Sacred and Profane (19 page)

“Loyalties!” The old man blew smoke out the window. “You have no faith in
Hashem
. You can’t possibly have faith in human beings—even those you love. Do you honestly think that Rina Miriam called me up and told me you arrived at her house drunk? She phoned and told me that you had come to her, agitated and sick, and she was going to put you up for the night. I told her it was
inappropriate for her to do so and I’d come get you. And do you know what she said?”

Decker didn’t speak.

“She said, ‘Absolutely not. He’s going to stay here. If my decision has shamed you, I’ll move from the premises, but he’s sick, he’s sleeping, and I don’t want him moved!’ Do you know what she was really saying?” Schulman said fiercely. “‘I’d rather shame myself than shame him before your eyes, Rav Schulman.’

“At that instant…” Schulman held up his index finger. “At that instant I knew you were drunk, for it’s no shame to see a sick person, is it? In fact, it’s a good deed to care for the sick, and she of all people wouldn’t deny me any opportunity to fulfill a
mitzvah
.”

The rabbi crushed his cigarette with his bare hand and threw it in the ashtray.

“Rina erred by getting involved with you in the first place. No matter how nice and understanding you were during that horrible time, the bottom line is you were a gentile. That’s it! Until you became a Torah Jew, she should have refused to see you. But she chose differently, and now she pays for her decision. I hear and see things, Peter. She puts up with daily ridicule, constant pressure from her parents and friends. She does it because she loves you and because she believed you when you told her you wanted to convert. Last night you placed her in a compromising situation. Her ethics were bound to be scrutinized by prying eyes. She chose your honor over hers. She’s an
eishes chayil
—a woman of valor. She’s too good for you.”

Decker swallowed back a dry lump in his throat.

“I never said she wasn’t.”

His answer didn’t seem to please the rabbi. He asked to be taken back. Decker turned the car around and headed toward the yeshiva in silence. He pulled the
Plymouth into the parking area and shut the motor. They sat in the dark for a moment, listening to the nighttime sounds. The sky was clear, moonbeams peeking through the branches of oak and eucalyptus.

The rabbi turned to face him.

“You can either wallow in self-pity or you can do better.” His voice had softened. He placed a firm hand on Decker’s shoulder and said, “The choice is yours, my friend.”

“You’re not working
today?” Rina asked as she opened the door.

“I took the day off.” Decker stepped inside.

He looked angry, she thought. His jaw was clenched and his pulse throbbed in the veins at his temples. She tried to make eye contact, but he was averting his gaze.

“What’s wrong?” she asked.

“Why did you tell Rabbi Schulman I was here the other night?”

“I had to.”

“You
had
to?” he mocked. “Some little gremlin picked up your finger and forced you to dial his number?”

“Peter, I’m a single woman living on the grounds of a yeshiva. I have a responsibility to uphold a certain standard of conduct.”

“What happened two nights ago was strictly between you and me, Rina. It wasn’t anybody else’s damn business.”

“It is if I’m living under a certain set of rules—”

“Funny you should mention that. I seem to remember a certain scramble on the floor where rules didn’t count too much.”

She blushed a deep rose.

“That was a rotten thing to say.”

“Did I go and report
you
to the rabbi? Little Rina Laz
arus was a very naughty little girl today—”

“Stop it!”

“How the hell do you think I feel, Rina?”

“I didn’t say anything—”

“Is this what I have to look forward to if we marry, Rina? Every little transgression or imperfection on my part gets related to the holy man so he can impart his divine judgment on my character?”

She stared at him coldly.

“I won’t even dignify that with an answer.”

“Humor me. Dignify it.”

She spoke through tight lips.

“What we do after we’re married as husband and wife in our own place is no one’s business but our own. But this wasn’t the same situation—”

“All you had to do was wake me up in a couple of hours and tell me to leave. Nothing happened. No one would have been the wiser.”

“We’re not children sneaking behind the backs of our parents, Peter. I had nothing to hide by letting you stay here. I just wanted Rav Schulman to know that.”

“What other things do you tell the great rabbi about me?”

She became furious.

“Nothing.”

“After all, he must have a hotline to God—”

“Every single Jew has a hotline to
Hashem
, anytime they want. All they have to do is open up a siddur and say
tehillim
. Rabbi Schulman is respected because he is a
tzaddik
and a
talmid hacham
—a pious and learned man—and not because he’s of divine descent. We don’t have popes, remember?”

“Well, some Jews obviously believe they’re more worthy—”

He was interrupted by the phone.

“Don’t answer it!” he ordered.

“This is still my house,” Rina retorted angrily. “I can answer my phone, thank you.” She jerked up the receiver, said hello, then wordlessly held out the receiver to him. He took it, and as he listened, his face became etched in pain. He said that he’d be right down and hung up.

“Bad news?” she asked anxiously.

“Do I ever get
good
news?” he answered caustically.

Something had deepened his horrible mood, hurting him. “What’s happened?” Rina asked.

“One of my informants, a sixteen-year-old girl who looks like my daughter, is in the hospital, beaten to a bloody pulp. Indirectly it was my fault. She was feeding me information, and when the case began to get complicated, I told her to back off. She didn’t listen, and I think someone got to her. Now she’s hanging on by a thread and I’m pissed off.”

“Peter, you can’t be responsible—”

“Don’t give me your pep rally routine. Life is not sugar and spice. Life sucks. This
place
sucks. I
hate
it. I hate the holier-than-thou attitude around here. I hate the self-righteousness! I hate the our-way-is-right-and-your-way-is-wrong pigheadedness. The goddam absolutes. You can believe in your little rules and rituals, but let me tell you something, in the real world there’s no blacks and white—only goddam muddy grays!”

He picked up a cup from her kitchen table and flung it across the room. He’d always had a good arm and a crackerjack aim. The brass had given up trying to lull him over to SWAT. It hit her wedding picture smack in the center, shattered the glass, knocked it to the floor.

She stared at the blank spot on the wall, then looked at Decker, holding back tears.

“How long have you wanted to do that?”

“A long time.”

“I know you’ve been under terrible stress, Peter, and I’m trying to be understanding—”

“Rina the angel. Or is it Rina the martyr taking abuse from her friends who don’t at all approve of her big, dumb goy—”

“Stop it, Peter!”

“You want to tell them something interesting, Rina? The next time they razz you about me being a
shaigetz
, you tell them I’m Jewish. That’ll shut them up.”

She stared at him blankly.

“It’s true, you know,” he said. “I’m Jewish, Rina. Just like you.”

“I don’t understand—”

“I’m adopted. My biological parents were Jewish. Understand now?”

She couldn’t answer him.

“I’ve known about it since I was eighteen,” he went on. “I knew I was technically Jewish the first time I stepped foot on the grounds here.”

“Why didn’t you
tell
me?”

“I had my reasons.”

Tears welled up in her eyes.

“How could you keep that from me? Didn’t you
trust
me?”

“It wasn’t a matter of trust. I didn’t tell you because I wanted to find out what being
your
kind of Jew is like, so I could either accept it or reject it. You know what, Rina? I reject it! I reject all your phony baloney customs and laws because they were made by rabbis who dwelt in ivory towers and never had to deal with the day-by-day crap of living. Like Schulman. Give him a month on the streets, seeing the garbage I see, putting up with scum and mud and shit that fills you up until your eyes turn brown. Give him one month of it and I guarantee you,
the man’s ironclad faith will be cleaved as wide as the Red Sea.”

He tried to stare her down, but she held his gaze with rage burning in her eyes. He’d never seen her like that.

“You’re so far off base, Peter, you’re not even in the ballpark,” she said. “Rav Schulman was in Auschwitz for three years. He lost his entire family. His wife was made sterile by Nazi butchery. His children were executed in front of his eyes—shot in the head. He was forced to dig their graves with his bare hands.”

Decker continued to look at her, but his eyes were no longer confrontational. A sour taste filled his mouth, a putrid stench clogged his nostrils. He felt nauseated. Lowering his head, he swallowed back a dry heave and walked to the door.

“I’m not a saint, Rina,” he said quietly. “And I don’t want to live with one, either.”

Her skull was a headdress of bandages, and what showed of her face was raw and ripped and poked with plastic tubing. Her eyes were closed when Decker walked in, so he pulled up a chair at her bedside. A cockpit of panels and dials monitored her vital signs. Green fluorescent lines jumped about on a screen and he heard beeps at irregular intervals. Techno-medicine. Decker wondered if any of it really helped in the long run.

Noticing her damp forehead, he took a tissue and dabbed the sweaty skin gently. She opened her eyes.

“Hi, Kiki,” he said softly.

Her lips turned upward. Her mouth tried to form a word, but instead she coughed feebly.

“Don’t talk. You’ll have plenty of time to talk.” She nodded.

“Go to sleep.”

Again she nodded. Her eyes closed and moments later she drifted off.

Decker walked outside the room and lit up. Immediately, two nurses and an orderly told him there was no smoking. He extinguished the cigarette.

A young woman approached him—a hooker who was trying to hide it. Her skirt was of modest length, but too tight. Her blouse was buttoned up to her neck but was still sheer enough to see her bare breasts and nipples. Her crimson-nailed feet were stuffed into open-toed sandals with fuck-me heels. She was long-limbed, with a horsy face—big teeth, thick lips, and large hard eyes saturated with hate.

“Are you the cop friend of Kiki’s?” she asked. Her voice was low and breathy. In the dark it would have been sexy.

“Who are you?” Decker asked flatly.

“I’m Lilah, a friend of Kiki’s. Like her
best
friend.”

Like her lover, he thought. The protective posture, the defiance.
Dare you to say anything against her, pig
.

“Are you Decker?”

He nodded.

“I’m the one who called you down,” she said. “I did it for Kiki. I knew she’d want to see you. God only knows why she singled you out. You’re just another cop—not even that good looking.”

“Do you know what happened to her, Lilah?”

“I have an idea.”

Decker waited.

“She had a bunch of these johns,” she said. “Real rich kinky types who pay well but toss her around…A bite here, a kick there…This time…I don’t know. Someone went overboard.”

Decker was taken aback.

“A john?”

The girl nodded.

“She was beaten up by a
john
that she’s serviced before?”

“Yeah, but none of them ever went this crazy.”

“She was
turning
tricks?”

“I know you told her not to, but—”

Decker clenched his fists. “For Chrissakes!”

“She just didn’t know if she could handle another bad foster home.”

“This wasn’t a
bad
foster home,” Decker said, struggling to keep his voice low. “All she had to do was keep her nose clean—”

“She wasn’t gonna go to that place, Decker. She told me that.”

“For God’s sake, why not?”

“The street may not be much, but to her at least it’s home.”

“
Home
? What kind of shit are you feeding me, Babe? She was smacked around and now she’s on the critical list. Home! Wake up and smell the roses.”

Lilah turned fierce. “She told me you did Juvey, Dick.”

“I do.”

“So
you
wake up and smell the roses—or the fucking garbage. Yeah, she was smacked around. What the hell do you think her father did to her? And the hairball never paid her for it, either.”

Decker ran his hands down his face. “I don’t
believe
this. I busted my ass…Who are these scumbags?”

“They ride by in Jeeps, four-wheelers. They could buy anything or anyone, but they love to slum in Hollywood. I tried one of them once, a fat old fucker named Maurice. Musta been about sixty-five. The money was great, but I got some pride.”

Decker said nothing.

Lilah shrugged philosophically. “Actually, the sucker
didn’t like me. I guess I was too old for him. What an asshole! He broke my fucking tooth!”

“Do you know which one did this to her?” Decker asked.

“No,” she said quietly.

“Can you tell me anything more about these assholes?” Decker asked.

“No.”

“Think, Lilah!”

“Look,” Lilah said. “I don’t know anymore. I’m tired. Leave me alone.”

“Don’t you want this bastard to
pay
for what he did to Kiki?”

“Cut the justice speech, cop. Assholes out there are big fat zits. Squeeze one, a dozen more pop up. I love Kiki, but I only got so much energy inside and I got to save it for when it counts. I was a white knight once. I just don’t give a shit anymore.”

Suddenly a high-pitched noise emanated from Kiki’s room. A monotone. A flat monotone. To correspond with flat vital signs. The lights outside the doorway flashed bright blue. He was shoved out of the way by a team of two nurses and a doctor. Decker made himself scarce, walking down the hallway, not wanting to know, but forced to stay until there was closure.

Fifteen minutes passed. The look in Lilah’s eyes said everything.

Shit!

The girl fell into Decker’s open arms. He held her as she sobbed pitifully. After she composed herself, Decker pulled away and said:

“You know who her parents are?”

“She hates her parents.”

“We’ve got to send the body to somewhere, Lilah.”

The girl wiped tears and running mascara off her cheek
with her fingers. “She’s from Indianapolis. Her real name is Patsy Lee Norford. I think her father’s name is Mick or Mike.”

“I’ll find him,” Decker said.

“You’re a nice guy,” Lilah said. She whipped out a compact and began to fix her melted face. “Kiki said you were a nice guy. I frankly didn’t think they existed anymore.”

“If Kiki thought so highly of me, why the hell didn’t she listen to me and just stay out of trouble for a week?”

Lilah broke into wicked laughter—a mixture of irony and bitterness.

“She was a dumb-ass,” she said, starting to cry. “And you’re a dumb-ass, also…I mean, don’t you
get
it?”

Decker waited for her to explain.

“She was fucking in
love
with you, for Chrissakes! She didn’t want to go to that halfway house because she knew she’d never see you again. I mean, you
told
her on the phone you wouldn’t visit her! She figured at least on the streets she could be your stoolie, and then she could be with you.”

She clicked the compact closed and stuffed it in her purse. “You men are real stupid shits. I don’t care who the hell you are—john, cop, asshole father of five fucking kids—you’re all shit for brains.”

She spat at him and walked away.