Faye Kellerman: The Garden Of Eden And Other Criminal Delights

But something nagged at my gut.

I turned the corner, made a series of right turns, and circled around the block. Then I caught up with my mother, who was blithely ambling in the sunshine. Again we exchanged waves, although she did have a puzzled look on her face. It said, Why did you come back?

And the man across the street continued to keep pace with my mother.

Too much TV, I chided myself.

To o many detective novels.

I drove off. One block, then another.

But this was my daughter, this was my mother.

Again I retraced my route.

By the time I returned, my mother was down on her knees, her hand gripping her head. The stroller had been tipped over. My heart raced as I pulled over, screaming, “Are you all right?”

“He took my purse,” she shouted hysterically. Frantically, she pointed around the corner.

Again I asked if she was all right. Was the baby all right?

Yes, my mother answered. Despite the fact that she had two scraped knees from her fall, she was fine.

Anger coursed through my body. This was my baby, this was my mother !

With my son firmly ensconced in his car seat, I gave chase. Admittedly, not the brightest decision I’ve made. But I reacted rather than considered.

The French Connection it wasn’t. I was in a car and he was on foot, so I caught up rather handily. Leaning on the horn, I rolled down the window and screamed at the top of my lungs, “Drop the purse, you son of a bitch!”

“Son of a bitch!” my son imitated from the backseat.

But the sucker kept running. In retrospect, I think it was more in fear than in obstinacy. He pumped his legs hard and fast, racing with the wind. Chariots of Felony. But even Jesse Owens wouldn’t have had a chance against a V-8 engine. I kept honking the horn, shrieking at him to drop the goddamn purse.

“Goddamn purse,” my son aped.

Up ahead was a pedestrian. Two of them. I don’t remember much about them. Except that they were male and one of them was wearing a yellow plaid sport coat. I don’t know why that particular fact registered, but it did. And it was the one in the plaid coat who pulled out the gun… pointed it at the runner, and yelled, “Freeze!”

And the man froze.

Just like in the movies.

I jerked the car into a driveway, not really understanding what was going on.

Plaid Coat instructed the runner to drop the purse. “Drop it,” he shouted. “Drop it, drop it, drop it!”

The runner had that deer-in-the-headlights look on his face. He dropped the purse.

Plaid Coat told him to hit the ground.

Just like in the movies.

I bounded out of the car, spoke to Plaid Coat. I pointed to the runner, pointed to my mother’s stolen handbag, and angrily said, “That’s not his purse!”

Neighbors began filing out, offering to call the police. Which was kind of redundant.

Because Plaid Coat turned out to be an off-duty policeman who had been visiting his father, heard me leaning on the horn, and came out to investigate.

Now he took off his belt and began to secure the suspect. At that point I went back to my mother. She was upright and so was the stroller. I pulled the car over, loaded them both inside. Her palms were sore, her pants were ripped at the knees. But, as promised, both she and my baby were all right.

“He took my purse!” my mother sobbed.

“We caught him, Ma,” I said.

“You what?”

“We caught him. We have your purse!”

“Oh. That’s good,” my mother answered. “That’s very good.”

“Very good,” my son coughed from the backseat.

We returned to the scene of the crime, now thick with patrol cars. I explained my story as I held my baby, and my mother explained her story from inside my car. The uniformed police officers were amazed.

“We never catch these guys,” one of them told me.

My mother was required to come down to the station to claim the purse. It would be there waiting for her. The police needed only a couple of hours to process the paperwork.

“She can’t just take it now?” I asked. “Save us both a trip?”

“Nope. Evidence.”

“Fine,” I said.

They congratulated me. I took my mother and baby home. We were all pretty shaken, but life does go on.

I loaded my son back into his car seat and zipped him over to the pediatrician. A good move on my part.

Indeed, it was strep throat.

“The Summer of My Womanhood” is perhaps the most emotional piece in the anthology. It’s about my father, who died thirty years ago at the age of fifty-three, and by the time I finished writing this essay, I was engulfed by a cloud of wistfulness. Dad owned a deli and a small bakery, and I was fortunate enough to work with him as a preteen and teenager. In order to earn spending cash, I often stood for hours behind the counter helping customers. Of course, my ultimate reward was spending time with my dad, and as I remembered him, my heart filled with treasured memories.

My father wasn’t a distant figure in my childhood, but I certainly didn’t know him well. Like many men of the World War II generation, he worked excruciatingly long and hard hours, not for career fulfillment or self-enlightenment but in order to pay the mortgage on a Veterans Affairs-financed three-bedroom, one-bath house in the hot, dusty San Fernando Valley of Los Angeles County. My father was in the retail food business, not by default but by choice. His decision, especially since he came from a religious Jewish background in which education had always been prized, always puzzled me.

When World War II broke out, Dad was drafted. Instead of immediately being sent to Europe, he was deemed smart enough by the army to send to college. After two years of attending classes at Rutgers University, studying subjects that obviously excited him-he spoke about them well into my young adulthood-he was offered officers’ training. After declining the chance for advancement because it meant a longer tour of duty, he was shipped overseas and into the infantry. God must have shone His light on Dad, because he spent only two weeks in the front lines, though it probably felt like years. After the brief stint, he was reassigned to the medical corps. Trained as a medic, he desperately tried to save what the enemy was determined to destroy. After the war, Dad’s fluency in Yiddish made him invaluable to the army because he understood many of the languages spoken by concentration-camp victims. He would often translate for his superior officers, aiding in placement and relocation of those who’d survived the Nazis’ final solution.

When he talked about the war, it was not often and not very much. But I do remember what he told me. Yes, he revealed stories of the human atrocities, but he was much more intrigued by the ability of ordinary people to rationalize those horrors away, by the denials in Polish towns where the stink of the crematoriums could be detected from miles away. It affected his lifelong outlook. How could it not.

Honorably discharged from the army, my father did what most newly married men did back then: They took jobs not for their glamorous titles but because they needed money. Even though Dad had passed entrance exams to local law schools, he decided to skip three years without income in favor of immediate cash. My father became Oscar the Deli Man-following in the footsteps of his father, Judah (Edward) the Butcher.

I’m sure money had much to do with it. But after observing my father at work up until he died, I do think he was happy with his occupation. It was backbreaking toil, which involved but wasn’t limited to toting hundreds of pounds of meat, lifting cases of canned goods, shivering in walk-in freezers and coolers during the winter in stores with no heat, and putting in ungodly hours- from dark to dark. Sunlight was something that glared through plate-glass windows. But the money he earned was from the sweat of his own brow, and that was good enough for Oscar Marder.