“Find out who it is, Rita.”
Over the phone I could hear her ask, “Who are you, anyway?” and the mumble of an answer.
“Morris Kapustin,” she said.
“Oh, right, the private eye.”
“Funny. He doesn’t look like a private eye,” Rita said over the phone, and, as usual, Rita was right.
Morris Kapustin was a short, very heavy man with a long beard peppered gray and a wide-brimmed black hat. He wore a suit badly and he was sweating badly and he breathed with the slight wheeze common to the badly overweight. From out of his pants, over his belt, flowed four sets of cotton strings. He flapped his arms as he walked into the office and without my asking he let out a high pitched “Whoooh” and dropped into a chair across from me. He sat down so hard a clock on my desk rattled on its base. His little feet barely touched the floor as he sat. He took off his black hat and wiped his forehead with a crumpled and stained handkerchief. Atop his mass of disheveled hair was a yarmulke.
“This office, it never heard from elevators? I’m shvitzing from the stairs. And it’s October, yet. If it was July you’d have to wring out the carpet. Morris Kapustin. And you’re Carl?”
“I’m Victor Carl,” I said, reaching out to shake his damp, pudgy hand. He lightly squeezed the ends of my fingers.
“Accht, that Benny. I didn’t mean to be rude, forgive me, I thought Carl was your first name. All Benny said was that I should meet his lawyer, Carl, at ten on Friday. I thought Carl was the lawyer’s first name. That Benny, I love him, but sometimes he’s so farchadat it is a miracle he doesn’t walk into a bus.”
“That’s all right. This is my partner, Beth Derringer.” He didn’t shake her hand.
“I’m pleased that I should meet you both. Especially the pretty lady, no offense to you, Carl. No, Victor, right? No offense to you, Victor, but in mine business, all day it’s grumpy old men shouting about thieves. It’s enough to give a headache the size of Pittsburgh. Accht, you don’t want to hear mine tsouris. Benny Lefkowitz said that you needed help. He didn’t tell me the what for. That Benny, he’s read too much Philip Marlowe. He’s always yelling after me, ‘Off to catch the crooks, hey, Morris?’ I say yes, when really all I’m after is a pastrami on rye. He’s lucky to have such a business, Benny, and the money he makes, it hurts just to think it, but he likes to imagine I lead a glamorous life, so I let him.”
He wiped his forehead again with the handkerchief, looking as glamorous as a piece of herring.
“I need a towel is what I need,” he said. “They should make for me a handkerchief towel. Such an idea, a handkerchief of terry cloth, for shtik fetah like me who shvitz even in October. I have family in the shmatte business, I know from what I’m talking. We’ll make a fortune, just the three of us.” He turned to Beth and winked. “We’ll retire to Haifa, sit on our balcony all day, catch a breeze off the Mediterranean, sip slivovitz out of clean little glasses. Don’t tell anyone our idea, the gonifs will steal it in a second. A second. I know, I have family in the business. Bigger crooks they don’t have on post office walls. Now, Victor, Benny said I should be meeting with you. So we’re meeting.”
“I think there may have been a mistake.”
“We weren’t supposed to meet today? I wrote it down, I thought, but he spoke to me only yesterday.” He reached into his suit jacket with his right hand, pulling out a little black notebook, while at the same time he searched an inside pocket with his left hand, extracting a pair of wire glasses, the ends of which he slipped over his ears. With a lick of his thumb he started through the notebook. It was as disheveled as he, loose papers of every sort poking out from its covers. “Morris, Morris, you’re growing so famisht, Morris. I was certain it was today.”
“No, Mr. Kapustin, our meeting was for today. You were right about that. But I don’t think you’re going to be able to help us.”
“Good, I was right about the day. Sometimes there’s so much it’s hard to keep track, and I get more and more confused. But at least I was right about the day, at least that. It’s been a week, you don’t want to know about mine week, believe me, so I thought the mistake it was maybe mine, but no. See, right here.” He poked at a loose piece of paper. “Ten o’clock, Friday. Carl. Now that’s cleared up. Good.” He closed the book and took off his glasses and stared at me with a squint. “So, Carl, tell me exactly why I won’t be able to help you.”
“What we needed,” I said, “was to find a man who doesn’t want to be found.”
“Such luck you’re in, then, that’s what I do. What I do, Victor, what Benny thinks is so glamorous, is that I find people, swindlers, crooks, gonifs who have taken off with a diamond or an emerald or the money from a cash register. You wouldn’t believe how many times a jeweler unwraps his diamond and finds it’s been switched. These are professionals, too. There is something about the way it shines, I don’t know, but it attracts thieves, all out to steal from each other. Not Benny of course, he’s an edel mensch, but the others. Me, I never cared so much for diamonds. Too easy to lose, I know. Mine wife, Rosalie, don’t even try to buy her a diamond. She doesn’t want to know from diamonds, Rosalie. Zero coupon bonds, yes. Diamonds, no. So Victor, this man you’re looking for, he’s a swindler?”
“Yes, actually.”
“Well, then, there’s no such mistake, no such mistake at all. Tell me who he is, what he did, his friends, everything you know, and I’ll find him. I’m no Houdini, but then who did Houdini ever find, huh?”
“But the fellow we’re looking for, Mr. Kapustin, is not Jewish.”
“Good. It hurts me here,” he pounded his chest, “whenever it’s a Jew I’m looking for, and you wouldn’t believe me if I told you how many times I been hurt right here. It’s a sin. And you know who I blame? Accht, you don’t want to know.”
“Mr. Kapustin, with all due respect, I just don’t think this job is for you.”
“No?”
“To be honest, I didn’t realize when Mr. Lefkowitz gave me your name that you were an Orthodox Jew. I guess working in the jewelry business, in which a lot of Orthodox Jews are involved, it makes sense because you can move within that world. But we’re not looking for a Hassid here.”
He leaned forward. “Believe me when I tell you this. It’s not only the Jews who steal. When it comes to stealing we’re such pisherkeh, the things we can still learn. You’ll be glad to know, Mr. Victor, that Morris Kapustin does not just find Jews. You name it and Morris Kapustin has found it. Just last week, an Armenian boy, cleaning up at Grossman’s, grabbed from the register and ran. I found him in Teaneck, Teaneck of all places. Who would think, an Armenian thief in Teaneck.”
“I’m sorry, Mr. Kapustin,” I said. “We’ll find a different agency to hire. Thank you for understanding.”
“Wait just a moment, Mr. Kapustin,” said Beth.
“A moment I have,” he said.
Beth pulled me outside my office. We left Morris Kapustin sitting in the chair, staring out my narrow window, pulling distractedly at his beard. Beth closed the door behind us and turned loose a fierce expression on me.
“What are you doing?” she whispered angrily.
“I’ll get someone else, one of those high-tech private eye firms that advertise in the Legal.”
“You’re not going to give him the job because he’s a Jew?”
“It’s not in his field. Our guy is in Buenos Aires somewhere, not Crown Heights.”
“I don’t think that’s it at all, Victor. He’s as qualified as anyone. But you don’t like the way he looks, do you?”