Wednesday the Rabbi Got Wet (19 page)

“Because it was a minor administrative matter, Rabbi. I didn’t say anything for the same reason that I didn’t mention the minor repair that I had made to the roof above the tailor shop. If I brought up for discussion every little item that came to my attention and that I acted on, we’d never finish.”

“It was no minor matter to Aptaker, and I intend to bring it up at the meeting.”

“Ah. Rabbi, you’re sore because I put one over on you.”

“You railroaded through the sale of the Goralsky Block. I’m going to move for reconsideration.”

“What? Because I didn’t happen to mention Aptaker’s letter to the board?” Kaplan was incredulous.

“For that, and because it has always been the practice on important matters, especially where they involve large sums of money, to hold over the final vote on a motion for at least a week.”

“You know, Rabbi, I never considered you a sore loser. You go right ahead and make a motion to reconsider, all that will happen will be that I’ll beat you again.”

Thinking it over, however, Kaplan decided he ought to alert Safferstein to the rabbi’s intention, he called and told him of the conversation he had just had.

“What does it mean, Chet?”

“Not a thing, Billy, believe me. I’ve got a real solid majority. I could even defeat him on the motion to reconsider.”

The next day Rabbi Small was driving along Route ‘28, that linear suburb of research laboratories, electronics firms and automated industrial plants, as he passed Goraltronics Incorporated, he was suddenly struck by an idea. Forgetting his reason for being on Route ‘28 in the first place – that he was on his way to the monthly meeting of the Greater Boston Rabbinic Council – he took the next exit and made his way back to the plant.

Unused to the ways of large corporations, he listened patiently as Ben Goralsky’s secretary explained that he was busy and would be occupied for the rest of the week; that he would not be available for the following week either since he was going out of town; that if Rabbi Small would tell her the nature of his business she would see about the possibility of arranging an appointment some time during the week after that.

“Can’t you just tell him I’m here now?” he asked plaintively.

Her smile at his naiveté was answer enough, and he was about to turn away when Ben Goralsky came striding out of the office and saw him.

“Rabbi Small, what are you doing here? Come in.” And much to the chagrin of his secretary, he put a burly arm around the rabbi’s narrow shoulders and steered him into his private office. Ben Goralsky was a big man with a large nose and knobby cheekbones. Though he was in his midfifties, his thick black hair showed no touch of gray, even at the temples. Seated behind his desk, he beamed affectionately at his visitor.

“Tell me what I can do for you. Rabbi.”

“Well, I wanted some information about the property your father willed to the temple.”

“Oh sure, what do you want to know? I see where Bill Safferstein finally got it.”

“The board voted –” the rabbi broke off as he got the implication of Goralsky’s remark. “You mean he tried to buy it from you?”

“That’s right, from my father, he told Billy it wasn’t for sale.”

The rabbi smiled knowingly. “So as not to appear eager?”

Ben Goralsky looked at him sharply. “Why no. My father really didn’t want to sell.” He canted his head and considered, then he laughed shortly. “Maybe that’s why Safferstein came to me – because he thought my father was just being cozy.”

“And what did you tell him?”

“Oh, I said I’d talk to my father about it. I gave him a statement on the property – you know, income, expenses, what it’s assessed for, lease obligations, the usual. On the basis of that, he made an offer a couple of days later. It was a very good offer, so I spoke to my father about it.” He shook his head. “He said he didn’t care to sell.”

“Why not, if the offer was a good one?” the rabbi asked.

“Well, at the time I thought it was because my father didn’t like to sell land. You see, we’d bought that property years ago because we had thought of building our plant there. It was right on the Salem Road with easy access for cars and trucks, but then Route One Twenty-eight opened up, and this was a better deal. In all that time, I couldn’t get my father to sell the Salem Road property. But now I’m inclined to think he didn’t want to sell to Safferstein because he was planning to give it to the temple.”

“But couldn’t he have sold the property and then given the money to the temple?” the rabbi asked.

Ben Goralsky chuckled. “And pay a capital-gains tax on the sale? Oh no, my father was too good a businessman for that.”

“You say it was a very good offer. Why do you suppose Safferstein was so anxious to get that property?”

Goralsky shook his head. “I don’t know, there’s talk of a big apartment complex for senior citizens going up on the Salem side, that would improve the block some, but not that much.”

“And can you think of why Safferstein would offer to buy the drugstore?”

“Aptaker’s? He did? Hm, now that begins to make sense.”

“It does?” the rabbi asked.

“Sure,” said Ben Goralsky. “It means he’s planning to tear down the block. It’s the land he wants, but I’ll be damned if I see why, there’s plenty of vacant land around there.”

“I’m afraid I don’t follow.”

“Look. Rabbi, the drugstore has a lease, and a lease is binding on all succeeding owners. If Safferstein’s going to tear the place down, he has to have it free of encumbrances, any idea what he offered for the store?”

“Only that Aptaker said it was a good price, he said Safferstein wanted it for his brother-in-law.”

Goralsky laughed.

“I take it you consider the brother-in-law a figment of his imagination,” the rabbi said.

Goralsky shrugged. “What else? He had to have some reason for buying a pharmacy.”

“How about the leases on the other stores? Wouldn’t he have to buy those, too?”

“The other stores were tenants at will,” Goralsky explained. “Only the drugstore had a lease, the old lease was about to expire, and Aptaker wrote to my father and he renewed it on the same terms, ten years. I thought it was a mistake tying ourselves up for that length of time –”

“But the tenant is equally bound, isn’t he?”

“Not really, Rabbi. If the tenant is a large corporation or an individual of solid financial status, then sure, he’s bound as much as we are. But if it’s a small man, what can we do? Suppose the drugstore decided to go out of business tomorrow, would we sue him? Or would the temple – because the lease is binding on any subsequent owner – sue him for ten years’ rent?”

“I see.”

“But I didn’t like to argue with my father about it. Toward the end he was pretty weak.”

“Yes, I remember,” the rabbi said. “When I’d come to see him –”

“Ah, but that was in the afternoon or the evening, Rabbi. In the morning he was apt to be pretty lively. Of course, that’s when he’d conduct his business.”

“You mean he actually was engaged in business even then, after he took to his bed?”

“Oh yes,” Goralsky said proudly. “He’d dictate letters and instructions every morning until almost noon, he did that right up to a few days before his death.”

“You mean he had a secretary at the house?”

Goralsky chuckled. “I guess she thought of herself as his secretary, actually, she’s one of the girls from our stenographic pool. I’d send her out to the house every morning, and even if my father didn’t have any business, she was someone to talk to – Alice Fedderman, her father is a member of the temple. Would you like to talk to her?”

“Why yes, if it’s all right.”

“Sure.” Goralsky spoke into the intercom. “Rabbi Small would like to talk to Alice Fedderman from the steno pool about my father. Would you have her go to the conference room. It’s free, isn’t it?”

“Yes, sir.” And a few seconds later: “She’ll be right down.”

“I’ll have someone take you there, Rabbi.”

She was waiting for him when he arrived, a slim girl of nineteen or twenty, heavily made up with eye shadow, liner and mascara, her lips were coated with a kind of white glaze, she was wearing high platform shoes and a very short skirt so that her crossed legs exposed considerable thigh. Rabbi Small had a vague recollection of having seen her at various young people’s functions at the temple, but then perhaps not – they all looked so much alike.

“Hello, Rabbi, they said you wanted to talk to me about old Mr. Goralsky so I took along the notebook I used when I went to see him.”

“I was interested in a letter he wrote to Mr. aptaker who has the drugstore –”

“Oh yes, about the lease.” She smiled. “I remember that very well.”

“Is that so? Any particular reason?” the rabbi asked.

“Well, it was just a little before – that is, toward the end, for one thing. But this letter I had to do a couple of times. It was like this.” She leaned forward confidentially. “He didn’t talk so good, I mean grammarwise. So he’d tell me what he wanted to say, and I’d like reword it in a business letter.”

“I understand.”

“We got this letter from Mr. aptaker asking if he could have his lease renewed. So Mr. Goralsky said since he was a good tenant, he’d give him the same lease he had before without any increase in rental. So I wrote the usual business letter. You know. ‘In reply to your letter of the twentieth, I am instructing our attorneys to draw up a lease on the same terms as the present one. When you receive the forms, please sign both copies and return them to me for my signature.’ The usual. But when I typed the letter and gave it to him to sign, he was kind of put out about the way I’d written it. I guess he was having one of his bad days, he said” – and she mimicked his heavily accented English – “‘I want you should tell him because he was a good tenant and never caused me any damage to my property and always paid his rent on time and kept up the property, I’m giving him the same lease like before and not raising him the rent.’” She favored the rabbi with a self-satisfied wink. “I took it down just the way he said it. I was going to write it that way, too, because I was kind of annoyed with him, he was a nice man, but he could also be, you know, like gross.”

“Gross? Mr. Goralsky?”

“Well, you know, like picky – picky. But by the time I got back to the office, I’d cooled down; so I fixed it up a little, but I still put in about how he was a good tenant and all, he liked it, so that’s the way we sent it out.”

“Mr. aptaker wrote back –”

Alice Fedderman shook her head. “I wouldn’t know anything about that. I only went there a couple of days more. See?” Between thumb and forefinger she held up a couple of pages of her notebook to show how little had been written. “I was told Mr. Goralsky had taken a turn for the worse and wasn’t up to giving dictation.”

“You’re sure no other girl was sent out?”

“Oh no, he liked me, and I liked him.”

“Even though he was gross?” the rabbi asked with a smile.

“Oh, you know. I didn’t mean gross like gross. I mean he was like nervous, maybe because he was so old.”

Rabbi Small thanked her and refused her offer to escort him back to the office. “I’m sure I can find my wav back,” he said.

He merely wanted to thank Ben Goralsky for his consideration, but after they shook hands and the rabbi had turned to go, he thought of something. “You said the lawyers went out to see your father about his will. Was that because he was confined to his bed?”

“That’s right, Rabbi. It was just three weeks, maybe a month, before he died.” His face grew somber and reflective as he added, “I guess he knew then he was going to die.” He extended his hand again. “Well, good-bye, Rabbi. I hope we’ve been helpful.”

The rabbi smiled. “You have, Mr. Goralsky. Believe me, you have.”

Lt. Eban Jennings sat down heavily, pulled out the lower drawer of Lanigan’s desk and then, leaning back in his chair, raised his legs to rest his heels on the edge of the drawer.

“Make yourself at home,” said Lanigan.

Jennings ignored the sarcasm and focused watery blue eyes on his chief as he declared solemnly, “McLane had a drugstore in Revere, and Kestler, the old man, had a chattel mortgage on it.”

“So?”

“So he lost the store when Kestler foreclosed,” said Jennings.

“Mm – interesting.”

“Yeah.” The lieutenant waited for Lanigan to digest the information. “I’ve heard it both ways,” Jennings went on blandly. “Some of those I talked to, women mostly, said he would have lost his business anyway, that after his wife died. McLane kept a dirty store and was nasty to customers. His wife was in the store with him, and I suppose she’d be the one who would be tidying up all the time, then when she died –”

“Sure.”

“And he was always having trouble with the people he hired. I talked to one of them, a pharmacist working for the new owner, he said he was a hard man to work for, grouchy and what you might call inconsiderate.”

“What kind of store is it?” the chief asked.

“It’s a small neighborhood store. My guess is that his real trouble began when the big cut-rate store opened half a dozen blocks away. If he’d been popular with the customers, they wouldn’t have changed to the new store, especially where his was handier.”

“Don’t you believe it, Eban. People will go quite a distance to save a few pennies, and then criticize the old place to justify their disloyalty,” he added reflectively.

“Yeah, could be,” Jennings agreed. “That was pretty much the point of view of the grocer next door. Of course, he’s suffering from some new supermarket competition himself, according to him, McLane kind of let go when his wife died, but he was sure he’d have snapped out of it in time. But” – he lowered his feet to the floor and sat upright to give additional emphasis to what he was going to say – “Jake Kestler called his loan and pushed him to the wall. Now that was about a year ago.”

Lanigan sat silent, his fingers drumming nervously on the arm of his chair as he digested the implications of his lieutenant’s report. Jennings broke the silence. “Look, Hugh, why don’t I bring in McLane for questioning?”