Saturday the Rabbi Went Hungry (12 page)

“Well, under the circumstances I think that’s only natural,” she said defensively. “Who was that tall, heavy man who kept pretty much to himself?”

He looked at her in surprise. “Didn’t you know?”

She shook her head.

“That’s the great Mr. Goralsky, Mr. Benjamin Goralsky, financial genius, president of Goraltronics.”

“What a shame I didn’t know,” she said. “I would have thanked him for coming today, a busy man like that. He left right after it was over, though.”

“Yes. His mother is buried there and I guess he wanted to visit her grave.”

“It’s a very nice cemetery, don’t you think? Ike would have liked it, a big field on a hill out in the country and all.”

“There were only about two or three graves.”

“Well, I suppose that’s because it’s new. Probably in time they’ll have to put in a road and replace that broken wire fence, but I like the way it is right now. And Ike’s grave, right there near the entrance. Everyone will have to pass by –”

He sat down on the arm of the sofa.

“I meant to ask you, Dr. Sykes. Who was the little red-faced man?”

“No one I ever saw.”

“He kept eyeing me all through the service. Every time I’d look up, he was looking at me.”

“That’s only natural. You were the principal mourner.”

“No, everyone else looked at the rabbi or the cantor.”

“Maybe it was a friend of Dodge’s; they were standing next to each other. Here he comes now. We can ask him.”

He opened the door for Peter Dodge and the two men shook hands ceremoniously. “You did a wonderful job,” Dodge said. “Everything went off splendidly. I would have offered to help, but it might have proved a bit awkward, you understand –”

“Of course. And I really didn’t have to do much, the people at the temple took care of most everything. Well, now that you’re here and Mrs. Hirsh is in good hands I’d better be getting back to the lab.”

“Oh, do you have to go now, Dr. Sykes?” She held out her hand. “I haven’t really thanked you for all you’ve done. You’ve been just wonderful.”

“Glad I could help. Your husband was a friend, a real friend. He’ll be deeply missed. Oh, by the way,” he said to Dodge, “who was the short little man standing beside you?”

The minister shook his head. “Don’t know. Why?”

“We thought perhaps he was a friend of yours. Well, he must have been someone from the temple.”

“You think so? He didn’t look Jewish.”

“How can you tell these days?”

Both men laughed. Dodge watched through the open door until Sykes had climbed into his car, then shut the door and turned to Pat. He took her hands in his, and holding them wide apart looked at her, his eyes shining with admiration. “You were magnificent, Pat,” he said. “A couple of times, I thought you were going to break down, but you rallied splendidly. I can’t tell you how proud I was of you.”

The Goraltronics plant, set back from Route 128 by half an acre of carefully tended lawn, was a one-story building covering two and a half acres with a parking space in the rear for four hundred cars. Seated in his modern office with discreet gray carpeting, the president of the corporation, Mr. Benjamin Goralsky, glanced at the calling card and snapped the corner of it with his thumb. ” ‘Investigator,’ ” he read aloud. “That’s a detective. I saw you at the funeral. You don’t look much like a detective, Mr. Beam.”

The figure in the visitor’s chair on the other side of the curved slab of teak that comprised Goralsky’s desk was short and fat with a round red face like an Edam cheese. His dark eyes all but disappeared when he laughed. He laughed easily.

“I don’t suppose any detective that looked like one would be worth much,” he said and smiled. “But I’m not a detective – at least, not the kind you read about. I don’t carry a gun and go around rescuing beautiful blondes. I just ask questions.”

“And you want to ask me some questions about Isaac Hirsh. Why me?”

“Well, for one thing, Mr. Goralsky, you were at the funeral. Everybody else I could account for: they were friends of the widow, or associates of the deceased, or officials of the temple. But I couldn’t understand why a big, important businessman like you would be there. And in the middle of a working day too.”

“It’s what we call a mitzvah, a blessing or a good deed, to go to a funeral. The rabbi announced it at the minyan – that’s our regular service – this morning. He asked as many as could to go. Strictly speaking, it’s a service so you’re supposed to have ten men there. The others couldn’t get away – they’ve got jobs. I’m my own boss, so I went. Besides, my mother is buried there and it gave me a chance to visit her grave.”

“I see.”

“But what’s all this about? Does your company always make this kind of investigation before settling a claim?”

“Only where there’s a question, Mr. Goralsky.”

“What sort of question?”

“Well, when a man drives into his garage, turns off the headlights, closes the garage door behind him, and then is found dead of carbon monoxide poisoning there’s always a question.”

“Suicide?”

“Isaac Hirsh took out an insurance policy of twenty-five thousand dollars less than a year ago. There’s a two-year suicide clause on all our policies and double indemnity for accidental death. If his death was an accident, the company forks out fifty thousand dollars. If it was suicide, we don’t pay a red cent. The company feels that fifty thousand dollars is worth a little investigation.”

“Yeah, I guess it is. And now that you’ve done a little investigating, what do you think?”

Beam smiled, and his eyes seemed to vanish. “I’m not the front office, but I’m guessing that when they get my report they won’t pay without the beneficiary going to court and making us. Look, this is a little narrow garage he’s got. There’s a trash barrel on the right. To get the car in far enough to close the door, Hirsh has to drive all the way to the back wall and in between the barrel on one side and the garage wall on the other. It’s a tight squeeze – I measured it myself. As it was, he left himself just over a foot on the driver’s side and about the same on the other. Get the picture?

“Now that’s pretty good driving for a drunk. Then he douses the lights but leaves the motor running. He slides out from under the wheel on the passenger side. It’s too tight a squeeze on the driver’s side because he’s kind of a fat little guy like me – and he pulls down the garage door. Then he comes back and gets in the front seat again, on the passenger side, where he was found.

“Now when you consider that most people shut off the motor almost automatically when they get into the garage, and that he didn’t forget to turn off the car lights or shut the garage door, that’s kind of hard to see as an accident. If he was so boozed up that he didn’t remember to shut off the motor, how come he was able to drive so straight and true, and how come he was able to remember to turn off the car lights and pull down the garage door behind him?”

“So why did the police call it accidental death?”

“The police! The guy is a citizen. He’s got an important job with the Goddard Lab, which is kind of a big outfit around here. What are they going to do? Make trouble? I figure before they’d call it suicide they’d practically expect him to make out a written statement stating his intentions and then have it witnessed by a notary.”

“I see. So what do you want from me?”

“Anything at all, Mr. Goralsky. Anything you can tell me.”

The interoffice communicator buzzed. Goralsky pressed a button. “Yeah?”

“Mr. Stevenson of Halvordsen Enterprises is here to see you,” came from the box on the desk.

“I’ll be right out.” He turned to Beam, visibly agitated. “Sorry, Mr. Beam, this is important. There’s nothing I can tell you, nothing at all.”

“Is something wrong?” Mrs. Hirsh asked Dr. Sykes. He had phoned from the lab to say he had important news she ought to know about at once. She led him into the living room, still unstraightened from the afternoon visitors.

“I wouldn’t call it wrong, exactly, Mrs. Hirsh, but I thought you ought to know. That fat little red-faced man who was at the funeral – you remember you said he was eying you all through the ceremony.”

“Yes, I remember.”

“Well, his name is Beam, Charles Beam. He was at the lab when I got back. He’s an investigator for the insurance company that sold your husband his policy.”

“What was he doing at the funeral?”

“Good question. I guess he was investigating.”

“What are you trying to tell me, Dr. Sykes? What is there to investigate?”

“That policy your husband took out, like all policies written these days, had a suicide clause. It also had an accidental death clause.”

“I knew that.”

“Very well. If it was suicide they pay nothing; if it was an accident they pay fifty thousand dollars. That’s a lot of money, and naturally they want to make sure it wasn’t suicide.”

“Well, sure, I don’t blame them, but it wasn’t. The police did some investigating, too, and they decided officially it was accidental. I should think that would settle it.”

“I’m afraid it isn’t as easy as that. The police don’t have to pay out any hard cash. They just have to come up with a cause of death for their records. Naturally, unless they have positive proof, they’ll put down accidental death. It’s kinder to the family.”

“But why would Ike commit suicide? He’d have no reason. He liked living here. We were getting along fine.”

Sykes said nothing.

“They’ve got to prove that it was suicide, don’t they? They can’t just say they think it was suicide and refuse to pay, can they?”

“No, of course not.”

“Well?”

“Look, Mrs. Hirsh, the custom in such cases is to investigate and should they decide it’s suicide they refuse to pay and it’s up to you to bring suit to collect. If they don’t have positive proof, they’re apt to offer a settlement – seventy-five percent of the claim, say, or fifty percent – depending on how strong they feel their case is.”

“But I don’t have to take it.”

“No, of course not, but you should have all the facts before you make up your mind one way or the other.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“That’s why I came over.” Choosing his words carefully, he said, “I never was going to tell you this, Mrs. Hirsh, and I wouldn’t now if you didn’t need to know to help decide a very important question. But the fact is your husband was going to be fired and he knew it.”

“Fired? But why? I thought he was doing well.”

Sykes obviously was embarrassed. “I wish that were so,” he said gently. “Especially since from all I’ve heard, your husband was quite a man when younger. When he was on the Manhattan Project his work was very well thought of by some mighty important people. But since coming to Goddard, and probably for a while before that, he just didn’t have it. He made half a dozen mistakes in the – what is it, less than a year? – he’d been with us. I covered for him each time with the boss, but this last time he made a mistake that was pretty serious. It was on a job for one of our most important clients, and I did what I could but the boss was stubborn. Ike had an appointment with him for Monday morning.”

“But what did he do?”

“I don’t think I could explain it unless you were a mathematician. But in general, his research seemed to prove that a whole new process was possible, a much cheaper way of doing the thing – sorry, but I can’t be any more explicit – and doing it better. The story leaked out and the company’s stock went up. And then we found that your husband had made a mistake. Naturally the client was angry. What made it bad is that the company is involved in a merger, so it makes them look as though they were manipulating their stock.”

“And Ike knew it?”

Dr. Sykes remained silent.

“Oh, Ike, you poor dear. He must have known and wanted to keep it from me. He was probably afraid we’d have to pick up and move along. We had moved so many times – because of the drinking, you know – and he knew I was beginning to think we had it pretty much licked and we’d be able to stay. He knew I liked it here –”

She broke off as a sudden thought occurred to her. “You don’t think it was because he was afraid he didn’t have it anymore, Dr. Sykes? I mean, you say he made mistakes – he never used to make mistakes. If he thought his mind wasn’t as sharp – from the drinking perhaps – But I wouldn’t have cared. He must have known that. No matter what happened, he’d still be plenty smart for me.”

“I’m sure he did know, Mrs. Hirsh,” Sykes said.

She sat up and squared her shoulders. “All right, then, what do I do now?”

“Nothing. You don’t have to do anything. When you hear from the insurance company, you can decide then. If I can help –” He got up. “If there is anything I can do, Pat – anything at all – you have only to call.”

She nodded. “Yes, I know. You’ve been a good friend to us.”

“Possel?What do you mean possel?”

“It’s like tref, not kosher, it’s unclean.”

“What are you saying, Mr. Goralsky? How can our cemetery be unclean?”

“It’s unclean because there’s a suicide buried there. A suicide is supposed to be buried in a corner, near the wall, off to one side. You buried a suicide right in front and that makes the whole place possel.”

“We didn’t bury any suicide, Ben. Who are you talking about?”

“Look, Mr. Schwarz, don’t pull that with me. Yesterday you people buried Isaac Hirsh in your cemetery. I was there. I saw it. Today, the insurance investigator comes to see me, and there’s no doubt the guy committed suicide. So I mention it to my father and he gets terribly upset.”

“Why should he be upset?”

“Why? Because, in case it’s slipped your mind, my mother is also buried there. All her life, she was a good, pious woman. She kept a kosher house and observed every rule and regulation, and now she lies in ground that’s been contaminated. And I shouldn’t be concerned? And my father shouldn’t be upset?”

“Look, Ben, Mr. Goralsky, I don’t know anything about Isaac Hirsh. First I’ve heard of the name. This is a matter the Cemetery Committee takes care of. I’m sure there’s some explanation. Did the rabbi officiate at the burial?”