Thursday the Rabbi Walked Out (28 page)

“You mean. I should call him now and – all right. I understand.”

It was an abstracted Rabbi Small who returned to the living room. Lanigan smiled sympathetically. “An old friend call you up?”

But the rabbi did not answer, he stopped and stood straight and tense with his arms rigid at his sides, the fists clenched. His head was thrown back and he was staring at the ceiling.

“What’s the matter?” asked Lanigan in alarm. “Anything wrong?”

The rabbi relaxed and said sheepishly, “No. I just thought of something. Tell me, have you ever fired a gun with your eyes shut?”

Lanigan blinked at the unexpectedness of the question. “No,” he said cautiously, “can’t say that I ever did.”

“Well, I did.” said the rabbi, and told about his experience at the shooting gallery in Revere. “I can see pretty well with my glasses, but when I take them off. I might just as well shut my eyes as far as anything more than a couple of feet away is concerned.”

“Then why did you take them off?”

“Well, I’d heard that there’s a recoil from a rifle, and I was afraid I might break them.”

“From a twenty-two in an amusement park shooting gallery?”

The rabbi blushed. “They seemed to be in the way when I put the gun to my shoulder. I probably wasn’t holding it right, the young man at the gallery seemed amused, too. But I wasn’t trying to hit anything anyway; just giving him a little business on a dull day.”

“And how did you do?”

The rabbi smiled. “I got a perfect score.”

“You did?”

“Uh-huh. Ten shots, ten misses, the attendant thought the sights might be off and gave me another rifle, and I did equally well with the second. Do you get the point?”

“I get the point that you’re a terrible shot.”

“No, no, it’s more than that, here was a narrow space, maybe fifteen feet wide at the most, full of all sorts of things – rows of clay pipes, ducks moving along in one direction while rabbits hopped along in the other, a large circle on a pendulum swinging back and forth. You’d swear that any bullet fired in the general direction of the rear wall would have to hit something, and I missed every time. I thought about it afterward, wondering how I could have achieved that incredible score, and then I realized that the empty space was many, many times greater than the space taken up by the targets. My point is that if Molly Mandell or Martha Peterson had shut her eyes and fired off six shots in the general direction of that recliner, you would have found the bullets buried in the wall or the ceiling. To hit all those small objects –”

“The painting isn’t small.”

“But the shot struck right in the mouth, and the finial on the lamp, and the pill bottle and, of course, the victim right between the eyes – that was very good shooting, I’d say – the work of a marksman.”

Lanigan looked at the rabbi suspiciously. “Are you trying to hornswoggle me with some of that Talmud hocus-pocus – what d’ye call it – pilpil?”

“Pilpul? No. But I’m suggesting another Talmud technique or method. You see, they were intent, those old scholars, on deriving the true meaning of God’s commandments. So they tested their interpretations by considering all kinds of examples and all possible alternatives, no matter how remote or farfetched. Because, only if it applied to an extreme case, could they know that their interpretation was correct. It came to me in a flash when Miriam called to tell me about Reuben Levy –”

“Who’s he?”

“A classmate at the seminary. Come to think of it, I told you about him once. Instead of using a good story to amplify a sermon, he did it the other way around and built the sermon on the story. You suggested it was like the man who got a reputation as a crackshot by shooting first and then drawing a target around the bullet hole.”

“Oh, yes, I remember –”

“And it came to me that you could work it the other way around just as Well, Suppose you had half a dozen targets and you hit each one in the bull’s-eye, dead center, and then erased all the targets except one, then someone looking at all those scattered shots, not even touching the outer circle of the one remaining target, would be certain that it was bad shooting and that the shot in the bull’s-eye was a pure fluke, and I remembered what they said at the Agathon when we went over there, that Gore was a crackshot and club champion. So I suggest another scenario, a man, a crackshot, having dispatched his victim with a single shot right between the eyes, standing there, cool, confident, a little self-satisfied smile on his face, emptying the gun by firing at one tiny target after another.”

“Are you suggesting that he took the chance of firing all those shots just so as to cover the accuracy of the first shot? It doesn’t make sense, he could have –”

“Not to cover the first short. To cover the second.”

“The second?”

“The clock, he had to set up an alibi. So after shooting Jordon, he advanced the clock to half past eight and then stepped back and shot it in order to stop it and establish the time of the murder. But if he had left it at that, just the two shots, the police would have suspected immediately.

So he covered it up by firing off the rest of the bullets, then all he had to do was to establish that sometime close to half past eight he was far away from here.”

“But dammit, he didn’t establish an alibi. I told you –”

“Oh yes, he did.” said the rabbi quickly. “He set out for Boston and on the way stopped to make a phone call from the office of a gas station. If there’s an attendant there, especially if it’s sometime near closing time, there’s a good chance that he’ll remember the time, and the person you call may remember. If it’s a housewife, she knows the time she serves dinner and what time they finish eating and how long it takes to wash the dishes, especially if she’s going out to do an errand. Unless the alibi calls for split-second timing, there’s a good chance that between the two, the gas station attendant and the housewife, the police will be able to triangulate a point in time that will be reasonably and sufficiently accurate. But you can’t call just anyone, not while you’re on the road to Boston. You can’t call any old acquaintance and say you were thinking of them. Not while you’re driving along the highway. It has to be in connection with something important, some matter of business. So he called Mrs. Mandell.”

Although Lanigan was impressed, he was not yet ready to yield, he even managed a supercilious look of unconcern. “And his motive. David? You’re not suggesting he did it just to prove to himself what a good shot he was.”

The rabbi smiled. “No, nothing so psychologically exotic. My guess is he did it for money.”

“You thinking of that report not balancing?”

“That struck me as significant, but –”

“Forget it.” said Lanigan flatly. “We had an accountant go over Jordon’s account. It was in apple pie order.”

“That wasn’t what I had in mind.” said the rabbi. “I was thinking of the remark that was made at the Agathon that night by Dr. Springhurst, that Jordon was without friends or family, and later, the seemingly contradictory remark that Gore was kin to Jordon. I assume that what he meant was that Jordon had no close or immediate family, but that Gore was a second or third cousin. But if there were no other relatives, and Jordon died intestate, then naturally Gore would inherit. Now, suppose that Jordon had confided to Gore that Billy was his son and that he was planning to make a will in his favor – .”

“I see what you mean.” Lanigan admitted, “and it’s possible. Of course, you realize there’s not a particle of proof for any of this.”

“Fingerprints?” suggested the rabbi hopefully.

“Of Gore’s? Plenty of them, but it’s only what you’d expect, he spent the evening here.”

“I meant, on the clock perhaps. Billy told me that Jordon set great store by that clock and didn’t allow anyone else to wind it. So if Gore’s prints are on it, that would be some kind of proof, wouldn’t it?” The rabbi squatted down and squinted at the clock lying on the floor.

Lanigan had gone back to the dining room for his folder, and now he returned, riffling through it. “Let’s see, here are blowups of various prints, and – oh, here it is – a summary of the fingerprint expert’s findings. ‘Carriage clock, on floor, no prints.’ I guess it was wiped clean.”

“But isn’t that in itself suspicious? There should be prints, if only Jordon’s from when he last wound it.”

“Not if Martha wiped it in the course of her normal cleaning and dusting.”

“Then hers should be on it.” said the rabbi.

“Unless she used those cleaning mitts some women use, there’s a pair in the kitchen.” He joined the rabbi and squatted down on his heels beside him.

“How do you wind it?” asked the rabbi.

“Oh; the back is hinged.” He picked it up by the folding brass handle on top and brought it over to the table. It was about five or six inches high, and the case consisted of rectangular plates of beveled glass, two of which had been smashed by the bullet, set in a brass frame. “It’s called a carriage clock, and they usually come in padded leather cases, an old-fashioned travel clock is what it is. You carried it by this handle, and when you got to your inn or hotel, it could be set on the mantelpiece. When you had to wind it, you took it out of its leather case and opened the back. See that square stem in the hole there? That’s where you wind it. You need a key.”

“Two keys.” observed the rabbi. “The stem in the center hole must be for resetting the hands. It’s smaller than the other. Where would he have kept the keys, do you suppose?”

“Well, we have a clock in the living room that you wind, we keep the key on the mantelpiece behind it.” He strode over to the mantelpiece, pointed and called out. “One key. Rabbi, but it’s a double key. One end is for winding the spring and the other for setting the hands, the one we have at home, you wind in front and you set the hands by just moving them.”

“Martha wouldn’t have bothered to wipe that.” said the rabbi, “especially if it were kept behind the clock.”

“Certainly not if she were wearing cleaning mitts.” He went back to his folder. “The summary doesn’t mention it. I doubt if our man checked it for prints. I’m going to call him.”

As they sat in the dining room awaiting the arrival of the fingerprint expert, Lanigan ruminated about the case. “I dismissed Gore as a suspect even before we dug out his alibi for him. I figured he was the one person who couldn’t have done it, because he was the one person who knew there was someone else in the house, he was the only one who saw Billy sent to his room and locked in. Somehow he must have found out that he had left.”

The rabbi nodded. “When I met with Billy on the island, he said Gore knew that he did it regularly when the old man sent him to his room, he had told him and they had laughed about it. Still, my guess is that Gore didn’t just gamble on it, he may have heard the window go up –”

“Yeah, it’s wooden sash and the door is thin. If Gore was standing just outside the door, he’d hear it all right.” Lanigan agreed.

They talked of Gore and the kind of man he was. “He’s well thought of in town.” said Lanigan. “Public-spirited fellow, like getting up this silver collection, for instance, he’s divorced and I heard it said at the time that maybe it was because he was so public spirited. You know, being active in all kinds of causes and not being home too much. I don’t know the kind of money he makes as president of the bank, but he lives moderately, we may find when we start checking that he’s been gambling. If he’s tight for money, Jordon’s couple of million would help out.”

“You don’t have to be short of money to try to acquire a couple of million.” observed the rabbi.

“That’s for sure.”

“And if he were certain the money was coming to him, after a while he might get to thinking it was actually his and Jordon only a sort of temporary custodian.”

The doorbell rang. It was the fingerprint expert. Lanigan led him over to the mantelpiece and pointed at the key. “When you were working here. Joe, did you check that key?”

“I didn’t even see it, Chief.” He felt that he had to defend himself. “Look, we don’t go over everything, we’d be here for a week. Just the likely things and places. I wouldn’t go dusting the ceiling, for instance, or the floor or –”

“All right, all right. Joe. Nobody is criticizing you. I want you to do that key now.”

They watched as he dusted with his powders and then looked with his magnifying glass. “Yup, there’s a nice print there. Tip of the thumb. I’d say, and I’m pretty sure it’s the right thumb.”

“Okay, Joe, here are blowups of the different prints you took here. I want you to go over those and see if this matches one of them.”

“Oh, I know this one. Chief, that’s Ellsworth Jordon’s.”

“Oh!” The sigh of disappointment came from both Lanigan and the rabbi. Lanigan shook his head in annoyance and frustration, but the rabbi said. “How about the other side?” He pointed at the key. “That print is toward the large socket that you use for winding the clock, maybe there’s one on the other side pointing toward the small socket that you use to set the hands.”

“It’s an idea.” said Joe. From his bag he got a small screwdriver, and inserting the tang into the socket, he flipped the key over. Once again he dusted with his powders and a moment later announced. “Yeah, and this one’s different.”

“Are you sure?” asked Lanigan eagerly.

“Aw Chief!” Joe was reproachful. “I couldn’t make a mistake on this one, there’s a little line scar right across it. This one is Lawrence Gore’s.”

“What made you think of Gore?” asked Lanigan. “Had you thought of him before you got the call from Miriam?”

The rabbi nodded. “From the time I heard about the quarterly report that Molly Mandell tried to deliver. By way of excusing her folly, her husband pointed out that it didn’t even balance.”

“Yeah, he told me that, too, and you mentioned it. Was it your idea that Gore was pilfering the till? Because he wasn’t, you know, we checked it out.”

“No, that didn’t occur to me. What struck me as strange was that, knowing that the accounts didn’t balance. Gore was still willing to have Molly deliver it to Jordon. On the one hand Gore was terribly anxious lest the report come in a day late, and on the other he was seemingly unconcerned that it did not balance. It didn’t make sense.