her lip was split.”
“Just once,” said Petra.
“Once was too much for Lisa.” That sounded boastful. Daughter asserting herself in a way mother never could? “She told me she wouldn’t tolerate it. And I agreed with her. For all the things her father did over thirty-six years, he never laid a hand on me. If he had, who knows what I’d have done.” She lifted her purse, hefted it like a weapon. “Of course, I didn’t know Lisa was going to go on television. If she’d told me about that, I probably would have advised against it.”
“Too public?”
“Tasteless. But I’d have been wrong. Why keep it all inside? What’s the point of being quiet and pretty and tasteful?”
She cried some more, dabbed. “Do I think Carter did it? Why not? He’s a man. They’re responsible for all the violence in the world, aren’t they? Am I as sure as John? No. Because no one’s ever as sure as John.”
She got up. “I know you’re trying your best, Detective. John wants blood, but I only want… something I’ll never get-my little girl back. Now, if you’d be so kind as to call me a cab.”
“Certainly, ma’am.” Petra stayed with her, holding the door. “Here’s my card. If you think of something, anything, please let me know.”
The two of them returned to the hallway. The door to Interrogation One was still closed.
“Your poor black friend,” said Vivian Boehlinger. “John’s prejudiced-I really despise him.”
“I’ll call that cab,” said Petra. “Where to?”
“The Beverly Wilshire. He’s staying at the Biltmore.”
Barely after 9 A.M. and she was exhausted; the time spent with the Boehlingers had sapped her energies. Poor Wil was still in there.
What a pair, even allowing for tragedy. No marital role model for Lisa. How much free will did any of us have?
The message stack had grown; four more tips on the boy. She dreaded Dr. B.’s follow-up calls.
In some cases, you bonded with the victim’s family. Here she was, wanting to punch Dr. B.’s lights out, creeped out by Mrs. B.’s avian laugh. Not good at all. And Stu still hadn’t arrived. Obviously, he didn’t give a damn anymore. Which didn’t fit a career opportunity thing. So maybe it was marital.
She did some fruitless follow-up with Missing Persons on Flores, was putting down the phone when Stu said, “Good morning.”
Freshly shaved, every hair in place. He wore a beautiful slate-gray gabardine suit, pearl-gray shirt, smoke- and-red paisley tie. So perfectly composed.
It pissed her off.
“Is it?” she said.
He turned around and left the squad room.
CHAPTER
39
Sam Ganzer didn’t park the Lincoln carefully. The twenty-year-old land yacht was too wide for each of the spaces behind the shul, so he used both of them.
Who was there to complain? The synagogue, once a social center for Venice’s Jews, had been reduced to a weekend facility, Sam’s maintenance calls the only thing that opened its doors before Friday night.
Even on the weekend it was sometimes hard to get ten men together for a minyan. Beth Torah wasn’t Orthodox enough for the yarmulke-clad yuppies who’d gentrified Venice, so they started their own congregation a few blocks away, brought a bearded fanatic rabbi from New York, installed a partition between the men and the women. The old, mostly left-wing crowd who patronized the shul wouldn’t hear of it.
That had been five years ago. Now most of the regulars had died off. Eventually, Sam knew, Beth Torah would close down, the property sold. Maybe the yuppies would reclaim it, which would be better than yet another cheap business added to the dozens that lined Ocean Front Walk. Sam didn’t mind the yuppies as much as some of the old socialists did. He had a deep-rooted distrust of authority but was, at heart, a businessman. Meanwhile, he’d park any damn way he pleased.
He felt he’d live forever. For seventy-one, his body was working okay. His brother Emil, living down in Irvine, not religious at all, was seventy-six. Good stock: generations of thickset, robust metalsmiths and carpenters honed by bone-numbing Ukrainian winters.
It had taken pure evil to cut down most of the Ganzer tree.
Mother, father, three younger brothers, two sisters shipped off to Sobibor, never seen again. Avram, Mottel, Baruch, Malkah, Sheindel. Had they made it to America, what would their names have been? Sam’s best guess was Abe, Mort, Bernie, Marilyn, Shirley. Last week, he’d raised the question with Emil, who didn’t want to talk about it.
All in all, forty-five Ganzers and Leibovics had been rounded up by the Ukrainian police and handed over to the occupying nazi scum. Sam and Emil, muscular young men-Emil a lightweight boxing champ at the Kovol gymnasium-were spared and enslaved as forced laborers. Eighteen-hour workdays on thin soup and sawdust bread. Midnight escape through the snow, living in the forest on leaves and nuts, nearly starving till they’d been taken in by a saintly Catholic woman. When her son came back from the war, he wanted to turn them over; the Ganzer brothers ran again, walking till the brink of death, finally making it to Shanghai. The Chinese had been decent. Sam sometimes wondered what it would have been like to stay, marry one of those gorgeous porcelain girls. Instead, liberation, Canada, Detroit, L.A.
For years he hadn’t thought about any of that crap. Lately, the memories had been returning, uninvited. Probably some kind of brain damage. His body was strong, but names, places were fading, he’d walk into a room, forget why. The ancient stuff, though, was as clear as day. All that anger-he could feel it pounding in his ears, bad for the blood pressure.
He turned off the Lincoln’s engine, got out. On Friday night and Saturday, he assumed sexton’s duties, had since Mr. Ginzburg died. With the unpaid position came maintenance obligations. Why not? What else did he have to do besides play the mandolin and sit outside his house getting too much sun-he’d already had four precancerous lesions cut off his face and one on his bald spot. Had to wear a stupid cap, like an old guy.
He took the hat off, tossed it into the Lincoln, locked up, enjoyed another look at how he’d parked. Better than leaving room for some drug addict to slump in a stolen car and inject himself. That had happened more than once. This neighborhood, always a little nuts, had become a crazy mix of gawking tourists on weekends, lowlifes crawling out of the woodwork at night.
Most of Ocean Front was one big gyp-joint now. Fly-by-nights selling cheap junk, weekends so jammed you couldn’t take two steps without bumping into some yutz.
For forty years Sam and Emil sold hardware and plumbing fixtures from their store on Lincoln Boulevard, things you could use. Both of them knowing how to install as well as sell, pipe a house from scratch. You got to be handy, living on your own, never depending on anyone else. Leaving Shanghai, he’d vowed never to depend on anyone else. Maybe that’s why he’d never married. Though the ladies loved him. He’d had his good times. Even now he once in a while got between the covers with soft-skinned grandmothers ashamed of what age had done to their bodies. Sam knew how to make them feel young and gorgeous.
He felt for the shul key in his pocket, found it, opened the back door. Not noticing the screen from the bathroom window lying on the ground, because it was partially blocked by his right front tire.
Moments after he got inside, he knew someone had broken in.
The silver-plated pushke was sitting atop the platform where the Torah was read, shiny against the blue velvet coverlet, right out in the open. The charity box hadn’t been used since Friday night, when it was passed around before services. Sam had put it away, personally, in a cabinet beneath the bookcases. Just a cheap combination lock, no reason to make a big deal-all it contained was a few dollars in coins.
But someone had tried anyway. And, look-food had been taken out of the same cabinet. Snack stuff for the
