Гарри Кемельман - Thursday The Rabbi Walked Out

"He could have shot the clock to establish an alibi." the rabbi observed. "He could have set it ahead and then shot it to stop it."

Lanigan's grin broadened. "Sure, except that no one connected with the case offered an alibi, not Stanley, not Billy, not Martha Peterson, not Gore—"

"He had an alibi." the rabbi pointed out.

"Not one that he offered, all he said when we questioned him was that he stopped on the road to Boston to make a phone call and that it was sometime after eight. Now, he could have, because in the office of the gas station where he made his call, there was a big clock on the wall advertising some kind of motor oil, the easiest thing in the world would be to say to the station attendant. 'Hev, is that clock right?' But he didn't, the point is he didn't offer any kind of alibi, we had to dig it out."

"Maybe that's the best kind." "What kind is that?"

"The kind where the police dig it out for you."

The phone rang, and with a muttered damn. Lanigan went to answer it, he picked up the receiver and, after listening for a moment, said. "Yes, he is. Just a minute." He called out. "For you. David. It's Miriam."

The rabbi took the phone and Miriam said. "Oh, David, do you know how long you'll be? Because the Reuben Levys called, they're in town, in Cambridge, for a wedding, they didn't want to call yesterday because of the Sabbath. But they'd like to see us if we can make it. I said I'd call them back."

"The Reuben Levys?" "You know, from the seminary." "Oh, of course, the Voice." "That's right."

"The Voice is in town? Well, what do you know. Yeah, I'd like to see him, but—Look, why don't you call him back and ask if you can call him a little later."

"You mean. I should call him now and—all right. I understand."

It was an abstracted Rabbi Small who returned to the living room. Lanigan smiled sympathetically. "An old friend call you up?"

But the rabbi did not answer, he stopped and stood straight and tense with his arms rigid at his sides, the fists clenched. His head was thrown back and he was staring at the ceiling.

"What's the matter?" asked Lanigan in alarm. "Anything wrong?"

The rabbi relaxed and said sheepishly, "No. I just thought of something. Tell me, have you ever fired a gun with your eyes shut?"

Lanigan blinked at the unexpectedness of the question. "No,” he said cautiously, "can't say that I ever did."

"Well, I did." said the rabbi, and told about his experience at the shooting gallery in Revere. "I can see pretty well with my glasses, but when I take them off. I might just as well shut my eyes as far as anything more than a couple of feet away is concerned."

"Then why did you take them off?"

"Well, I'd heard that there's a recoil from a rifle, and I was afraid I might break them."

"From a twenty-two in an amusement park shooting gallery?"

The rabbi blushed. "They seemed to be in the way when I put the gun to my shoulder. I probably wasn't holding it right, the young man at the gallery seemed amused, too. But I wasn't trying to hit anything anyway, just giving him a little business on a dull day."

"And how did you do?"

The rabbi smiled. "I got a perfect score."

"You did?"

"Uh-huh. Ten shots, ten misses, the attendant thought the sights might be off and gave me another rifle, and I did equally well with the second. Do you get the point?"

"I get the point that you're a terrible shot."

"No, no, it's more than that, here was a narrow space, maybe fifteen feet wide at the most, full of all sorts of things—rows of clay pipes, ducks moving along in one direction while rabbits hopped along in the other, a large circle on a pendulum swinging back and forth. You'd swear that any bullet fired in the general direction of the rear wall would have to hit something, and I missed every time. I thought about it afterward, wondering how I could have achieved that incredible score, and then I realized that the empty space was many, many times greater than the space taken up by the targets. My point is that if Molly Mandell or Martha Peterson had shut her eyes and fired off six shots in the general direction of that recliner, you would have found the bullets buried in the wall or the ceiling. To hit all those small objects—"

"The painting isn't small."

"But the shot struck right in the mouth, and the finial on the lamp, and the pill bottle and, of course, the victim right between the eyes—that was very good shooting, I'd say—the work of a marksman."

Lanigan looked at the rabbi suspiciously. "Are you tryina to hornswoggle me with some of that Talmud hocus-pocus—what d'ye call it—pilpil?"

"Pilpul? No. But I'm suggesting another Talmud technique or method. You see, they were intent, those old scholars, on deriving the true meaning of God's commandments. So they tested their interpretations by considering all kinds of examples and all possible alternatives, no matter how remote or farfetched. Because, only if it applied to an extreme case, could they know that their interpretation was correct. It came to me in a flash when Miriam called to tell me about Reuben Levy—"

"Who's he?"

"A classmate at the seminary. Come to think of it, I told you about him once. Instead of using a good story to amplify a sermon, he did it the other way around and built the sermon on the story. You suggested it was like the man who got a reputation as a crackshot by shooting first and then drawing a target around the bullet hole."

"Oh, yes, I remember—"

"And it came to me that you could work it the other way around just as Well, Suppose you had half a dozen targets and you hit each one in the bull's-eye, dead center, and then erased all the targets except one, then someone looking at all those scattered shots, not even touching the outer circle of the one remaining target, would be certain that it was bad shooting and that the shot in the bull's-eye was a pure fluke, and I remembered what they said at the Agathon when we went over there, that Gore was a crackshot and club champion. So I suggest another scenario, a man, a crackshot, having dispatched his victim with a single shot right between the eyes, standing there, cool, confident, a little self-satisfied smile on his face, emptying the gun by firing at one tiny target after another."

"Are you suggesting that he took the chance of firing all those shots just so as to cover the accuracy of the first shot? It doesn't make sense, he could have—"

"Not to cover the first short. To cover the second." "The second?"

"The clock, he had to set up an alibi. So after shooting Jordon, he advanced the clock to half past eight and then stepped back and shot it in order to stop it and establish the time of the murder. But if he had left it at that, just the two shots, the police would have suspected immediately.

So he covered it up by firing off the rest of the bullets, then all he had to do was to establish that sometime close to half past eight he was far away from here."

"But dammit, he didn't establish an alibi. I told you—"

"Oh yes, he did." said the rabbi quickly. "He set out for Boston and on the way stopped to make a phone call from the office of a gas station. If there's an attendant there, especially if it's sometime near closing time, there's a good chance that he'll remember the time, and the person you call may remember. If it's a housewife, she knows the time she serves dinner and what time they finish eating and how long it takes to wash the dishes, especially if she's going out to do an errand. Unless the alibi calls for split-second timing, there's a good chance that between the two, the gas station attendant and the housewife, the police will be able to triangulate a point in time that will be reasonably and sufficiently accurate. But you can't call just anyone, not while you're on the road to Boston. You can't call any old acquaintance and say you were thinking of them. Not while you're driving along the highway. It has to be in connection with something important, some matter of business. So he called Mrs. Mandell."