Wednesday the Rabbi Got Wet (29 page)

“Go on.”

“So now the question is who would do a thing like that?” Lanigan continued. “Obviously someone with a grievance against one or the other of the Kestlers. I say either Kestler because Dr. Cohen phoned in that prescription and gave the name Kestler as the patient, the pharmacist, Ross McLane, asked him for the initial, and he said J. But J could be either Jacob, the father, or Joseph, the son.”

“Ross McLane took the prescription over the phone?” the rabbi asked. “He remembered it?”

Lanigan nodded approvingly. “You’re thinking it’s strange he should remember a prescription he took days before? Well, he did because the name Kestler meant something special to him. You see, he had a grievance against the old man.”

“Well then –”

Lanigan held up a finger to halt the interruption. “There were three pharmacists at the Town-Line Drugs that night, and each and every one of them had a grievance against one or the other of the Kestlers. Ross McLane’s was against the father; Marcus and Arnold Aptaker both had grievances against the son.”

“What kind of grievance?” asked the rabbi impatiently. “There’s a measure and a scale in grievance as in other things. My neighbor’s little boy broke one of our cellar windows, so I could be said to have a grievance against him, but not as great as if he’d broken the large picture window in our living room, and in neither case would it be sufficient to make me want to do him an injury, at least not anything more serious than spanking his bottom, which would be an excellent thing for his character, by the way, but which would then give his parents a grievance against me because they don’t believe in punishing children, which accounts for his breaking the window in the first place.”

“That’s the Damon kid?” Lanigan chuckled. “I ought to begin keeping a file on him. In another couple of years, I figure he’ll be coming to our official attention. But these grievances against the Kestlers are more than you’d have from a broken cellar window, or even a picture window.” He summarized the dealings each of the three pharmacists had had with the Kestlers. “So you see,” he concluded, “each of them had good reason for hating either the old Kestler or the young one.”

“And because you think Arnold’s was the greatest grievance, you suspect him?”

“Oh no, David, at first I thought it was McLane, especially when I found out that Marcus Aptaker had been out front waiting on trade and that it was McLane who’d been filling prescriptions, at the time I didn’t know that Arnold had been in town. I was sure I had the right man. But I didn’t want to act hastily, especially where it could affect Aptaker’s business, and him being in the hospital and all. So when McLane came in on another matter, I invited him into the office here and we just chatted, we got to talking about how he’d lost his store, and he was completely candid about hating Kestler.” He hitched forward in his chair, indicative of the importance of what was coming. “What’s more, he didn’t hesitate to admit that when he found that the prescription he was taking over the phone was for Kestler – he remembered it all clearly – he said he’d be damned if he’d fill out a prescription for him and handed it to Arnold to do. Now if he’d wanted to do Kestler dirty, he had only to change the prescription and say that was what Cohen gave him over the phone. How could the doctor prove he hadn’t?”

The rabbi sat silent, his mind running over the evidence. It suddenly came to him that the story Dr. Muntz had told him related to the same evening, the night of the storm. “Now I’ll tell you something.” the rabbi said. “I’ll give you some information that will knock the pins from under your case. Not an hour ago. Dr. Alfred Muntz was at my house, and he told me in the strictest confidence – but I guess the present situation warrants my telling you – that the prescription he gave Safferstein for his sick wife and that he had filled at the Town-Line Drugs that same night was not at all what he’d ordered, there, too, the label was right but the pills were wrong. Now according to his own statement, McLane made out the Safferstein prescription, so he made the same kind of mistake that you say Arnold made on the Kestler prescription. You said a mistake of that kind was as unlikely as a woman mistaking salt for sugar. But if there are two women working side by side in the same kitchen and one uses salt for sugar in baking a cake while the other uses sugar for salt while preparing a stew, then no matter how unlikely it is, you’ve got to assume that just such a mistake was made, all the more so because two such mistakes are even less likely than one. In the present case, if it was not an accident, then you have to assume it was a conspiracy, that McLane and Arnold held a whispered conference while Safferstein waited, and they both agreed to change the prescriptions that two different doctors had ordered for two different patients, one of whom, Mrs. Safferstein, they had nothing against, and that is nonsense.”

Lanigan smiled broadly. “Thank you, David. Your story explains how Arnold managed it. I’ll admit I was a mite bothered about it. It seemed as though young Aptaker would be taking an awful chance putting up the wrong pills with McLane just a couple of feet away. Since McLane had taken the prescription over the phone, he’d know what was supposed to go into the bottle Arnold was working on. But I see how he managed it now, thanks to you, they’ve both typed up the labels and pasted them on their respective bottles, then Arnold distracts McLane’s attention and switches the two bottles, then each fills the bottle in front of him and Safferstein gets Kestler’s medication and Kestler gets Safferstein’s.”

“But what goes for Arnold goes equally well for McLane,” the rabbi objected. “McLane could have distracted Arnold’s attention.”

“But he didn’t. Just a little while ago, Arnold told me he knocked over a bottle of cough syrup and McLane went into the toilet to get a mop to clean it up. I might add that McLane didn’t pretend he didn’t know who Kestler was, and McLane didn’t leave town the next day, either.”

“But if it’s a case of the two being switched, anyone who had the two bottles could have done it. Safferstein could have –”

“Now that’s not like you, David,” said Lanigan reprovingly. “What do you mean?”

“Throwing suspicion on one of your people to save another.”

“I was merely listing the possibilities,” said the rabbi coldly.

“Yeah, but Safferstein is not one of them. Why? Because he didn’t even know Kestler, not the son or the father, and Kestler didn’t know him, they’d never had any dealings whatsoever. What’s more, Bill Safferstein had no way of knowing what would happen if he gave Kestler his wife’s medicine.”

The rabbi sat silent, then he asked, “Are you going to charge Arnold Aptaker?”

Lanigan considered. “Not yet, maybe there is some explanation. Look how it was with McLane. I thought I had him, and he wriggled off, well, maybe young Aptaker can be lucky too. I’ll talk to him again, maybe if you spoke to him first…“He looked at the rabbi questioningly. “I’m willing to gamble a little.”

“Not to mention that you don’t have a case that would stand up in court.”

“Why haven’t I?”

“Because you don’t have proof, real proof, that Kestler died from that pill,” the rabbi said. “No autopsy was performed and –”

“With what I have right now. I could get an order for an exhumation without any trouble at all. Believe me, David.”

“All right. I’ll talk to him.”

With Lanigan watching through the open door, the rabbi sat beside Akiva, and in low tones he explained the case against him, at first, the young man registered shocked disbelief, but by the time he had finished, he was confident and placid once again.

“He’s all wet,” Arnold said. “I didn’t hate Kestler. I was sorry for him. I’ll admit I was sore when it first happened, and for some time after that. I used to dream of getting revenge. You want to know something? I’d get homesick plenty of times, especially at first, and when I thought of what happened, why I wasn’t at home, I’d daydream of getting even in all kinds of ways. But never once did I think of doing it by giving him the wrong medicine on a prescription. It just never entered my mind. It was against my professional instinct, I suppose, then when I joined Reb Mendel and the chavurah, I realized that any hatred I had for Kestler was like hatred for myself. Because he was me and I was him since we’re all part of the same unity. Do you understand?”

“And when you saw J. Kestler on the prescription?”

“Nothing. It could’ve been Joe Blow. Sure I recognized it. But nothing. No reaction. You know, sometimes you see a prescription for someone you know and you say to yourself, ‘Hm, Bill must have a bad cold.’ Like that, but that’s all.” He patted the rabbi’s arm. “Look, don’t you worry. I didn’t do anything wrong, so everything is going to be all right. You’ll see.”

A policeman came up from the wardroom in the basement, he walked by to go to the chiefs office and then stopped and did a double-take, “Hey, Arnold. I didn’t recognize you. What are you doing here?”

“Hello, Purvis,” said Arnold, smiling.

“You know him?” Lanigan called from his office, he came to the doorway.

“Arnold Aptaker? Sure, we went to high school together. Last time I saw him he had a beard like an old Jewish rabbi –” He blushed. “Sorry about that. Rabbi, it just slipped out.”

“That’s all right, officer, but nowadays it’s the young ones that have the beards.”

“And when was that. Purvis?” asked Lanigan.

“Last time I saw him? It was the night of the big storm. I was on duty patrolling the entrance to Route ‘ A, to slow cars down because of the broken branches on the highway ahead, and this car comes barreling along –”

“You mean he was speeding?”

The policeman colored as it occurred to him that he might be faulted for not having given Aptaker a ticket. “Well, not really speeding, well, maybe just a little speeding. I mean maybe not enough to hand the guy a ticket, but enough to make him think I might to get him to slow down. So I blow the whistle on him and walk over and it turns out we know each other.”

“Where were you going, Arnold?” asked Lanigan.

“He said he was driving down to Philadelphia,” the policeman volunteered.

“And what time was this?”

“Oh, around three o’clock in the morning. I’d say.”

“Three o’clock Thursday morning and he said he was on his way to Philadelphia? Come in here, Purvis.” Lanigan stood aside for the policeman and then shut the door of his office behind him.

“Now, Purvis, this is important. I want you to tell me, as well as you can remember, just what he said.”

“Gosh, Chief, that was a couple of weeks ago. I just sort of walked over to where he’d stopped and said the usual – you know, like ‘Going to a fire, buddy?’ And he said something about how he was trying to make time getting to Philly, then he recognized me and then I recognized him, maybe I made some crack about his whiskers, the way anyone would.”

“Of course.”

“Then I guess we talked about what various people we knew in high were doing now, and he asked me about my brother Caleb, and I told him he was working on the town paper, then he takes out his billfold and hands me a fiver –”

“He tried to bribe you?”

“Oh no. Chief, nothing like that. You know me. If I thought he was trying to bribe me. I’d’ve hauled his ass right out of the car and taken him down to the stationhouse.”

“Naturally.”

“It was for a subscription to the Courier. You know about Caleb working on this campaign to get the old-timers that moved down to Florida to keep in touch with the town. I happened to mention it, and that’s when he outs with the five-spot.”

“I see, he wanted to get news of the town regularly.”

“That’s right.”

Lanigan flung open the door and called out to the sergeant on the desk. “Sergeant, book that man.”

“What charge, sir?”

“Willful murder of Jacob Kestler.”

While Akiva was being booked in the outer office, Lanigan in his own office was explaining to the rabbi. “Here’s a young fellow who hasn’t seen his folks in a couple of years, finally gets around to driving up here, he comes up Tuesday night and leaves Thursday, that’s a mighty short visit for all that driving. You’d expect him to stay through Saturday, anyway, well, that made me a little suspicious of him. But now it turns out that he left in the middle of the night, he works at the store Wednesday evening and a few hours later, he’s on his way to Philadelphia, the courts always regard flight as evidence of guilt.”

“But –”

“Just a minute, there’s more,” said Lanigan. “Naturally I wondered about his coming back this time. I mean, if he’d done something and was running away, why would he come back? Well, he would if he thought it was safe. If we started to investigate Kestler’s death, it wouldn’t make the Philadelphia papers. Chances are it wouldn’t even make the Boston papers. So how would he know? Why would he take the chance? Well, Officer Purvis just told me that your young friend gave him five dollars to subscribe to the Courier for him. What do you think of that?”

In the cell block in the basement, the rabbi tried to talk some sense into Akiva. “You’ve got to get a lawyer. You’re just hurting yourself.”

Akiva shook his head. “No lawyer.”

“Why not?”

“Because he’d just get in the way and mess things up, he’d tell me what to do or he’d start filing motions or something, and it would just interfere.”

“Interfere with what?”

“With the natural course of events.”

“But when you’re arraigned tomorrow morning, the judge will assign you a lawyer if you don’t have one.”

“So he’ll assign him, Rabbi. I can’t help that, but it won’t be me lacking faith and picking one on my own.”

“How about your mother, Akiva? Are you going to call her? Would you like me to go see her?”

“She’s visiting my aunt in Boston, she’s not due back until sometime tomorrow.”

“Do you have the phone number? I’ll call her for you if you like.”

Again the young man shook his head. “No, she wouldn’t be able to sleep all night for worrying. More likely; she’d come a-running. No, she’ll find out soon enough.”

“How about the store?”