Free Cold Case Squad by Edna Buchanan Page A

wanted to protect her from the crime, drugs, and
weird-ness that lurked in the dark. She was all he had.
    She tapped her chin with an arthritic finger and pursed her lips
thoughtfully. "Jewish," she said, and nodded. "Sounds like Jewish,
Orthodox."
    "Who?"
    "The killer."
    Sam laughed. "What makes you say that, Gran?"
    "Don't you laugh at me, Sonny. I been around longer than you and I
still know a few things. Sounds Orthodox."
    He still grinned. "How so?"
    "The things he does. I worked for the Waldmans long enough to soak
it all up. Why, I always prepared their seder, helped those children
study for the bat and bar mitzvahs. Chopped the chicken liver, fixed
the gefilte fish. Braided the challah—that's bread, Sonny. Wasn't
nothin' to learn, jus' like plaitin' hair. Grandma Waldman taught me
all of it in her kosher kitchen. Had two sets of pots and pans, two
sets of dishes, two sets of everythin', even glasses and crystal and
dishtowels—even two dishwashers—and they can never be mixed up
together. I know all about it." She sternly wagged a gnarled index
finger. "So don't you talk no smack to me."
    He remembered the Waldmans. For more than thirty years she'd worked
for generations of that large and warm family. She'd taken him to their
big house in Miami Beach. He had played with the children, the first
boys he'd ever seen wearing yarmulkes. When he mocked their skullcaps
later, she'd lashed out, indignant. "Jus' remember, Sonny, you never
hear of anybody gets mugged by a boy in a yarmulke."
    When the family patriarch, Rabbi Saul Waldman, died, she had taken
him with her to the funeral.
    "I'm not doubting you, Gran." He fished his notebook from his
pocket. "Okay, which things are you talking about? Let me write this
down. Maybe you can help me solve the case." He spoke half in jest, but
his curiosity was piqued. "Maybe you'll make officer of the month,
Gran."
    "Don't you play with me, boy. I know what I'm talkin' 'bout here.
The man you want doesn't work on
shabbat
, the sabbath. They
don't work on Saturday." She shook her head, then sipped her tea.
    "They have rituals for the dead." She put down her glass. "The
women, their eyes and mouths closed?"
    He nodded, seeing again the blown-up photos forever etched in his
mind's eye.
    "They never leave the dead alone. Somebody sets by them all the
time, readin' the Psalms."
    "I remember that," Sam said. Two years earlier, after a Jewish
police officer was killed in the line of duty, a fellow officer, a
fellow Jew, had remained with the corpse in the medical examiner's
morgue overnight.
    "But people who observe Orthodox customs are religious," he said,
thinking aloud as they always did when trying to solve a mystery before
Sherlock Holmes.
    "Everybody's capable of murder, Sonny. You say that yourself.
Religious people kill each other every day. How 'bout that rabbi in New
Jersey who murdered his wife?"
    "New Jersey?"
    "I watched some of that Court TY" she said grudgingly. "Wasn't bad."
    "But burial has to be within twenty-four hours, right?"
    "There's exceptions, like the sabbath or relatives comin' from a
distance. Other things."
    "Well, thanks, Gran. I'll look into it."
    "And for the first meal afterward, the mourners eat bread and
hard-boiled eggs."
    Eggshells in the garbage. Crazier things had happened.
    He stood up, stretched, and, ignoring her protests, carried the
plates into the kitchen.
    "Hey!" He noticed something. "Gran, your back door's not locked!"
    "Oh." She shrugged "It keeps stickin' and gits hard to open."
    His lunch curdled in his stomach. "But didn't I tell you a hundred
times? You have to keep the doors locked. Where's the WD-Forty?" He
foraged for the small, nearly empty can in the toolbox in the kitchen,
then squirted a few shots of oil into the balky lock. He snapped it
back and forth several times. It still felt stiff and out of line.
    Exasperated, he ran his hand through his hair and glanced fitfully
at his grandmother, placidly rinsing dishes in the