The Yiddish Gangster's Daughter (A Becks Ruchinsky Mystery Book 1) by Joan Cochran (popular books of all time .txt) 📗

Torah is kept. When the cantor’s solo comes to a close, the old man mounts the steps. He’s bent so far over he faces the floor and struggles to surmount each stair. His elbow is supported by a middle-aged man I assume is his son. The senior Cohen is well into his nineties and the overhead lights throw reflections across the pale freckled pate on which a tiny white yarmulke tenuously rests. It inches down the back of his head and slips toward his neck as he mounts the stairs. I’m surprised he reaches the bimah with the yarmulke still in place.

My father seems to be equally engaged by the yarmulke’s progress because he doesn’t speak until Cohen shuffles across the upraised stage.

“Fifty years ago, the old bastard probably led prayers at Sing Sing.” My father speaks louder than he needs to. I don’t know if it’s deliberate or his hearing aid is set too low. Either way, he’s attracted an audience.

“Dad, this is not the place,” I whisper loud enough so people in adjacent seats know I’m not a party to his rudeness.

His eyebrows rise in mock surprise. “Who are you? The rebbetzin?” He picks up the prayer book and pretends to find his place. “I’ll tell you about it on the way to the Marmelsteins.”

I do my best to read responsively with the old man. But it does no good. I’m trying to picture this Itzhak Cohen in a jail cell at Sing Sing. And as my stomach lets out a growl that can be heard five seats down, I think longingly of the Shabbat dinner we’re heading to once services are done.

Between Tootsie’s stop in the men’s room and his insistence on schmoozing with old friends in the lobby outside the sanctuary, it takes a good half hour to make our way to the car once services are over. The parking lot is empty, but a security guard mans the entrance and watches us get in the Mercedes.

The Marmelsteins don’t attend Sabbath services but invited us to come over for dinner when we’re through with ours. They still live in Coral Gables, down the street from the house in which I grew up. Neither Tootsie nor I have seen them since my mother’s funeral years earlier and I’m looking forward to reminiscing about the old neighborhood and my mom. Mrs. Marmelstein, who played on my mother’s tennis team, saw my food column two weeks earlier and invited me to join her family for Friday night dinner. It was obvious from her brief silence that she was caught off guard when I mentioned I was going to temple with Tootsie that night. She said to bring him along, which was generous given that she knows about his cheating. Naturally, I have not shared her hesitancy with my father.

“So who’s this Itzhak Cohen?” I ask my father once we’re on the expressway heading south. “It’s pretty hard to picture the old guy in prison.”

“He’s not much to look at now but he was a big son of a bitch in the old days. I saw him two, maybe three times. Built like a barrel back then, thick through the chest and short. But all muscle.” Tootsie wipes his forehead with a handkerchief, then aims the air-conditioning vent toward his face. “I met him in New York.”

“Last year?”

He gives me a confused stare, then laughs. “Yeah sure. On the way to your cousin Harriet’s wedding, I stopped to see Itzhak. Don’t be an idiot. In the forties. Just after your sister was born.”

“When you were working on the docks in New York?”

“You got a good memory, Doll. I had the occasional day off. And for once my boss, Sammy, had the decency to show me around.”

My father fiddles with the vent again. I can’t actually hear the cogs turning but from the way he flips his head from side to side, it’s obvious he’s mining his brain. Every time we get together now, he’s got a new story for me. It’s as though his revelations about Fat Louie opened the floodgates. I suspect he’s trying to explain himself, to justify his behavior by walking me through his past.

“I don’t want you to repeat this,” he says as we mount the ramp onto I-95, “because I doubt his wife or son know the story.”

I smile. There’s not much chance of that.

“It was about halfway through my stint on the docks. I guess Sammy wanted to reward me for working so hard, because he called on a Friday to let me know he’d pick me up at my apartment Saturday night. He said we were going to see the real New York.

“That sounded good to me so I put on a fresh shirt, my best suit, and a red tie your mother bought for me before I left. I was waiting downstairs in front of my building when Sammy pulled up in a shiny black Packard driven by a man in a chauffeur outfit. Very classy. I didn’t know my boss was such a big shot. I slid into the back seat next to Sammy, who wore a tux and looked sharp for an old guy.” Tootsie laughs. “He was probably forty-five to my twenty-five.

“We headed north on the West Side Highway toward the Bronx but I was too busy checking out the car to notice where we were going. When I looked up from the wood paneling and leather seats, the driver was already cruising through a neighborhood I’d never been in. We drove for a while, maybe an hour, through a hilly area with estates set back from the road. I figured Sammy was taking me out to some ritzy restaurant in the suburbs so I was shocked when the driver headed up a long driveway to this dump. The paint was peeling and the lawn was infested with weeds. It was big but looked like nobody had taken care of it in years. At this point, I didn’t feel