Стив Хокенсмит - Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 51, No. 6, June 2006

“What’s a chilul? ” I whispered.

“Transgression, abomination, like that,” answered Sam.

In this community? What was this rabbi smoking?

But he wasn’t finished. Another ten minutes of diatribe passed as he lectured the entire congregation on how unworthy they were, how their stubborn clinging to “outdated methods” like Modern Orthodoxy would be their undoing. And that he wasn’t about to stick around to watch them sink into a morass of debauchery and filth.

“Is he saying what I think he’s saying?”

Sam’s face had turned so red it was veering uncomfortably close to a mixture of flame-colored and deep purple. “He can say whatever he wants but it won’t matter — he’s ruining my granddaughter’s bat mitzvah!”

No kidding. Sam’s expression was now dangerously close to outright terror.

“Shouldn’t somebody—”

Sam grabbed my shoulder. “Not you, Danny. Let him finish.”

No one else said a word, and the rabbi finally finished his tirade uninterrupted, sweat pouring down his forehead. He gave the congregation one last scowl and stormed out of the synagogue.

Sam’s granddaughter got up, looking like she was about to cry. She motioned for her parents to join her on the pulpit.

Amazingly, the ceremony continued as if the rabbi’s speech had never happened. Shira’s parents blessed the girl, then signaled for everyone to go downstairs for the post — bat mitzvah meal. At first, no one quite knew what to say to each other. It was supposed to be a celebration, but the atmosphere felt positively funereal.

Then Sam hushed the crowd.

“Well, you have to admit, that’s a hell of a way to resign from a synagogue.”

The crowd laughed nervously, then more genuinely, and things went back to an approximation of normal.

I wondered if I’d ever attend a completely uneventful synagogue service.

A week later I was in the shop waiting for Sam to show up. We were supposed to go over the monthly accounts together, but he was over an hour late. It wasn’t like him; normally he beat me to the shop by twenty minutes, and I always made sure to be there a half hour before opening.

I’d just begun to dial his number when someone shrieked behind me.

“Danny! Sam’s in terrible trouble!”

It was Sam’s daughter Rebecca, the mother of the unfortunate bat mitzvah girl. I’d met her for the first time at the synagogue, and unlike his son Reuben, who clearly couldn’t understand why Sam had invited the token goy, Rebecca seemed reasonably civil, if a bit distracted.

I tried to calm her down, but she wouldn’t have any of it.

“No, no, there’s no way I can possibly be calm, not with my father in jail!”

I couldn’t process her words. “Sam? In jail?”

“Oh Danny, it was awful! He’s so frail, you know, and when the police came to arrest him—”

“Rebecca, please! Sit down.” I rushed from behind the counter and found a nearby chair. I brought it toward the counter and motioned for her to sit.

She sat.

“Now,” I said, facing her directly, “Tell me what’s going on.”

“Rabbi Kranzman was murdered last night. The police think Sam did it.”

“Why the hell would they think that?” I blurted out.

“Because of the bat mitzvah,” said Rebecca, “and the fact that the rabbi used it as a way to get attention to himself.”

“That’s a reason for him to kill someone? Seems pretty flimsy.”

“The cops, they’ll find any reason to arrest someone. And now they’ve found one for my father.” She buried her face in her hands.

“Please, Rebecca, don’t cry. I need you to start from the beginning. The rabbi was murdered?”

It took a while, but eventually the story came out. Kranzman’s elderly neighbor noticed that the door to his house had been slightly ajar. She’d come in, figuring that there had to be a pretty good reason, but not thinking clearly beyond that. So when Mrs. Gertel found Kranzman lying on the floor, stabbed at least fifteen times according to the cops, she ran away screaming and called for help.

The police showed up and started asking questions. Somehow they’d got wind of the whole resignation affair and the utter fury Sam had directed toward the rabbi.

“But didn’t they hear about the party?” I asked. “He was in great spirits afterward.”

Rebecca sighed. “Oh Danny, you didn’t know about their run-in?”

“What run-in?”

“In the men’s bathroom. Kranzman had come back because he felt entitled to eat the food as ‘an invited guest.’ The nerve! But no one could kick him out. Sam tried to and yelled at him so loudly that almost everyone could hear. Where were you?”

I’d left early because I hadn’t wanted to keep Sharon waiting. It was our date night and I’d never broken one once since we’d started going out.

But I didn’t want to explain that to Rebecca. “I had to leave early.”

“And my father didn’t tell you what happened?”

“Now that you mention it, he did seem awfully quiet for the past few days.”

“Well, he threatened Rabbi Kranzman. Said that if he didn’t resign like he’d promised to the public, then he — my father, I mean — would make him pay dearly.”

That didn’t sound like Sam at all. “Those were his words? ‘Pay dearly?’ ”

“When there were over four hundred witnesses...” she trailed off, sounding more helpless than ever.

She tugged at my sleeve. “Danny, you have to get Sam out.”

“Well of course,” I said. “How much is bail?”

“No, not that! He’ll be out by morning. Even though it’s a hundred thousand dollars bond.”

The cops obviously had much more than they’d told Sam’s family, but I didn’t say anything. “All right, if not bail, then what?”

She looked at me meaningfully.

I shook my head. “Rebecca, I don’t know what Sam told you about me—”

“But you helped Rabbi Brenner out. And Mrs. Sandell—”

“Those were one-offs. I just work in a Judaica bookstore that Sam owns. That’s it.”

“Danny, we’ll pay very well.”

She’d said the worst possible thing. I didn’t want charity money from the Levins and I said so.

Rebecca seemed genuinely apologetic. “I thought that might help, but of course you’re right. You’ve worked with him for so long, he means much more to you than mere money. And truly, Danny, you might even know Sam better than any of us. What would it take for you to help him, to help us?”

I was no private investigator. But somehow, people kept finding me to help them out with little problems. Things like following would-be son-in-laws around Baltimore looking for their dark side. Or spying on community matrons’ husbands, looking for some tragic flaw that would enable the women to divorce the louts and collect their due. All ending in ways I never expected, leaving people far worse off than they had been before they’d enlisted me to help.

I’d had my reasons, but I didn’t relish doing the same task again. Especially for something far more personal.

But Rebecca was right; Sam did mean a lot to me. And I couldn’t let him down.

“Who else do I need to talk to?”

As it happened, not too many others.

Sam was the obvious one, but for some reason, he didn’t want me to see him.

I asked Rebecca why.

“He only wants you to talk to him once you’ve had a chance to meet everyone else.”

“But that doesn’t make any sense. They weren’t arrested for murder.”

“No,” she said, trying to keep an even keel, “but that doesn’t mean they shouldn’t be.”

I started at the top, so to speak, with the president of the synagogue. I didn’t harbor too many hopes he’d tell me anything, but he was surprisingly friendly on the phone.