Mrs. Kaplan and the Matzoh Ball of Death by Mark Reutlinger Page A

jerks and bumps, which of course it frequently does. I noticed that Rachel was not on the shuttle bus this time. I mentioned it to Andy and asked him to wait a few minutes.
    “That won’t be necessary, Mrs. Berkowitz,” he said. “Mrs. Silverman told me when she was getting off the bus earlier that she has a lot of shopping to do and she’ll be taking a taxi back.”
    When I remarked on this to Mrs. K, she nodded but became thoughtful. After a minute, she turned and said to me, “Ida, we must try to do something to save poor Doreen from that terrible man. He is clearly taking advantage of her, and she does not have the nerve—or maybe it is the self-esteem—to stand up to him.”
    I could only agree, of course, but I didn’t see what it was that we could do about it. If her own mother was unable to get her to see what a mistake she was making, I didn’t think we, who were almost complete strangers to her, would have more success. Nevertheless, I was confident that when Mrs. K said we must do something, something indeed would be done.

16
    “So now we have this long list of people,” I said to Mrs. K the next day, “but what do we do with it? Where do we go from here?”
    We were seated in the garden of the Julius and Rebecca Cohen Home for Jewish Seniors, where we had taken our tea on this warm and sunny afternoon. Mrs. K had her notebook on her lap and had been going over her entries, adding a note here and erasing one there. It was so pleasant out there, with the blue sky and little snow white clouds framing the climbing roses and bougainvillea, that I was not in the mood to think about thieves and death; but I knew that to Mrs. K it was extremely important that she be absolved from any part in either the theft of Daisy’s earrings or Bertha Finkelstein’s choking, and as soon as possible. I also knew that she did not trust the police to be in any hurry to absolve her—just the opposite, in fact—so she would have to do it herself, with my help of course. And about that I think she was right.
    Mrs. K looked down at her notebook and then up at me. “As a way to narrow down our suspects, I would certainly like to know whether any of the persons on our list has a criminal background,” she said, “such that they would be more likely to have taken those earrings.”
    “Once a thief, always a thief?” I replied.
    “Something like that. Only I mean it also in a larger sense: If in the past one person has demonstrated a fine character and proper conduct his whole life, and another has shown himself to be mean, dishonest, or unreliable, which would you first suspect of a particularly bad act later in his life? The
mensch
or the
ganif
?”
    This, of course, was easy to answer, so I did not bother.
    “I wonder if Isaac Taubman’s son Benjamin, the policeman, would be able to help us find out,” I suggested.
    “As it turns out,” Mrs. K said, “it is too bad he could not have stayed longer at the
seder.
People act differently when a policeman is around, especially if they have it in mind to commit a crime. But yes, that seems like a good idea. Of course, he might be willing but not able, if he does not have access to these criminal records.”
    “He should have. I remember when my nephew wanted to rent an apartment across town last year, he had to pay for some company to—what do they call it—‘screen’ him to make sure he had not moved out without paying his rent at his last place, or caused a lot of damage. And he told me they also checked that he didn’t have a criminal record. I remember being surprised they would go so far just to rent you an apartment. But if some nosy landlord can find out if someone has a criminal record, surely a policeman will have no trouble. And if he cannot, maybe we can just call the same company my nephew’s landlord called and tell them these people want to rent an apartment by us. Then we can find out anything we want to know about them.”
    Mrs. K laughed at this.