Invisible City (Rebekah Roberts #1)(67)

“We wrote a short piece on the initial arrest,” he says. “And another when the charges were dropped. I’ll see if I can get confirmation on the name of the man he assaulted, though I doubt I’ll be able to connect the two cases tonight. What’s your plan for tomorrow?”

“I think I can get some good information from Miriam, Aron Mendelssohn’s sister. She and her husband live in the same house as the Mendelssohns. And she was there when the husband threatened Rivka. Apparently she got really upset about the whole thing.”

“Will she talk to you?”

“She’s already talked to me a little,” I say. “Now I have more information to go at her with. Even if she doesn’t give me details, maybe she’ll confirm stuff.”

“Okay,” says Larry. “You go to Borough Park tomorrow. But everything has to be on the record. First and last names. The department is embarrassed and they’re going to be on everything you say. If you give them a chance to make you look bad, they’ll take it. Get it on tape if you can. Start small. Be accurate. That’s the most important thing. If all this shit you think is true is true, you’ve got weeks of stories on this. Maybe more. You’re going to write up what you got from her friends now, but what’s the story for tomorrow? What can you get by four P.M.?”

“I can talk to the family. Get their take on the investigation. And ask about their connection to Shomrim.”

“Okay. I’ll work on Saul, and getting an official cause of death for Rivka. If the cops don’t have that, they don’t have anything. So we’re set?”

I nod.

“Good,” he says, and stands up. “You’ve got everybody’s attention here, Rebekah. Yesterday I didn’t know who you were. Neither did Albert Morgan. Personally, I think you’ve done some great work. But this could still turn out pretty bad for you. Could turn out good, too. Real good. A big story like this will impress people. Just get it right. And get it on the record.”

Larry leaves. I take out my notebook and type my earlier draft into the system. To what I already have from Sara Wyman about Rivka’s dead child and the fact that she was questioning her marriage and the rules of the community, I add the bits about Aron Mendelssohn threatening Rivka and Suri’s comments about how Rivka wanted Coney Island to be a “sacred space.” I send the draft to Mike.

“Rebekah!” he shouts moments later from behind his cloth cubicle wall. I jog over. “It’s way too long. We only have seven inches.”

I watch as he hacks the story to pieces with the DELETE key.

The woman whose body was found naked in a Brooklyn scrap pile Friday wanted to divorce her wealthy husband, but was afraid she’d lose her children, according to multiple friends.

“Even if she was granted a divorce by the rabbi, Hasidic women rarely retain custody,” said Sara Wyman, a social worker and former member of the Hasidic community to which Rivka Mendelssohn belonged.

Two weeks before the 30-year-old mother-of-four’s death, friends say that her older husband, Aron Mendelssohn, confronted her about an affair and physically assaulted her in a “safe” house for ultra-Orthodox Jews in Coney Island.

“He grabbed her,” says Devorah Kletzky, 22. “He was yelling in her face. He said he’d see her shunned.”

Wyman and Kletzky both told the Tribune exclusively that Mendelssohn had begun “questioning” her rigid Orthodox life after the tragic death of her infant daughter, Shoshanna, last year.

Wyman said she had “no idea” how Mendelssohn could have met such a gruesome end. “I just hope the police find who did this—she didn’t deserve to die so young.”

Police have made no arrests in Mendelssohn’s murder. A gardener for the family was questioned and released over the weekend.


It’s all technically accurate, but lacks any context or background. Mike presses a button and sends the story to the copy desk.

“Call in with what you have on the family and the Jewish cops before four tomorrow,” he says. And then, without looking at me: “Good luck.”





CHAPTER FOURTEEN


By the time I walk out of the Trib building, it is nearly ten o’clock, but just as I’m walking down into the F train to go home, Sara Wyman calls.

“Can you meet?” she asks.

“Now? Where?”

“There’s an all-night diner on Flatbush. I’m bringing someone I think you should meet.”

I walk across Fiftieth Street to the 1 train, and forty minutes later I’m back in Brooklyn. Sara Wyman is already at the diner when I arrive. Sitting beside her is Malka, from the funeral home.

“Thank you for meeting us,” says Sara. Her hair is a wild, rumbled mess of hat-head and her eyeglasses are hanging on a beaded chain around her neck. Malka looks polished and prim, just like she did in the basement of the funeral home.

“You are the reporter?” asks Malka as I sit down. She looks uncomfortable.

“You two know each other?” Sara is surprised.

“I met Malka the day of the funeral,” I say.

“You did not say you were a reporter,” says Malka.

“I know,” I say. “I should have. I apologize.”

This seems, oddly enough, to satisfy her. Or else she is simply distracted. “Is it true Saul Katz has been arrested?” she asks.