“No.”
“So now I know why you have no faith. Somehow, I don’t know how, but somehow we will find that too. But first we find this crook Stocker, agreed?” He smiled warmly and was back to being jolly Morris Kapustin. He took out a bundle of pages and looked through them quickly. “What was this Windward Enterprises thing you have so much papers about?” he asked.
“That was Stocker’s own stab at real estate syndication. It didn’t take and a lot of people lost money.”
“Windward is a funny name for such a business.”
“I hadn’t thought about it,” I said.
“Maybe he was a sailor of some sort,” said Beth.
“This one,” he said wagging a finger at Beth, “this one has sechel. Are you married, by any chance?”
“No, I’m not,” said Beth.
He turned to her and his face brightened with interest. “Are you perhaps Jewish?”
“No, I’m sorry, Mr. Kapustin. But I do eat kasha at the deli.”
“That’s something at least. Accht, too bad. Not for you, of course, but…” He sighed deeply and wearily. “You see, I have a son. He’s in the business with me.” His shoulders dropped from the burden. “What could I do, he needed a job.” He waved his hand. “So what for am I hocking your tchynik? This sailor thing is a good possibility. He might have run off with a boat. Generally they run off with a woman and not their wives most often you wouldn’t believe. But with sailors, they sometimes run off with a boat. Me, I never understood that one inch.”
“There are not many Jewish sailors,” I said.
“You may be right, but the amount of Jews who think they are sailors, don’t even try to count that high, you give your brain a hernia. What time do you have on your watch, Victor?”
“Ten forty-seven,” I said,
He put his watch to his ear. “It’s stopping again. I have to leave, quickly, one more appointment for this day.” He pushed himself out of the chair. “Kramer. A set of earrings is missing, gone. It’s only him and his wife, so where are the earrings? You tell me, I don’t know myself. But I know Mrs. Kramer, she doesn’t clean. Even with her first husband, Kimmelman, and he wasn’t a jeweler, he had a small grocery with no money anywhere and still she wouldn’t clean. So who cleaned the earrings? That I must know.”
“We have a deadline in this case, Mr. Kapustin.” I said.
“Always complications. So how much time do you have? Six months?”
“Three weeks.”
“Three weeks, Victor, I can’t find the toilet in three weeks.”
“Three weeks, Mr. Kapustin.”
“Call me Morris. Okay, three weeks. But don’t now be expecting miracles. Vos vet sein, vet sein. I’ll start first thing Sunday morning doing the search.”
“What about tomorrow?”
“On the Shabbos, Victor? Never a shoe did your grandfather sell, Victor, on the Shabbos, that you know. But I should be working on the Shabbos? You’re insulting me now.”
“Okay,” I said. “First thing Sunday morning.”
“By the way, Victor. I didn’t want to mention it but now that we’re friends, that eye of yours. What happened, nu?”
“A little accident.”
“You know, a slice of gefilte, not too thin, from the refrigerator with the jelly. It works nice.”
“Thank you, I’ll try it,” I said, without the slightest intention of putting a slice of gefilte fish on my face.
He pointed a stubby finger at me. “You won’t listen to me, I know, Victor, I can see it. What does an old fat man know about anything, you think. Put some gefilte in mine eye and I look like a fool, you think. But why you should be caring so much how you look is beyond me, Victor. Be your own man. For sixty-six years such has been my secret. So I’m not wearing the newest fashions. Thin ties, wide ties, Victor, I wear mine ties and that has always been good enough. So the gefilte, you try it, you’ll see.”
I looked at Morris as he prepared to leave, gathering the papers into a messy pile and shoving it all into the file, grabbing his coat with both arms. A short sloppy Jew who wasn’t embarrassed to be a short sloppy Jew. I would try the slice of gefilte fish on my eye. I’d buy a bottle at the deli. Who knew? And suddenly I didn’t like the fact that I was being told what to do by Prescott and Moore and Chuckie and the demonic Mr. Rogers, that I was being played like a puppet as I reached for what was being dangled. How was it that someone like Morris Kapustin could be his own man but that it was impossible for me? Fuck them all. Rogers had told me that I was in the middle of something that I couldn’t understand and I didn’t like that one bit. And Chuckie had told me I was already as good as wasted and I didn’t like that one bit either. So maybe I’d check out some of the things I had been told by Prescott and Moore, just to be sure. So maybe I wouldn’t float safely through this cold and rainy fall, maybe I’d fight the current and lift up my head to look around and figure out some things.
“Before you go, Mr. Kapustin,” I said.
He turned. “Such respect I can’t take, it makes me want to dress better and who needs so many suits. Call me Morris.”
“All right, Morris.” I reached into my top drawer and took out the chip with the wild boar’s head on it that I had snatched from Bissonette’s love chest. “Have you ever seen anything like this before?”
Morris dropped his coat on a chair, stepped up to my desk, and took the chip. He put on his glasses and examined it carefully in his small, fat hands. “This is a casino chip, like in Atlantic City, but with no name and this picture. This is a very strange thing here. Every other chip like this I’ve seen, it had the casino name on it. That’s so you know where to take back your money, what little money you have left. And still they line up for the buses. Who can explain that to me? And Rosalie now has started. She plays blacktop. I would forbid it, absolutely forbid it, except that she brings home more than she takes.”
“Could you try to find out what it is?”
“I could. Is this something to do with Mr. Stocker, the thief?”
“No, it’s a different case.”
“A different case?” He lifted his head and gave me a flash of genuine smile. “So, I think maybe you gained a little faith today, Victor. A little faith in Morris Kapustin. No?”
20
I WAS SLEEPING, or trying to in any event, feeling a painful pressure on my eye as I burrowed my head into my pillows, the tangy sweet smell of gefilte fish still clinging to my skin, when the buzzer rang. I groped for the clock radio and read the blue-green fluorescent numbers: 2:38. In a heartbeat I jerked awake, remembering that I had been twice threatened with serious harm only a few nights before. I imagined a horde of drug dealing thugs outside my apartment ready to rip out my spleen and decided not to answer the buzzer, but it rang again and then again and so I dared a look out my window. The street was empty and wet, glazed with a heavy rain. I lived in a brownstone converted long ago to apartments and there was no intercom between the small vestibule, where the mailboxes and buzzers were, and my apartment. The only way to know who was buzzing was to go downstairs and see. I pulled on a pair of jeans that had been lying on my floor and carefully, like a cat burglar, slipped down the steps of my own building to get a look at my late-night visitor through the inside vestibule door.
Veronica Ashland.
She was wearing a tan raincoat and jeans, her brown hair falling flatly in damp strands. The mascara under her eyes was thick from the rain, or was it tears, I couldn’t tell just then, but her eyes were red and her lips thick, as if she had been crying. I searched the vestibule behind her. She was alone. Without opening the door I shouted, “What are you doing here?”