The Yiddish Gangster's Daughter (A Becks Ruchinsky Mystery Book 1) by Joan Cochran (best authors to read .TXT) 📕

“Take a look at your Hanukkah present,” he says, motioning toward the kitchen table with a spatula. Not a word about why I haven’t called or whether he’s contacted his “friends.”

A small box, wrapped in blue-and-white paper with dancing dreidels, sits dead center on the table. I pick it up and feel its heft in the palm of my hand. It’s solid and heavy for such a tiny package. When I tilt the box, nothing shifts.

Tootsie comes around the kitchen counter and stands across the table from me. He hugs his chest, hands tucked into his armpits, and rocks back and forth in an agony of anticipation. “You going to open it?”

“What’s the big hurry?”

“Just open the damned thing.”

I tear the colorful paper away to find a brown cardboard box sealed with masking tape. Once that’s off, I disentangle the gift from crumpled sheets of aged, yellowing newspaper. I’m anticipating a paperweight for my collection.

Instead, I find a gun.

I’m so surprised I almost drop the weapon. I’ve never touched a gun before and the cold, hard steel feels foreign and dangerous in my hand. It’s an ugly little snub-nosed revolver, shiny stainless steel at the barrel with a dark walnut grip

“What is this?” I ask, placing the weapon on the table. “Is it loaded?”

Tootsie picks up the gun, spins the cylinder, and delivers the verdict: “Empty.” He sets it back on the table. A smile edges his lips. Something’s up.

“All right,” I say. “You want to tell me what this is about? You know I hate guns.”

“You don’t recognize it?” He snorts. “It’s the gun your Uncle Moe gave me when we opened the showroom near Overtown in sixty-two. I showed it to your mother and she wasn’t too pleased either. But it was a rough neighborhood. Lots of whores and pimps hanging out on the corners. Moe and I kept guns in our office.”

“Why’d you move into such a lousy area?”

“That’s where all the showrooms were. Everyone went there for their restaurant supplies.”

“Did you ever use it?” I motion toward the gun with my chin.

He looks at it, then back at me. His smile is gone. “I almost blew off a schvartze’s head with that gun.”

I cringe at the derogatory Yiddish term for black person. He misinterprets my reaction as disbelief.

“You heard me right. Your mother knew about it. You were probably too young to be told.” He pulls out a chair and sits. I join him across the table and make myself comfortable. This is going to be a long one.

“What happened?”

“It was a Saturday, around two in the morning if memory serves, when the cops called. The store’s burglar alarm went off. When I got to the store, your Uncle Moe was there along with two cops. A colored kid, maybe twenty, tried to break in through our roof but fell into the skylight. He was lying on the floor surrounded by glass shards and with his arm twisted at a weird angle. Poor kid was sobbing.”

“That’s awful.”

“You haven’t heard the worst of it. Moe was holding a gun to his head.” Tootsie curls his lip. “You know what my brother, that son of a bitch, did? He handed me the gun and said, ‘I got a rap sheet, you don’t.’ I stood there like a schmuck until it hit me. Moe wanted me to the shoot the kid.”

“Uncle Moe really asked you. . .” I’m horrified. My uncle was no angel, if my father’s account of Louie’s death is to be believed. But to kill a defenseless kid?

“You heard me,” my father says. His face is red. “I was as shocked as you are. So I looked toward one of the cops, a fat-faced Mick not much older than the kid on the floor. I figured he was going to tell Moe to lay off. Instead, he shrugged and said I had a right to protect my property. I couldn’t believe it. This bastard broke into the business I spent my life building, ready to take what I worked hard to get. But to murder him?”

“Did you let him go?”

My father looks at me, his eyebrows raised. “Of course I did. What the hell kind of person you think I am?”

I’m not about to answer that.

“I got mad all right. But not at the kid. At Moe. He’s five years older than me and, like an idiot, I always listened to him. But this was sick. I grabbed the gun out of his hand, walked into my office, and locked it in my drawer. Then I came back and told the cops to get the kid out of there before I killed them. They called an ambulance and the boy got hauled out on a stretcher. After they left, I gave Moe a piece of my mind. He acted like the whole thing was a big joke, said he’d used the threat of my arrival to frighten the intruder. Idiot.”

My father rises and returns to the kitchen, where he removes the latkes from the pan and places them on a paper towel-covered plate. They turned a little too brown while we were talking. Tootsie brings the plate to the table, then returns to the kitchen for bowls of apple sauce and sour cream. I’m silent, eating the crispy potato pancakes and digesting what he told me.

“You think Uncle Moe would’ve killed the kid?” I say when I’ve had my fill.

“You didn’t know your uncle if you need to ask.”

He’s got a point. My uncle was kind to me and, as far as I knew, a good husband and father. But I was a child when he died and most of my memories of him revolve around holiday dinners, magic tricks, and the Barbie outfits he and Aunt Gert bought me. I recall his temper though, yelling at my father and Aunt Gert. My mother whisked Esther and me from the room when he started