Howard Engel: A City Called July

“Tell me about it,” I said. “Remember I’m a professional private investigator as well as a member of the Jewish community. It’s like talking to the doctor. Practically the same thing. Just tell the story the way it happened. Just the outlines. We’ll put in the colours later. It’s just like doctors. Okay?” Mr. Tepperman and the rabbi shifted in their chairs and waited for me to look at one of them to continue. I gave the nod to the rabbi. He cleared his throat.

“You know Larry Geller? Everybody knows Larry Geller. Everybody liked him and trusted him.” I made a steeple of my fingers to show that I was taking it all in. Geller was a lawyer with an office on Queen Street across from the post office. I didn’t know him well; I’d met him several times. I remembered expensive suits and cologne.

“Sure, I know Larry. What about him?”

“He’s disappeared,” the rabbi said, as though I’d been missing the point for the last ten minutes. “He’s gone. Vanished.”

“Two weeks ago,” put in Tepperman. “Without a word. Poof! He doesn’t even say goodbye to his wife and children. Off the face of the earth.”

I swallowed a lump of disappointment. I couldn’t see anything but police work in this. Larry Geller, the good-time Charlie. He could be depended upon at bar mitzvahs and weddings to raise more dust with his back-slapping than anyone else. He was a big wheel in the local chapter of B’nai Brith.

I’d seen his picture in the Beacon more than once. In fact I remembered seeing it only a day or two ago. I should have read the caption.

“We all trusted him,” said Saul Tepperman, shaking his head.

“You’ve been to the police about this?” I asked. “At least I suppose his wife has.”

“Police!” the rabbi said, lengthening out the vowel until it sounded like a siren screaming. “The police shouldn’t be brought into this until the right time.”

“The rabbi’s absolutely right, Benny. If we can settle this thing within the community …”

“Excuse me, Mr. Tepperman. With all respect, when a man disappears without a trace, poof! it isn’t a community problem any more. It’s police business. I mean, look, this is serious. This has to be handled right. You don’t know whether the man’s alive or dead. You have to take in all the possibilities. And think of his family, Rabbi. Think of what they’re going through. What you’ve got to do is go directly to the cops on this.”

“Benny, it’s not that way.” Once again an exchange of looks passed between them, making me feel as though I was the butt of a joke I was too dense to follow.

“So, if it’s not that way, what way is it? He’s disappeared but you’re not worried? I can see on your faces how worried you are. Tell me.”

“Like I said, Benny,” said Mr. Tepperman, “we all liked and trusted Larry. He was a lawyer, an educated man. Who would you trust if it wasn’t Larry Geller? I ask you? Hesh Riskin from the bakery trusted him with his mortgage money. I’m talking about twelve thousand dollars. Hesh gave it to Larry to pay off the mortgage on the store. Nine months later, when he’d just come back from Florida, he found a letter from the building’s owners waiting for him. They told him that he could lose the building because he had stopped making mortgage payments. He didn’t know what to do. He had a paper saying the mortgage had been paid off. What was he to believe? That’s when he came to see the rabbi and me. He was the first.”

“One of the first. Don’t forget Naomi Spivak. There are over fifty people in the same position as Hesh Riskin.”

“With some,” continued Tepperman, “it wasn’t mortgages.”

“That’s right, Saul. With the Sterns it was investments, with the Greenblatts it was their life savings. I’m talking about old people, Benny. People who wanted to put up their savings in a mortgage. Something to retire on. A little security. Is that wrong to have a little security in old age?” he asked me with passion in his eyes. I had a hard time remembering that he was only speaking rhetorically. He did it so well, I felt caught up and wanted to answer.

“Well it’s gone now,” said Tepperman. “Mortgages, investments, savings, security: it’s all gone. Disappeared with that son of a bitch Larry Geller. Excuse me, Rabbi.” The rabbi gave him absolution with a wave of his hand.

“Let me get this straight. You mean Geller has defrauded fifty people and skipped town? And you don’t want to go to the police about it? That’s crazy.”

“You have to understand. Think of the damage to the community. These people worked hard for that money, Benny,” said the rabbi. “Now you want them exposed as stupid on top of this? There’s a limit!”

“Geller’s not going to walk in with the money. He’s not going to see a blinding light and pay back all his onetime friends and neighbours. It may embarrass individuals in the community, it may embarrass the Jewish community generally, but if they want Geller’s hide, if they want a running start on getting some of their own back, they have to go to the cops. They’re the only game in town on a thing like this. They are victims of fraud. They’ve had the till ransacked and you want them to look the other way. Let me think. There’s breach of trust, there’s fraud over two hundred dollars, theft over two hundred, uttering forged documents, probably false registration of titles. We’re talking about half the criminal code here, Rabbi, and you want it hushed up. I don’t believe you.”

“We thought that you might consider …”

“Are you kidding, Saul?” I said, trying out his first name. “A job like this requires an army of trained personnel. We are looking for a needle in a haystack, and the only thing we know for sure is that the haystack has moved out of town. You want me to hang around the hotels in Miami Beach in case he walks in, Rabbi? It’s more than a million to one that you’d ever hear from either of us again. Should I pack a bag and look for him in Europe? Have you any idea what that would cost? Saul, be reasonable. And speaking of large amounts of money, have you any idea how much he got away with? In round figures?”

The rabbi cleared his throat and said something. I didn’t catch it. “I beg your pardon?”

“Two …”

“What?’

“Two million dollars.”

“Oh, my God! Two million! And you want to keep it buttoned up! What about his wife? What about his partners? Are they going to cooperate and help keep the lid on? You can’t just replace the divot and play through. Somebody’s going to want to yell good and loud. Rabbi, you can’t honestly tell me that that would be letting the community down?”

“The people I’ve talked to don’t want a fuss. They don’t want to see their names in the paper. That’s not unreasonable.”

“Look, both of you, the Law Society has a fund that tries to pick up after crooked lawyers like Geller. Don’t flatter yourself that Geller’s the first. There are lots of Gellers. There’s a Geller in every ethnic community and Gellers wearing Trinity College blazers too. Geller is universal. Where was I …?” I was riding my rhetorical bicycle too fast again. “Oh, yeah. In order to get some of their money back, first of all Geller has to be disbarred. That’s a legal process. And it can’t happen unless you go to the police.”

“We’d just as soon …”

“Mr. Tepperman, if a thief broke into your store, wouldn’t you phone the cops right away? Well, this is the same thing.” Tepperman was moistening his lips again. He shifted inside his grey tweed coat. His face had taken on a high colour where his skin was pulled tightly across his cheekbones. The rabbi next to him looked birdlike and brittle. They both looked at me like I’d been beating them over the heads with two-by-fours. I felt like I was trying to roll the stone away from the gate to the ghetto. I was dealing with intelligent reasonable men. I’d known both of them for years. They both looked at me with frowns on their lined faces. I was being difficult. All they wanted was no fuss. Fuss was the enemy, fuss got into the papers, fuss was at the root of anti-Semitism. They hated fuss more than they hated Geller or more than they hoped to see the two million again. You had to respect them for it, I guess.