxygen mask on but she keeps pulling it off. She just keeps rambling in a weird combination of Spanish and Yiddish,” she said. “I have no idea what she’s saying most of the time.”

  I felt bad for Lili, and guilty at the same time. My mother had gotten sick when I was living in California, right after my ex-wife’s first miscarriage. I had to be there for Mary, and I didn’t realize my mother would pass so quickly. And then my father had gone into his decline while I was in prison, and I even had to miss his funeral. I hadn’t been able to be there for either of them, and I couldn’t do or say anything to damage Lili’s relationship with her mother and lead her to the same kind of feelings I had.

  I could, perhaps, do something for Joel Goldberg, and his brother. We’d see.

  13 – Agitation

  Rick and Rascal arrived a short while later. “Any news on the death of the rabbi’s brother?” I asked, after I’d given him a beer and Rascal and Rochester both got treats.

  “I tracked down the driver of the bus that night,” he said. “The regular driver was sick and he was filling in. He thinks he remembers a homeless-looking guy get on at the train station, and then getting off at the synagogue. He does remember that two guys got off there, but couldn’t identify a photo of Joel Goldberg. He wasn’t paying attention, just wanted to finish the run and go home.”

  “Someone else got off at the synagogue with Joel. Maybe this other guy saw something.”

  “If I trust this driver’s memory. There are a couple of developments within walking distance of that bus stop, so it could have been some guy on his way home. I’m going to meet the bus tomorrow night and see if maybe this guy is a regular, and if he or anyone else saw anything that night.”

  He sighed. “I don’t have much to go on, and the chief is not happy. There hasn’t been much in the press beyond a single mention in the Courier-Times, but because this is a township crime, he’s getting pressure from over there, as well as from our side. It’s possible that someone meant to rob the temple, and Joel got in the way. Which means there co
uld be a burglar slash killer loose in town. No one likes that idea.”

  I served up the lasagna, and as we ate I told him what Daniel Epstein had said about the paper I’d found at the synagogue. “He says it’s written in Yiddish, a lot of names. He’s going to translate it for me and mail it back to me.”

  “There’s no indication that Joel could understand Yiddish, is there?”

  I shook my head. “Rabbi Rob says their parents didn’t speak it to them.”

  “So it’s unlikely that could have set him off, isn’t it?” Rick said. “What about the photograph? Aaron is a pretty common name, I guess, but what about the other one – Kalman?”

  “I don’t think it’s that popular,” I said. “But we can look it up.” I got my laptop and did a search for the name. Kalman was a Yiddish given name that came from the Hebrew, and farther back from Greek. It was also a Hungarian name given to children to ward off evil spirits. It had never been a popular first name.

  “Can you search anywhere else?” Rick asked. “I mean, legally?”

  “Sure. I can go into some of the immigration databases. Maybe I can find a pair of brothers named Aaron and Kalman.”

  I sat back in my chair. “I think Joel Goldberg saw something that upset him in the ruins of the old synagogue,” I said. “It made him agitated and sent him off to see his brother.”

  “That’s one theory,” Rick said. “But remember, the guy was schizophrenic. We don’t know what was going on in his brain. He could just as easily have gone there to confront his brother, accuse him of something. I’m still not letting the rabbi off the hook, since he has no alibi for the time of Joel’s death.”

  “Blaming the rabbi doesn’t feel right.” I didn’t want to believe that Rabbi Goldberg had killed his brother – but there was the story of Cain and Abel again, and I couldn’t ignore the possibility. “And speaking of feelings, Lili told me that you picked out a ring for Tamsen.”

  His face brightened. “Yeah, it’s a real stunner. I think she’s going to love it.”

  “When are you going to give it to her?”

  “I was thinking about when I propose,” he said drily.

  “That’s not what I meant, numb nuts.”

  “Not sure yet. I mean, I know I want to do it, but I want the time to be right. I want it to be special, you know?”

  We brainstormed about places and times for a couple of minutes as we played with the dogs, but nothing jumped out at either of us. Eventually Rick and Rascal left, and then, as I had promised Rick, I spent some time online searching through immigration and family history records for a pair of German boys named Aaron and Kalman.

  The sheer volume of records was overwhelming. So many refugees fleeing the conflict in Europe, running from pogroms and other persecution. As I expected, Kalman wasn’t that common a name, but none of the ones I found had a brother, or even a male cousin, named Aaron.

  I spoke to Lili again late that night, just before bedtime. She’d had a confrontation with her sister-in-law Sara, who demanded to know if Lili had a copy of her mother’s will.

  “I was stunned,” Lili said. “It’s a broken pelvis, and it’s serious, but it’s not like she’s going to die tomorrow. And the way Sara said it was like she thought I was conniving with my mother to inherit everything. It’s not like I haven’t gone down there before.”

  “There isn’t that much, is there? Just her condo?”

  “My dad was a very successful engineer,” she said. “He made a lot of money and watched every penny he spent. She probably has a couple hundred thousand squirreled away. I don’t need it and I don’t mind if she leaves everything to Fedi and his kids. But I did not like the accusing tone Sara was using.”

  “I’m sure she’s stressed,” I said. “You said yourself that the burden of caring for your mother had fallen on her and Fedi.”

  “Burden,” Lili said. “Hah. Until she fell, my mother has been pretty self-sufficient. Sure, she gets these obsessions and Fedi or Sara has to go over and calm her down, but she hasn’t had trouble walking or taking care of herself. It’s just Fedi who’s been pushing her to move in with him.”

  “Trying to prevent this kind of problem?”

  “Whose side are you on, Steve?”

  “Always yours, sweetheart. Remember what I said last night? Don’t let them grind you down.”

  “I’m tired and cranky. I’ll talk to you tomorrow.”

  We ended the call with mutual affirmations of love and I went to bed, Rochester eager to take Lili’s place by my side.

  Monday was a slow day at Friar Lake, and it gave me a lot of time to think about Lili and hope that her mother would improve quickly so she could come home. Rochester sensed my grim mood and brought me his squeaky ball. He dropped it at my feet and looked up at me with his doggy grin. I picked up the ball, which was slippery with saliva, then immediately brushed my hand against my pants. “Come on, boy, let’s go outside and play,” I said, and he romped out of my office, his tail wagging madly.

  I called him the golden thiever because he didn’t usually like to play fetch; he’d get the ball or Frisbee or whatever I’d thrown and then settle down with it firmly clasped between his paws. But that afternoon he was willing to play, and I threw the ball several times in the grassy yard beside my office.

  The leaves on the oaks beside the abbey chapel had begun to turn, and there was a crispness in the air that presaged autumn. But I couldn’t stay melancholy because Rochester’s joy was so infectious.

  I spent some time online looking for information about Joel Goldberg. I used a couple of different search engines and a combination of terms, and I found a lot of material. Over the past year, Joel had been a frequent poster to a Holocaust information list serve, mentioning occasionally that he had to rely on public internet access at libraries and cafés, and he engaged in many discussions about how to trace family members and others who had died during the Shoah.

  In my conversation with the rabbi, he’d mentioned that their grandparents had survived the camps, and through Joel’s posts I discovered it was their father’s parents that he’d been talking about. Lev and Rifka Goldberg had been children in Auschwitz for a short time before they were liberated. Joel had apparently pored over many lists of inmates, both those who died and those who survived, looking for their names and those of any family members.

  He had been constricted by the common nature of his last name. Many families from Russia, Poland and Germany shared it, and according to what he’d written, Joel didn’t know the name of the village his grandparents had come from. Some of the databases he mentioned were private, either by subscription or membership, and I resisted the impulse to hack my way into them. Joel didn’t seem to have much of a filter in his messages and posts; if he had learned something I was sure it would be online in a public place. I wasn’t sure if that was naiveté on his part, a side effect of his illness—or just an innocence of the kind of trouble that openness could bring.

  There was way too much material, and I didn’t have enough information to know what I was looking for, so eventually I gave up. I sat at my desk, staring into space, when Rochester came up to me, wagging his tail, with a book in his mouth that he’d picked up from the coffee table in the lobby. “Did you want me to read to you, puppy?” I asked, as I pried the book from his jaws. It was a copy of the coffee table book Lili and I had collaborated on about the history of Friar Lake. She’d taken gorgeous photos of the exteriors and interiors of the old stone buildings, both before and after renovation, and I’d written text about the history of the property.

  Rochester sat up and stared at me.

  “What? You can’t want to go out. We just went.”

  I looked at the book in my hand. Was he trying to tell me something about the abbey? About Lili?

  I hefted the book in my hand, getting a sense memory of all those days I’d ferried books home from the old Gothic-style library in Stewart’s Crossing.

  Of course. The library. B
uddha McCarthy at the Rescue Mission had told me that he’d sent Joel Goldberg to the library in Trenton to look up old records. “You think I ought to go to the library, don’t you, boy?” I asked, and Rochester woofed.

  We left Friar Lake soon after that. It was a hot day by autumn standards and I didn’t want to leave Rochester in the car, so I dropped him at home, gave him a biscuit, and promised I’d be back soon.

  I used my phone to locate the library branch closest to the Rescue Mission and drove along the river through Yardley and then Morrisville, and across the Calhoun Street Bridge into Trenton, taking another of my nostalgic journeys into my past. I recognized the building as I parked nearby – a two-story marble building with big windows and a four-columned entrance portico. Back when I was a kid, my mother had held onto her Trenton library card, and she’d taken me there a couple of times while she looked for something and I got to browse through the kids’ books.

  The librarian at the reference desk, a hipster guy with tattoos and a goatee, remembered Joel. The plaque in front of him said that his name was Akiva Teitelboim, a classic Jewish name, but surprisingly he had a light Spanish accent.

  “He was very well-spoken for a homeless guy,” he said. “We get a lot of the homeless looking for shelter here when it rains or gets too cold.”

  “You remember what he was looking for?”

  “First off, he wanted a phone book, and then I saw him looking through the bus schedules over there.” He pointed to a rack of brochures listing each route.

  The need for bus schedules was evident, if Joel was on his way to Shomrei Torah. “Anything else?” I asked the librarian.

  “He asked if we had anything about the history of Trenton from the 1940s, and I told him about our Trentoniana collection. We have a huge collection of photographs, manuscripts, trade cards, letters, postcards, diaries and maps. Lots of old newspapers on microfilm, too.”