Her voice sinks to a whisper. “I think they liked him because he was such a star. The one and only reason. He was their golden boy.”
“You think?”
“Of course. And they didn’t care what he talked about either, so long as he was out there on Friday nights performing.”
“He packed the house, huh?”
“Packed the house? You never heard him, did you? He had a voice like a poet. Like Mario Lanza, like Harry Belafonte. Of course he didn’t sing. For that we have a cantor. But you know what I’m saying? A golden boy. When people heard him open his mouth, everything came to a halt, let me tell you. You could hear a pin.”
I take a seat opposite her desk. “Okay,” I tell her, “you’ve got my attention. What’d he talk about on Friday night?”
She paused, looking for just the right words. “I’m no scholar, I’m just an old woman who works here. Twenty-seven years. It’s not forever, sure. But that doesn’t mean I don’t have opinions.”
“Let’s hear them, then,” I say.
“My opinions? Okay. This is what I know—” She points solemnly to her bosom. “In my heart. Rabbi Ezra, le sholem, had a vision. He was always so restless, you understand, always searching. It’s not easy to have a vision, Mr. Parisman. Not everyone appreciates. A few of our congregants thought he said crazy things sometimes. They would come up to me now and then after services and whisper in my ear. But he wasn’t crazy at all.”
“So what’s your diagnosis?”
She smiles, pulls her glasses gently away from her face. “I think he thought about things too much. I think he was obsessed. But obsessed is not crazy, is it?” I start to respond, but she doesn’t wait for an answer. “He could behave perfectly well in the world. It was just that he was trapped by a dream. And that dream meant he was never going to be satisfied, not with the old Judaism, at least.”
“The old Judaism?”
“Well, of course, now we’re so splintered everywhere, there are many brands of Judaism. A spectrum, the rabbi used to say. Conservative, Reform, Orthodox, Reconstruction, whatever that is. But the core belief—the gist—is pretty much the same no matter what shul you go to, nu?”
“I don’t belong to any temple, Mrs. Applebaum.”
“Fine,” she says. “Fine, nebich. Never mind. Be a lone wolf. But you understand what I’m saying. Even the kids outside this door—” She points quietly to the hall where I’d just come from—“they think they have the answer. They’re sure, in fact. According to them, it’s all right there in the Torah.”
“And it’s not?”
She rolls her eyes. “All I’m saying is, you should take some time. Sit down and be still and read his sermons. Especially the last three or four. The man had a vision. I’m just a secretary, of course, I’m not learned like he was, but even I could tell.”
She opens the middle drawer to the file cabinet and pulls out a sheaf of paper. “Here,” she says, “I’ll make you copies. You don’t need to bring them back.” She rises and feeds them methodically into the copier. “This will take a few minutes, Mr. Parisman. You want to poke around in the meantime, feel free. Our rabbi had nothing to hide.”
It’s not such a large room. Not much bigger than my office at home. There are the usual tomes I’d expect to find in any rabbi’s work space—Torah and Talmud, along with endless commentary, and many of his own notes penciled into the margins. But he didn’t limit himself, I notice. Everywhere you turn there are things you wouldn’t expect—dog-eared paperbacks on psychology and philosophy strewn around, a pile of old New Yorker magazines, a biography of Martin Buber, a collection of Hannah Arendt’s essays, and some tattered Primo Levi. There’s a solid shelf’s worth of twentieth-century fiction—Lolita and On the Road and The Tin Drum and Midnight’s Children. On the carpet to the left of his leather chair is an impressive stack of used books—a hodgepodge of Egyptian archaeology and old-Hollywood film memoirs. Mrs. Applebaum hasn’t tried to organize any of this, I see. Maybe she tried once and was reprimanded. Maybe this is how she wants the rabbi to be remembered.
He has a few silver-framed family photos on the desk—his wife and daughters. From the looks of them I’d guess they were taken a long time ago. One of a five- or six-year-old girl. She’s got a tutu on, and she’s in the middle of a wild, passionate leap across a stage. Another girl in a ponytail is curled up with a cat on her lap, and there’s also a third one, a black-and-white close-up of a teenager brooding into the camera.
“How’re his kids doing?” I ask.
She gives me a you-can’t-be-serious look. “How would you expect, Mr. Detective? They’re dancing in the street.”
“Sorry.”
“We’re all sorry. We’re all heartsick, really. I spoke with his wife, Miriam, yesterday afternoon. His widow, I mean. She’s sad, sure, but I can already hear it in her voice, she’s making the best of a terrible situation. And she’ll come back. It’ll take a while, but you mark my words—she’ll be okay.”
“That’s good to hear.” I pick up the photograph of Miriam. Not a raving beauty, but there’s an ancient kindness in her eyes and a strong, knowing smile. She seems durable, tested. What every rabbi’s wife should be. I set the picture down, gently adjust the angle. “It’s been what—ten days? So they’re done sitting shivah. Everybody’s gone home. In my book, that’s when the real mourning starts.”
Mrs. Applebaum doesn’t respond to this, and for a while we’re both knotted up inside our own personal memories of loss. I can still see my mother the moment she died. She was lying on her hospital bed. The light was streaming in through the Venetian blinds. There were tubes and catheters and things but she wasn’t in any pain. Not anymore. It was early, five in the morning, but there was no such thing as time. Loretta and I were crouched silently beside her, and I was holding her hand and she was smiling. She’d stopped talking days before. Every couple of minutes, I would put some shaved ice into her mouth to keep her comfortable. She was breathing, but it was shallow and uneven. Then she sort of turned away and half-closed her eyes, like she meant to take a nap. And that was it. I was holding her hand, and I felt a flutter of tiny pulses in her fingertips. It was so beautiful and so very odd, as if some anonymous workman, a janitor, was strolling methodically, room by room, through a large empty building flicking off the lights. And when the pulsing stopped, I glanced up at her face and I knew.
“I realize you’ve got a job to do, but I wouldn’t go see them just yet,” Mrs. Applebaum says. She’s standing behind her desk and she’s muttering to herself as much as she’s talking to me. “Wait. They’re not ready. It’d be like opening up the wound all over again.”
“You don’t have to worry. It was never my intention.”
She pulls the sheaf of papers from the copying machine, staples each sermon together in the upper left-hand corner, slips them into a manila folder, and presents it to me. Nice and neat and organized. “Here. Read. This will tell you all you need to know about the man.”
I thank her and head for the door. When I step outside again, it’s just past noon and the light on La Brea is intense. There are no shadows anywhere. The homeless man, the man with the greasy hair and the rheumy eyes and the red bandana, the man who could be God, has vanished. I unlock the car door and as I do, I notice something glinting back at me from the hood. I pick it up, turn it over gently in my hand.
Someone has left me a bright shiny bullet.
Chapter 6
UP UNTIL THE TIME you’re thirty, you’re pretty much invincible. Nothing but blue sky, that’s what most folks think anyway. If they think at all. That’s why they always like guys under thirty in the military. After