Will Thomas - Some Danger Involved

"Were there any particular women he saw more than others? Did he see any of them more than once, or have one as a friend?"

The young fellows looked uncomfortable, as Zangwill had earlier.

"Rabbi Mocatta's daughter spoke with him, sometimes," Kosminski said cautiously. "He went to dinner at their house occasionally. I got the impression that the two of them were merely friends."

"Did any of you see him after the Shabbat was over? On the street, perhaps?"

Nobody had.

"So no one saw him after he 'was off like a shot,' until his body was found. Do you think he had some sort of appointment or rendezvous?"

"If he did," Ben Judah said, "he was certainly very cool about the whole thing."

"And when did you notice he was missing? When did you start to worry about him?"

"I noticed about ten thirty that he was gone overlong," Ira Moskowitz said. "But last year, he directed a Purim play and rehearsals sometimes went on until eleven thirty. By midnight, we certainly began to worry."

"Did you look for him?" Barker asked.

"We couldn't," Birnbaum volunteered. "If we went in search of him in the middle of the night, we would wake Mrs. Silverman. And if she knew Louis was gone after midnight, she might think ill of him and toss him out. We didn't want him to lose his rooms just because he was late. He'd been here for over two years."

"So what did you do?"

"What could we do?" Ben Judah countered. "We went to bed. We didn't believe he could get himself into a real scrape. Certainly, we couldn't predict that something like this would happen to him."

Barker sat for a moment or two without speaking. Then he tried a different tack. "Would you say he was an ambitious fellow?"

"Oh, yes," Moskowitz said. "He was always talking about 'getting on.' I think he wanted to be another prime minister, like Disraeli. He lamented to me once that he was too old to attend Oxford or Cambridge."

"You talk about ambition like it is a bad thing," Ben Judah sputtered. "He was studying to be a rabbi. He would have made a great one, like Maimonides. He had good motives. He was a real mensch."

"I'm not attempting to besmirch Mr. Pokrzywa's memory," Barker said. "I'm trying to get at the truth. Can any of you fellows think of anything Louis Pokrzywa had done recently that seemed out of the ordinary, for him at least?"

"He canceled an appointment last week," Rosenthal said, finally. "He was going to tutor me, but not ten minutes before we were to begin, he came up all apologies and said he couldn't do it, that he had to go somewhere. He didn't say where."

Ben Judah spoke up reluctantly. "I suppose if we're discussing things out of the ordinary, I saw Louis talking with a woman I didn't recognize in Petticoat Lane a couple of weeks ago."

"Could you describe her?"

"Rather pretty, a Choote, I think. That is, a Dutch Jew, by the look of her."

"Did they go off together?"

"How should I know? I saw Pokrzywa every day. I couldn't care less who he spoke to. One minute they were there, then they were gone."

"And this was on market day, you say? Two weeks ago?"

"Yes. Sunday. Midafternoon."

Barker bowed. "Thank you for your time, gentlemen. We'll intrude upon your mourning no longer."

Outside in the hallway, Barker stood a moment, still in his stockinged feet, and pulled on his lower lip in thought.

"What are you thinking?" I asked.

"I'm thinking that, collectively, men are only slightly more observant than mollusks. For insight, we must talk to a woman."

Instead of putting on our shoes, Barker and I padded down the hallway to the landlady's private rooms.

If Barker was thinking he'd get on better with the landlady, he was mistaken. She was a cantankerous-looking woman in her early sixties, wearing the shiny black dress common to matrons and widows. Her hair was pulled back so severely, it would have won approval from the Spanish Inquisition as a method of torture. I could see why, on that fateful night, the gentlemen who were her boarders had decided not to disturb her. When Barker introduced himself, she even had the audacity to demand what I myself had always feared to ask.

"Why are you wearing those glasses indoors? What's wrong with your eyes?"

Barker's more expressive eyebrow, the left one, curled itself into an arch above his spectacles. "An infirmity, madam," he said, "brought on by an injury." His fingers stole to the scar which bisected his right brow. "We'd like to ask you a few questions and to see the late Mr. Pokrzywa's rooms, with your permission."

"Do you have proof that you are who you claim to be?" the woman demanded. In response, Barker presented her with his business card.

"Don't you have a badge or something?"

"We are private enquiry agents, madam, not constables."

Mrs. Silverman gave him a grunt. She weighed no more than a hundred pounds in her full ensemble, but she seemed a formidable match for my employer under the circumstances. Reluctantly, she opened the door and allowed us into her own rooms. The furniture was much like that of the sitting room. The air was so dead and still inside the room, one would have thought it hadn't been aired since Lord Melbourne's day. I was beginning to become a convert to Barker's ideas concerning air circulation and the body, although Mrs. Silverman didn't look like she'd be keeling over dead any time soon.

She sat down on the edge of a chair, and we followed her lead. The padded chair I sat in was so stuffed with horsehair, I might as well have been on the actual horse. She picked up a pair of knitting needles and began to knit.

"You have questions?" she prompted.

"Yes, madam. May I ask what sort of boarder Mr. Pokrzywa had been?"

"He was the best kind. He paid on time. He asked almost nothing of me. He was not wasteful like Mr. Birnbaum, messy like Mr. Moskowitz, gluttonous like Mr. Rosenthal, or constantly complaining like Mr. Ben Judah. My only reservation against him was his large collection of books, which tended to attract cockroaches, and he was able to remedy that by powdering his shelves with boric acid. I do have my doubts about the floorboards under his bookcase, however. Books can be quite heavy, you know."

"Did he keep regular hours?"

"No, he did not. But he peppered me with so many explanations of this charity group and that charity group that I finally gave him leave to go about his business without regaling me. That fellow needed a wife to keep him home nights. That's what got him killed."

"I don't doubt it for a minute," Barker said. I could see he was trying to be conciliatory to Mrs. Silverman, but if I saw it, so did she. Had she been a cat, the fur on her back would have stood on end.

"Had he been regular in his irregularity, then? Out most nights?"

"That boy had a fund of energy like I've never seen. He lived on five hours' sleep. He worked during the day, attended classes in the evening, then was out doing charity work until late. Many is the night I've come upstairs at two in the morningЧ I'm a restless old woman, and creaks in this old, settling house disturb meЧ to find light under his door. I warned him reading would undermine his health, and I was right. Tell me I am right!"

We were both quick to agree.

"I suppose he had no time for lady friends."

"Time he could have made, gentlemen," she said, with what passed for a chuckle. "They certainly would have made time for him."

"Did Mr. Pokrzywa ever break an appointment with you, especially in recent months?"

"No, he did not. He was polite to his landlady, unlike the rest here."

"Were there any deviations in his schedule lately?"

"Only that his work seemed to increase. Before he would come home a few nights a week at eight thirty or nine. Now he was out until almost ten at least."