I don’t bother arguing. Hopefully, Larry will gloss over the fact that I failed to realize Saul was no longer an active member of the force when I used him as an NYPD source. After all, it makes the paper look bad, too.
Morgan turns to me. “You write up the story about the boyfriend and the divorce. Mike, make sure photo gets the image. Rebekah is on the family and the Shomrim tomorrow. Confirm a financial connection. Have the NYPD comment on their relationship with the group. Do they train them? What’s the deal? And get the family on the record about the murder investigation. Who do they think did it? Are they worried it won’t get solved?”
I pull out my notebook to scribble his directions. He continues.
“Ms. Roberts, you have not yet lost your position here. But consider yourself on probation. Larry, you’re lead on this. Update me tomorrow.”
After Morgan leaves, Larry and I follow Mike back to the city desk and we sit down at two computers no one is using. I flip through my notes as I wait for the machine to boot up. These PCs were out of date when I started college.
“So,” says Larry, “who do you think did it?”
I hesitate. “I’ve been thinking the husband. She was dumped in his yard. She was cheating. These people don’t take stepping out of line lightly. And infidelity is totally unacceptable in women, from what I can tell. Like, automatic loss of custody of the kids. I tried to talk to the husband, and he scared the shit out of me. He looked desperate. And the people I talked to, the other outsiders, they said he threatened her. Said he’d take her kids away, shun her, that sort of thing. They said he was really angry. And this was, like, a week or two before she died.”
“What did Saul think?” asks Larry. “Did he say anything? He was feeding you information, but was it to send you in the wrong direction?”
“I didn’t feel like he had a direction,” I say. It’s nice to be able to bounce what I’ve learned off Larry. Unlike some of the old-timers I’ve met, he seems genuinely interested in his work, despite the fact that he’s probably been doing it for more than three decades. I bet I can learn a lot from him. “He never speculated on who might have killed her. Just that he was sure the department was fucking it up. Not interviewing people. Kowtowing to the community.” I tell Larry who the man Saul assaulted was, and why he said he did what he did. “Obviously, the assault didn’t make the papers, but I don’t remember reading anything about a rabbi sex scandal either,” I say. “Did we cover it?”
“We wrote a short piece on the initial arrest,” he says. “And another when the charges were dropped. I’ll see if I can get confirmation on the name of the man he assaulted, though I doubt I’ll be able to connect the two cases tonight. What’s your plan for tomorrow?”
“I think I can get some good information from Miriam, Aron Mendelssohn’s sister. She and her husband live in the same house as the Mendelssohns. And she was there when the husband threatened Rivka. Apparently she got really upset about the whole thing.”
“Will she talk to you?”
“She’s already talked to me a little,” I say. “Now I have more information to go at her with. Even if she doesn’t give me details, maybe she’ll confirm stuff.”
“Okay,” says Larry. “You go to Borough Park tomorrow. But everything has to be on the record. First and last names. The department is embarrassed and they’re going to be on everything you say. If you give them a chance to make you look bad, they’ll take it. Get it on tape if you can. Start small. Be accurate. That’s the most important thing. If all this shit you think is true is true, you’ve got weeks of stories on this. Maybe more. You’re going to write up what you got from her friends now, but what’s the story for tomorrow? What can you get by four P.M.?”
“I can talk to the family. Get their take on the investigation. And ask about their connection to Shomrim.”
“Okay. I’ll work on Saul, and getting an official cause of death for Rivka. If the cops don’t have that, they don’t have anything. So we’re set?”
I nod.
“Good,” he says, and stands up. “You’ve got everybody’s attention here, Rebekah. Yesterday I didn’t know who you were. Neither did Albert Morgan. Personally, I think you’ve done some great work. But this could still turn out pretty bad for you. Could turn out good, too. Real good. A big story like this will impress people. Just get it right. And get it on the record.”
Larry leaves. I take out my notebook and type my earlier draft into the system. To what I already have from Sara Wyman about Rivka’s dead child and the fact that she was questioning her marriage and the rules of the community, I add the bits about Aron Mendelssohn threatening Rivka and Suri’s comments about how Rivka wanted Coney Island to be a “sacred space.” I send the draft to Mike.
“Rebekah!” he shouts moments later from behind his cloth cubicle wall. I jog over. “It’s way too long. We only have seven inches.”
I watch as he hacks the story to pieces with the DELETE key.
The woman whose body was found naked in a Brooklyn scrap pile Friday wanted to divorce her wealthy husband, but was afraid she’d lose her children, according to multiple friends.
“Even if she was granted a divorce by the rabbi, Hasidic women rarely retain custody,” said Sara Wyman, a social worker and former member of the Hasidic community to which Rivka Mendelssohn belonged.
Two weeks before the 30-year-old mother-of-four’s death, friends say that her older husband, Aron Mendelssohn, confronted her about an affair and physically assaulted her in a “safe” house for ultra-Orthodox Jews in Coney Island.
“He grabbed her,” says Devorah Kletzky, 22. “He was yelling in her face. He said he’d see her shunned.”
Wyman and Kletzky both told the Tribune exclusively that Mendelssohn had begun “questioning” her rigid Orthodox life after the tragic death of her infant daughter, Shoshanna, last year.
Wyman said she had “no idea” how Mendelssohn could have met such a gruesome end. “I just hope the police find who did this-she didn’t deserve to die so young.”
Police have made no arrests in Mendelssohn’s murder. A gardener for the family was questioned and released over the weekend.
It’s all technically accurate, but lacks any context or background. Mike presses a button and sends the story to the copy desk.
“Call in with what you have on the family and the Jewish cops before four tomorrow,” he says. And then, without looking at me: “Good luck.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
By the time I walk out of the Trib building, it is nearly ten o’clock, but just as I’m walking down into the F train to go home, Sara Wyman calls.
“Can you meet?” she asks.
“Now? Where?”
“There’s an all-night diner on Flatbush. I’m bringing someone I think you should meet.”
I walk across Fiftieth Street to the 1 train, and forty minutes later I’m back in Brooklyn. Sara Wyman is already at the diner when I arrive. Sitting beside her is Malka, from the funeral home.
“Thank you for meeting us,” says Sara. Her hair is a wild, rumbled mess of hat-head and her eyeglasses are hanging on a beaded chain around her neck. Malka looks polished and prim, just like she did in the basement of the funeral home.
“You are the reporter?” asks Malka as I sit down. She looks uncomfortable.