“Okay,” Carella said, and picked up a pen and drew a triangle in exactly the same way.
“Then I started the second triangle at the western point — the one here on the left — and drew a line over to the east here...”
“...and then down on an angle to the south...”
“...and back up again to... northwest, I guess it is... where I started.”
Carella did the same thing.
“That’s right,” he said. “That’s how you do it.”
“Yes, but we’re both right-handed.”
“So?”
“I think a left-handed person might do it differently.”
“Ah,” Carella said, nodding.
“So I think we should call Documents and get them to look at both those cabs. See if the same guy painted those two stars, and find out if he was right-handed or left-handed.”
“I think that’s brilliant,” Carella said.
“You don’t.”
“I do.”
“I can tell you don’t.”
“I’ll make the call myself,” Carella said.
He called downtown, asked for the Documents Section, and spoke to a detective named Jackson who agreed that there would be a distinct difference between left- and right-handed handwriting, even if the writing instrument — so to speak — was a spray can. Carella told him they were investigating a double homicide...
“Those Muslim cabbies, huh?”
...and asked if Documents could send someone down to the police garage to examine the spray-painting on the windshields of the two impounded taxis. Jackson said it would have to wait till tomorrow morning, they were a little short-handed today.
“While I have you,” Carella said, “can you switch me over to the lab?”
The lab technician he spoke to reported that the paint scrapings from the windshields of both cabs matched laboratory samples of a product called Redi-Spray, which was manufactured in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, distributed nationwide, and sold in virtually every hardware store and supermarket in this city. Carella thanked him and hung up.
He was telling Meyer what he’d just learned, when Rabbi Avi Cohen walked into the squadroom.
“I think I may be able to help you with the recent cab driver murders,” the rabbi said.
Carella offered him a chair alongside his desk.
“If I may,” the rabbi said, “I would like to go back to the beginning.”
Would you be a rabbi otherwise? Meyer thought.
“The beginning was last month,” the rabbi said, “just before Passover. Today is the sixteenth day of the Omer, which is one week and nine days from the second day of Passover, so this would have been before Passover. Around the tenth of April, a Thursday I seem to recall it was.”
As the rabbi remembers it...
This young man came to him seeking guidance and assistance. Was the rabbi familiar with a seventeen-year-old girl named Rebecca Schwartz, who was a member of the rabbi’s own congregation? Well, yes, of course, Rabbi Cohen knew the girl well. He had, in fact, officiated at her bat mitzvah five years ago. Was there some problem?
The problem was that the young man was in love with young Rebecca, but he was not of the Jewish faith — which, by the way, had been evident to the rabbi at once, the boy’s olive complexion, his dark brooding eyes. It seemed that Rebecca’s parents had forbidden her from seeing the boy ever again, and this was why he was here in the synagogue today, to ask the rabbi if he could speak to Mr. Schwartz and convince him to change his mind.
Well.
The rabbi explained that this was an Orthodox congregation and that anyway there was a solemn prohibition in Jewish religious law against a Jew marrying anyone but another Jew. He went on to explain that this ban against intermarriage was especially pertinent to our times, when statistics indicated that an alarming incidence of intermarriage threatened the very future of American Jewry.
“In short,” Rabbi Cohen said, “I told him I was terribly sorry, but I could never approach Samuel Schwartz with a view toward encouraging a relationship between his daughter and a boy of another faith. Do you know what he said to me?”
“What?” Carella asked.
“ ‘Thanks for nothing!’ He made it sound like a threat.”
Carella nodded. So did Meyer.
“And then the e-mails started,” the rabbi said. “Three of them all together. Each with the same message. ‘Death to all Jews.’ And just at sundown last night...”
“When was this?” Meyer asked. “The e-mails?”
“Last week. All of them last week.”
“What happened last night?” Carella asked.
“Someone threw a bottle of whiskey with a lighted wick through the open front door of the synagogue.”
The two detectives nodded again.
“And you think this boy... the one who’s in love with Rebecca...?”
“Yes,” the rabbi said.
“You think he might be the one responsible for the e-mails and the Molotov...”
“Yes. But not only that. I think he’s the one who killed those cab drivers.”
“I don’t understand,” Carella said. “Why would a Muslim want to kill other Mus...?”
“But he’s not Muslim. Did I say he was Muslim?”
“You said this was related to the...”
“Catholic. He’s a Catholic.”
The detectives looked at each other.
“Let me understand this,” Carella said. “You think this kid... how old is he, anyway?”
“Eighteen, I would guess. Nineteen.”
“You think he got angry because you wouldn’t go to Rebecca’s father on his behalf...”
“That’s right.”
“So he sent you three e-mails, and tried to fire-bomb your temple...”
“Exactly.”
“...and also killed two Muslim cab drivers?”
“Yes.”
“Why? The Muslims, I mean.”
“To get even.”
“With?”
“With me. And with Samuel Schwartz. And Rebecca. With the entire Jewish population of this city.”
“How would killing two...?”
“The magen David,” the rabbi said.
“The Star of David,” Meyer explained.
“Painted on the windshields,” the rabbi said. “To let people think a Jew was responsible. To enflame the Muslim community against Jews. To cause trouble between us. To cause more killing. That is why.”
The detectives let this sink in.
“Did this kid happen to give you a name?” Meyer asked.
Anthony Inverni told the detectives he didn’t wish to be called Tony.
“Makes me sound like a wop,” he said. “My grandparents were born here, my parents were born here, my sister and I were both born here, we’re Americans. You call me Tony, I’m automatically Italian. Well, the way I look at it, Italians are people who are born in Italy and live in Italy, not Americans who were born here and live here. And we’re not Italian-Americans, either, by the way, because Italian-Americans are people who came here from Italy and became American citizens. So don’t call me Tony, okay?”
He was nineteen years old, with curly black hair, and an olive complexion, and dark brown eyes. Sitting at sunset on the front steps of his building on Merchant Street, all the way downtown near Ramsey University, his arms hugging his knees, he could have been any Biblical Jew squatting outside a baked-mud dwelling in an ancient world. But Rabbi Cohen had spotted him for a goy first crack out of the box.