“Think you’re right,” Decker said. “Seems Hersh was always scrapping with someone, a real troublemaker. But the teachers I talked to felt sorry for him. He didn’t have any real friends and wasn’t real swift in his English studies. His parents spoke to him only in Yiddish. Oftentimes, his parents weren’t even around. His sixth-grade teacher said whenever she had a problem, she dealt with the grandfather, who also spoke more Yiddish than English. She said Hersh seemed very attached to him. It was very traumatic for Hersh when he died. He didn’t return to school for almost a month.”

“Where’d you get all this information?”

“Once you know the person’s full name, all the rest is easy,” Decker said. “You go backward. Get the name, get the birth certificate, then the parents’ names, then their addresses. You canvass the old neighborhood, talk to old teachers, shopkeepers, friends. The family didn’t have any close friends as far as I know. Neighbors describe the Schaltzes as people who kept to themselves. Hersh never played with the kids on the block—probably one of the reasons why his English was so bad when he started school. Had he been sociable, he would have picked up English even if his parents spoke only Yiddish.”

“Sad.”

“Yeah, it’s sad. If you’re lucky, that kind of loneliness can spawn creativity. But in most of us, it does strange things to our heads. Anyway, I figured it was worth spending an extra day in New York discovering what makes this guy tick. Besides, Marge volunteered to do a lot of preliminary footwork in L.A.”

“Nice of Marge.”

“We’ll owe her a good dinner,” Decker said.

“Anytime,” Rina said. “So what makes Hersh tick?”

Decker shrugged. “His religion made him an outsider. I don’t think there’s any love lost between him and Judaism.”

“That’s a shame,” Rina said. “There must have been some sort of conflict for them to live in Kew Gardens when they were Satmar Chasids. Maybe the mother wasn’t as religious as the father. Maybe she insisted they live there. Even among the Orthodox, there can be splits within families.”

“Just like with Eli Greenspan,” Decker said. “His father working in North Carolina, his mother insisting the family stay in New York.”

“Exactly,” Rina said. “How’s Eli doing, by the way?”