“I thought this was a Conservative synagogue,” Carella said. “That sounds like Orthodox practice to me.”
“Well, he’s an old man,” Meyer said. “I guess the customs die hard.”
“The way the rabbi did,’ Carella said grimly.
3
They stood outside in the alley where chalk marks outlined the position of the dead body. The rabbi had been carted away, but his blood still stained the cobblestones, and the rampant paint had been carefully sidestepped by the laboratory boys searching for footprints and fingerprints, searching for anything which would provide a lead to the killer.
“J,” the wall read.
“You know, Steve, I feel funny on this case,’Meyer told Carella.
“I do, too.”
Meyer raised his eyebrows, somewhat surprised. “How come?”
“I don’t know. I guess because he was a man of God.” Carella shrugged. “There’s something unworldly and naive and — pure, I guess — about rabbis and priests and ministers and I guess I feel they shouldn’t be touched by all the dirty things in life.” He paused. “Somebody’s got to stay untouched, Meyer.”
“Maybe so,” Meyer paused. “I feel funny because I’m a Jew, Steve.” His voice was very soft. He seemed to be confessing something he would not have admitted to another living soul.
“I can understand that,” Carella said gently.
“Are you policemen?”
The voice startled them. It came suddenly from the other end of the alley, and they both whirled instantly to face it.
Instinctively, Meyer’s hand reached for the service revolver holstered in his right rear pocket.
“Are you policemen?” the voice asked again. It was a woman’s voice, thick with a Yiddish accent. The street lamp was behind the owner of the voice. Meyer and Carella saw only a frail figure clothed in black, pale white hands clutched to the breast of the black coat, pinpoints of light burning where the woman’s eyes should have been.
“We’re policemen,” Meyer answered. His hand hovered near the butt of his pistol. Beside him, he could feel Carella tensed for a draw.
“I know who killed the rov? the woman said.
“What?” Carella asked.
“She says she knows who killed the rabbi,’ Meyer whispered in soft astonishment.
His hand dropped to his side. They began walking toward the street end of the alley. The woman stood there motionless, the light behind her, her face in shadow, the pale hands still,, her eyes burning.
“Who killed him?” Carella said.
“I know the rotsayach” the woman answered. “I know the murderer.”
“Who?” Carella said again.
“Him!” the woman shouted, and she pointed to the painted white J on the synagogue wall. “The sonei Yisroel! Him!”
“The anti-Semite,” Meyer translated. “She says the anti-Semite did it.”
They had come abreast of the woman now. The three stood at the end of the alley with the street lamp casting long shadows on the cobbles. They could see her face. Black hair and brown eyes, the classic Jewish face of a woman in her fifties, the beauty stained by age and something else, a fine-drawn tension hidden in her eyes and on her mouth.
“What anti-Semite?” Carella asked. He realized he was whispering. There was something about the woman’s face and the blackness of her coat and the paleness of her hands which made whispering a necessity.
“On the next block,” she said. Her voice was a voice of judgment and doom. “The one they call Finch.”
“You saw him kill the rabbi?” Carella asked. “You saw him do it?”
“No.” She paused. “But I know in my heart that he’s the one ...”
“What’s your name, ma’am?” Meyer asked.
“Hannah Kaufman,” she said. “I know it was him. He said he would do it, and now he has started.”
“He said he would do what?” Meyer asked the old woman patiently.
“He said he would kill all the Jews.”
“You heard him say this?”
“Everyone has heard him.”
“His name is Finch?” Meyer asked her. “You’re sure?”
“Finch,” the woman said. “On the next block. Over the candy store.”
“What do you think?” he asked Carella.
Carella nodded. “Let’s try him.”
4
If America is a melting pot, the 87th Precinct is a crucible. Start at the River Harb, the northernmost boundary of the precinct territory, and the first thing you hit is exclusive Smoke Rise, where the walled-in residents sit in white-Protestant respectability in houses set a hundred feet back from private roads, admiring the greatest view the city has to offer. Come out of Smoke Rise and hit fancy Silvermine Road where the aristocracy of apartment buildings have begun to submit to the assault of time and the encroachment of the surrounding slums. Forty-thousand-dollar-a-year executives still live in these apartment buildings, but people write on the walls here, too: limericks, prurient slogans, which industrious doormen try valiantly to erase.
There is nothing so eternal as Anglo-Saxon etched in graphite.
Silvermine Park is south of the Road, and no one ventures there at night. During the day, the park is thronged with governesses idly chatting about the last time they saw Sweden, gently rocking shellacked blue baby buggies. But after sunset, not even lovers will enter the park. The Stem, further south, explodes the moment the sun leaves the sky. Gaudy and incandescent, it mixes Chinese restaurants with Jewish delicatessens, pizza joints with Greek cabarets offering belly dancers. Threadbare as a beggar’s sleeve, Ainsley Avenue crosses the center of the precinct, trying to maintain a dignity long gone, crowding the sidewalks with austere but dirty apartment buildings, furnished rooms, garages and a sprinkling of sawdust saloons. Culver Avenue turns completely Irish with the speed of a leprechaun. The faces, the bars, even the buildings seem displaced, seem to have been stolen and transported from the center of Dublin; but no lace curtains hang in the windows. Poverty turns a naked face to the streets here, setting the pattern for the rest of the precinct territory. Poverty rakes the backs of the Culver Avenue Irish, claws its way onto the white and tan and brown and black faces of the Puerto Ricans lining Mason Avenue, flops onto the beds of the whores of La Via de Putas, and then pushes its way into the real crucible, the city side streets where different minority groups live cheek by jowl, as close as lovers, hating each other. It is here that Puerto Rican and Jew, Italian and Negro, Irishman and Cuban are forced by dire economic need to live in a ghetto which, by its very composition, loses definition and becomes a meaningless tangle of unrelated bloodlines.
Rabbi Solomon’s synagogue was on the same street as a Catholic church. A Baptist store-front mission was on the avenue leading to the next block. The candy store over which the man named Finch lived was owned by a Puerto Rican whose son had been a cop — a man named Hernandez.
Carella and Meyer paused in the lobby of the building and studied the name plates in the mailboxes. There were eight boxes in the row. Two had name plates. Three had broken locks. The man named Finch lived in apartment thirty-three on the third floor.
The lock on the vestibule door was broken. From behind the stairwell, where the garbage cans were stacked before being put out for collection in the morning, the stink of that evening’s dinner remains assailed the nostrils and left the detectives mute until they had gained the first-floor landing.
On the way up to the third floor, Carella said, “This seems too easy, Meyer. It’s over before it begins.”