Book of Nathan (9 page)

“Thanks!” I said, hoping Agnes might hear me. Even if she
happened to, thanks
didn’t
seem to be something that came her way all that often.
 

Chapter 6

Twyla
Tharp pushed a red M&M through her high-glossed lips a few minutes after we
left the Florida Mall parking lot. “What exactly is kosher?”

“Food approved under Jewish dietary laws,” Doc Waters
answered while digging into the bag of candy I had bought earlier in the
morning.

“Yigal says he’s kosher and
Jewish,” Twyla said. “I told him I used
to be a Catholic and in CYO. But then when the bishop said I was going to hell
because of what me and him did, I turned Presbyterian.”

There was a long story locked behind Twyla’s words, but I
was too tired to open the door.

“Yigal says there’s no reason why I couldn’t go kosher,”
Twyla continued.

“If anyone could help make that happen, Yigal would be the
man,” I said.

“Well anyway, thanks for buyin’ the M&Ms, Bullet.” Twyla
leaned across the front seat of the rented Mitsubishi to stroke my right
shoulder.

“Yeah, thanks, man,” Maurice called out from the backseat.
The professor pitched in his own few words of appreciation. It was noon, and
after fasting all morning, a couple of handfuls of confectionaries had just
made me a minihero. Ironic. Working my tail off to save the life of some social
outcast wasn’t likely to buy me so much as a tip of the hat.

“Where we going now?” Maurice asked.

“Lunch at Friedman’s Restaurant. So go easy on the candy.”
The older I got, the more I sounded like my mother. If only—

Catherine Manchester Bullock never saw a socially relevant
finish line she didn’t want to cross. It didn’t matter how many hurdles stood
in the way. The goal was to get to the end no matter how much energy and
personal sacrifice it took. My mother had a supply of grit and determination
that made her as tough as she was inspirational.

My parents believed experience was a far better instructor
than talk. So, from age ten until I was out of high school, my mother hauled me
to a soup kitchen at Camden’s Fourth Street Mission. Each Monday and Thursday
evening, I helped feed a long line of community castoffs. And although it was
my late wife who turned me into a hardcore advocate for the homeless, it was my
mother who first opened my eyes to what it was like to be destitute in America.

I still remember the ragged, hungry army that drifted into
the mission. First were the women worn down by the ghetto and too many kids.
They dragged themselves into the dining hall looking haggard and exhausted.
Most ate dead-eyed and sad, oblivious to their whining and screaming offspring
doomed by a gene pool and an environment to repeat the fate of their moms.

Next came the surly young men who usually showed up with an
attitude that Mrs. Bullock wouldn’t let in the front door. They had to leave
their boom boxes and swagger outside if they expected a hot meal. Most of the
time, my mother got her way plus a reluctant dose of respect.

Last to arrive were the street people—the men and occasional
women who smelled as bad as they looked. They hobbled up to the food line
mumbling incoherently and scratching lice from their oily hair. In the early
years, I was sickened by the grossness and putrid odor. But my mother taught me
that mental illness or misfortune didn’t justify avoidance or contempt. In
time, I traded my fear and loathing for as much understanding and compassion as
a teenager could muster.

A hot meal didn’t come without a price. After dinner, there
was a requisite processional to the chapel where the poorest of the poor sat on
wooden benches half listening to a preacher sermonize about the apostles,
heaven, and hell. My mother resented the proselytizing, but she was as much a
pragmatist as she was an agnostic. She knew it was religion that put the
mission in the ghetto. If it weren’t there, hunger would take its place. It was
a matter of capitalizing on the opportunity and minimizing the
downside—another one of life’s lessons passed along to her son.

While Mrs. Bullock forced herself to live with the mandatory
after-dinner homilies, she wasn’t shy about debating religion with the
mission’s born-again director, a recovering alcoholic who credited his six
years of sobriety to Jesus Christ his Savior. They were an odd couple, this man
and my mother. For some inexplicable reason, they became close friends who
thoroughly enjoyed arguing their polar opposite positions. He never strayed
from his religious dogma while my mother plucked the inconsistencies from the
Old and New Testaments. But there were also issues that put them on common
ground.

Both were incensed by the nation’s miserable treatment of
the three million homeless men and women who wandered the nation’s streets and
back alleys. They saw firsthand how poverty and disease walked together. The
homeless who rambled into the mission each night weren’t just poor, they were
sick with tuberculosis, AIDS, malnutrition, infections, and a long list of
other ailments. Alcohol, drugs, and mental illness were demons for over half of
them; physical disabilities and bad luck plagued the rest.

The director and my mom agreed overpopulation was the root
of most of the world’s problems. They talked about how the world had to absorb
210,000 new lives every day—and how this extraordinary population growth was
stressing the planet. The director was for distributing condoms and tying
tubes—but not for abortion. My mother insisted abortion had to be part of the
solution. They went back and forth for years, never coming to terms.

My mother died a few months before I met Anne. Had she come
to know her future daughter-in-law before a short, agonizing illness pummeled
her body and eventually her spirit, she would have closed out her life with a
smile. Her baton had been passed. Doug Kool once hinted that I married Anne
because she was my mother incarnate, but I know that’s not true. There were too
many differences between the two women. What I did marry, though, were my
mother’s ideas and ideals.

Twyla snapped me out of my reverie. “You okay, Bullet?”

“Yeah, I’m fine.”

Twyla applied another coat of lip gloss. “Is Friedman’s
Restaurant kosher?”
 

“Kosher as they come.” Friedman’s Nosh & Grill was Yigal
Rosenblatt’s idea. After Yigal had invited himself to lunch, he confessed to
being “religiously constrained”—PC talk meaning he was kosher through and
through. Which was why I was now turning into Friedman’s parking lot.

Yigal was waiting for us when we stopped in front of the
nearly empty diner. Zeus’s attorney and Twyla reunited like they hadn’t seen
each other in months and the happy couple led the way to a round table near the
back of the restaurant.

“Yiggy,” Twyla purred, studying the menu, “this is all so
foreign
.
”

She was right. The bread was
Pas Yisroel
and the meat,
Debraciner
.
I had no idea what that meant. Even Yigal was confused. With my head still
aching and my body feeling the effects of too little sleep, I was ready for
anything that would give me some relief. A glass of an Israeli chardonnay got
me moving in the right direction. Next, like everyone else at the table, I
ordered a cup of soup.

“What are these things?” Twyla poked at a half dozen round
objects bobbing up and down in the broth.

“Matzo balls,” Yigal answered. “Definitely. That’s what they
are. Matzo balls.”

“Balls?”

I could feel the conversation degenerating. I asked Yigal to
tell us something about the leafy vegetable piled on a serving plate in the
middle of the table. It was an unappealing mush that, so far, no one had
touched.

Doc Waters picked at the greens. “
Schav
. Some people call it sour grass but
it’s really sorrel leaf.”

“Really?” Yigal looked surprised. “Always wondered what it
was. Never knew.”

Again, I found myself in awe of Doc’s span of knowledge. He
was a gentile and yet here he was out-koshering Yigal.

“You think Zeus’s story holds up?” Doc asked later over
coffee.

“Don’t know,” I answered. “It could have happened the way he
said.”

“I’m thinking it’s too bizarre a story not
to be true. Doesn’t matter. The cops
are never going to buy it.” Doc paused to glance at Yigal who was talking to
Twyla. “If this ends up in a courtroom, Zeus is history.”

“More than likely.”

“The college kids who saw what happened are Zeus’s biggest
problem.”

Not that much of a problem if Zeus could afford a decent
legal defense team. The witnesses were two well-oiled Rollins College juniors
wandering around the wrong side of town at three in the morning. Dissecting the
testimony of a couple of twenty-year-olds who were half in the bag when they
bumped into Zeusenoerdorf and Kurios would be a cinch for most defense
attorneys. But not for Yigal.

“So what happens now?” Doc asked.

“We drop Twyla off for her job interview, and visit the
crime scene.”

“The crime scene. Why? Every FBI agent and meter maid within
ten miles has probably been over that area.”

“Were they looking for evidence that could prove a blue car
rammed a white van off the road?”

Doc ran a hand through his hair. “Maybe not.”

“Any idea what Kurios was talking about just before he
died?”

“Father Nathan?”

I nodded. “Ever hear the name?”

“Never.”

Bad news. Doc, usually good for a hypothesis or two, left me
dangling.

I paid the bill and walked outside. It was just after one
o’clock—time to make a return trip to Nordstrom’s. Yigal asked if he could meet
us at the department store to continue discussing the Zeusenoerdorf case. The
lawyer’s ulterior motive, aka Twyla, was sliding seductively into my Mitsubishi
and even Maurice chuckled at Yigal’s excuse.

I drove to Nordstrom’s with Yigal’s car in my rearview
mirror. When we arrived at the store, I asked for Agnes but was directed to
another saleswoman with no nametag. She informed us that Miss Tharp’s two suits
were finished and so was Agnes—at least for the day. Manny Maglio had a way of
inflicting a lot of collateral damage.

The saleslady escorted Twyla to the same changing room where
she had been sequestered earlier. A few minutes later, Manny’s niece emerged
wearing a stylish but still sexy suit with her wild blonde hair pulled back
from her face and bunched with a stunning lacquered clip. She looked nothing
short of stupendous.
 

“I don’t feel right in these clothes,” she carped.

“You look
right,”
I shot back. Maurice and Doc nodded in agreement. Yigal was vibrating like a
pile driver.

“You think?” Twyla studied herself in a full-length mirror.
“I look so different
.
”

Thank you, Agnes.

We headed for Universal Studios with Yigal still in my wake.
The HR and Employee Recruitment office was easy to find—a large building
adjacent to a mammoth parking lot.

“According to the interview schedule, Ms. Tharp is to stay
with us through five p.m.,” a receptionist informed me.

“Okay,” I said. That would mean two hours of interviewing.
Doug had assured me that Twyla was a shoo-in for a job. Even so, I had this
not-so-funny feeling that the more exposure Universal had to Manny’s niece, the
lower the odds for full-time employment. “Any chance she might be finished
before five?”

“All interviews take at least two hours.”

“Ms. Tharp is not your usual applicant—”

“Two hours.”

Of all the thrill rides and amusements packed into Universal
Orlando’s one hundred acres, I wondered if anything could quite match the
entertainment value of a Twyla Tharp employment interview.

Universal
:
Previous employment?

Tharp
:
-Sin City Cabaret, Jersey Dolls, Bare Elegance, G-Spot and Jiggles Go-Go.