“I see. So you painted until sundown Friday?”
“Right.”
“And then you came back Saturday morning?”
“Right. But what it was, the windows needed a lot of putty, and the sills needed scraping and sanding, so by sundown Saturday, I still wasn’t finished with the job. I had a talk with the priest, who said he was about to go inside and pray, and could I come back after services to finish off the job? I told him I had a better idea. I would come back Monday morning and knock off the little bit that had to be done before I went on to this very big job I got in Majesta — it’s painting a whole factory; that’s a big job. So I left everything right were it was in back of the church. I figured, who’d steal anything from right behind a church. Am I right?”
“Right,” Carella said.
“Yeah. Well, you know who’d steal them from right behind a church?”
“Who?”
“The cops!” Cabot shouted. “That’s who! Now how the hell do I get my ladder back, would you please tell me? I got a call from the factory today. They said if I don’t start work tomorrow, at the latest, I can forget all about the job. And me without a ladder!”
“Maybe we’ve got a ladder downstairs you can borrow,’ Carella said.
“Mister, I need a tall painter’s ladder. This is a very high factory. Can you call this Captain Grossman and ask him to please let me have my ladder back? I got mouths to feed.”
“I’ll talk to him, Mr. Cabot,” Carella said. “Leave me your number, will you?”
“I tried to borrow my brother-in-law’s ladder — he’s a paper hanger — but he’s papering this movie star’s apartment, downtown on Jefferson. So just try to get his ladder. Just try.”
“Well, I’ll call Grossman,” Carella said.
“The other day, what she done, this movie actress, she marched into the living room wearing only this towel, you see? She wanted to know what —”
“I’ll call Grossman,” Carella said.
As it turned out, he didn’t have to call Grossman, because a lab report arrived late that afternoon, together with Cabot’s ladder and the rest of his working equipment, including his brushes, his putty knife, several cans of linseed oil and turpentine, a pair of paint-stained gloves and two dropcloths. At about the same time the report arrived, Grossman called from downtown, saving Carella a dime.
“Did you get my report?” Grossman asked.
“I was just reading it.”
“What do you make of it?”
“I don’t know,” Carella said.
“Want my guess?”
“Sure. I’m always interested in what the layman thinks,” Carella answered him.
“Layman, I’ll give you a hit in the head!” Grossman answered, laughing. “You notice the rabbi’s prints were on those paint-can lids, and also on the ladder?”
“Yes, I did.”
“The ones on the lids were thumb prints, so I imagine the rabbi put those lids back onto the paint cans or, if they were already on the cans, pushed down on them to make sure they were secure.”
“Why would he want to do that?”
“Maybe he was moving the stuff. There’s a tool shed behind the synagogue. Had you noticed that?”
“No, I hadn’t.”
“Tch-tch, big detective. Yeah, there’s one there, all right, about fifty yards behind the building. So I figure the painter rushed off, leaving his junk all over the back yard, and the rabbi was moving it to the tool shed when he was surprised by the killer.”
“Well, the painter did leave his stuff there, that’s true. He expected to come back Monday morning.”
“Today, yeah,” Grossman said. “But maybe the rabbi figured he didn’t want his back yard looking like a pigsty, especially since this is Passover. So he took it into his head to move the stuff over to the tool shed. This is just speculation, you understand.”
“No kidding?” Carella said. “I thought it was sound, scientific deduction.”
“Go to hell. Those are thumb prints on the lids, so it’s logical to conclude he pressed down on them. And the prints on the ladder seem to indicate he was carrying it.”
“This report said you didn’t find any prints but the rabbi’s,” Carella said. “Isn’t that just a little unusual?”
“You didn’t read it right,” Grossman said. “We found a portion of a print on one of the paintbrushes. And we also —”
“Oh, yeah,” Carella said, “here it is. This doesn’t say much, Sam.”
“What do you want me to do? It seems to be a tented-arch pattern, like the rabbi’s, but there’s too little to tell. The print could have been left on that brush by someone else.”
“Like the painter?”
“No. We’ve pretty much decided the painter used gloves while he worked. Otherwise, we’d have found a flock of similar prints on all the tools.”
“Then who left that print on the brush? The killer?”
“Maybe.”
“But the portion isn’t enough to get anything positive on?”
“Sorry, Steve.”
“So your guess on what happened is that the rabbi went outside after services to clean up the mess. The killer surprised him, knifed him, made a mess of the alley, and then painted that J on the wall. Is that it?”
“I guess so, though —”
“What?”
“Well, there was a lot of blood leading right over to that wall, Steve. As if the rabbi had crawled there after he’d been stabbed.”
“Probably trying to get to the back door of the synagogue.”
“Maybe,” Grossman said. “One thing I can tell you. Whoever killed him must have been pretty much of a mess when he got home. No doubt about that.”
“Why do you say that?”
“That spattered paint all over the alley,” Grossman said. “It’s my guess that the rabbi threw those paint cans at his attacker.”
“You’re a pretty good guesser, Sam,’ Carella told him, grinning.
“Thanks,” Grossman said.
“Tell me something.”
“Yeah?”
“You ever solve any murders?”
“Go to hell,” Grossman said, and he hung up.
9
Alone with his wife that night in the living room of their apartment, Meyer tried to keep his attention off a television series about cops and on the various documents he had collected from Rabbi Solomon’s study in the synagogue. The cops on television were shooting up a storm, blank bullets flying all over the place and killing hoodlums by the score. It almost made a working man like Meyer Meyer wish for an exciting life of romantic adventure.
The romantic adventure of his life, Sarah Lipkin Meyer, sat in an easy chair opposite the television screen, her legs crossed, absorbed in the fictional derring-do of the policemen.
“Ooooh, get him!” Sarah screamed at one point, and Meyer turned to look at her curiously, and then went back to the rabbi’s books.
The rabbi kept a ledger of expenses, all of which had to do with the synagogue and his duties there. The ledger did not make interesting reading, and told Meyer nothing he wanted to know. The rabbi also kept a calendar of synagogue events and Meyer glanced through them reminiscently, remembering his own youth and the busy Jewish life centering around the synagogue in the neighborhood adjacent to his own. March twelfth, the calendar read, regular Sunday breakfast of the Men’}s Club, Speaker, Harry Pine, director of Commission on International Affairs of American Jewish Congress, Topic: The Eichmann Case.