Friday the Rabbi Slept Late (19 page)

“Oh my God.” He covered his face with his hands.

The rabbi looked at him with pity and decided it was no time for preaching. “She was not hurt, she said. She understood.”

“She said that? She said she understood?”

“Yes.” The rabbi, uncomfortable at the turn of the conversation, tried to change it: “Tell me, Mr. Bronstein, does your wife ever leave the house?”

His face softened. “Oh yes, when the weather is nice and she feels up to it I take her for a ride. I like to drive, and I like to have her beside me. It’s a little like old times then. You see, she’s sitting there beside me just as she would be if she were well. There’s no wheelchair to remind me that she’s sick, although I have one, a collapsible one, in the trunk and sometimes on a warm night we drive over to the boulevard and I put her in it and walk her along the water.”

“How does she get into the car?”

“I just pick her up and slide her onto the front seat.”

The rabbi rose. “There are one or two points I think might be worth calling to the attention of the police. Maybe they can check into them if they haven’t already done so.”

Bronstein also rose. Hesitantly he offered his hand “Believe me, rabbi, I appreciate your coming here.”

“Do they treat you all right?”

“Oh yes.” He nodded in the direction of the cells. “After I finished answering their questions they left the door of the cell unlocked so I could walk up and down the corridor if I wanted to. Some of the policemen have been in to chat and they gave me some magazines to read. I wonder –”

“Yes?”

“I wonder if you could get word to my wife that I’m all right. I wouldn’t want her to worry.”

The rabbi smiled. “I’ll be in touch with her, Mr. Bronstein.”

As he left Bronstein, the rabbi reflected sadly that his first attempts to help had succeeded only in uncovering two points, both minor and both detrimental to the unfortunate man. In his interview with Mrs. Bronstein he had learned that on this one night of the week she had not been up to greet her husband. Of course even if she could say he had not seemed upset, it would not help much; as his wife she would not be given full credence, and in any case it was only negative evidence. And what stuck in his mind from his interview with the husband was the picture of him scooping his wife up in his arms and depositing her on the car seat. He had always thought it might be difficult and awkward for the murderer to carry the body from one car to the other, but now Mel Bronstein had demonstrated it would be no trick at all, that he was a practiced hand at it.

Bronstein’s car was a big Lincoln, whereas his was a compact, which could make a difference. When he got home, he drove into the garage, got out, and studied the car, a frown on his thin, scholarly face. Then he called into the house for Miriam to come out for a minute.

She did so, standing beside him and following the direction of his stare. “Did someone scratch it?”

Instead of answering, he put his arm around her waist absently. She smiled affectionately at him, but he did not appear to notice. He reached out and swung open the car door.

“What is it, David?”

He pulled at his lower lip as he surveyed the interior of the car. Then, without a word, he bent down and picked her up in his arms.

“David!”

He staggered with his burden over to the open car door.

She began to giggle.

He tried to ease her onto the seat. “Let your head hang back,” he ordered.

Instead, still giggling, she wrapped her arms around his neck and put her face against his.

“Please, Miriam.”

She pecked at his ear.

“I’m trying to –”

She swung her legs provocatively. “What would Mr. Wasserman say if he saw us now?”

“Having fun?”

They turned to see Chief Lanigan in the doorway, a broad smile on his face.

The rabbi hastily set his wife down. He felt foolish. “I was just experimenting,” he explained. “It’s not easy to maneuver a body onto a car seat.”

Lanigan nodded. “No, but although the girl probably weighed more than Mrs. Small, Bronstein’s a good bit bigger than you.”

“I suppose that makes a difference,” the rabbi said, as he led the way into the house and to his study.

When they were seated, Lanigan asked how he had made out with Bronstein.

“I got to know him this afternoon,” said the rabbi. “He’s not the sort of person who would be likely to do a thing like this –”

“Rabbi, rabbi,” the chief interrupted impatiently, “when you’ve seen as many criminals as I have you’ll know that appearances are meaningless. Do you suppose a thief has a furtive look? Or that a confidence man is shifty-eyed? Why, his stock in trade is an open, frank appearance and an ability to look you straight in the eye. You people are called the People of the Book, and I suppose a rabbi is a particularly bookish sort of person. I have a great deal of respect for books and for bookish people, rabbi, but in matters such as this it’s experience that counts.”

“But if appearances and manner are deceptive, then all appearances are neutralized,” said the rabbi mildly, “and it’s hard to see how a jury system could possibly function. What do you base your convictions on?”

“Evidence, rabbi. On mathematically certain evidence, if it’s available, or on the weight of probabilities if it isn’t.”

The rabbi nodded slowly. Then he said with seeming irrelevance, “Do you know about our Talmud?”

“That’s your book of laws, isn’t it? Does it have anything to do with this?”

“Well, it’s not really our book of laws. The Books of Moses are that. It’s the commentaries on the Law. I don’t suppose it has any direct connection with the case at hand, but you can’t be too sure of that either since al! kinds of things can be found in the Talmud. I wasn’t thinking at the moment of its contents, however, but rather of the method of its study. When I began to study in the religious school as a youngster, all subjects – Hebrew, grammar, literature, the Scriptures – all were taught in the ordinary way, just as subjects are taught in the public school. That is to say, we sat at desks while the teacher sat at a larger desk on a platform. He wrote on the board, he asked questions, he gave out home lessons and heard us recite. But when I began Talmud, instruction was different. Imagine a large table with a group of students around it. At the head of the table was the teacher, a man with a long, patriarchal beard in this case. We read a passage, a short statement of the Law. Then followed the objections, the explanations, the arguments of the rabbis of old on the proper interpretation of the passage. Before we quite knew what we were doing, we were adding our own arguments, our own objections, our own hair-splitting distinctions and twists of logic, the so-called pilpul. Sometimes the teacher took it on himself to defend a given position and then we peppered him with questions and objections. I imagine a bear-baiting must have been like that – a shaggy bear surrounded by a pack of yelping dogs, and the moment he manages to toss off one another is ready to charge. As you begin to argue, new ideas keep presenting themselves. I remember an early passage I studied, which considered how damages should be assessed in the case of a fire resulting from a spark that flew out from under the blacksmith’s hammer. We spent two whole weeks on that one passage, and when we finally reluctantly left it, it was with the feeling that we had barely begun. The study of the Talmud has exercised a tremendous influence over us. Our great scholars spent their lives studying the Talmud, not because the exact interpretation of the Law happened to be germane to their problems at the time – in many cases the particular laws had become dead letters – but because as a mental exercise it had a tremendous fascination for them. It encouraged them to dredge up from their minds all kinds of ideas –”

“And you propose to use this method on our present problem?”

“Why not? Let’s examine the weight of probabilities in your theory and see if it stands up.”

“All right, go ahead.”

The rabbi got up from his chair and began to stride about the room. “We will start not with the body, but with the handbag.”

“Why?”

“Why not?”

Lanigan shrugged his shoulders. “Okay, you’re the teacher.”

“Actually, the handbag is a more fertile field of investigation if only because it touches on three people. The body lying behind the wall concerns only two people: the girl and her murderer. The handbag involves those two and me, because it was in my car that the handbag was found.”

“Good enough.”

“Now, what are the possibilities by which the handbag could have been left where it was found? It could have been left by the girl or by the man who killed her, or by a third party, unknown, unsuspected, and until now unconsidered.”

“You got something new up your sleeve, rabbi?” asked Lanigan suspiciously.

“No, I’m merely considering all the possibilities.”

There was a knock on the study door and Miriam came in with a tray.

“I thought you’d like some coffee,” she said.

“Thank you,” said Lanigan. “Aren’t you going to join us?” he said when he noticed there were only two cups on the tray.

“May I?”

“Certainly. There’s nothing very confidential about this. The rabbi is just giving me my first lesson in the Talmud.”

When she returned with a coffee cup, he said, “All right, rabbi, we’ve listed all the people who could have left the handbag. Where does that take us?”

“Of course the first question that comes to mind is why she had the bag with her at all. I suppose it’s automatic with some women.”

“A lot of women attach their house key to the inside of the bag by a chain,” suggested Mrs. Small.

Lanigan nodded to her. “Good guess. That’s how she had her key, attached by a short chain to the ring that’s the zipper-pull for an inside pocket.”

“So she took the bag rather than go to the trouble of detaching the key,” the rabbi went on. “Now let’s consider one by one the people who could possibly have left it in my car. First, to clear him out of the way, the third party, the unsuspected stranger. He would be someone who happened to be walking along and saw the bag, presumably because it was lying on the ground somewhere near the car. He would certainly open it, if only to find out if there was any identification so he could return it to its proper owner. But, more likely, he would open it out of common curiosity. If he were dishonest, he would have taken whatever of value it contained. But he did not do this.”

“How do you know that, rabbi?” asked Lanigan, suddenly alert.

“Because you said you found a heavy gold wedding ring. If the man were dishonest, he would have taken it. That he did not, suggests to me that any other thing of value – money, for instance – was left undisturbed.”

“There was some money in the purse,” Lanigan admitted. “About what you’d expect, a couple of bills and some loose change.”

“Very good. So we can assume it is not the case of someone finding the purse, taking out whatever was of value, and then tossing away the bag itself, now valueless, so that it would not be found on him.”

“All right, where does that get you?”

“It merely clears the ground. Now suppose he were honest and wanted only to return it to its rightful owner, and he put it in my car because he had found it nearby and assumed it belonged there, or because he thought the driver, finding it in his car, would take the trouble to return it to the rightful party. If that were his sole connection with the bag, why did he put it on the floor in back instead of on the front seat, where the driver would be sure to find it? I could have driven around for days without seeing it.”

“All right, so a hitherto unsuspected stranger did not leave the bag in the car, neither an honest one nor a dishonest one. I never said one did.”

“So we’ll go on to the next. We’ll take the girl.”

“The girl is out. She was dead at the time.”

“How can you be so sure? It would seem that the most likely explanation for the handbag is that the girl herself left it in the car.”

“Look here, it was a warm night and you must have had the window of your study open. Right?”

“Yes. The window was up, but the Venetian blinds were down.”

“How far do you think you were from your car? I’ll tell you. The car was twenty feet away from the building. Your study is on the second floor, say eleven feet above ground level. Add another four feet to give you the height of the windowsill. Now if you remember your high-school geometry, the line from the car to you is the hypotenuse of a right triangle. And if you work it out, you’ll find that the sill was about twenty-five feet away from the car. Add ten feet to give you your position at your desk. That means you were thirty-five feet from the car. And if someone had got into that car, let alone quarreled and got murdered in it, you’d have heard it no matter how engrossed you were in your studies.”

“But it could have happened after I left the temple,” the rabbi objected.

Lanigan shook his head. “Not too easily. You said you left sometime after twelve. You figured out it was about twenty past. But Patrolman Norman was walking up Maple Street towards the temple, and about that time or very shortly thereafter he was within sight of the temple. The parking lot was under his observation from that time up to three minutes past one when he pulled the box on the corner. Then he headed down Vine Street, which is the street the Serafinos live on and was therefore the street the girl must have come down.”

“All right, then after that?” suggested the rabbi.

Lanigan shook his head again. “Nothing doing. The medical examiner first reported that the girl was killed around one o’clock, with a twenty-minute leeway either side. But that was on the basis of body temperature, rigidity, and so forth. When we questioned Bronstein we discovered they’d eaten after the movie, and that enabled the M.E. to make a determination of the time on the basis of stomach content, which is a good deal more accurate. He gave us a supplementary report that fixes one o’clock at the outside.”

“Then in that case we have to consider the possibility that in spite of my proximity to the car I was so engrossed that I heard nothing. Remember, the car windows were up, and if they were careful in opening and closing the car door and if they conversed in low tones I wouldn’t have heard them. Also, the way she was killed, by strangulation, would have prevented her from crying out.”