William Lashner - Bitter Truth

My arms and face are covered with mosquito bites. On the balcony of my hotel room I examine those I can closely in the sun, wondering which of the swollen swaths of flesh contain the squirming larvae of the botfly the nun had so kindly warned me about on the flight into Belize. I wonder if the man I am chasing knows how to suffocate the beefworm with glue and Scotch tape or instead lets it grow within him, like he let the evil inside him grow and fester. I know now the root of that evil, I have seen the ledgers in which it was documented in even rows of precise numbers. Some crimes are forgotten the moment they are perpetrated and it is as if they had never occurred; some crimes live on forever. The tragedy of the Reddmans was that the crime in those ledgers was of the latter. It is still alive, still virulent, still cursing the perpetrator’s heirs a century after its commission.

THE OLD LEDGERS WERE SPREADout on our conference room table, cracked open and releasing a finely aged mold into the air. The numbers inside were inked by hand and showed the day-to-day operations of the E. J. Poole Preserve Co. for the years up to and beyond its purchase by Claudius Reddman and the change of its name to Reddman Foods. These were the books Caroline had found behind the secret swinging panel in the library at Veritas and the accountant was now hard at work, I expected, letting the numbers in the ledgers tell him the story of how Claudius Reddman had managed to wrest control of the company from Elisha Poole. It was the very day of Edward Shaw’s funeral, a day of ostentatious mourning and the false tears of heirs. Oh, what a cheery scene that would be. With Edward dead, there was nothing for Dante to gain by killing Caroline anymore, so she had left her seclusion to attend the funeral, though I still had concerns for her safety. She asked me to join her, but I declined. I had stirred the Reddman family pot enough, I figured. Today was a time to leave them to the misery of their present while we uncovered the sins of their past.

While Yitzhak Rabbinowitz, of the accounting firm of Pearlman and Rabbinowitz, worked on the books with Morris, I occupied myself with the piles of paperwork generated by the District Attorney’s relentless prosecution of Commonwealth v. Peter Cressi . I doubted I would still be on the case after the abdication of Enrico Raffaello, and I thought of just bagging the whole thing, but my malpractice carrier liked me to actually do the work required on my cases, so I was responding to the government’s requests for discovery, the government’s motions in limine, the government’s suggested jury instructions. At the same time I was busily drafting my own motions to suppress whatever I could dream up even the flimsiest reasons for suppressing. The arguments were rather weak, I admit, but they all passed my baseline standard: the red-face test. Could I stand before a judge and make the argument without my face turning red from embarrassment? Barely, but barely was enough to satisfy the ethical requirements of the Bar Association and so for suppression I moved.

At about three in the afternoon I stretched at my desk and strolled over to the conference room to check on the accountant’s progress. I expected to see the two men elbow-deep in ancient volumes, following the figures in the ledgers with their fingers, tap tap tapping numbers into calculators spouting long ribbons of white awash with damning sums. What I saw instead was Yitzhak Rabbinowitz and Morris Kapustin sitting together at the end of the table, feet propped, as relaxed and carefree as a couple of cronies swapping tales over coffee at the deli.

“Victor, come over, please,” said Morris, waving me in. “Yitzhak, he was just telling me about our mutual friend Herman Hopfenschmidt.”

“So I tell him,” said Rabbinowitz, “I say, Herman, with your business such a success and with what you have in the bank, and I know how much it is because I’m your accountant, you still throw around money like a man with no arms.” Yitzhak Rabbinowitz was a tall, broadly built man, bald with a bushy gray mustache. He wore a sport coat and a short-sleeved shirt so that his hairy forearms stuck out from the sleeves, one wrist adorned by a gold Rolex, the other by a flashy gold and diamond band. He leaned back in his chair as he told the story, gesturing wildly, his words coming out slightly wet. “Be a tsaddik, I say. Give a little. Beside, someone in your tax bracket, you could use the deductions. Give a little, Herman, I say, give till it hurts. So what does he do? He clutches his chest and says, ‘It hurts, it hurts.’ ”

“That Hopfenschmidt, he’s always been a chazzer, ” said Morris, nodding. “He still has the first dollar he ever stole.”

“I say, Herman, that’s not funny. Not funny. So how much can I put you down for? Ten thousand? Frankle, he gave ten thousand last year and you earn twice as much as Frankle. And Herman says, ‘It hurts, it still hurts.’ I say, five then at least. Even Hersch with his one dry cleaning store, he’s giving five thousand and you earn ten times as much as Hersch. Think of all the children you’ll be helping, Jewish children, who can’t afford even a chicken neck on Shabbos . What does Herman say? ‘It hurts, it hurts.’ I say, all right, one thousand, but that’s the minimum I’ll accept and he says, ‘But you don’t understand, Yitzhak, it hurts, it really hurts.’ Next thing I know he falls off his chair. Splat, right on the ground. He was right, it did hurt. He was having a coronary.”

“For real?” said Morris.

“Of course. Would I joke about such a thing? He’s at Einstein as we speak. As we speak.”

“Some chazzers, they’ll do anything to keep from giving.”

“Mr. Rabbinowitz,” I said, interrupting. The Reddman books were sitting at the other end of the table, forlorn and alone.

He looked up at me and smiled. “Call me Yitzhak, please, Victor, now that we are working together.”

Working? “Well then, Yitzhak, I was just wondering how we are doing on the books. Have you found anything yet? I’m sort of in a hurry on this.”

“It’s going very well, Victor. Very well, and almost we’re ready to show you some things. Not quite but almost.”

“You want maybe some coffee, Yitzhak?” asked Morris.

“Yes, that would be terrific,” said Rabbinowitz, smiling at me. “Cream and sugar, Victor, and don’t be stingy with the sugar.”

“Anything else?” I said flatly.

“A doughnut or a pitsel cake, would be nice. Anything for you, Morris?”

“Just a water, my stomach still is not what it should be.”

“You know your problem,” said Rabbinowitz to Morris. “Too much fiber. It gives gas.”

“Tell me something I don’t already know.”

“A coffee with cream and extra sugar,” I said. “A pitsel cake and water.”

“You’re very kind, Victor. Thank you,” said Rabbinowitz. He turned his attention back to Morris, as if I had been dismissed. “So as soon as we’re finished here I’m going over to give Herman a visit up at the hospital. Coming so close to his Maker, maybe it will have softened him up. I tell you, Morris, it was a miracle, really. I think now I can get from him the ten.”

“Sit down, Victor,” said Yitzhak Rabbinowitz when I came back from the Wawa with the coffee and an Entenmann’s cake and a bottle of mineral water. “We’ll show you now what we found.”

“You’re ready?”

“It was rather clever, but not so very well hidden. I’m surprised that Poole didn’t catch it himself. The key was learning when it was that this Reddman started keeping the books.”

“We think we have it now,” said Morris. “We were forced to match the handwriting in the earlier journals with some letters we found in the books and from later journals, after he bought control.”