Levy shook his head. “Not that I’m aware. They’ve set me up to talk with you because I probably spent more time with Naomi — and that’s not a lot — than anyone else.”
“Did she confide in you, Zev?” I didn’t want him to invoke the clergy-penitent privilege. I wasn’t looking for Naomi’s admissions of wrongdoing, if there were any, and I didn’t believe they would survive her death. I wanted to know if she trusted him with any personal information that would be of use to us.
“You mean as a rabbi?” He knew exactly where I was going. There was no privilege if she had merely leaned on him as a friend. “Not that way. Sometimes she would come to me with questions about things I’d said in class. Then she’d linger to get to what was really on her mind.”
“What kind of things?”
“She was still haunted, of course, by what had happened to her mother. That tested all the depths of her religion and beliefs, into politics, back to threatening her faith completely, over to obsessing about the Israeli- Palestinian peace process. You know about her protests?”
“Maybe not as much as you do,” Mercer said.
“No, don’t assume I got any substance out of her on that. Naomi was just proud of her activism. Much of it was sincere, although I think some of it was a way of calling attention to herself.”
“What’s the role of women here at JTS, Zev?” I asked. “How are they accepted in the Conservative movement?”
“That’s a good question, Alex. You might not get the same answer from any two people. It’s not like you Reformers, who have been much more welcoming to women and to gays. It’s one of the topics that drew fire from Naomi.”
I was beginning to flesh out a better picture of her. She had been thrust into the outcast role early on by her life circumstances. But she also seemed to have grown comfortable in that skin.
“Have you ordained women as rabbis?”
“We have. But only for the last twenty-five years. I don’t think Naomi had the intellectual rigor to go there, but she was fascinated by the feminist role in religion. Women as clergy have emerged from a grassroots push, after a very long debate. Now about thirty percent of our rabbinical students are female.”
“Does that still cause division in the ranks?” I asked.
“Not here, I don’t think. But you will find many Jews — just as you will in every Christian denomination — who don’t believe that women belong in this role. Didn’t you face that in your work?”
“Not openly, Zev. Not my generation of litigators.” But I knew that the women who had come before me in the law, as in many careers, had faced insurmountable obstacles simply getting through the door of the courtroom. Even legendary prosecutors like Frank Hogan thought that trial work was too tawdry for lady lawyers. “Did Naomi come up against any of that here?”
“Not that I know. I hope you’ll look in at our synagogue on your way out. You’ll see the balconies that existed so that women were seated separately from the men in the old days. They couldn’t have dreamed at that time of leading services.”
“And now?”
“There are always a couple of students who arrive believing they won’t have to participate with women. It’s no longer possible here.”
“Did Naomi clash with any of them?”
“I can ask about that. She liked to argue. Maybe she thought she was debating, but I’d say the better word is argument, in her case. I don’t think she made enemies here. No particular friends, although the dean is asking around about that. But no real enemies.”
“Do you know anything about Naomi’s social life? Did she date anyone here?”
Zev blushed as he answered. “That’s outside my calling. I simply wouldn’t know.”
“Nothing you observed in her actions with other students? Nothing she said?”
“I had the impression there was a man in her life. Not here at JTS. I had the sense that he was somewhat older than she. That there was something inappropriate about the relationship, or she might have been more open in discussing it with me.”
I saw Mercer jotting down notes. He must have wondered, as I did, how serious Naomi’s involvement with Daniel’s stepfather was, and whether it had been ongoing in the recent past.
“Did she ever talk with you about her brother?”
“This is the first I’m hearing she had any siblings. Naomi never mentioned him.”
“When was the last time you saw her?”
“One week ago, to this very day. My course is given on Wednesday, and she had missed it. I saw her in the library and asked if she was okay. She didn’t usually cut classes.”
“Did she tell you why she had?”
Zev Levy blushed again. “I’m sorry that our last conversation was a bit confrontational. She didn’t like answering to me. She thought I was prying. Perhaps she thought I was — how would you say?…” He looked at Mercer and raised his shoulders.
“Coming on to her?”
“Maybe so. I can assure you that I was not. But she snapped when I asked how come she had cut class if everything was okay.”
“She got short with you?” I said.
“I misspoke. Out of character for me, by hindsight. Completely out of line.”
The earnest young rabbi seemed shaken by the recollection.
“Naomi told me she had a friend who was ill — a guy. She said something about the fact that he was being treated at Bellevue. I should have just left it at that.”
Bellevue was a city hospital, the oldest public medical facility in the country. It had a grim history and was not a place in which you wanted a loved one to wind up. Bellevue was best known as a psychiatric facility for the indigent.
“What did she say about her friend?” I asked.
“She wouldn’t talk to me about him after I opened my mouth. ‘What is he crazy, this guy?’ I should have held my tongue before speaking. I just couldn’t think of anyone being treated at Bellevue except a psych case. ‘What do you need with a madman?’ That’s the last thing I said to her.”
TWENTY-ONE
ZEV Levy had walked us back to the building entrance. Before we said good-bye, he had something else to tell us, a bit sheepishly. “I want you to know that I called Naomi a few times over last week-end. I left messages at her home.”
Mike had checked the answering machine at the apartment. There was nothing on it, whether because she had picked up the calls herself or because Daniel had listened and erased them.
“The tech guys in the PD will be able to retrieve those,” Mercer said, half bluff and half wishful thinking. “Remember what you said?”
Levy shifted uncomfortably. “I — uh — I think I just apologized for being so rude. That’s right, I offered to meet her for coffee too. I did try to make a — uh — an appointment.”
“At school?”
He reddened again. “No, down near her apartment. But she never returned my calls. And then, of course — well, the murder. I never saw her again. Maybe I wasn’t so far off when I called her friend a madman.”
“Thanks for your time,” Mercer said. “The Homicide Squad will probably send a few detectives over to talk with some of the students. We’ll try not to intrude too much.”
“Whatever is necessary. We’re very willing to cooperate.”
We made our way back toward Mercer’s car. “You think the rabbi was trying to make an appointment,” Mercer asked, “or a date? Bad choice of words today, that he should have held his ‘tongue.’ ”
