The Mourning Sexton (15 page)

CHAPTER 23

W
hen he got back from court, Hirsch found Rosenbloom in the office manager's cubicle. For the umpteenth time, the unflappable Molly Hamilton was listening to her boss grumble about receivables and billable hours and out-of-control overhead and declare, loudly enough for all to hear, that he could earn more and sleep better working the drive-thru window at McDonald's. Acting, in short, as if he were in it only for the money.

Hirsch knew better. So did Molly.

They all did—right down to the receptionist and the mailroom clerks. They all knew that Seymour Rosenbloom relished his skirmishes with the banks and finance companies that hounded his clients. They'd all heard him cackling over the way he'd outfoxed yet another smug creditor. They all knew he loved drubbing the law firms that once rejected him.

GMAC or First National might have a
contractual
right to repossess that car or foreclose on that mortgage, but Rosenbloom's clients had the next best thing, namely, a lawyer with a Talmudic skill for finding ambiguities and loopholes in the fine print of form contracts drafted by lawyers with a fraction of his brainpower. He regularly came up with ways to halt foreclosures and derail repossessions that left his opponents slack-jawed.

All I do,
he liked to say,
is try to level the playing field.

As if it were no big deal to put his forklift driver from Fenton on equal footing with, say, Bank of America.

“I'm getting too old for this,” he groaned as he wheeled himself down the hallway.

Hirsch followed him into his office, sneaking a look back at Molly, who stood watching them with her hands on her hips. She smiled and rolled her eyes.

Rosenbloom moved behind his desk and turned to face Hirsch. “
Nu?
”

“I ran into Guttner outside Judge Shea's courtroom today.”

“Really? Why was Jabba slumming?”

“Looking for me.”

“Blimpie is getting a little antsy, eh?”

“Seems to be.”

Rosenbloom chuckled. “Can't figure out why you won't take his money.”

“He does seem perplexed.”

“Curious, eh? That pompous motherfucker is eager to throw money at you this early in the case? Suggests to me that Jabba's hands may not be lily white.”

“Maybe not.”

“Trying to settle a case this soon? Before his shock troops get a chance to bill some hours? That greedy bastard would no more pass up a fat fee than pass up a dozen jelly doughnuts.” He paused. “By the way, you ever find that gal? The one who moved to Chicago? What's her name?”

“Ruth Jones. I'm still looking. If she's in the phone book, she has plenty of company.”

“Lots of them, eh?”

“Twelve listings for Ruth Jones and more than a hundred listings for R. Jones. I tried several last night, several more this morning.” He sighed. “Slow process.”

Twenty minutes later, back in his own office, he stared at the phone and shook his head. He'd just concluded a short conversation with yet another R. Jones from Chicago—this one named Roshanda, who was convinced that he was the same Hirsch who represented her ex-husband Cletis, and who slammed down the phone after suggesting that he perform an unnatural act, first upon her ex-husband, then upon the divorce judge, and finally upon himself.

He thus eyed the phone warily as it started ringing moments later. Could Roshanda have Caller ID?

He picked it up after the fourth ring.

“How's it hanging, Rebbe?”

Hirsch leaned back in his chair and smiled. “Hey, Jumbo. What's up?”

“Not me, dude. I'm down here in hillbilly heaven and it feels like the third level of hell.”

“I thought you loved Nashville.”

“Hell, man, I ain't calling from Nashville. I'm in friggin' Branson, Missouri.”

“Branson? Doing what?”

“Going so stir-crazy I'm contemplating a parole violation. There's this dang industry conference on computer security they put on here every year. My company sent three of us to attend.”

“Bet you're loving the music.”

“Oh, man, if I hear one more steel guitar playing twangy chords, I may just go postal.”

“How much longer does the conference run?”

“We finish tomorrow at noon.”

“You flying home?”

“Nah. I drove my pickup over. I was thinking I might drive back on forty-four, maybe stop by to see you.”

“Great. I'll buy you dinner.”

“Been awhile for us, ain't it.”

“Too long.”

“I'll second that.”

Neither said anything for a moment.

“You still a bankruptcy lawyer, Rebbe?”

“Mostly.”

“Mostly, eh? What else you got going on?”

“Just a wrongful death case.”

“Big bucks?”

“Hard to say.”

“What's wrong?”

“It's kind of complicated.”

“That don't sound good.”

“It's a long story.”

“So we'll have ourselves a long dinner and talk it out.”

Hirsch smiled. “That sounds good. Actually, I almost had something up your alley.”

“Computers or pussy?”

“The former.”

“What do you mean by ‘almost'?”

“We can't find it.”

“The computer?”

“Yep.”

“Whose was it?”

“The government's, actually. But the dead girl used it at her job.”

“Why'd you need her computer?”

“She sent some e-mails that might be relevant. And she may have written some documents as well.”

“I hear you. Same question.”

“What do you mean?”

“Why do you need her computer?”

“To review that stuff.”

“You got her e-mail address?”

“Yes.”

“What's the ass end?”

“What's the
what
?”

“The part after the ‘at' symbol.”

He found his notes. “M-O-E-D,” he read, “dot-U-S-Courts-dot-G-O-V.”

Jumbo chuckled. “This might be your lucky day, Rebbe.”

“Why?”

“Sound to me like that gal's computer was hooked into the courthouse network.”

“Which means?”

“Which means you and me gonna have an interesting conversation tomorrow night. What time's dinner?”

CHAPTER 24

H
e crumpled the sheet of stationery and tossed it into the wastebasket with the other five crumpled sheets. He took out a fresh sheet, set it in front of him on the kitchen table, and wrote,
Dear Lauren:

He stared at the page.

You'll be turning 24 this Sunday,
he wrote.

A few days before his release from prison, his ex-wife's attorney delivered a letter to him warning that neither of his daughters wanted anything to do with him again. Ever. The hammer letter ended with a vague warning about unfortunate consequences if he ignored the express desires of his daughters. Nevertheless, he wrote each of them letters—always on their birthdays and on Rosh Hashanah, and occasionally one or two other times during the year. Lengthy letters. Always upbeat. Always supportive. None were ever answered. That didn't matter. Well, it did, but at least the letters didn't come back stamped “Return to Sender.” He'd wondered whether they read them. According to Dulcie, Lauren said she did.

He stared at the page, thinking how to phrase it. This time it was different.

Although every one of your birthdays is special for those who love you, this one is particularly special for me. Until last week at Professor Lorenz's clinic I hadn't seen you since your fourteenth birthday. I've thought about you, of course, and I've dreamed about you and prayed for you. But after all those years, it was difficult to picture you in my mind. I could still see you as you were on your fourteenth birthday, but what did you look like now? How had you grown? What had you become?

He paused, remembering again their brief encounter at the clinic, seeing again the young woman who'd last been his awkward eighth-grade daughter.

Now I know, and I am so proud.

He stared at that sentence, fighting the urge to crumple the sheet.

As if his being proud meant anything to her.

But maybe it did. He was still her father.

Shift the focus. This is her birthday, her special day.

Professor Lorenz told me about your work at the clinic. She thinks highly of you, Lauren.

Twenty-four, he thought.

He tried to remember his own twenty-fourth birthday.

When I turned 24, I was in law school, too. But I had little interest in helping the types of people you serve at your clinic. That was my failing—just the first of many.

He stared at that last sentence for a moment and then ran his pen through it:

That was my failing—just the first of many.

This was his daughter, and this was her birthday. He was debris from her past. She didn't need to be reminded of his failings, and he certainly didn't need to wallow in them for sympathy.

He set down the pen.

What the hell was the purpose of this letter? All of his prior birthday letters had been chatty and carefully undemanding. No guilt trips, no pleas for forgiveness, no attempts to force himself upon her or her big sister. Just an innocuous I'm-thinking-of-you. For her birthday two years ago he'd congratulated her on her acceptance to Washington University School of Law—a fact he'd learned from his ex-wife's attorneys, who'd sent him a payment schedule for tuition for Lauren's first year. For her last birthday, he'd included a few reminiscences from his first year of law school and offered some advice about things he'd wished someone had told him when he was going into law school. Of course, he wouldn't have paid any attention to such advice, and he assumed she didn't either.

But now, well, now he'd finally seen her. He'd been close enough to touch her. Everything had changed. The shame, the reticence, the uncertainty—they'd all given way to a simple longing to see her again. To sit with her. To talk with her about her day, about her plans, her hopes, her dreams.

Just to be with her.

Powerful feelings.

And, he reminded himself, feelings she might not share.

Who could blame her?

So don't come on strong.

I've gotten to know Professor Lorenz because she was friendly with another law student who worked at her clinic. That young woman died in an automobile accident a few years after graduation. I've filed a wrongful death action on her behalf. Professor Lorenz has been nice enough to help me with certain aspects of the case. She is an impressive person, and thus the fact she thinks so highly of you should make you proud.

The letter was getting away from him. They always seemed to.

I apologize if this seems disjointed, Lauren. I keep thinking how much I miss you and how much I love you and how sorry I am that I was such a lousy dad for you.

Too intense.

He glanced at the wastebasket and back at the letter.

Just bring it to a close,
he told himself. He'd spent nearly an hour on a letter that would take her less than a minute to read.

What's done is done, of course, and people move on with their lives, but that doesn't change the facts or make them any better. I'm proud that you haven't let that stuff get in your way. You were a wonderful little girl, Lauren, and you've become a wonderful young woman.

He toyed with suggesting they meet for coffee somewhere—nothing big, just to talk.

Not yet. Don't overwhelm her.

I hope you have a happy 24th birthday, Lauren. May this be a good year and a sweet year for you.

Love, Dad

After a moment, he folded the letter, slid it into the envelope, and opened the drawer to get a stamp.

CHAPTER 25

H
irsch stayed after the morning service to help the rabbi straighten up.

“You seem distracted,” Zev Saltzman said.

Hirsch was putting the prayer books into the slots along the backs of the seats. He turned toward the rabbi.

“I've been busy at work,” he said.

The rabbi nodded sympathetically. “A father's
yahrzeit
is never easy.”

“I suppose.”

He hadn't considered it. His mourning sexton function had become so routine that the list of names read aloud by the rabbi before he led the
minyan
in
Kaddish
didn't always register with him. Yesterday the list had included Hirsch's father, who'd died that day years ago. He'd known it was his father's
yahrzeit
, of course—indeed, he'd lighted a
yahrzeit
candle at his apartment—but he hadn't allowed himself to linger over the memories. There'd been too much else on his mind.

The rabbi turned off the shul lights, and they walked down the hall side by side.

Hirsch smiled as he thought of his father. It had sometimes seemed that Milton Hirsch spent most of his final two decades bragging to his friends and his optometry patients and even the checkout ladies at the supermarket about his son David-the-Harvard-lawyer. If Hirsch won an important case or landed a big client or delivered a speech at some bar association function, he would eventually hear about it from someone who'd spoken with his father. Although his father's continuous bragging was no doubt a bore, people seemed to tolerate it from someone as good-natured and modest as Milton Hirsch.

But the bragging ended with Hirsch's arrest, and a year after Hirsch entered prison, a massive heart attack sealed his father's lips forever. His mother, never one to miss an opportunity, wrote him in prison the day after the funeral. She wrote that his father died of a broken heart. She was dead as well, killed five years ago in an automobile accident in Florida.

We're orphans now,
his sister had written him after that funeral.

“David,” the rabbi said, pausing near his office, “I had a visit yesterday from a lawyer. He was asking questions about Abe Shifrin.”

That snapped him back to the present.

“A lawyer”

The rabbi nodded. “I thought you should know.”

“What kind of questions?”

“Mainly about his mental state.”

Hirsch tensed. “Who was the lawyer?”

“Felts, I think. Or maybe Folts. Something like that. He gave me his card.”

“Do you still have it?”

“In my desk. Come with me.”

He followed Saltzman into his cluttered, book-lined office. The rabbi walked behind his desk, pulled open the top drawer, and lifted out a business card.

“Here you go.”

He handed the card to Hirsch.

KENNETH M. FELTS, ESQ.
ATTORNEY AT LAW

According to the address, his office was in Clayton, a busy suburb of St. Louis and the county seat.

Hirsch asked, “What did he want to know about Abe Shifrin's mental condition?”

“He asked if I'd observed any decline in his mental functions. Did he seem more forgetful than before? Less focused? Less organized? That sort of thing.”

“What did you tell him?”

“I told him that I hadn't observed any big changes. I explained that Abe didn't come to services as often as he once had, and thus we didn't have an opportunity to spend much time together. I suggested that he talk with you. I explained that you were representing him in a lawsuit. He seemed to know about your lawsuit already.”

“Did he tell you why he was asking these questions?”

“I asked him that very question. He told me he was representing Abe's sister, Hannah. Hannah Goldenberg. He said she was worried about her brother, especially his mental condition. He said he'd been retained to help her out.”

“That's how he put it? ‘Been retained'? Not retained by her?”

Saltzman thought back. “I'm pretty sure he said ‘been retained.'”

Hirsch stared at the business card as he mulled it over.

He didn't know for sure, of course, but he'd been in enough of these litigation chess matches to sense what might be afoot on the other side of the board. Marvin Guttner may have just moved another dangerous piece into position. He ran through his options—none of them promising. Just a matter of time now.

He handed the card back to Saltzman and stood up. “Thanks, Rabbi.”

“You're welcome, David. I thought you might want to know about it.”

Saltzman walked him to the front door.

“David,” he said as Hirsch put on his coat, “is there anything else bothering you?”

Hirsch concentrated on buttoning his coat as he weighed his response.

Anything else?
he said to himself.
How much time do you have?

He glanced at the rabbi, and suddenly he was too weary to be sardonic. Saltzman was a good man, a gentle rabbi who studied the Talmud and visited the sick and worked patiently with the bar mitzvah students. But he was no Pinky. Hirsch knew he would never find another Pinky.

“David?”

“I'm okay,” Hirsch said. “Just a lot going on.”

Walking across the parking lot toward his car, he smiled as he thought again of Pincus Green. It was a sad smile.

Oh, Pinky,
he thought,
I could use some of your guidance.

Pinky had been the Allenwood Jewish chaplain—a young Conservative rabbi who made the three-hour drive from Philadelphia once a week to meet with the handful of Jewish inmates. At the warden's urging, Pinky scheduled a session with Hirsch, who'd been stuck in what the prison psychiatrist diagnosed as a mild depression.

Hirsch had entered that first session with low expectations, made even lower when he saw the young rabbi, who perfectly matched Hirsch's stereotype: short, pudgy, bearded, thick eyeglasses, wrinkled dark suit. Hirsch told him right off that he was wasting his time. He didn't believe in God, he used to observe the High Holidays on his country club golf course, and the closest he'd ever come to a spiritual experience inside a synagogue was when his wife's cousin Arlene from Scottsdale gave him a blow job in a darkened classroom down the hall during the
kiddush
luncheon following his eldest daughter's bat mitzvah. He'd intentionally used the phrase
blow job,
determined to repel the young rabbi.

But Pinky had listened with an expression of mild amusement. When Hirsch finished, Pinky assured him that God was losing no sleep over whether David Hirsch believed in Him, that there were worse venues than a golf course for confronting your shortcomings on the Day of Atonement, and that a blow job from a casual acquaintance was nothing compared to one from the woman you loved.

“But enough about
shtupping,
David. They tell me you're from St. Louis. Let's talk about those Cardinals of yours.”

Which is exactly what they did for the first few sessions. Pinky Green was a consummate sports fan whose encyclopedic knowledge far exceeded Hirsch's. Although the rabbi was not even born in 1964 when the Cardinals slid the pennant out from under the slumping Phillies, he knew the game-by-game details of the late-season swoon of his beloved team.

Gradually, the rabbi steered the focus of their meetings from sports to Judaism, and Hirsch, to his surprise, responded. Within a year, he was lighting the candles on Friday night and reciting the
Shabbas
blessings. By the time of his parole, he was keeping kosher, wearing a
kippah,
and studying Hebrew. For reasons he couldn't quite articulate, he'd found solace in the rituals and the teachings of the religion. Even so, he was troubled by his continuing doubts in God's existence.

“God is patient,” Pinky had assured him during their final session, just two days before Hirsch's release. “He'll wait for you to come home, David.”

A year later, while in Israel visiting his sister and her family, Pinky was killed when a suicide bomber blew himself up inside a Jerusalem café.

Hirsch unlocked his car door.

Well, Pinky,
he thought, glancing upward,
is God still waiting for me?